Friends

so i finally gave in and started a Twitter.
i dont think i'll say too many words,
but will try to post pics of random things and such. ;)
http://twitter.com/audreykawasaki

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Poll #1429518 Click Opera Customer Service Feedback (Flipwhack Metaloop) Poll
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Eighty Years of Book Cover Design by Faber & Faber -- as previewed in a multimedia feature in The Guardian -- jogged a few memories for me. Faber is probably the publisher I've owned the most books by, after Penguin and Picador. Seeing the covers laid out in this way made me think of Emily Jacir's artwork Material for a Film, which displays the books owned by a Palestinian poet assassinated by the Israeli secret services.

The two Lawrence Durrell covers visible in the glimpse below of Jacir's piece were designed by Berthold Wolpe, a long-time Faber designer. We had them on our family bookshelves in the 1960s, so when my mother and I met and drank a pastis with Lawrence Durrell in Avignon in 1985 it felt like meeting an old family friend. (My mother embarrassed me by saying "My son Nicholas writes too!" Which totally wasn't true.)



Of the Faber covers, I found the ones designed by the books' own authors the most interesting. T.S. Eliot's design for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats looks like a zine -- surprisingly light and scrappy, twee and pungent.

David Jones' Anathemata almost reminds me of a Peter Saville Factory Records design. Letting this poet-painter design his own jackets was totally the right thing to do -- as with the great Alasdair Gray, the effect is to create the impression that the artist has a personal stylistic universe which can be extended into any medium. That can be a welcoming and charismatic thing; the feeling that an artist's vision is immersive and comprehensive, different from everything you know.

Looking at the cover for Crow by Ted Hughes reminded me of how this book of visceral reports "from the life and songs of the crow" influenced my debut record The Man on Your Street ("songs from the career of the Dictator Hall", whose thoughts are described in The Courier as "hovering on like rooks as he wings his way below").

The generic postmodern Pentagram design that wrapped all Faber poetry titles from the early 80s onwards made me start thinking of Thomi Wroblewski, the designer I befriended and worked with from 1987 on. Thomi -- employed by Mike Alway to do the least el set of el single sleeves ever -- was known for his Talking Heads and Siouxie and the Banshees sleeves, as well as William Burroughs jackets for Picador:



When we started collaborating, Thomi had a big studio above the office of maverick Scottish publisher John Calder, in Green's Court, just off Brewer Street in Soho. I ended up spending a lot of time there, meeting Calder and some of his unlikely hangers-on (the Jewish doctor from Eastenders!). Thomi shared my taste for refined erotica (he designed an edition of Apollinaire's 1907 smut classic Les Onze Mille Verges, which publisher Peter Owen had to paraphrase, so subversive was it still considered to be in 1980s Britain), and liked to photograph you naked, writhing like a dancer. So it was up in that Soho studio that I posed, naked and masked, with various pretty girls for the Murderers, The Hope of Women sleeve. Thomi even dressed me up as dandy barfly Julian Maclaren-Ross, and put me on the cover of Memoirs of the Forties, his book about Fitzrovia. I'm seen from behind, toasting Soho.

What I notice about Thomi Wroblewski's 1980s book jacket work now is that while it often transgresses against the standards of good taste, it has an interesting maverick diversity -- exactly the sort of quirky zing that Wolpe-period Faber books had, but Pentagram-period Faber had lost by the time they standardised their poetry line with the tight-assed, Laura-Ashley-like "pomo ampersand classic" design.

This period of 1980s late pomo design is now coming back with a rush; the stretched typefaces on Thomi's 1988 Quick End anthology, for instance (The Quick End was a collection of short stories by Michael Bracewell, Don Watson and Mark Edwards, a writing group formed under the tutelage of Kathy Acker -- I faithfully attended all their readings) look rather like what Mike Meiré is doing now at 032c magazine. There's an awkward, ugly energy here which suddenly looks interesting again.

I've been down for the count this week with bronchitis & the flu. it's pretty much sucked.

but, i have prints in the "printed matter" show at gr2 in los angeles (they look like this
and next week i'll have a small painting in the group show "dime bag" curated by jordin isip at giant robot new york.
links forthcoming.

i've also:
1. consumed approximately four different types of cough syrup this week.
2. finished reading the chronicles of narnia series (worst ending ever, imo) & "animal, vegetable, miracle" - and just started re-reading "Tom sawyer" which is so far (at abt. pg 192) way better than i remembered.
3. been watching a harry potter marathon seemingly every day, because that is all that is ever on tv, ever.

When I first moved to the northern tip of Neukolln in 2006 there was a funky little record store (it also sold comics, jagged grungy silkscreens, books of pervy photos of wounded Japanese girls by Romaine Slocombe, and copies of FRUiTS magazine) on my street called Le Petit Mignon, run by a frenchman called Guillaume Siffert.

