Bill Randall

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Crashing a pro photographers’ conference, looking at cameras and lenses costing more than an acre of land in some places, was a little like being in the locker room in middle school.

It didn’t help that I was carting around a Holga, a plastic toy that shoots on 120mm film. Its focus dial offers: head, person, people, and mountain range. Its case occasionally keeps out the light, and the people who develop your film usually apologize until you mention, to their relief, a Holga was involved.

All the gear lust & envy brought to mind a few artists working with meager means. I have in mind not Bolexes and Holgas so much as the PXL-2000. This plastic video camera, with an ethereal black and white image taped to cassette, came from Fischer-Price. Grown up not at all, it now has it s own film festival, of all things.

And the whole of the work from the PXL hardly compares with the work, almost undiscovered, of the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy. Working in virtual isolation, he returned to his hometown in Moravia after studying art in Prague. He made his own cameras, crafting long lenses out of pipes, tape, and handmade lenses. The photos– almost always of women, spied from afar– have a glowing, hazy texture, being born with the patina that takes most photos years to acquire. His approach would take most pros years to learn, as they unlearn all the artistic traps of expensive gear.

Miroslav Tichý, MT Inv. no.: 1-30, © Foundation Tichý oceán

A few notes:

*I made a dumb misread of the Tokyopop contract that doesn’t affect my larger point. Sorry about that; it’s now fixed.

*My website inches to completion; the Art section has stills from my films, and more photography. If the descriptions aren’t up yet, my people will have it up in a couple of days. If so inclined, take a look and invent your own versions of these films in your head.

*Thanks to my comrades from the Photogogue, I was able to enjoy a little of the NPPA conference the last few days in Louisville. This group of press photographers, training in multimedia so as not to follow the dodo, had an air of optimism and opportunity, a nice surprise given industry trends. I ate good food, ogled gear, and met good people, especially Tyler and Bob at breakfast.

One chap rightly noted that Louisville is not a major city. Pleasantly pocket-sized, I usually give it short shrift for its basketball. Nonetheless, it offers abundant pleasures:

• People going broke at the horses, or the riverboat casino across the river
• The air of a Giant Robot store in Ultra-Pop, a boutique on Bardstown Road. We chatted with affable owner Paul, who’s celebrating the store’s first year in July.
• the cheese plate at Lilly’s on Bardstown, with ineffable friend KC
• the little punk bar on 3rd & MLK, though I was disappointed the punks weren’t all 50-somethings playing Minor Threat vinyl on sharpened dentures
• Finally, Maido, a relatively new izakaya (Japanese pub). My impression of Louisville’s Japanese food is pretty bad, barely a reminder of good Japanese. Compared to Lexington’s twin jewels of Sugano & Izakaya Yamaguchi due east, it’s embarrassing (thanks, Toyota factory). Despite my initial reservations– the bartender, stunning manager, and wait staff were no more Japanese than me– they do grilled & fried right. I’m told the co-owner’s the daughter of an Osaka restaurant czar. I only had a few favorites, and while the kimchee pork was a little dry, the miso eggplant was quite fine. Same for the tea. Even better were the takoyaki. If Maido were to shut down and reopen selling nothing but hundreds of little takoyaki, I would line up around the block.

Re-reading David B.’s L’Ascension du Haut-Mal (released in English as Epileptic), three images struck me.  The book concerns his family, burdened by his older brother’s crippling seizures; looking for a cure, his parents turned to macrobiotics and metaphysics.  David B. draws liberally on fantasy throughout, mixing childhood perceptions with spiritual maps and strange history.

1. He also includes his childhood art,  not that far removed from his adult work.  All children draw, usually until some too-harsh criticism makes them stop; at a young adolescent stage, they often focus on the detail at the expense of the whole.

This focus also characterizes the art of the mentally ill, repeating intricate patterns like fractals.

2. As the book progresses, the images increasingly give way to diagrams, which mix and flow into the normal world of David B.’s family.  These images, drawn largely from medieval symbology and occultism by modern esoteric sects, show the world as a map, populated by strange creatures.  So do the meridian systems of Traditional Chinese Medicine, as Jean-Christophe is early treated by an acupuncturist.  They echo the scientific progress of mapping the body, always with an eye to control; they never do.

