Lena's exhibition

My friend Lena Konstantakou's exhibition opening party at Idea Generation Gallery in Covent Garden, London, is tomorrow night. Three articles in Greek-language magazines (one is above) about her, her pictures of Cuba – and mentioning my father's three Castro pics included in the exhibition. Too far for me to go from Tokyo to London just for the opening – but good luck!

OK, go on…

OK Go's Damian Kulash talks thoughtfully and interestingly on not so much making music as making a career out of making music in the online age. And on making those videos.

OK Go are justly renown for their excellent videos. "Here it Goes Again" (approx 53,000,000 views on YouTube), "This Too Shall Pass" (approx 20,000,000 for two versions), "End Love" ("only" about 2,500,000 – there must be another one with more views somewhere!), the new "White Knuckles" (already 4,300,000).

So how many watch his interview on how they go about making a living when music is watched (and consumed) for free? Well, I guess people just want the end result, not how it works  – 1,439 views after almost 6 months online.

Dead metaphor

Another – yes another! – referenece to print as "dead trees"*. How convenient – it suggests in one catchy, repeated (and repeated) phrase that print itself is dead and that the internet and iPads etc are saving the planet. Just think of all those living trees now we use iPads! (Evidence?) Yet iPads and computers use rare metals, are usually not recycled, need charging and already use more energy than old methods of printing and distributing. And much print uses grown trees (paper usually doesn't use randomly "killed", non-replaced, trees; what a strange business model that would be). ie: much print is from trees that are farmed, grown. Or from recycled paper.

So if you like iPads, fine. If you use the internet a lot (like me), fine. Just drop the "dead trees" reference, for accuracy – and for the sake of good journalism.


*"That means the last defenses that kept dead trees relevant to me have been overcome."

A building with atmosphere

As regular readers (who am I fooling?) will know, I'm a card-carrying member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. So this installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale looks like something I'd like to experience first-hand. It's Japanese architect Tetsuo Kondo's collaboration with German architectural climate engineers Transolar to create an indoor cloud space. The video above shows it in action (and has a German-language commentary). More photos on the Tetsuo Kondo site here. And an overview with further images from a visitor here (from where I learnt about the show).

Ama divers

These photos are from the 1930s to the 60s – a time when the women (and men) who worked the sea worked semi-naked. And a time when the anaemic skinniness too often currently put forward as an ideal Japanese womanhood (or more accurately girlhood) was still a thing of the future. A time in the past, for sure, but still living memory for some.

A back-story – explained this month in a Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in-house magazine article by John R. Harris – is of more ancient past: how the Onjuku ama-san of 400 years ago rescued shipwrecked Mexican sailors, starting a link that continues to this day between Mexico and Onjuku.  For 400 years this way of working continued. Now looking back only 40 years, it's gone. (Ama still work in parts of Japan, but not naked and sometimes only for tourist display.) Yet John, the author, who lives in Onjuku, knows of some of the women pictured – now perhaps in their 80s.

The photos appear in a book on the subject (now out of print) by a local sake-brewer-cum-photographer, Yoshiyuki Iwase – there are more on a website dedicated to him. There are a couple of photos in museums (and the one of the working women at the top of this page won Prime Minister's Prize in 1957, for example), and in Iwase's son's gallery at the sake brewery, but it's unclear where all the negatives are.

I designed the cover for the Number 1 Shimbun – in a style hinting at Life magazine. Read the article here.

Enlightening stuff?

I don't know anything more about this digital-SLR-made documentary by Peter Chang and Noah Smith – Children of Enlightenment – than what it says on vimeo, but it looks like it might be a good antidote to those continued, surface-only, travel-book representations of Japanese youth rocking in Yoyogi Park or whatever…

What's new?

Generally, I try and keep negative opinion to a minimum on this blog. Praising something good, fine – but criticism is often just an opinion and since the web is a depository of the pornography of opinion (opinion masquerading as the real thing, but mostly there just for stimulation) it can do without my addition.

So this is a rare example, prompted in part by the backlash from some quarters against Takashi Murakami's exhibition in Versailles. Now Yoshitomo Nara, contemporary of, and culturally complementary to, Murakami is exhibiting at the Asia Society in New York and The New Yorker has a short film by Gus Powell – above – of Nara at work. (Powell nicely describes the scene as "one part Edward Hopper and one part Museum of Natural History.)

