autumn tactics

I believe I have made it through my journal backlog all the way up to the my European trip, save a copy entries on the back of random napkins and flyers. I hope to round those up in the next couple of weeks, but for now I just have all that thinking from the end of the year to type up and I should be solid.

In the meantime photographs from Berlin and Amsterdam are finished, so you can start with those or rummage through the blog archives from last August to December.

東京。最大の首都。

何百万人のサラリーマンがいるんだ？たった一人の幸せは何？お金？嫁さん？プラモデル？

いや、違います。

イカ納豆、モロキュウ、ゴーヤー玉子とじ、とサッポロ生ビール。

はい。幸せ。

So it’s 2010. In the end of December I went to Seattle on business and then a week later had my first live musical performance in roughly twenty years, and then a week later I went to Berlin and Amsterdam for my third European excursion. I have fifty pages of notes in my Kellogg’s journal, as well as seven rolls of film, but for that you’re just going to have to wait a little. In the meantime here are my new year resolutions.

The tangible:
1) I will have at least two photo exhibitions this year, one of which will be at a private showing
2) I will produce at least one EP length album of entirely new music produced

The intangible:
I will be more at peace with my decisions in life, both personal and professional, and towards this more honest with myself and others. To thine own self be true.

So by some sort of miracle I’ve managed to get on the plane with a window seat and no serious ill effects. I’m a little hung over but given that I got only two hours’ sleep on a wide assortment of twelve drinks, I’m doing pretty damn fine. I didn’t get a number of things into my bag that would have been helpful, but packing Thursday was the smartest thing I’ve done in ages and I do have the essentials.

I ask myself how I ended up with such a precarious balance of self-destruction and success, but truthfully it was just a complete lack of judgement coupled with a virtually non-ending string of good luck. VERY lucky: lucky I didn’t say anything more self-centered or obnoxious to my co-workers, lucky I somehow paced myself drinking through the night; lucky we didn’t all split up at midnight and call it a day, lucky we went back to The Hub, stole a good table and the girls we chatted up were just the right level of drunk to screw around with for hours. I must have bought a lot of karma in sending those nengajou (New Year’s cards), because I was just on fire from the minute we left the office last night until I walked down the boarding ramp. What adventures lay in store for me now?

Pure. Unadultered. Mayhem.

I’d write about it, but the crusted sunburn of my victory is far too sweet for words. I am just going to sit here and let it slowly waft off of my skin while the mind reels in nirvana.

December means bounenkai end of year parties. Alcohol, mayhem, and people you’ve just met. Oh yes.

I have a new keyboard. This keyboard’s space key should work 100% of the time. The last keyboard’s did not. You can imagine how no space key would impede writing. Japanese was especially frustrating because the conversion key from kana to kanji is the space bar. Oh yes, it was most impossible to do any sort of writing at home.

Mail, blogs, chat, GOOGLE!

Time after time again I had to CTRL+C a space from some random web page and then CTRL+V it between every word. Maddening. Yes.

But I’m back. Slightly crazed, but back. Expect much more writing (tonight I want to get at least three posts in.) This again is a good time to recommend the RSS, because these entries are dated retroactively. A feed will inform you of them nonetheless.

Huzzah for space bars.

Things have gotten sort of jumbled up again lately. Another cycle of increased madness at work consumes my minutes, hours, days, nights, and more things than I can remember go left undone. This is supposed to be a very special month, at least I thought it should be, because it’s the last month of my twenties. Good bye glorious decade of self-awareness and experimentation. Where do I go from here? So many questions. Such a half-assembled mess…

I haven’t really ever found a place that I call home
I never stick around quite long enough to make it
I apologize that once again I’m not in love
But it’s not as if I mind
that your heart ain’t exactly breaking

But if my life is for rent and I don’t lean to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cos nothing I have is truly mine
–Dido

So August has ended with Nature Wind (which I’m in the process of scanning, so please wait a moment), and now we are already a third the way through September. Have I been working overtime? No, not since August. Have I been spending a lot of my non-working time drinking in September? Yes; for better or worse, yes.

I ventured to CEDEC last week and took a rare trip to Chinatown in Yokohama. I got to hook-up with dear friend Hirota-san again. Saturday I went to the park with a friend and played guitar in between cranberries and sips of wine. Then Saturday night I went to Hirano’s Venetian dinner party. It was a bit of steep investment in terms of money (sixty dollar entrance fee), and time (an unbelievable five hours), but somehow my sanity didn’t degrade noticeably and I ended up scraping by with a terrible headache and rolling in bed Sunday.

This week I’ve been out drinking three nights in a row, and honestly considering I’m leaving for Vietnam tomorrow morning, I think I’m just going to call it an early night (which isn’t to say I won’t be meeting someone for drinks… it’ll just start at seven-thirty as opposed to ten).

September is the month of aki-aji beer in crimson and gold cans, of the Dara Dara Matsuri (ginger festival); of lying in the cool morning sun and eating kaki (crisp persimmons). September is a number of vacation days, of cat-sitting for my best friend while longing for another dazzling rave.