3. Likewise, the adult David B., cocooning himself in lines and meridians, only with his own pattern.

From my notebook, when I was working in Wakayama, south of Osaka:

I’m fascinated by Touch, but not for its eternal brilliance. It just comes on television every day when I get home from work. This 80s baseball soap, a creaky classic, matches nicely with new commercials for Calorie Mate and Boss Coffee. In a way, the 80s were to anime what the 70s were to manga, mapping the territory for everyone to follow. Touch, with its love triangle, high school tensions, and pop songs, could be any tv show from the 80s. Given that kids still watch it, it could be every tv show since.

Since I’m usually cooking when it’s on, I can’t say how the love triangle’s progressing. In fact, I can’t even tell whether they’re showing the episodes in order. They all run together: school, practice and games, tiffs large and small, life-changing teen drama. Sometimes I feel that five different scenes shoot out of a blender every day—there’s your show. In the episode where Punchy’s two illegitimate kids show up (he’s the dog, mind), in between slow-motion shots of Minami doing gymnastics and the baseball coach’s bobbing head, there’s an old school montage of baseball practice. The kids run, hit some balls, and hit the field like nothing else exists. It goes into the night, but it could go on forever.

This montage lifts the practice above the story, where it becomes an emblem of sorts. Touch does have a story arc, with twin boys both in love with Minami, both on a team headed inexorably to Koshien Stadium for the championship. The outcome is inevitable, and not the reason anyone watches. Rather, we watch to see the same thing every week, to see just a little progress without making it end, like everything in our lives eventually does. I finish cooking, turn off the television and the next day go back to school. Repeat.

Why not, then, a 26-episode series in which the road is clearly defined but the progress never told? It could work quite well, even as a thirteen hour loop played forever and only watched five minutes at a time. We don’t recall the long days and adjustments after, say, our first confession of love. We recall the excruciating buildup before we spilled our hearts out of our chests, terrified they wouldn’t make it out there on their own. We recall life on the edge of the cliff, right before you lose balance, knowing you won’t be able to pull back but enjoying every unmeasured moment.

He is quite adamant on the question of whether society owes the artist a living; he feels it does not.  He urges young artists to structure their finances in such a way that they do not have to rely on the sale of their art… Irwin does not subscribe to the sackcloth-and-ashes school of artistic romanticism; he sees no special virtue in staying in garrets.

Later:

During the mid- and late sixties, Irwin was supplementing his meager art income in part through his teaching, but that only for a few years at a time.  His principal source of income was playing the horses.

…”I think the race track was probably, in terms of discipline and learning, one of the most important activities I ever had,” he explained.  … “The thing about the race track is the incredibly wide range of information that has a bearing.  If you’re going to have a chance there, you have to achieve the discipline necessary for keeping track of all of it.  The one thing more than anything else is learning to pay attention.  Because every year it’s different; even during the period of a meet it will go through cycles or phases.  It’s real tough to put your finger on it, but the name of the game is to sense the upcoming tilt before anyone else does, to notice the particular combination that’s beginning to gel before anyone else notices it.  And to do that, you have to pay attention to everything.”

From Chapter 12, “Playing the Horses,” in Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin, apparently to be rereleased in October 2008.  Still one of the best books on art I know.

Good to see more people saying what I have (on this blog & in an article in the new TCJ) about Takashi MURAKAMI not being “Japan’s Andy Warhol,” as Mia Fineman does in a slide essay for Slate . Instead, she compares him to Walt Disney, another master marketer. But Japan already has its Disney, Osamu TEZUKA, another example of a tidy comparison that muddies the water.

Tezuka, Disney, and Murakami all have signature characters; they all founded employed other artists in their studios; they all produced animation. Respectively, they’re a humanist, a fantasist, and an otaku evangelist. Murakami’s the odd one out because he’s trying to change the structures of the fine art market, whereas the others somehow created high art in popular media.

Since Murakami should be judged in his context, I propose that he become “No Irony Art Baron Jeff Otakoons.” Besides the faux Engrish and awful pun, it’s more precise, and includes the last Next Andy Warhol in the bargain. If it doesn’t take off, it’s clear evidence that we’ll suffer Next Andy Warhols for another fifty years until the media finally gets another celebrity artist it can use for shorthand. Murakami’s too Japanese, and too otaku, for that to happen now in the West. Maybe soon.

