Delicious Kikokushijo Academy

One of my research sites is Kikokushijo Academy (K.A.), a juku (cram school) specifically designed for children who have lived outside of Japan for an extended period--an experience which often jeopardizes their chances at passing school entrance exams upon returning to Japan. While most of the students are Japanese, the school also offers a place for a number of young people who are bi-racial and attend Japanese public schools, though they may use English at home with one parent. The school is a unique, vibrant place where a range of young people from across Tokyo study together under an international and racially diverse faculty. Over the past year, I've grown very close to the 11 year-old students in my Saturday morning class. Together we decided to make a short video to introduce and explain the school to other kids interested in attending K.A. I helped the class write a script and Ken Oka and Kouta Oyama took on the task of developing storyboards and shooting directions. Over the summer, squeezing filming activities into our weekly class time, we shot the piece and I edited it in several stages, bringing rough cuts to the kids for their comments and approval. I intended the project to be collaborative, though time constraints meant that we couldn't devote ourselves to it as we would have liked. This short video has none of the conceptual depth of the work I did with photographer Wendy Ewald over the years, or the intensity of the photographs made by the refugee Karen teenagers in Thailand with whom I did From Journey to Dream. The video does reflect a collaborative relationship however, as I used devices the kids chose, such as speeded up footage which the kids found familiar from its common appearance in Japanese television news pieces. Though the piece was basic and uncomplicated in its intent, Ken and Kouta lead the film confidently, making it far more revealing and intimate than one might expect. Their happiness, wit, intelligence, and eagerness animate this video. More than this, their friendship has been a great joy in my life.

消耗品（人）

shoumouhin(in): tokyo skateboarders: consumable goods/expendable bodies

This is a short paper presented at the conference, Youth and Imaginative Labor: East Asia and beyond, held in Tokyo on July 21-22, 2007. I'm primarily interested in a series of large, black and white ads that Nike SB placed in strategic spots around Shibuya and Harajuku, zones that have been increasingly hostile to actual skateboarders. In the absence of skaters, Nike is able to draw on the authenticity skaters seem to represent. This is an authenticity furthered by the fact they are unwelcome in public space, especially in places of hyper-consumption like Shibuya. Relegated to skateparks or late night forays into forbidden sites, the skaters engage in a practice that is dangerous and destructive to both their equipment and themselves. It is exactly this "failure"--the damage they suffer--that makes them "real", in a way that traditional sports find antithetical. So while the shoes and boards get consumed in the process of skating, so too the skaters themselves are "consumed" by Nike's advertising. Additionally, the skaters, many of whom work dead-end low-wage jobs, appear as "expendable" labor within neoliberal Japan. Under neoliberal logics which fix blame on individual failings, they are held responsible by newspaper columnists and government officials for their own "failures" to secure a steady job and thereby ensure a valid (recognizable) position within society. The young men I'm researching don't make sense to normal social and economic structures: they are floating labor outside the dominant systems of control exercised through the workplace, and they use their excess energy to skateboard, hardly a suitable recreation for Japan's youthful future. At the same time, they provide the authenticating practice, the evidence, of an "outside" to normative society and its logic of public space and this "outside" or non-place grounds the fantasy of bodily rapture that Nike uses to push product.

This paper is dense and I'm trying to open up other questions about phenomenology, bodily experience, identities and self-understandings produced in intense practices, practices that signify a dedication but show no coherent or expected results or pleasures. Is there ecstasy? Is there a kind of possession? Is there a feeling of sociality? How does all this intersect with the fantasies produced in consumer capitalism, as in the dense areas of Shibuya or Harajuku?

Skate and destroy.

渋谷の妄想症

there are invisible holes in the city's interweaving fabric of perpetual motion and static structures. passageways and corridors and ticket gates give way suddenly onto open space where no single direction exerts a dominant pull--bodies rush and flow and pause, waiting to be joined to continue journeys back into the dense landscape of urban dreamscape. there is a kind of paranoia here, or a delusion, but perhaps more appropriately a kind of haunting. things are present, but made partial, incomplete, a binary relation fractured by something missing.

