20 April 2006, early morning It was hard to go back to work after all that fun art stuff. But I did it. I'm almost through with the first week.
Anyway, the exhibition was a success in my eyes. I worked hard to propose the idea and plan it out. I gained a lot of printing experience, I mounted everything and learned how to cut straight lines. I also found two people who are making money from photography in an interesting way: the darkroom owner and the gallery owner. This gives me ideas. Kumiko gave me a lot of help and support with the whole project. It wouldn't have been so good without her. I was able to attend the exhibition on Friday and Saturday, and talk to everyone who came in. It was interesting to see and hear so many reactions. Most people had the same questions about how my subjects reacted to being photographed, and about my technique for taking them. Some folks walked in and walked out quickly, while others stuck around to talk or take multiple passes around the room. Lots of interesting photographers came in. Some were weird, unsocialized artist-types, and others were the sophisticated beret-wearing variety. I noticed that many of the artistic types wore backpacks. One guy had on red pants and a red turtle-neck with a shaved round head and round glasses.
Saturday was the biggest day. I'm sure there were several metric tons of humanity that day. There were no dead moments. Some of the Saturday stars were: Brian and Keiko, Paul and Jenny, Paul and Kyoko and the kids, Jacob, Mark and Yoko, Natchi and Hina-chan, Ketchi, Kanai-san from Hino with her fiance, Ueda-chan, Bubu, Ayaka, and Noguchi-san.
The award for longest amount of time spent at the gallery goes to Friday visitors Yvonne and Brendon, from my office. Kevin also came from my office after cleaning his house. Thanks Kevin. As is the case wherever they go, John and Tomo were probably the most entertaining guests. Tomo is a painter and John is a big beloved goofball from a Nishinomiya branch of my office. They're married. John has lots of great stories about being a Brooklyn landlord and army private.
Brendon and Yvonne are both aspiring writers. Brendon brought part of his manuscript for me to read. I finished it on the train ride home and at the subsequent ramen shop. It was really good. I was a little worried that it might be lame and I'd have to read 50 pages of amateur science fiction with a bunch of silly alien names and second grade sentences like "Xanthar sensed that danger awaited in the inky blackness of the uncharted area in his holographic map" , but it was actually really easy to read, and kept my attention, and it's not about aliens, and I want to know what happens next, and I'm speculating about what happens next, which is probably a very good sign. This is a first experience for me, reading a manuscript, and I want to do more of it. Now I want to read Yvonne's and Brian Dowell's stuff. I seem to know a lot of writers suddenly. Of course, having me say your writing is good is not the greatest of compliments. After all, I've re-read Doctor Who novels.
Once again, thanks to everyone who came and everyone who helped me make this small dream come true. I'm glad I did it.
Speaking of reading, I'm working on "The Silver Chair", book six in the Chronicles of Narnia. I finished "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" which is the one I was most interested in because of the cool title. I remember though, that The Silver Chair is the title that most appealed to me when I was a kid. I didn't have the chops to read a seven-book series back then though. It would have taken me years. I think that Poirot really taught me how to read. The problem with these Narnia books is that the cover art is really silly. I've had to but a book cover on the one I'm reading now. It has a snake bearing its fangs. The next volume has a rearing white unicorn!
12 April 2006, early morning Opening day was just what I'd expected. Only a few people (maybe 10) came into the gallery before 6pm, but after that, we got a lot of viewers and free pizza-eaters. It was a lot of fun answering questions about the project. I exchanged cards, respectful Japanese style, with several dudes. Most of the people who came in were men. Several of them, Arita-san, the gallery owner, knew by name...regular customers. Others were my friends or Kumiko's friends, and just a few were unknown to anyone. Chu-san, the owner of the printing lab I use, came with his shamisen, and gave us a long serenade. My friend Barry, in Brooklyn, was hoping we'd serve white wine, just like in the movies, and we didn't let you down, Barry. We didn't have wine glasses though, which might have detracted from the frou-frou art illusion. In the end, there must have been about 30 people in the gallery on the first day, including Kumiko's parents, who were nice enough to send flowers, and their famous neighbor, Mrs. Hashimoto, whose reactions to the photos were really heartening. My first guest was Brian Convery from my office. I was happy to see him, and he stayed and talked for quite a while, until a guy from another gallery down the hall came in and said "bonjour" to him and took him off to his own exhibition of stacks of paper painted brown. That guy had said "bonjour" to me earlier in the hall, which is one of the last things you expect to hear from a middle-aged Japanese guy in Osaka. But Brian can speak French, so I guess he got a pretty good reception. Besides Brian, Ayami came from my current office, along with a friend, and Linda and Dani came from my old office. It was such a pleasant surprise to see my old and new friends in this setting, a setting which is strictly supporting me. It made me feel loved. I think it's easy to say you're going to go to something like an art opening, but hard to actually drag yourself down there and commit your attention for a respectful length of time to something with the potential to be really boring and awkward if you really don't like the art. Anyway, it wasn't at all boring, but it would have been if no one had shown up. A lot of Kumiko's friends came out too. Her friend Kubo from USJ brought two other USJ people, including a Jamaican guy named Chris, who was interesting to talk to. I was glad to meet him. He's a pizza chef at one of the park restaurants. Bubu was there of course. By coincidence, she works in the very next building. It's always a pleasure to see Bubu, since she's just the nicest girl you could ever want to meet, and as I've heard from Kumiko, a ukulele player of no small talent. To everyone who came to the opening day, thank you. I was touched.
