Article on the 35 Minutes Gallery just went up on CNNgo (see HERE). Photos above by Teppei Togashi, showing Shoida Masayuki talking with a policeman who had come to bring order to the party. After one year of showing together the final 35 Minutesmen show will take place over the last weekend in March. It will be sad to see it finish-the monthly saturday night parties have become the most enjoyable art openings in the city and the photos are always straight and honest.
Walking to Now Idea to hear Åbäke’s talk last saturday was when the first sign of the coming ice deluge appeared. We thought it might be warming up, that spring was coming, but we were wrong and things have escalated to point where it is now snowing outside, my toes are freezing and there is a growing puddle materializing under the front door where the umbrella is hanging from the handle.
The talk at Now Idea was by UK based design collective Åbäke. Maki and Kajsa took turns drawing on rolls of paper while talking about ‘Dent-de-leone‘ – a small publishing house for artist’s books. Hiroshi, the owner of Now Idea, recorded the event via Ustream (you can see it above).
Åbäke are confusingly simplistic. Making actions, doing actions, recording actions, designing actions in a way that mimics real life. If it wasn’t for their sense of aesthetics you might not say what they are doing is artistic at all. This is really the thing that got me most excited about their talk—the potentiality of not creating work which references/represents anything; where everything is an opportunity for content generation—coming to a place where there must be no lost opportunities for design, even if that means designing life itself and repackaging it as ‘valid content’. What it says to me, and it is a good, even dangerous thing to say and something i believe in, is that there is a happy potency latent in all actions; a potency for design (even though that sounds incredibly unfashionable and stupid). Is there even room for design in other peoples actions too? Is there room for design in terrorism, sleeping, murder and walking through the rain?
“I had a dream yesterday that I was trying to pick up a big stone. It was among the other grey and white stones along a river. Trying to hold onto it, I squeezed it with both hands. As soon as the stone felt the slight pressure of my fingers it popped; exploding like a clump of dirt thrown at a road sign from a passing car. I wanted to hold one of these stones by the river, big round stones.
I saw another stone and picked it up, again the sand passed through my fingers. Wet sand. But this time I noticed that some residue remained. A tiny ball, made of quartz, sand and glass shards. It was resting in my palm. As I went on picking up stones and having them burst and crumble the cumulative residue slowly grew and hardened into a new and complex stone.
This is how things could be. Visitors to Tokyo find themselves trying to hold onto something solid. Artless orienteers; ticking off personal lists of sites that correspond to their ideal image of the city. But you can’t choose your own projection of the city; it wont be held; it passes through fingers; it leaves you with whatever residue it chooses. In Tokyo there is no center, no horizon (literally), and no space or time for understanding what you are seeing with anything other than the simplest prototypes. Which is why you can’t hold onto anything, only bits, shards, and after long enough, perhaps a crystalized conglomeration of something.”
Text for a magazine from Melbourne on ‘Ways of seeing Tokyo’.
“But he possessed certain innate talents which Khor himself was willing to recognize; he could charm away bleeding, terror and rages, and he could cure worms; bee’s obeyed him because of his light touch. Kalinych was closer to nature whereas Khor was closer to people and society; Kalinych never liked thinking things out for himself and believed everything blindly, whereas Khor had reached a high pitch of irony in his attitude to life. He had seen much, knew much and i learned a lot from him.” From Ivan Turgenev’s ‘Khor and Kalinych’, his first short story. Turgenev’s short portraits of Russia’s rural poor are hypnotizing. Photo is of a high area on the old road from Hakone to Tokyo taken on December 26th 2009.
Yesterday Martino Gamper cooked lunch at Now Idea Bookshop. It went for four hours and i enjoyed it. Gamper is the man from the ‘Total Trattoria’ and ‘100 Chairs in 100 days and its 100 ways’ books. He was helped by the Maki and Kajsa from Abake and it was all chaos and limited space. After eating in the sunshine, with fresh air and easy talk, i had a strong desire to sleep but i’m sure that would have been rude. Sleep is usually hard to find but when it comes knocking uninvited in the middle day it is my body’s way of thanking me for eating a proper meal with nutrition. While i was leaving i noticed the selection of recommended publications which Hiroshi has put up in the shop. Jeff Burch’s small booklets were on display. Jeff is a good friend (and snorkeling enthusiast) from Sydney, his publishing house is called ‘The Spring Press’ and it releases documents and sounds; a real labor of love, and worthy of praise as one of Australia’s most important independent labels for it’s very high production standards and amazingly restrained sense of ‘content’.
Jeff recently sent two albums he recorded in the mail. One is of his solo work: lots of metallic ringing and unrhythmic clanging, coupled with natural melodies that wane between the tense and the familiar. It’s a good release. But he recorded it almost two years ago and i think he might be a bit tired of it now. Jeff also plays in ‘Songs’ with three other people; they are making Australian music critics happy. A band of unrepentant modernists who are maybe just a little bit jaded. While many other bands are trying to find the ‘new’ sound between old genre’s and musical anomalies, Songs are semi-content to extrapolate from what they consider to be modern music’s highpoints: the Flying Nun golden era and New York no wave. It’s not often you can describe a band as equanimous, so i am going to enjoy saying that Song’s are genuinely equanimous. I think they actually sincerely want to make ideal pop music. It’s simple and strong music.
Video of Bruce Russell from Jeffs Blog (HERE). Bruce is a member of the Dead C—seminal New Zealand noise from the late 80’s—and will soon release a solo album on Jeff’s label. Bruce sounds like a farmer; lots of bad jokes and self-deprecation. It is all brilliant.
This is the sunrise, from the first day of 2010. Some New Zealand friends in Tokyo (Cathy, Andrew, Andre and Ellie) hired a van and filled it with futons. Hannah and i joined them at the last minute. We watched the sunrise with the boot up, out on a headland in Chiba. People amassed and clapped and prayed as the sun came up; there we many people, maybe hundreds. The futons were an ingenious idea, but the metal van got so cold that i was able to fully recall the sensations i felt the last time i almost froze. That was in the middle of Russia, riding a train from Kazan to St. Petersburg with a broken heater and a double layered window where one layer had been smashed by delinquents (aka ‘gypsies’) en route. It got down to -45 Celcius. Two old people took pity and put their blankets over my brother and I when they left for their stop. Being uncomfortable does wonders for the memory. I read somewhere recently that children used to be beaten when an important or notable event took place, in case the children were required to recall the event in court. I will never forget the first day of 2010. Although, it didn’t actually get that cold over New Years Eve—probably only about minus one or two, but my body temperature plummeted against the metal; half frozen, unable to fully fall asleep or fully wake up i remember intensely fantasizing about hot cans of coffee in each of my pockets.