September is the last full month of my glorious and storied twenties.

Work has reverted to the Saturday/Sunday combo mode again temporarily, so most of my plans this weekend were squashed. However I did manage to leave on Sunday around 4:30 so I could visit my friend Daisuke’s restaurant in Edogawabashi. He’s in the process of renovating the new building for business, and selling excess dishware in the process.

I met some new people and made friends. It’s hard for me to remember names off the bat until I get someone’s personality lodged in my mind, so I try to associate faces with kanji (brother 聖也、sister 麻衣、father 弘).

Today marks the first time I’ve had two consecutive days off in roughly two months. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I have made a full recovery, my spirits are much higher and there’s a spring in my step that hasn’t been there for a while. I awaken with no difficulty, fatigue, or dread in my heart. I am happy to rise, and when walking down the street I am driven to song. As the bird says, “I’m not singing because I am happy, I’m happy because I sing”.

Yesterday I managed finally getting the winter coats and blankets into the vacuum compressed bags, as well as my grand recabling done. Dust bunnies have been relocated to the slums of Dubai and many a zip strip keeps the myriad of wires behind my AV setup manageable.

Today I will finish migration of my phone address book and tomorrow be rid of the accursed Willcom. I also will repair the steering column damage done to my green cruiser bicycle, in addition to finishing cleaning. I have prepared meals for myself two days in a row! I know this is your standard (well duh, you’re out of college, fool) terrority for those single age twenty-nine and over, but you have to understand how complete lethargy from overwork drives away all motivation to not only prepare food, but eat it as well.

Yesterday I had a three hard-boiled eggs and a bowl of natto rice for breakfast. Today I took the preparation a step further and made miso, carrot, and boned salmon soup from the last unfurried ingredients in the refridgerator. It was quite nice actually. And my rice got a power-up as well from today’s serving of white and brown with five grain mix added for good measure. I even brewed up a pot of my classic spearmint tea.

I am counting the days until I remove television from my life completely. Once I assemble a plan for a filing system for prints and negatives, I will make the switch and my dear Toshiba will be reallocated for resale/recycling. Huzzah for books and music.

Last night I also managed to visit the darkroom for the first time in about three months. I am getting better, in terms of technique. It’s more a matter of patience and thinking before moving on (duh), but still I am pleased to have far less pictures stuck together or developer burns from poor washing. It bothers my conscience how much water and chemicals are used for my hobby, however.

In any case, I would show you the prints but as you know the monitor is an inferior medium for displaying images when compared to paper, so you’ll just have to visit me and come see my albums.

Speaking of albums, I upgraded Gallery to 2.3, the only change you’ll really notice though are the slideshows are far nicer than before, thanks to Piclens. Now if only the Gallery integration worked with WordPress properly…

Now that my workstation is nearly set up, I can start the DAM workflow I’ve been planning for months. Remaining big ticket items are raising the monitors to my eye-level, and a 64-bit copy of Photoshop to go with Windows 7.

…slowly, but surely, growing.

Work has kind of shut me down physically and mentally the past several months. I think year on year I need to focus on achieving all of my artistic and organization goals by the end of June because summer just makes everything grind to a standstill. However, I’ve managed to take a collective twenty minutes at work and make a number of well-informed purchases to improve my life once I have the chance to live it again.

Since the passing of my Winbook J4, I have completed the initial phase of migration to my new PC, Cheyenne. I bought a 24-inch Nanao LCD to go with my monster machine and after figuring out a way to squeeze it onto my desk I’ve been enjoying it immensely. All that remains is a great recabling of my computer and AV area and I’ll be set to go. The only significant drawback is what plagues most media enthusiasts, lack of hardware support. The centerpiece of my photographic work, the DiMage Scan Elite 5400 II does not work in 64-bit Windows 7. My Handspring doesn’t seem to sync either, but this is less of a bother. The upshot is I have to keep my Windows 2000 box under the desk for the time being to handle the initial stages of data processing.

My POS PHS Willcom phone lived up to its purchase price and the microphone stopped working, rendering the device to be little more than a glorified pager. Since the dude at Willcom Counter was rude, unsupportive, and inflexible regarding my inability to communicate vocally unless I agreed to a two-year contract extension, the offices of David Ventura will no longer conduct business with the company, and I have jumped ship to au. I now have (for free) I new phone with an 8-megapixel camera and bevvy of useful accountrements for a measly 1400 yen a month, or about fourteen dollars (a third what I was paying with Willcom).

For the children of the world, happiness means Christmas. For the game publishers of the world, Christmas means autumn sales, and so, for the game devlopers of the world, autumn sales means kiss your summer goodbye.

This is the second year in a row that I’ve observed this phenomenon. The weeks tick by with scores of events I would normally focus on, all blossoming to evaporate without me ever being aware of their existence. I haven’t been to photo class, much less the darkroom, in over five weeks.

So in amidst the constant waves of management, tech ramp up and lock down, there are but a few points worth mentioning in my life. Here they are presented in coarse, unprocessed snapshot format, for I have less than four brain cells not running in degraded mode.

