After lunch, we had a panel on “Radical Visual Culture in 1960s Japan” with Jonathan Hall (Pomona College) situating Okabe Michio’s remarkable 1968 film Crazy Love in dialogue with Susan Sontag’s writings on camp, William Marotti (UCLA) on the significance of early 1960s avant garde musical performances by the Group Ongaku, and Miryam Sas (University of California-Berkeley) on a variety of experimental animated films from the period.

Our last panel covered “Music in Film,” with Daniel Johnson (University of Chicago graduate student) looking at changing modes for representing romance/sex and sentiment/irony in Nikkatsu action films, Michael Raine (University of Chicago) discussing how we might rethink the practices of reading that 1960s popular films seem to suggest as their proper modes of use, and Junko Yamazaki (University of Chicago graduate student) on the use of avant garde musical forms in the film soundtracks composed by Mayuzumi Toshiro.

The conference ended with a screening of the remarkable 1964 Toho musical, Kimi mo shusse ga dekiru (You too can get ahead!, dir. Sugawa Eizo), a marvelous film that brings together many of the themes we had been talking about over the course of the conference. It was a stimulating, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exhausting two days, and I’m grateful to all of the participants and to all of my colleagues for making it possible.

Here’s a trailer for Kimi mo shusse ga dekiru:

The press is reporting today that Arakawa passed away on Wednesday. The news is both sad and ironic: Arakawa vowed that his work was “architecture against death,” and he and Gins famously announced for an exhibit that “we have decided not to die.” It is also ironic, because today at the University of Chicago we begin “Engaging Commodities: Crossing Mass Culture and the Avant Garde in 1960s Japanese Film, Music and Art,” a conference exploring figures like Arakawa, who troubled the boundaries of art, commerce, and scholarship to generate a remarkable moment in global cultural history.

Of course, Arakawa lives on — in his impact, in our conference, and, surely not least of all, in the Reversible Destiny Mitaka buildings:

The conference will also feature special appearances by musicians who were key figures in the 1960s Japan rock scene, including Alan Merrill, an American singer/songwriter who was a member of the Group Sounds band The Lead, then a solo performer signed by the influential Watanabe Pro management agency, and subsequently the leader of the pioneering glam rock outfit Vodka Collins. (After leaving Japan in 1973, Merrill founded The Arrows, a band that had several hits in the UK, including the original version of “I Love Rock and Roll,” a Merrill composition later recorded by Joan Jett and many others).

Three original members of the legendary Group Sounds band The Golden Cups will also appear at the event — lead guitarist Eddie Ban, bassist Louise Louis Kabe, and drummer/singer Mamoru Manu — and the conference will include a screening of The Golden Cups: One More Time, an acclaimed 2004 documentary about the band.

All events are free and open to the public, but RSVP is required for the Friday evening sessions featuring Merrill and The Golden Cups. The RSVP link and a full conference schedule are available on line at:

http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/japanatchicago/

The event is the eighth in the annual Japan@Chicago conference series and is sponsored by the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies. Persons who may need assistance to participate should call 773-702-2715. For additional information, please contact Sarah Arehart, Outreach Coordinator for the Center for East Asian Studies (sarehart@uchicago.edu).

[Updated May 13: We have added the RSVP system for the Friday night sessions mentioned above because we anticipate a large demand for the limited number of seats available]

Let me trace it back to a week ago tonight. I (or whomever it was) caught the Ike Reilly Assassination in concert at Lincoln Hall. Shooter Jennings (Waylon’s boy) opened with a surprising paranoid set of Southern-fried prog-rock-country, and then Ike and his band took the stage. His parents were in the house, he announced, and it was all in all a fine show. Shooter came on stage to perform the wonderful duet, “The War on the Terror and the Drugs,” included on Ike’s most recent album. If you haven’t heard it yet, stop whatever it is you are doing immediately and click on the following video:

The next day was my anniversary, and we celebrated by watching our daughter play Lucy in a middle-school production of “Snoopy! The Musical.” Our offspring performed wonderfully well, and the show itself is great fun, including complex ensemble songs like “Edgar Allan Poe” (see video from another production below) and “Clouds.”

On Saturday afternoon, I was at the Joffrey Ballet, taking in “Eclectica,” their spring program: Gerald Arpino’s 1971 piece, Reflections, plus two world premieres: Jessica Lang’s pretty awesome Crossed , a meditation on religion and spirituality in which the dancers duck around large moving stage sets, and James Kudelka’s Pretty BALLET, also quite striking. One reviewer calls it “the most intellectually engaging Joffrey program in recent memory.” Call me engaged.