Finally, moving from Warhol to Disney has troubling implications. It relies on an arbitrary wall between high & low culture. Fineman writes, “For those of us who were reared on the idea that art is a special kind of luxury product—more contemplative, denser with meaning, somehow resistant to the status quo—- Murakami’s radical leveling of art and commerce can be pretty unsettling.” While I (and most Cistercians) bristle at the linking of luxury and contemplation, I can’t relate to the split. For those of us reared on the experience and not the idea of these things, there are multivalent works, some trash, some exalted, all on a level field. A lot of the trash commands high prices in the white cube, while some of the lowest forms reward the most contemplation. My reading of Murakami finds little in his work, outside the attempt to build a fine art market in Japan from scratch, not already fully realized in the anime and manga he mines. I think his writings confirm this. To call his work “historically important” without engaging the otaku culture that defines it is to suffer from myopia.

One more thing: can we declare a moratorium on “rictus”? Thanks.

Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm, one of those remarkable Soviet silents, thinks it’s a documentary almost until the end.

Like Man With the Movie Camera from two years previous in 1929, it shows the workers working, building up the glorious Soviet state, with a pulsating, innovative soundtrack attached.  It hovers right between sync sound and “silence,” though silent films never were.  Chaplin for one hoped films would stay poised between the two.

Near the end, in a bravura sequence recalling Man’s finale, Vertov’s camera fixes on some workers in a steel mill. The molten metal burns white-hot, moreso on the film stock.  The workers stretch it out to make rods, even as the tension in the material fights with them.  It becomes like a dance on the screen, as light starts whipping around.

It anticipates Norman MacLaren, Brakhage and all those experimentalists, likely inspiring a few.  It also points to the mechanics of the medium, strips of film (memories of light) pulled taut and thrown through a projector.  Now that the mechanics are increasingly lost– light’s not thrown, but washes through a CRT or LCD or another acronym, at home, not a palace– the process seems not antique (though it could) but otherworldly.

A few cartooning/illustration tidbits from the new Economist:

Their talented cartoonist KAL is celebrating some 30 years with the newspaper, with a gallery of his work and a video about his job and how he got it.

The British children’s book is in trouble, squeezed by the Internet, foreign competition, and high production costs.

Also a nice diary on languages by a polyglot in five-plus; interesting reading for anyone who’s ever asked a hotel clerk if any rooms are available yesterday and been laughed out the door.

Some of these may become subscriber-only after this week.

Finally watching Ozu’s Equinox Flower reminded me that David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema has been reissued as a PDF file. Bordwell has the story on his blog, which bizarrely enough has stills from… Equinox Flower. I feel strangely reflexive.

The book is one of the best pieces of criticism, film or otherwise, that I know; download it and see for yourself. It goes for like 500 bucks on eBay, so help destroy the collector’s market.

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As usual, late to the party:

In Washington, D.C. at the Japan Information and Culture Center at the Japanese Embassy. The road from unruly kids’ stuff to Official Culture, it seems, takes less than 53 years.

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GeGeGe no Kitaro just reminded me of an old GeroGeriGeGeGe 7″ I have lying around. I don’t even own an record player. 45 rpm, 11 incomprehensible bursts of noise. Which reminds me of this photo slide show of Osaka noise band Hanatarashi’s most infamous live gig. “The backhoe show.” Did he hotwire it? Where were the cops? In 1986 Tokyo had no foreigners, and so no need for cops.

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And: my Japanese is eroding quickly. Reading Kamimura Kazuo today, I thought Jiro said to Kyoko, “Kyoko! Give me a toilet! Quickly!” Really, he wants a towel.

I have a deadline coming up, for a long essay on Drawn & Quarterly’s Summer ‘08 release of Seiichi Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy (”Sekishoku Erejii”), now open for preorder. The book, first serialized in GARO from 1970-71, far outstrips contemporary U.S. undergrounds in narrative sophistication. It focuses on a young couple living in sin, but the action’s all in Hayashi’s oblique storytelling and graphic range. Its appearance in English is some kind of milestone, and D&Q’s edition is a good one. To whet your appetite, links & images:

First, Seiichi’s bio on D&Q’s maddening web page.

Second, YouTube video of the hit song inspired by the comic. I weep nostalgic tears for the Showa Era, thanks to Morio Agata’s haunting melody.

Finaly, a handful of (grayscale, sorry) pages from the Japanese edition, showing Hayashi’s range, storyboard-like layouts, and Tsuge influence: