關於 walking bass example ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

【哈瓦那·古巴】English after Mandarin

義大利藝術評論家Philippe Daverio說「真正藝術包括不同方位的解讀」，需要具有「模擬兩可性或是不可捉摸性」。我覺得哈瓦那就是這樣一個獨特的城市。作為一個真正的藝術城市，哈瓦那真實體現了那種不可捉摸的面向。
Philippe Daverio, an Italian art critic, says real art includes interpretations from different perspectives and should be ambiguous or unpredictable. I think Havana, as a true city of art, genuinely reflects that unpredictability.

對於古巴的第一印象來自於社會主義風格的哈瓦那機場。外觀有棱有角，活像是隨時會翻身戰鬥的變形金剛。這點又跟注重建築與環境與人文呼應的新未來主義建築不謀而合，就像Zaha Hadid在廣州建造的那兩隻蟾蜍劇院一樣。這麽多的想像與那種所謂的藝術的模擬兩可性恰恰重合。
My first impression of Cuba came from the Havana airport with that strong socialistic flavor. The angular exterior of the terminal looks exactly like one of those Transformer robots who might spring to life and battle at any second. This coincides with the concept of neo-futurism buildings which stresses the link between buildings and their surroundings. A great example is the angular toad-like Guangzhou Opera House. All that imagination accords with the so-called ambiguity of art.

內部紅色的證照查驗關讓人感覺熱情卻又搭配共產主義的不協調。飛機上座位旁邊的古巴先生嘴裡不時哼著歌曲，機場接駁車和接機計程車上也有動感音樂。我感到困惑。
Inside the terminal is the red immigration cubicles with that yellow tint, which gives a sense of incongruity combining passion with seemingly cold communism. That reminds me of the Cuban guy next to me on the plane who was humming songs all the time. Music can also be found on the boarding gate shuttle as well as the taxi I rode to downtown Havana. I was perplexed.

我問接機的司機英文哪學來的。他說學校裡的外來語文教育中有英文的選項，但不是很受重視。司機又說歐巴馬時代古巴開始轉型經濟準備起飛。可惜目前川普打壓古巴，連房地產都低迷。從路上年輕一代的新潮穿著，我感覺到古巴已不再是舊時代的古巴了。對於古巴一切都還在摸索中。
I asked the cab driver where he learned his English. He replied that English was one of the foreign language options in school, but English was not considered important. He then started to talked about how Obama helped boost Cuba’s economy with the loosened US-Cuban tension. It was unfortunate since Trump swore in and everything had been beaten down including the travel and real estate industries. I could still spot the change from young people’s fashionable outfits. It felt like Cuba was not the old Cuba that I learned from the travel guide. Everything about Cuba was yet to be explored.

哈瓦那絕不是說英文天堂。從找住宿開始，我那卑微的西班牙文就被迫徹徹底底地運轉起來。還好事先下載了估狗翻譯裡的西文選項，加上我確實請過家教老師學習基礎西文發音，這樣勉強能與當地人溝通一下。我也懷疑憑我這樣三腳貓的西文能有什麼本事去解讀這樣一個謎一般的國度？
By all means, Havana is no heaven for English speakers. From the moment I decided to find a casa/guest house on my own, my puny Spanish vocabulary was forced to work hard. (Yeah, I only know about a couple of hundred words. Shame on me!) The good thing is that I downloaded Spanish on my Google Translate in advance. Plus I hired a private tutor to learn Spanish phonics. I somehow managed to communicate with the locals. Sometimes, I doubted how I was going to open up this mysterious nation with my lousy Spanish.

入住後第一件事情就是憑著以往旅行經驗慣例出門找超市。哪知那樣的作法在這特立獨行的國度完全不適用。在哈瓦那舊城區(Habana Vieja)的民宅區裡沒有所謂的招牌。這意味著一個社區中大多數人彼此相互認識，才能知道誰家在哪裡提供什麼樣的服務。可憐如我，為了找瓶裝水，在附近用破爛的西文「Donde esta el agua」問路。經過三個人指了不同的方向後，終於找到一位熱心的先生直接帶我去一個不起眼的窗口買水。饒是這樣我也花了將近30分鐘才順利取得珍貴的飲用水資源。
The first thing I did after I checked into a casa was to follow my routine as a traveler and find a supermarket. Who would have known that this idea completely did not work here. In some residential areas of Old Havana, shop signs simply do not exist. This probably means most people in the community know each other, and thus are aware of where to go to find services they need without shop signs. That translated into my predicament as I tried to find some bottled water in the neighborhood. I literally asked for directions with my broken Spanish, Donde esta el agua? Following three kind passersby’s help in three different directions, I found a nice guy who took me to an inconspicuous window where I finally obtained two very precious bottles of water, which took me 30 minutes for this entire water-getting process.

在找水的途中我看到了麵包店只批量生產吐司和小圓麵包、窄門裡只賣菸和酒的店家、有簡單桌椅的餐廳，以及一目了然的理髮店。這一切都沒有資本主義的招牌來包裝社區的基本運作。也因為對於這裡的無知，我將注意力集中在斑駁街道與頹傾樓房之間發出的聲響上。鍋裡油炸的聲音、收音機裡的音樂、雞啼、車子裡的動感貝斯、路人跟我說hola、先生親吻太太臉頰打波的聲響、吉娃娃的嗷叫，以及路人在街頭講公共電話的聲音—我走在街道的中央聆聽哈瓦那的脈動。當然我所在的這條街絕對不會是觀光客川流不息的Obispo步行街。總之，這裡的許多事物顛覆了我對一個城市的認知。
En route to finding water, I saw a bakery producing only toast and rolls in batch, a shop selling only cigarettes and liquors, a restaurant with simple tables and chairs, and a barbershop that you can see it all at a glance. Everything here ran basically without the packaging of capitalistic shop signs. Because of my ignorance of Cuba, I started to shift my attention to the sounds made between the mottled streets and faded buildings. Deep frying noises from a pan, music from the radio, a rooster’s crowing, pounding bass from a car stereo, hola from a passerby, smackers from a husband to his wife, a chihuahua’s barking, and someone talking on a public phone—I was walking in the middle of a small street listening to the heart beats of Old Havana. Where I was standing is surely not the tourist-flooded Obispo pedestrian zone. Regardless, my perception about what a city ought to be was totally overthrown by the things I experienced initially.

對於古巴的第一印象是新奇且難以用一般邏輯去理解的。我覺得接下來的旅程我應該放下對於一個國家既定的預期。也許這樣才能領會只屬於古巴的不可捉摸的藝術。
My first impression about Cuba was novel yet hard to understand with the common sense. I felt I needed to let go of my expectations for the country. Perhaps, that way I could grasp a touch of the unpredictable art that only belongs to Cuba.

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Nobody’s Fool　　( January 2011 )

Yoshitomo Nara

Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.

But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.

While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.

As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.

In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.

Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.

Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!

I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.

Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.

By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.

After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.

And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.

Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.

But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.

The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.

Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.

After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.

Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.

After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.

I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….