New article went up on CNNgo – “Fantasy fairs: Tokyo theme parks for the stressed” (HERE).

No one does escapism quite like the Japanese, and no city provides more creative ways to escape than Tokyo. This is a city where stress (and finding ways to escape it) is concomitant with living. The theme parks in and around Tokyo are prime examples of Japan’s excellent escapism; literal temples to fantasy erected during Japan’s financial bubble which lasted until the early 90’s. Today there are 20 remaining theme parks near Tokyo (the indoor ocean and ski field both closed), one of which – Tokyo Disneyland – is the third most attended theme park in the world. According to the 2009 Theme Index, a report on global attractions and their attendance, over 13 million people visited Tokyo Disneyland in 2009, a 4% decrease from the previous year. But that decrease will do little to damage the profits of the Disney empire, instead it’s the smaller, more eccentric theme parks which are threatened by the current financial crisis.

Additionally the huge theme park developments across Asia (particularly China) are nearing completion, which will likely lead to fewer Asian tourists visiting Tokyo. Theme parks that are not visited die, and if you look in the right places you can see the evidence – parks abandoned and overgrown as ‘haikyo’ (ruins).

Read the rest HERE.

Photos from 2008 when Hannah and I went to Disneysea for the first time. In her hysteria she managed to convince me that we should wear matching Mickey face t-shirts.

Teppei Togashi, a noise artist from Tokyo, recently traveled to India. He went to make some field recordings of funerals along the Ganges; recordings of immolation. A small book has just been made of the photographs he took while he was there called Formless India. When i look at this book i am reminded of the many Japanese photographers who visited India and brought back classic reportage styled black and white photos. What Teppei brings to that tradition is a looseness and a real fascination with life (and death). His images feel casual and unconsidered, often it doesn’t look like he was trying to find a specific image but just took whatever he saw. That might sound simple, but i think it’s quite hard to do, hard to take images of what you are actually seeing, rather than what you want to see. Schema’s (HERE) are hard to break!

Although they are not black and white some of my favourite photographs of India are by soft-porn photographer Kishin Shinoyama (one of the only Japanese men over 50 to be arrested twice for indecency in 2010) in his book “Yokoo Tadanori soshite Indo”. Supposedly even Yukio Mishima helped out with that book; good luck finding it though. Super mezurashi. Instead, buy Teppei’s great little book, it has a lot of life in it and will be sold at the small Bonehouse and Working Towards Stall at the upcoming Tokyo Art Book Fair (HERE).

While in New Zealand last i wrote an essay about New Zealand’s graffiti community. It was published in the latest issue of Art Asia Pacific and co-authored by Ega Hiroshi, an occasional graffiti researcher from Tokyo. The essay was originally titled “Watching My Name Scroll By”, and dealt with the ways in which graffiti – as a cultural practice – is imported into New Zealand (predominately via the internet) and how that importation is resisted and modified locally. What emerged was an illogical re-confirmation of graffiti’s original carrier: the train. Despite having only a few train lines, which are mostly invisible to the city’s residents, local graffiti writers of Auckland have chosen to converge on the trains and traintracks to paint.

While i was finishing the essay a young Australian died after ‘train surfing’. I could not help linking this action with graffiti. Train surfing has all the transgression of graffiti, uses one of graffiti’s key mediums, and is bound up in masculine rituals and rites (as graffiti was/is). I felt this tragedy illuminated graffiti in a profound, and horrific way; interfacing with the City in a corporeal and primordial way. I am currently writing about this tenuous link for a small book called “Death in Vandalism” “Dead Riding” which will be released at the Tokyo Art Book Fair 2010.

Above is a video of one of Australia’s train riders. Jimmy C. is also known in the graffiti community of Adeliade as the graffiti writer ‘JAM’.

Suishou no Fune are a band from Japan i like. Pirako sings and plays guitar and Kageo also plays guitar. They run a curry shop in west Tokyo. Here they are playing at Echo in Shibuya. This is the first song they played, and i like that the recording shows Pirako frustrated with equipment not working properly. In this instance Mark Anderson is drumming. He is the drummer in two other Tokyo bands:

One band is called ‘Greymouth’, a duo, with sound artist and physicist Mark Sadgrove. Greymouth’s debut release was recently reviewed favorably in ‘The Wire’ magazine, which is notable. Thurston Moore, from Sonic Youth, reviewed the first release of Mark’s other band, ‘Mysteries of Love’s ‘wasted love’ cassette (HERE). Debatably, this was a positive review. Mark is also my neighbour, and in general i give him a favorable review. I just heard that he spent the evening in Shinjuku’s red light district paying to having the dead skin on his feet eaten by fish (HERE).

Stills from a video – A Lapse of Memory, 2007 – by Fiona Tan.

Fiona Tan is currently showing “The Changeling” at Wako (HERE) for one more day – July 24th. She has also been working on a project in Japan for the upcoming Architectural Biennale in Venice, which i am looking forward to seeing.

While in Australia i wrote a review of Tan’s set of two exhibitions called ‘Coming Home’ – one video work (Disorient, 2009) was shown at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the other work (A Lapse of Memory, 2007) was projected at the National Art School Gallery. The review was for Art Asia Pacific (Issue 69) and the ending said:

“In 1983, historian Geoffrey Blainey feared that Australia would become a “cluster of tribes,” as waves of migrants from Eastern Europe, the middle east and Asia poured into the country. Tan’s work supersedes such antiquated notions surrounding multiculturalism, by offering a psychological portrait of the realities of contemporary interculturalism – geographical spaces (or people) as carriers of hybrid cultures rather than simply hosts of an assortment of disparate traditions.”

20 Guilders are a Japanese band. There are two members: Tabata Mitsuru (also in Acid Mothers Temple & the Cosmic Inferno) and Suzuki Junzo (also in Miminokoto). They started the band to play all the hits from when they were growing up. This is their cover of The Undertones song Teenage Kicks, at Echo In Shibuya last Sunday morning.

Diego Maradona is infamous for the goal he scored with his hand in ’86 against England. But the translation below is of the commentary when Diego scored the second goal of that match – the “goal of the century”. Translated by Mercedes Villalba (HERE), a poet from Buenos Aires. Take special note of the commentators blending of ‘Diego’ and ‘Goal’ into ‘Diegoal’:

“Maradona has it.
The genius of global soccer starts from the right.
Genius, genius genius, GOOOOAL!
I want to cry. Oh, my God. God bless soccer.
Diegoooooal.
I have to cry, excuse me.
Maradona, in an unforgettable run, in the play of all times…
Cosmic kite, what planet did you come from?
And leaving so many British on the way, to make the whole country a closed fist screaming Argentina.
Argentina 2, England 0.
Diegoal, Diegoal.
Diego Armando Maradona.
Thank you God.
Thank you for soccer.
Thank you for Maradona.
For these tears, for this: Argentina 2, England 0.”