Thursday aug 1
Big day, milk club
I'm off to the Watari Museum in Harajuku. It's really more of a gallery than a museum. . . 4 floors of art by some German guy named Carsten Nicolai. He's into science/exploratorium type art. One piece is some white noise 'trapped' in a vacuum tube. The only way you could hear the noise is to smash the tube. Another piece is a 'cloud chamber'. Cloud chambers are these boxes scientists shoot subatomic particles into, and when the particles collide, they produce clouds of vapor which indicate the precise particles created in the explosion. But Nicolai (like Duchamp) declared the cloud chamber art by putting it in a museum. I've never seen a cloud chamber before so I was really stoked. The best thing ever though was an aquarium full of jellyfish. It takes a certain kind of humility to realize that nothing you are ever going to sculpt or paint is as cool as a jellyfish. I ask the nice museum lady if she ever thought her job description would include feeding jellyfish.
Also at the watari museum is this total bad-ass bookstore, so I buy a shitload of art books and then run around Harajuku and aoyama looking for more books. I determine my favorite artists from Japan are'
Takeshi murakami
(he was on the cover of giant robot. He does bright eyeballs, and also pornographic anime statues ten feet tall)
mariko mori
(she has three books, none of which I could find anywhere in Tokyo) she does
these beautiful elaborate installations and also dresses up cosplay style
and takes pictures in public places that way.
Chiho aoshima
(no books about her, somehow….) does beautiful,
creepy, very elegant EPS computer art about women bleeding
Junko mizuno
'hell babies' . . . actually she's no good .
never mind.
Aida makoto
(most of his art stinks, but he has like 4 things that are so incredible they
make you go, DAMN Japanese people are fucked up, incredibly realistic space
turds, comic books about general macarthur's snakey penis, hari-kari schoolgirls….)
unfortunately he only has one book, and it sucks.
Kenji yanobe --
he does these life-sized anime-looking bathyscaphes and robot dog outfits that rule, but also his book sucks ass. Why do art books never show you the things you want to see?
Miwa yanagi
(she does these elaborate photos of sleeping uniformed mannequins in weird public places)
But I don't like aya tanako or nara yoshitomo-I can't even tell them apart. They both do big-eyed waif girls and seem more interested in selling themselves as a label than producing anything fucked up or thought provoking.
Anyway, after buying 12 art books and then - impulsively- buying 6 pounds of health food (because, when am I going to ever find a health food store in Tokyo again?) I march along - fully laden with bags-to meet my penpal kumi for the first time.
Kumi is in many respects the most 'typical' young Japanese person I've met-she only sends email from her cellular phone. Her hobbies are shopping, dancing, and . . . surfing? In another respect, Kumi is a typical pen-pal (which is to say NOT typically japanese): she's spent lots of time abroad, speaks good English, and has a boyfriend overseas. Plus, she works at the most bizarre Japanese institution: the indoor ski-park. Named SSAWS, the park apparently has a machine that sprays real snow crystals from vents in the roof. I wanted a schematic of it, but she's only in the rental department, not an engineer.
Then I go to a nightclub. . .The club is MILK. It's famous for having not only music performances, but also fashion shows and performance art and s/m also. Tonight is 'electronica' music made by nerds with laptops. It's not so bad really, but I'm mostly annoyed with the audience who don't want to dance to it, just nod their heads and think about it really hard. Loosen up, Einstein.
as soon as I come in, though, I notice that everyone speaks English really well! This is the only place I've been in Japan where the average fool is fluent. I meet kazuyo's pal, named hyato. He does some electronic music and then - in the middle of his set- lip-synchs to the insane clown posse. I mean, sure. Why not?
Then I meet Abe and Hikari, who waste no time introducing themselves. How friendly is that? Abe is a soft-spoken fashion student, and Hikari is a very drunk computer programmer.
