on hiatus till August. mostly.

Time to finish my book. But I leave you with
• the first episode of a nice new animé, Library Wars. It’s a near-future story, after the Japanese government declares a state of emergency, institutes a media improvement act, and initiates a new special forces division of book-seizing operatives. Alex says: “At the same time, libraries have been declared autonomous governing bodies with their own armed forces. Of course havoc, nostalgia, and romantic subplots between recruits -in-training ensue. Dialectics return!” You can see it on Youtube:

• a CBC review of the terrible-seeming new movie starring Mike Myers. I’ve seen the trailer 5 times and it’s still terrible, even with hockey jokes!

• and in tribute to the late, lamentable heat wave, the liner notes of a new musical genre also born out of one of the hottest summers on record. From a new Trojan boxset I picked up @ Amoeba other other day:

The development of Rocksteady, and the demise of its predecessor, Ska, resulted from a general need for change allied with one of the hottest Jamaican summers on record. The scorching conditions which persisted throughout the eearly months of ‘66 undoubtedly played its part in the desire for the creation of a slower style more conducive to dancing in such a climate. As the high temperatures continued unabated, the tempo of the music decreased according and by the end of the year the transformation from Ska to Rocksteady was complete. The once favoured driving beat had disappeared and with it the limits its rigid structure had imposed.

So, who knows what the future of heat waves will bring?

refreshments

In these sultry times near the equinox, a girl’s thoughts naturally turn to…beer and snacks. The heat is bringing back memories of the last extended stint of writing-induced hermitude I had, a hot hot summer in Kyoto in 2005. I lived next to a Korean neighborhood, so I got used to the evening ritual of shuffling out to the beer machine in my slippers (yes, outdoor slippers), dropping in a couple of coins, and having a very refreshing long swig of beer before, or during, the time it took to look and see if any haphazardly parked bikes got cleared out by the cops that day, and get sweaty enough to want to take a shower again. So, the very onset of such heat reminds me of Korean food, and beer, and vinegar, just because it is always tasty to eat vinegar in hot weather.

Fortunately, though I won’t be doing any world tours this summer, I can still do the world tour of the grocery stores of Los Angeles. And the east side is hopping with them. My current fave is the sleeperly-named Super King, an Armenian mega-market on San Fernando. Not for the faint of heart. Good produce and Turkish/Greek/Russian selection of hard liquor, very ecumenical; a lesson for us all. Closer to home, and bike-able, is the HK Market, my Korean market friend (HK for Hankook, no English links, sorry). Not only do they, like in Asia, mark down all the prepared food with about 2 hours to go before closing, but they have all sorts of yummy vegetables, many suitable for pickling.

All these excursions are all just a way of working up to the task at hand, the development of pickling skills during idle moments when I’m not working (as I actually am a lot, with various school mentoring things that, technically, senior faculty other people should be doing). The above illustration shows what “egoma” or “perilla” or “shiso” leaves look like when you treat them all kimchi-like for a day or so, by adding onion, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, red pepper. And enjoying, on a bed of rice, or with a nice cold beer–yum.

If I am cooped up much longer, I will probably run out of Korean produce, and start in on the tofu innovations. If you see me residing out on the lawn in a homemade organic tofu igloo come the dog days of late August, do not be surprised.

Miyazaki Tsutomu, otaku, executed

These days, the term “otaku” is often embraced with pride, to mean a sort of mild geekiness or coolness based on collecting and knowledge-sharing, but many have forgotten the term’s subcultural roots, and the moral panics that followed its embrace. Miyazaki was the first video-comic-subculture consumer to truly peg otaku as perverse and criminal. He was convicted for the pretty gory mutilation and murder of 4 schoolgirls in 1989, and sentenced to the death penalty, and when his two-room apartment was searched, a big stash of porn and horror films found was, including the items that were hyped as his favorite films, selections from the Guinea Pig series.

Not a cute animé series, but rather a laboratory of sorts, the Guinea Pig are pretty rough horror films, with  graphic torture scenes of girls, of the “let’s see what happens” sort. But, as in many cases when it helps move the goods, otaku were de-stigmatised and brought around as emissaries of cool in the post-Pokémon and post-Murakami Takashi world.

