"Art of the Samurai" at The Met: The Best Show on Earth
It does not sound like anything I would have been interested in, and you may easily feel the same way. And yet, "The Art of the Samurai," just put up on view at The Met, is an exquisite, do-not-miss, unbelievable exhibition—even for those of us who know absolutely nothing about Japan, ancient or recent history, ferrous metallurgy and/or war. At heart, this exhibition is actually about super fabulous outfits! I mean, mind-blowing, 400-year-old, space-age, unbelievable, gorgeously-made rock star outfits, constructed from hay-smoked deer leather and steel and silk and gold.
There is an outfit of ceremonial armor made for an ambassador who went traveling around the world somewhere around the time when John Hancock was in diapers. (I may be off by 75 years one way or the other because I know nothing about history! But the context: unbelievable!) There are hats so gorgeous and so refined and bizarre that they look like some crazed concoction of scatter-brained, pot-smoking French 1980s fashion designers. One, in particular, is a swooping black swirl, that resolves into a black, angled fist at the top; it is clutching a Buddhist ceremonial object that looks like an infinity symbol version of an eggbeater. It is insane.
The entire exhibition is a giant, mind-blowing WTF explosion. WHAT IS THIS COAT, with Dutch sailing ships on the back?
HI, VOLCANO COAT, from the 17th Century!
I don't even know what to say about this.
Also there are swords galore. Now I am not a person who cares about swords. But this is some unbelievable swordy goodness. Also there is an insane video about the traditional making of swords, which is some seriously laborious business, taking as it does some six months and undoubtedly much accidental burning and mutilation.
The show is rotating objects throughout its run, so you should go now, and then in a few months, in part because NO ONE WILL EVER SEE much of this again. Like, it is cobbled together from families and repositories of official cultural treasures and stuff and that we even get to see it at all is amazing. We highly endorse it.
Imagine getting killed by the dude in the first helmet, would that be a fabulous death? Blood Spray and Sunshine dancing gently across that lovely bronze sculpture.
I think a very similar helmet is worn by a foe in one of the dream sequences in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. That guy lost though. Sorry.
Blood spray? No, I'm afraid the SHEER HEAT from the RAZORER THAN RAZOR SHARP blade swinging through the air at the speed of light would CAUTERIZE YOUR ARTERIES and flesh LIKE A SIDE OF STANDING RIB-ROAST leaving you a pile of smoldering meat. Thanks for the fabulousness, Bronze Dragonfly Dude and Death-Stag Man!
Those robes, ps, are what I imagine you blog in every day and I'll thank you not to disabuse me of that notion.
There is nothing funnier than swords.
Unless your holding the Business end.
Or worse yet, on the receiving end, like the many pour souls in these headlines.
I cannot understand how scholars could ever have posited homosexuality among the samurai. Really?
Not much difference between a Samurai and a Drag Queen, fabulous outfits and they will cut a bitch.
All warriors end up fucking each other. Not being killed is a hell of an aphrodisiac, and then there's the sweat, and the orifices, and the understanding.
Not just homosexuality, but man-boy love!
I want to see this and I want the volcano coat!
I like the symmetrically Deco-esque helmet. I can imagine Patrick Dennis and his crazy aunt seeing this at some fabulous costume party.
The Polish version:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Polish_winged_hussar_by_TBenda_.jpg
Of course, Bill Cunningham photographed all these coats when they first came out.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/04/24/fashion/20090426-street-feature/index.html
I would peg you for a kimono boy: http://www.japansociety.org/event_detail?eid=41b9f5c
Heh. Pegging. Heh, heh.
Look at that face on the crazy gorgeous deer helmet in the last picture! Twenty bucks says I'll be seeing that in a nightmare sometime soon.
To quote Toshiro Mifune in Throne of Blood, in which he wears a helmet with, seriously, a three-foot-wide crescent moon:
"Are you from the spirit world?"
"It's Japanese."
"How do you know?"
"Because I bought it in Japan."
There was a show (a Nova?) a little while back about, like, the one remaining place in Japan where they still make swords "the old way," and it really was fucking fascinating.
That was on PBS, wasn't it- There's the metal-smelting sensei, who cooks the gob of metal with a team of round-the clock supervision until it's JUST SO, then sends it on down to the forge sensei who hammers it for an entire year until it's into just the correct shape, then he sends it to the polisher sensei who spends another year polishing it with some special material, and so on. Clearly, none of those people have ADD.
Don't forget the documentary "Yasukuni", which places master swordmaking in "a complicated, contentious and often horrific history," as the New York Times put it.
As fun as it is to collectively indulge our samurai sword fetish, it's good not to lose sight of what they were actually used for, again reported by the Times.
i was at a samurai museum once (i skipped the "museum of cutlery" which is apparently full of cool swords) and they had a little placard next to a helmet saying "armour is a form of arms designed primarily for self defense". i've often wondered about the "primarily" part, but obvs the end of the thought is "and secondarily for being faaaaaaaabulous".
anyway, the dutch ship coat is probably from nagasaki, no?