crazy for dramacrazy

I rarely turn on the television set at home in Chicago, but whenever I'm in Japan I wind up watching television whenever I get the chance – it’s great for picking up the language and cultural nuances, and there are categories of shows that just don’t exist anywhere else. The insane game shows, the children’s programs about beetle battles, the myriad programs of hip young people moaning over delicious food... and the variety/talk shows that report on news stories or funny stunts with a panel of celebrity guests who watch along with you, their reactions visible in a little rectangle in the corner of the screen.

We just don’t have access to much of this in the US, aside from random youtube clips of the wackier stuff. So many thanks to Kianga for turning us on to Dramacrazy.net, which makes hundreds of Japanese and Korean drama shows available to a wider audience… and with English subtitles!

Among these is Kimi wa Petto (you are my Pet), a comedy-drama that Andy and I've become completely obsessed with lately.Originally broadcast in 2003, the show is based pretty directly on a very popular manga series by the same name, which friend and fellow comics enthusiast Jeff turned me on to earlier this year, available in English in the US under the title “Tramps Like Us.”

The premise is this: Tall, successful, smart and beautiful, Iwaya Sumire seems to have it all... but her stature and status make her completely intimidating to most men, including her former fiancée and her boss, who treat her like crap. Angry, depressed, and lonely, Iwaya comes home one evening to find a teenage boy passed out in a box in front of her apartment, and struck by his resemblance to her childhood pet, she takes him in and nurses him back to health. Their relationship develops into that of pet and owner, while she navigates some crazy power dynamics with her coworkers, her landlord, her therapist, and her new love interest (!)

The show funny, sexy, odd, and completely addictive. It also offers a glimpse (albeit an exaggerated one) into some of the more unpleasant gender roles that are still at play in Japan. Not all women here are content to be cute and docile, and this show pries open those stereotypes while also showing how complicated it can be to operate outside of them. See for yourself HERE: Just scroll down for links to all ten episodes...

You can start with this one:

trash day

Garbage disposal is something you might not think much about, but in Japan it’s quite a project. There are strict fines for improper disposal of certain materials, and instead of big public trash cans you usually have to find one of the specially separated plastic / metal / burnable waste cans next to a convenience store if you have something small to throw away.

Space is at a premium here, and instead of giant dumpsters for the garbage we wind up with at home, my neighbors and I stumble out early in the morning to tuck our little bags of trash under a big plastic net on the corner that’s let down on certain days for specific materials: Glass and dry batteries are Friday, and Wednesday is for plastics, metal cans and folded-and-bound former cardboard boxes. General ‘burnable’ garbage (foodscraps, cellophane wrappers, waste paper etc) is picked up on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

Unlike in the US, you can’t just take out your giant bag of garbage the night before (or several nights before) trash day. The net on my street is let down only between 7am and 9am on the day of a pickup. A sign in my apartment building warns that this is because our neighborhood is “sensitive to the pyromaniac” but I suspect it has more to do with the giant crows who still sometimes manage to ways to drag the trash out from under the nets and make a giant mess of it on the street, causing the old woman who lives across from our trash pickup site to rush out with her broom to deal with the mess (and to regularly offer me as the resident foreigner some detailed instruction in Japanese on how to properly tuck the trash under the nets.) Sleeping in on trash day is no joke, especially in this 95-degree heat, as it means your apartment might smell like rancid fish for three days until you’re allowed to remove the offending items to the curb.

Apparently some regions of japan have as many as 44 different categories of trash / recycling disposal, all firmly enforced, with a goal of seriously reducing waste production over the next 30 years.Japan’s obsessive categorization of trash might seem a bit weird to Americans, but according to this fascinating NY Times article, it may be the look of things to come for us as well! There’s some debate about whether all the sorting (which is a fairly recent thing) actually leads these materials to different locations or not, as the country is still working out a large-scale system to deal with all its garbage. Either way, I must say it makes you really aware of how much waste you produce in a day, which is never a bad thing.

hana bi!!!

I always feel a twinge of disappointment when have to be in another country during the 4th of July, as I miss the relaxing revelry and the fireworks that go along with celebrating our country’s independence. This year was no exception, but I was comforted by the fact that Japan is known for hana bi, or fireworks shows, which happen throughout the summer in various locations.

No offense to the folks at home, but Japan’s take on fireworks kind of beats the pants off any such show I’ve seen anywhere else. Rather than a half-hour spectacle that starts with the 1812 Overture and builds to a grand finale, Japanese hana bi can go on for quite a while and tend to go full-blast all the way, pausing for short reloading intermissions throughout – a different narrative approach to the whole thing.

The hour-and-a-half-long Yokohama fireworks show last night was apparently one of the more spectacular in Japan this summer, and we inadvertently found ourselves with the perfect seats at BankART, where we were already spending some time in the studio showing around visitors and friends. The streets were packed with traffic and people dressed up in celebratory yukata. I don’t even want to imagine the crowded subway situation, but up at BankART we just pulled a few chairs out onto the back deck (which is a pretty excellent place to hang out anyway) and enjoyed a tremendous and stress-free view of the fireworks.