A collaborative that includes film fest programmer Alex Zahlten organizes the largest J-film fest in the world, held in Frankfurt each year. Alex interviewed a recent J-horror director, TSURUTA Norio, who talks about how the moral panic in the wake of Miyazaki, and the desire to distance from his spectre, provoked a whole new atmospheric aesthetic of J-horror films, which produced The Ring and much of what we think of as J-horror today.

Oddly, some photos of Miyazaki’s room, as in the example above, were part of the Japanese government’s offering to the Venice Biennale last go-round, as they apparently chose to ride the wave of “Japan cool,” and Miyazaki phobia had died down.

Miyazaki’s hanging took place, as is customary, without an announcement, on June 17. Rumors abound in the papers about why this took place now, just before the G8 summit which is taking place in remote Hokkaido in July. And about the relation of Miyazaki to a recent stabbing binge in Akihabara by a temp worker. Much of the speculation dwells a bit luridly, in my opinion, on recent incidents of youth crime, and connects them rather lazily to comic or game images, as responses to perverse stimuli.

More perverse to me, or differently so, is the new maid café in Culver City, which has leeched all the hostess-bar function out of the café, and made it into a coed gallery. It’s supposed to be a kind of hostess bar, an oasis of “innocent” sex industry work in the stinky-boy electronics zone of Akihabara, where the maids –popularised via Sade in the late 60s, think role play here–hold your hand and listen to you whine about not having a girlfriend, while you drink lousy dishwater coffee. It’s not supposed to be for sweet young girl-things in their twenties to meet for a yummy high tea. It’s just wrong! Of course, it’s probably easier on the server to pass out the sandwiches and not have to listen like a captive bartender and understand the freaking customer.

scoreboard confessional

I think the last time I was really into basketball, the players wore what look kinda like hot pants today. I think my love for basketball got checked into another brain in a storage locker at some point, and I went on to maybe other things, definitely other places, and most certainly other national sports (hell-O hockey, the national sport of Québec! hell-O baseball, the national sport of Japan!).

When I think about it, a good decade of my life was spent seeing basketball at least once a week, live, not even counting the high-school and amateur stuff. I mean as conceived by Bobby Knight protegés in the midwest, nipping around the heels of the NIT, big-time adjacent, if not truly the big time. “The best offense is a good defense,” “free throws make a game,” and so on.

It held such a grip, was such a part of the ambience that one of my high school friends, a girl, was recruited by the Pac 10. And another, whom I used to give rides home with his trombone banging up the passenger door after practice, drifted up to Chicago and got addicted to codeine, before he started sending robots to Mars (wait a minute!).

But lately my love for basketball has been re-kindled. Hell, I think a lot of my driving philosophy and strategy (that’s driving as in cars, not as in motivation) came from strategizing how to get out of an icy parking lot overloaded with sedans in subzero temperatures on a school night.

But I never realized till lately, given that I left that life over 20 years ago, and since I have moved back to the US and have been reading up, and listening up to various fraquaintances, how racially freighted was the whole Larry Bird trip, vis-à-vis what came to be called, in my college-town home-town in downstate Illinois in the ‘eighties anyway, the “run and gun” style of ball-playing. There are many reasons to be embarrassed about downstate IL, in this election year; this is one of them. The ‘run and gun’ phrase was supposed to refer to the institution of the shot clock in college ball, and the kinetic results that followed with conspicious disregard to the dues-paying of a “good defense.” But it also stood not so subtly in for the way that black players from Chicago aka “upstate” were changing the game and, implicitly, the stakes–in other words, less free-throw stoicism and more jump and versatility, moving between formerly land-locked positions (as in playing outside your position of guard, forward, etc).

Anyway, game 6, featuring the roll over and die cave-in that can hardly be called a performance by the Lakers, came in just in time to help along this remembering.

I went down to watch the game with my neighbor, and I had I forgotten how much fun it is to sit around and watch the players just move around the court, and mutter about it. The improv conspiracies that develop as things just happen to move a ball down the court. The back-memory of moves from here to there, of hot-pants and hairdos, from something out of nowhere, to jubilation at winning, to getting the shit kicked out of you with grace, to the timing of the taunt song at the end of the game. My, things have changed while I was away.

