Big one here: this will take a while..

Here goes:

YaYoi Kusama (b. 1929),the internationally famous Japanese artist, checked herself into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in 1977. This was to become her permanent residence, a short distance from her studio where she still works, having produced novels, short stories, poetry, paintings, fashions, and most famously and recently six Infinity Mirror rooms – installations travelling to five museums in the US and Canada - at the Art Gallery of Ontario where I stood in line patiently to get 20 seconds inside each room.

It’s all the time I would ever want. I am vulnerable to vertigo and the Rooms put me on the verge. They are cube-shaped rooms lined in mirrors with flickering lights (one with spasmodic strobe lights) on all sides and the ceiling. A description tells me there was water on the floor, but I was not aware of it. One floor, I remember, the first one, was thickly planted with white and red protuberances – sort of phallic. Kusama has a thing about penises. The devastating room for me was studded with tiny lights magnified and reflected to infinity – yes.

I was reminded of the Marvel-comic-based movies about The X-Men. Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) rides his wheelchair into a vast room on a ramp leading into and looking over a space studded with tiny lights, each one representing the life of a mutant in the world. (Go see the movies.) Twenty seconds of a Kusama room was all I wanted. A staff person opens the door to indicate the time is up and three of us dutifully filed out. Three people at a time are allowed in; the ramp space is tiny. I was single and assigned a companion couple each time but at this last one when I was alone, a staff person came in with me. I asked her if anyone had had a seizure in the room. She was sort of non-committal but I gathered some sort of affirmative. Not surprised.

I was also reminded of another Mirrored Room I saw a long time ago now but I Googled it and it’s still there, installed in 1966, part of the permanent collection in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, by the Greek-American artist, Lucas Samaras (b. 1936). I actually described that room and its effect in a novel (unpublished) I wrote about a woman artist obsessed with self-portraits and therefore with mirrors. (It’s explicitly sexy; I’m sure I couldn’t write it now – fading memory and all.) Well, when I looked up the Mirrored Room, Samaras was the first one in the Google line-up; second was Yayoi Kusama.

The final room we entered was the Obliteration Room, a large gallery furnished with ordinary chairs, sofas, tables and so on. Each participant – that’s us – was given a slip of paper decorated with multi-colored, sticky circles of varying size. We were invited to stick them anywhere in the room, on the walls and furniture, wherever we pleased. This was the fifth week of the Kusama exhibition with I don’t know how many pilgrims who have attended before us, so the room was COVERED with polka dots (another of Kusama’s obsessions). It was, in fact, obliterated.

Talk about hands on! If Rembrandt were alive today he’d roll over in his grave and yet he had his own obsession with mirrors, obviously: he painted a lot of self portraits.

I was also reminded of another famous Japanese woman, Marie Kondo, about three and a half decades (she lists her birth year as “circa” 1985) younger than Kasuma but listed in Time magazine as one of the “100 most influential people” in 2015. She tidies things. See The life-changing magic of tidying up (translated from the Japanese).

When Kasuma was ten years old she experienced her first hallucinations – “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. When Kondo was in junior school (similar age?) she tided up the bookshelves while her classmates played and experienced a breakdown and fainted. When she came to, two hours later, she realized her error. She had been looking for things to throw out.

“What I should be doing,” she said, “is finding the things I want to keep. Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying.”

And she tells you how to make your socks happy. (The trick is in the folding.)

Kondo’s trick of organizing is called the KonMari method and that’s all I’m going to tell you.

When I finish my present spate of work, I’m going to tidy up my life/files. And then I’ll have more room. Not mirrored, of course, but my own.

When I get to it today, I hope, I'm going to consider the Millennial generation. Most of us live in a generation ghetto with little opportunity to cross the boundaries of age, occupation, status, income and so on, unless we happen to be related to or live with or- best- work with a person of another generation I have been fortunate enough recently to crross the line and meet with a few Millennials almost as if we were contemporary. Almost because I was just visiting. I'll tell you about it.

LATER: I left you with a promise to consider Millenials. Well first, the age range:

Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 22-37 in 2018) will be considered a Millennial, and anyone born from 1997 onward will be part of a new generation. (That would be Generation Z, I think.)

My grandchildren are Millennials. I have a pretty good relationship with them, especially with the ones who live in Toronto, but it’s family not peer.

I think I told you last week that I attended a gathering arranged by the Playwrights’ Guild of Canada, of which I am a member. This one was set up for playwrights to meet designers, ten of each. We introduced ourselves, explained our purpose and tossed out ideas, if any, then we mingled and chatted. My purpose was to meet some people who are still active (alive). As you know, I am so old I have lost most of my contacts: producers, directors, publishers, agents, etc.They are dead, retired or have lost their marbles. I’m up here, all alone with my marbles.. So I wanted to meet some live ones.

I talked to an interesting writer/director/manager/designer? Alex Dault has a theatre of his own; he's A.D. of Theatre by the Bay in Barrie. I wrote him the next day, telling him that I had lived in Muskoka for 16 years and had a play written for a rural (not rustic) community. He told me that he has lines on appropriate (new) plays but he graciously invited me to attend a play-reading evening the following Monday – in Barrie, of course.

I don’t have a car any more so I needed to find a driver who cares about theatre and who might be interested in seeing what this generation is doing. Three plays were up for reading that night. We left before the last and longest one because we had to get back to Toronto. But we had a good, interactive time, listening and sharing, even daring to make the odd comment in the discussion following each reading.

Now, about those Millennials. I’ll give you a capsule generalization I picked up online.

“Generations exhibit similar characteristics—such as communication, shopping, and motivation preferences—because they experienced similar trends at approximately the same life stage and through similar channels (e.g., online, TV, mobile, etc.). Generation-shaping trends are most influential as people come of age, which means that members of a particular generation will develop and share similar values, beliefs, and expectations. It is important to remember that at an individual level, everyone is different. But looking at people through a generational lens offers useful predictability for those trying to reach, inform, or persuade a large cross-section of a population.”

They have a sense of entitlement, which is supposed to be their general recognizable characteristic. That’s because their parents, the Boomers, wanted to give them everything and make their lives better than their parents'.

Mind you, theatre minds are different again, but they profit by their cohorts. That sense of entitlement gives them confidence; love of theatre gives them passion; their expectations give them high hopes (glass half full).

“Instead of complaining about adapting for millennials, it’s imperative for leaders and managers to acknowledge the role of millennial behavior as an indication of the needs of the modern workplace to attract, leverage, and retain modern talent.”― Crystal Kadakia, The Millennial Myth: Transforming Misunderstanding Into Workplace Breakthroughs

I really enjoyed the evening discovering current talent. It’s a good thing we went on Monday; the weather and the roads since have been dreadful. As it was, the driving was easy and we had a good time.