Sharknado: Japan

You have to feel a little sorry for the Okinawan sharks suddenly stuck on the sidewalk outside the Sony building in Ginza. Though if TV movies have taught me anything, it's that they'd barge into our homes and eat us all in a heartbeat given half a chance.

Sammy Davis Jr. and Suntory. You know, for kids!

We went to Zoetrope the other day, a Shinjuku bar known for the owner's tremendous selection of Japanese whiskeys and for the eclectic films he projects on the wall. Horigami-san stopped a Fatty Arbuckle silent reel and put in a DVD of old Suntory ads. When he saw us smiling at this Sammy Davis Jr. commercial, he said that it had been "the first – well, maybe or maybe not the first, but definitely one of the first "– in the long line of Japanese TV ads starring famous foreigners. (Hear that? No Sammy Davis Jr, no Lost in Translation.) He said the ad was popular when he was in elementary school and that all the boys loved to recreate it at recess. He claims that any Japanese man in his early fifties is guaranteed to have memories of pouring milk or juice into a cup in the schoolyard and doing his best Sammy Davis Jr. impression. His face lit up when he re-enacted his 10-year-old self doing the commercial. Wait!

Paper at Meguro Museum of Art

 

I loved the Paper show at Meguro Museum of Art. There is a whole wall of Naoki Terada's 1/100 architectural scale paper people mounted in tiny clear cubes (no photos allowed!). Each one is complete scenario stripped down to its most basic elements. The one called "Shibuya" was just a dog, sitting at attention. Some were grouped, like the couple that dates then breaks up after increasingly desperate apologies, and then there's the poor figure who gets sicker and sicker in works titled “Drank a lot,” “Are you okay?” “Seriously, are you okay?” and “Call an ambulance.” Others stood alone, like “Catching an escaped monkey,” and “A quick nap,” with an office worker dozing under a desk. To get so much humor and pathos into these tiny, featureless die-cut paper dolls was amazing. The other one I really loved was the butterflies alight on old books by Ryosuke Uehara and Yoshie Watanabe. There's mass-market stationery based on this work. How tawdry! Who would buy such a thing from the museum gift shop? Oh, uh, me. 

Lots of neat things from Yasuhiro Suzuki. I've run into his whimsical flipbook drawings and realistic paper sculptures twice in the past week. I also liked his video installation of waves projected onto open books, Books on the Edge. 

Those paper bowls by Torafu Architects have never done much for me, but people love them. There are are 400 of them hanging from the ceiling.

The show is on til September 8. The museum is about a 10-minute walk from Meguro Station or 15–20 from Nakameguro. I'd recommend bringing a bathing suit and hitting the municipal pool next door. 

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