Eikoh HOSOE event at LACMA, June 21 (free stuff about Japan)

Sorry for the over-logistical and rather clinical orientation lately, but family and other stuff has prevailed. But now so shall the eternal quest to bring Japanese things to public eye, without costing an arm and a leg!

I’m passing on some info about a talk and exhibition coming up at LACMA, which are really wonderful. The talk is at 2 on June 21st. Above, an image from photographer HOSOE Eikoh, whose exhibit will be opening the 22nd. Info is thanks to John Solt. Hosoé is one of Japan’s greatest living photographers, and has won numerous awards over his half-century career, including the prestigious Mainichi Photographer of the Year for 2008. (The Mainichi is the most populist of the 4 major newspapers in Japan, and its photo-journalism has a great deal of integrity.)

Hosoé is a big documenter of the butoh dance scene. Born after/because of the bombs, butoh has 2 founders, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. Ohno just turned 100 and is still dancing. His son Yoshito is also a dancer, and will be at the talk.

Below is a bit more background, and the specs of the talk, featuring major dance dignitaries as audience members, and the exhibit itself. At LACMA, the big-ticket Japanese art items tend to be from the Price Collection. So it is a big step to have an exhibition from the 20th-21st c. on show, as is happening here.

More from John: “…Hosoé will be coming to town for the exhibit arranged by LACMA astute curators Hollis Goodall (Japanese dept.) and Charlotte Cotton (photography dept.). The Japanese Pavilion has shown quality art over the years, but it’s great that they are now also focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries, allowing viewers to see that Japanese culture is dynamic and not stuck in the wonders of ukiyo-e and then jumping to manga/anime without anything in between (this perception is prevalent in USA consciousness, but not in Japanese culture itself).”

There will also be some very cool avant-garde visitors, on site at the talk. They are:

“…three other great avant-garde friends of Eikoh Hosoe’s from Japan [who] will also be flying in to grace his opening. They are: (1) the renowned butoh master Yoshito OHNO, flying in after a performance in Montreal; (2) Yoshie YOSHIDA, the great critic of art/dance/culture who has been closely associated with Yukio MISHIMA, Tatsumi HIJIKATA, Kazuo OHNO, and the avant-garde for over half a century. He usually wears a kimono and a Panama hat like a pre-WW2 dandy and might be the hippest old man you’ll ever meet; (3) artist Takashi SHINOZAKI, whose gorgeous new book UTSUROBUNE (which means a boat hollowed out from a tree, with Buddhist connotations of “Empty Boat”) has just come out.”

Screening of Passing Poston (cheap/free stuff about Japan)

I was asked by the film-makers to spread some news about this new doc, about the internment of Japanese Americans during the war (roughly from 1942-1945). Besides these dates, it’s also playing for free at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) on June 28, with a panel afterwards with three of the film’s interviewees.

The trailer doesn’t actually refer to what makes this film different from other films about internees’ experience, or even a visit to JANM itself, which is a bit of a shame. But the LA Times did a nice piece following up the film, and cut to the chase of what is different about these internees (19,000 of the roughly 110,000 total people interned)–the transfer of farmers to an Indian reservation, in Poston Arizona, because of their special skills. The “Berkeley researcher” referred to here is an artist, Ruth Okimoto, one of the people who will be at the JANM screening.

What the Berkeley researcher would discover was that the U.S. government had deliberately selected Japanese Americans with farming experience from California Central Valley towns like Sacramento, Bakersfield and elsewhere, to help develop the reservation’s agricultural potential, Okimoto said. Researching documents in the National Archives, along with Colorado River Indian tribal archives and other sources, Okimoto discovered the then-named Office of Indian Affairs partnered with the War Relocation Authority to develop an internee labor plan.

I have spent a lot of time reading and talking about the internment and its processes in both the US and Canada, but I am still getting my head around this, as the precursor to the prison industrial complex, in its very intricate bureaucratic plans and use of confined labor, and the deliberate forced mobility of farmers from the Central Valley and other agro areas. My thoughts are hovering back and forth between “man, this is really screwed up,” and wow, I am really glad to be in LA to have a chance to see this, and hear what people have to say.