In March 2007 Le Petit Mignon closed its Neukolln shop, moved up to the Torstrasse in Mitte, and merged with Staalplaat, a Dutch record shop and label which started as a cassette distribution operation in 1982. At the time, it looked like Le Petit Mignon was getting "upwardly mobile", moving from a marginal area to hipster central in Mitte. But in early 2009 rumours started to reach our ears that Le Prodigal Mignon was seeking to return to Neukolln, bringing Staalplaat with it. Guillaume spent a couple of months scouting locations, and finally settled on Flughafenstrasse, a busy commercial, working class street that slopes down from Tempelhof Airport to the Neukolln town hall.

The new Neukolln Staalplaat -- called Staalplaat Working Space -- opened in late April. I made my first visit last night, to see a Midori Hirano show in their concert space at the back. I actually missed Midori's set because of a fireworks display at Tempelhof, catching instead the sensuously placid guitar sounds of Rac-ka, a duo from Osaka.

It felt good being in there, even if there was something a bit cautious about the way Guillaume had to unlock the door to let us in. On the Staalplaat blog page Rinus details not just the new venue's problems with noise-obsessed neighbours, but their view that "the neighbourhood is turning into a red-light district, with illegal prostitution, women-, drugs-, and arms trafficking, bribery, violence and noise disturbances."

I personally felt a big hippy-alternative vibe of calm. Staalplaat's concert room has sofas. It's very quiet in there (and not just because of the neighbour with the decibel meter) and the only lighting is a couple of candles and some ghostly ambient seep from the backyard. When experimental music is playing, you're instantly in a Wire magazine article, and when the show is over and the audience mills out into the shop area you feel something of the vibe of the old Rough Trade shop in Covent Garden, the one under Slam City Skates.

The move back into Neukolln -- deeper into Neukolln, in the developing area around Boddinstrasse -- seems to have given Staalplaat a rush of relevance, a new mission and energy. Whereas, up in Mitte, Staalplaat pretty much blended in, sensibility-wise, with neighbours like Bongout Gallery and Neurotitan, down here in "deep Neukolln" it seems to be back on the cutting edge, joining semi-squat cultural guerilla operations like Loophole (from which I did a livecast back in February at the invitation of the ubiquitous Rinus Van Alebeek). The gamble seems to have paid off; foot traffic into Staalplaat during the day is apparently rather higher down here "in the middle of nowhere" (actually close to happening spots like Weserstrasse) than it was up on tacky Torstrasse, the Oxford Street of Berlin hip.

Neukolln may not have Mitte's buy-yourself-hip clothes boutiques (oh shit, did Best Shop close down already? Maybe Mitte doesn't have them either!) but it does offer less conventional clothing possibilities. I'd recommend a trip to the gigantic Bauhaus store on Hasenheide, directly across the road from Viet-café Hamy, our cut-price version of Mitte's Monsieur Vuong. At Bauhaus you can marvel at gorgeously utilitarian gas cannisters, chipboard slabs, orange-painted trolleys and red nested toolboxes.

Copying Jan Lindenberg -- my personal style guru, who uses them to soften his recycled MDF chairs -- I bought a €4.60 recycled Bauhaus packing blanket yesterday and modeled it for Hisae's camera right there in the store, to the amusement of Saturday shoppers. I run the pictures here so that Twit Opera and the Anons can mock me as if I weren't already mocking myself, and because milky_eyes was complaining yesterday about the absence of photos of me. Packing blankets -- like deep Neukolln -- are where it's at, man. You read it here first.

we found this pug by our house;
she is lost
animal control came & took her away;
i hope her people come get her soon!
i want to keep her tho, she is so cute & friendly & seems like
she came from a house with cats, cause she
wasn't interested in poly & timby at all
if she was my dog i'd call her geek

i had an a-liner skirt class this morning at fancy tiger.
this is my skirt! it was fun. i need to buy some pinking sheers now,
and a sewing guage. and check to see if my machine has a
zipper foot, cause i bought this pattern & some fabric. also
some bedsheets to practice things with; everything was 1/2 off
at goodwill today. it would be nice to make a pie... blueberry pie!
but i'd have to go walk to whole foods. maybe i'll wait
& have marream over next week, i don't think we cld eat
a whole pie by ourselves anyways. and i need a pie dish.

On Wednesday Yoshito, Naoko, Hisae and I took the train to Blankenfeld, a satellite suburb about 25 kilometers from central Berlin. Japanese friends had invited us to Workshop Japan, an afternoon presentation of the part-time work they'd been doing over the last three months, teaching German children about Japanese crafts, lifestyle, language and philosophy.

Coming from dense, Turkish Neukolln to Blankenfeld was like entering another world. After riding two trains and a bus we found ourselves skirting a poppy-dotted wheatfield in a thunderstorm. Boat-shaped suburban houses were surrounded by gnome-haunted gardens, many boasting ornamental fountains, statues of goats, and clumps of bamboo. Even in the heavy rain, we paused to marvel at flowers and plants we never see in the inner city.

At the school -- a clean, modern brick box -- ten-year-olds scurried about in Japanese headbands, guided by the friends who had invited us. Look, there's Ido-San, the performance artist! But today she's Ido-San, the judo instructor! Look, there's Saiko, the art student who works in the kitchen at Smart Deli! But today she's the kimono lady!