I liked Nara – I have a limited edition signed print of his from about 10 years ago as one of the (very, very) few artworks I possess. But time has passed and changes happen – except, it seems to Nara, who, like Murakami, seems to have become a product in himself. Perhaps, with calendars, books, sake, figures, ashtrays etc to promote he can't go changing his style too much. On the wall in the background to film is an old painting, exactly as it was 10 years ago, and Nara is working on painting directly onto an old electric guitar body – painting an image that could have come from the same period. Surely painting onto a guitar body is something you do for a friend, or for someone's stage act, not as main piece?

Of course, many artists continue to work in the same media or take the same approach and any changes are round the edges, unfolding over time. But this approach seems stuck in aspic rather than reveling in your chosen media.

Oh well, we all have opinions. Perhaps you don't share mine.

U.Kimono

The Union Flag continues to be a loved design element in Japan (as elsewhere). Here it is in a shoot from the new Kimono magazine, as the main element in a contemporary kimono ensemble. (By the way, I've mentioned Kimono before.)

It's funny how mainly just three flags get used iconically in design, perhaps each with associations attached. The flags of UK, the US and Japan all get used internationally. The UK for associations with the post-colonial, 60s, Punk, "Cool Brittannia"; the US for 60s, road-culture, cultural dominance, war and anti-war; Japan for the manga, cool samurai, pro-warrior and – perhaps more ironically – anti-war reasons. Other country flags may get used (China's or other red communist-country flags perhaps) but usually for limited or literal reasons, and most just don't make it into design generally.

Of course, there has been different dominance at different times across the globe from these three countries, but surely (?) it's as much – or more – the original design of the flags that allows their continued use in fashion and design.

The flag obi in the ensemble pictured is from modern antenna.

Intimacy explicit

The National Portrait Gallery in London is one of my favourites for its exhibitions. And favourite among the exhibitions are the photographic portrait award exhibition (open to submissions from professionals or amateurs) and the painting portrait award (similarly so).

The latest Taylor Wessing photographic portrait exhibition award shortlist features a delightfully shocking portrait, My British Wife by a photographer named Panayiotis Lamprou. It's a casual, intimate, lovely – and perhaps pornographic – shot of the (Greek) photographer's (British) wife outside their summer house on the island of Schinousa. She wears a short summer dress, has just finished eating (the pan is at her elbow), has her legs slightly apart and is revealing her pudenda as the already-short skirt rides up. The light in the image is Aegian: bright and gentle at once. Her expression is one of comfort with the photographer (in a photograph that was not originally intended for display, apparently).

Such "pornographic" shots are easy to shoot when aiming for pornography, but it's harder to achieve a casual familiarity and an intimate portrait of the subject (intentionally or unintentionally). I love this shot. (I also love its title, with just a hint of something: cross-national relationships, pride, assumed national characteristics. The final image belies any cheapened use of the title, where you could argue that "British" or "wife" are unnecessary, since one could just use the sitter's name.)

The sitter is attractive and strong – belying any "ownership" inherent in the title. (And she presumably agreed to the photo's submission!) The photographer has achieved something strong and beautiful too. Read The Guardian article here (also see the full photo).

Good luck, too, to my ex-colleague Abbie Trayler-Smith with her excellent photo from a series on childhood obesity, also short-listed.

Update, Wed. Nov 10,  2010: First prize went to an excellent shot of a 14-year-old hunter. "My British Wife" claimed second.

Picturing secrets

How do you decide the line between morbid curiosity (as a viewer) and celebration (as a photographer)? The yakuza seem to occupy a level in people's minds where curiosity makes them a bit more mysterious than the Mafia, for example. I got to meet a (largely inactive) yakuza during the summer and to see his full-torso, epic dragon tattoo – which was decidedly impressive and a treat to see. Again – and elsewhere – this summer, I visited an onsen where yakuza were obviously allowed (tattoos are usually disallowed in public baths). Again, there was a frisson to be sharing a public bath with impressively tattooed – though also tightly-permed – bathers.

But, being on the wrong end of the yakuza, is the same as being on the wrong end of the mafia. (Perhaps check out Jake Adelstein's documentary of dealing with Tokyo Vice, for example. Or Beat Takeshi's fictional attempt to bluntly outrage in film).

Would a close-up visual exploration of the Italian Mafia, in these well post-Godfather days, be rewarded in the same way as the self-publishing site Blurb has rewarded the book The Yakuza in Tokyo, a winner this month in their photo book award? The photographer – Anton Kusters – had a great deal of access, that is plain. And a great deal of photographic skill and talent. But more and more, while ackowledging their part in cultural history, Japan is more wanting to deal with the problems of yakuza as much as giving them a continued air of mystery.

