Tokyo Flower Children 5

Winchester Nii Tete hails from a famous family of drummers in Ghana. And Tokyo is so lucky to have him.
His playing is energetic, joyous, dignified, virtuous.
Behind him is Teruyuki Kawabata, leader of Cigarette She Was , a composer/lyricist who plays the guitar, percussion and other instruments.
On his right is Keiji Kubo, a language expert who totally respects aboriginal culture, and plays the bass/didgeridoo.
On Winchester's left is Haruna Shimizu, also with Cigarette She Was, who someday wants to have her own cafe-on-wheels.
I get in a lecture mood when I hang out with such talented pure-spirited people.
I have told Winchester he has beautiful eyes.
I have told Teruyuki his "Jounetsu wo torimodosou" is a great song.
I have told Keiji his girlfriend Akiko is "KawaYUUUUUI!"
And so, at the Pit Inn in Shinjuku, the other night, I told Haruna she must stick with the man she chooses to love because loving someone isn't about weighing the pro's and con's to get a good deal.
Too many Japanese women are still waiting for that deal _ like they are prizes to be won.
Love is not something you receive from someone else. It is all and only about your Self.
It's a lifelong battle _ like Art and Life.
Love endures through tick and thin, through sickness and health, through the good times and the bad.

Tokyo Flower Children 4
Tokyo Flower Children 2
Tokyo Flower Children
Tokyo Flower Children 3

Tadanori Yokoo

Dreams blend with reality like time warps in a collage of bathers, samurai, phallic symbols, milk-spurting breasts, waterfalls, ukiyoe prints and half-born babies in a voluminous retrospective of Tadanori Yokoo's prolific career at Setagaya Museum.
Images jump from postwar Japan(schoolchildren, Mishima) to Hollywood (kissing blondes), then India and other faraway places as quickly and as unexpectedly as the workings of a genius artist's mind.
In the same way, mediums keep shifting _ pasted photos, oils, silkscreen, Plexiglas.
The usual demarcations of history, geography, references and dimension are no longer relevant.
Even canvases get shredded.
Themes are repeated, over and over, as colors change from ocean-blue to reproductive red on towering canvases.
We enter Yokoo's mind, stepping into a world of magic and mystery that is probably where we end up when we die and also where we were small and unknowing before we were born _ the primordial that lurks like a hallucinatory flash behind a mirror, or behind our own image in the mirror, hiding behind our backs, or caught around a corner or beneath the water's surface or embedded inside a hidden wall:

Michelangelo is /blue dolphins jumping are /a couple dancing inside a skull is /a portrait of Pablo Picasso is /crossroads in the darkness getting shot by a film crew are /faces wearing sunglasses are /a photo of a cat's face /is a screaming salivating woman who is posing at the same spot Mona Lisa was painted.

Things crumble like sand.
And that face or that thing from another century pops up in our consciousness as it always belonged there, as reminders of our finite lives and our connection to the eternal.
Almost 70, Yokoo is voraciously young, curious and evolving like a child.
He stands quiet, ever charming in a tux, his signature curly head held high, as he greets guests at the museum reception, surrounded by chattering dignitaries/celebrities.
What is refreshing is that he thinks big _ real big, on the scale of the Pyramids, grandeur of the galaxies, the insight of a divinity.
That same "bigness" is present in his physically small works, down to the tiniest pencil sketches.
Yokoo is big.
Yokoo is not timid.
And Yokoo is persistent.
One moment, you see a work from the 1960s, a fluorescent depiction of a woman in bondage, and you think: He is at his prime; he can't possibly top this.
But then there's another, and yet another, and yes, another, from the 1990s, maybe just this year, all equally strong and different, yet retaining the voice that is so defiantly Yokoo.
I interviewed Yokoo when I was a reporter at The Japan Times.
I went to his studio filled with knickknacks from all over the world _ figures and artifacts.
What's this? What's that?
Everything looked like art in his studio. I was probably picking up ashtrays with wonderment.
Why do you keep asking what is this? what is this? he said with a smile.
Yokoo later told me he enjoyed my articles.
You don't know anything about art, he said, but you write what you feel, and that's what I want my works to evoke in people.
It's a nice thing to say to a writer.
As I leave the museum, I return to the world, suddenly equipped with a new eye.
Everything looks different as though the objects are part of Yokoo's paintings, just making cameo appearances in the landscape before me, to remind me that everything is as much salvation as it is illusion.

