Tactical Museum

Creative Commons Japan seminar and e-learning

Last Friday evening Kai from AIT and I went to a seminar organised by Creative Commons Japan. Our friend and MAD guest lecturer Dominique Chen is active in commons activities in Japan, and he made a report on the recently held isummit in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Although I had been aware of Creative Commons for a long while, I had never really spent much time looking into it and related issues. In fact the catalyst for our participation was our current research into extending our MAD school into the web through some form of e-learning. One of the main issues discussed in Croatia was what is called Open Education - emerging forms of learning which are essentially free and open to all and which enable users to produce or remix received content, like a wiki. This kind of thinking about online education and learning has been referred to by Stephen Downes in a 2005 article as e-learning 2.0. There seems to be lots going on in this area - education in the virtual world Second Life is, I understand, also an area of great interest for this community.
As an educator at both official art universities (I have to grade people) and MAD (independent evening classes run by non profit AIT since 2001), this is all exciting, if a little overwhelming. As we look into the possible routes we could take into this area, we are thinking about how content can be transmitted to learners, what kind of content this should/ can be, if it should only be us who makes this content, the implications for economics and charging in all this and how Creative Commons can help, whether all students can 'get into' using web based tools and things, whether we will retain our motivations to keep transmitting through computers etc etc.
The positive sides are that e-learning can potentially reach out to people who live far outside Tokyo and who are interested in what we do, or people who are super busy.
I learnt at the seminar that the next isummit will be held in Sapporo Japan next autumn. It would be good to make this a target, and try to get something running by then. I am very interested in attending the next summit too. Dominique mentioned that these summits used to be dominated by media activists and the free culture hardcore, but that in recent years they attract a much broader range of people including business leaders, copyright lawyers and sponsors. There seems to be a much more open and friendly mood between all parties - probably due to the 'movements' maturing over time.
Over Belgium beers afterwards (Trappiste Rochefort) I exchanged ideas with various Creative Commoners. It was interesting how few knew much about figures like Marcel Duchamp or even Walter Benjamin - both  important figures within the arts in terms of issues of originality, reproduction and  sampling. We may be invited back to present some thoughts on these kinds of people from the art historical/ theoretical perspective, at the next CC japan salon.
Many thanks Dominique and all involved.

Hiroko Okada's 'Aizou Bento' (starring me) and 'Gag Art'.

Hiroko Okada is an artist whose works have tended to emerge out of her own experiences, as a young Japanese woman artist, a mother, a lover. Hiroko is maried to the artist Makoto Aida now. I first met her in London in around 1997 when she was in a group show there in Brick Lane. I have worked with her since then and had the opportunity to 'star' as one of her fictional husbands in her latest video piece which is currently showing at the Mizuma Art Gallery in Nakameguro Tokyo. The exhibition is called 'Aizou Bento - Love and Hate Lunch Box'. The video is set in California, on a set of a cruddy daytime TV cooking show. Hiroko is the show's host chef. There are three video segments, each starring her with a non Japanese husband, with whom she makes one specific bento, or lunch box. Artist Mario A is a lecherous husband full of sexual innuendos. I am a professor from Berkeley and we endevour to make a 'PC' (politically correct) bento, with foods from various parts of the world. There is a scene where Hiroko pours dollops of brown sludge (actually chicken feed grain mixed in water) from a bucket on which her husband Makoto Aida has written 'UNHCR'. The last husband is artist Pol Malo who makes a 'Chance Operation' bento in silence with Hiroko. Its funny and full of gags - art very much in the lineage of many Mizuma artists - Makoto Aida, Muneteru Ujino...but also the Showa 40 nen kai group (Group 1965) which includes Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Parco Kinoshita. For many art world people, this kind of work is simply beyond the pale, kitsch of the highest order. But there does seem to be a rather impressive roster of artists who have made works in this vein. It remains largely unwritten about. Perhaps because it does play to the viewers most deprived and base desires, it is usually left out of more official histories. I suppose European equivalents might include some of the work of the late Martin Kippenberger and his Cologne posse or what the artists groups BANK were up to in London. This is a kind of work which certainly quotes quite specific cultural references in Japan, and thus may be difficult for non-Japanese to fully appreciate. However, Hiroko's video is actually mostly in English with Japanese subtitles (similar to Makoto Aida's 'Bin Laden' video which I showed at the Singapore Biennale last year, which also deftly uses subtitling). Having been brought up in Japan until 1980 and watched a lot of TV, I often see the kind of popular slapstick gag comedy which used to be on, in the work of these artists - particularly The Drifters, a five person gag sketch team with a full complement of falling stainless steel buckets, fart jokes, food fights and slippages. I suppose Hiroko and the artists mentioned above are of a similar generation - a time when we could still be genuinely amused by endless one-liner gags and then be told off by our mothers for imitating them at home.

