"Thomas Ruff" @ National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT)

I was quite taken with Thomas Ruff's work, helped, I think, by their monumentality - many are somewhere in the vicinity of 1 to 2 metres along either or both dimensions.

The earlyish-career portraits - an example of the 'typology' approach that he uses at times - are a highlight, the size of the seemingly objectively shot passport-style photos of people's faces imbuing them with real interest.

Also noteworthy were his portraits of a different kind - shots of Mies van der Rohe buildings, which capture some essential simplicity. A few digitally manipulated photograms with glassy, eye-catching effect. And three different series created by (again) manipulating existing sources taking space as their subjects ("Stars", "cassini" and "ma.r.s").

Non-Ruff pieces from elsewhere in the museum that grabbed me included Tai Kambara's "Notes of a Pessimist" paintings (1923), the surrealist "Landscape with an Eye" (Ai-Mitsu, 1938), Tatsuoki Nambata's "Generation" (1959), two earlyish ones by Yayoi Kusama (this trip has brought home to me that despite the ease with which she can be identified and pigeonholed, Kusama's work has genuine charge) and three on the theme of moonlight: Shinsen Tokuoka's "Moonlight" (1950), Komei Kondo's "Moon Flower" (1964") and Tatsuo Takayama's "Heaven" (1964).

China Mieville - This Census-Taker

In
Keying, No Obstacle Withstands.

What an elegantly gap-filled, worryingly incomplete and unsettling novella this is. I can't help find its absences and silences frustrating, beholden as I am to the usual desires for narrative and resolution, but that only adds to the power of This Census-Taker - like a missing or painful tooth, you can't help constantly probing at it, to still be met by the same lack each time.

The Hope Is So:
Count Entire Nation, Subsume Under Sets. -
Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize 
Interests. So
Reach Our Government's Ultimate Ends.

The East

It's hard to know how good an actor Brit Marling is - indeed, whether she's even good at all. In both this one and the other that I've seen her in, the excellent I Origins, she has an opacity to her - a mysterious kind of internal stillness - and I can't tell whether that's a function of the characters she played (it would make sense for the undercover operative infiltrating a radical eco-activist collective that she plays in The East) or rather something that she carries with her into all of her performances. Anyway, it makes her an oddly compelling figure at the centre of this one - compelling in its very lack of expressiveness - and helps to keep the film interesting, together with the inherent tensions relating to whether/when she will be outed and whether each of the titular East's actions against mega-corporations will come off. Also good: Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen Page (of course), Patricia Clarkson.

Garbage - Strange Little Birds

Surprisingly good given this late stage in Garbage's career; I remember way back when Version 2.0 came out (that would have been 1998), I already felt like it was overproduced and lacking that jagged dark-lightness that made Garbage so defining. Despite song names like "Night Drive Loneliness" and "Even Though Our Love Is Doomed" - and lyrics to match - it's textured enough while retaining that fuzzily sweet angst that made them such a treat (and one of my favourite bands) in their pomp.

"Hiroshi Sugimoto - Lost Human Genetic Archive" @ Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

Another reminder of how great and enriching contemporary art can be. There's something of the wunderkammer to Sugimoto's design for the main work here, the "Lost Human Genetic Archive" itself - a succession of dimly-lit rooms divided by standing corrugated iron partitions, in which the artist imagines a series of scenarios in which the world could end, and gives voice to them through a singular last survivor and an installed jumble of objects and art pieces, sometimes only one or two, for others with far more, mixing types and periods. There are times when it is a bit rough edged, the ideology a bit too self-evident and simplistic, undergraduate even - but the forcefulness of the whole prevails nonetheless. An example, to illustrate:

* * *

26  The fetishist

Today the world died. Or maybe yesterday. Back in the Neolithic Age, people found magical things to worship in the natural world. Eventually we came to fashion sacred objects with our own hands. This stone rod is an idol, a phallic symbol thought to have figured in fertility rites. Even later advancements in civilisation did not change humans so very much. In modern society, we still worshipped latter-day idols and brand-name luxury goods. We discriminated against people by the cars they drove and the clothes they wore. Though, of course, fake items were rife. But as copying techniques became ultrarefined, the fakes surpassed even the originals. Fetishism lost its magic; people lost their objects of faith. When the market for brand-name goods collapsed, the global economy contracted, swallowed down into a Great Depression. The ancient gods who banned idolatry were right: A world that believes in nothing is a dead world.

Stone Rod
Jomon period (10000-400 BC)
117 cm

Hospital Gurney
1950s
56 x 214 x 39cm

YSL Pattern Fabric

* * *

Also: "Abandoned Theatre", a series of photos of just that, each lit at its centre by a shining white screen which is the result of the exposure of the film for the entire duration of a particular film. And "Sea of Buddha", which are striking large-format images of the statues in Kyoto's Rengeo-in Temple, together with a small glass pagoda constructed by Sugimoto himself.

Justin Cronin - City of Mirrors

A good ending. Neither The Twelve nor this one has captured the unnerving electricity of Cronin's first cast, The Passage (part of which was that I had no idea where it was really going at any stage), but they pretty much sustain the story and it never feels like he's cheating. The integrity of the vampires, the human antagonists, and those somewhere in between - that is, the logic of the world set up here - holds throughout, and so does the interest in what will happen next.

"Kishin Shinoyama - La Maison de rendez-vous" / Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

More nudes! These were interesting, and left me wrestling with a few different responses - which I think is a good sign.

On the one hand, the female models are very conventionally very attractive - uniformly slim, pale skinned, large breasted, big eyed etc - and definitely sexualised (in nearly all of the photos, they're completely naked apart from being in stilettos - and make up, if that counts). There are ten of them and they're the vast majority of the show - there's only one male subject, who appears only in I think seven or eight photos in a discrete room. Which is a bit 'hmm'-inducing.

On the other hand, the concept of the show is that they're all photographed in and around the gallery itself (in some cases slightly furnished), and that works extremely well, with Shinoyama taking full advantage of the interesting spaces within and outside the building (a 1930s western modernist style building) and its permanent installations.

So in the end I liked it more than I found it 'problematic' - I liked its spirit.

The gallery itself is also an attraction, including in the way that it and this particular exhibition are integrated. Sculptures arranged in the gardens outside, and a handful of pieces integrated into various nooks of the three-floor building, including one by Yoshihiro Suda, who I only came across for the first time just last week, "This water unfit for drinking" (2001) - two of his wooden flowers 'growing' in an alcove of exposed pipes, peeled-away tiling and general disrepair.

Very good.

"The Universe and Art: Princess Kaguya, Leonardo da Vinci, teamLab" @ Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

This reminded me of how nourishing contemporary art can be.

The exhibition is organised into four sections: "How Have Humans through the Ages Viewed the Universe?" (including mandalas a-plenty, books and instruments of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and other art including Laurent Grasso's intriguing "Studies into the Past"), "The Universe as Space-Time", "A New View of Life - Do Aliens Exist?" and "Space Travel and the Future of Humanity", and the "Space-Time" section, given over to contemporary work, was really something - I wonder if the subject (what we used to call 'outer space') works particularly well with the conceptual apparatus of contemporary art?

Anyhow, there is Andreas Gursky's "Kamiokande" (2007), which I've seen before and I don't think impressed me that much then but certainly did this time round (underground neutrino observatory - as it happens, in Japan), Bjorn Dahlem's "Black Hole (M-Spheres)" (2016), a sculptural reinterpretation of the Milky Way, Trevor Paglen's breathtaking photos, especially "They Watch the Moon" (2010) and "Keyhole 12-3 (Improved Crystal): Optical Reconnaisance Satellite near Scorpio (USA 129)" (2007), Jia Aili's "Hermit from the Planet Dust" (2015-16) which invokes a whole lot of art movements but none so much as simply 'sci fi', and best of all, Conrad Shawcross's "Timepiece" (2013), which was utterly hypnotic and achieved its aim of referencing "a sublime form of astronomical time, as experienced in sundials and interactions with the Sun" - a suspended set of metal arms, three bulbs, one in constant rotation (orbit) and a single metal spike on the ground, shadows thrown through the movement.

And then at the very end, in the "Space Travel" closer, a participatory video and music installation by a collective called teamLab - "Crows are Chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as Well, Blossoming on Collision - Light in Space". A dark room in which the neon images of crows, flowers and other visuals stream across the four walls and the floor of the room to music, taking their central point from the centre of where the viewers of the work are gathered in the room itself. Also sublime and immersive as the lights swooped round and about and up and down were all swirled together.

It also occurs to me that maybe I was primed a bit by having gone to the 52nd floor city view observatory (which had created a very meditative mood as the night lights of Tokyo glittered below in panorama in the darkened quiet of the circular passage beside the windows) and then the open air sky deck above it immediately before seeing the exhibition.

"Dali" @ National Art Centre, Tokyo

A substantial retrospective covering his entire career, drawing from the collections of the Reina Sofia,  the Fundacio Gala Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres (Dali's birthplace) and the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, USA.

Very early works (1918-21) then a period of hopping through a series of modern art styles starting with cubism throughout the twenties, during which - interestingly - it's the ones which take the human body as their subject which most clearly prefigure his later style ("Nude" 1924, "Nude in the Water" 1924, "Girl with Curls" 1926).

Then his most familiar surrealist period of the 30s, which is well represented but not overly so, and I felt the force of these a bit anew - those yellows and blues gleaming vividly through his dreamscapes: "Invisible Sleeper, Horse, and Lion" (1930), "The Shades of Night Descending" (1931), "The Invisible Man" (1932), "Enigmatic Elements in a Landscape" (1934), the glowingly limpid "Surrealist Composition with Invisible Figures" (1936),  and the out and out nightmare of "Palladio's Corridor of Thalia" (1938) which is an early appearance of the girl with the skipping rope who is his motif in those wonderful illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (also on display here, along with a lot of other drawings).

Paintings, drawings, etc through the remaining decades of his life, including some unexpected, wonderful jewellery in gold with inlaid gems.

An aside: it is unfathomable that it was seven years ago that the NGV had its major Dali exhibition. It seems so recent! 

Garth Risk Hallberg - City on Fire

Its ambition is clear, not least in its sheer length - I read it on kindle but it's close to 1000 pages in physical form - but also in the number of characters, their intersecting stories, and the back and forth through time within the umbrella goal of evoking NYC in the late 70s. For me, it was ... fine. Well written, well put together, enough of a through-narrative (organised around the mystery of Sam's shooting and with the city's July 1977 blackout as its climax) to hold the interest, characters who weren't jarring (but who never quite lived and breathed either) and some decent imagery and themery. But nothing revelatory either - even in the lower-bar sense of that word.

"Ren Hang: Tokyo" @ matchbaco, Tokyo

Photos of (unglamorous, or not conventionally so anyway) naked people arranged in various external Tokyo locations - friends of the (Chinese) photographer. A handful of them had the glimmer of something.

Everest

A fairly convincing Hollywood version of 'like being there'.

"Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou: Timeline 1906-1977" & "Dialogue with Trees" @ Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

The "Pompidou" exhibition is one piece from each year from 1906 (selected as the year that the Fauves burst into public view - I guess the first major movement in modern art of the 20th century) to 1977 (the year that the Pompidou itself was established). It was super crowded so I engaged with the exhibition mostly on the level of paying attention to the curatorial decisions that have been made to select these representative-but-not pieces (one of the exhibition notes makes the point that the chronological ordering evades the temptation to tell a story through 'isms') while trying to be open to any individual pieces that might jump out at me.

The ones that I took particular note of: Frantisek Kupka - "Vertical Planes I" (1912); Alberto Magnelli - "Lyrical Explosion No 8" (1918); Robert Delaunay - "The Eiffel Tower" (1926 - these are striking whenever one comes across them in their boldness); Seraphine Louis - "Tree of Paradise" (1929); Pierre Bonnard - "Nude by the Bath Tub" (1931 ... and Bonnard has made me pay attention a few times now I think); Otto Freundlich - "My Sky is Red" (1933); Pablo Gargallo - "The Prophet" (1933-36); Kandinsky - "Thirty" (1937 - an exercise almost in monochrome, black on very pale blue: "The 'content' of painting is painting"); Edith Piaf's "La vie en rose" in lieu of a work from 1945 given the significance of the year in the world's history (a song which has picked up some proper emotional associations for me in the past few years); Henry Valensi - "Symphony in Pink" (1946 - musical painting); Matisse - "Large Red Interior" (1948); Nicolas de Stael - "Composition" (1949); Giacometti - "Woman of Venice V" (1956 - pulled me up and made me reflect again on the poignancy of his figures); Simon Hantai - "Memory of the Future" (1957); Victor Vasarely - "Arny (Shadow)" (1967-68). As the length of that list probably makes clear, it was a very good exhibition despite the crowds.

And the "Dialogue" one collects work from five contemporary Japanese artists all of whom work in wood. Best were Yoshimasa Tsuchiya's warmly glowing animals (the mythical and larger scale ones especially memorable) with their crystal eyes and Yoshihiro Suda's extremely realistic plant sculptures, installed in unlikely spots around the gallery space so as to appear to be growing from walls, spaces and so on.

Suicide Squad

I guess low expectations are the key with these superhero movies because I enjoyed this one, even though I could feel a part of my mind keeping track of all the ways in which it was sub-par. Pity it wasn't better though - I remember seeing that "Bohemian Rhapsody"-tracked trailer and thinking it might be something amazing ... but instead it comes across as a merely functional and rather bland version of its attempt at a 'worst of the worst' type subversion of the genre. Margot Robbie is memorable though, for reasons both good and bad.

"Anish Kapoor" @ SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo

A small exhibition in this private gallery that evidently represents Kapoor here, all exploring his notion of the void. 

