Tokyo Fashion Week

The woman from the Klimt painting kept her word, and two geometrically misshapen cardboard invitations arrived in the mail addressed in Japanese to "The Venerable Lindsay" and "Our Goddess Tanya." For a moment I wondered what I should wear.

Swarms of men with lenses for eyeballs were expensively arranged at the foot of the stage. Tiny notebooks were open to pens on laps under conversational slouches.

The garments entered: a celebration of decency, evolved from fig leaves (in purple, gold and green for autumn). A flutter of shutters flattered the Russian teenagers, mail-ordered in proportion and nourished on tobacco; waxen hands at the ends of sleeves.

Would there be an answer inside that black room? The kind of thing that gently shifts the course of history or daily life?

Gustav Klimt paints Erykah Badu: drunk, miniature, and Japanese

It's cocktails after class and I can sense a hive of curls buzzing next to me. I look into her face and we're inside a Klimt painting. She tells me I'd be better off with my hair swept away from my face; I am at her complete mercy. She asks me on a date, and I say yes. She is putting my hair behind my ears for me, asking everyone for their approval. She pushes her glass up to the bar and they pour more white wine over her round, enormous rocks of ice. I eat an olive out of her martini glass. There are too many to count (but where are the martinis they came with)? Her card says "President" and she promises to send me an invitation to her show.

The student who brought me there, Ken, is drooling agape and telling her how much we both love fashion, while I apologize for him with my eyes, knowing I'd just told her otherwise. She smiles back. I can see now that she looks like a tiny rendering of Erykah Badu. Ken orders me another undrinkable cocktail. This one is orange in color. Ken has no idea what I like, I realize. Erykah Badu probably does.

The Truth About Sunday

Tanya and I dressed up like characters from a Doctor Seuss book and took pictures of one another with our cell phones. She read Oscar Wilde's De Profundis while I was videotaped having a cigarette over makeup. The stereo wasn't working but everyone sang along. We paid each other substantially and spent it on bread rolls.

Blank Fury

She was a beautiful, fine-boned woman with black hair down to her thighs. She stood enchantingly before my seated companions and in her elaborate American folk cottons delivered a soliloquy which might have seemed full of praise had I not understood the lexicon.

The message in her delicate hands was airy and passive and her face was a blanket. Yet she was telling us that she was irate. Our promise to arrive at half past three had been worth nothing. It was nearly four thirty.

She didn't want to be introduced to me. She didn't look at me. I stared at her hands, and then at the oranges on the table. This was the first time I had ever witnessed the anger of a Japanese person, and I was finding it to be an entirely impressive experience. I checked it numbly off the list as Yuusuke asserted quiet excuses to his elder sister.

She went away and I was invited to try on the clothes she had designed, but I was too scared to touch them. Her brother bought me some short cake and turned on the juke box. We all acted like nothing had happened.

The next time I went to her studio, she smiled but didn't say anything. Her brother told me that she'd been embarrassed and apologized for her behavior, but it was too late. I already knew that she was insane.

Gatsby

I had tea with my friend Ken last night. He was busily showing me photos of the Maserati he's going to give himself for Christmas when he pulled out a small white package of what looked like baby wipes.

"I get sweaty sometimes and these refresh my skin," He explained, "but they're a little spicy around my eyes."

Minty things do seem spicy. It's the same sensation, but sweeter and colder, don't you think, reader my reader? My little brother used to say that mint gum is spicy, and we all knew what he meant, so what was the difference? Would you have corrected him? I didn't. It's too cute a mistake.

I didn't correct Ken, either. Instead I asked if I could try one (they're made by Gatsby), and kept it away from my eyes. Is anyone else startled by the existence of a mentholated tissue made for men of fashion to dab refreshingly about their faces and slender necks?

Gatsby, you blur the lines further.

Spoon Market

How does your typical grimy, dark, monotonously beat-driven club become charming, artistic, and genuinely danceable (with warm, understated lighting to boot)? Leave it to the magic of the Tokyo girls' pop community. The heroic Tokyo Pinsalocks are three futuristic-hippie styled rock-and-roll superstars who (with an overtly huggable man named Holly) organized a night of female-fronted performance, food, and art last weekend at Ebisu Milk. The result was refreshing.



