KANAZAWA: Yoshitomo Nara and things

This weekend, I travelled a long way to visit Siobhan who lives in Toyama-ken, known as the 'armpit of Japan' cos of the shape and location of the massive bay it's in (it's also about 6 hours away from here on the North coast about halfway between here and Tokyo horizontally). Fri night she just met me and we went for dinner and drinks at her local bar 135, and on Saturday we headed down to Kanazawa, the big city in the next prefecture along, Ishikawa. The East square of Kanazawa station is wonderfully designed with a large wooden gate and huge glass roof: (the 'clock' in this picture is actually made up of tiny fountains, and it rotates through different displays.)



We headed over to the 21st Century Modern Art Museum. When you get there, there's a great permanent exhibit called 'Leandro's Pool' which looks like a little swimming pool from above, but there seem to be people in it, then later when wandering round the galleries you come up beneath it and can look up out of it.



The museum is a fantastic building, its a massive one story circle shaped glass building in the middle of Kanazawa. Really interesting design and good to just walk around in.



Anyway, one of the main reasons for going there was to see the exhibitions put on by Yoshitomo Nara, whose work I love. He's sort of artist in residence there at the moment, working with Osaka based design unit Graf on 3 projects going under the name of Moonlight Serenade.

The first one was called 'Voyage Of The Moon', but I couldn't take any pictures inside. The place was a massive dark blue room with a few yellow lights embedded like stars, and in the centre of the room a large hut with a face on top (looking exactly like the one from the picture on the right) where you could queue up to go in, containing a workspace designed by graf with Nara's paintings, drawings, sketches, little models and toys in his signature style (as well as crushed beer cans and written notes) were displayed. It was fantastic. My favourite was a innocent looking kid with the caption. The world owes me. Fucking world. Wish I could have taken a picture.

The second one, 'Dog-o-rama' was two parts: a MASSIVE stuffed dog in the middle of the room called 'Pup-up-the-dog' which people can bring their own things to stuff it with, and 'Pup Patrol' which is full size multicoloured dog costumes hung up around the outside. The idea is that kids can go and wear the dog suits while they go round the museum. The kids look SO CUTE in the outfits, but this photo is off the actual website as I felt it would be a bit weird to ask strangers to let me take pictures of their children.



The final thing he did was to take the outside 'project room' and turn it into a cafe/workshop. Similar to the Voyage Of The Moon hut but on a much larger scale. First he stuck a fake house over the entrance, then made one half a cool cafe and the other half more pinned up drawings, soft toys, graffiti, and this time some photography as well. Was cool to sit in the cafe (which itself had some unusual and cool things, we had "Chocolate Cake(from puddle)" and hot milk cocktails like Malibu and hot milk served as if it they were cups of coffee) and look around. Apparently from time to time he shows up and does work in the workshop, but not when we were there.



Couple of other things from the other main exhibition, called Real Utopia: Tales of the Unlimited. While some things were a little strange (a video of a man repeatedly washing his face with curry), the majority were fantastic. The sort of 'irony' in modern art is something I really don't like, and I loved this exhibition as the exhibits were simple and honest, even when slightly crazy. See the one in the middle below, it was a pitch dark room with regular things in, dining table and chairs, couch and tv, mirror, bench, shelf etc, but all with coloured spots on and a black light. It was really effective! It's called I'm Here, but Nothing, and apparently "generates an endless infinate space, in which all things in the world like the self and other are obliterated, yet exist as each dot in the space."


The exhibitions had great names like 21c. Erotical Flying Machines - A trip to the Galaxy, which was massive spacey drawings and Ladder to Heaven which made use of a dark room, with a blacklight lighting up a white ladder, and positioning of mirrors to make it look like there was a ladder running through the centre of the room that went both up and down as far as you could look, looked fantastic.

They have a room called 'People's Gallery' where apparently different groups can hold exhibitions, and at present it's the graduating students from the Kanazawa college of art. Check some pictures, and and amazing sculpture:



There was a very small exhibition room which was all about monsters, gundams, Godzilla, and stuff like that. I have no idea why it was, although they seemed to have commissioned an anime style drawing of a white dragon attacking the museum itself. The museum was fantastic, and I was so lucky that Yoshitomo Nara's exhibitions coincided with my visit up to that area. Yay for wonderful coincidences.