The Invasion of Japan

I recently came across the very interesting war plan called Operation Downfall, prepared in 1945 by the Americans and outlining their invasion of mainland Japan. The dropping of the two atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945 led to Japan's capitulation and the forestalling of the invasion plans. However, as can be studied in the above link, the plan makes fascinating reading. I had been browsing through Mike Davis's amazing study of apocalypse and Los Angeles, 'The Ecology of Disaster', and pondering how cities become targets, when I stumbled across the invasion plans. The map above in particular shows how US led forces would have landed on beaches in and around Tokyo bay and Yokohama, and worked their way inland from various directions, effectively surrounding Tokyo. This particular element of the plan was called Operation Coronet. I began to think whether other cities around the world have also been the subject and target of invasion plans - and what such plans reveal about the geographies of the cities and the priorities of the invaders. No doubt, numerous Cold War era nuclear target plans exist. However, looking through the 1945 invasion plans of Japan, I was struck by the very human nature of them - relying not on the dropping of bombs, but on the landing of troops who would move into and through populations, neighbourhoods, wards....I find it amazing that the city I live in was subject to such intense strategic scrutiny and analysis. It has made me want to visit the various landing beaches and trace the routes which would have been taken by the Americans.

For Tokyo though, there is always Godzilla.....the ultimate excuse to knock down buildings and neighbourhoods to make way for a new shopping mall or Roppongi Hills.

 

Yaribi Museum in Tama Art University

I went to see the Yaribi museum today, after my class at Tama Art University. Yaribi is a little wooden hut constructed illegally on the roof of the painting department of Tama University by a number of students. They organise exhibitions in it. The link above takes you to their blog page (in Japanese), but you can see pictures of the current show as well as construction photos. One of my students is involved, and we spent some time chatting in the museum. The structure will stay on the roof for a while, and has the support of a number of professors. I suggested they perhaps involve curating and critical studies students as well as artists, to try create a broader public platform. Anyway, it is wonderful to see such initiatives in the normally rather quiet and reserved spaces of art schools.

Suggestions

I realise that living in Tokyo one is frequently and gently urged to do certain things, or to take specific actions, on the recommendation of someone. Two examples: on the TV weather news, it is very common for the weather person to suggest, at the close of the report, that we should take care to take an umbrella, to take care driving, to take care in putting the laundry out to dry, to take care, to take care....secondly, in most parts of Tokyo at 5pm the local council plays a chime on the public address systems scattered throughout the streets. This is something I remember from my childhood and is, I think, a very long tradition in Japan. It at once warns kids that they should start heading home, parents start to worry and the city begins to gently transform from its day time persona into its shadow. I dont know if these kinds of things point to a 'Nanny State'. But anyway, one is certainly made aware by others of how to act, what to do, when to act. I guess it keeps the population in check. If the friendly-looking weather girl suggests it, well, you just got to do as she says....I think the weather people are agents of the Prime Ministers office. The weather makes for the perfect backdrop to disseminate subtle messages as to how we should behave, and be good citizens.

Micropop and ROJO - 2 exhibitions for the spring

I went to see two exhibitions recently. On Friday, to 'Architecture of Terunobu Fujimori and ROJO' at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and on Saturday to 'The Door into Summer: The Age of Micropop' at Art Tower Mito. It's been a while since I had the time and energy to go to see big shows in a relaxed and focused state of mind (with 16 Hour Museum, new academic year and marriage...). Fujimori and ROJO was shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2006 Japanese Pavilion, while Micropop is the curatorial debut of critic Midori Matsui.