If you wanted to have an organic vegetable-based cupcake custom-decorated, you had only to choose which colors. If you wanted your hair trimmed at 3 am, a mere 500 yen would have you looking better than usual at such an hour. If you wanted to buy handmade yarn monsters or spoon-and-fork earrings for your girlfriend, it was all there on proud display by its creators.



And the music, OH, the music and the sass. Falsies on Heat showed us all who was boss. What a relief to watch women so utterly in charge of their sex appeal use their bodies to color the music. Chocolat and Akito invited us back to the funky 1970's in a tiger-striped beret and candy-flavored vocals. The Tokyo Pinsalocks delivered their nostalgic future-Tokyo sound with characteristic "I'm a sexy robot" head jerks. Perhaps most unexpectedly, DJ Daniel Robson (an exception to the female theme, but certainly not unfriendly to it) had me dancing as if my Volvic bottle were full of something else entirely.

My bandmate Kate and I were honored to wear the whimsical designs of our friend Hirose Megumi for our two short sets.



A night like that one reminds me why I put up with living in Tokyo.

Transformers

If there hadn't been wiry black pubic hair blatantly escaping from the top of her jeans, the makeup artist would have looked fourteen. She was idly curling the loose ends of a strawberry blond afro-clown wig and asking the photographer how her English got so good. I clasped a sweating glass of tea and let CNN absorb me, feeling hungover.

The stylist arrived and made an accusatory comment about my atmosphere, saying she could tell I was a musician. They would change that.

They coaxed me into plaid tights with a silky white dress and the stylist's own enormous yellow high tops, which were just snug. The poufy wig was well suited to my drawn-on complexion--everyone agreed. I rode side saddle on the back of the photographer's bike to a gravel parking lot. They handed me a bottle of blue imported mineral water as a prop and the doe-eyed makeup girl delicately wiped the sweat from my upper lip with her index finger. The photographer was waiting for the sun to go behind a cloud. They fanned me from either side. I told them they really didn't have to do that, but they disagreed. Knowing they probably didn't want the stars melting off my face, I let them continue fanning me like a queen, too groggy and hot to protest.

Turn your head this way.

Oh my GOD that's cute.

Pretend you're sad.

Cute, Cute, Cuuuuute!

I was barely there. I was a scarecrow clothes hanger. I didn't say very much, nor could I listen hard. I wanted to be in bed. I was supposed to be glowing with vitality today, but as a result of my condition, I was the weak element in this four-person charade. I felt guilty and told myself to try harder.

You know, you really act like a Japanese person.

Yeah, most Americans we work with complain a lot more.

I was happy to hear this, but wondered if it meant they could sense the extent to which I was holding in my discomfort. The stylist knew. I could tell by the critical way she was looking at me--the way someone looks at her own face in the mirror. It made sense; I was wearing all her Work. I was her body. She probably wanted me to look happier in her clothes, or at least thinner.

After five artful combinations of clothing and face-drawings, everyone ate Thai curry and spring rolls together. We talked about our burgeoning careers in fashion and fantasized about publication in So-En. It was all so romantic that my food rumbled from within the stylist's high waisted woolen skirt, climbed up past the Oklahoma style crocheted vest she'd chosen, through the plastic seashell necklace and into the toilet. The painted-on freckles fell off and were flushed down as well, and I threw in the false eyelashes for luck. The whole outfit somehow found its way into the toilet bowl and I didn't stop it.

I emerged from the lavatory without their Work; an empty palette. I don't think they could see me anymore after that, because nobody said I looked cute. I mentioned that I was a little bit hot and they gazed blankly. Sweat dripped and smeared my mascara and nobody flinched. They just blew smoke into the early night and chuckled about something the makeup artist's fiance had said. I wondered where I should put my hands but no one instructed me. It was several hours later, after I'd gone home, cleaned out my medicine cabinet, and scrubbed the entryway that I was able to regain control of my body.