Artsy Fartsy

The last weekend in September I didn’t bother planning any travel since two big art/technology exhibitions being planned by my school took place. I figured I’d have to work a ton, but it turns out they hired outside translators for it, so I ended up only having to go in a couple hours on Saturday. I’m not complaining, but if Gifu Prefecture is wondering why it has so little money, here’s a prime example. You’re already paying me, here’s a grand opportunity to use me, and yet you hire outside people. Now, I couldn’t have been everywhere at once, so some outside help was necessary, but I barely did anything during the five days of the exhibition. It worked out well, since my friend Erica was crashing at my place that Wednesday, and was now free to hang out a bit. She got to Ogaki in the evening, and we immediately grabbed a late dinner. While listing off possible places to eat, I mentioned the 50s Diner in Ogaki that has burgers, fries, shakes, etc. The minute I said shakes her eyes went wide “Shakes?! We’re going!” Okay, done and done. She seemed lost in another world when her Choco-banana shake came, and that point I realized how much I take for granted the fact that there is an old-school 50s burger joint right here in Ogaki. Although she is in a considerably larger city, no place serves shakes. An in general, for its size, Ogaki has a lot of Western creature comforts available. I can get taco spice and tortillas, along with Cherry Coke and A&W Root Beer at Kaldi’s (an import food store), there’s a Subway in the mall south of town. Not to mention the giant mall complex Loc City right by my apartment. So, in a word, I’m glad I got the placement I did. Ogaki is a easy town to live in, and when I need a shot of something nostalgic from home, there are methods available. Some, I realize, aren’t so lucky. That being said, there is still plenty I can’t get over here, Glass Nickel’s Fetalicious pizza being one of them, that I am looking forward to eating while back home.

After indulging in some Americana, we decided to hit up the game center, which, to be honest, despite being a 3 minute walk away, I hadn’t really played many of the games there. Sure, I’ve been dragged in for purikura (photo booth), and we hit it up back at the beginning before Street Fighter 4 and Tekken 6 came out on PS3, but this time Erica and I hit up a bunch of classics, including air hockey, hoop shoot, a couple light gun games (Time Crisis 4, anyone?), Taiko Drum Master, plus a crazy game where your throw plastic playpen balls at moving targets on the touch sensitive screen. The game has you competing against each other, so it wasn’t long before Erica and I just started throwing the balls at each other. You don’t get points that way, though, you just get weird stares from people.

Despite my decidedly intense game face, Erica whooped me in the Buzz Lightyear(!) themed air hockey.



Erica, gangsta as always. "Yo chief, can I hold my gun like this? It looks so cool!"



The weird yet fun playpen ball touch screen game. Have at thee!!



The next morning I took Erica back to the station and stupidly didn’t bring an umbrella. As luck would have it, the skies opened up halfway to the station and we got thoroughly soaked. Sad panda.



Due to my now soaking clothes and, more importantly, shoes, I decided to stay in most of the day instead of heading to the art exhibition (had the day off for Autumn Equinox). So it was a lazy day, I watched a good chunk of the sumo tourney coverage, and once that was finished, headed out for some special performances occurring downtown as part of the exhibition. Now I’ve never been the most artistically inclined person, and my ability/willingness to “appreciate” art is modest at best. Now, I’ve certainly enjoyed plenty of art in the past, but most of the time that is because it is visually interesting, or I can recognize the talent needed to create the work. One thing I have a hard time getting behind, and maybe I just haven’t seen the right performer, is interpretive dance. There was a trio of interpretive dancers accompanied by a violinist performance on/around the main stage. They were trying to be “modern” or “edgy” or something, as the violinist merely drew the bow once, and the note was fed into some electronic repeater. So the background music just consisted of a few cycled, shrill violin notes. One of the dancers especially I couldn’t figure out, as she just seemed to be writhing around like a fish out of water on stage at times. That was interspersed with other random spastic movements as she moved to and fro. If that’s all it takes, I could be a freaking interpretive dancer.