Fujimori is an architectural historian who has turned his hand to designing and building. He was one of the original members of the ROJO Society, formally founded in 1986. Fujimori's buildings are Yoda-like, organic shapes made from earth, woven rope, grass and trees. He has realised a number of houses and buildings, but seems to be as interested in the processes of building and craft as design. The exhibition opened with a gallery full of the implements used by him and his team to cut, carve, burn and weave wood and other natural materials. It was a warm and enveloping exhibition - I think partly because visitors were asked to remove their shoes and walk on woven mats around his models and photographs. The smell of rope and hessian permeated the galleries. Like the Mingei Folk Craft Museum in Tokyo (the only museum I know of which asks its visitors to remove their shoes), the simple act of walking around without shoes affects the way one engages with the spaces and works. My favourite exhibit was a large diorama model plan for Tokyo in the year 2101. Huge white organic shapes protrude out from dense forests, like moomin skyscrapers made from wood and plaster, overlooking an ocean dotted with wind farms and glass domes. Reminiscent of the final scene from Planet of the Apes, in the corner was a rusted and collapsed model of Tokyo Tower, half submerged under the sea.

The ROJO Society was founded by artist Genpei Akasegawa, Fujimori and a number of other creative people in 1986. Meaning 'street', 'roadside' or 'pedestrian ways', the ROJO group have spent nearly forty years observing and photographing quirky, often useless and strangely beautiful street scenes - a children's slide with a missing middle section - a bicycle left to be reclaimed by ivy and plants - the sand trails left in a park by cyclists - plastic containers used as flower pots - DIY adjustments to house gutters - a face-like pattern made on a parked car after a heavy snow fall - man-hole covers....there was an amazing slide show in one of Fujimori's dome huts made from rope, with commentary from the original society members, which showed many of their 'masterpieces'. Watching and listening, I could not help but mull over what de Certeau talks about in 'Practice of Everyday Life'. Akasegawa called this practice 'Tomason'. The exhibition confirmed for me the significance of what ROJO have been doing since the 1970s, as a uniquely Japanese reading of the city and the everyday as a political space, of intertwined relations and rules. What struck me again was the fact that they go out into the social space, they stroll and wander through the city, through towns and parks, observing and picking out. The camera is their marker and memory, re-inscribing our everyday spaces in unexpected ways. There is something perhaps rather conoisseurship-like about what they do, but I found that this is actually something developed through dialogue within their group, through sharing perspectives and viewpoints and discussing. One could hear this clearly in the accompanying commentary on the slide show. It is a shared activity which has gradually developed its own languages, codes and histories. Sitting in Fujimori's woven Yoda-dome, the meaning of tactical action was strongly re-enforced in me.

Which brings me to another reading of the tactical. Micropop is a fifteen person group exhibition which attempts to mould a particular reading onto a younger generation of Japanese artists working mainly since the 1990s. Curator Midori Matsui's extensive and highly engaging accompanying texts in the catalogue and exhibition hand-outs, point to a shared sense of micro-survival in the artists works. In an age of flattened values and proliferating small narratives, Midori suggests that micropop embraces the everyday and its embededness in the swirling pool of images and information, as a place from where to create individual 'micro-survivals' which offer testimony or witness to individual lives. I visited the exhibition with AIT artist in resident Khadim Ali, originally from Afghanistan but now resident in Pakistan. I wrote memos as I walked around and I thought I would try to recreate these memos here, without too much formal cleaning up.