You can look at Kusters' photos, or not, for you to decide the line…

Wishful thinking

I first read James Bond as a 12-year-old, mostly in Pan mass-market paperback editions, certainly with trashy covers. The novels been through a variety of styles and aims since then, up to and including Penguin Modern Classics, the latter with their quality images and silver jackets. I've re-read all of the series at sometime, including in the pulp-fiction-style US paperback and that Classic series, both from Penguin. This month sees another branding as a "trilogy", three novels which feature the Bond ovillain Blofeld. With a nice skull and a three-bar gold design (linking in with Goldfinger) the cover looks in the Classic tradition.

I'd love to do some fiction design, and something for this kind of book. So here's my imagined design theme for a series: gunmetal-grey (well, lighter, but let's call it gunmetal), each with a movie-still cutout, a quote from the book, a Walther PPK barrel-snout end-on, with a drift of gunsmoke. The back covers list the name of the Bond girl and the Bond villain in that novel novel. And each spine would have a letter to spell out JAMES BOND 007, which is the right number of letters and spaces for the books that Ian Fleming originally wrote. All just for my own entertainment, I emphasise (until, of course, somebody wants a new series designed…)

Below: Pan Books' cover as I read it; reimagined US Penguin editions went pulp-style; a Penguin Modern Classic trilogy; the cover of the new trilogy

Making a career of photojournalism

Would love to support the enthusiasm of this article… but can't quite fathom what it's talking about. It's a rebuttal of the idea that photojournalism is dead because of a new agency whose business model seems… what? New? The article doesn't say who is going to pay the way of these photojournalists. Photojournalists aren't dead (I know a few) but it sure is hard to make a living, though some do. (This applies to journalists and musicians, too – perhaps the hardest hit of all in the online changes.) I can't see what the Luceo agency does to change that fact.

It's good that they are planning 25 and 30 years in advance – such optimism is admirable. But things are changing. A career in photojournalism 25-30 years hence is surely impossible to plan for though possible to aim for (with flexibility and dedication rather than optimism).

As the article concludes, there is no such thing in business as a pessimist. But a blind optimism, while making you feel good, doesn't make for good business either. Meanwhile, outside of such enthusiasm, I wish the excellent Luceo photographers as well as any photojournalist…

Numbered list

I'm pretty busy, so just posting some trivia. The Internet is awash with numbered lists. Recently I was asked by a friend for a top 10 favourite songs. Last week for a top fifteen favourite albums. Using the same formula, I saw a Facebook friend's top fifteen favourite visual artists. (My top: hmm, Anish Kapoor?) None of us are immune – you can see my top 100 favourite movies here, just for example. The Internet seems built to house numbered lists. There are so many numbered lists, I thought I'd list my favourite numbers. So, my top ten favourite numbers are:

1.) 3 (It's a great number. If a number is divisible by 3, its digits add up to 3: eg: 21 where 2+1=3. In art and design a triangle is a strong design element. So many things – not least in religions – are split into 3. "3 is a magic number" as De La Soul adapted)
2.) 2 (A pair can be such a good state. Somehow also more fundamental – matter and anti-matter for example. Or if you want to be more poetic, the earth and the moon, the stars and the planets, When 2 R in Love. Dividing into 2 is the start of life itself. If we weren't symmetrical ourselves, would we like 2 so much?)
3.) pi (How come there's a number so essential and so mysterious? Wondrous: it should be number 1 on the list. You can abbreviate it to 22/7 [very roughly], or 3.14159 – or to 5 trillion decimal points, still an abbreviation, thanks to these Japanese and American computer geeks. Before it was "accurately" worked out, the ancients rounded it up to 3 – see list number 1.)
4.) 3866 (My first telephone number. From the days when you used to say your number when you answered the phone – and you used rotating dials. Not nostalgia, its just ingrained in my head from answering the phone. It begins with 3 – see list number 1)
5.) 1976 (A great year for film releases. Including one that heads my own list: The Man Who Fell to Earth. Also Carrie by Brian de Palma, who went on to mix great entertainments with duds, and continues to so do; Taxi Driver, by Martin Scorsese who went on to become the most over-rated directed still working. And also, not only Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses … but Storm Boy, Clint's masterpiece The Outlaw Josey Wales, Network, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Rosi's Illustrious Corpses, Freaky Friday (Jodie Foster again), Eraserhead, Bugsy Malone – the fourth Jodie Foster Release of the year,  Assault on Precinct 13 – whose music I still hum, and All the President's Men. A bumper crop.)
6.) 300,000 (The speed of light – in kilometres/hour and approximately. Got to have an Einstein-related number in there somewhere! I learned it as 186,000 miles/hour, but kilometres is easier. And includes "3" – see list number 1. Of course, they have slowed it down to 38 miles/hr – I think just because they can.)
7.) 7 (Another number featuring in its own place. How many colours in a rainbow? That's right – nobody really knows as there's a whole spectrum in there. The ancients used to say 3 or 4. Isaac Newton decided on 7 because he believed it was magical number. Don't you love the accuracy of science!)
8.) 10x8 (Numbers which are stuck in my memory from my print photography days. It was, in fact always just a tad too small for a print size – while being the last design-related number I remember in inches. How can Americans still design in them? Actually, for display reasons I always preferred 11x16, but it's not quite as magical as 10x8.)
9.) 1.6 (…or 8/5 or 1.6180339887 – here's an interesting fact, this 10-number string doesn't appear in the first 200,000,000 numbers after the decimal point of pi [perhaps not surprisingly]. It's the Golden Ratio, and such a great balance for design – notably architecture and photography. I believe I read it was 1.4 in Japanese art.)
10.) 12 (British money used to be figured in base 12: how unhelpful is that! About as unhelpful as the Japanese counting in 10,000s – so 100,000 is named 10x10,000s. Thank god for the decimal, or 10 – but a small celebration of 12. After all, the earth is about 24,000 miles round the equator – give or take about 1,000 miles –  splitting its 24 hour day at 1,000 miles/hr. Not so neat in kilometres. 12 is easily divisible into 1/3s and 1/4s – unlike 10 – where the answers are actually opposite to the fractions: 4 and 3. For the latter, see list number 1)

Apologies for commandeering Tatsuo Miyajima's Counter Window to illustrate this piece of frivolity. I saw it in London. Impressive, but not as impressive as his superb room-of-numbers Mega Death. Come to think of it, Miyajima may be my number 1 favourite visual artist.

A "new" world

It's always intriguing to come across "lost" art – in this case, connected with the still-being-absorbed understanding of people and place of a quite recent time. New light, as the cliché might have it, is thrown on this, the American "frontier", with Denver Art Museum's restrospective of Charles Deas' painting from around the 1840s.

As always, a little light is thrown on the life of the painter as well – he apparently painted prolifically until at age 29 he became insane and thereafter lived another couple of decades until his death in mental institutions.

More excellent pictures from The Guardian are here.

A flat "non"?

Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is exhibiting in the Palace of Versailles – despite an 11,000-signature petition that he shouldn't.

Murakami isn't actually that provocative these days – it's more that his brand of pop art sits as a provocation-to-some amongst the baroque finery of Versailles. (Though judging by the promotional photo above, it sits in a rather good contrast.) It's a reputation of provocation – his plastic-pop/manga-style statue of a jism-curling boy, My Lonesome Cowboy, is apparently purposely not exhibited. In fact, such figures come from his glory days when his "flat art" seemed a challenge to, well… something. To me he's a faded "pop" star, whose collaboration with Louis Vuitton makes him more of an anti-Warhol of Japanese art rather than the occasionally cited Andy Warhol of Japanese art. Like the so-called "bad" boys and girls of so-called Brit Art, he doesn't so much shock as ride the modern shock-of-commercialism to sell things. Which is less "art" and more simple "commerce".

Some – Miss ko2 and the spunky My Lonesome Cowboy – were startling and fun. Others…? Well I leave it up to you to decide quality and your sympathies (or not) for the 11,000 signatories in Versailles…

Two pick-ups – two pick-me-ups for design

Two pick-ups on Japanese historical art and design from round the web. One this week (via pinktentacle) of images from the University of California, San Francisco's wondrous Japanese woodblock collection of 19th century prints on the theme of health.

The other from last year (but which I only just noticed via Facebook) from a blog posting (from Journey Round My Skull) of images from a book of early 20th century Japanese book covers – Japanese Book Cover Design 1910-1940 (which is out of print and will cost you $570 used!)

Overheard in the Newsroom #5731:

Designer: “Sometimes I just need to go home and drown my sorrows in bacon.”

How true. (Though as a freelancer I'm already home. And English bacon tops Japanese for some unexplainable reason.)