Some kimono-clad girls in front of us took a lot of cell-phone photos of each other and a few of the fireworks, too, and I put my own camera through the paces to try and catch a few good shots. Our fellow artists passed around plates of takoyaki and baked potatoes, cups of beer, and other festival snacks and we all had a pretty nice night of it.

2010 summer open at BankART NYK

I've been delaying this post because it's kind of impossible to pick just a few photos or a few aspects of the Summer Open to write about... but here's a taste.

Friday was the culminating event of BankART's 2010 Summer Open, which has been a two-month long intensive residency for 45 emerging and established artists including Andy and myself. It's still on view, for those of you in the Yokohama/Tokyo area... through August 5th. If you think you might visit, drop me a line, since there are several video components that sometimes travel with us.


The opening party for the 2010 Summer Open was a pretty spectacular multimedia experience, including a guy in an illuminated suit, giant soft-sculpture flowers, amazing video, performance, painting and installation, and lots of eating, laughing, drinking and celebrating. The experience here over the past two months has been a bit like grad school, with late-night studio time sometimes devolving into giggling youtube sessions with the artists in nearby studios, convenience-store meals (which in Japan at least manages to be a fairly decent thing) and a lot of trial and error in the studio.

The results are pretty spectacular, I must say. I'll be doing more posts soon (time willing) on some of my favorite artists and projects. In the meantime here are a few shots from the evening.

studio visit!

One of the amazing things about receiving a grant from the Asian Cultural Council is the way they connect current and former Asian Cultural Council recipients. I've been so fortunate to meet up with some really incredible people here and made some good friends in the process. Last week I spent the day with acclaimed artist and fellow enthusiast of medical/biological things Kaoru Motomiya last week to check out the science exhibits at Tokyo University Museum, and Andy and I both had a great time catching the tail end of the Tanabata Festival with incredible audio/installation artist Kianga Ford, who's been doing research through a residency at Tokyo Wondersite this summer.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to have a studio visit from Kenichi Yokono, who I mentioned in an earlier post: he makes incredible woodblock paintings that aren't printed, but inked and presented as physical objects in and of themselves, their format and imagery referencing both contemporary manga culture and traditional ukiyo-e prints. The axe at left is a nice example.

Yokono-san brought along his wife Makiko Inoya and their two-year-old daughter Ichiko, and the five of us ate lunch and had a lot of fun running around BankART to see some of the work that's up right now. Ichiko was especially fascinated by the earbuds attached to the Bunrui Bento that Andy and I collaborated on. The bento (below) includes insects, plants, shells, and a tiny embedded version of Andy's konyaku stingray-release video Back/Forth, is accompanied by the lovely (and apparently kid-addictive) music of biologist, musician, and friend Yui Suzuki.

resurrection: artists you should know about, part III

The evening before the public opening was a bit more dramatic one might hope. Our friend and studio neighbor Terada Shinobu has spent the past two months painstakingly constructing a delicate eight-foot wall made of thousands of gauze bandages. His work crosses over into a variety of media – video, performance, photography, installation, and painting… but it always incorporates gauze bandages because of their material and conceptual flexibility.

Terada-san’s installation this time was built to be the counterpoint for a big performance on opening night involving a rockstar-esque stage dive into the exquisite eight-foot tall wall, but things took an unexpected turn around 10pm the night before, when the cord from a vacuum he was using to clear the rest of the space caught the corner and pulled the whole thing down in about two seconds.

It was a pretty dire situation and most of us were at a loss for words. Everyone was working late that night for the event the next day, and soon a small crowd of artists and staff members gathered to assess the damage and help Terada figure out what to do.

It was decided that we’d resurrect the fallen wall as best we could, which seemed a bit impossible given the ephemeral nature of the whole thing... but ten or twelve people began to slide sheets of plywood underneath, caaaarefully pulled and pushed, and in an amazing feat of collaborative energy managed to get the whole thing back up! The end result was a bit more tousled than the original, but pretty great in its own sort of way – the delicacy of the layers was miraculously intact, with a tousled waterfall of bandages careening over the top.

The evening of the opening, the work included time-lapse video of the work in progress (which he’d been documenting during the residency) along with documentation of its destruction and resurrection. The unplanned bit from the night before created a strange loop of time travel, suggesting that the wall that had just been destroyed in performance might rise again after the performance, extending his gesture toward the themes of perfection, control and destruction beyond the theme of virtuoso guitar-smashing to something strangely hopeful. The dive went well and everyone cheered, and after the performance visitors were invited to take off their shoes and wade through the mounds of gauze on the floor, breaking it apart. The piece has since turned into a daily process of reconfiguration and metamorphosis.

one day till showtime...

The big open studio event for BankART NYK's Summer Open is this Friday, and I've still got a lot of work to do, as you may be able to tell from this photo. Andy and I are putting the finishing touches on a new video, and spent a good chunk of the day installing the hair waterfall drawing from the museum's ventilation system (hence the high vantage point of this messy-table photo). Now there's a lot of cleaning up to do!

To clear my head for a bit, I wandered around the 2nd and 3rd floors and checked out what other artists were up to. Some have their spaces gallery-ready, with everything hung and ready to go, others are setting up for live performances and events on opening night, and there are still a few more that reveal the same sort of frenetic energy I can relate to just about now. Perhaps some of you will recognize the fellow carefully arranging his photographs below. Can't wait to see how it all comes together!