Jurassic World

Chris Pratt is pretty good at these roles. Those dinosaurs aren't bad either. But Jurassic World is neither fun enough nor exciting enough to really get past the ridiculousness.

Crimson Peak

Hugely melodramatic. Is that it? Crimson Peak looks the part, but doesn't have the emotional and allusive layers that del Toro normally provides. Something of a disappointment.

Lucy

Scarlett Johansson as a Luc Besson action heroine - of course it's watchable, even though it's also very slight. Her depthlessness, as usual, enhances her performance. Also, I thought the Korean bad guy had something of the air of a world-weary Gary Oldman (not least in Besson's magnificent Leon).

Peadar O'Guilin - The Call

YA dystopia with a twist! The premise is neat and the interspersed chapters from the perspectives of the children as they are 'called' from this magically walled-off alternate Ireland to be hunted by the sidhe in their own land work, as does the polio-impaired main character Nessa and what this means for her chances of survival. A proper page turner.

Scott Lynch - The Lies of Locke Lamora

Renaissance-ish Venice inspired fantasy. Quite fun and a bit of dirt under its fingernails too.

Seto Inland Sea art islands: Naoshima and Teshima

This was, along with 'go to Tokyo at some point', literally the first thing that I knew I was going to do in Japan this trip. The idea of a collection of islands more or less dedicated to art - and specifically contemporary art - was irresistible, and especially in such a scenic setting.

Naoshima

A very good experience. A mix of modern and contemporary art arranged around the island and collected in a few museums and buildings. Significantly, and much to the benefit of the whole, the major museums all share an architect in Tadao Ando, whose sensitive approach to working with landscape and light to integrate his buildings into existing space while working with the art that they contain (from Wikipedia: "Ando's architectural style is said to create a "haiku" effect, emphasizing nothingness and empty space to represent the beauty of simplicity. He favors designing complex (yet beautifully simple) spatial circulation while maintaining the appearance of simplicity.") is integral in particular to the Chichu Art Museum. Also nice was the way that other people were hopping between the same places in various orders, many taking advantage of hired bicycles to cover the hilly terrain, and recurring at the different attractions over the day.

I started at the Benesse House Museum because it was the earliest opening, having set my alarm to get the early ferry across. It's a wonderful setting and great building, and the art was pretty good - there's no obvious unifying theme but the 40 or so pieces arranged across the three floors hit a fair number of high points. The always intriguing Gerhard Richter is represented through a hauntingly blurred portrait of his daughter Betty (1991), there is a neat Cy Twombly ("Untitled I", 1968), and I was introduced to a few other artists through colourful, punchy pieces (Jennifer Bartlett, "Fish and Bread" 1989; Yukinori Yanagi, "The EC Flag Ant Farm #1" 1992-93, Sam Francis, "Blue" 1952-53). Also, neat: Jonathan Borofsky's "Three Chattering Men" (1986) which is just that - three sculptures with hinged motor-driven jaws muttering "chatter" over and over, broken occasionally by a sung-chanted hum.

In something of a circuit over a few kilometres, various outdoor sculptures and installations including Yayoi Kusama's two pumpkins (the yellow one was surprisingly stately and had real presence on its pier location), a bunch by Niki de Saint Phalle whose energy I liked (I first came across her only a couple of weeks ago in Martigny, also enjoyed the one at the Hakone Open Air Museum, and now these ones in Naoshima too) and a moving Walter de Maria piece installed in a chamber beneath a small rise - two dark granite reflective spheres, and on either side a gold leaf-covered standing wooden pillar ("Seen/Unseen Known/Unknown", 2000).

Then the Chichu Art Museum, which was amazing - the cultural highlight of my last twelve months at least and probably a fair bit longer. And, on its own terms, maybe the best modern/contemporary art museum I've ever visited despite its very small (but utterly perfectly chosen) selection. Everything worked towards that effect, from the entrance and the building spaces and gardens to how the individual artworks are showed in spaces purpose-designed for them, and all speaking to each other (it's all underground, no less - something of an Ando hallmark I think).