ENTER -  Shimabuku's Santa Claus photograph attracts my attention. The artist wears a cheap santa costume and stands next to a train line, carrying refuse bags. Its by the sea, and looks fairly warm. There is another work composed of found discarded drawings which the artist collected and showed on the streets of Kobe. Another photograph shows a house after the Kobe earthquake which has a painted sign on it saying that now is the chance to recover our humanity.
Arima Kaoru draws faintly on old newspapers...I think that newspapers represent a shared social space, a media space full of good news, bad news. The papers flutter as I pass.
Aya Takano is drawing space comics.
Ryoko Aoki's room is full of pinned bits of paper, paper cut-outs, origami, textiles sewn together - no frames. Ephemera. Things seem faint, slight, juxtaposed.
The first large scale work is a wonderful painting by Hiroshi Sugito who shares a room with Yoshitomo Nara. I think Sugito's paintings are pretty amazing - Peter Doig flashes into my mind.
Tam Ochiai's room is full of rows of pinned drawings - all sorts of images, texts, random? Title seems to be 'eternal soup'.
PONDERING - does this work need the protection of the white cube?
There is occasional reference to social issues. One of Tam's drawings says 'Green Manhattan', and shows Manhattan as a big green forest.
PONDERING - Is this kind of drawing a conscious anti-academism? A reaction against the formal, life drawing training most artists in Japan must go through? It favours a child-like quality, a faintness...why? Does it express a stance against society?
Chihiro Mori - mix of paintings, paper, objects....
PONDERING - there is a lot of flourescent, bright colour used - why? Is it referencing neon signs? Ads? Its Pop...look at me!
Taro Izumi's room is like a boy's bedroom with TV's, sounds of animals, counting. a ladder leaning against a wall. Its messy, but in a Japanese kind of way.
PONDERING -  are we being asked to make something out of all the bits, the fragments? Some larger narrative?
One of Taro's videos is really good - he doodles over TV programs. News-casters and commentators talk and he keeps drawing faces and shapes over them on the screen. Trying to keep up with the speed of the media, but in vain.
Hiroyuki Oki has a little poster for the local soccer team as one enters his space...it says in big letters 'Believe in Myself'.
PONDERING - Is there any 'larger' social or political framework which sustains their work? seems sonehow isolated....seems far off, distant somehow...un-connected, momentary, passing pleasures. This could be the 'Revolution' for Japan. Just finished reading 'In the Miso Soup' by Ryu Murakami, and something feels similar....he writes about a young generation who are pretty knowing and critical of things in society, but keep this in, sort of resigned to their situation.
PONDERING -  Recreating everyday experience? Mirroring it? Little editing going on....transpose bedrooms and studios to the gallery.
PONDERING - There don't seem to be many other voices or experiences in a lot of the work...closed in? Dialogue with who?
Masanori Handa is installation with large objects, on tables. Seems arbitrary, but then again seems as though each thing has been placed very carefully and should not be moved by the visitor...this would upset the system in place.
Koki Tanaka's installation with monitors and objects on desks and tables - I notice a strategically placed Doors CD placed on one of the tables. Liam Gillick-ish colour panel windows. There is a stack of DVD players under the table, feeding the multiple monitors showing his videos. These seem like the artists mind, a repository of edited excerpts, looping over and over. Kippenberger's Franz Kafka's America also used lots of desks and tables.
PONDERING - use of things seems different to e.g. Jason Rhoades or John Bock or Franz West? Seems more deliberate, formal?
There is a video by Koki showing a cook preparing food in a kitchen - it seemed appropriately out of place - it showed a practice - there was no wastage in the man's movements. Was he a kind of guardian for the exhibition?
KK's room is full of wires, and feels hot. Jason Rhoades in a four tatami mat room? Can't buy too much, over-fill.
TEA - Khadim and I talk about things....he mentions that a lot of the work seems to express things which everyone has in themselves - a desire to express something inside. He says that artists in Pakistan mainly deal with the social situation they live in and that Japanese artists have lots of time to think about themselves. He also liked that video by Taro Izumi, and Tam's drawings....Khadim is a miniature painter.
TRAIN HOME - Was it like indie music circa 1986? Sarah records.....I played drums in The Dougal's - we made a flexi single in 1989 called 'Bobby Gillespie's Dead' (of Primal Scream). The whole song was pretty much that one phrase over noise. Micro-survival takes many different forms I guess.

Laughter at The Mori Museum

A couple of shows just opened at the Mori Museum - 'The Smile in Japanese Art' organised by Yuji Yamashita and 'All About Laughter' curated by Mami Kataoka. Both take humor and laughter as hubs from which to survey various forms of art.

Haniwa, rabbit (6th-7th Century Japan.)
On entering the Museum, one first passes through the 'Smile in Japanese Art' exhibition, installed in dark rooms and containing what seemed to be a treasure trove of works on scrolls, carvings and paintings. Visitors are greeted by ancient earthen figurines and animal sculptures (see above), which seem to smile enigmatically through simply made eye holes. They made me ponder the whole culture of cute characters in Japanese society, and how perhaps they are, in the end, ingenious methods to delay or avoid having to think too deeply about our inevitable end. In fact what struck me throughout this exhibition was how the smile as seen in many of these traditional works seemed to be strongly related to death, dying and fate - very often through the medium of some religious parable or metaphor. The laughing faces of various Zen monks painted energetically on scrolls seemed to know something that perhaps we have forgotten, or choose to ignore.  And, so fittingly, I found myself thinking about such things as I entered the second exhibition focusing on contemporary artists works.

