Last weekend I popped into my fave watering hole with my flatmate Chioma when I heard a booming voice in my ear:

You have got to stop stalking me Martine Cotton

I swung around and lo and behold! It was Mr Leo Ryan, an old colleague and friend from Brisbane who I haven't seen for easily 3 or so years. Back then I had a little bookings and promotion agency called Sparkletone, and had won the contract to put the live acts into a huge super-wanky "super-club" called Family. Leo had just come back from a stint in NY and had started doing PR for the club. But Family is owned by a.. erm... fairly ruthless family who made their money through bookmaking and horseracing (very old school shady stuff) and who own virtually an entire city block and all the hotels and clubs on it, and we both got pretty burned by them.

He stuck around in Brisbane for a while after that and then moved on to London, where he is based now, working for a Design company called Tonic. So, it turns out that the company sent him to Tokyo Design Week [see here and here and especially here]...

He and his old uni friend (another Brisbane boy, Greg, who is one of the lovely folk behind Sundown) are closely involved with a gorgeous charity event called Common Threads that involves auctioning off the reworking of vintage kimono by some of Japans hottest young fashion design companies, including
Fumio Akiyama � Fumio
Shinjiro Asatsuki � MOOD et MOON MODE et MOON
Minoru Adachi � MODE ACOTE
Yasunobu Anaguchi � DOPPEL G�NGER
Koji Aruga � Koji ARUGA
Yasuyuki Ishii � YASUYUKI ISHII
Hiroko Ito � HISUI
Michiyo Inaba � MICHIYO INABA
Toshikazu Iwaya � Dress Camp
Yutaka Enomoto � STUDIO ytk 1029
Hanji Komiya � Hanji
Norihito Sato � NORIHITO SATO
Takezo Toyoguchi � TAKEZO TOYOGUCHI
Hisada � MIXED-UP CONFUSION
Noriko Fukushima � NORIKO FUKUSHIMA
Patrick Ryan & Mami Yoshida � YAB-YAM
Kikuko Maki � GARDE COLLECTIVE
Sue Kanazawa � TRIPTYCH: WR & Teturo Nagase (stylist)
Kaori Sumi � Kaos
Richard Sharpe - DEEP SPACETIME
Seiji Inoue � INOUE DESIGN LABORATORY
Yumi Terauchi � Terauchi Design Office
Rumiko Kono
Mykonos
Atetie Opa
Mika Nomura
Cathy Carew
People Tree

The parade and auction itself is being held this coming Friday - the 15th, at Kanda Myojin near Akihabara. There'll be DJ's and performances besides the parade, so it'll be a pretty big night. Wish I could go but hey, guess what? I'll be working. Surprise surprise. My life has become a farce! Can't wait for next year when I can quit some of these jobs and chill out a bit.

In other news, I got (along with the entire city and Tim the punk-rock pimp's bedroom) completely drenched in the biggest Typhoon [check here too] to hit Japan in a decade yesterday. Jo took some great photos - check em out. Never really seen anything quite like it - well maybe some cyclones from my childhood when cyclones seemed to be much bigger - rain just blowing sideways. It was really exciting - I watched the Inokashira express train go speeding through Shimokitazawa station at the height of the storm, and then come reversing back about a minute later... much to the general amusement of the dozens of soaking commuters. Many more commuters were not so amused when they shut down the Odakyu line for a while - never seen Shimokitazawa station so crowded.