I also had planned to peruse the Vietnam 1954-1975 exhibition while there, but having gotten a late start (as usual for me recently) and having spent so much time looking at the Ueda photos, I ran out of time to see it before they closed for the day. But thankfully that one will still be running for a couple more weeks (through February 19), so I can still go back and see it.

Note: If you go to the museum, make sure to go in through the main entrance, so you can check out the mural-size photos that line the walkway up to the entrance – currently including one of Ueda’s images (see photo).

You can find some more information online.

Wednesday of this week marked the beginning of the twelve-day long
Canadian
Style (TAB
page and 日本語)
event that design maven Jean Snow

is producing at Cafe Pause in
Ikebukuro. There’s an opening party this Saturday night, February
4, starting at 7pm. I plan to be there for it to find out just
what the hell this thing is all about – so hope to meet some other
curious and interesting people there too.

To get to Cafe Pause for the event, just make your way to the
Ikebukuro JR station, take the Seibu East exit and follow the
directions in the map below. (It’s only a 5-minute walk.) Or see the
Tokyo Art Beat page for Cafe
Pause, where you’ll find other maps and a QR code you can use to
access and store directions on your mobile phone.

And since Cafe Pause is after all a cafe, in addition to the normal items on its menu — light meals, snacks, sweets, and a full drink menu ranging from lemonade, “lemon cola”, “triple berry soda” and a variety of tea and coffee drinks, to beer, wine, and cocktails (including some of their own original cocktails, with names like “May”, “Lily”, “Jun”, “Teany”, and “Florent”) — a few special Canadian-themed specialities will be available, including a special meat pie and a bunch of maple stuff, even a maple-flavored cocktail.

As far as what else to expect, here are a handful of details from Jean:

… various installations (the main participants include
designer Sonia Chow
and photographer/DJ Marc Xavier LeBlanc)… video projections,
compiled themed mixes of Canadian (most independent) artists, and an
interactive installation, “Red + White/Read + Write,”

But to find out more, well, you’ll just have to head
there on Saturday night and/or before the event concludes on February
12 and see it for yourself.

Note that Jean has also created a Flickr
photo set for the event and is posting
up-to-date details at his site as it proceeds.

Some time back, Tokyo Art Beat asked five internationally known
artists and designers – Jonathan Barnbrook, Paul Cox, Power Graphixx
(Masahito Hanzawa), Noboru Tsubaki, and the Buro Destruct crew from
Berne Switzerland – to each create an original T-shirt design in
celebration of Tokyo Art Beat’s one-year anniversary.

The result is a set of
limited-edition T-shirts, each with a unique design not available
anywhere else, in any other form. Only a very small number of the
shirts was printed, and Tokyo Art Beat is making them available
only through the end of this month (February 2006). Given the
small quantity produced, owning one is a bit like having a print
directly from the artist, restricted to a extremely small number of
copies. So the phrase “collectors item” is a
more-than-appropriate term to describe them.

And given Tokyo Art Beat’s rapid rise to success and ambitious
plans for the future, you definitely won’t have any better chance to
acquire an artifact that’ll mark you as a someone who’s been hip to
Tokyo Art Beat since “back in the day”.

So head on over to the Tokyo Art Beat site now and place an
order (日本語版). 5000
yen gets you your choice of any two shirts in any sizes you’d like
(XS, M, L). Note also that they take international orders and can
ship internationally.

The ordering page also has details about each of the artists who
created the shirt designs, as well as links to detailed images of each
design. Or follow the links below to get directly to those detailed
images.

	Jonathan Barnbrook			Power Graphixx
	Buro Destruct			Paul Cox
	Noboru Tsubaki

Note that all proceeds from sale of the shirts goes to Gadago (the non-profit organization behind Tokyo Art Beat) and so will fund feature improvements at the site, and help them to cover more events at more galleries and museums and other art venues.

This is a reminder that tonight (January 30) is the first MobileMonday Tokyo event for 2006 — the
MoMo Tokyo New Year
Shinnenkai, at Ruby
Cafe in Azabu-Juban, starting at 7pm (日本語版).

Directions: There’s a map to Ruby Cafe available online. But looks like it’s very easy to find: Just ride the Oedo subway line to Azabu Juban station, take exit 7, turn left once you get above ground, walk 5 meters, and you’re there.