I’ve been wanting to get to the ImaginAsian theatre downtown for a while–partly to see films, and partly to see the building, and what kinds of spaces might be used for programming.

the melancholy of the tennis boy–more facts only a ‘Japanologist’ could love

Continuing with last week’s Murakami Ryû obsession, I came across something you don’t see often enough with US authors–cocktails named after their works! Something to strive for with the next great American novel. The conceit here is that Murakami’s late night TV blab-show, “Ryû’s Bar,” generated the drinks. Above, we have the Almost Transparent Blue.

Fair enough, very drinky sounding. Let’s see what’s in it: 15 ml eau de vie de framboise, 1 t of green mint, 60 ml of champagne. Seems a bit classy for all those orgy scenes, but maybe Ryû is just a cooler customer than I, and lord knows blue is not a naturally-occurring food color. (Here I’m not getting bent out of shape about orgies, but referring to the clichéd, un-humanish style of Murakami’s prose with the ‘unnatural label. And let’s not even ask about the draft version of this drink, shall we, as I mentioned here.)

What’s next? Well, cutting to the chase, a gin drink, the “melancholy of the Tennis Boy.” I guess the tennis boy is an old-school rummy. Also, this is the cougar drink of choice, say the jodhpurs below, when shaken, not stirred. Why not help him out by setting him up with some drinky stripes. His other ingredients include 1 t of green mint (liqueur, I am beginning to surmise), 10 ml of Pernod, 60 ml of soda.

And lastly–skipping, sadly over such drinky marvels as the “69″ and the “War on the Other Side of the Ocean,” we will truly know when we have bought the fascist farm when we all drink three squares of this, the “Love and Illusion in a Time of Fascism.” Mind you, this is a two-volume novel about survivalist high tech operators in the Arctic Circle in the time of millennial hunter and gatherers, that reads like the dry parts of the Economist. No psychology whatsoevah.

In case you are wondering, after the apocalypse, we will be drinking single malt Laphroaig Scotch and dark beer combos, 30 and 45 ml, respectively.

crafty boy meets information capitalism

The LA Times did an interesting article today about a new chain of “tech shops,” one of which is slated to open in Los Angeles. Apparently, for about a hundred bucks a month, you can use the atelier and its stuff, which includes welding torches, a 3-D printer, and facilities for neon production. Hard to find room for that economy of scale stuff in your apartment. Which is one of the many compelling reasons why places like the fun and amazing Machine Project exist, so you can learn things about like tissue culturing and crochet, and fornicating sea slugs.

But I digress. The switcheroo of scale in the LAT piece–individual and mega, as in the use of quaint artisanal terms like “atelier” to describe 15,000-foot mega-spaces–is kind of a capsule version of how the idea works. You can’t just play with stuff, it has to be very purposeful, as in the “R&D” of the headline. Along these lines, the workshop is an interesting mix of DIY and business plan mentalities. In the article, this slide is bridged by the regulator of the term “maker.”

Make is, of course, the O’Reilly publication from the Bay Area that features cool crafty boy stuff (mostly, though there is a cool article about a female engineer’s efforts to make swimming robots). My favorite project so far is the gun-operated alarm clock: “Hack a retro gaming light gun with tilt switches to control a vintage digital clock radio. When the alarm wakes you up, grab the gun and kill it off!”

So just as the term “maker” is ambiently brandable and pitched to boys, there is a sister publication, Craft, which typically has girly stuff. I did a piece for them on cosplay last year, which was great fun, highly informative, and they paid me on time! The sex separation as strict as any highway rest stop is pretty striking, but hey, why not cross the great his-n-hers divide by cross-reading.

But getting back to the LAT, imagine my surprise when Kinko’s came across as the great DIY business model.

By offering affordable access to otherwise out-of-reach tools, TechShop is lowering start-up costs and providing a commons for previously isolated minds. It’s a place where “makers” — as members of the do-it-yourself movement are known — can make such products as water-cooled stacks of computer servers and remote-controlled robots that do videoconferencing.

It’s doing for physical goods what Kinko’s did for printed products, said David Pescovitz, a research director at the Institute for the Future, a forecasting group in Menlo Park.

