continuing MADE IN OAKLAND Series ... Segment 14
the story of Cho's kweejibo clothing co., a men's shirtmaker and shop, all locally manufactured
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"clothing is costume"
the fog disappears in celebration the city's favorite moment, Halloween. the sun comes out for this day always as if it knows this is the city's eminent moment. i donned my costume as a mushroom. not in just any mushroom costume, my body is a white stem with little brown flakes, like a thin skin peeling off, all achieved with glue paint and brown tissue. i have white face powder and an enormous wire-engineered mushroom headdress. it is covered in speckled brown silk and bunches of brown tissue paper. my waist length hair is thrust through a hole in the middle of the headdress so it would cascade over like a waterfall.
We show ourselves at a Halloween fete hosted by the Tamanos*, famous Butoh dancers.
Butoh is a rebellious modern Japanese dance form involving complex facial gestures as well as almost primal shivering movements. Japan's pre-eminent author Yukio Mishima* praised Koichi Tamano for having the quintessential Butoh body. Koichi Tamano trained with the original progenitors of the Butoh movement. *(Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas produced the film "Mishima : a Life in Four Chapters")
Hiroko Tamano, wife of Koichi, looks at me in the way a cat does when it sees a delicious feathery bird. i realize at the last moment that that my costume is very Butoh. she grabs my head, my headdress and starts to rip and tear the paper and silk and pull at my hair. everyone watches, shocked and appalled. they are all in their fine regalia ton which they too have worked on all day. they make indignant noises afterwards. San Franciscans take costuming seriously. especially my friend Tom, who is disguised as a special mushroom fungus which grows only on the side of a corncob, and will go on later that day to win a notable prize at yet another party, a bottle of champagne. he says, "how dare anyone think they can fuck with someone else's costume?" but Hiroko is right, my costume is now perfect, more bedraggled, but more real and more magical, and of course, more Butoh. we hope to attain this in our daily work, after all, to remember what we may have forgotten, that all costume is clothing, all clothing is costume.
*Koichi and Hiroko Tamano are the owners of Country Station on Sycamore Alley. country Station is country style Japanese food, with delicious sushi. It is part Japanese restaurant, part Butoh cabaret. Koichi is the sushi chef. They serve ravishing sushi, country style noodle soup with an aromatic broth full of vegetables and veritable lotus root slicings and thick udon noodles cooked to perfect texture in just the right amount of time.