before me, as I wait too, an inaudible narrator appears, seeming at first to also be waiting, but I realize he is speaking to us all, but without being heard--his voice is absent, and there is only his gesture. His hands mark out some occult terrain, or illustrate some instructions. he occupies a space that is empty, suddenly. people who inadvertently pause nearby readjust themselves beyond some invisible perimeter, or simply hurry through. they have a legible purpose: to meet someone here (a group of three girls bow to one another and move off-screen), to meet someone elsewhere (a woman runs from right to left), to receive or transmit information to someone who is not present (a man holds a cell phone to his ear). around us all is white noise, the massive screens benignly illuminating the Shibuya intersection with their looped sequences of light and sound--even this non-sense is legitimated with commercial purpose. capitalism talks to us of fetish objects made real through labor and money.

the man speaks to no one that can be seen by the camera, by me, this entranced observer. my own purpose is suspended as i strain to see what it is not there, hear what i cannot. i realize i am filming this to discover some explanation, to understand what possesses this man even as he possesses this self-created zone of impossibility. his is an uncanny counterpoint to tokyo's impossible consumer architectures that flow and hum with a fantastic energy we inhabit with our bodies and imaginations. this zone before my camera is an interruption. it exists, yet those of us around the man refuse to make it real by including it in the space of the ordinary. this "ordinary" is also fantastic, one which allows us to mask over what is not present. the ordinary is a tentative membrane that has meaning because it fuses together with other things we believe exist and have knotted together with skeins of meaning. we hold this weird manifestation apart, each of us calculating the distance necessary to prevent our own inclusion in this haunted space that bespeaks dislocation, disassembly of meaning, absence and abnormality.

it is a space of doubled impossibility: invisible visibility. to rephrase Avery Gordon, we each utter: "i see [you/you] are not there." this scene is ghostly, but the man is so alive and in being so he exhumes the absence all around him (and our own absences too--who are we not with? who cannot hear us? who can we not speak to?). he is alive with his own language--the motion of his lips in silent speech, the accompanying choreography of his hands, the slow turning from side to side as if seeking to broadcast or acknowledge the fullness of his audience, or perhaps single out a specific recipient. but where is this absent other? the man is a talkative representative of what is missing. none of us want to become the counterpart to his speech: representative of that missing figure, the receiver, the listener, the patiently unseen, that ghostly, impossibly other being that is so apparently present.

i am unsettled as he turns and his eyes meet mine. but it is only the briefest contact. new detours emerge. people devise new lines of motion in response to this uncanny place that has occurred where before the space was understood and comprehensible, full of coherent communications. the city is upended momentarily, its territoriality dislocated by the immateriality of ghosts. beyond what i can see and my own sense of visibility--my own frail empirical truths--all is incomplete. all is ghostly. all these people will disappear. no-one can hear. i am not seeing you. you are here.

with transitions removed

the small half-pipe at the Nogawa skate spot is in the process of being disassembled, leaving the skeleton stripped of its plywood skin. the panels were leaning against the frame last night when I went skating and were transformed from scrap into a surface of pleasure and risk. frontside/backside wall-rides, Tokyo.

Nothing is a fetish for the truth.

Ian pulled some truly punk rock ingenuity from those years of bunking down with crusties and sketchy West Coast kids for so many years. Or maybe that was upstate NY comin’ out of him in the clutch. Either way, he figured out how to inject a parched inkjet cartridge with a syringe full of screen-printing ink so he could coax out both of our invites for the Nike SB “Nothing But the Truth” video premiere. Even though I didn’t witness this feat of Yankee can-do spirit, his simple retelling of it was the most interesting event of the evening.

Amid love hotels and gauche clubs, most notably the ubiquitously dull “Club Asia,” the theater is a stark futurist slab of concrete façade, a venue inclined towards the reprint of Chomsky’s fabled “Manufacturing Consent”—the last film I saw there—than commercial skateboard hype. Apart from the extravagance of Nike’s promotions crew renting out a theater in Shibuya, there wasn’t as much flash and pop as I expected. Nothing like Shanghai’s premiere that included ramps, several of the SB team, and a bouquet of blandly and scantily attired girl-hires. Maybe the budget had already been blown on the video itself, and the remaining green would go further cashed out in RMB than yen and would get deeper into a dreamy “emerging market.” That’s casino capitalism doubled down: marketing and venture commerce meet faddish extreme sports that have bloody consequences for bad judgment.

