Sketchbook Confessional July 2019

How do you talk to someone on the bus about your book you’ve been writing for two years? How do you even talk to your spouse or best friend?

How do you talk casually through monumental creative challenges?

Can you?

The creative world would benefit from some kind of confessional ritual, a place where you can go to speak your deepest artistic truths to someone behind a curtain, someone who can sort of forgive you, who is likely just as flawed as you, but invisible.

For this reason, I’ve created the Sketchbook Confessional, a post where I confess what I’ve been up to lately. This is an attempt to keep myself accountable and also try to reel in the absolute chaos of creativity that is otherwise off the chain … if the chain ever existed in the first place.

I have this feeling that if we don’t talk about what we go through as creators, if we don’t get it out somewhere, it’s no good.

That said, I have no idea if this will work. I’ll try it out and get back to you.

Confessions for July 2019:

Confession 1: I went to the Critical Role panel at Denver Comicon in June and was charmed and awed at how great the D&D community was. What’s cool about D&D is that it brings people together - and with a common goal. I started offering to draw D&D characters for my friends, and was quickly buried in over 20 requests! For some reason, I thrive on absolute chaos and was able to crank out a few D&D characters - if you’re still waiting I’m sorry, I’m hustling!

Truly, drawing D&D characters is really fun and a great way to improvisationally make characters. The great rule of Improv is saying Yes, And … - and saying Yes in art and life seems to work for me. I will make many more!

Confession 2:

I mowed a lot this month. Dear reader! The plants in Maryland are insane, growing something like seventy inches every year. I am very certain that my neighbors want me to mow even more, and that they perceive me as a very lazy mower. Despite my best efforts, I am the proud owner of some kind of local citation for having too many ugly overgrown plants in my yard. I promise you that I am trying my best to both mow and make art.

While mowing my criminally-overgrown yard, I thought a bit about plants in art that I’ve made and I really haven’t focused enough on plants. Similar to mastering hands and interior design, plants are the next drawing challenge on my plate to charge at.

In other plant-related news, I went to the Lotus Festival in DC and had never seen so many amazing lotuses. I took some photos to bring back to the studio. The lotuses were over 6 feet tall. Something to write home about!

It’s weird that I ran into giant lotuses in real life after working with lotuses as a theme in Tilted Sun, but, it might also be that lotuses are an eternal art symbol that you are bound to run into from time to time.

Confession 3:

Tilted Sun is almost back up and running! There are 20 pages bumming around on my iPad Pro, just waiting to be launched, but …. I’m being so possessive and cautious about them! It’s at the point where if I do not put out these pages, my iPad will surely get stolen or cracked or something, so I’d better do it soon. I’m thinking end of August.

Here are work-in-progress sketchbook images from my iPad in Clip Studio Paint for Tilted Sun

I’ve also made a few process GIFs - all the pencilling is digital, so it technically doesn’t exist. I wish it did. This is the only bad thing about making comics digitally.

Confession 4:

There are a lot of moments in Tilted Sun concept art where I don’t exactly know exactly when or where the concept is going to fit into the plot of the comic, but I want to get the concept onto paper anyways. Some of the concepts take more or less framing and set-up than I expect, which is part of the fun of making comics!

Confession 5:

I started drawing romance again. How romance works for me is, the worse the world gets, the meaner it seems, the more I tend to start drawing dreamy-ass romance scenes. If someone yells at me while I ride my bike or harasses me on the internet, I usually go home and draw romance that day. They spring from some kind of unkillable hope within me, I sort of wish it would die, but it’s like the white whale that cruises onward through the ocean even though he’s taken several spears.

Confession 6:

I am working on an amazing new project with my buddy Audrey! It’s super secret, but it has to do with cats.

Confession 7:

Crow Magnum is still underway! This is a comic I am working on with author Laurel McHargue. After drinking a Red Bull at 6 pm and staying awake for 36 hours I finally got to the right place in my head with this comic.

Crow Magnum link!

Confession 8:

I was exhausted over 4th of July weekend and couldn’t muster any energy except in drawing anime, like this recreation of a cel from Cowboy Bebop.

Confession 9:

I was able to crank out a couple paintings of Mt. Elbert. Mt. Elbert is like Mt. Saint Victoire - I’ve painted it at least 20 times and will paint it many, many more times in my life. I’m at the point where I almost believe I understand Mt. Elbert. Mountains are incomprehensible and grand.

I don’t know if I will ever stop painting Mt. Elbert.

Related blogs:

Museums for Monster Inspiration

Crow Magnum - Comic Preview!

Who wrote this?

Tilted Sun

Art Reads: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

On a long enough timescale, all art has to stand alone. Eventually, there are no explanatory placards, no audio guide, no artist’s statement. There’s just a painting on the wall and nobody knows where it came from, who made it, or what it means. There are pictoglyphs in Utah and nobody knows who made them - they’re 3000 years old.

So why read the letters of an artist if the works are iconic enough to stand alone? We already know Vincent van Gogh is great. Do his paintings need words to back them up?

Why dive deeper into eternity?

In the case of Vincent van Gogh, the letters tell us that he was not just the best painter, but one of the best people to ever be on the planet.

Most people know about Vincent’s mysterious end, but few could summon thoughts about his more optimistic early years. In his younger years he seems to be full of hope, so much that he is ready to give life advice to his younger brother Theo. In his letters he talks about polishing his boots and encourages his younger brother to eat well, especially a lot of bread:

He polishes his boots, he eats bread, he keeps up with his brother and anticipates future letters. He writes to send letters, and writes to get letters back.

The letters arc like a novel, where Vincent starts out relatively orderly, optimistic, and powerful (eat bread!) and he ends up in a place where he has to ruthlessly defend his choices against his entire family, like in this passage where he falls in love with a single mother, Sien, and brings her into his home.

At the end of the passage above, he is truly like the ideal man in the Spice Girls song “Wannabe,” where Sporty Spice croons: “If you want my future, forget my past.”

via GIPHY

We’re almost in a world that won’t judge our Vincents or our Siens. I’m not sure.

Vincent’s world didn’t leave him unjudged. In fact, it barely left him alone. It barely let him do anything, and it’s a miracle he made any work at all.

Vincent dedicates a heartbreaking amount of time to defending himself against his father in letters to Theo. He writes like a man attacked, writing to his only friend. He doesn’t depict himself as a saint, either, he admits he knows he is being stubborn upon several occasions. It’s funny that he writes only to Theo - maybe Theo is the only person in the family who was worth talking to, or, Vincent’s letters to his father were torn up or lost. It’s hard to imagine Vincent writing even MORE than this, but I wouldn’t put it past him.

Vincent seems stubborn at best in his letters-of-self-defense, and not too accusatory of those who antagonize him. And what if he’s right about how terrible his family is? What if his father and mother are stuck in their ways, and the rest of the world is moving on. The rest of the world isn’t aghast at loving a single mom.

When Vincent’s father finally dies, the concerns in the letters transform - Vincent is set free and can finally talk about, well, painting, in his letters instead of defending himself against his father.

The edition has only one letter from Theo, the Dear Brother, for the first 150 pages. The tone of the letter comes off as “Stop doing what you are doing and calm down, and say sorry to father.” At this point, Theo and Vincent are so upset that they are itemizing each of their argumentative points with numbers (1), (2), ect:

In response to this missive from Theo, Vincent writes back something like 5000 words, each itemizatized response to points (8), (9) ect as long as Theo’s entire letter. It would have been like writing a tweet and getting a novel in response.

Since the entire book is so one-sided - we get dozens of letters from Vincent and only one from Theo, Vincent is easy to sympathize with. You fall under his spell, and it’s a good spell. It’s not like reading the deranged journals of the protagonist in Pale Fire, or reading the diatribes of other mentally-understocked unreliable narrators. Yet, I wondered, what did Vincent do or say that made his colleague Mauve say to him “You are a vicious person?” Whatever it was, Vincent sort of leaves it out of the letters.

