次のTOMODACHINKOに出演決定！今回はDJ、ライブペイント、そして???

2011年6月17日（金曜日）
TOMODACHINKO Vol.8@北堀江CLUB vijon

OPEN/START 20:00
ADV/DOOR ￥1,000 別途Drink代￥500
（前売りのシステムはございません）

＜ コスプレ大歓迎！男女ともに更衣室あり＞

< DJ >
E-ROGic / FJK / やまーと（LOG IN） / show坊や（ゆとり） / wenZZdey / nnnoOommiii（digital maestro）/ カワイヒデナリ / せかんどwithせかんど工房 / Aにゃん / 手乗りももんが / TAMA(アソナイ) / 偽モナー / BENNY / Energy JUN

< LIVE >
MONALINA / SCYTHEWRACK SYSTEM / Samurai Head

＜ DANCE SHOW ＞
まなさまと愉快な変態達 / せかんど工房

< VJ ＞
RAM(異臭騒ぎ/Diatonik) / MUHHAN / 花音(bungeee/AREA XIII/UNION CULTURE) / MAKOTO / 桝谷良彦

＜ Photo ＞
Kiyomasa（ECLIPSE） / やまーと（LOG IN）

＜ FOOD ＞
ももこのごはんやさん / セカンドインパクト

＜ ランジェリーBar ＞
TOMOKA

＜ LIVE PAINT ＞
(Flyerもベン作！)
BENNY（CHOPSTICK TATTOO）

Hell City 9 was awesome. Durb puts on a great convention and it really shows. Wow. Just blown away by everyone’s kindness and generosity at the event. Got to do a lot of nice work too. Thanks for everyone who came out! Can’t wait to go back. Since I didn’t take any photos of my own, here’s some highlights ripped from other people’s farcebook pages:

友人と食事会！亜米利加の料理は久しぶりでめっちゃ便秘ぃぃぃ！
Dinner with friends! Miss American food – just not the “lack of roughage”!

HCの初仕事や！そういえば、亜米利加にきてからの初彫り！STARBLOODのJON CLUEと一緒にブースを借りた。がんあがりぃ！！
First tattoo of the Convention! Boothin’ it up with Jon Clue from Starblood Studios (And Jentle Jess!) Freakin’ psyched like a psychopath!

最後のオーダーはJONの友達KEVIN君の首！朝まで彫っていた、部屋に！
Rippin’ up Kevin’s neck in the hotel room till morning! (Sorry Jon, next time I promise!)

そして終わったら、フィッシュアンドチップス！新しい写真を見つけたらここにアップするわ！
Then there was Fish and Chips! The end until I get more photos from folks!

A friend of mine passed me this article in the paper and I totally forgot to post it! What a find! Screw the May Blues!
これを更新するのを忘れちゃった！友達からの記事。カブレラ選手のタトゥー発見！

Man, Alex Cabrera is a big dude! Have you ever seen this guy? He’s like 2 meters tall!
というか選手はでっかぁ！少なくとも２メートル以上。

What was going to be a witty photo of me and this Cabrera poster will now be turned into a gripe about just how difficult it is to take a photo of yourself with the iPhone fumbling for the ‘shutter’ on the screen that you can’t see.
まぁ、このポスターでカブレラの大きさのネタを作ろうと思ったけど…iPhoneのタッチパネルで自分の写真を撮るのは無理！撮ろうとした事ある？やってみてや、ほんまに！

Um…. moving right along, some more flowers this week! Keeping with our tall theme, a taller arrangement including some golden chrysanthemums. When arranging flowers in our particular school there is usually a ‘rank’ to the colors, with the heavier colors on bottom in order to balance the piece. But even though yellow technically falls below than white, it takes precedence in the case of the chrysanthemum as it is a symbol of the Son of Heaven. And it was the emperor Saga himself for whom our school is named.
えぇ、さてと… 高いものテーマを続きまして、今週の生け花は高い花瓶で！流によって違うけど私達の場合は花の色の順番もある。バランスの為、だいたい「重たい」色はしたの方に入れる。そして「軽い」色を高くて入れる。もちろん、白は一番上に入れるはずやけど嵯峨御流の場合は黄色の方が上に入れる。天皇陛下のシンボルなので。「嵯峨御流」の嵯峨も嵯峨天皇の事です。

More Chop Kids! Careful Kyon, the new talent is always a short step behind biting at your heels!
チョップキッズ！アゲーン！気をつけろ、きょん！若いやつは以外とはやくのびてくるんで気をつけないと追いこされちゃう！

