autumn tactics

So, Design Festa has ended, much sooner than I expected, actually. Friday night I toiled updating my poems and assembling my concept summary until morning, returning from the Southern Tower Kinko’s as the sky grew light at 4:30 Saturday morning. After sleeping for two hours and being dead to my alarm, the impatient calls from my ride at seven threw me into a dash of assembly until 12:15, over an hour past the show opening. I foolishly thought that being the second time around I’d be more prepared and installation would go smoother, but again this time I had nearly twice the materials as the last, and my booth setup was more complicated than my previous outing. Thank the Lord I had friends with me to put it together. Without them, there would have been no show

Then with a sweat-frosted brow, I stood proudly in my skiing cowboy shirt, eyes alight nostrils flaring, continuing on energy that came from some sort of environmental tap. Balancing on my toes, rocking over my knees I smiled, beamed, and gestured. I explained what Tokyo meant to me, what my goals were for the future, how the buildings and the colors, the stories witnessed and imagined all drove me nearly insane with ardor that simply must be redirected onto these two dozen pieces of coloured paper.

I didn’t eat for thirty hours, just absently sipping plastic bottled sports drinks between the waves of young girls that drifted in and out of my booth. When I sensed someone was not in a hurry and genuinely looking at my wrinkled black canvas, I intruded making a slight bow and offered a headset playing a remixed version of Leonid’s Crater. The ambient river that I coaxed out of the microKORG mingled with samples of clacking heels, passing bicycles, and slowly withdrawing automobiles. Birds warbled and summer cicadas sang: so much shuffled and tinkling green tea powder over a sublime layer of mint cake. The sound was well-received and led to conversations, long moments where I forgot my humility and sped on feverishly, taking every question and using it as a springboard into a clammy reel of my philosophy. Perhaps too emphatic, after finishing a complete revolution of my spiel, conversation often dropped off sharply and my exhaustion precluded common sense, ending each meeting with a weak smile and a passing of my business card.

I sold a dozen or so postcards, gave away a handful more, and at the end of the day had so much in my mind of how I would improve upon it all next time, during packing up and the train ride home I was virtually catatonic.

Already a bushel of future concepts have risen up in my mind like sprouting weeds after a long summer rain. I don’t have time to enumerate them all right now, because this is the stream of consciousness post, and I don’t have the gallery assembled yet anyway. Give me a day or two and then you can see the collective fruits of my efforts (and maybe even hear them).

Not much, apparently. Actually even though I had a couple days off last week for Golden Week, much like last Christmas there was very little resting going on. I didn’t even make a 36-hour trip to Kyoto this time. I went to the park like once.

I’ve been grinding my gears with Photoshop, OpenMPT, and the microKORG over the past month. I forget if I mentioned it, but I’m currently working on a show and this time I have a theme. The good thing about this is if I pull it off, it’s a lot easier to connect with the guests, increasing the chances of having some sort of lasting effect on someone. The bad thing is that my tool usage skills are behind the curve for what I hope to accomplish.

I have sixteen days. If you have a spare moment, send me an angel.