Next we wandered round the famous gardens kenrokuen, and the castle gate, Ishikawa-mon. They were beautiful, slightly similar to the gardens in Okayama a couple of weeks ago (both are in Japan's top 3 gardens) but with more of a 'foresty' feeling.



Then we did a bit of shopping. Kanazawa has some really good shops clustered together on a couple of pedestrian streets (I prefer them to shopping centres/malls, much more personality) and we happily whiled away some more of the afternoon.



Most of the shops were crazy expensive but had good stuff, then we found this great second hand store with loads of eclectic bits at really cheap prices, like jackets for Y4000 (20 quid) and stuff. See the red Wrangler jacket Siobhan is trying on below? So we're browsing that cheap store, and she sees it up on the top of the shelf on a display and asks the guy if she can try it. He laughs, "it's too expensive" but goes and gets the stick to get it down anyway. IT COST Y480,000. Thats £2,400, or 4,800 Mickey Mouse War Dollars. WHAT THE HELL? They guy said it was 'very famous'. After that Bathing Ape seemed positively cheap. (And it is anyway compared to the UK which made me look at it again in a much more favourable light.)



Headed back to Siobhan's town, Uozu, to have dinner and meet up with her friend Josh, before heading out to Toyama, next town along, for a night called LoveBuzz. Was fun, cute barmaid Yuka from 135 the night before was transformed into cool indie pop DJ Yuka:



And we hung out with some of Siobhan's friends and I met her boyfriend Yutaka for the first time (and his mental mate Yusuke):



Traditional 5AM beef bowl, then back on the first train and crash out. Sunday just hung out with some of Siobhan's friends, dinner in a cool cafe she likes, then some arcade and purikura in Uozu. Uozu is really cool, you can see the mountains on one side (high, white mountains as opposed to my little green ones) and the sea on the other. Really nice feeling to it. Looooooooong train journey home, and time to start next week.

Best anti-smoking poster ever:

Izushi, where funny soba lives.

Just a little post. Japan is big on regional specialities. In a way that the UK just isn't. Everywhere you go, you hear that this region is 'famous' for a certain type temple, or mannerism, or flavour of Pocky or something. This focus on regional styles is big, running through food, fashion, language, local sights, in Tokyo one of my friends girlfriends was reading a hair magazine, and in there they had styles listed as 'Osaka', 'Tokyo', 'Kyoto' etc, even though (it seemed to me, but maybe I missed the subtleties of it) each style could be seen in any of those places. In fact today I found out that even every Bape store has it's own camo! So anyway, Izushi (apparently called 'little Kyoto' but that's a bit optimistic if you ask me) is famous for Izushi Soba, where me and my supervisor (below) went on Thursday.



Just as I was reading Chris' blog entry about Izushi, my supervisor comes up and is like 'let's go to Izushi and eat Soba tonight'. It's been a while since me and my supervisor just chilled and went somewhere. Rocking to Dave Brubeck in his car, off we went for the hour and a half drive. My supervisor is such a dude, talking bout Yoshitomo Nara, Final Fantasy which we both liked when kids but dont really play now, Vissel, London, we've got really similar interests. He works so hard (one important difference I guess) that its been ages since we just hung out and went somewhere.

We hit a very chilled resturant with fish and a little tree inside (??) which only served one thing, Izushi Soba. It comes on little tiny plates, and you mix up a sauce made of raw egg, dashi (fish stock), tororo (mashed up potato goopy thing), grated onion, spring onion, and a touch of wasabi. You dip the noodles in and they are delicious. You eat in multiples of 5 identical small plates, and apparently if you eat 15 you are a 'soba expert' or something. I could only manage 10 but it was enough. Only cost me Y1000 (fiver) as well. After that you add some hot water with a bit of dashi in to your cup of sauce and drink it.