One last bit to go out on in May. I always thought I’d avoid doing those ‘whacky Japan food’ posts, but I couldn’t resist. Maybe it’s the absurdity of the “Fried Chicken” font taking precedence in size over the title of the drink itself… or the fact that cross branding beer and fried chicken is novel in and of itself. Placing product advertising on other products is certainly not new, but this one really punches you in the eyeballs from across the aisle.
５月のラスト！あまりそういう外人が好きそうな「日本の変な食べ物」のブログが好きちゃうけど昨日コンビニに行って、これを見てしかたないと思った。まず「フライドチキン」は「麦とホップ」より大きく入っている。「ビール」もかいていないし。飲み物の空き缶に食べ物の広告がのっているとはちょっと違和感と思わへん？たまにあんねんけどこんなにハデなのは初めてみた！

私は長く日本に住んでいるのに、今でも上手く日本語で伝えられない事もいっぱいあります。今日もそういう気分です。昨夜、私の大事な友達、大好きな先輩が亡くなりました。申し訳ございませんが心から言葉をうまく伝える為、私の母国語を使わして頂きます。

I was hoping I would never have to sit down and write this.

Sometimes you find yourself thinking unspeakable thoughts. The kind of things that leave even the most amoral of us with guilt pangs. You see a friend on the road to hell and your mind starts to envision where it will lead, and you briefly think to yourself, “I can’t believe I just considered how I would write that guy’s epitaph.” It’s taboo to think like that. It’s a downer. It’s a bad vibe… Self-defeating. And maybe, you fear, Self-fulfilling. And so you push down those terrible thoughts and bury them in the recesses of your heart and think too hard about not thinking of them ever again. You turn your back from reality, and all it’s ugliness – and force yourself to think positively but all the while doing nothing. And when you finally get brave and lift up your head again, you’re no longer where you were – too much time has passed – and you find yourself here, typing these words – alone and thinking these previously unthinkable things, but now it’s too late. Now it’s all too real. But most frightening of all is that this “reality” is already on it’s way to becoming a faint memory – like a slow ache that relents little by little.

On the evening of April 25th, 2009, a few days before his birthday, my friend and senpai Okano Hidenori (Hiderow) the legendary tattoo artist who ran Hiroshima’s Tommy’s Fire Tattoo Studio passed away.

Years ago, somewhere around twenty-oh-three or so, long before I even had a tattoo or considered it as a career, I was living far away from Kansai in a tiny village in Kyushu. Old friend’s and tattoo sempai’s Doug Hardy and Josh Arment had come to visit Japan from the states and I had decided to take advantage of their visit to make a week long trip around Honshuu with them. Doug was scheduled to do some guest tattooing at Chopstick Tattoo in Osaka as well as Tommy’s Fire in Hiroshima. It was there that I met Hiderow.

Hiderow’s studio was unlike anything I had yet experienced in any tattoo shop anywhere. Gundam models, cute nude figurines of questionable age, and screenfulls of animation littered the studio – it was more like an otaku’s toy box from Akihabara than a tattoo studio at first glance… up to and including the inflatable mannequin with the high school girl swimsuit. High quality prints by my favorite artist Alphons Mucha adorned the walls, flanked by rising sun flags and there were a mess of photo albums chock full of Hiderow’s art. What you could really say about Hiderow’s artistic style was that it had “asobi-gokoro” or in other words it was wild, free, crazy… imaginative and inventive. It had unique vibrant color schemes. It was FUN and most importantly the work didn’t look like anyone else.

Hiderow was easy to click with – a real affable fellow. I had a habit of keeping a sketchbook with me and so we swapped books to compare styles. I was psyched to hear what he had to say, but even more excited to see his underdrawings. They were mad. They were sick… and his girls were so damn sexy! We really enjoyed a lot of the same imagery. I felt really embarrassed showing him all my scummy dirty pencil drawings. But Hiderow was thoughtful in his critiques and showed me how he used those Mitsubishi dual red/blue pens to tighten up a drawing – a technique I shamelessly “borrowed” and still use to this day. He had his shop gal make color copies of his flash as a memorial of my trip to Hiroshima, and gave me a couple hand colored sheets (!) to take back. He even showed me a sketchbook from his elementary school days – complete with spaceships, race cars, and of course a slew of Dragon Ball characters.

Us eating. I am fat and white.

