KRAZY Starts Off This Weekend, Douchbaggery Ensues
This is required reading primer. And thanks to Hinano & JP I got to go to the little reception and talk they had tonight. And why I’d be throwing words like douchbags and said baggeries around.
I just returned from the opening night for KRAZY, which is a similarly-themed art exhibition happening at the Japan Society @ NYC. Because it took me like 5 minutes to realize where the place actually is, as I have nothing to do with these rich good-doers ever before in my life, let me just let you know that:
It’s located across from the UN building in Manhattan. I got a very nice view of the Sid Meier-class World Wonder on my way there and realized I never go to that part of town, like, east of 3rd Ave. The exhibit is right off 47th St, and it’s hard to miss coming across from the north or south on 1st Ave, since it can only be at that one place and there’s this park-like area so the place is not cluttered at all. And yes, it took me 5 minutes to realize it’s not helpful to find where it is on their website, so go go Google.
Some other personal notes. Think of this as pre-writing for a more srsbzns writeup later. Not necessarily that will happen >_> <_<
1. I feel like Takaki Tohno. In that I took some trains I never had before and acted stupid at one point because of the foreign-ness. Also, I feel like Takaki Tohno because I had to make as many connections as he did to go home. (!!)
2. Weeaboos. Beware. Ueno-sensei is on to you. So one of the three curators at the gallery is this pure-bred academic (he’s GOT to be one, the way he talks). At any rate, Toshiya Ueno teaches at Wako Univ. @ Tokyo, and currently is a visiting prof at McGill Univ. @ Montreal. He covers media theory, cultural studies, and does a wide range of research including literature, critical theory, and obviously anime and manga culture among other things. Google your way into it if you’re curious, although I imagine much more of his stuff is in Japanese. This is interesting because half of the speech of this somewhat stereotypical Japanese academic guy gave is almost like admonishing crazy weeaboo-ism. He even criticized that whole “soft power” and “gross national cool” stuff, which was very refreshing and very appropriate. Actually, he’s like an academic Hinano almost, and had criticisms for everyone. To paraphrase in my own words, it went like the Japanese Akiba-kei types are too socially and politically conservative given their underground status and social, emotional and financial needs in a post 9/11 world (don’t ask me how he worked that in); the American “douchbags” need to stop looking at trends and start to look at the uniqueness of each individual artists and what called them to draw the things they do; it’s not about what anime is like, but about what it means on an individual level, a trans-locational postmodern perspective that has nothing to do with it being from Japan but everything being what it really is as is.
3. Roland Kelts, who is trying to sell this book called Japanamerica. I got a copy there (should’ve gotten it signed, lol) but more importantly I need to read it. I ended up catching him during the reception later and talked briefly, and if half of the stuff he mentioned to me is in the book then this book is worth reading just for citations and footnotes alone! It’s definitely dated as it was written in ‘06, and for the softcover version it had updates (so go get that one). He’s also working on a follow-up. Kelts is the second of three curators for this exhibition. If you’re curious, I asked him about Touhou, doujinshi in general (and he went on and talked about it being a farm! Without my prompting! YESSS.) the whole meltdown of anime industry (no, nothing to do with ADV, but everything to do with CR and the Japan side), and some other stuff before I skipped town. Damn, need to dig this guy harder after I read the book. Kelts, for biographic information, teaches at Toudai, Sophia Univ. and Univ. of the Sacred Heart Toky. He also writes for The Daily Yomiuri (in English?), and some other stuff. He also is the guy behind that “Anime Masterpieces” thing that’s going around North America, showing Studio Ghibli stuff. Google Book Search shows 2 things he’s done. He’s got a blog, and he’s on a book tour right now I think. And he plays the drums…
4. The third curator is pretty cool too actually, but I lack a personal context with the “elitist douchbaggery” he spoke of in terms of how and what in regards to the gallery. I think it’s all good and stuff, if you’re into art galleries. I’m not so sadly I can’t say anything about it. That said, they did design some neat stuff, especially the anime room (with the whole Yoko Kanno shrine I alluded in Hinano/JP’s post).
