あけおめ

Happy new year peeps. Hope this one is better than the last. 

めんそーれOkinawa

Shisa, the Okinawan lion-dog creature, decorates many houses.

Mensore means welcome in uchinaaguchi, a native Okinawan tongue. It's one of the most common native words a tourist will see around the island, which mostly, at least in the large commerce areas, runs on mainland Japanese.
This was my third time in the Ryukyu Kingdom, the first when I was a kid and the second two years ago. Again, Skymark was the cheapest deal I could find on a flight. Thankfully, no needy seatmates were in residence this time around.

Body-shaming freebie at the hotel

I looked into staying at the place I stayed last time, but the hostel has changed hands and a double now costs about the same as a cheap business hotel - except the hotel has the benefit of a private bathroom. We ended up getting a Toyoko Inn club card (¥1000-¥1500) because at a few hundred yen discount per night for five nights, it paid for itself. In addition to the discount, you get a free night's stay for every ten. Since the card is for life, it also saves me the hassle, at this hotel at least, of being asked for my passport. I always refuse to provide it (I don't travel with my passport domestically, and guests who are assumed to be Japanese are not usually asked for ID), but it saves me the whole refusal song and dance agitation. Getting worked up less often is good.

So after arriving late at night, cabbing to the hotel, and crashing out, we spent the first day in Naha city riding the monorail and checking out the city. At Shuri station, we found the cleverly named 35 coffee, and when I saw they were offering iced coffee for only 100 yen, we got one. 35 in Japanese is san-go, which in a homonym for sango/coral (珊瑚). This coffee company spends a portion of its proceeds preserving coral reefs in Okinawa.

We hit up Vegi Cafe Shanti for lunch, a beautiful little vegetarian cafe offering Nepalese-style food. Some of their sales go to building a school in Nepal. Yum!

These ladies are doing a tea-gathering dance.

We had both been to Shuri Castle before, but walked around the grounds anyway and got there just in time for a Ryukyuan dance performance! We got to see four traditional dances from various aspects of Ryukyu culture, from the courts to the farms. I love the whistling and chanting that goes along with Okinawan traditional music!

View from Shuri castle

On the way back to the monorail station, I spotted this storefront and we stopped, intrigued. NPO Agora is a non-profit dedicated to helping those with developmental disabilities, especially those with mental disabilities. Here they have a cafe and social space, and also sell arts and crafts made by their members. We bought some jewelry. This day left me with the impression that Oki has a higher than average level of do-gooders/socially conscious people.

We also hit the prefectural museum, which has both art and history wings. We chose the history museum, and learned about both the natural and folk history of the island and the archipelago(s). Worth it!

yesterday

with B at Lion
(apologies for my crappy photoshop skillz. i don't get how you can scan something on the same machine, on the same setting, within one minute of the other, and get two different shades like this. pros?)

More stuff I did in Oregon

It was really hot one day, and we went to the soapbox derby race on Mt. Tabor. We gorged ourselves silly on vegan pastries from Sweetpea Bakery and sat around in hats amidst scratchy weeds.

We bowled at a benefit for the food pantry where Kelly works, and won all kinds of stupid keychains and slices of pizza.

I played lots of scrabble in bars and parks and living rooms. Represent! I miss scrabble.

bankart

My friends Andy and Christa are in Yokohama this summer doing an art residency at BankART 1929, near Bashamichi station.

(photo from Christa's blog)

Two warehouse floors on the water are busting with artists of every stripe, doing various things from making plastic bottle sculptures to video installations to drawings to performance art.

The opening for their work is tomorrow/tonight, Friday July 30th, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Admission is 500 yen. The work will be available for viewing until August 5th. Go check out contemporary art in a cool location and a great space!

Try 80*80, a local food restaurant (80% of their food comes from within 80 kilometers of the café), or La Tenda Rossa, a little Italian joint with great pizza, both within a few blocks of the studio.

ryan

When I was fifteen, I wrote a lot of letters. Fifteen was the year I found punk rock and indie music. And zines. Maybe even more than music, I credit zines for politicizing me, teaching me, and drawing me into a community of really fucking cool and intelligent people that showed me that there were alternate ways of thinking. That the bullying, cocaine-snorting, Banana Republic wearing status quo that I saw all around me wasn't the only way of being. That sounds emo now but it's everything when you're fifteen.