Anywho, I wasn’t exactly impressed with that, but I should have waited, as the next performance, by some of the students at the school, made less sense, and required even less skill. A dozen or so of them took the stage in some half-baked costumes probably designed by throwing crap from the closet at a wall and seeing what sticks.

Wow.



I wouldn’t be so critical, but this is quite possibly the school’s biggest event, and this is a big performance event within that larger event. In other words, a time to put the school’s best foot forward. The school was/is in a battle to stay in existence. It needs to justify its importance to a cash-strapped prefecture and this exhibition was supposed be an important part of that justification. Instead, I saw costumes that would be laughed out of most Halloween parties, with each of the students in this group simply banging on random objects posing as instruments, and then screaming unintelligibly with no rhyme or reason. Guess what? If I was a prefectural bureaucrat, I would have just found some wiggle room in the budget. Harsh? Probably. Realistic? Absolutely.

To its credit, after this there was a taiko drum performance on the sidewalk by a local group, which was entertaining.



Then there was some little troupe of hippie performers that make music with bamboo instruments. It was a little mini-workshop where kids could participate and bang on the bamboo. A really solid idea, except for the fact that I couldn’t hear a thing thanks to the construction guys tearing down the metal stage. With pipes clanging against the ground constantly, and guys whacking at them to loosen them from the stage frame, I couldn’t help but concentrate on the noise and my impending headache rather than the neat workshop. Someone couldn’t have had them hold off? I imagine, though, that the stage builders didn’t give a crap and just wanted to get done and home. Yeah, I’d put money on that.

That Saturday I was supposed to help interpret for one of the foreign artists at the technology exhibition, so I headed out a little early and stopped by the art exhibition downtown to check it out. The school has a group that does TV programming for the local cable channel, and some of that was surprisingly funny/interesting. I didn’t get to see everything before I had to head to the tech exhibition. One of the foreign artist pairs had a table on the exhibition floor, and was supposed to be doing a workshop from 4-5pm. There was no actual workshop, so I just ended up standing around the table for 2 hours, occasionally helping people engage with the project, but mostly doing nothing, especially since there was another guy on duty, essentially doing the same thing.

The tech exhibition, though, had some cool stuff, so I returned (off –duty) on Sunday to just check out all the other tables. There was a bike that had LEDs built into the spoke area of the wheel, and when the wheel rotated, the LEDs formed an image or simple animation. Neat! There was also a series of live musical performances and workshops with unconventional self made musical set-ups. I checked out one such performance, and although walking in halfway through, I immediately got into the music. It was some solid techno, only made better (worse?) by the amount of Pikachu paraphernalia on stage.



I also stumbled upon a neat project where a pong game system is hooked up to a pair of jeans, and you move the zipper up and down to move your paddle on the screen up and down. It was definitely more difficult to control using the zipper, but my natural video game ability came through and I became the first person to actually win my match against the computer paddle. Woot!



There was some cool liquid art as well as a group of knitters with some impressively complex-looking creations. And I thought this thing was just plain neat.


One guy had built an Othello-playing machine comprised mainly of LEGOs.



Then I came upon a table with a project that is distinctly, and damningly, Japanese in nature. There was a waist and pair of legs (stuffed, I imagine) sitting in seiza sytle (knees together and bent) on the table. The legs were wearing a standard skirt from a school girl outfit. Then there was an iPhone with the picture of an animated school girl from the waist up. They had designed an app/system so that the iPhone is wirelessly connected with a fan/air burster hidden underneath the skirt. The harder one blows into the mic of the iPhone the more air gets shot up. Blow hard enough, and the skirt flips up, revealing the panties of these stuffed legs. Only in Japan.



I couldn’t help but think how much further ahead they’d be on the woman front if they had taken all that time they used to design this pointless system and actually used it to interact with the opposite gender. They tried to get some 10-12 year old looking kid to do it, but the kid was understandably wierded out and refused to. Good choice, kid.

I ended up getting roped into helping one of the foreign artists around the show floor, but I eventually got out of there and back home. Hakuho racked up a 4th straight undefeated sumo championship, and is on course to break the all-time win streak record come next tourney in November (starts in just over a week!). That should be exciting!