I then jumped into the car and drove to Sparta, Wisconsin, where I spent the night in a dive motel that shall remain nameless. Only the sheets have been changed to protect the innocent. The next morning, I drove up the Mississippi River to Stockholm, Wisconsin, to pick up some of my mother’s paintings for a new retrospective exhibition. I’d forgotten how pretty that part of the country is. I spent the rest of the day tracking down more paintings for the show across central Minnesota — Edina, St. Paul, North Branch.

Monday morning I helped set up the exhibit in the Art Gallery at Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater, Minnesota–where my mother, my sister, and I were all born. It’s a wonderful collection of 14 of my mother’s best works, many of which haven’t been shown publicly for years. It will be open through June 29, and there are new prints and cards of my mother’s paintings for sale in the hospital gift shop. Details on hours and how to get there can be found here.

Monday evening found me at Target Field, the new home of the Minnesota Twins. While ingesting far too much animal protein, I watched my favorite baseball team clobber the Detroit Tigers. Wilson Ramos, the Twins’ fine young catching prospect, got three hits in his second Major League game, this after he collected four the night before in his debut, thereby setting a new rookie record and sending Twins’ fans into a mild frenzy. It’s a fine new ballpark, too, with many thoughtful details, inside and out. I didn’t mind the raindrops that fell intermittently through the evening, not one bit.

Tuesday, I drove back to Chicago, picking up along the way our oldest from his dorm to haul him home for summer vacation after his freshman year at college. Then yesterday I helped host the great historian Harry Harootunian for a couple of very stimulating talks here at the University of Chicago. The day ended at a restaurant in Chinatown, with good food and lively talk with our visitor and several colleagues.

After all that, I woke up this morning and looked in the mirror, and it was me again. Welcome back, and don’t forget to turn off the lights when you leave again.

“R&R (…&R)” is an exhibit of works by Susanne Slavick. She takes photographs of contemporary wartime destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon and paints over them images from classical Islamic artwork, creating strikingly beautiful symbols of healing. One large panel, for instance, consisted of black-and-white photographs of bombed out cars, with colorful painted images of angels in the heavens pulling on ropes attached to the twisted hulks below. Slavick’s works give a sense of “restoration ” (one of the “R” words she has in mind in the exhibit title), and they also prod us toward a new awareness of our place in a global, millennial flow of history: I couldn’t help wondering how the images of our own violent times will look to human (or angelic) observers 500 years hence. The exhibit runs through April 4. You can see more of Slavick’s work here.

In a neighboring gallery we found “Up is Down: Paintings by Joel Sheesley.” In sharp contrast to Slavick’s macroscopic take on human history, Sheesley uses a microscope: his paintings depict small puddles in his back yard, with each water surface transforming into a mirror that reflects upward: ladders, clouds, people. The detailed images are often achingly beautiful, as Sheesley opens up an almost infinite sense of joy and wonder in the most mundane of (literally) backyard phenomena. The exhibit runs through April 3. Sheesley’s website is here.

The orthodontist appointment likewise turned out pretty well. I hope your Saturday morning brought you something splendid, as well–whether on a macroscopic or a microscopic scale.

When I first arrived here in Chicago a couple of years back, I managed to offend one of my new colleague’s sensibilities. We were walking across campus together when this respected scholar asked me if I didn’t simply love the architecture of the university’s buildings. Without thinking, I replied that I thought it was a little silly. Here in Hyde Park, a neighborhood studded with masterpieces of Prairie School and other early-twentieth-century styles of American design, why had the Rockefellers and the university administration decided to build in the Gothic style, as if Hyde Park were thirteenth-century Cambridge or Oxford? It reminded me a little of the Magic Kingdom in Disneyland.

I could tell by my colleague’s facial response that I’d said the wrong thing — I have practice in recognizing that look, given the number of times I put my foot in my mouth in the average day.

Since then, I’ve come to appreciate the campus’s beauty a bit more, especially in summer when everything is in bloom. Most of all, I like the gargoyles that keep watch over us from the turrets and arches of the buildings on the main quad.

Yesterday, my daughter and I trekked over to Rockefeller Chapel — the most Gothic of all the campus buildings — for the opening reception for “That Gargoyle on My Shoulder.” The exhibit brings together gargoyle-related works by local and national artists, including paintings, photography, and sculpture, all of which look remarkably at home in the looming chancels of the chapel. One inventive piece pairs two small paintings in round frames, one of a conventional gargoyle mounted on a cathedral tower, the other depicting a modern video surveillance camera in the same position. We’re still being watched from on high, the piece reminds us.

The exhibit also includes some thirty papier-mâché gargoyles produced over the past five or six years by sixth graders at the University of Chicago Lab Schools–including one done a couple of years back by my daughter Sonia, pictured above. Here’s the planning sketch she did for it, which now hangs in a prominent position on our walls at home.

