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.

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 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’.

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).

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.”

“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.”

I said:

“With Weerasethakul, everything begins as a story. The Primitive series draws on his own memories: a firefly entering a room, his father’s death, a dead brother’s immolated body and a subsequent search for his reincarnated form (the identifying sign: a small black mark behind the ear). This tale is told in the opening pages of the artist’s book Cujo, also on show. If these memories invite quick, easily shelved (and forgotten) explanations via labels like ‘Buddhism’, ‘rebirth’ and ‘Eastern philosophy’, the work itself absorbs and transcends such categorisations, presenting elemental images and abstracted actions that echo Eastern mysticism but are really adjuncts to Weerasethakul’s personal and intuitive symbology.”

Many people are writing about Apitchapong now thanks to his recent win of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the showing of ‘Phantoms of Nabua’ at the BFI. But the most interesting and astute words i have read about the Thai filmmaker were written by David Teh, a researcher and writer on Thai film and video art. Much of my review was influenced by an email interview with David. The following excerpt is from a paper he wrote while at the National University of Singapore “A moving image that can remember its past lives…” By David Teh (National University of Singapore).

He said:

…The cinéphile commentary on Apichatpong has left many stones unturned. There’s a lot of what [Walter] Benjamin called “histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious”; not much “profane illumination”. The worst gap, though, is an almost complete failure to contextualise these films that tell us, however undidactically, so very much about the people that are at their centre. Let me outline three characteristics of what I’m calling an ‘animate’ cinema – permeability, itinerancy and historicity. … I’ll confine myself today to the question of historicity, by way of a rough pre-history of cinema in Thailand – to which Apichatpong is more alert than most artists – but which should serve to introduce all three points…

…Part of the appeal of Apichatpong’s work in the west lies in its demonstration of the sheer permeability of the cinema – as against the sealed production spaces of industrial filmmaking – yielding a radical candour that can’t be reduced to the use of non- professional actors or the lack of scripts. Permeability traces many vectors:
- it’s architectural;
- it’s in the lighting;
- it’s textual (the texts are permeable to other texts;
- But most permeable of all are the people: the porosity between cast and crew; overlapping from one project to another. These collaborators are multi-channel mediums not just for storytelling, but also channeling other people, a spiritual permeability.
- and finally, the animation of the inanimate world, its transmissions, while rendered more subtly than our ghost festival, perhaps no less promiscuous…

… Apichatpong’s works are always studies of/in media, a reflexivity not lost on his early interpreters. This has lent confidence to auteurist accounts, allowing anchorage to canonical moments in art-cinema history, a dish then garnished with that je ne sais quoi, the surplus that exceeds the conventions of Euro-American film aesthetics and makes Apichatpong Apichatpong, cultural-exotic, Buddhist-transcendent, and so on. The problem is that this movement from formal (and international) base to aesthetic (and local) superstructure tends to confine the matter of a reflexivity about media to the medium of film, overlooking the many other media – and media genealogies – that inform his filmmaking. These would include (in the spirit of our ‘expanded’ mediumship): visual art (as distinct from film), sound and architecture; the ‘old’ broadcast media: TV, and radio in particular – its formats, its voice, so central to the imagining of national community in what is still a largely oral polity. He also taps the older oral and performance traditions – ghost stories (Haunted Houses), the Likay folk opera (Dogfahr) – whose memes have found such traction in electronic media.”