• The centrepiece was the room housing five late Monet water-lily paintings (circa 1914-26) whose blurry colours and shades had a powerful impact on me - since that first encounter with Monet's late work at the Tate Modern several years ago, there's been an important place in my interior landscape for these, and this was an incredibly rich presentation, right down to the carefully chosen whites of the marble floor and frames. 
• The Walter De Maria, "Time/Timeless/No Time" (2004), completes the other piece elsewhere on Naoshima, although they are arranged to form a virtual cross - a large (2.2m diameter) dark reflective granite sphere at the centre of a naturally lit room surrounded by 27 gold leaf-covered pillars. It was hypnotic. 
• And three pieces by James Turrell: one of his "Afrum" projection pieces (1968), "Open Sky" (2004) in which the sun was dazzlingly bright when I visited, and "Open Field" (2000) which was one of his colour field pieces in which the viewer is immersed in colour and light and thereby experiences them as immediately as possible. (previously)

Lee Ufan Museum also made for a deep dialogue between the artworks and the space in which they were housed. I don't think these bare, zen-like sculpture/installation pieces of steel, concrete and stone (plus some paintings) would have worked half as well in an environment less simpatico. As it was, though, they resonated.

Brief visit to the Ando Museum, also designed (on request) by Ando himself - a conversion of a traditional house with a light and space-filled modern concrete interior which elaborated on his architectural practice and, given that he was responsible for all the key recent landmarks in Naoshima, by that fact also on the reimagining of the island in those terms.

And navigated to each of the 'art houses' in the Honmura area - six old houses located throughout a residential area each of which have been converted to showcase a contemporary installation. They included another Turrell, "Minamidera", where you're led into a pitch dark room and sit for several minutes while your eyes adjust before dim lights gradually emerge.

Teshima

Most of the smaller installations were closed on the day that I went so in substance this was just two main pieces, but they were worth the trip.

One was Christian Boltanski's "Les Archives du Coeur", one of a number of sites for this piece (including our very own MONA), in which you enter a dark room where one of the many thousand previously recorded and registered heartbeats of a participant is played, loudly and resonantly, as a suspended light bulb flickers in time and provides the only illumination. I took the option to record/register my own, which meant that I got to then hear it in the room immediately after. It felt quite profound.

And the other was the Teshima Art Museum which only houses one piece but it's a doozy: Rei Naito's "Matrix" (2010). Built into a hill, and exposed to the open air by two large circular spaces in the 'ceiling', it's essentially a large concrete cavern from the floors of which small streams of water periodically issue, meeting up with others and creating flows across the floors and arrangements of small pools which change over time. It's maybe 60 metres across and you experience it by walking through, sitting, lying amidst it. A very meditative and beautiful experience. Really left an impression.

Haruki Murakami - Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Apt to have read this in Japan - started in Kyoto, made a dent in it sitting at the bar of an izakaya/restaurant type in Uno Port and finished it in my hotel room that night.

This is Murakami in restrained mode; even when there are hints that the book is about to take off into something crazier at around the mid point - the recounting of Haida's father's story, Tsukuru's weird sex dream (of course there's one), the revelation of why his friends had summarily cut off contact with him all those years ago - it pulls back to the central and rather simple theme of its protagonist's coming into himself, and in a sense coming of age (albeit at the late age of 36), by confronting the unresolved questions, absences and harmful self-beliefs that are holding him back. So the suggestions of the supernatural or irreal are positioned as experientially literalised metaphor for those barriers to Tsukuru's self-realisation, rather than as 'actual' happenings - a device that runs through many of Murakami's novels with varying degrees of stylisation.

It's also on the slight side - its themes familiar and, to a large extent, likewise its moves along the way, and more a sketch than a fully painted piece. And it doesn't have the quiet, plaintive poetry that marked the more subtle of some of his past ones (like Sputnik Sweetheart and South of the Border, West of the Sun). And yet, it still has something - whatever else, his voice still speaks to me. 

Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox - Swipe Right for Vintage

Intersections galore. The artist's and the record's premise: recent songs done in old-school style (big band, lounge, shoo-wop, etc). A recommendation from Erandathie a while back and then independently coming to it desultorily following links wondering whether Haley Reinhart had gone on to anything much post American Idol (specifically this performance) - here, she provides vocals on three songs that I know well in "Lovefool", "Seven Nation Army" (one of the album's better cuts, which manages to retain a decent level of grit despite teetering the entire time, like the whole album, on the edge of pastiche) and "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)".

Overall, more of a novelty than a keeper, but a few worth worth hearing, including the energetic take on "My Heart Will Go On" feat Mykal Kilgore (C.f.).

Wild

Ordinarily I'd run a mile from this kind of premise - protagonist hits rock bottom and gains new perspective on life by hiking a 1,100 mile course on her own. But I found myself thinking that maybe I would appreciate it at the moment, and yes, I did! It helps that, as I'm reminded every time I see her in anything, Reese Witherspoon is very good (it's easy to forget and just see her as another pretty face). And also that Cheryl Strayed is believable - she seems like a real person (it helps, but is no guarantee of that, that this was an adaptation from the real Strayed's book account).