5. Yes, the Yoko Kanno shrine. I call it a shrine, but it’s more like just a sound-isolated booth. Think of a small room size of a walk-in closet in a rectangle shape. The entrance, which has no door, is posed on the long side along the edge. The rest of the same side of the room has a waist-high window with soundproof glass. A piece of bio about Kanno and her works is etched into the glass, in white. I couldn’t read it because it’s backwards from the inside, but w/e, it’s nothing I didn’t know. The short edge of the room by the door has a matrix of about 12 different Yoko Kanno soundtracks, and it’s a pretty solid if very mainstream selection–Bebop, Wolf’s Rain, GITS. Each of these rested on white nails stuck into the wall (white), and a text description below each album. Each album display is also enclosed in a plastic bubble cover, like most of the other exhibits in the gallery. The other walls in the room are painted black, and you can hear the sound coming from the ceiling. Sound isolated indeed. I could stand in there for a long time. And yea, it’s just playing those tracks. I think when I was in there it was going through one of the later GITS soundtracks.
6. The reception. The place had free alcohol. And, lulz, the servers were serving those Japanese hard candy that you could get in any East Asian supermarket. There were also pocky, of several types. I thought of them as foods from Chinese folklore that eating it would corrupt my spirit or turn me into an immortal fairy, but I think that’s just silly omo talk.
And…that’s probably it. The exhibit is going to be around for a month or so, and it took me about 20 minutes to go through it, although I skipped a lot since some are just stuff I own (like most of the anime section) or stuff I don’t care about. If anything, it just made me want to check out the anime for Stop! Hibari-kun and reminded me that I’ve never really sat down and read Five Star Stories. I’d say that’s mission accomplished on their end.
So would Hinano have hated it or not? And did you feel douchbagy there?
i hate people smarter than me just as much as the next blogger, but this really doesn’t seem anywhere near as egregious as that link makes it out to be. and yeah, kelts seems like a pretty awesome dude, could you explain the whole doujin farm thing a little more for me? also, what’d he say about touhous
[…] In part of a post, omo brings up a very interesting thing that really tickles my balls. […]
DS: Hinano would have hated it, but I think the speech part was worth going for. I mean it’s typical of these events, more than half of the people are old guys who donated money and are members. There were a handful of your teenage weeaboo types however, and they represented.
kransom: LOL, take Hinano’s fangirl rage with a grain of salt. To be honest this whole experience totally exceeded my expectation, and I didn’t need Hinano to make a low expectation of things. I’m not a liberal arts major type of person and after working all day I’m just glad a 1.5 hr lecture didn’t put me into snooze mode at all.
Doujin farm thing. Basically I asked him about ZUN and Touhous, and he thought I was saying something about an animation studio. After we got that straightened out he just went on and talked about the doujinshi scene. It seemed that he only recognized the name and didn’t do any research on it. I guess he is still a real academic in that sense so he probably didn’t know that much. As for the doujinshi scene, he was saying how they are IRT to the commercial side of things, and he just went on and talked about how in a way the doujin scene is a farm system and a dialog. Pros would put references in their works to show that “they read it” and some people have made the jump from amateur to pro through the system. Well, it was just conversation, and I didn’t want to hammer him. More like I wanted to tell him “I already know this move on and answer my question already.”
lelangir: Damn you ball tickler.
So basically, Ueno went off on the kind of stuff that really grinds my gears?
What was his take on that whole “gross national cool” business? The common criticism that I’d basically heard is that it misinterprets what soft power is, since soft power is supposed to be because of ideology and not simply the fact that they sell lots of consumer products. Like that McDonald’s burger or Levi’s jeans or Michael Jackson song is supposed to also be a representation to all those people back behind the Iron Curtain about the good life to be had thanks to democracy and capitalism over there in the free world. A Nuhroodo mango or a Nanoha hump pillow isn’t really supposed to represent any kind of ideology, and if it represents anything, it’s simply anime world where everyone confesses on rooftops and Tokyo blows up every day and if you walk back and forth monsters will attack you.