I had been exposed to cool music a year or two before: grunge, Radiohead, Fugazi (thanks Scoot!). But fifteen was when I really started to get into the underground, go to tiny all ages shows, post on internet BBSes, and develop pen pal relationships with folks all around the country and the world that were writing and drawing and making art.

I can't remember now exactly how I found Ryan, whether it was through Pepito's zine or a sojourn to Green Noise Records in Eugene or through some other sinuous and complicated connection. But I found You Think You're a Failure Fanzine and I fell in love. The spare, simple stories, the pen comics, the stark backdrop of Cleveland with cigarettes and wool knit caps and warehouse spaces. I wrote to Ryan and we became pen friends, trading back and forth letters and zines and cassette mix tapes. I always thrilled to receive one of his letters, the page thick with his neat boxy handwriting and harboring some secrets or wisdom. Not that he was ever didactic; just that he was truthful and sensitive and a little older. We poured out our souls on the page and trusted our stamps would deliver them intact.

I didn't love him in the puppy love way, and I didn't have a crush on him. But I respected the hell out of him and cherished his friendship.

A few years after we started writing, I found myself in Cleveland during a long and stinky cross country trip on a forged Greyhound bus pass. I looked Ryan up and he took me in, letting me crash on his couch. I felt a little apprehensive at first, not because I was afraid of him but just that we had never met in person and I wasn't sure what to say. But he immediately swept that away, confiding in me and talking to me like we were old friends. Which we were, in those letters. We had been making confessions forever. We ate perogies in a diner and I met his roommates and we walked that concrete and rusty wire fence town, his writing come to life just as I had seen it in my imagination.

We continued writing after that, sporadic letters and packages, eventually a few emails, and lately Facebook. He moved to South Carolina and married his girl and had a son. Ryan was always lovely and sweet, but often morose. After making this family, there was new light around his words. He wrote about how they made him look at his life differently.

Ryan continued to make art, and his most recent and well known project was the I Want Your Skull zine series, collecting artwork from a range of artists and publishing volumes and posters.

Ryan died in a car accident this past weekend. His son was in the car but survived. Ryan August was 34 and left us far too early. Ryan helped make me who I am today and I have only love and gratitude for him.

Do You Like Impressionism?

Another museum: this one is owned by the Bridgestone Corporation. Nothing like tires and the ex-prime minister's mama providing art exposure!

The show that's running now has a big mish-mash of impressionists. I'll admit to knowing diddly squat about art; they do have some water lilies in the mix. Manet, Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne.

Rousseau was my favorite.

Bridgestone Museum
The collection runs through July 25th, but they seem to have a pretty large private collection and do shows something like this pretty often. It's a good place to check out Western and Western-inspired art.

arty farty

It was Redhead's birthday a few weeks ago, so we checked out the Mori Art Museum before heading off to dinner at the Hills. We saw the Roppongi Crossing: Can There Be Art? exhibit. About 1/3 to 1/2 of the pieces were pretty good, I thought; not bad for a group show. They allow photographs, and the one above is a skate ramp and mural by some graf kids. I guess a friend of mine, a skate-rat kid, knows one of them: SASU.

This ∞∞∞∞∞ piece is made out of circuit board thingies.

This was my favorite section, a series of embroidered photographs by the artist Satoru Aoyama. The artist hand embroidered these photo recreations with metallic thread. The attention to detail and dedication this requires boggles my mind. The description gave a nod to William Morris and his commitment to handcrafts, and this is just the kind of OCD personality-driven art that I can appreciate.

The exhibit runs until the beginning of July and is worth a look, I think. By the way, did you hear about the art theft in Paris? Some jokers sawed a padlock and broke a window and made off with Picasso, Matisse, and more. If that's all it takes to steal master works, I'm in the wrong line of work.

A visit to Mori Tower wouldn't be complete without the obligatory picture of the Tokyo skyline. This was the first time I was able to visit the roof. Tokyo was cold and blue that day.

角隠し

My mom taught me a new word today: it's the word for bridal veil.

tsunokakushi

角隠し

Trans.: hides her horns.

lost things

This video is really pretty.

By Angela Kohler featuring Alison Sudol/A Fine Frenzy as the character and musician.
Via Lobster and Swan.

starting 'em young

snowtown!