Linda Ronstadt - Greatest Hits vols 1 & 2

Together these cover the period from the start of her career in the late 60s through to the end of the 70s. It's very nice, but the problem for me is that it sounds like the absolute epitome of easy listening. Still, the sweetness of these songs is sure something.

Black Hawk Down

Ridley Scott in fine form - the film works as entertainment as well as, it feels like, education. Quite the cast too - in addition to 'headliners' Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Sam Shepard and Tom Sizemore, plus two of the most charismatic actors out there in William Fichtner and Eric Bana, I also recognised (with the benefit of their subsequent roles) Orlando Bloom, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau aka Jaime Lannister and Ty Burrell aka the guy from Modern Family ... and Tom Hardy is in it too.

(previously)

"Miura Kageo: Retrospective" @ Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art

This is what was showing when I visited, so I went and took a look. It was without the benefit of any English description, so an interesting experience to be confronted by new art with no context at all! Miura's medium turns it to be dye on textile, with which he created some quite marvellous effects. I particularly liked the bold swatches from the 1960s, which reminded me of Robert Motherwell except colourful, and the whimsically detailed figurative landscapes that he had turned to by the 2000s.

National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (MoMAK)

One specific, small exhibition: "Artists around Mannequin Factory Nanasai - Experiments of Art + Design + Crafts in 1946-1980". Nanasai Kogei was a mannequin company established shortly after WWII that assembled a large group of sculptors, painters and craftspeople, and one of its founders, Ryokichi Murai, was responsible for two very striking aluminium sculptures on display here, a mannequin for the exhibition 'Nanasai of Today '67' and one called 'Rose' for the equivalent 1976 exhibition. Bonus points to the museum for posing mannequins throughout the building, including one sitting in the reception desk wearing a 'staff member' badge.

And elsewhere, several similarly small themed selections from the museum's collection.

Drawings by Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka - as billed.

Before/After a Feverish Era in Japanese-style Painting. The 'feverish era' being the 1950s and 1960s when Art Informel was highly influential in Japan - the subject of a separate exhibition that I'd missed. These were a collection of fairly miscellaneous other paintings from the 1920s through to the 1980s. Best: Takashi Asada's "Mountain Landscape in the Summer" (1948), Hisao Domoto's "Chartres on Sunday" (1953-4) and Taika Inohara's abstract-leaning "Carp" (1977).

Minamata - black and white photos by W Eugene and Aileen Mioko Smith documenting the effects of mercury pollution from industrial activity in the town on Minamata in the 1970s. Sobering topic, but the photos didn't affect me much.

A Refreshing Way to Enjoy Summer: Modern Glassworks and Textiles. Glass has appealed to me for as long as I can remember and some of these were very nice to look at, notably Joel Linard, Asa Brandt and Dominick Labino.

Ceramics of Celadon Blue and Bluish White. A descriptive title! Basically this is my favourite colour or very close on the spectrum to it, so I liked this. Stand out (from the whole museum actually) was the "Little Clay Images: Twenty Pieces of the Sea" set by Osamu Suzuki (1987), the individual porcelain pieces given suggestive and apt names like "Spring Wave", "Gull" and "Sunlit Sea".

Paintings in the Taisho Era (1912-1926). All-sorts from that period. Favourite: "Avila" by Kunitaro Suda (1920), "Whipping" by Eitaro Ishigaki (1925 - dramatic and bold) and "Sea-side Village" by Seifu Tsuda (1912).

13 Assassins

Takashi Miike; samurai manoeuvring and then samurai battle (lots of it).

Bjork - Vulnicura

Listen to an artist's music for long enough, and it becomes part of you - all the elements that make it distinctive, and how they come together, they get under your skin in a good way, so that there's at least a trace familiarity that already exists whenever you listen to their music, even when it's new.

Somehow, I don't think it was until I saw her perform live that I properly realised how significant Bjork's music was to me - or maybe it's just that the reminder that that set brought, after a period when the pull I'd felt towards her music had waned, confirmed something I'd already known (this was  itself a good eight years ago now, so we're talking a lot of history). It's kind of surprising really, given that I already well knew how much I'd internalised all of those first four albums (Debut, Post, Homogenic, Vespertine) and the number of her songs that I counted amongst my favourites (especially, especially "Hyper-ballad"), plus the various associations that I'd built up with her music - but there you go.

Anyway, point is, Bjork is a major figure for me - I've taken a lot of her music to heart over the years, and it has come to feel very intimately connected with many parts of me. But I haven't kept up with her over recent years - the last couple that I listened to left me underwhelmed, and I think I've missed one or two since, and so coming to Vulnicura it's felt a bit like I've had to re-learn how to listen to Bjork, and in the process I've been rediscovering both the ways in which she demands attention and challenges the listener and the pleasures and rewards that come with those things.