It’s more like reading a surprisingly reasonable defense against social crimes that are not nearly as bad as those of Paul Gauguin. Unlike Gauguin, cough, van Gogh never took a 14 year old as a wife - in fact all he wanted was to help a single mom. Van Gogh is like the Samwell Tarly of his time - he's already outcast from his family but falls in love with a single mom and loves her, gives her and her baby a home, and his father berates him for this and for many other shortcomings that Vincent seems to have. Vincent even refers to himself as a ‘nobody’.

If the world had more Sams and Vincents rather than fathers of abandon, imagine where we could be. In fact it’s probably the Sams and Vincents that keep it all together for us, the real fathers who know how terrible life can be for both men and women, and for all people, and who step in where nobody else will. It breaks my heart.

Reading these letters, you start to overly agree with Vincent - the world is actually very dumb, everyone sucks, Vincent is right about everything! But nobody can be that perfect, right? Citing suspicion of perfection, you can find the devil’s advocate on your shoulder wondering over these letters: What if he’s lying?

What if Vincent is casting himself as some sort of saint, where he’s really not?

But then - why would he lie? At best he could embellish, but he’s not interested in looking cool or being a savior. He’s not a land owner or a merchant, he self-identifies as a nobody. The letters are going only to Vincent’s little brother Theo, who isn’t impressed with Vincent at all. If Vincent wanted to preserve and glamorize himself in the eyes of his overbearing family, he would have never written about Sien at all. Instead, he nails himself to the cross.

In my whole life as an artist, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone represented more unfairly in popular culture or more misunderstood by non-artists. Van Gogh’s ear and suicide stand out as some of the most contested facts of art history. Was the ear a chapter of deranged self-harm, or was it Gauguin who chopped off the ear? Was Vincent’s death a suicide or was it a misaligned murder?

I’m not sure if these murder-mystery questions matter as much as we think they do. No matter what hurt van Gogh, we didn’t want it to happen. We didn’t want Vincent to get his ear cut off or for him to cut it off himself. We didn’t want him to kill himself or be murdered. We wanted Vincent to be around for a bit longer.

At one point, Vincent is beaming about how his doctor mistook him for an iron worker, and in other letters he carefully plots out how many years he had left. (Some artists live to 60 or 70!) Yes, carrying an easel all across the landscape will make you pretty buff.

Stress was plowing down on him from all directions - family, finance, occupation. He spent so much time defending his thoughts and choices. Sitting in my bed and staring at the letters, my poodle snoring and a TV show playing in the other room, I thought to myself: “What was the point of all of this fighting with his father ... what was the point of these thousands of words scrawled out across hundreds of pages. What if all of this time could have been spent on painting?”

Ultimately Vincent’s defense of himself and his ideas in his letters did matter for his painting - anyone else would have given up, not just on art, but on everything. His world was just crowded to the brink with antagonism. Vincent’s art didn’t happen because of his painful life, he made art despite it, and it’s simply amazing that it happened at all.

So, with all of his tenacity, why did van Gogh’s life end at such a young age?

I didn’t know what to make of the ending of this novel-of-letters. If we believe Van Gogh shot himself and was not assaulted, it’s as if Theo’s moment of weakness along with Vincent’s worsening epilepsy is enough to send Vincent over the edge. The moment that Theo shows weakness is the moment that Vincent gives in.

But I barely buy the suicide belief because Van Gogh was so interested in staying alive throughout all of his letters. The letters don’t even strike me as unhinged in a slight way, they’re simply very expressive. It wasn’t insane that Vincent could respond to Theo with novel-length itemized lists of arguments, it was just exhaustively comprehensive. Vincent spent his entire life defending his choices, accepting his choices, and believing in his work. Near the end, he even moved to a new asylum in the hope of getting better treatment. 

Nobody could have cured Vincent’s epilepsy, but his hope was there. Why work so hard to get better, why be so intensely in love with the world, why defend yourself, and then just throw it all away? I think Vincent didn’t do himself in. It had to be something else.

The Letters are ultimately a mystery novel where there is no answer.

We’re lucky if private writing like Vincent’s letters surface every quarter century. It’s rare to find and even rarer for it to be interesting. Much of Vincent’s letters are brilliantly alive with feelings, and some of it is… Vincent is in the hospital, or he is dreaming about paint going on sale.

So, yes, the letters contain some mundane pieces - it’s not not forsaken romances and family feuds all the way down. Vincent is troubled by the same issues we might run into today - he voices his mistrust of clever lawyers, he gets expensive dental bills.

It’s Vincent’s unrepenting honest love for the world that is a treasure. Seeing Theo’s letter, honesty isn’t present in private letters all the time - letters can be as carefully buttoned up, as repentful, as punishing as life on stage.

Imagine the scholars of the future finding a private Youtube account on a server somewhere - all of it could be a heartbreakingly accurate revelation of our time, or it could be nine-minute reviews of Monster Energy Drinks.

Which could be, yes, it’s own revelation - but not as touching as Vincent scrawling off missives to his brother like “I’m dating a single mom, I don’t care what dad says!”

Where else can we find this honesty? Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations are best thought of as private journals or notes-to-self - Aurelius never meant for the writings to reach the world. Like Meditations, the letters of Vincent van Gogh were meant for the eyes of only one person, yet here we are reading them, translating them, publishing and republishing them, lamenting an untranscended 150 years of dental bills and expensive paint.

Aurelius’s private writings wouldn’t be so odd if other writers in his time weren’t marketing their work as savagely as Don Draper. The Roman poet Ovid was writing highly-sought, wildly popular advice to women on how to look beautiful and sexy in the Ars Amatoria one-hundred years before Aurelius was penning his notes-to-self on how evil never dies.

Even when van Gogh was writing his extremely private, thoughtful letters, Dickens was cranking away at words that would be cast out to thousands and later, millions of people. In our strange little time, we write furiously on Facebook walls and on Twitter, and each scribble has it’s own performative bent - we’re trying to look cool, or be funny, or do… something? Who really knows what we are doing when we share a thought on the internet, but it’s all very on-stage.

Reality exists, privately, and we only get to see it in letters like this. Perhaps the key to truth in art and writing is that we should all create as if nobody will hear us but the person we love most. It might be the only way to be eternal aside from painting.

Related blogs:

Vincent van Gogh at Houston MFAH

Who wrote this?

Vincent van Gogh paintings at the National Gallery of Art

Vincent van Gogh’s The Rocks

Fan Art Friday: Utena and Cowboy Bebop

Grant me the power to bring the world revolution!

A young girl’s parents die, and at their funeral, she is consoled by a prince. She’s so touched by the prince’s kindness and regal bearing that she vows one day to become a prince herself.

Normal girls would fall in love with the prince, right? But why love a prince when you can … be one?

Utena could come off as an ultra-weird anime, but like any anime with something to say, it frames itself too well to be confusing. It luxuriates in it’s own mythology. I don’t know, you just have to watch it.

The orphaned Utena grows up, goes to school, and insists on wearing a boy’s uniform to class. There are no rules against it! 45 seconds into the first episode, beats the boys at basketballs and makes the girls swoon. She’s well on her way to accomplishing her goal of being a prince. In fact, by episode 1, she already is a prince.

All of this is well and good but there are people in the world who can’t deal with Utena being a prince, and the rest of the series sees Utena fighting through unimaginable forces as well as high school gossipers. When she decides to save the Rose Bride and be the prince of the bride, almost everyone antagonizes her.

The Rose Bride belongs to the strongest duelist, who, in this case, is Utena. Nobody expects the winner of the bride to be a woman, but again, there are no rules against it.

I wanted to draw the moment in each Utena episode where Utena pulls the sword from the chest of Anthy, the Rose Bride. Why does the bride contain a sword in her chest? It represents both power and death, and pulling the sword out is only for the worthiest.

Stranger things have happened in the world of love and history, where Helen of Troy was the Face who Launched 1000 ships, Anthy’s body is capable of producing thousands of dueling swords. There is a sword inside of Anthy for as long as anyone wants to fight over her.

