Missed me? Then kiss me, fucker!

As the delightfully fragrant lilac blossoms flap at my window, the black dye is casting its toxic glamour on my hair. Its pungent chemical smell strangely compliments a cup of espresso and the Japanese-brand cigarette smouldering in my lips.
It seems we're back in London... Nothing new in this town, everything's fucked as per usual.

Can't drink on public transport, can't murder anyone without papers butting in, what's a girl to do here?

I'll tell ya what. Get roped in to do catwalk for some dodgy punks, get bladdered on a quart of JD backstage and start smashing bottles in the backstreets of Hoxton. Then you get given a silver baseball bat and push around some bitches onstage. Rolling on the catwalk in spiky heels in a staged cat-fight whilst camera flashes right up your gash...

Drama culminates in snogs and scratches on your boobs just over the strips of black gaffer-tape, and then you swap skimpy outfits with a hot tranny in the back alley, feeling up her tanned £4500 tits while cabbies drive veeerrry slooowly past you...
I do love London in some sick destructive fashion, I love the cunt from the bottom of my tarry hateful heart. But only recently that heart was lost in kitschy S&M love hotels of Osaka...



So yes, Japan was fabulous as usual. To get you in the mood let's start the report with just some random visual hilarity and weirdness.
Manko fruit porn:

Fashion: observe Jizo, Buddhist patron of aborted babies, sporting a "Cheerful Little Kids Club" bib.

And of course some obligatory pornographic purikura stickers:


I experienced hanami, the spring festival when sakura blossoms snow on the land and the entire nation (usually so proper, orderly and well-behaved) decide to spend the whole week camped in parks under the blossoming trees, sitting on the blue plastic tarps, eating, smoking and drinking to the point of vomiting. Here is the view you might get from their spot:

And as the fine decadence and excess unfurls you realise that you can't even see sakura anymore through the stalls that sell most bizarre foods - from deep-fried Italian spaghetti dusted with icing sugar to custard-filled pancakes shaped like a fish.
Here's me gorging on one in Osaka:


I spent a lot of time on shinkansen, positively bulleting my way from Tokyo to Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima... At times I felt like I was a character in Almost Transparent Blue - urban towns under overcast sky flickering between steaming mountains; druggy feeling in my clammy claw squeezing a ballpoint pen with neon-green fingernails, scribbling stream of consciousness in my Nippon scrapbook - about the nostalgic smell of stale cigarettes in the upholstery of the seats; the carriage full of smoke and oyaji, balding liver-spotted old geezers, all with a can of beer and a fag, hacking up their tired lungs, sucking on hard sweets. It's so romantic I could die. The blue nostalgia, flashes of town names like Yokohama, flashes of sea as grey as the sky, flashes of wilderness with landscapes seemingly crafted by most talented gardeners; Pocari Sweat factory amongst the rice paddies. The conductor quietly crosses the carriage, he turns back at the doors and takes a small bow even though nobody's looking up from their beers, manga magazines or super hi-tech mobile phones. I'm wired and already drunk at 9am. Let me give you a couple of tips about the fastest train in the world. Firstly, you can always get a seat in one of the smoking carriages. Secondly, the disabled toilets are pretty spacious and having sex at 200km per hour is highly advisable.

Extreme mysticism of Kyoto, wandering in the rain under endless red tori gates, bringing inarizushi as a gift for the stone foxes who wear better makeup than mine.

I don' know what I was thinking, flying over to Japan five years running and never leaving Tokyo. Osaka is the fucking shit. If Tokyo people were London, then Osaka people would be Rome. The fashion styles are shamelessly hysterical, and I'm not talking about prissy Tokyo Lolita! (Lolita is dead but more about that later) Girls are dressed in micro shorts, patterned tights, polkadots, leopard print and lace all at once, they smoke cigarettes and look like they can rip your eyes out with their over-decorated acrylic claws. Girls are baaaad but the boys are WORSE! Big hair, skinny ripped jeans and designer wallets on chains, outrageous bling, pointy snake-skin shoes with golden spurs, pseudo-yankee plaid shirts with rolled up sleeves, embroidered bomber jackets, giant Vuitton handbags... Unisex pair look is big, sometimes the only way to tell a guy from a girl is that the guy is the one with bigger hair with more highlights.


In Osaka I also had the pleasure of meeting a brilliant illustrator Rockin' JellyBean (he draws sensational, fleshy, cum-dripping babes and if you haven't seen his work you have seriously missed out). JellyBean showed us some good rockabilly eatin'n'drinkin' establishments, the sweetest love hotels Japan has to offer, and the one most fantastic secret place I've laid my eyes upon for 26 years of me being on this planet - but I won't blab about it on the internet... I'm sure you'll understand, fantastic secret places are secret for a reason. I also got to witness a bizarre and wonderful artist duel between JellyBean and Jason Atomic, my other beloved artist. I filmed it and here it is - for the art lovers out there.


Let's do some more brash name-dropping, shall we? Here I am buying sake from a vending machine late at night with Junko Mizuno, yet another superstar of the art world.


Before I get any comments may I just quickly have a micro-rant? People keep telling me how "lucky" I am to be spending time in Japan. There's nothing lucky about it! If I hear another one of you whine to me how much you love Japan and how jealous you are of my adventures I'm honestly gonna slap you, so be warned. Here's a suggestion: stop wasting your money on overpriced hello kitty shit from ebay, SAVE UP. If you're lucky enough to have a dreamland which is just a plane ticket away then get off your lazy arse! As of this autumn you'll need ID cards to buy booze and fags from vending machines. Tedious reality is constantly catching up with our dreams... I keep meeting girls who are lost in futile daydreams about joining the frilly flock of kawaii Gothic Lolitas in Harajuku. Sisters, you've pissed about too long, lolita is dead. The only frilly dresses I've seen this year are on desperate overweight office ladies and a few gaijin kids looking very lost and confused. Fret not, Harajuku is brilliant again thanks to the return of the live bands lined up by the Yoyogi park, and the rockabilly gangs hanging out on sunny Sunday afternoons... Clad head to toe in leather, the rockers roar up on their shiny bikes to loiter, comb their quiffs in front of a full-length mirror and dance to each other next to a boombox, whilst their girlfriends look away bored; the girlfriend is just a status thing (like bikes and shoes and outfits) to show up other guys, it's such an amazingly peacock "sexless gay" scene.


Anyway. Travelling is exhausting but typing about it is even more tiring. I shall wrap this up with a tip for my aesthetically gifted readers - I've got some fabulous art prints up in the sales group.