I think the specific context where the criticism lived was in politics, and he didn’t actually describe it as much as circumscribed it in the role used in politics. The valuation of this soft power even in the eyes of the power players in Japan (namely, Rozen Aso’s meeting with Obama) is very small, despite the increasing amount of lip service they’re paying, I guess, to recognize that fact. It seemed that this soft power is overvalued internally versus internationally.
Actually, I get the feeling that Ueno does know this stuff grinds some people’s gears, so he actually didn’t dig into it much. Roomful of weeaboos and all.
jp: have you heard the marxy x macias podcast on COOL JAPAN? it does a pretty good job of laying out some criticisms of the whole mess.
http://neojaponisme.com/2008/10/28/podcast-on-cool-japan/ for the url
I think they realize that politically they can’t have it both ways. If they want to play up that they’re a basket case (so that they can do things like cheapen the yen), they can’t exactly go around emphasizing how they have all this soft power because of all of their consumer products and whatnot.
Glad you explained “farm”, since the word makes me think of weeding and compost-heaps or maybe massive applications of herbicide and hot August afternoons among the hay bales, and I was trying to fit doujinshi into that image. The best I could come up with was fanning myself or swatting blackflies.
Omo, almost everyone there had been at work all day. That’s one of the constraints on a show like this: you have to keep the sleepy-heads from dozing off, but you also have to keep the half of your audience that knows a fair amount from rioting at the superficiality. The sleepy-heads are there for a reason, they want some meat, too, they’re just not up to a lot of challenge.
No pre-production art? Sigh. That’s the stuff that interests me. Not so much the finished product, but how the product evolved from first conception to final release. Better done in a book, I guess.
If I make a Book-off run before this show closes, I may wander over that way.
Please do a writeup on Japanamerica when you get to it.
I’m really skeptical in that some of these people looked too old to walk down a flight of stairs, let alone “worked all day.” But I guess that also mean it’s past their bed time ;) There were some businessmen there too, but I think some of them are the usual hataraki man types and this day-night routine only means that they’ll bail by 8:30 to hit up some yakitori place a short walk away after shaking enough hands and passing out enough cards. Coincidentally I walked past this stretch on the way to Grand Central that had 2-3 of these kinds of places lined up and they even looked authentic enough to attract real Japanese cliente.
JP: well, that sounds like a form of criticism of soft power to me!
I did see Kelts at Katsucon with his book. I should have grown balls to just go up and greet him, as well as taken his book while I was at it. Sounds good.
Thanks for the write-up. As someone who’s taken a course on anime in college (w/douchebaggery up at 10), I would probably have been interested in this as well. Maybe they’ll swing by DC one day. Or if they’ve already done so, maybe they’ll do it again.
And as I’m listening to the GITS 2: Innocence OST at the moment, I’m surprised that Kanno also did most of the tracks on it. Thought it was all Kawai. Good on her. :3
Ah, thanks for the write up. Hmm…. if Kelts is still trying to sell his book, then he probably should be writing up an updated version soon. 2006 is pretty dated, but even then, it should probably be established that he wrote the book in 2005, and it got published a year later, so make that four years out dated. But for a static mediumn, five years is probably not as bad as other things I have seen in other book industries.
I exchanged a few sentences with him on that note, and he is writing a follow up book. But yeah, he knows it’s outdated; things have changed drastically the past couple years.
I recall seeing the KRAZY! exhibit back when it was at the Vancouver Art Gallery - wish i had had more time to check it out more thoroughly. In terms of what’s on display, there’s likely not much an anime blogger would not know or have heard about already; the exhibit, seeing as it covers a wide range of topics, is unable to really do more than provide an introduction to what is currently going on in each field.
I really recommend checking out the non-anime exhibitions though, a lot of very interesting graphic novels and styles on display.
The NY display is supposedly a smaller, Japanese-only fraction of the Vancouver version. But yeah, it’s mostly for appreciating some of these works in an unusual setting.
[…] objective angle. More coverage of the event (and definitely more positive coverage) can be found at Omonomono and Ogiue Maniax (the latter who, happily for me, writes, “Overall I didn’t get too much of […]
[…] Sadly I will never taste the nutty interior on this title >_> [Did I mention how reading Kelts’s book reminded me, heh, Nerima Daicon Brothers, to speak of another “bad” show that I’m […]