There are a lot of problems and painful moments confronted by Utena too, in the same way that Game of Thrones confronts skin-crawling themes like incest, abuse, death - Utena goes there. You know those quizzes online that are like “Which My Little Pony Character Are You?” and you’re pretty okay no matter what - if you get Twilight Sparkle or Fluttershy, it doesn’t matter, because both are pretty cool ponies.

You can’t do the '“Which Utena Character Are You” quiz without feeling extremely uncomfortable, in the same way as characters in Game of Thrones. Sure, Tyrion is the one cool guy, and Arya works well, but would we ever really want to be Jon Snow, Theon, Jaime? We all love Game of Thrones, but nobody wants to ‘be’ a character like Jaime Lannister in the same way they would be okay with being a character like Sam or Frodo. You’re Sam if you’re ever faithful, you’re Frodo if you’re okay with self-sacrifice, but who the fuck is okay with getting with their aunt? Who is okay with pushing a kid out a window? It’s somewhere nobody really wants to be. Utena feels that way, with characters who look cool on the outside and who are well acted and voiced, but most of them are absolute scum.

Utena isn’t the only good character in Utena, she’s just the only great one. You sort of only hope for and root for Utena and the Rose Bride, and everyone else kind of sucks and antagonizes or stands by.

Even if Utena Is The Best and Everyone Else Sucks, the question asked by the anime is still interesting. Why can’t girls be princes? Grant me the power to bring the world revolution. In some dream where I become a prince and I become a successful director like James Cameron, Utena will probably be my Battle Angel Alita. Even if it fails and nobody else likes it, I’d still do it.

Since we’re falling into a giant pipe dream, let’s talk about another anime and make some art about it.

Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop is an anime of creative freedom because it only has everything - hacker kids, sentient artist satellites, spaceships, a deadly love triangle. In between all of the serious stuff about crime and death and love, the directors take a mental siesta and produce an entire episode where everyone accidentally gets high on psychedelic mushrooms. Sounds a bit like life, actually.

In thinking about Cowboy Bebop, I wanted to make a recreation of this cell:

The anime works its own kind of special magic when you try to replicate these cells - you realize Spike’s feet are clubby boots and that his legs are way too long to be right in any anatomy book. But none of this matters, Cowboy Bebop doesn’t just have style, it has swagger. It has belief in itself.

It’s the right balance of funny and serious. I believe in Spike - Spike is driven to figure out a few things in life, but mostly he is driven by his next paycheck, and, well, food.

Related Blogs:

Fan Art Friday: The Watchmen

Shameless Fan Art: Metal Gear Solid 5 and Red Dead Redemption

Shameless Fan Art - Myst, Persona 4, Captain America, Final Fantasy, Zelda

Who wrote and drew this?

Akihabara - Dragon Quest Lawson Store

In Akihabara, I happened across this Lawson convenience store dedicated entirely to Dragon Quest.

This is it, this is the whole blog.

Medium Moment: PaperLike for the iPad Pro

Imagine giving a kid a basketball for Christmas on a lark because you found the basketball in a discount bin, and then the kid turns into LeBron James.

That’s sort of what happened when Apple created the iPad Pro - it wasn’t exactly intended for artists, but when artists use the iPad Pro, it transforms them into the LeBron James of art.

Drawing on the iPad Pro is like slam-dunking Starry Night on your greatest enemies.

But, really? Art on an iPad? Serious digital art is produced on computers, not on tablets.

Despite starry-night-slam-dunking, there is an Achilles heel in the iPad Pro - a tiny weakness which almost renders it completely useless.

For all of of its cosmic computing power and portability, the iPad lacked a critical art factor - drag.

via GIPHY

Wait, not that kind of drag! But you know I would never miss an opportunity for a Miss Vanjie gif!

Writing on an iPad Pro feels like writing with a ballpoint pen on glass.

In theoretical physics, everything happens in a vacuum. In reality, you always have to account for drag.

Drawing on the ipad Pro on its own is like doing theoretical physics, like throwing a ball through outer space. Drawing on paper is like a ball falling through air - there is resistance and drag, and it all comes down to earth.

The iPad Pro theoretical physics vacuum has suprised and frustrated artists who are used to drawing with a pencil and feeling more of a fight, more resistance from the paper. We just aren’t ready to produce on glass.

So, what to do about the drag problem? Here we have this amazing device that comes at us with bangin’ software like Procreate and Clip Studio Paint, and yet moving the pencil across the device’s surface is like bowling a penguin down a slip and slide.

Paperlike, an attachment that sticks to the iPad’s surface, solves the slip-and-slide problem of the iPad Pro. I cranked out a couple drawings and didn’t even notice or think about the surface.

While applying the Paperlike, worried “I’ve been drawing on this iPad with no cover for three years will PaperLike undo all of that brutalized learning?”

No, it actually helped a lot. In fact I like Paperlike on the iPad Pro better than all of the tablets that I own, all of which are gathering dust underneath a dresser in my bedroom, along with a bunch of Magic the Gathering cards and clothes that don’t fit me.

Paperlike in indoor lighting. It’s a drawing of http://www.bersama.com/ !

The how-to-apply video from Jan on the Paperlike website was very helpful. iPads are running anywhere from $800 - $1200, people aren’t going to want to put any attachment on such a machine without clear directions. Artists are cost-sensitive customers. Paying even $30 can be a lot, so the video helps. Watching the video, you realize that the folks at Paperlike have thought of everything - they really have their customer’s best interests at heart.

It was also nice to get two Paperlikes in my order. I was a huge dummy and, while I near-perfectly applied my first Paperlike, I put my coverless iPad in my DUSTY BACKPACK and on the DUSTY WASHINGTON DC METRO it ended up not being a good idea. I should have added the cover after the Paperlike, but alas. I’d definitely recommend a cover.

I drew some dreamy fantasy art to practice with Paperlike, it was an interesting feeling. My art was better than usual because I went through less frustration to make it. The final product was realized faster.

An added bonus of the Paperlike is that it makes it easier to look at the iPad Pro for a long time. After staring at non-PaperLiked glass-covered comic pages and gleaming illustrations for hours on end, I’d find my astigamtism-addled eyes straining along in my skull.

Suffering from eyestrain is like never caring about your pinky toe until your pinky toe gets a cut on it and suddenly you’re hyper aware of the pinky toe’s integral role in life. Paperlike softens that nasty glare and it’s soooo nice.

At night or in low light, you really can’t see or perceive the Paperlike at all. Here is a shot of the Paperliked iPad Pro at night:

A couple panels from Tilted Sun under the Paperlike on the iPad Pro

So, is this a good thing to buy? Could Apple release a matte iPad and make Paperlike moot?

Apple could release a matte, drag-happy iPad, but I don’t think that Apple cares that about artists or art production to do so.

Plus, phones and ipads are all about shinyness these days - shinyness and brightness.

When Apple created the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil, they didn’t know how much artists would love it or how powerful it would be for artistic production. Apple only seemed to retroactively understand the extreme love that artists had for the device. They probably won’t build out from this understanding. Visual artists are, what, 0.5% of their customers?

The ideal user of the iPad is just about everyone, and as much as I keep saying that Art is For Everyone, artists are still a tiny segment of everyone. Either way, I hope Paperlike stays around for a while and that they continue to help artists with this extremely specific problem. Get thee a Paperlike!

Paperlike website: https://paperlike.com/

Related blogs:

Clip Studio Paint for the iPad Pro

Who wrote this?

Read the comic from this blog! Tilted Sun

Tokyo Mix: Gundam Cafe, Godzilla Store, and Maruzen Nihonbashi

The best thing about any city are the things that don’t fit neatly into a listicle or a 5 minute youtube video. The best things a city has to offer are secrets, places that aren’t perfect, and off-the-grid moments that aren’t going to get any likes on Instagram.

Gundam Cafe in Akihabara

The Gundam Cafe isn’t great for food. It’s not going to win any awards for service or cuisine. But, it is a fun place to rest your feet after going up and down multiple reps of six-story buildings. There’s no line, no weird reservations and no wait.