By the way, the installation went pretty smoothly. Considering we had 60 prints to hang in a perfectly smooth, level line, it didn't take too long. Arita-san has some special tools to speed up the process, and I got pretty good at hammering nails. Kumiko made fun of my black lips from holding nails in my mouth.
I wonder how many people went to the gallery today. It was a rainy day, so I don't imagine attendance would be high. I had to work today (Tuesday) and also tomorrow and Thursday, but I'll be back as exhibition host on Friday and Saturday. I hope the rain stops.
7 April 2006, early morning It's almost here! I'm feeling pressed to get everything ready now. I've printed 60 photos. Now I have to mount them on self-adhesive foam board, which is easy, and then cut them down to size from the oversized foam board with perfectly straight lines (the hardest part of this whole mess). I'll spend all of tomorrow (today) doing that and then gluing wooden rails on the back to hang them. I'm not excited about this part. I spent the last three hours making up an order form for the custom portfolios that I'll be selling at the gallery, and printing out information about the show's concept. I hope I don't have too much trouble cutting straight lines. On Saturday, Kumiko and I will go to the gallery and set things up. Whoa, I just had a panic moment on the set-up date, but it's over now. I'm okay. I'm going to bed.
Here are directions to Early Gallery, which is open Monday - Friday from 12 to 7, and on Saturday, from 12 to 5:
Take exit 1 from Yodoyabashi (Midosuji Line) Station. Cross both branches of the river and continue past the highway. Turn right at an Okinawan specialty shop (hibiscus flower on the window). Turn left at the second street. This street runs right into the historic Oe building. The gallery is on the first floor.
2 April 2006, afternoon Feeling kind of lethargic on my 4th of 5 days off. It's just a rainy day and I ate too much for breakfast, and haven't set to work on the work I need to be doing. It HAS been a very productive holiday though. I finished printing for the exhibition after about 8 hours in the lab on Thursday and Friday. Yesterday I took a break from the exhibition, and delivered our old microwave to a friend in need. It had been sitting on top of my wardrobe for at least a year and a half. I'm so glad to be rid of it. The other option was to pay the city to take it away, so this was much better. I had to bungee it to the parcel rack on my bicycle. It was really heavy, but no problem. In the end it was delivered safely. After the delivery, I took the train into Umeda to buy some retouching materials. That's the work I should be doing now: touching up the dust grains and hairs that inevitably get enlarged along with the image. I did my best to control it in the printing stage, but it seems there's always a little something left. While I was at the camera shop, I bought my first bulk roll (100ft) of film. About a month ago, I paid $1 + $14 shipping for an old-stock Israeli-made bulk film loader from Ebay. Yesterday I figured out (after some frustration) how to load it up and reel it into film canisters. It will eventually save me approximately $30 per 18 rolls, but for my first 18 rolls it will only save me $6, due to my initial investment. Last night I cooked up our very last harvest from the garden. I haven't mentioned the garden in an awefully long time because we'd lost interest and abandoned it. But the end of March, meant it was time to clean everything out, so the city can go in and re-till all the soil for a new crop of pseudo-farmers. We've decided not to re-up. Amazingly though, when Kumiko and her parents went to start cleaning up, they found that the brussels sprouts I planted months ago, the seeds of which we illegally imported with my mother's complicity, had produced a considerable amount of food. They harvested most of it and cleaned up my mess, and then Kumiko and I went back to finish the job. Kumiko had left one brussels sprout plant standing so that I could see how beautiful they were. That's the plant I cooked up yesterday. I cooked the sprouts and the leaves. They were really flavorful. That's the end of the garden. Any further planting will have to be done on the balcony.Does anyone remember my garden plotter? It was last updated in September 2004. It's time to start covering up all those white specks and hairs. Oh, I almost forgot: after we'd cleaned out the garden plot, we took our shovel and hoe to a nursery at Ryokuchi Park, and they gave us a pot of roses in return. So those roses can serve as a remembrance to all the fun we had and the hard work that went into our gardening days.
Our new roses, out in the rain. Digital picture.
A delicious brussels sprouts breakfast. Photo by Kumiko
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