Look what the Tanuki dragged in....

Clinty Baby! He turned up! Made his way over here to give me a hand with making my work! At his own expense! There were lots of distractions but lots of late nights and early mornings (for a change). There's been quite a lot of low level narcotic abuse involving dangerously strong esspresso and enough sake to choke a Ninja. Sadly he's off to Kyoto on his travels now, leaving me with a sty, lots of work to do and a tricky caffiene dependency, but I sure did apreciate the company and the help. Nice one Bokkers. Last night we threw an impromptu farewell knees-up for him in Studio1 to show off his numerous and exceptional photo's in a slide show. I made a tray of onegiri's (rice cake triangles to be wrapped in seaweed and scoffed) and it turned into a show and tell of amazing talent and good cheer. Truly memorable. Some scenes:

As you can clearly envy, The "Good Doctor" Michael Fowler, sound-scaper and performer extraordinaire gave us a very generous performance on my piano; a piece his old piano teacher wrote. In fact he's kept some exceptional company having worked with Stockhausen and Steve Reich. Several bottles of sake later the evening ended up in the salon listening room with the good doctor giving me a masterclass on how to listen to Glenn Gould's final Goldberg variations recording ("Best performance ever recorded")  Morizio Pollini "nailing" Stravinsky ("2nd best performance, ever"),  and Steve Reich's music for 18 musicians (a mind bending musical journey such as I have never experienced!!!) Domo....., proper domo. Video, press play

That's a glimpse of my latest greatest work called Torusknot-91. It was hard.... Did my back & my brain in. 12 hours of staring at this with your hands above you head and you can feel the edge!

A while back I promised to show you all some crazy dancing & violin, well I've waited this long in the  hope that my in theatre piracy will pass un-scolded now that the whole thing's cooled off a bit. Ladies and gentlemen a small snippet from an evening of very inspiring and avant-garde Japanese contemporary dance:

Actually Susuki & Yashemi (tossing papers and teeth clenching violin) practised that piece at AIAV on a week long residency, so they gave us a dance class/workshop that was amazing. To wit:  

 ... me rolling around on the floor... it's difficult to explain.

Happiest of days

love to ya

j