Bill Randall

HOME ART TEACHING WRITING ABOUT

This would have been more substantial, but I’m gobsmacked after receiving today the fourth bill from a random-violence-related emergency room visit. From November! The fourth!

Also, it is due last week.

I want to believe in the free market, but why hasn’t it ground the medical establishment into dust? Everyone I know regards hospitals as a place you go to die, or at least pick up MRSA. Next time I’ll just pay my Chinese doctor fifty bucks to stick needles in my head, even if it’s a sucking chest wound.

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Figure 1.  The Emergency Room. 

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Anyway, spellcheck thinks the article I just finished should be about this:

• Yoshihiro Tatum, from the legendary mange anthology Agro
• translated and edited by Yuji Oink and Adrian Domino
• the artist Mesozoic Furukawa
• Geiger, the “dramatic” version of mange, and:
• the founders of Geiger Studio, like Slouchy Sakurai and Takao Satin, whose violent fantasy Olga 13 now defines “Geiger” more than Tatum’s grim realism.

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Also, I just finished John Nathan’s new memoir, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. He has lived a singular life, traipsing to Japan at 22 and soon after translating heavyweights like Yukio MISHIMA and Kenzaburo OE. He makes a memorable cameo with Kobo ABE in the film The Face of Another and became a filmmaker himself, making some classic documentaries. A philosophical, sometimes regretful tone doesn’t change the fact that many of his stories are an utter scream, whether about pitching to Hollywood, Saul Bellow being scum, or fighting with his blind grandmother-in-law.

His translation of Oe’s A Personal Matter helped secure the Nobel, but Nathan has his own voice.  This book was a pleasant surprise, unlike random bills and that dude standing at the top of the escalator at Chinatown Station for those two minutes I was distracted, feeling pretty good about the world.

Apparently comics artist Kazuo Umezu’s house may remain a candy cane.

His neighbors had sued to stop him, but the judge ruled in his favor. Libertarianism might yet take hold in the collectivist isles. Umezu, old enough not to care, has shirts, umbrellas, even a floor totally decked out in stripes. Why? He’d never seen such a thing before. Neither had his neighbors.  Which raises the question: upon what exactly does a Japanese neighborhood association frown? Since bizarre Japanese architecture’s practically a worldwide cliche. It doesn’t take Kisho Kurokawa to turn in the likes of this house of fugu:

But it’s in an entertainment district. Perhaps this typically boxy residential neighborhood’s more to their liking. This from around Mt. Koya, where Umezu & I used to live (not together, or in the same decade). Neither its charming dumpiness, nor the local Shingon Buddhist monks, explain why Umezu turned to candystriping as an affront to the place.

Which raises another question: what did the neighbors do when PL (Perfect Liberty, an Osaka-based new religion) planted their headquarters in sleepy Tondabayashi? When it looks like a spaceship that flew to the earth from a far-off star and promptly melted?

(orig. report seen via Tom Spurgeon; Japanese report & photo from Sponichi Annex; point-n-click snapshots mine)