Across the album's nine long songs, only one - the rapturously lovely opener "Stonemilker" - strikes me as immediately accessible. The others all take work. But when they open themselves up, they're all worth it - those knits of voice, strings and electronic sound brought together in ways that, if often alien, are always navigable and ultimately lead somewhere at once familiar and new. 

Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurts - Daughter of the Empire

It would've been, I think, more than 20 years ago that I previously read this, and I remember being fascinated by it. It was one of the first 'adult' fantasy books I came across, and its primary focus on politics - rather than war or quests - made an impression, as did the Japanese-feeling setting. Re-reading it over the last few days, its flaws are difficult to ignore: the linear story-telling, the shifts between characters' perspectives (a pet hate of mine when done in a way that isn't thoughtful), the way that all of Mara's retainers are outstanding at whatever their jobs are, the simple progression from one successfully conceived and executed plan to the next, almost chapter by chapter. Which isn't to say that it doesn't have good points - but the simplicity of it means that it doesn't satisfy any more.

King Arthur

Like on my previous watch, I found this easy to watch but was a bit frustrated by the way that, once it's made its high concept choices (ie who are Arthur, his knights, Guinevere and Merlin in this version, and who are their enemies), every move is basically the most obvious and it never gets more than surface deep.

Kazuo Ishiguro - The Buried Giant

Something a bit different from Ishiguro - a sort of quest-fable-fantasy-allegory set in immediately post-Arthurian Britain (an aged Sir Gawain is a significant character). It's all very misty, in every sense, but it works in its opaque, meditative fashion. Not as good as the others of his that I've read, but cut from the same cloth despite its very different setting. 

Pola Museum of Art, Hakone

A small but well selected collection - though when I visited, some of the galleries were closed because they were setting up for a new exhibition.

There were probably about 25 or 30 pieces in the first display, 'Western Paintings' - entirely Europeans working from about the 1870s through to the early 20th century, and with the emphasis on the different ways that colour was being worked with and rethought during that period - which included a luxurious eight or nine by Monet (my favourites: "Water Lily Pond", 1899 - I've seen at least one other of that series before; "La Promenade", 1875; "Sunset at Etretat", 1885)), and the rest comprised of Renoir (who has struck me in now about three different museums during the last fortnight in a way that he never has before - here, e.g., "Anemones", 1883-90 and "Girl in a Lace Hat", 1891, and a couple of stunning undated landscapes), Cezanne, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Matisse, Odilon Redon, Raoul Dufy, and one each by Degas, Vuillard and Pissarro ... not much to quibble with there!

Plus a few western-style paintings by Japanese artists over the same period (Meiji, 1868-1912; Taisho, 1912-1926; Showa, 1926-1989), of which I was struck by Sekine Shoji's "Three Heads" (1919), Fujishima Takeji's "Profile of a Woman" (1926-7) and Maeta Kanji's "Nude Seen from the Back" (1927). Also, the startlingly modern (as in contemporary) "The Fields", Kuroda Seiki (1907).

And a display of glassworks, mostly by the Daum Brothers. The ones with the landscapes were especially beautiful.

Hakone Open Air Museum

Many sculptures made by a mix of Japanese and other artists, classical through to contemporary, spread across a large set of gardens (which it took me a while to find the entrance to on a hot day, having accidentally stumbled on its outer edge while following a path along a waterfall from a town that I didn't realise was so close by).

Three that stood out, all near the entrance (possibly my attention waned as the afternoon wore on, even though it was a pretty great sculpture garden): Carl Milles' "Man and Pegasus" (1949), mounted high and silhouetted against the mountain backdrop; Giacomo Manzu's cheeky yet grand "Grande Striptease" (1967); and "La Pleureuse" (Francoise-Xavier and Claude Lalanne) - a large white stone head on its side in a pool, crowned by vines.

Oh and a Picasso pavilion, because of course there was - he's been unavoidable on this trip so far.

Firefly & Serenity

I didn't expect that Firefly would take the 'Western in space' quite so literally: cattle rustling, a train robbery, plenty of gun-fights and more, not to mention the country theme song. It works a treat, though, its likeable and convincing (of/informed by genre) characters and interesting plots keeping up the pace across all 14 episodes, each of which tells its own story while contributing satisfyingly to the larger whole. I thought this show would be a good diversion, and it was, but it's much better than just that.

Watching the tv run made me appreciate how cleverly Serenity is constructed, to continue and resolve a lot of the loose ends left by Firefly's untimely cancellation while also working as a stand-alone (which is the basis on which I've watched it before (1), (2)), and all while remaining true to the tone and dynamics of the show.