Sadly the noodles I ordered were lukewarm, I wasn’t sure if they were supposed to be served cold, or hot, or if I was just an idiot, but I didn’t care that much because I was able to watch Gundam theme song intros on repeat with several of my fellow easily-bedazzled Americans.

As a 14 year-old I watched Gundam Wing secretly on my grandparents’ tv in Houston via Adult Swim. Our channels in Colorado didn’t even have Cartoon Network (which is also how I got hooked on Pokemon, but, different blog for that). Anyways, at the Gundam Cafe, I didn’t care if the noodles were cold, in fact, the cold noodles made sense. They felt good in a desperate way, like eating McDonalds in Kansas after driving a thousand miles. Even though the drive across Kansas sucks, you’re still a million years ahead of the pioneer who died on the plains trying to get to San Francisco. You’re still taking Xanax instead of getting thrown into an asylum. 

The menu design and coasters are the reason to go to the Gundam Cafe. Art and your Gundam Memories are the reason to go to the Gundam Cafe. Just order whatever, swoon over the menu’s design, not the food, watch the Gundam theme songs on the big screen and call it good. 

Ideally Gundam would be better served by a museum somewhere, but there can’t be a museum for every anime. 

Or can there? Prove me wrong … ;)

Godzilla Store Tokyo in Shinjuku

I thought I had seen all of the Cherry Blossom fever, until I was floored by this cherry blossomed-themed Godzilla diorama at the Godzilla store in Shinjuku.

One of the coolest things about Tokyo is the hyper-specific stores. There isn’t a Godzilla shelf in a Target, there is an entire Godzilla store for all of your Godzilla needs, hopes, and dreams.

The diorama above the gachapon machine is pretty cute! Even Godzilla loves gachapon!

Maruzen Nihonbashi

Maruzen, a bookstore chain, is worth checking out in any location. It was fun to visit Maruzen in Nihonbashi and catch up with what everyone was reading.

I loved how books for adults had illustrated covers. The most serious subjects had cartoon covers.

In addition to Harvard Business Review and Radical Candor, Strengths Finder is in Japan!

I saw the ‘Life Shift’ book several times on bookshelves in Tokyo and thought several times about picking it up. I thought it was the Aleta St. James book, but, I couldn’t figure it out for sure.

The most interesting shelf of books was this one, dedicated entirely to manners and grooming for men. There were similar areas for women, but I’d never seen such a focus on this in any Western bookstore. Where other cultures might be trying to say ‘looks don’t matter!’ right now, urban Tokyo is unafraid with admitting that looks do indeed matter - the hallmark book on this being “Class Act: Appearance Matters for your Success”

The lint brushes and shoe brushes almost did me in, but they’re not as surprising as the entire 200 page manual dedicated to shoe care.

Women’s magazine’s were pretty par for the course, they looked to me a lot like women’s magazines in the States or in most of Western Culture.

Related blogs:

The Best Shirts of All Time in Harajuku

Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens in Cherry Blossom Season

Shin-Koenji

Comics and art are alive in Akihabara

Harajuku Shirts and Shops

A few years ago I was visiting an art fair in Aspen and a big dude on a trick bike trundled across a busy intersection. Like the charmed hippo in Heart of Darkness, it was a miracle he wasn’t struck down immediately by several Lambourghinis, a Hummer, and a series of Range Rovers. He sort of looked like he was on the drug bender of his life, but, maybe he just did this every day. With some people, it is hard to tell if they are lucky or skilled, or an uneven mix of both.

As I walked through Harajuku in Tokyo, I pretty much felt like Aspen Drug Bender Bike guy. Walking through Harajuku as an American, you can feel your brain oscillating between thoughts of “Am I lucky or am I skilled?” The scores of fellow shoppers in Harajuku sort of avoid you, they don’t immediately plow into you, but you also have to work for it.

My inner self glaring up at the diffused sun, for reassurance, I wandered into a Harajuku store with several stores in it, an unfolding Russian Doll minimart where each brand had a dedicated floorspace and cashier. Unseparated by walls, the brands ran together, yet they didn’t. If the streets of this place felt crowded and too small, the shops watered down some of the chaos.

Here, the real mind-oscillation begun. Harajuku has the funniest, most zen shirts I have ever seen in my life.

Step by step, have a time

Keep ideals, spite of all. At first it doesn’t make sense, then it is zen

Seen above: Does Tempt Ably, Army (Not the real Army), a $2000 leather jacket based on an episode of Adventure Time, Describe Below, Belief Thing That Take A Side Sincerity.

I stared at the subtext of this makeup store for an awkward amount of time. To my jet-lag addled brain, the words seemed to shine, emblazoned on the vinyl signing like some kind of modern Charlotte’s Web:

Self confidence and liking yourself greatly benefits the process of becoming beautiful.

It felt like reading a weird translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, where an ancient and wise person was dishing on some eternal beauty facts that transcended any issue of Allure or Cosmopolitan. This store contained the secret to being beautiful, but the biggest secret was to like yourself. … What?

So (In Jerry Seinfeild voice) What’s the Deal With These Shirts? I really don’t know, but I loved the elaborately-written sentiments much more than I loved, say, a shirt with parrots and pineapples on it in the youth section at an American Macy’s. I’ve never seen shirts with so much to say.

Even if the zen-garbled sentiments aren’t fully understood by the person wearing the shirt, it’s not like every person in North Dakota with a Kanji tattoo knows the true meaning of the characters. Most Kanji tattoos probably translate to Belief Thing That Take A Side Sincerity.

Before visiting Harajuku, I saw a lot of other, more techy neighborhoods in Tokyo and a lot of western society’s problems solved: fast trains, omni-available healthy food, and safety in the form of unlocked bikes and polite policeman.

Yet, Harajuku solves one of the biggest Western plagues of all: the samey Hipster.

The helixing vicious cycle of Hipsterism is that it’s a movement toward individuality, yet, at a certain point, all hipsters start to look the same. There are only so many flannel pieces and tight-fitting jeans and boots you can buy, only so many carefully-sourced Anthropologie sweaters you can throw on yourself before you look exactly like the person next to you.

The vibe in Harajuku scatters away from the curve towards sameness. It’s on some other kind of graph altogether.

While the main walk in Harajuku pops with funny shirts, colorful contact lenses (legal!) and crepes, the real fashion gems of Harajuku lay enclosed by LaForet, a multi-level mall. LaForet has the magic of small, super small, and hyper-curated items that don’t appear anywhere else. Each store is like viewing an independent art show. These aren’t famous labels or famous names and they probably never will be, but they’re really fucking cool.

In addition to clothes each shop has hand-curated accessories, like the hip-things section of Urban Outfitters, only with the cultural memory of a person you’d actually want to hang out with. There’s Kermit the frog in a mini shopping cart, for some reason. Drawings that seem like they were made by your little sister. Pez dispensers? A Toy Story book straight out of 1998.

LaForet is home to the Sailor Moon store as well! One of the greatest things about Tokyo are the popup shops in malls that are dedicated entirely to just one anime, show, or pop culture phenomenon.

United States malls are great at pumping out aggregate pop culture fashion aimed like a laserbeam at youth culture and the even-more-lucrative geek culture - Box Lunch and Hot Topic are sure to have your favorite Godzilla T shirt. At Hot Topic, somewhere between Linkin Park tees and Full Metal Alchemist wallets, you’ll find Sailor Moon stuff, yeah. Tokyo draws in enough fandom, enough otaku, to have an entire Godzilla store, several stores just for Kirby’s Dream Land, and countless popups dedicated to new short runs of Anime.

It’s easy to see Harajuku and Laforet as a place just for young people. While there were mostly younger people in the mall, Laforet caters to one kind of person: those who want something both new and good. So, Harajuku proves to be another place in Japan that goes all out. Expression is everything and uniqueness is everything. Though I spent enough time in Tokyo to eventually see a sweater repeated in Shinjuku and in Harajuku, in both places, you get the feeling that if you don’t buy the piece today, you’ll never find it again. Harajuku is a bit punk this way. It’s not a thrift store, not Prada, not Macy’s - it’s a kind of fashion shopping experience that could only exist in Tokyo.