The subdued crowd of style-fiends in expensive denim and fitted T’s with requisite 59 caps and unscratched boards clutched close, seemed nonplussed by the coolness of the space itself, and this indifference hung thick in the auditorium itself. Two kids sat quietly beside me, rocking a pair of expensively-swooshed windbreakers cut and patterned from an unmistakable 1980’s steroid-muscle beach aesthetic. They murmured “hot” or “amazing” or “scary” as key moments of physical jeopardy and triumph played themselves across the screen. Skaters rocked-and-rolled and gave proof of their street credentials with tricky flips done switch over (requisite) gaps, or big flips over handrails to waiting embankments. The filming depended on pre-lit environments and careful choreography while the edits were fast and clean. It left the skaters sanitized and ironically unremarkable in their consummate displays of rare skill. As Nike SB has labored to infuse their brand insurgency with legitimacy, their calculated image-crafting seems to have cost them the ability to let calculation and control remain as split-second miracles of the skaters themselves. Apart from a few sequences shot on scarred concrete highway barriers made barely rideable with crude transitions and Chet Childress’ scenes, the skating itself was reducible to a series of predictable set-pieces which belie the risks and intensity of finding spots and dialing them in. The Nike magic of soaring conventional athletes is a puppet that lives in the theater of mainstream sports but on the streets that magic struggles to conjure itself within the truth of skating’s failure and improvisation. Out there on the street objects disappear and suddenly reappear with totally new purposes under the fiery slash grinds of skaters. Even the most adroit skaters crash and bleed with far more frequency than they stick tricks in spotlighted glory. “Nothing but the Truth” occupies an increasingly crowded corner of the truth-universe, one stuffed with the wall-projection-trophies of manufactured truths about brand and sport synergies and the wacky personalities that make both come alive. What is finally on display is not magic, but a kind of taxidermy of risk. Effortlessly precise riders like Paul Rodriguez or hardcore skaters like Childress are made into coherent shills-in-motion to animate the imagination of a global brand.

With skating broken down into tightly framed depictions of triumphalism, edited free of the context of slams and false starts and bad timing, what remains is only a thin veneer of raw proficiency presented in series, like a checklist, or a sneaker collector’s catalog. In order to give “flavor” to the team, to make them more than flawless but rote street performers, the film introduces the conceit of movies-within-the-movie. The Belgian director duo, working under the nom de plume Lionel Goldstein, rehearse their low-tech narrative conventions again in which the normative portrayals of sport are undermined with clever exaggerations of mythical underdog stories told in a raw documentary-style.
Here Goldstein presents the skaters documenting themselves as eccentric iconoclasts. This attempt at a kind of ironic nonchalance befits a moment when major brands are found casually yet determinedly slumming in the erstwhile ghettoes of art and sport. With seeming ease corporate money can now successfully make allies of old-school innovators as Nike SB recently did with Lance Mountain and transgress those old color lines between jock and the outsiders. Goldstein’s technique is perfectly suited to portray this Nike-funded filmic distillation of pure body practice—skateboarding—coming from that wellspring of authenticity, “the streets.” The resulting concoction is a tepid depiction of truth’s ironic mutability—nothing is true here and that indeterminacy makes Nike and its team as legitimately bound up in the intense conflicts over meaning and representation under capitalism as anyone else.

As if to underscore this surreal drama of brand-enhancement and street credibility, the film is scattered with little skits of the skaters being interviewed by lumpy old men in suits posing as Hollywood B-rank producers seated at cheap fake-wood desks. They want to help the skaters tell their “stories”—whatever improvised piece of theater the team riders can concoct using moldy warehouses full of props and the help of a make-up department and a procurer of silicone augmented models. Cut with bits of 16mm film, shot on a near-abandoned movie lot in the desert, these scenes are eerie and aimlessly experimental in their “truth”-telling. They attempt to restore to the skating a kind of insane intelligence that is so absent in the clean footage that comprises the bulk of the film. This device isn’t simply a weak plot vehicle to carry the repetitive money-shots of (skating) flesh in action. They are totally disconnected from the skating geographically, thematically, and stylistically while loosely serving as introductions for various riders.

The film is most compelling and weirdly unnerving around these scenes flashing us with the film’s post-modern best: the self-conscious pretend acting of the skaters playing themselves in their fantasies—the ridiculously self-scripted vignettes—within the larger fantasy of being filmed for Nike’s self-promotional and legitimizing video. For us watching, the layered fantasies seemed to present too much incoherence to respond to, and the audience was quiet, occupied with popcorn and the beer—tangible realness made better by being free. A trite slam section ended the film, repetitive outtakes belittled as a freakish distraction to the long credits.

