What's the day before the 14th? Is it the 12th? God dammit, I'm having a hard time keeping my links in order.

So today I went with Helen to the Henry Art Gallery to view an exhibition called "Superflat", supposedly a showcase of new, hip art originating in Japan. What I got was a bunch of generic anime panty-shot girls painted on postcard sized canvases, a couple of animated shorts in typical anime style, a few examples of extreme "porn" anime, a bunch of modern art which just happened to be by people who were Japanese nationals. And a forty foot "zero" made out of extreme closeups of a model "zero" fighter plane scotch taped together.

Overall, I didn't get the impression that there was any unifying theme or style to the artwork, only that it all had some vague connection to the Japanese culture and the kind of ideas that it produces. I've seen this stuff ever since I was little, since I first attended a JASH meeting in Pearl City. Since then, there's nothing new under the red sun. It was a little embarassing, looking at preadolescent cartoon girls with their forbidden anatomy exposed and defiled by tentacles, teddy bears, or whatever else with a woman who is privy to my feelings about things like this. How do you react when you turn the corner and there's a picture of a girl with cow udders for breasts, poking luridly out from behind a school backpack? As for me, I keep a straight face on. I recoil slightly, inwardly. I think about the people who find this kind of imagery erotic, perhaps reclusive and disconnected loners. The kind who make "Everything/Nothing" sites, such as Stile Project and I dunno, Snowsurfer, one of the guys Gus has to be friends with in order to avoid alienating his ex-girlfriend/housemate. I don't feel above such people, but I do think that they'll have problems in their relationships with women, especially if they're accustomed to thinking of them as sex meat with five shitting nipples and huge protruding orifices.

Anyway, "Superflat" brings that somewhat sub-mainstream form of porn into the arts community, and examines it for signs of profundity, little note cards bulging with "concepts", "evokes", "attempts", and the ever popular "challenges". Oh yeah, and a whopping huge crashed zero made of photographs and tape. That thing interested me the most out of the exhibit. I'm not sure how I would feel about Zeros if I were a Japanese national, but I imagine they regard them with a mixture of pride and embarassment. The aircraft that won victory in an attack that, we are taught in school, constitutes underhanded and evil betrayal. But hey, nothing lasts forever, even evil underhanded victory, and I think that's one of the concepts the flat Zero came out of. The artist also intends it to be burned at the end of the exhibit. Oh yeah, the last thing on the Zero's little info card was that it "challenges the concept of death as an end to reality". Maybe I'm paraphrasing a little.

Every moment dies as it passes. We can't save an instant. That's hard to get over. That's why I have a closet full of time fragments. Homework from 4th grade, medals from boy scouts, whatever. I'm trying to save my moments.

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