three degrees of tokyo

1. had brunch with ee and folks, which was great fun. always a delight to see her, and i’m excited to see how she’s going to make out on her week-long trip to tokyo in a few weeks. although now i keep trying to think of dope lyrics that someone would work into a nerdcore wedding proposal. i’m not starting rumors, but i just like the idea overall. or what if it was a japanese nerdcore wedding proposal? sweet!

2. went to see the matthew barney exhibit at the sfmoma, since it’s ending next week and i’m going to be out of town, so this may be my last opportunity. it was actually pretty interesting and enlightening, and now drawing restraint 9 makes a lot more sense than when we saw it at the sfiff. the whole drawing restraint concept sort of boils down to his experiences as a former football player, in that when you train your body to do things like weightlifting, you put a restraint or weight on your muscles in order to break the fibers and then have them grow back stronger. barney envisions artistic ability in the same fashion: restraint is necessary to induce artistic outbursts. the whole field emblem is a capsule shape with a rectangular restraint across the top, which embodies this concept.

in dr9, where they make that large field emblem out of petroleum jelly and then cut the restraint out of it and then everything collapses, it’s trying to show how the body without the restraint is nothing, and will just collapse, as will the restraint without the body. the exhibit at the sfmoma actually has both of these, with the body made out of a plastic cast, but the restraint being an actual petroleum jelly block that was molded and then allowed to collapse on its own.

as for filming it on an actual japanese whaling ship, he said that he wanted to avoid getting in the middle of a very political and sensitive issue, yet incorporate all the legacy and history that goes around the years and even culture of whaling that is so much a part of japanese culture.

however, the best part may have been all the people in the museum looking up, dumbfounded, mesmerized, and mouths agape, at barney’s drawing restraint 7, which involves satyrs wrestling in the back of a limousine.

all in all pretty fascinating. catch it if you can before it leaves next sunday…

3. finally, the best of all— this via tv-in-japan via boingboing, is so incredibly great:

this is just more proof that japan is the best place on earth.

Posted at September 10, 2006 10:22 PM