Kinda cynical use of the term “commons,” in my opinion, nicely finessing both the material histories of both the open-source and 17th-century enclosure movements. And while I harbor fond memories of midnight runs to the Castro Kinko’s many a time, I’m not sure it’s anyone’s idea of an empowered workforce, as the interviewee intimates.

japanese experimental film screening @ The Box (free stuff from Japan)

*Follow-up on the screening and lecture itself: very well-attended, with about 40 people, and occaasional passers-by, including small kids with basketballs, peering in from the street, Chung King Road. No one can resist a boarded-up room showing movies, it seems. What I didn’t do justice to in the original post was Nao’s installations. One was taken down for the screening, but two remained up. There was one in the basement, the one with footage from Saipan, that was very absorbing, and the basement was a good place for the kind of immersive voiceover, atop images that navigated through water. The textures were quite lush, the voice soothing, and very descriptive, so it took me a while to realize that it was describing various munitions that lurked underwater off the coast of Saipan. Buried war treasures. I ended up going to dinner with the very generous gallery owner and other attendees, which was a blast. Lots of good stories about artist forms of transit, specialised forms of tea-pouring (e.g. the British rail pour, and the lush life of Altadena).

The gallery is currently holding an exposition by film-maker/sculptor Naotaka Hiro. Screening of short Japanese experimental films, in The Box, in Chinatown, tomorrow, from 7-9. Images are from: Matsumoto Toshio, Shiki soku ze ku (1975); Itoh Takashi, Spacy (1981); and Iimura Takahiko, In the River (1969-70).

Actually–there’s some Saipan content, too, with the collaborative piece with Sid Dueñas. The wonderful and entertaining Jonathan Hall (of UCI) will give a talk interspersed with the screenings. Yes, it’s free!

May 10 - June 7, 2008

The Box gallery is pleased to present an exhibition which will include two new video pieces by Naotaka Hiro and a new collaboration with Sid M. Duenas. The first new video is the third in a series of pieces that involve a human skull. In this particular piece the video is a documentation of a performance Hiro did in which the skull hung from the ceiling with a wire and Hiro built onto the skull using sticky rice, attempting to make a sphere. The video shows the quick movements of a disjointed male nude, with the frame of the video disconnecting the body from the feet and his own head.

The second video piece also dissects the body; placing plastic toy body parts into a non-descript landscape. In this case the body parts in the video are objects, not attached to a human figure. The body parts that remain are disturbing and the viewers contemplates their own bodies’ relationship to landscape. This piece will include two video projections running side by side.

The third piece, To and From, that is collaboration with Sid M. Duenas, is a video in which these two artists explore the relationship of their personal and political cultures. With Hiro being of Japanese decent and Duenas being of Saipanese decent, decided to travel to Saipan and explore the very location of conflicts between these two countries.

“i-Phone killers” in Japan

An interesting Forbes piece on the “meh” hopes of the iPhone’s future in Japan, whose consumers are notoriously demanding about their gadgets. (You may wonder why I link to such a venue, but in fact, to keep up with what’s up in Japan, you have to read the biz press. The big books on pomo, empire and neo-liberalism have nary a mention of important things like the 1985 Plaza Accord, which basically paved the way for globalization in US-Japan circles, which is to say, a couple of eensy-beensy details like free trade between the world’s first- and second-largest economies.) Anyway, back to enjoying the symptom…

The real trump card for Japanese handsets may be their screens. Screen quality is so important to Japanese consumers that cellphone manufacturers have begun branding their handsets the same way they do their TVs–Viera for Panasonic, Aquos for Sharp and Bravia for Sony. Consumers will often invest in the same brand for their handset and their home TV, say analysts.

Pictured above is the number-one best-selling phone, a Panasonic. I have to say I love Panasonic durability, even if I am not going to be swiping my subway fare or paying my gas bill with a phone anytime soon.

Screens are a selling point mostly because the Japanese are big fans of mobile TV. Unlike the U.S., where TV-on-the-go is a nascent and pricey industry, Japanese consumers enjoy mobile TV free of charge, with plenty of fresh content. Under a system called “One Seg,” phones can directly access television broadcast signals. Like larger LCDs, these screens display crisp images in up to 17 million colors.