The Boss

A Melissa McCarthy comedy that I watched because Kristen Bell was in it. Nothing to write home about - quite poor actually.

Captain America: Civil War

All seemed a bit of a mess - a lot happening and it wasn't always clear why, or sometimes even what - but the fun kind of pandemonium. An impressively large cast of superheroes is rolled out, with most making some kind of impression (a young Spider-Man gives a good comic turn), but I think it would've made more sense if I'd been more familiar with the franchise to date.

Despicable Me

Quite charming.

Musee des Confluences, Lyon

An anthropological museum in a striking building which I liked. Permanent exhibition contains a lot of standard museum-y objects (scientific instruments, bones, stuffed animals, human tools and artifices etc) and wrapped them up in themes with accompanying commentary about the place and meaning-making activities of humans: origins; species; societies; eternities

Temporary exhibitions: Antarctica (including breathtaking videos), shoes (diverting enough), west African pottery.

Worth the visit.

(w/ Wei)

Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

Quite impressive, not least in the way that it covered art (and related) from the beginning - ie antiquities down the ages and paintings (and later sculpture) from the Old Masters on.

I of course went through in reverse chronological order and spent much more time with the most recent, starting with 'les modernes' (20th century) which was pretty good: side by side pieces from Sonia and Robert Delaunay, good Picasso ("Femme assist sur la plage", 1937), Matta, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva again, likewise Wifredo Lam, and two who were new to me who I liked, Pierre Combet-Descombes (a Lyonnaise painter from the first half of the 20th C) and Alfred Manessier's two "Favela" paintings from more recently. Leans French/European.

19th C - Impressionists and those who came before, again leaning French and not attempting to be comprehensive in its survey. Both Sisley and Monet represented with multiple excellent pieces (below: "La Tamise a Charing-Cross", 1903) - both artists into whom I've grown over time.

Everything else - passed through much more quickly, flickers of meaning and impression, in the way of these things.

(w/ Wei, although we more or less went through the museum on our own paths)

Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny

Created in 1978 by one Leonard Gianadda (named after his brother Pierre, who had died in a plane accident two years earlier), this museum sits on the foundations of a Gallo-Roman temple, some of which have been preserved - and nicely integrated - within the building and in its extensive gardens; there's also a collection of Roman antiques, the highlight of which for me was the surviving pieces of a large bronze statue of a standing three-horned minotaur, which is apparently a mythical figure from the region (it wasn't the only minotaur we saw in the town).

Somewhat randomly, but I guess reflecting the interests of its founder, it houses an automobile museum - maybe 50 or so cars dating from the 1890s to about the 1930s. Quite the sight. I don't know anything much about cars but most of the names were familiar and it was very evocative.

The temporary exhibition, "Picasso - L'oeuvre ultime - Hommage a Jacqueline", covered Picasso's later years, like the one in Lucerne. Mostly taking Jacqueline Roche (later Jacqueline Picasso) as their subject, from when they met in 1954, through marriage in 1961 and then the artist's death in 1973. Pretty good, and it was also interesting to see more of Picasso's revisionings of the work of others who he admired, like a couple of versions of "Les Femmes d'Alger" (inspired by Jacqueline's resemblance to one of the odalisques in Delacroix's painting), as well as some from his "Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe" series (Manet) and one taking Matisse as its starting point ("L'Atelier de la Californie ... in fact, the California ones in general tended to be good).

But the best bit was the sculpture garden, which included a commissioned Chagall mosaic housed in a pavilion with a pair of sculptures ("Oiseau et Poisson", 1964), a pleasing de Kooning ("Reclining Figure", 1969-83), one by Jean Arp ("Roue Oriflamme", 1962), one of Robert Indiana's iconic "Love" pieces and many more (Cesar, Rodin, Miro, Brancusi, Calder, Ernst...). Two who I hadn't heard of and liked: Niki de Saint Phalle ("Les Baigneurs", 1984) and Alicia Penalba ("Le Grand Double", 1979). Beautifully laid out and varied.

(w/ Wei) 

Emma Cline - The Girls

The vivid flare of this novel comes primarily from its evocation of the intense relationships and feelings of teenage girls, but the setting (1969, in a commune that is obviously meant to bear strong parallels to the Manson Family) brings an additional intensity - in its urgency and consuming nature as well as the darkness that it explicitly plays out. There is some beautiful, sparkling writing in The Girls and the dissection of character (or its lack - this is one of the book's preoccupations) is sharp. I raced through it - yet didn't find it completely satisfying, and I'm not entirely sure why ... perhaps in the end it's a little bit too much on the surface? Overall though, very enjoyable and well laced with insight.