The mission this day was to reach Osaka to meet the artist working under the name of Rogues Gallery and to attempt a Kenji Yanobe opening.
The goal was achieved.
I have seen the Fuji and you are seeing my hotel room.
I like sharing these details of my everyday life. Don't you think this room is just beautiful? A few years ago my dream was to live in a hotel. Now, I'm starting to think about it in a different way. Maybe I do not choose the good ones. Maybe I am aging. Maybe both. I don't understand why these international hotels do not try to contextualize their interior design. McDonald's is doing it. I don't know. It would make our nights more exciting. Nothing to do with Japan. Once again, I need to share my despair, my deep hotel rooms melancholia. Dürer versus Holiday Inn. I know you care. I know you'll share.
The hotel itself was located in a sort of mall that hosts in its lobby half a tree, artificial. Cut to fit into the lobby. And it is a plaza. Like this little plaza in Europe, in a little village. A church, a cafe and a tree and that's it, you have a community. Here it is the same. A mall, a hotel disembodied, and half of an artificial tree, and you have a place to go on a date.
It is fine with me. I know nobody asked me my opinion. But such is the way French people are. We always think we have something to say. One just need to get used to it.
So, after this moment of strong, cheap anthropology, I met with the Rogues Gallery gang.
They are two.
Yasuhiko Hamachi, born in 1970; and Yukihisa Nakase, born in 1971.
They wear black leather, they are very quiet, and they barely speak English. But, they had a translator in the person of Eric C. Shiner from Pittsburgh, who is a student at Osaka University. He is writing a dissertation on Morimura.
Rogues Gallery. They are quiet, but they are very noisy at night. But one must wait until nighttime. We did. They took me to a music store. We shared some taste in music. They also took me to a new department store that has on its roof a gigantic "big wheel". My god, Japan is entertainment. These people need to play.
The project: a car (a French one, Citroen -- artists know how to push the buttons). The artists have connected a "sound machine" to the car's engine and other mechanical parts. One of the artists uses an electronic sampler to sample the car-originated sounds. Behind the wheel, the other artist drives.
Right on.
You enter the car and they take you through the night on highways in the city, and you are surrounded in the car by their music. It is a very nice experience. It is like a movie. You can build your own little narrative (you do not need to know mine). At first, I was thinking, "Okay, it is like a sophisticated radio in a car." But it became a nice experience about improvisation, about relationship working in time and space. I like them. I started thinking how this experience could be done in Minneapolis in the middle of the winter. One thing is certain: a French car won't make it.
The way they work is very simple. You call them. They choose a meeting place. And they take you for a ride, free of charge.
After our little tour we went to the Kenji Yanobe opening in the Kirin "hyper post-modern" building. The building is located in a very shiny area, which is also a very well known cruising place in Osaka. Nothing happened to me...My new friends were little ashamed of me behaving like a tourist taking photos that were, I have to admit, "clichés," and that I deleted right away.
Opening was okay. Met with Kenji who was very busy shaking hands. Saw Ishibashi who was tired and did not want to come to dinner with us. Too bad because he is very cool.
I socialized and tried to behave.
I did a very embarrassing thing for the reputation of the institution which umbrellas me. I was talking with someone, having a drink and a cigarette. I was using what I believed was an empty beer can as an ashtray. Then I figured out that the person in front of me did not seem to be happy. I was using his beer as an ashtray. This was embarrassing. But not as embarrassing as the uncontrollable laugh that possessed me when I understood the situation. He laughed too.
We left the scene and I went for dinner with Eric to a Korean barbecue. The plan was to spend the night in a club. And we found out that Bubu de la Madeleine was performing in a drag show at Explosion. Once again...right on, after a brief digression into arcade games.
Explosion deserves its name. Do I need to be more specific about this late evening that ended up as an early morning that you feel as a very late evening (if you don't get it, I do understand myself, and I won't say more, anyway).
It was great. I ran into Kathleen Gontcharov. I danced (yes, curators can move their body to rhythm, sort of).
The show was amazing. Very professional. And I met, randomly, Simone.
Let me tell you who Simone is.
I knew about Simone thanks to my friend Alexandre Périgot, who told me the day before that he was willing to include her in his project for Let's Entertain (the project is called Fanclubbing). Simone is a beautiful drag queen and is the Queen of the Japanese drag scene. She can perform, among others, Charles Aznavour "a capella." This is quite a weird talent if you know that Aznavour is an Armenian French singer whose career never really made it over the ocean (and I mean any ocean -- even considering both the Channel and Lake Geneva as oceans). Nothing personal Charles.
Speaking with Simone was so strange, so full of a perfect attitude. I thought for a minute I was speaking with Greta Garbo or Eva Braun.
The shows were "live" or karaoke and mostly out of control. With Japanese kids screaming at me while I was taking images, "This is Japan, this is not straight!"
It is so strange to see a culture so comfortable with transgenderism, but so defensive about homosexuality.
Bubu performed a beautiful piece that could have been called "Got Milk?".
Late, late night.
As a Catholic, I knew I'd have to pay for that. And I did.