There won’t be any presesentations tonight because this one looks to
be purely a
networking/social event to start off the new year. Presentations will start
up again at next
month’s event (planned for the MTV cafe in Harajuku). And the MobileMonday
team’s record for
putting together past
presentations has been outstanding and has covered a lot of ground
(Opera Browser for 3G Mobile Phones, Chaku-Uta, mobile Flash, and
color codes, to name just a few) – so I’m sure we have
some interesting things to look forward to at upcoming MoMo Tokyo
presentations this year.

Advanced get-in-for-free registration for tonight’s event is now closed,
but you can still attend. Just show up at Ruby
Cafe in Azabu-Juban after 7pm (日本語版) and bring
along 1000 yen to pay at the door. When you get there, look for a guy
with keitai in
one hand, tallboy in the other. Chances are, that’ll be me,
though I might instead be
posing as a solid citizen for the evening.

Anyway, Arty Farty is in Ni-Chome, right around the corner from Advocates Cafe, where I posted an entry from my mobile about a little earlier. Advocates closes around midnight on Sunday, so Arty Farty is always a convenient place to retreat to when they shut the doors at Advocate. I’ve heard Arty Farty has an all-you-can drink wine thing (like the beer blast at Advocates, except, well, with wine), though I’ve never been there for it.

Had some news from my friend Monty just before I headed back, of the kind that causes you remember to try to make the most that you can of the time you have with people you care about, which I guess I managed to do this weekend, and which is more than I can say of every weekend, so I guess I can rank this one as a success in that regard.

Shinjuku Ni-Chome, by the way, is a part of town with a lot of gay bars. Advocates is one such, though that’s not to say that it’s a place that makes non-gay people feel unwelcome or anything. I’ve always felt welcome here, at least.

Advocates is small but it opens out to a wide sidewalk, and when the weather’s nice, you’ll find dozens of people here, and “Advocates” becomes the sidewalk and even the street around the bar instead of just the physical environs of the bar itself. Particularly during the time of day (7 to 9) when they have “beer blast” going on (all the beer you can drink for 1000 yen).

Anyway, it’s a very nice place. Plan on stopping by some time — especially on a day when the weather’s clear and comfortable.

It has a bit of the feel of a college coffee house, except that instead of having a view out to some “quad” or whatever, it has a 5th floor view out to a neon-lit busy Tokyo intersection.

Other particulars: a full drink menu, including liquor, sake and shouchu, beer, wine, juice, tea, and coffee. Nice lighting, nice staff, usually good music. Seating for about 30 people and not usually crowded (so a good choice for impromptu gatherings). A selection of decent light food. And reasonable prices. A variety of interesting books and magazines you can borrow and enjoy along with your food and drink.

Also, a real rarity in Tokyo: outlets into which you are free to plug in your laptop’s AC adaptor and/or keitai charger.

And to top it all off: it’s open until 3am every night, including Sunday and Monday.

To find it, just ride the Ginza line to Gaienmae station, take exit 3, and you’re there. Well, almost. What you’ll see at the street level when you come up and out from the exit is a place called “Sign”. Office is in the same building, just on the 5th floor. So just go around the corner, left from the entrance to Sign, and climb the stairs (no elevator) up to Office, and enjoy.

Also attempted to find a new place nearby called Lotus Root Gallery — somewhere in the midst of a mostly residential area. But once we got to the general area where it’s supposed to be, could not spot any sign for it even though we probably spent 10 or 15 looking and had to have been just a few meters away from it, wherever it is. At one point Satori pointed out a young hipster-type guy to me and said he must be looking for the same place because she had seen him already, circling around just like us.

Anyway, that little side trip wasted at least 30 minutes altogether — on a day when we had already gotten a late start — so Lotus Root Gallery is now officially on my shitlist.

But we did manage to get back to Le Deco and I did have time to see more of the Tokyo College of Photography “apartment” show, and to talk with one of the photographers, Priyash Karmacharya — who was kind enough to bring us some tea. Also, Funiku Ookami of the “7″ show there (also ended today) gave Satori a couple of shoe creams, and another photographer from the “apartments” show gave her some cookies, so she went away pretty happy for the day and fairly successful as far as scoring of sweets swag goes.