So I have been listening to Stairway to Heaven quite a bit. It is something to measure distances by. The art studio where I paint is one stairway to heaven and half a kashmir from my apartment.
Also if we want to talk about comparisons, there was a time when I would measure costs of things by bowls of ramen. As in, a CD is about 2 bowls of ramen, or something like that. Now it is rolls of film or packs of paper. Something costs 12000 yen? Thats 40 rolls of film. The next level is in Leicas- as in the plane ticket home that I bought today cost one good M6, significantly more than the beater no-meter M5 that I could have gotten a ticket for just a few days earlier, had payday fallen within the window for a cheap ticket.
Unrelated, I bought a bunch of post-card sized photo paper to print thank-you photographs to send to those who came to my nikon salon photo show, but never got around to printing them. However I think that I will find a good photo and then print a stack of them for my new year’s cards that I know I need to send out. Want one? Then please email me your address.
Maybe tomorrow there will be yet another earthquake to wake me up around 6:30am. It’s getting to be where maybe I don’t need to set my alarm anymore.
Another letter from my hometown newspaper’s opinion page:
Eye-opening experience
Parents, beware! If you have children of any age, be sure to use your parental controls on your TV or cable box.
I was flipping through channels last Tuesday night and got a shock! On channel 41 BBC at around 9:30 p.m. they showed full upper female nudity! And I am not talking about a short, little glimpse, I am talking about seeing breasts for more than a minute, dead center.
I could not believe it. I had never seen nudity on regular cable before, so I called Time Warner to see what was going on. They said that the network can put out what they want, and that I need to use the parental controls on my TV or cable box to block the programming.
So, please, parents, let’s keep our children innocent. Be responsible for what your kids watch! This experience has definitely opened my eyes.
Valerie Popp, Lincoln
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Good thing she does can’t get Chiba TV’s Friday night 1am programming in Nebraska. I don’t exactly know what the BBC was showing that was so titillating(!), but I doubt it was a nekkid lady in a love hotel reading dirty manga books out loud in not so PG-friendly tones.
Last night, on a tip from the author, I at last was able to find a photo book that I had been after for a long time. Mitsugu Onishi’s “Wonderland 1980-1989” is an incredible collection of photographs of Tokyo in the 1980s. Shot with a square format camera at all sorts of cultural events and in and around east Tokyo, he has made work that is both everything about photography and Japan, but without any of the cliches or sentimentalism that is found in so much “Japan Photography”. You can see some selected images from the series on his website, in GALLERY 1.
I found his book at Genkido, a first rate shop of fine art and photography books. They have an intelligent and classy selection of books- Not only did I go home with Wonderland, but also with a signed Araki book (2000 yen, which was 200 yen cheaper than if I had bought it new), and Looking at Photographs by John Szarkowski for 1800 yen. I was tempted by the Japanese edition of Robert Frank’s The Americans for it’s translation of Kerouac’s forward, and probably gasped too loud ( I had my music on at the time) when I saw an original edition of Hiromi Tsuchida’s masterpiece, Zokushin, and maybe I gasped even louder at seeing the price of 20,000 yen…
I have said it before, Onishi Mitsugu is the sharpest photographer working in Japan today. And not because I know him, it’s because his work is always right on. It has everything to do with Japan, but at the same time the photos themselves do not depend on their being images taken in his homeland. The are first and foremost excellent photographs, with the rest of the details following along, interwined with the time and places that they were taken. You can see some of his work on his site, with some amazing new images in the New Gallery section. While the photographs are top notch, they tend to be hidden behind a bit too much flash programming. Regardless, take a look.