Possibly the best one

I feel this

I knew I’d reached peak Harajuku when I found a shop with what seemed to be every ski jacket that my family and I wore in Colorado in the 1990s. At this point, I exited the store, texted my friends in the States who might have still been awake, and bought a crepe to relax and watched the crowds roll by until finally, all of the teenagers evaporated into the metro and I could go home. I metroed back to my Air BnB and flipped through my camera roll on my memory-starved iPhone, reliving the shirts one by one, laughing and texting them to whoever I thought might still be awake in the world, throwing them up on Facebook and Twitter to prove, somehow, that all of the shirts were real all along. Truly, there is a Harajuku shirt for everyone, every personality type can be found in the mystery of a shirt in Harajuku. I went back to Harajuku the next day.

Related Blogs:

Comics and art are alive in Tokyo!

Who wrote this?

Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens

Day and Night in Shinjuku

Art Reads: Steal The Show

This book probably falls on a spectrum for most creators and most professionals - depending on how much time you’ve spent in drama classes or at Toastmasters, the approach in this book could be anywhere from totally new to you, or advice you’ve heard before.

But wherever you fall on the spectrum it doesn’t matter, because Michael Port’s writing is fun to read and isn’t accusatory or pompous. He’s like a cool dad who wants you to rock the presentation, get the job, ace the keynote. He’s like your drama teacher without the drama.

The pieces of advice might be things that, deep down, we knew were true, but it’s nice to have Michael Port in your corner reassuring you. It’s fine to assume multiple personas, he says. It’s fine to rise to the role, in fact, it’s great! Yay.

Michael Port never pitches the idea of life-as-a-movie or life-as-a-tv-show, but instead he pitches it as life-as-role, and you can take multiple roles. In fact you should take multiple roles. It’s what modern life demands from us and we can rise to this occasion.

I used to spend time with people in entertainment and met a few indie-film actors. One might think of actors negatively in the same way that people think of artists: if they’re good at acting, what if they are good at faking, embellishing, manipulating?

Turns out none of this needs to be a concern. Actors are among the most genuine, sweet people I’ve ever met. They’re studying and creating, and sometimes they get chosen for roles and sometimes they do not. They’re doing their best for a job they’ve been hired to do, for a role they have been selected to play. This mode of thinking is well-communicated in this section about taking risk and stepping up to challenges below.

While casting directors and job interviewers and bosses can all-too-often be seen as antagonists or gatekeepers, deep down, they want you to succeed. They want you to wow them. It’s your job to make big, strong choices.

Michael Port tells us that if actors can do it for roles, non-actors can do it for the many performances of life. In this mode of framing life-as-performance, Michael isn’t teaching us how to become an actor or how to get famous (thank god). What he is saying in this book is “You already are an actor! Here’s how to get good.” The confidence in this book is infectious. I felt like I had just climbed a mountain with the coolest person I know.

Like a good keynote, the book didn’t drone on and on. At first I found myself wishing that the author had included a few more anecdotes of how he worked with his students to overcome their fear, then I realized he didn’t have to do this, it would have been too much.

For the introverted like yours truly, it’s probably true that just reading a book won’t help us perfect our public speaking goals. Along with Steal the Show, Michael Port has built an entire public speaking empire, a website, classes, and his own keynotes. This book is just a book, it’s just step one. Yet for being ‘just’ a book, it’s a well-voiced, active, stagelike read.

Like some kind of ride, I wished this book were even longer and I was sad when it was over, so I went back and reread several points. It’s the ‘Let’s ride it again’ at Disneyland kind of book. You’d want to lend this book to a friend that you care about, but also buy another copy for yourself just in case.

Related Blogs:

Art Reads: Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces

Art Reads: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

Art Reads: Snow Crash

Shin-Koenji

Like a bead of water on a glass, Shin-Koenji is just one tiny glittering piece of Tokyo.

During a ten-day trip in Tokyo, I stayed near this shrine, the Myoho-ji temple. Across the street is a grocery store and a 7-11, and its near the Shin-Koenji station for a relaxed metro ride into the city. The metro wasn’t even bad during morning rush hour - more often than not I could find a seat.

Graveyards and temples, an art school, a small park - while I can’t say Shin Koenji reminded me of anywhere else in the world, it was the picture of peace and order. Like taking a ski run for the first time and already knowing it like the back of your hand, Shin Koenji is a safe and easy place to stay while visiting Tokyo. It’s not as exciting as other districts of Tokyo, but it doesn’t try to be, either. It was cool place to relax after visiting the city each day, a cool place to make a lot of art in the evenings.

On the last couple days of my stay in Shin Koenji the sky lit up like this.

Narrow streets cut through Shin Koenji and even more alleyways connect the neighborhood. It’s a great place to be a pedestrian or a cat. It’s easy to find your way through this neighborhood as most people seem to have a path memorized to and from the subway.

A sunny day in Shin Koenji - mirrors were used to make traffic easier to see throughout the narrow, tightly-cornered streets.

The metro station at Shin Koenji was chill throughout most of the day - the only time to really avoid was the 9 am rush hour where countless workers were jamming in to each car to get to work each day.

Here I am at my Air BnB in Shin Koenji!

Related Blogs:

Comics and art are alive in Akihabara

Sekaido - Art Store of Paradise

Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens

Vincent van Gogh: His Life in Art at the Museum of Fine Art Houston

This show of Vincent van Gogh in Houston is one of the best Van Gogh shows I’ve seen as far as diversity of work and the message of the show. Not every Van Gogh painting is here, but there are definitely paintings that are rare, less-seen, and drawings that floored me. Starry Night at the MoMA and Self Portrait at the Musee d’ Orsay are probably the two Van Goghs that we think about most, this show gives us reasons to see lesser-known Van Goghs in an iconic way.

Like the following three paintings after Millet:

Detail of the above painting, where the paint isn’t brushed on so much as applied like patches of bricklaying cement:

To this day I don’t know how Van Gogh painted this way. A brush doesn’t lay down color like a trowel, and to do it with a palette knife you’d have to have the patience of a saint. We all know the painting is a lovingly-made replica of one of Van Gogh’s art heroes, Millet, but how, how the heck did Van Gogh do this?

How did he paint like this, with the volume of the paint jutting out from the painting? Brushes press down paint and smooth it out, palette knifes lay down color, but there isn’t a tool in painting that lays down little embossed swatches of paint like the green swatches above. There just isn’t. Whatever Van Gogh was doing, he was using paint in an absolutely new way. He was laying it down and then shaping it, or he was loading his brush for every single stroke, dipping the brush and hitting the canvas, dipping the brush and hitting the canvas, over and over again. This would be an incredibly hard - but rewarding - way to paint.

In paintings like these, copies of Millet’s work of peasants bundling hay, the paint is applied and shifted in a way that would be less maddening. You can see that Van Gogh laid down colors and then shifted them, sculpted them across the canvas, later adding touches of atmosphere like the purplish haze around the hay and sky below.

Van Gogh never saw these peasants but he was often thinking about them. He loved Millet and cherished Tolstoy and ever since Potato Eaters, was more concerned with peasants than most.

Van Gogh had failed at many other courses in life before setting out to paint - he tried to be a teacher, he tried to be a preacher, and didn’t make it at either. While he didn’t succeed at painting financially in his lifetime, his success as a painter eternally stemmed from his habits of hanging up paintings and prints all around him in his rooms, and writing to his brother about paintings and landscapes. In reading Van Gogh’s lettters, I’ve never seen anyone be such a fan of other painters. In one letter to his brother from 1875, he writes a short greeting and then goes on to list all of the paintings he has hanging in his room:

He was studying these paintings like he studied and quoted The Bible in other letters.

When Van Gogh copies Millet or makes a painting ‘after Millet,’ the best we could analogy that we could make for our time is that Van Gogh made unabashed fan art. The paintings above are homages, or fan art, or both.