Conscious of watching this quintessentially Californian rebel-sport enacted on a screen in Tokyo, I was struck by how tightly circumscribed around Americans the movie remained. The film hardly presented Nike SB as a global team despite it having sponsored riders around the world. This is in sharp contrast to Nike’s broader significance transnationally, from its production sites littered along the poorer and non-unionized edges of the world’s economy to shoe lines such as Nike’s famed “Glocality” series created by diverse designers representing their particular nationalities. More specifically, while Nike SB has employed Japanese designers such as Takashi and Yuji Sato, therefore extending the creative/cultural linkages across the globe and proving that stylistic metabolism across space and nationality is rewarding and necessary, there was no similar acknowledgment of the vitality of skateboarding’s imagination beyond America. A strikingly narrow range of riders skated over far-flung terrain, super-flattened into a nameless mélange of global, (mis)appropriated architecture. The emphasis on Nike SB’s team cadre certainly links its brand to a few recognizable skaters who are geographically positioned to benefit from skateboarding’s media and industry epicenter and its simultaneous authenticating, originary location--California. Across the Pacific Rim, on the streets of Tokyo, however, this rehearsal of skateboarding’s “true” sites and riders hardly affected the skaters I ride with regularly. Out in the western sprawl along the Chuo train line, skaters generally were unimpressed with Nike SB’s efforts to situate itself as part of their world and the film too was unremarkable to them. Particularly because it made no effort to link its narrative or riders to those who share the wider cultural and physical spaces that skateboarding thrives within.

As the movie finished there was finally weak, uncertain applause and the audience dispersed into the lurid unreality of Shibuya’s pleasure zones. It seemed like we had become part of intertwining fictions, caught up as spectators and participants in fantasy all at once. Despite this, skating’s spontaneous energy couldn't be completely contained by the film and Ian and I longed to go lay out some long slappy grinds and recreate some truth for ourselves.

motion experiments

as a music door.

Necessary sound-blasts for riding the trains through Tokyo's blight of post-modern architecture and weary consumers.
Two albums of deep dub to chant down the darkness. Alpha & Omega, who recently performed at Unit in Tokyo, released another dense and eerie album in 2006, with contributions from both Scratch Perry and Mad Professor. "Trample the Eagle & The Dragon & The Bear" is full of stepper's rhythms and ghostly production that gets almost translucent with the oxygen sucked into the hollows of the bassline. Jonah's off-kilter vocals are left alone, dry and organic, and then suddenly ricocheted through reverb chambers, increasing the uneasy and compelling quality of this recording.

Kousuke gave me Kanka's "Don't Stop Dub" after an all-night session at One-Blood in Ikebukuro. Thickly cooked electro dub from France that keeps company with High Tone and Brain Damage--other notable bands operating in stealth from Europe. Heavy, simple electronics all cold and sharp edges with the snare flattened out in deep space compression. Military Dub (version), A Ticket to Die! and Whise come with vocals set on stun and concussion beats pulsing across the embattled landscape of Sarkozy's reactionary France.

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"We are not in the least afraid of ruins."

"We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history.


We carry a new world here, in our hearts."

dread of death.

This is a beginning under siege: An image of anarchist militia members bearing the coffin of Buenaventura Durruti, draped in the red and black flag. Barcelona still stands behind them, its walls and columns intact even if the government and society had splintered apart under the duress of fierce military and aristocratic reaction to the liberatory desires of many ordinary Spaniards. Madrid, where Durruti had died, already reflected this national cataclysm. Its buildings were smashed by artillery and bombing. Madrid and its occupants were subject to Nazi enthusiasm for an expendable laboratory to test their new Fascist war-things. Durruti had led an exhausted column of anarchist volunteers to come to the aid of Republican soldiers and common folk defending Madrid from the onslaught of Franco's Fascist troops, recently recalled from suppressing colonial territory in Morocco. While new technologies of mass warfare were being hurled from the sky, Durruti died a prosaic and singular death when his pistol went off accidentally. He was carrying his own bullet all along.

More than a half-million people crowded the streets for his last turn beneath the black flags. Within three years the horrors of right-wing terror that Durruti had fought against his entire life would reach even that last radical bastion in Catalonia. The mass graves would fill with the punctured and rent bodies of Franco's violence. It is a kind of unearthly dread, to struggle against what seems without end: the twined monster of militarism and capitalism.

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