Ecological Fur

It's real fur.
But Chie Imai has added recycled polyester as fabric to a few of her 2008-2009 collection items to make it luxury fur with a green conscience.
My story.
Two women were sitting across the table from me during the show.
One of them said with a giggle: "This fur costs 20 million yen. You can buy an apartment with that."
Then the other said: "You cannot buy an apartment with 20 million yen."
Imai says global warming has hurt the demand for fur, although sales are growing in new markets like Russia and China.
And so she has also come up with "seasonless fur" products.
She showed me a short jacket of white lacey fabric with white fur trim that she said can be worn in air-conditioned places even in the summer.

Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor's fingers are genius crazed mice, appearing and disappearing, light speed flashes of moments. Cecil himself, his shirted back, trickling sweat, then soaked wet, is a giant uncaged animal, arching, crouching, sometimes lovingly, but most of the time viciously, from the right side of the grand piano, where crystal clear sparkles of notes are triangularly cornered stars falling upon keyboards, all the way to the left hand side, groaning heavily with the growls emanating from the dark piano, now breathing so deeply with life. His unpredictable colors unbelievable originate from a hidden almost perverse yet ultimate, space of soul, outside any
reality. That penetrate, fill your wholeness, that has already forgotten to resist. Concentrated muscle tense that is relaxing, freeing in the numbed hypnosis of his drugging power. Drinks lie untouched on the night club tables. Ears become one. And all other music, all other sound, all other thought can suicidally stop in shame before Cecil. When he rests, and he doesn't rest, he releases you to sigh in lyrics of relief, the beauty of jazz rhythms, only to thrust you back into the irregularly regulated chords he hears. Till you hear his hands, parting seas, red and black, back and forth. The mad jerkings of perpetual tears choked confusion in your chest are muted in an overwhelmed one-ness of peace. You are tiny, fantasy-filled, merely deformity caught in the immatured evolutionnary stages, but you are ecstatic to have stayed alive long enough to experience what you just experienced. So that the world is no longer a void. But an eternal feeling blanketing cities, skies, machines and
men.

From Yuri Kageyama, "Peeling," Berkeley, Calif: I. Reed Press, 1988.
First published in Oro Madre.

an ode to the Caucasian male

Poetry by Yuri Kageyama.
Guitar and music arrangement by Carl Freire.
Recorded in Green Village Studios, Tokyo, April 13, 2008.
"an Ode to the Caucasian male," from Yuri Kageyama, "Peeling," Berkeley, Calif: I. Reed Press, 1988.
First published in "Women Talking, Women Listening."

an ode to the Caucasian male

white man
white man
with the silky blond hair
the emerald-blue eyes
and the cool million dollar grin
I won't mind being a Suzy Wong for you.
cuz
I'm tired of the laundry-men
and the dirty restaurant cooks
who can only smell of won ton soup
and talk about chowmein
they don't have the powers,
the style you do
seems you've got to be white
to really be a man
the long sleek legs
with the acid rock walk
in the hot tight pants
where the warm prick dwells
it's okay
you see only the race in me
just a stereotype, not my personality
it's okay
cuz, white man
you have
whiteness
to give.

Rei Sato at Kaikai Kiki Gallery

Rei Sato is one of Japan's brilliant young artists who are part of Kaikai Kiki, the studio of Takashi Murakami.
Her whimsical lyrical works take the pop manga style of the Murakami School, defiant, maddeningly vibrant, so hardened and cynical, a step further, perhaps, in a more serene and introverted direction.
They give a view of the world of a child fingerpainting fish, the happy sun, girls with quizzical expressions and weedlike flowers, sometimes on fabric, sometimes on enlarged photos that are lazy snapshots, like those taken on cell phones, purposely making no assertions whatsoever except in seeing, recording and being.
A makeshift cafe at the gallery _ low coffee tables, muted lighting, a guitarist sending bubbly sounds through electronic equipment, hushed conversations _ also included a book shelf filled with knickknacks: fuzzy stuffed animals, figures, plastic watches, books, a half-filled pot of herb tea, tawdry memorabilia, everyday items that give glimpses into the artist's mind.
Making your way toward the back, ducking hanging beads and pieces of cloth of different colors, you see that the works become more and more like scribbles, pencil drawings of tiny girls, forgotten notes, scrawled on bits of paper, fragments of thoughts, mischievous markings on newspaper. And in the very back next to old posters of Japanese movies are graphic art from Yumeji Takehisa and the words:
"I want to be a poet."

Mobile Fashion

Xavel is the company behind the Tokyo Girls Collection fashion show and mobile/PC sites for electronic shopping that showcase some of Japan's biggest brands _ fashion houses puzzling to anyone other than young Japanese women with names like Deicy, Titty, Cecil McBee, Spiral Girl.
The shows, which attract thousands of people, work more like catalog shopping.
The people can order clothes right then and there as the models prance on the runway before their eyes.
It's a great business idea.
And these women are certainly having fun.
Whether their energy and goodwill can be channeled into something other than just-looking-good remains to be seen.