Like a kid who loves Spiderman so much that he starts doodling, Van Gogh loved Millet so much he wanted to make Millet paintings himself. He was relentless to learn and studied the hell out of painting and kept painting, and didn’t quit even when he got sick.

The book is a homeopathic remedy book. What about the smaller onion that has fallen onto the book’s cover? Did it just fall off, is it hiding something on the cover? Unlike a spread in Oprah, It’s not the most organized scene, but the onion is kind of hiding the book.

The lavender shadow in this painting almost did me in. I’ve never seen such a bright shadow. Though this was a painting of an asylum during Van Gogh’s stay there, it looks like a great place to recover. It looks like this place would heal anything.

It was nice to see The Rocks at this show in different lighting - though in the permanent collection at the MFAH, The Rocks takes on a new light against a darker wall in this exhibition. Typically it’s on the second floor of the museum and is against a lighter wall, though still encased in an ornate golden frame. I was so entranced by The Rocks when I saw it that I wrote a small mini-blog just about this painting, nothing else. Every time I see it in Houston, there’s something new to see. And it’s unlike any other Van Gogh I’ve seen. The sky relishes with broader, more lengthy strokes than other Van Gogh skies. Pink, yellow, blue cross the canvas and lead you to believe in a wind that shakes the dark tree. I believe in the rocks in this piece. Vincent could look at what would otherwise be someone’s throwaway photo and make something iconic out of it.

Vincent had mentioned The Rocks in a letter to Theo, where he complained about dust and wind. Painting en plein air means chaos seeps in from all angles - bugs, dust, wind, time, people walking up to you and asking you about art - all of these are challengers to making a painting outdoors.

Limited time does compress talent in a good way - you have to see accurately and replicate quickly, before the wind throws dirt into your skies.

In many Van Gogh paintings you can tell when he has acquired a new paintbrush - in the painting of a wheat field above, he has a larger brush by far than in other works and isn’t afraid to set it to work in the sky and foreground, where the smaller details are worked in the strip of trees in the horizon. The painting above could have been made with the staccato, small brushstrokes of Starry Night, but instead, more generous knifings of paint complete the atmosphere.

I’d never heard the story of the painting above, or seen the painting. If you’d asked me on who had made this painting I would have said an early Manet, maybe Lautrec on a weird day, someone else, but not Vincent van Gogh.

The painting depicts woman that Van Gogh was seeing at the time. He may have painted her right there or sketched her and painted her later, but either way, boy she looks glum. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere else.

According to the placard, the relationship later took a ‘stormy’ turn. Beer in one hand and cigarette in the other, this is how you get through dating Vincent Van Gogh.

(Okay, maybe that’s not beer, but it sure looks like beer)

The thought is that Van Gogh must have been too much for most people - committing himself to asylums, getting in fights with Gauguin, rejection after romantic rejection, failed jobs, living with his parents at age 30 … people just couldn’t really stand him after a while. But who knows? Maybe we’re looking at a guy who had a lot of the same problems that guys (and gals!) in their 20s have, and 150 years later, romance, jobs, and families are mostly the same. He tried to teach, he tried to preach, but painting was what he was meant to do and while Theo was a saint of financial and emotional support, it couldn’t save Vincent.

Speaking of Gauguin, the sitter for the portrait below had been painted by both Van Gogh and Gauguin in one sitting. This isn’t my favorite Van Gogh - here is why: in it you can see that with Gauguin sitting next to him, Van Gogh was influenced to paint more like Gauguin, which is not who Van Gogh was. Gauguin was a monster to others, Van Gogh was only a monster to himself.

Van Gogh tried on Gauguin’s more abstract style but ultimately rejected it for more realism, one of painting’s best ‘Be Yourself’ moments. Van Gogh is now described as post-impressionist because he doesn’t fit in with the impressionists, either - he was really his own thing.

Vincent Van Gogh being real

A portrait that is thought to be of Theo, Vincent’s beloved younger brother.

Impasto-clad peonies.

Many drawings in this show - rare and just as dramatic as his paintings.

The drawing above of a peasant woman is an earlier work, hung early in the show. I think you’re supposed to see it as sub-par compared to Van Gogh’s later drawings, but it’s full of unexpected promise. It could be early or late and I would have believed you. Like many drawings from Van Gogh, this drawing is not afraid of darkness. Approaching deeper values bravely isn’t something that all beginners do, but Van Gogh did it here and in his other drawings.

The display case below contains facsimiles of a sketchbook at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Far too delicate to move, the facsimiles displayed with the tools that Van Gogh might have used bring the sketchbook closer to us.

There are several displays of tools throughout this show that are well done - a paintbrush or pen in a case isn’t something you see often, and I found myself wondering why this was the case. Why don’t museums display more paintbrushes when museums throw a painting show?

A fundamental theme running through the show, placard after placard seemed to swoon and chime over the fact that Vincent had written so many letters to his brother, 830 in total, and - swoon! - thanks to all of these letters, we know so much about Vincent’s life!

Vincent is the art historian’s cake and cakewalk and eating it too, where other painters move in and out of existence through receipts, documents, lore, apocrypha.

Yet, even after all of his letters and works, we still don’t fully get him. His lovers or would-be lovers rejected him, his friends couldn’t stand him - the only person who seemed to understand him and believe in him was his younger brother Theo.

Van Gogh was an occasional all-caps kind of guy, though some pop-art depictions and accounts of his personality would make you think he was All All Caps, All The Time

If you aren’t bold, If you don’t write it down, if you don’t draw it, nobody will know. Writing and painting, for Vincent, were both equal forms of existing and expression. Loving God and loving his brother.

After the show of paintings and a cruise through the giftshop (a well done giftshop by the way), there is an awesome interactive display called Van Gogh Up Close. My Mom grabbed this photo of me below - someone - a team of designers and fabricators - built this whole replica of a painting and you could sit in it!

There were other lifesize replicas, projections of Starry Night, and paintings on whiteboards that you could try your hand at coloring in, or hijacking.

Stuffy art critics get mad about highly-instagrammable museum displays like this but I think they’re great. There’s nothing wrong with loving art and wanting to be a part of it. There’s nothing wrong with bringing art closer to everyday life, and everyday life closer to art. Van Gogh Up Close is a perfect name. Vincent never could have imagined people in the far future running in and out of his paintings like ghosts slipping through walls, but here we are.

Vincent van Gogh: His Life in Art runs until June 27th at the MFAH Houston

Related Blogs:

Vincent van Gogh at the National Gallery of Art

Who wrote this?

Vincent van Gogh’s The Rocks

Caran d’Ache Watercolor Pencils

Sekaido - An Artist's Paradise

While walking in circles through Shinjuku with a dazzled-American look on my face, I happened across what looked like a pretty cool art store. I wandered in on a lark, thinking it would be nice to check out what this store had to offer.

It ended up being the most comprehensive art supply store I have ever seen. 

Floor after floor, Sekaido just keeps going up and it just keeps offering more and more to artists.

The bottom floor of Sekaido dedicates itself to office supplies and greeting card, cute Moomin things you can get for your friends, and a couple Gachapon in the back corner. What surprised me most about the office supplies was … for some reason, there were aisles and aisles full of binders. Office supply shoppers in Japan seem to be very selective and also amped to get binders, folders, and organizers. 

I knew that journaling was a huge trend in Japan, but I found myself asking, in a Jerry Seinfeld voice, what’s the deal with these binders? If anyone knows lemme know! Maybe it’s just nice to be organized.

The next floors of Sekaido focused more on artists who like to paint, draw, and sculpt. 

With four aisles dedicated to comics, Sekaido suggests that comic-making isn’t a deeply mystified task for extremely pissed off and stressed people. Instead, comics come off as a fun and accessible part of art! Look! You can get cool books, and - what? - prelined comics pages?? (you don’t have to draw your own freakin margins like a Sisyphean slave?). Sekaido is also home to the only display of Clip Studio Paint I’ve ever seen in a retail store (you don’t have to be an uber nerd who researches into the blue horizon to figure out CSP exists!) 