Missing film

I'm looking forward to the new film version of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro (when you've set yourself up in the mood for his style) is one of the best, most engaging, and gently (or subtly) disturbing writers around. The book was good (though I await an attempt to film the excellent, perhaps unfilmable, The Unconsoled). The film is directed by Mark Romanek, director of the very good One Hour Photo  – and the excellent Static.

Or, as he likes it and as Time reports this week, "his single feature film (One Hour Photo)." Romanek is an example of the pitfalls of an artist having full control of their work. He doesn't like the superb Static and tries to wipe it from memory and release. (I guess journalists like the one from Time go along with his decision, or didn't fact-check, and there's no DVD version). It was one of the best independent small films I've seen – but can't see again.

I imagine Never Let me Go will be good. But I wish his "artistic temperament" (in quotes because he'd prefer you to remember his music videos than the quirky, tragic feature film from his younger days) would allow us to see Static again. There's only one video on YouTube which puts scenes of the movie to the main song (This is the Day by The The) from the soundtrack, and reveals rather too much. The withholding of the film is our loss – but Romanek's too.

We always did see the same, we just saw it from a different point of view (2)

These may not be the same, but they do share a different view on related subjects (or is that related views of different subjects?). One on modern Japanese culture, one a publication of alternative manga; one from an academic publisher (left), one for popular culture; one published last year (left), one last month; one red, one orange. (One design by Mary Mason [left], and one by Akino Kondo.) Different views of different girls in different cascading backgrounds. But with a certain similarity in the difference.

Know your icons

Who'd have thought there were so many design options for "Men" and "Women" toilet icon designs.

The linked blog-post is intended by the author as a look at gender stereotypes more than design – and so almost makes it seem there's no solution to the options (because of embedded, two-way ideas in portraying men and women as icons.). Therefore, the writer's preferred option: unisex toilets. Meanwhile, in the process she's uncovered some quirky design decisions.

By the way, in Japan, when the signs are coloured men are always blue and women red. Which led to a mistake by a Japanese woman friend in London, who, on auto-pilot, followed the colour rather than the shape and ended up in the men's toilet. It is funny, the seemingly "natural" way these separations are taken on board and enforced – I had another woman friend desperately in need of a pee at an event who avoided the long queue for the women's toilet and entered an empty stall in the men's. Some idiot men were banging on the toilet door and yelling her to get out immediately. Strange world we live in.

Further to this "problem", I'm reminded of the QI programme which said that the world "girl" originally meant a "child" (of either sex) and that pink was the preferred colour for boys and blue for girls (which would confuse the blue-for-boys allocation on Japanese toilets). As I said, a strange world…

The photo above is a very old one of mine (on an early cheap digital camera), not from the linked blog, taken in a cinema where Romeo + Juliet was showing.

Via mutanteggplant

Typographical Kon artist

One for film-obsessives and typographers only, perhaps. A friend pointed me in the direction of a book out last month: Kon Ichikawa's Typography. Ichikawa was a film director, but one who apparently also did the typography for his titles. I've only seen a couple of Ichikawa's films – both good. (Others, such as An Actor's Revenge, have a reputation, but I haven't seen them.)

I've not yet seen the book, but was curious to check out a few of his posters and YouTube clips.

Above are some of his title-designs: Ten Dark Women (or Ten Black Women – the translation has an alternative in English for obvious reasons) at the top; Odd Obsession; and part of the trailer for The Crowded Train with its text cut at the horizon of the crowd. Left is Enjo (based on Yukio Mishima's book Temple of the Golden Pavilion)

Drink up

On the often good "Letters of Note" blog the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee recently wrote of the possible end of books: "Guess this is the last of the wine."

Castro captured

My friend Lena Konstantakou is having an exhibition of her Cuba photos – from Sept 30-Oct 3 in London at the Idea Generation Gallery. Early notice for the London-based readers to mark their diaries.

Alongside Lena's contemporary photos are my father's three snaps of pre-presidential Fidel Castro. May dad worked at the airport in the Caribbean island of Trinidad and when Castro was passing through Dad had his snapshot camera and, perhaps mistaken for being a member of the press, was allowed close. The three shots were just family photos, increasingly indistinct memories (my father passed away 25 years ago, my mother can't remember exactly if it was 1958 or 59, but thinks 58.) Now, from family memories to the exhibition wall.

Castro is in the news still these days for his thoughts and health. This apology may not exactly rectify the pastt, but is impressive for a world leader – and I never saw Castro as one prone to publically admit mistakes. Interesting.