A review of the exhibit in the Chicago Maroon newspaper praises the student works as “impressive” and concludes

Sixty beady eyes observing your every move certainly has the potential to be unnerving, but That Gargoyle on My Shoulder manages to unite the grotesque with the whimsical for an overall experience that is quite positive. The elephant-eared, tentacled, long-snouted beasts that adorn the inner walls of the chapel make the space a little eccentric, quite inventive, and very exemplary of the U of C.

That’s the word I should have used two years ago: not “silly,” but “eccentric.” It would have reduced the awkwardness of the moment, and it also would have been more precise.

The show runs through March 19, and they promise to serve hot chocolate to visitors. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and check out the eccentric vibe.

While there, we visited the Beloit Farmers Market and loaded up our trunk with apples, cheese, bread, etc. We also visited the famous Logan Museum of Anthropology and the Wright Museum of Art on campus. The latter features a remarkable collection of plaster casts of classical Greek sculptures. They were sent by the Greek government to its pavilion at the 1893 Colombian Exposition here in Hyde Park, and Beloit College bought them up after the fair closed down. It reminded me of the Temple of Zeus at Cornell, a student coffeehouse decorated with Cornell’s own collection of plaster replicas, acquired about the same time as Beloit’s.

I’ve also managed finally to make my way into volume two of Murakami Haruki’s latest novel, 1Q84. It took forever for me to wade through the 550 pages of volume one, a sign to me at least that the work is not one of his best. I’m also currently reading Dennis Washburn’s translation of Yokomitsu Riichi’s 1929 novel, Shanghai, as well as Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, both for my graduate seminar.

Can it be that tomorrow is already Monday?

After getting her braces adjusted, we headed over to the Art Institute. I used a trick I learned on our recent London trip: when touring an art gallery with a teenager, pick out in advance a handful of paintings you want to see, spend a few minutes in front of each, and then cash in your chips while you are still ahead. Since you haven’t burned out the kid’s short attention span, you might even be able to look at a few more works on your way to the exit. It worked like a charm again today. We saw three or four of my favorite pieces from the special exhibit on Japanese screens that I wrote about here earlier, then checked out “American Gothic” and “Nighthawks.” Sonia was still into it, so we headed for the Impressionism rooms and then strolled through some of the earlier European collection. We spent a good deal of time looking at a fifteenth century painting of St. George killing the dragon as well as at several striking El Grecos before we made our way out.

Outside, as we waited for the traffic light to turn green, a homeless man tried to sell us a copy of Streetwise. When we didn’t bite, he offered us instead a couple of jokes.

1). What’s the difference between a school teacher and a train? When you’ve got a piece of gum in your mouth, the teacher says “Spit it out,” but the train says “Chew chew.”

2). What do you call a school teacher who won’t fart in public? A private tooter.

Not bad, I thought.

We ate pizza for lunch and took the train home to Hyde Park. On board, Sonia told me about the funny look the lady at Borders gave her recently when she asked where their Lou Reed CDs were. (I’d asked for a couple of titles for my birthday). Apparently, thirteen-year-old girls aren’t part of the expected audience for Uncle Lou.

Later, back at home, when we were supposed to be doing our work, I instead used the wonders of YouTube to introduce Sonia to a new art form: ventriloquism. We watched footage of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Jay Marshall and Leno, and Dan Horn and Orsen.

There are worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Ventriloque: Jay marshall – kewego

I also took in the Cy Twombly exhibit (on through October 11) in the museum’s new modern art wing. It includes a number of paintings that integrate written script, including meditations on a haiku by Takarai Kikaku (1661-1707), a poet who has long fascinated me.

Over at Japan Focus, there is a marvelous new translation (from German) of an article by Tawada Yoko, the poet, novelist and essayist who works between Japanese, German, and English. “The Letter as Literature’s Poetic and Political Body” is a thoughtful, imaginative meditation on the status of written script in this age of graphic novels, cell phones, and Internet. Even translations of classic literature are metamorphosing before our eyes, growing insect legs and acquiring hard paragraph breaks. Tawada writes,

The letters lie there like delicate, dangerous fish bones long after the reader has consumed and digested the contents of the text. The useless bones should probably be thrown away, but somehow they look significant. I stare at a letter on the page I’ve just read and wonder: what are these strange figures here before my eyes? Are they shadows or footprints? They gaze back at me wordlessly, as if they wanted me to remember something. It’s no longer the meaning of the text that’s at stake. The question, rather, is how to respond to the unsettling presence of the bodies of these letters.

I’m not sure what this has to do with writing and visual images, but last weekend in London Amy Winehouse made a guest appearance in concert with the grand old ska band The Specials. I’ll be in London for most of next week. I promise to keep my eyes peeled for any similar cameo appearances–and, for that matter, for any imaginative couplings of written script with visual iconry.