Not that excellent software needs a box, but, sometimes, yeah, you need a box. There was also a Wacom display:

The painting floor also had products that I never knew I needed - such as a painting jumpsuit. Forget aprons, forget gloves, forget ratty paint shirts —  get thy artist body into an entire PAINTING JUMPSUIT like a Bob Ross Power Ranger. I was in love. 

Many art stores in the States have how-to books but they lack inventory of books showcasing the work of powerful, established artists. Art history also goes missing at art stores. 

Why does this matter? Why does it matter if there are no Georgia O’Keefe books at Hobby Lobby? 

Why does it matter if Sekaido has a book of The Movie Art of Syd Mead and Michael’s doesn’t?

If all you have is how-to books in an art retail store, the store is assuming that you, the customer, are always a beginner, never a master. You are a perpetual beginner at Michaels and Hobby Lobby. 

Large American retailers like Michaels have the most obvious opportunity to transform the beginner mentality of their stores and bring artist books into their inventory, but even independent art stores do not commonly carry trophy books of established, beloved artists. 

My favorite supply from Sekaido was this brush pen and small drawing album.

I was so excited about the brush pen that I ripped off the package with my teeth and cast it aside and forgot to even try to read what the brand was. After some careful retroactive Googling, the brush pen is this product: a Kuretake Brush Pen.

This brush pen as of writing currently has no 1-star reviews on Amazon - for good reason. It doesn’t give up. It’s like inking to your heart’s desire and never breaking your process to refill the pen in a reservoir.

If you’re an artist or you know an artist and you’re in Tokyo, go to this store! It will change your life.

Related Blogs:

Magasin Sennelier

Who the Hell Wrote This?

Animate in Akihabara - Comics are alive in Tokyo!

Day and Night in Shinjuku

Food everywhere, six-story book stores, multi-level shops, ramen and host clubs for days, After wandering around Shinjuku Gyoen Gardens at full Hanami in a state of bewildered dazzlement, I found myself wandering around Shinjuku the city.

Shinjuku looks a lot like you might imagine, like a concept-art vision of Blade Runner where the artist busted out the Good Watercolors. It’s more adult than Harajuku but still pretty Hello Kitty, with surprises like DVD stores and Mexican Food Casa Tequila as well as old standbys like an H&M where you could buy shirts with Garfield on them. Shinjuku only has everything.

While most of Shinjuku sparkled with a kind of jammed hypercompetitive bravado (Visit our ramen shop, see the Robot Restaurant! Godzilla! Movies!) graffiti and trash floated around in a couple alleys or places you weren’t supposed to notice. I liked this a lot about Shinjuku - the little punkass things in the city felt like hanging out with the goth girl who knits a sweater during the high school musical. When there’s so much panache and light and brigades of masterfully-produced Host Club trucks rolling by you, observing the graffiti feels so sweet. Getting a seat at a 6-person ramen shop feels like winning the lottery.

In buildings like the Taito Game tower above, you could play Pachinko or beefy arcade games the likes of which have never crossed the Pacific and never need to, it would all be just too much. Arcades were also packed full of claw machines, more than you could ever imagine, each claw machine containing just about anything - Sword Art Online figurines, Cup Noodles, Every Pokemon.

I’ve only been in Vegas once, during a layover on the way back to Texas after Thanksgiving. In what seemed like a more-hungover-than-usual terminal of the Vegas Airport, I tried some slot machines out with my husband Marc, mostly because they were themed after Dolly Parton. For a while I seemed to be winning, I actually was not sure what Dolly Parton was trying to communicate to me. Whatever she did, it all seemed good!

I lost, but, did I?

The Dolly Parton slots in Vegas - ahem the Vegas airport - are a bit like arcades in Shinjuku: I had no idea what I was doing but it was pretty fun! What’s ten dollars down the drain for some cool animations?

For every claw machine I tried and where I spent 10,000 yen at ineffective, frustrated grasping, I ended up spying the same stuffed animal in a shop for around 15,000 yen (about 15 or 20 bucks, not bad). All I could think was that when people go into these claw machine joints, they are remarkably okay with the thrill of the chase. Hopefully they aren’t addictive, gambling spirits, but surely, when the prizes are this cute, addiction happens. Otherwise how could there be so many damn claw machines when the logical, 15000 yen Neon Genesis Evangelion figurine can just be obtained online?

I gave it a shot. My arrhythmic heart chugged faster as I maneuvered the claw well enough to grab a Vaporeon, only to feel a brick of disappointment hit my ego when the machine inevitably flubbed the smiling stuffed creature at the last moment. Shinjuku arcade claw machines are a lot like working with computers. The machine just sort of tries its best given input, but you also know there’s a human somewhere in there who made the machine the right mix of perfect-yet-imperfect.

After the arcades I went to a bookstore in the Shinjuku Toho Building (of Godzilla-looming fame), where the bookstore became like a strange dream and the bookstore just kept going. It had not one, not two, but six floors of books, and there were so many people in the bookstore - people of all ages.

Vice in Japan at the Shinjuku Toho Tower

They had a pretty cool selection of computer science / programming magazines too! I definitely texted and slacked this one to a few friends back home:

The Python has a pretty funny hat but hey Tensorflow and Keras

In a half-real state of jetlag back in the States after my trip to Japan, I flipped through my photos while taking the Yellow Line over the Potomac to my office in Virginia. I’d taken so many shots on my poor withering iPhone 6 that I couldn’t download any new apps or conduct Evil Tests, my favorite career task when I am not on vacation. Clip Studio Paint was also crying out like a wounded antelope, wailing for More Space on my iPad, and since losing my artwork would make me jump in the Potomac, I shuffled, migrated, and sluiced all of my Japan photos off my iCloud account like my life depended on it. Shortly after this I ran out of storage space in my Gmail account, which was never intended to be Dropbox, but hey, free things have their limits.

So I had a lot of photos. While organizing the photos at Starbucks later that day, I realized that while in Shinjuku I had apparently been wandering around in circles for an entire day and deep into the night, the photo at the top of this blog being nearly the same place as this photo below, with the bright pink sign on the left standing out like a bookmark in transcontinental time.

Related Blogs:

Shinjuku Gyoen National Gardens

Nezu Gardens

Animate in Akihabara - Comics are alive in Tokyo!

Artist’s Paradise: Sekaido

Origami Kaikan Ochanomizu

Several floors of paper wonders and artistry await you at this amazing place dedicated to the art of origami! Not a far walk at all from Akihabara, and you’ll stumble upon a few shrines and temples along the way.

At first this tree looked like any other bonsai - upon moving a bit closer, you can see that a bouquet of painstakingly cut paper composes the tree.

All origami contain the magic of transformation. It’s a simple piece of paper, until suddenly, at the last fold, it’s a crane. 

Like a magician releasing doves from her hat, watching someone make origami is transfixing and delightful - we are at the magic show to see the change, to see the unexpected. 

Origami was much more difficult to master a few years ago, before the advent of Youtube. It would take an incredibly competent writer and artist to draw out and write out the steps to create a certain origami. If you were to memorize the steps of making a paper crane and then draw it out to someone, this is what most origami books did. The only other way to learn was possibly by watching a friend fold, and maybe your friend was a faster kinetic learner, better at comprehending directions, more exact, or just lucky. 

Either way, with Youtube or without, origami is a surprisingly social art. There’s a showmanship piece to it, magical engineering moments.  It’s fun to share origami with friends - for kids it is fun art about animals, and for adults there is elegance, craft, sweet technical moments akin to tuning an instrument or fixing a bike. 

Now, it’s so easy to go onto Youtube and see a video of a person’s hands turning a piece of origami paper and folding it crisply and with the right side of the paper used from the beginning.

Like all art and design, failing at Origami happens all the time. Or at least I will admit it happens to me. A few years ago I bought a desk with pink trim at Ikea. It ended up bringing more of a building challenge than its pink trim promised. Though a small desk, it had several lovable compartments, and I ended up placing a key part on backwards and upsidedown, even after carefully reviewing the printed instructions. 

