Jun Takahashi has always maintained the role of the peaceful warrior, fighting the creative battle for his own particular vein of anti-fashion – an anarchistic mix of subversive punk references, hidden details and fantastical mythologies.
His honest, innocent approach to his craft has attracted the attention and the cooperation of many interesting creative souls over the years, including Rei Kawakubo and Patti Smith.

Patti first encountered Jun’s work through photographer Yoshie Tominaga, who has worked extensively with the two artists on separate projects. Via a series of letters, all of which are published in Tominaga’s book “The Shepherd”, Patti and Jun conversed over the possibility of collaboration, and arrived at the following poem Neo Boy. For Jun’s Fall Winter 2004 Undercover show “but beautiful”, Patti recorded her own recital of this special poem, originally published as the 8th poem within “Radio Ethiopia”, the 1st section of her 1978 book “Babel”. It was played as the soundtrack of the show in March 2004.

The poem captures an esoteric mood, telling the tale of the spirit Neo Boy through a surrealist, existential stream of consciousness. Birth, death and the broad reality of sensual human experiences and modern society are deconstructed within her short stanzas, the raw power of freedom, escapism and creation represented by Neo Boy’s animalistic qualities, his bird mask and his ‘magic touch’.

An excerpt from “Neo Boy” by Patti Smith

“neo boy w/ skin shimmer. yellow rubber tissue fingers forming crazy mountains. etched in pink fluorescent shadows flubber shadow. paper flowers nodding rhyming bearning (sic) red teeth.
neo boy grins and leaps into the sea pommaded (sic) with blood.
the sticky kisses. the wet and shining lips of the neo boy slobbering on his master. the innocent worship. the exotic mathematics. the music of neo boy popping electric exclamation points from wet tongue of neo boy on commack spleen rack sliding home free like oiled baseball thanks to oil droplets on the feathers of the neo boy craning his neck to aim sink and eat (not devour) the moon.
goo-rain la lune caught like a gas bubble in the belly of neo-boy dreaming of remarkable voyages accursed ships frozen in dish shapes and his crazy disgrace as he exists in a field of jazz.

neo boy, neo boy, neo boy, neo boy melts in jelly machine,
the whole thing is how he can change the scene or be a changeling, transformation is relative says neo boy.
tropical plants shiver, what can you say about habitat that hasn’t been said before?
greedy children lap up radioactive jewels
spit in the dunes by these so-called know-it-alls.
soon the gleaming bones of innocents will be scattering the sands and some enterprising old soul will gather them up in an old leather bag and sell them to a contact.
some kinda contact. some kinda roman woman or some kinda bird head.
Someone will come, a beautiful though thoughtless, childless shrew who will rearrange the bones with all the discreet adoration of a Japanese boy adjusting his weapon, neo boy.
he dons, he dons his bird head, he dons his bird face mask and plucks up a sharp metal star and cuts a new scene from a sheet of copper, what can you say about habitat that hasn’t been said again?
we take these pieces of paper, these precious sheets, we bend them into birds and we fill the illiterate…”

Above image: Patti Smith photographed by Annie Liebovitz.