It is a huge show with many single video projections, monitors and works sharing open spaces, at moments too tightly crammed into even the large galleries of the Mori. But I think this is how Mami likes it - in fact the exhibition felt somehow familiar and halfway through, I realised why: it felt like The Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery while Mami was Director there.
The exhibition is divided into four sections, beginning with a small but wonderfully displayed survey of Fluxus, Hi-Red Center and 1960s works. After this initial historical prelude, in effect, the rest of the show could almost have been one large continuous parade of artists working today. The section dividers seemed to fade into the background, I think partly because of the sheer scale of the show which made one adopt a browsing posture rather than a slow, learning one. In this sense the exhibition display was carnivalesque and Bacchanalian, a visual and physical assault. At times it was hard to relate certain works with the thematics of the show but, like biennales, a certain scale probably loosens curatorial formalities. There was a moment when a small girl with her mother put a white handbag, part of Erwin Wurm's silly postures installation, over her head spontaneously and her mother kept saying in hushed tones to her to take it off because it looked ridiculous. Standing next to this small drama (pictured above), I was made aware of how momentary and fleeting laughter is.

The other moment I found myself laughing out loud was watching John Bock's video 'Dandy', in which John plays a character inspired by a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Having worked with John on the first Yokohama Triennale and knowing something of his character no doubt affected by watching, but he is without question a master of a certain mutated slapstick. In the video he was collecting the farts of his assistant maid into a strange looking machine and having an epiphany sniffing it - yes, admittedly it is very 'Benny Hill' or 'Drifters'.
Fun aside, the exhibition prompted questions about the act of laughing today, and whether there is indeed anything really to laugh about now. I tend to agree with the great Woody Allen on this - he says that everything is a tragedy in the end, moving towards some kind of collapse, and that comedy or laughter is always done to mask or bear this reality. I also thought about laughter as something we actually never do alone - it seems to be an act we do at something or someone, with someone, for someone, in relation to something or someone. Laughing seems to be something we do because we are social creatures, trying somehow to make the best out of the situations we find ourselves in.
A surprise for me was the omission of Martin Kippenberger from the show - one of the key Jokers of contemporary art? 'All About Laughter' is an enjoyable exhibition with a certain 'magazine' quality about it.  But I was unsure if it really managed to investigate the various aspects of laughter it set itself through the sections - I ended up reflecting on the smiling faces from the traditional show and thinking that laughter is probably, in the end, something deadly serious.

I had to take a picture of this sign in the museum shop.

MOT Annual and Hiroshi Nakamura

The 'airport departures hall' like space of MOT.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo  hosts its MOT Annual exhibition now, a show entitled 'From a World As Large As Life', showing works by five artists, Sayaka Akiyama, Izumi Kato, Yuri Shibata, Naoko Chiba, and Daisuke Nakayama. The explanatory texts explain how people today are increasingly isolated and mentally affected, even though surrounded by more information than ever before - a familiar line in many exhibitions these days. The artists works tend towards illustrating this thesis, rather than offer further questions about this state of affairs. It is certainly a question that has much relevance in Japan. I felt that each of the artists in the show offered perspectives on this topic, but rarely from beyond their own experience, space or codes. It thus felt somehow limited and curatorially folded in on itself. One often hears the phrase 'art of the four tatami mat' (being the size of a traditional micro living space) here, a reference to the often insular and self-healing tendencies in contemporary art from Japan. The relationships with otaku cultures are not incidental. I liked most of the works in the show, but it was perhaps the frameworks which the curator had placed over them (information oriented society, loss of bonds etc) that made me slightly frustrated. I think that there would be different ways to present and discuss such work - something which I think the critic Midori Matsui has endevoured to do and which will hopefully be 'tested' in her first curatorial exhibition project to open soon at Mito Art Tower. However, I enjoyed very much the new clumpy wood sculptures of Izumi Kato (below), which are like little alien babies. I could imagine a very large one looming over a Cure concert (note the flourescent eye shading/ Head on the Door period Cure).

Sayaka Akiyama's small delicate embroidered textiles and paper shards also stood out for me, being maps of her movements through the city. I read her practice as detournement, a playful criss crossing of the urban space, but this never seems to be highlighted.

The other exhibition currently on at MOT, is a retrospective of the political painter and illustrator Hiroshi Nakamura (b.1932). I had known of his work through a few of his famous 'reportage' period paintings from the post war era, when he painted various political struggles and incidents (below: '5th Sunagawa' 1955).