Origami is similar - minor imprecisions stack up and affect the finished piece. Make one slightly imprecise fold in the beginning, and the work is harder at the end. 

It’s still true that the earliest folds in any origami are the most important - a slightly misaligned corner-to-corner fold will create a crane with lopsided wings. You have to be patient and precise to get origami right. Successfully following a fold pattern takes at least a couple tries or careful diligence. 

Paper flowers at Origami Kaikan.

One of the floors features a bestiary of paper creatures and plants. Each is labeled in Japanese and English, though it’s pretty easy to see what is what, the labels also help identify different styles of folding the same creature.

These papers in the Origami Kaikan shop were to just die for.

Origami Kaikan also has an amazing selection of handmade papers, and a papermaking studio on the 4th floor.

While at Origami Kaikan, myself and several other visitors were lucky to see a demonstration from origami master Kazuo Kobayashi, who folded this beautiful

The absolute best thing about Origami Kaikan is that you could tell every person in the building truly loved and was proud of their origami. 

While patience helps me fold and it’s fun to uncover new patterns and papers, at this point in my origami journey, the idea of creating a new fold or a new origami creature sounds like the kind of task reserved for an emperor. Creating new ideas in origami must take a kind of talent that I can’t even imagine. 

But that’s why Origami Kaikan is so cool - you get the feeling that both the Emperor of Origami and the kid who can fold paper frogs would like it here. 

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Sticker punks in Tokyo

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Comics and art are alive in Tokyo!

Stickers in Tokyo

After basking in cherry blossom splendor and safe, clean, and efficient society in Tokyo, I said to myself: “All right, blossoms are cool, but where are all the punks in this town?”

Turns out pretty much everything in Tokyo is honorable and pristine except for electrical cabinets, which provide a habitat for thousands of unique sticker species.

Punk culture didn’t surface at all in Tokyo, at least the urban and suburban environments where I ventured. I kept looking for what might be considered a ‘bad neighborhood’ in Tokyo and did not set foot into such a place - it didn’t seem to exist. Stumbling upon a temple was easy, but finding any crassness or edge in the city was hard. At one point I took a random train to a random neighborhood in North Tokyo just for a lark, and I still found healthy food, clean streets, and nice people.

The meanest person I met in the entire trip to Tokyo was an intoxicated German lady in Shinjuku who seemed to think I was German and began yelling at me in German. So - if not for belligerent tourists, who are all these punks putting up these stickers? I have no idea who they are or what they want - they seem to be very quiet and quick and good at their sticker-slapping jobs - but I am in love with their gusto.

Pods Pods Pods Pods

Stickering the electrical cabinet is a good idea - you can’t exactly paint over a steel cabinet, and it’s a pain to take the stickers off. And there are so many stickers on these things that you kind of get the idea that the police, shopkeepers, and clerks of the world are overwhelmed in a hydratic ocean of stickers. Peel one off and three more take it’s place overnight.

I was the only foreigner and the only person I saw who paused to look at these stickers. They weren’t interesting to anyone else. I’m not sure how locals experience them other than as noise in everyday life, background radiation in an already-neon-soaked environment.

Who was Jaeson and why was he here?

Not many vending machines were stickered, but this one in Shinjuku seemed to be everyone’s favorite sticker placer. To get this photo I bought a Boss Coffee and realized that the flap to retrieve my coffee was jammed by a couple persistent stickers. After some wiggling I retrieved the Boss Coffee just fine, and thankfully, no sticker punk was evil enough to cover the coin slot with a sticker.

I’ll be the first to admit I have no idea what Satan’s School For Girls might be without Googling it, but I am 100% onboard. And who, or what, is Lone Deer Laredo?

Were these stickers for bars, clubs, brands, artists? I’m sure all are involved.

That’s Mr. Kaneda to you, punk!

Many of the stickers in Tokyo shouted messages of self-love and forgiveness. The Stop Homophobia sticker was rare, but I saw it everywhere in Shibuya. The ‘Be Easy’ sticker hides one that is even more funny: Fuck School Do Drugs. If the most punk-ass thing you can do in America in 2019 is be kind to your friends, the most punk-ass thing you can do in Tokyo is stick up for yourself and forgive yourself in a harshly performant culture.

At the end of my journey to Tokyo, I felt a bit like the person in the sticker above - like flames were rolling off my brain and jetting out of my face. It was a trip of seeing and believing. Plastered with these stickers, even the boring nooks and crannies of Tokyo alleyways, telephone poles, and metal pipes suddenly had something extreme to say. Stunning! Smash! Unique! Satan’s School For Girls! JS One! Jaeson was here!

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AKIRA display in Shibuya

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AKIRA display in Shibuya

A ton of really cool things are in Shibuya, including this huge AKIRA display over a construction site near Uniqlo. Moments from the comic I THOUGHT I had forgotten were 10 feet tall and continued for 100 meters. In the map below, it’s in section 15 across from the Uniqlo marker.

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Nezu Museum Gardens

While on my way to Nezu and waiting to cross a street, two rushing, flexing Lambourghinis (Dark purple and brilliant cobalt blue) blazed past, and a man walking a poodle with a Fendi shirt and a Louis Vuitton scarf trotted up next to me, waiting for the Lambourghinis to race away and for the crosswalk to open up.

Pangs of simultaneous fancy car and fancy Fendi poodle envy struck me, and I felt some kind of guilt at not lavishing enough attention on my own poodle back at home.

Ginza, in effect, floored me as much as Roppongi, where it felt like some alternate-reality product between Aspen and the ever-chrome River Oaks in Houston. It’s like Beverly Hills on eleven. Ginza was also the only neighborhood in Japan that I visited where I saw people running and exercising. I’m not sure why this was - maybe the other districts were more dedicated to fashion, shopping, and museums - but in Ginza, I found myself shuffling out of the way several times for speedy runners with extremely cool-looking shoes.

By the time I had reached Nezu, I was exhausted from watching Lambourghini races and bedazzled by Fendi poodles. Even cushioned by Newton Running shoes, my feet felt flat and used up. Yet, I didn’t think about my feet at all though as I walked through Nezu gardens. Thinking didn’t happen.

Visitors had placed 1 and 5 yen coins atop Buddha’s head and hands. I found myself wondering who had placed the coins, and who eventually moves them. It seemed like a task that would be conducted by a spirit in the earliest morning hours.

Many wells and bridgesides at Nezu gardens glitter with yen donations from local and international patrons.

The Nezu museum contained many art treasures and I was lucky to see an exhibit dedicated entirely to lotuses in Buddhist art. While no photos were allowed of the museum, the gardens allowed cameras.

Yet, photos barely do this place justice. The peace and quiet of Nezu gardens that doesn’t fully make it through in these photos, at least.

Though struck through with a webbed grid of metro rails and roads, all of Tokyo only murmurs. Like a slumbering, horizonless giant, it’s a surprisingly quiet city where you could hear a cherry blossom petal fall to the ground. Walled off from an already-hushed metropolitan city, Nezu gardens are quiet within quiet. Thundering Lambourghinis and Fendi-clad poodles might as well be happening on another planet.

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Roppongi Cherry Blossoms

Roppongi Cherry Blossoms 2019

Roppongi is a beautiful part of Tokyo to visit - especially when it is Cherry Blossom Season! It was amazing to take these photos of cherry blossoms near the Suntory Museum of Art inside Roppongi mall. (real name)

I didn’t stay long at Roppongi while in Japan, but while I did, I snapped a few shots of these cherry blossoms near the mall. Roppongi strikes me as a bit like Aspen Colorado or River Oaks in Houston - it’s resplendently fancy, full of both families and workers - as long as you are fancy! The mall has more independent stores than your average luxury mall, and even nerfing down the street in my Newtons, I felt repeatedly like the least fancy person on the block.

Dazzled by the cherry blossoms, I was just as dazzled inside the mall at the Suntory Art Museum.

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