Like Superman, these friends of ours have secret powers. We thought they were artists, but after a quick change of clothes in a phone booth they become... ambassadors for Japan! Speculating idly as the slick Workshop Japan DVD played to the teeming assembly hall, I wondered if I too could earn money from the German government teaching "the Scottish Way" to kids? Is there even a Scottish Way worth learning? How do we arrange our gardens? How do we fight? How do we dress? Is it sufficiently different from the German way to warrant a three month course? Is it charismatic enough? Could this be what my Book of Scotlands leads to?

I suppose I was perceived as a parent at the Workshop Japan afternoon -- a parent nobody had ever seen before, not attached to any particular child. Like all the other "parents" I raised my Japanese digital camera and snapped dutifully during the kimono fashion show, as young German girls paraded past in unlikely kimonos featuring what looked like the double-headed eagle of the Hapsburg Empire.

In fact, if I was the "father" of anyone, it was the Japanese instructors themselves. It was with some kind of paternal pride that I told Saiko-San that the arrangement of hair at the back of her neck had achieved the pinnacle of iki beauty.

What I noticed, out at Blankenfeld, was that we all became different people there. In central Berlin the culture allows us to be somewhat ageless and cultureless. Out at Blankenfeld, we suddenly had ages and cultures. I was "old", the girls (in their mid to late 20s) were "responsible adults", and the kids were "kids". Your perceived age slotted you into this syntagmatic hierarchy, did away with equality, made you act a certain way. We also had more noticeable ethnicities. All the kids were white, and German. All the instructors were Japanese, and did stereotypically Japanese things, like paper-folding and flower-arranging. I passed, I guess, for a German.

Despite the emphasis on culture, there was less cultural mixing going on out at Blankenfeld than happens in central Berlin. Last week Ido-San did one of her multimedia performances in Neukolln -- an act that mixed Japanese and Western idioms. But out at Blankenfeld she was being 100% Japanese.

It was a relief to get back to dense, dirty Neukolln, where people are as various as flowers are in Blankenfeld. It seems to me that central Berlin is the exception and Blankenfeld the norm, in the sense that rather few places allow you to escape your age, your class, your race and your culture -- should you wish to! -- in the way that urban Berlin does. Here nobody ever says "Act your age!" or "Scots don't do that!" or "Be a man!"

But if it's a sort of freedom to escape your age, your gender, and your culture, it's also a sort of freedom to embody them gorgeously, generously, even stereotypically. Perhaps, out in blank Blankenfeld, my Japanese friends were suddenly free to express a repressed part of "themselves" -- the part, paradoxically, that we're not at liberty to change.

That'd be my piece for the Kokeshi Show that opens tomorrow at the Japanese American National Museum in LA. curated by Christina Conway.

When the Serpentine Gallery Pavillion opens on Sunday, it'll be Britain's first exposure to SANAA, the architectural team of Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima, responsible for New York's wildly successful New Museum.



Every July the Serpentine Gallery -- currently under the direction of the enlightened Hans Ulrich Obrist -- lets an architect erect a temporary pavilion in its Kensington Gardens enclosure. SANAA's, the ninth in the series, is certainly the least bombastic. As the Times' architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff explains in a video on the paper's site, the Japanese team has built a light plane of polished aluminium sloping modestly towards the ground across pillars and bendy plexiglass walls. The inside space, dotted with Nishizawa's white bunny chairs, merges inside and outside. From a distance, the mirrored structure seems to blend with the trees, like a calm sheet of reflective water.



Equally reproachful of bombast is the music of Otomo Yoshihide, the subject of a new documentary called KIKOE. Filmmaker Iwai Chikara (who also runs a club with Yoshihide) filmed the musician over ten years, building up 500 hours of footage of concerts, interviews and sessions, which he's edited down to 99 minutes. Chikara calls it "a document of a system observed from a fixed point" -- the fixed point being Yoshihide himself, and the "system" being collaborators like Sachiko M and Kahimi Karie. The film shows at Shibuya Eurospace later this month before heading out to European film festivals.



Yoshihide is part of the No Input onkyo movement which shares a certain organic minimalism with SANAA's architecture. "I just wanna listen, no playing," as Sachiko M puts it, and I can imagine SANAA saying the same about Kensington Gardens -- their building really seems to want to listen to the park rather than dominate it.



My final example of a Japanese dislike of bombast comes in the form of the documentary Jesus Camp, which we watched last night on the recommendation of Japanese friends. The Christian evangelicals depicted in Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing's 2006 film probably won't surprise anyone -- they're a well-explored, even over-familiar subject, and for the moment they've lost their mainstream political capital -- but what I found interesting here were the cut-aways to a Japanese studio discussion in which a short-skirted woman exclaims to an expert how sorry she is for American kids whose ideologically-motivated home-schooling doesn't allow them to study art or music -- let alone Darwinian evolution -- and whose parents are so out of love with the world that they can't wait to die.

"It's truly scary that 25% of Americans think this way!" these Japanese commentators agree. A religion, or a culture, with a little more love for its surroundings -- and a little less bombast -- suits them better.