I've written about going to the yuki matsuri a few times before.
This trip to Sapporo was so nice. I brought enough clothes, mostly, though my toes got a little cold.
I had really good company and a great hostess. Sarah is freaking adorable. She wears the shit out of some blue eyeliner and she knows all the best places in this town.
Like the ferris wheel in Susukino.And the night view from JR Tower.
The Ice Terrace at Mt. Moiwa. (It was freezing and whited out when we got to the top, but the view from the ropeway was amazing, and we were able to buy algae erection phone charms.)And maybe best of all, a slinky cool hole in the wall hipster bar (barlor) called Penguin...
that specializes in serving parfaits until 3 a.m. Is this heaven?
I went to a bunch of places I hadn't been before, even though I've been to Sapporo several times. It's a beautiful city (Portland's sister city, holla), and I recommend it.(All photos mine except erection guy. You can click on it to get to the source.)

boro

Amuse Museum in Asakusa is six slender stories of good stuff. I cottoned on to this place when Kim recommended, nay insisted, that I see the Boro exhibit.
I'm so glad I went. Boro loosely means rags, and this exhibit features old patchwork kimono, mats, and other clothing made from piecing together every little scrap of fabric the makers could find.The pieces were collected by ethnologist and archaeologist Chuzaburo Tanaka, who found most of these articles in Aomori prefecture in the '60s. They have since been designated a national treasure. And Akira Kurosawa recruited Tanaka to provide him with authentic Tohoku costumes for the fox wedding scene in the amazing film Dreams.

(Storyboards for the film in the Dreams room.)

A big theme running through this exhibition is もったいない, mottainai, or waste. The exhibitors really want to stress the rare and priceless nature of each scrap of cloth and each needle (which explains the needle memorial day that I've mentioned before), and show sashiko kimono (made with hemp and precious little cotton) and sakiori (裂き織り）, which is rags and old clothing torn into tiny strips and woven. I've been just a little obsessed with sakiori ever since my Japanese teacher showed me a piece a year or two ago. I am enthralled by the idea of cutting barely usable, tattered cloth into tiny little pieces and making something sturdy and new from it. It appeals to me immensely. So I was really excited that there was not only a sakiori display, but a demonstration room.
Called the orihime (織り姫）room, after the weaving princess in the Tanabata folktale, some lovely women dressed in kimono were doing sakiori on a 200 year old loom. I was drooling. There were even pieces they had made on sale, and they welcomed you to have tea and a chat, or even to try out the loom.

There's a Boro book out, and if you like this kind of thing, I highly recommend this exhibit. The pieces are really artfully and whimsically displayed, in a more imaginative way than is usually found in museums. There are also a few floors of ukiyoe including reproductions of the Tokaido road checkpoint pieces. All told, it was an excellent use of 1,000 yen and a few hours of my afternoon. The exhibit runs daily until the end of February.

And, won't somebody please teach me how to quilt? I'll provide hot chocolate and muffins.

Cooper has skillz.

This is a friend of mine. He has become pretty famous in the last year or so for his photographs. Some of them are very cool.He's a really sweet guy and I had a chance to visit with him a few days ago.

Best Safety Match

It's lucky that I have an altar at my house, or I might have had to take up smoking, just so I could buy these.

伊東市

Ito is a pretty city on the water. Along route 12, there's a lovely organic café called Chant.
It's light and airy and they have a delicious vegetarian katsu set lunch with all the fixings.
Afterward, check out the sculptures at Nagisa Park, by the sea.
It's a great place for a nap in the grass, practicing yoga, or playing the flute, like an old auntie nearby was doing.

Been watching

movies lately. Part of the weather thing. I finally got around to watching Hula Girl. I'm late, I know, I know. I just didn't bother because the title and cover makes it seem so fluffy and silly! But it was actually kind of good. I didn't know about the coal miners and the tar-paper shacks involved before watching it. It has the ever-adorable Yuu Aoi. I cried. But I cry a lot. Thankfully, these days, mostly when watching movies.
And I watched one called A Blue Automobile (青い車), with Aoi Miyazaki and Arata. OK, that doesn't mean that much to me because I don't keep up with the movie stars. But it was kind of dark and kind of funky. Good light. From 2004.
I made this cornbread tonight and I have more movies. Call me when the typhoon's blown past.