He set us up a place to stay near Peace Park. It was my first time to Hiroshima, so I was still caught up in the history of the place… If you’ve ever been there than you know it’s hard to be in Hiroshima City and not reflect on humanity a bit – but as we sat there smoking and drawing only a kilometer or so from the hypocenter of the first atomic bomb detonated on a civilian population, both of us from countries previously at war, I could feel a strange sense of peace presiding over the whole trip… you just can’t put it into words, but it was there… and mostly, I think, because of Hiderow’s generosity and good will.

Hiderow's Turbonegro girl on Doug!

Hiderow showed us around town, fed us amazing food, taught us about the rivalry of Osaka’s Okonomiyaki and Hiroshima’s HIroshimayaki, he introduced us to girls, brought us to parties, there was a bit of tattoo trading, and everyone was roaring the whole time. It was unreal how out of his way Hiderow went to show us a good time on that trip – as one hentai to another he even took notice of the oddly large amount of girls in overalls from my sketchbooks and called three or four girls to the studio decked out in their denim.

What, you think I’m making that part up!?

Tommy's Fire representin' the GiO styles! Circa 200X

I had never been so psyched.

Although I had been on the fence for awhile at that time, I was finally hooked. I knew I wanted to become a tattoo artist. It was to be a pirate’s life for me after all. And yeah I was still like 23 and dumber than a box of hammers, and I didn’t know anything, so I wanted to ask Hiderow for his advice. I barreled into the studio one morning and spilled my guts out to him, dropping an eraser as I recall out of my bag as I got out my sketchbook again.

And then he told me something I needed to hear.

He said, “If you can’t take care of your own eraser, how can you take care of other people’s things?” He didn’t look at me when he said it, he was busy fiddling with his tattoo machines. But it was like the music stopped, the CD skipped, and I that was the end of a dramatic, exciting, and life changing week… and the beginning of our friendship.

When I sit down to tattoo I often recall those words… and during those first terrible years of toilet scrubbing at Chopstick, with no vacation and no cash, I would dream about the day that I’d be able to go back to Tommy’s Fire again to visit, this time as a fully fledged tattooer to show Hiderow how my art had gotten better and then be blown away by how he had gotten better still.

And like all things in life, there’s the way you think things will be and there’s the way everyone else tells you things will be… but in the end, it always ends up being something completely different. And you realize you were naive or arrogant or both to think you’d ever had a shot at predicting how it would all turn out.

Nearly 7 years went by since that trip and yesterday I made the journey to Hiroshima to see my friend Hiderow one final time… and to say goodbye.

Godspeed You Sergeant!!

– 4.25.2009

If you met Hiderow, or just knew his art, than you experienced a rare and wonderful human being indeed. His legacy is his art, his tattoos, and his friends. If you’ve never seen his work, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Original signed and stamped Flash by Hiderow

Hiderow loved cats!!!

Flash by Hiderow - Sexy Goils!

Religious Goils!

Underdrawing by Hiderow

Underdrawing by Hiderow

Tattoo on our friend Todd by Hiderow. Enmakun! (えん魔くん) Hiderow also loved tattooing his favorite anime characters.

The other day a mystery box arrived

またMETAL GEARのネタ？さぁ、開けてみよう！

OMGWTFROTFLLOL I CAN HAS CEREALZ?

うぅわっ！何これ？！亜米利加の伝統的な朝食、あめちゃん、タトゥー雑誌が入っているぜ！流石、軍人の友達のPBXパワー！ありがとうぅな！

What could it be? Mysterious treasures from the west? Or merely the PBX powers of friendly troops in Sasebo?

や〜。

せっかくこんな朝食に慣れて来たのにこんなアッッッッマイやつが届いたら…食うしかないなぁ！

Just when I’d gotten used to my fish head soup breakfasts.

Lies! Damn Lies!

No, tattoo ointment is a good source of Vitamin D. This is chocolate and peanut butter. For breakfast.

何よ、この超フェークな「ヘルシー」の言葉。チョコレートとピナツクリームやでぇ！亜米利加のキッズ以外、信じる人おる？

Slow your role there Cap'n

イメージキャラクターもむちゃくちゃ！顔は完璧な気違いや！このシリアルに変な薬が入っているんちゃう？というか、子供の時めっちゃ食べた気がする。

Is it just me or is the Cap’n lookin’ a little more… jolly than he used to?

Toi Toi Toi!

Ah, Begora! The T-Rex be after me frosted lucky Chayrms!

この箱の裏にのっている画像は多分時間つぶしゲームやと思うねんけどどうみてもただこのキャラクターはLSD飲み過ぎたって感じやろう？

Goils!