They introduce me to their other nerd pals, Ryosuke and Masako and the organizer, Shuto. Then Hyato takes me to the other room to watch a musician whose 'instrument' is a Nintendo gameboy played through a kaoss pad. Not only is it the best music of the night, but the guy's name is 'p-cow.'
Not only that, but during his set, 4 naked butoh-dancing guys come out of nowhere and start rocking really hard. Maybe I'm sexist but I like naked guys. Naked women always have this connotation of 'I'm desperate for attention.' But naked guys are so taboo, so much more rediculous, that anyone with the guts to do that gets respect from me. what's more, the nerdy guys in the audience are really happy about the naked guys, they're not tripped out about it.
later on, some older Chinese guy keeps trying to buy me drinks. He's the best dancer in the place, it turns out. his name is Mew, and his boyfriend's name is Taq.
They're pals with some young women, Mizuki, Makiko and Fuku-chan. More friends for me! later I also hang out with the staff, Yukio the bartender (whose fashion and hair looks straight out of SF's Mission district) and Yasuko, the super tall waitress. Fukuchan is obsessed with Byzantine art, and Makiko is studying French literature. Wow, actual art students like from fruits magazine or something!! This is the coolest place ever, too bad I'm passing out.
after that, we watch some crazy FREE-jazz band play at five in the morning. we're still dancing, Mew is kicking everyone's ass, and the band starts going from free-jazz to playing James Brown covers for no reason, as butoh naked guys crawl everywhere....
At 6 am I take the subway home. The subways crowds are weird, a mix of over-motivated early bird businessmen and totally hangover club people. The most worrisome club people are these women, always in pairs, dressed like total sluts. It's like, ok, you stayed out all night, you're obviously a hoochie, what are you doing still with your friend? Shouldn't you be at some guy's house right now? Shouldn't someone be snorting lines of coke off your tits right now? I mean, what's the point of being a total sleaze if you're just going to go home with your pal anyway??
Friday aug 2
Karaoke debut
Sleep all day. but unfortunately, today was the ONE DAY that Tokyo was caught in a massive FUCKING THUNDERSTORM so I couldn't really sleep at all. Then I go meet kayoko again. but I'm late, and to top it off, the train is stalled for 15 minutes. So I meet her 40 minutes late. Her favorite restaurant is now closed so we go to this awful pastry place and I start crying, because I know I've ruined the evening for her. eventually I get over it, thanks to some waffles.
We go bust my karaoke cherry. It's fucking fun, because they have the Ramones. And black Sabbath.
. . . . .
(see if you can guess which Sabbath hit i'm karokeing just by the lyrics on the tv screen. . . )
I mean, what the fuck?? Japanese karaoke has the most random songs ever. Like, 40 n'sync songs and only 2 songs by britney spears? Public enemy but not RUN DMC? And mysteriously, no hank Williams. But james brown's sex machine. ( I make kayoko do the 'get on up' parts)
also amazing is the random video images that they put up on the video screen to supplement the scrolling lyrics. It's like a entire new genre of 'sub video': it kind of has to do with the song genre but not really. They just shot a million feet of stock footage and then just grab random armfuls of it for each individual song. Like, motorcycles, followed by a woman hiding behind a greek column, followed by a man walking along a beach, followed by 2 women shopping. . . and she song is 'YO BUM RUSH THE SHOW
'.
The best part of the whole thing is, they actually put up flavor flav's monolog from 'yo bum rush the show.' On the screen, as if it's to be sung. There's something so deeply spiritual and moving about 'I'm a stomp a mudhole in your ass' transcribed phonetically into Japanese for some drunk businessman to sing
.
Kayoko sings pink, ricky martin, and liquid's 'barbie world.'
But the main show is the large rooms, where a dozen people will sit, drunk off their ass, and just YELL and laugh uproariously. I swear, if I could turn invisible and just watch these people perform, I'd be here every damn night. These motherfuckers can NOT sing. Holy SHIT.