Nakamura's work contrasted with that in the MOT Annual, reminding me of the very strong socially engaged tendencies within post-war Japanese art history. The works, many in glass cases, certainly expressed their political and cultural contexts, but seemed to speak powerfully about issues still looming in Japan - particularly its relationship with the US. His later works seemed to borrow from manga and animation, rendering hybrid machines and super cool looking landscapes in black and white. His images from the 1960s and 70s, were particularly disorientating, showing traces of psychedelic influence and Pop. There were a couple of very nice works on wheels too, I think called something like Portable Landscapes (below).

They were like large wedge slices of cheddar cheese with a handle and little roller wheels. Inside was a 'frozen' collage landscape of various materials like clothes. Although in the show they were encased in glass cases, it forced me to visualise them being towed in the streets by Nakamura - which made me then dream about artists and briefcases, and how interesting it would be if all artists (and curators for that matter) also invented their own briefcases, and how this would create  a city full of portable museums and overflowing desks - another kind of 'information-oriented society'.

Art @ Agnes art fair and Displays

I visited 'Art @ Agnes ' yesterday at the Agnes Hotel in Kagurazaka, just behind The British Council building in Iidabashi. This is the third time the fair has been held in this hotel and over thirty commercial galleries were showing their wares in various sized rooms. All of the galleries are Japanese and showing contemporary art.

  Being a small boutique type hotel with rather narrow corridors, the place seemed teeming with art fans. I bumped into a few of my students as well as several artists and of course many gallerists. The scale of most of the work was small, no doubt due to the spaces of the hotel rooms, but nevertheless there were some wonderfully creative displays. I must admit to not being much of a fan of art fairs - is this because I go with no intention of buying? As well as the usual 'Tokyo Power Galleries' - Koyama Tomio, Koyanagi, Taka Ishii, Mizuma etc - I was particularly interested to see works presented by new, younger galleries like takefloor  and Misako + Rosen . These two spaces shared a hotel room, and to my great relief, provided the only musical interlude among all the galleries - a video work showing on the hotel TV blared Jimi Hendirx songs.
The other interesting thing for me - and I must apologise for not paying so much attention to the art - was the experience of going around the fair. It required considerable contortion as one seemed to be constantly squeezing past other visitors in hotel doorways and into bathrooms through half open doors. I found this strangely pleasant and a nice change to the vast open spaces one is usually afforded in museums and galleries. There was a kind of 'Tokyo domestic' feel about this, a bit like going to a friends flat, where one is also conscious of moving around in limited spaces. Within this situation, there were some wonderfully odd displays of art work - Richter's candles placed on a pillow, like a sacrament, Hosoe Eiko's famous photograph of Yukio Mishima in a bath tub, a gold fish swimming in a bath tub, a photograph in the toilet, and my favourite, an A.R. Penck painting wedged into the hand rail by a bath tub. This last display made me think again about how painting relies on gravity, on the act of hanging - and how it begins to lose its sense of grace and gravitas once the hang is replaced. I started to ponder the idea of painting resting on the world, its weight being supported on something already existing. Manzoni's plinth supporting the world came to mind as did paintings which are propped or leant (also Japanese byobu screens) as did those huge abstract expressionist canvases which are hung very low, almost touching the floor, but still hung. Some pictures of these episodes below:

I left the hotel around 3-30pm, and by then a long queue had formed outside the entrance. I sat on a bench in a small park adjacent to the hotel and munched almonds, waiting for my artist friend Hiroharu Mori to emerge.

'Survivart' end of year Do at Super Deluxe

I am playing some tunes at Super Deluxe tonight at the kind invitation of Survivart , a collective of young arts organisers and artists who have been organising a series of informal talks with arts professionals in Tokyo on topics of art, money and survival. I think a number of them are students who came together to try to ask questions about the art situation in Japan and create spaces for discussion. I think what they are doing is good. Tonight's event is called 'Waki Ai Ai', and will include a talk session with Yuko Hasegawa of Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Atelier Bow Wow architect Tsukamoto Yoshiharu and an exhibition of young artists works. I am on from around 10pm for 45 minutes or so and plan to play some sad post-rock type things, moving into prog rock from Italy and Thailand, moving into Can and Latin New Wave and finally moving into some synth disco classics.