That was Izushi.

Even though I think Bathing Ape is overdone, I still love their camo patterns, and finding they have city variations was pretty cool.Here are the camos of some places I've been.

Osaka
London
Sapporo
Aoyama
Harajuku
Yokohama
Hiroshima
Kanazawa
Kyoto

Also just booked up my flights for HK next month, with a 8 hour (gah) stopover in Taipei, which gives me the excuse to include this excellent purple camo:

Hong Kong
Taipei

(Obviously theres only stores in the bigger cities, but I wonder why there's no store in Kobe, even though more obscure places like Maebashi in Gunma have one. I guess maybe they think Osaka is close enough? Who knows.)

STEVIE

Stevie was absolutely amazing.

Arrived at the closest subway station to the Osaka Municipal Gym at about 6, and street vendors were setting up festival food stalls, and loads of people were milling around. From the young to the old, the fashionable young guys and cute girls to middle aged businessmen, it seemed that everybody in Osaka wanted to see Stevie.



The venue itself was quite big, imagine round arena just a little smaller than Albert Hall with just one layer of stalls. (I normally don't like seeing acts outside of a club, but obviously Stevie is an exception) We were sat in the stalls right oppostite the stage, behind the arena, third row back, so although he wasn't that close, we had a great view.

Stevie was clearly in a brilliant mood, being playful with the audience and playing around a little with the songs. It was the last night of his Japan tour and the band were clearly on a high. His voice was in unbelievable form - I'd say better than his last couple of records, and better then on Natural Wonder. The band was smaller than then - no strings, it was drums, bass, perc, guitar, extra keys, trumpet, sax and 4 singers. There was so much energy and you can tell everyone was loving it.



I would have taken more pictures, (as these are terrible I know) but there were stewards milling around looking out and I didn't want to risk it.



I've always had the opinion that Innervisions is Stevie's best album, and so you'll see why I loved the way the concert started. Check the full set list:

Too High
Visions
Living For the City
Golden Lady
You Are The Sunshine of My Life
Higher Ground
Superstition
Don't You Worry Bout A Thing
If You Really Love Me
Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer
Lately
Stay Gold
Overjoyed
Go Home
Part Time Lover
My Cherie Amor
Sir Duke
I Wish
I Just Called To Say I Love You
Master Blaster
So What The Fuss
As
Encore: Another Star

UNBELIEVABLE set list.

Loads of little touches to the arrangements made them great, such as a latin segue at the end of Don't You Worry Bout A Thing, additional vocal refrains at the end of songs, and a whole bunch more solos. (I can't be 100% sure, but I'm fairly certain that during Stevie introducing the band over the As intro looped around, he said the other keyboardist was Ronnie Foster, who's a Blue Note artist - 'Mystic Brew' big tune remixed by Madlib on Shades of Blue.) The tunes flowed straight from one to another (except for a couple of times when Stevie would talk to the crowd) and it built perfectly, towards massive tunes like I Wish (complete with those stops) and Master Blaster. Just to hear all these songs you know inside out that mean so much to you performed with such energy and mastery was incredible.

Stevie was really playful with the audience too, during If You Really Love Me giggling and making little musical jokes during the soft part and before Part Time Lover he announced he was going to sing something acapella and stood up. The bassist started saying something about 'Da Da Da, Da Da, Da-Da Da-Da' and him and Stevie kept this going for a few minutes before getting the audience to chant it, and joining in making it the intro riff from the tune, finally singing it just with bass and drums.



