Lady Gaga fans go all out in Yokohama

Found this on the interwebs. Great photos of Lady Gaga fans at her Yokohama concert at Tokyo Fashion.com blog.

Our front door

One of the strangest features of nearly all Japanese middle class apartments are their doors– typically metal, short and oddly un-residential to my eyes. These doors define residential living here, along with hallways that are open to the elements, and endless rows of symmetrical fluorescent hall and stairwell lighting visible from the streets.

I was reminded of this when my American artist friend who lives in Beijing and is in Japan for a 2 month artist residency told me about her strange Yokohama apartment door. She didn’t realize how typical and pervasive this door is.

What do you think it looks like? Sometimes I feel like it’s a prison, a submarine, an industrial farm. More recently, these doors seem normal and unremarkable.

Students’ ceramics show

Last week was the students’ ceramics show in Nishi-Ogikubo. Fourteen students plus the in-law teachers exhibited their work in a cozy two-story gallery. After just two months of ceramics lessons, it seemed a little early for me. All credit is due to my excellent teachers.

I showed almost twenty flower pots, and put flowering plants in six of them and pre-refrigerated bulbs in several more. I was very surprised to sell seven flower pots– four to my aunt K, and one each to ceramics student S, our friend K from Yokohama, and generous W from Peru and Chiba.

Here’s two other views, an overview of floor 1 and another image of my pots, including the giant one which will soon hold my lemon tree.

I missed it, but I heard that the 11-month-old S who comes to the studio with his mom climbed into the giant pot below.