My new post on the Gomi Gomi blog is up. This one was an attempt at linking modern replications, imitations and copies, to Blade Runner, spiritual fetishes, and eventually back to Japan’s pre Shinto, animistic past. I have started seeing replications everywhere lately, from the newly constructed life size Gundam robot in Odaiba (see photos below), to the craze for tiny plastic replications of beans with faces that is sweeping the nation. Photo above is from a Buddhist festival in Asakusa where the focus was on locals (i.e. Yakuza) carrying portable shrines to the temple, but every now a then a man would hold a small chair above his head in the same style and walk through the crowd.
More photos from Odaiba. Featuring life size Gundam, beach instructions, and enormous semi abandoned buildings feat. encroaching vegetation.
Photos from a trip to Odaiba. Highlights include fake beach (which you are not allowed to swim in), man utilizing a towel as a hat, blue bus feat. bus driver taking a nap and retro-futurist / neo-brutalist / bruto-metabolist architecture.
Record shops are everywhere here, in fact, i think that Shibuya has more record shops per square kilometer than anywhere else on earth. The most interesting (and probably important) record shop i have seen so far has to be Modern Music, a tiny, cluttered shop occupying a cramped apartment in one of Tokyo’s suburbs. Modern Music is the face of P.S.F. - Japan’s seminal experimental and avant garde record label. I went there on a rainy afternoon with Vicente Gutierrez for his Noise Project, a few weeks ago. After getting buzzed in from the intercom downstairs, and walking up the apartment stairwell, the shop itself is a ramshackle shock with record stacks forming tiny cities and cardboard boxes strewn everywhere. Owner Ikeezumi-San talked with us about how angry Keiji Haino is (at the mention of his name Ikeezumi made devil horns on his head), how much he dislikes the Boredoms and ‘noise’ music (he prefers psychedelic improvisation) and his love of the first four Maher Shalal Hash Baz records (conveniently all sold out). Incredibly messy and mundane space.
Gomi Gomi is a new blog on Tokyo. It’s for the TV3 News website, I was asked to do it by the editor of the world news section - Hannah Sarney (thanks Hannah!). They let me wax lyrical / moan on about a range of topics that go full spectrum from mundane to unintelligible. First post is on tourist envy, gion-go sound words, and general urban mess.
Mingeikan is a folk craft museum located near Yoyogi Uehara, i think. I rode my bike and got terribly lost on the way there, so it could be anywhere east of Shibuya as far as i remember. It was begun by a visionary man called Soetsu Yanagi, he began the Mingei movement in the 20’s and 30’s, a movement towards humble folk arts. It was interesting to see the heavy role Korean arts played in the inspiration of Yanagi’s philosophy. I knew Korean culture was influential on Japan, but this was a direct and clear link. The space inside is very old and traditional, everything squeaks as you approach it. A lot of the work was what you would expect from a traditional museum, but some work was shocking and surprising for me. Although very ‘folky’, it also felt austere and brutal. A shameless and knowing desire to reach humble, simple expression through traditional means. I want to use the word honesty to describe it all, but i’m not going to. Photos from from inside the museum and of the cover of the museum’s zine ‘The Mingei’.
Photo from a booklet of stone drawings, part of a rubber-banded set of photocopied research materials called ‘Cantero’ published by Mejunje (Julian Gatto and Mercedes Villalba). Made with an approach that’s personal and honest, steeped in everyday exploration and discovery, Cantero shows the people they met and ideas that they thought were valuable while they were in Tokyo. Cantero includes three research publications, a small booklet on the parallel physical histories of a city by Darryl Wee, a collection of stone drawings I did earlier this year, and video footage taken in Tokyo. Cantero is available at Now Idea Bookshop and Gallery in the back of Aoyama.
Review of Ryoji Ikeda’s solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, just went up on Tokyo Art Beat. You can read it HERE.
“It’s strangely reassuring to watch the data multiplying upon itself. This was the one piece which people just sat and watched, sometimes moving closer to see what was really going on, at other times sitting against a wall, bathed in white reflection, watching the loop play over and over. There was a sense that this unknown data is mapping something monumental and significant. But what we are seeing is merely the sound of progress, the texture of information, without any of the baggage or context we would normally give it, a kind of ‘mechanical glossolalia’: a machine speaking fluently in a language we do not understand.”
Photo’s taken for Vicente Gutierrez’s Noise Project. On the floor at the front of the Keiji Haino show. Photos show Haino-san’s Silvertone and cleaning up with girlfriend and muscular assistant. I recently came across an interesting Haino interview. This was one particularly good part from that interview that I identified with (especially the part about Jim Morrison being a spirit guide):
HAINO: Maybe it’s like that scene in the movie where Jim Morrison sees the Indian and absorbs him–maybe Jim Morrison entered into me.
AC : Like a spirit-guide, or whatever.
HAINO : Yeah, possibly. But still there are certain pitiful aspects of what he did that I want to stay away from, drugs, etc.
AC : Back when you were doing Lost Aaraaff, did you ever use external stimulants like alcohol or drugs?
HAINO : Never. I had and have absolutely no interest in that. And that’s why I am the way I am now. I don’t resemble anyone, nor do I have any intention of doing so. I want to avoid the gaze of god. God is always watching, always following and that’s why people are able to do things. When I do something, I don’t want it to be under the gaze of god. If I do it properly then I can avoid that gaze. That’s the true meaning of being an outsider. That’s where everyone goes wrong. The reason why people say that they want to be free is because they aren’t. They want to be something that they aren’t–but once you are conscious of that, the same state will persist forever. That’s why I am an outsider in the true sense of the word–I am something else. I don’t mean blaspheming and saying fuck you to god. Everyone is born a descendant of god–the true outsider wishes to go somewhere else. That’s what I want to do. I believe that I need to do that in order to make my own music. There’s no one who can legitimately use the word “myself”–everyone is a “too.” That’s why I think that I am justified in saying “I myself” so much in my lyrics. And that is far more difficult than taking drugs. What I am doing is the real stimulant. To truly perceive yourself, to realize that you are alone and then see how far you can go on your own.
Reading the NY Times yesterday, it seems the world has gone crazy for recession gardening and cheap D.I.Y. answers to bankrupt ideologies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Thank goodness! I for one am highly excited about what the collapse of our particular brand of capitalism will bring about, a renewed love for building, making, and creating perhaps? A move to a truly sustainable lifestyle in the country? Western micro-farming? On the other hand, all this renewed ‘green excitement’ may just be hot air. How far is everyone willing to take their so called ‘eco lifestyle’?
Someone who is taking the flow on effects of their lifestyle seriously is David Duval Smith. David is a New Zealander who has lived in Japan for a long time and half of garden design group Namaike. He used to work for some serious design agencies in Tokyo and then, just over a year ago, turned his back on corporate city life and started a farm just out of Tokyo in Kamakura. He is growing a small crop of edible herbs and vegetables, and is also working on putting in a pond for ducks to generate his own little ecology. Stimulated by the permaculture movement and thinking seriously about how we create and consume energy, he has built up a micro farm inspired by people like Masanobu Fukuoka. Tokyo’s greatest vegan chef, Yoyo-san, took the Argentinian research group Mejunje to the farm as part of their research residency here. Darryl Wee, a writer here in Tokyo also came, and I tagged along to take photos and find out about city weeds. I know Tokyo is the great city of contrasts, but returning home via Shinjuku station seemed immoral after spending the afternoon with so much green.