After that tune, Stevie sat at the piano and started playing.
"Welcome..." he said in a strict voice "to the class of Steveland."
"This means, that this is my music class. I want it to be the best music class... in the world. Tea!"
Somebody brought him some tea and he put on a terrible British accent.
"Thanks sou much forr ther teea!"
People start applauding, for no real reason.
"Stop!! This is my class!! Don't do anything till I tell you!"
He started getting the crowd to sing little music exercises, little arpeggios and stuff, and for a crowd of a few thousand odd people it sounded pretty good. It sounded for all intents and purposes like he was going to launch into "Ribbon in the Sky", but then he switched it around, had males and femals singing different interlocking parts at the same time, and launched into My Cherie Amor :o)

Hard to pick out highlights because every track was amazing (kind of trite, but again, with Stevie he sidesteps all that. Same with lyrics, half the things he sings from anyone else would be cheesy, but he's just so honest with it that its not even in question), but I guess for me were the deeep version of Visions, the tunes we used to play in Steel and HYM of course, Part Time Lover which had an incredible energy. If You Really Love Me was fantastically arranged and a lot of fun. And the final encore, heavy rendition of Another Star, perfect finish. When the band did finally finish, unlike the smooth soul they'd been piping in before the concert, triumphant string music like a march from Star Wars was played around the venue. Right kind of feeling :)

After they were selling some CDs including a new double album Best Of, this guys job was to stand there with a massive sign with the tracklisting on, seemed kind of funny when they could have just hung it up. Note how they've highlighted with a red star the tunes Stevie played tonight. Japan is all about attention to detail.



Got the last train back and got home around 1.00. Nice to know I can make it to Osaka and back in a night, even if it is more time travelling than actually being there, but it was more than worth it.

Inner Flight

(This post must be read while listening to Searching by Roy Ayers.)

Ups and downs. That's the best way to describe the time here. As you can probably tell from the blog, it's usually way more ups than downs, but when you do get down, it's so different from normal. Something to do with being away from your usual people and things who help, and it hits you quicker.

A more chilled weekend. Friday night just chilled at my place with the student teacher who I've become close to and she's helping me a bit with my Japanese. We just watched some Ally McBeal (reminds me of home, Hugh and Jenna used to watch it in our house at uni and during college I used to watch) - which strangely enough made me miss... something but I don't know what. I think when you're in that mood anything can set you off. Saturday headed down to Kobe to meet up with a friend I hadn't seen for a while. Picked up some great music that I'd probably be raving about were I feeling a bit more genki:


Unfortunately my friend had to work the following day and so only had time for dinner, so it looked like I'd be heading back up to Tanba early that night which seemed kind of shit at the time, when you're in that mood the last thing you want to do is be alone in the inaka. Called a friend who was going out in Osaka and headed out there instead after dinner. Was great to catch up with my friend before that though, we just chilled in an izakaya having a few beers and some nabe, smoking vanilla cigarettes listening to Coltrane (thanks again Japanese restaurants) and talking to each other about Life Plans (she's deciding whether to leave the country on an Adventure- of course, my advice was Go For It.) Was still feeling a bit down, and in a kind of dont care mood stupidly spent Y15000 (£75) that I don't really have to spare on a ring... which most frustratingly couple hours later was scratched to shit in the club... stupid.

Commercial hiphop club, got drunker than I've been in ages. I don't say this proudly. I know I'm not 16 anymore and it's not cool or novel to get really wasted. Maybe being on a bit of a downer pushed me on, I don't know... but either way I was out of it. Didn't do anything stupid though so was okay. Clubbing nights in the UK generally end with a kebab, over here its all about the 5AM gyudon (beef and rice bowl). Came back to Aogaki (which is always a lonesome experience in the morning), slept through my stop for the first time ever and ended up even more in the countryside than normal. Even more pretty there though. Came back sunday mid morning, went for ramen with my supervisor, then we went back to mine to play winning eleven 10 (pro evo) for most of the afternoon. Had more people round in the last few weeks than I have since I got here practically. (Still single figures I think, I'm not really living the Tanba life wholeheartedly.) It's weird, you can have weekends you spend mostly by yourself and feel fine, yet then you can spend time with different people over a whole weekend and feel lonely. I guess when you're in that mood, nothing you can do really.

I'm feeling a little introspective at the moment. Situations have changed a little, I'm more than halfway through my time, thinking about the future, the past, etc etc. Feel like my perspective is changing. Missing people I love, missing people I know I shouldn't be, thinking about What's Next after I get back. Will things have changed? What do I want for the future? In thought.

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P.S. Two new random banners, Beer and Snow.