1008 July 19-Aug 1, 2013 - Metropolis

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CYNDI
LAUPER
Friend of the LGBT community,
friend of Japan
By Dan Grunebaum
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) may have just been struck
down, but pop icon Cyndi Lauper has been ahead of the curve on
gay rights for decades.
“I got into it because when I sing for people I see their faces, I
hear them, it’s not like I’m blind,” she says from her home in New York City
ahead of an appearance at the Summer Sonic festival near Tokyo on August
11. “I thought they [LGBTs] were a creative group of people, and as I got to
know them I got to see something was wrong. It upset me that no one else
was saying anything.”
Lauper created her True Colors Tour for Human Rights in 2007 and
2008, named after the title track of her second album, “True Colors,” a song
that had become an anthem for the LGBT community. The nationwide tour
featured artists like Deborah Harry and the B-52s. She followed that up with
her True Colors fund to support anti-LGBT discrimination.
“One thing led to another and we did the tour,” says Lauper, who had
been involved in gay rights activism for years before organizing her circuit.
“Then we decided after the tour that people still needed help, so we opened
the fund. Then we realized the only way we can really help is to make it bigger.
Then I realized this is great, so we set up a foundation and helped HIV
sufferers. Doing this makes me able to help in a way that really does help,
because I don’t want to do a vanity charity project—I ain’t got time for that.”
Lauper is now known globally for her LGBT activism. In Japan, however,
this aspect of her career gets short shrift. Instead, she is celebrated here for
her kitschy, hummable girl-pop—and her stubborn refusal to leave the country
when the Tohoku earthquake struck during her 2011 tour.
“We didn’t know what was going on at first,” she recalls about the harrowing
day of March 11. “People kept saying, you can go home. But when I saw
the airport and saw how the people were there, I felt, I’m not leaving, because
maybe I could be a distraction for them. The first time I came to Japan and
sang ‘True Colors’ in 1986 at the Budokan, they sang it back to me. So I felt if
I left what the hell would that song really mean? So I didn’t. Not only didn’t I,
but the promotion team, the Kyodo people, they stayed on the road too just
like me. So in a lot of ways, I thought the people were inspiring.”
Lauper’s connection to Japan long predates the disaster. With her reality
TV show Cyndi Lauper: Still So Unusual, Tony-winning musical Kinky Boots,
and bestselling autobiography Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir, 2013 has proven to
be a year of remarkable resurgence for Lauper. But there were times when
it seemed like Japan was the only market still standing behind her music.
“The Japanese fans and companies were great people and really stuck
by me,” she recalls. “When the Americans made me feel like I should crawl
and fall off the edge of the earth, these people would come to me and say,
art
WAR/ART
1940-1950
History painted by the
defeated at MoMA
By C. B.Liddell
There is a common belief that history is written
by—and therefore distorted by—the
winners, but this is not entirely true. Japan’s
experience proves that the losers do also
have their say. This is apparent at the WAR/ ART 1940-
1950 exhibit at Hayama’s Museum of Modern Art in
Kanagawa Prefecture, although in this case, history is
not so much written as painted.
This is a good thing because words aim for a total
picture that tends to weave a web of bias and deception,
whereas painting is connected to isolated impressions
and moments of truth where the artist connects with
their emotions. So, even though this exhibition presents
an extremely Japan-centric view of WWII, it is
nevertheless a sincere one, and one we can all respect
no matter what our historical judgment of those now
distant events may be.
Some of the artwork is only tangentially related
The Disintegration of America
to the war, but serves to evoke a sense of the pre-war
cultural milieu. This then gives way to more explicit
war-themed art. Seiichi Hara’s rough, edgy sketches
in pastels and ink, showing the daily life of Japanese
soldiers and scenes from occupied China, are as much
reportage as art. These works contrast with a series of
contemporary color woodblock prints that show iconic
and idyllic scenes of Japan—suggesting that the war at
that time was strictly an overseas affair with minimal
impact on the home front.
As we progress into the 1940s, this distinction
is at first maintained
but after a
few celebratory
works, like Hoshun
Yamaguchi’s
Final Attack on
Hong Kong Island
(1942), the mood
darkens noticeably
as overseas
defeats and austerity
start to bring
the war closer to
home.
One of the
most interesting
works is Kikuji
Yamashita’s The
Disintegration of America (1943), a surrealistic attempt
to break the spell of American and Western iconography.
A city collapses in the background, while a toilet
roll, the actress Bette Davis, a knight’s helmet, a tattered
American flag and a collapsing Greek temple are all
thrown together in a visual tirade against the West.
Not surprisingly, works from the climactic year of
1945, when Japan suffered defeats in Okinawa and
Manchuria, as well as the fire bombings and the dropping
of two atomic bombs before surrendering, seem
almost absent from the exhibition, with only a handful
GALLERY NIPPON
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