This is my teikaku. Essentially the national government’s plan to shore up the flagging economy: give every working man, woman, and child 12000 yen (about 120 dollars) to stimulate consumer spending. Kind of like a tiny tax refund with the suggestion you use it to save the sagging market by purchasing domestic beer.

This is a very classicly inspired Rusty photograph. It’s got virtually all of the elements that first enchanted me about Japan… blue sky, fish scale clouds, tall evergreens and a lattice of man-made cables around a lower quadrant of the frame.

One day last week I came outside and discovered some unseen prism was casting a near perfect gradient of visible light into the stairwell.

When I came home that same night, I met this frog in the driveway. His name is Carl.

Only fraternal love keeps game devs from choking each other to death during the march towards ZBR.

And only a panoplly of the finest ingredients an Asakusabashi sushi-chef can collect from around the country can sustain my haggard body.

Since I have no time to go outdoors I’ve been entertaining the idea of synthetic melanin stimulation.

After six and a half dutiful years of service, Eilonwy, my WinBook J4 has died (the coroner has reported a confluence of excessive dust intake and old age as the cause). This has motivated me to move up my schedule for building a PC capable of meeting my needs for high-bandwidth photographic and audio processing.

Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz/FSB1333MHz/L2cache 6MB)
ASUSTeK P5Q PRO
4GB PC8500 DDR2 1066MHz JE
HighPoint RocketRAID 2640×4
2x OCZ Vertex 120GB SSDs w/ 64MB cache paired in RAID-0
Hitachi/IBM 1TB HDD w/ 16MB cache
NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT (DVI×2/HDTV)
BUFFALO 8x Blu-ray drive

Ungodly fast, and currently running Windows 7 RC1 with aplomb. I have named her Cheyenne, in honor of my long-since deceased laptop which carried me through undergrad.

With some trouble, I open the window and turn off the embalming cool of the air conditioner. It’s in the upper seventies and cloudy, a typical late spring Saturday with moderate traffic.

The buses come regularly and often, stopping outside of the guest house three stories below. Nearby someone is intermittently running a ban saw and children squeal with joy across the street. An old bicycle’s brake whines to avoid hitting a kindly old lady, largely oblivious to the bustle around her.

My head is slightly swollen and stuffed with menthol tissues, another night of too much beer and cigarettes. The lump in the back of my throat is easy to ignore, the gentle throbbing behind the peaks of my disheveled eyebrows is strangely satisfying; a kind of half-conscious telekinetic massage.

Today I have three meetings in order, mostly photography and exhibition related. Then tomorrow a photo shoot at Zushi beach and a date for mayhem and villainy with Rob.

But first I must start with enjoying this glorious day of low grade hangover in placidly busy Tokyo. The atmosphere is far too stimulating.

Counting the days ’til summer…

The thirty days beginning from the end of February are a challenge in displacement endurance. Three locations, five days of skiing over a nine-day period, roughly thirty-hours on buses. Tuesday I head to Los Angeles for a business trip. Two weeks later I’m in San Francisco for another. Fortunately I’ve come into use of a laptop notebook that weighs less than nine pounds and has a battery life of more than five minutes. Mind maps, Visual Assist, blog entries. It’s interesting to think how what seems so convenient and state-of-the-art now will be laughable in a decade’s time.

The downside of all this travelling is a virtual freeze on artistic development. There has been little writing, and virtually no photographic advancements made in the last eighty days, save for a one day darkroom course I took last month. I made a wiki for what I’ve learned, but I have to use a discount coupon by Saturday for another session.

My visa expires at the end of May, but I think I will continue to get more than my money’s worth on my re-entry permit before then. Six unbroken years in Japan. Six. So much work, so many trips, so few regrets. Life is rich, and so are the possibilities… for a road warrior.

This afternoon I was mucking about in FL Studio, but I kept getting distracted because I’ve had it in my mind to streamline my footprint, both physical and digital. I have plans to collapse the site as it is and fold it back to something much more basic. Right now I’m just thinking photography, the blog, and the wiki. No more college-era neophyte attempts at creation. That past has long since outlived its usefulness and now it’s more of an eyesore than anything else.

I brushed up a very few minor parts of the blog template. Headers should be uniform more or less through all category and monthly archives. I think I’ve figured out a way to fix 90% of the broken image links in the history, I just need to risk a global search-and-replace on the DB. The older blogger titles will have to be done by hand, unfortunately. There’s four hundred and eighty-some to deal with.

I put the search form back, it should work all right, though it’ll bring a harsh light onto all of those stupid blogger title entries. Once I get the older posts all marked up with titles, categories, and slugs I’ll add the most dense category labels to the sidebar.

Yesterday I took a one-day course in dark room printing. It was pretty interesting, though as you’d expect quite frustrating at first. There are so many steps in manual printing that are handled for you digitally, mostly alignment-related things. I have a couple of discount coupons to go again in the next few months, though, so I’m looking forward to that.