autumn tactics

Sometimes circumstance does me a favor and makes me wait. It’s the only way I have found peace.

The greatest passion is the unthinking. There is no doubt, no questioning, no measurement of the fervor. An unseen force grips the heart and spurs the body into action. I am consumed of late by a subtle form of madness. I come home from the office as always around ten and immediately set to work. Scanning film, adjusting levels, printing proofs, tweaking text. I scour the internet for resources on technique, reference media, and self-promotion. The whirlwind around my fingers does not stop until well past three in the morning, when I collapse in a pile upon the last vacant spot in my upturned room.

For two weeks I have continued like this, my every idle second spent on combing the deep recesses of my mind for forgotten tasks.

So buried in photography have I become that I can’t even remember actively what I’m doing.

Exhausted. After one more darkroom marathon session and class I must crash…

What do you do when the world pulls the rug out from under your heart?

Find the stupidest movie with the corniest one-liners possible and guffaw your blues away.

Thank you, Mr. DeLuise. God bless.

I woke up again inexplicably at five a.m., and deeming it too early went back to bed. I missed the sweet spot around seven-thirty and woke up at nine, but I had a dream that had me whistling on the way to work.

I wore my pink and grey striped three-quarter sleeve under my reversible vintage down vest, blue nylon-side out. It felt _fantastic_.

I left the work of multi-threaded allocators at nine and swung by Yodobashi on the way home to undo the damage I’d done the night before. I returned the Fuji Rembrandt fibre stock for some Ilford RC pearl coat. It’s not quite as vibrant and textured as the Gekko stock I used for the Enoshima show but it should be more in my range for darkroom experience.

I’ve torn a couple drawers apart exposing the complete lack of organization the last three years’ film stock has been subjected to, but it needed to happen sooner or later. Going to the darkroom tomorrow has just given me the kick I needed to get down to brass tacks. Saturday I’ll probably pick up a couple more Hakuba albums and get it all in order at once, chronologically and labelled as God and Phillip Greenspun intended.

Anyway now I have my material sorted and about thirteen shots or so to try out with the new medium tomorrow. And then on Saturday evening I’m off to hit up Gentenkaiki for a long, hippie rave of a three-day weekend.

Autumn always seems like a time to reboot. The heat goes away, so doing things, simple things, isn’t laborious. Autumn has a lot of anticipation, too, so that adds a little fuel to the fire. I think part of it is programming from all those formative years where autumn meant new grade, new classes, school supplies, activities, aspirations, dreams. “This year it’s going to be different, I’m going to join all these clubs, make a million friends, be the top of my class and get Mary Jane Perfect to go with me to homecoming.”

But you can’t escape the drama. The drama follows you around basically forever until… well… if you’ve been talking to me a lot lately you know exactly what I’m talking about.

This weekend I.am.out. For better or worse, I’m going to Gentenkaiki with the two Satomis. This is a 3-day affair so I am going to pack to-the-teeth. There will be moving water, grass, quiet, Buddhism, noise, dancing, alcohol, ?1?#$, and undoubtedly drama.

But that’s my life in autumn. Drama.

Who are you? Is it your parents’ love? Your friends’ influence? Something you saw on television? What the girl on the street told you to be? Maybe all of it. You have no choice really, existing is experience, and the all the mind does is absorb and make it your own.

There’s something inside of all this, like an uncarved doll in a supple piece of wood. The question is will my conscious mind where the tools are kept listen to the wood?

Autumn has finally come, and the rides to and from work on my bicycle are envigorating. The balcony feels wider, cleaner, fresher. The house air is cool and carries a faint tint of paperbacks. My heart swells with the energy of the season, and I have no end of things to do.

I live by myself, spending long, quiet nights and weekends in solitude, but in my mind I’m never alone. There is a deep warmth inside that makes me smile. This is a blessing.

[originally recorded April of 2001, before the start of autumn tactics but included for posterity]

The stewardess made me put my laptop away. I guess it’s because they want your undivided attention during takeoff, because it’s the most likely time for a disaster to occur. So I started watching the safety video with nothing else to do. I swear I know the male attendant in the tape like he’s my in-law. I call him Brad. I’ve flow roughly twelve thousand miles in the past month, which is a big deal for me who hates traveling. I went to Vancouver at the beginning of March for an academic event. It was actually pretty nice: the sidewalks are really wide, and everything is super clean. The average level of education in Canada seems to be a lot higher than the States, too. Forgiving the western obsession with curling, it was pretty cool to see the world “obseqious” in a headline on the front page of the national paper.

That had to be the start of the one of the wildest, most interesting trips I’ve been on. I bought Cuban cigars for my old boss and smuggled them back into the States, met a condomologist who educated me in the ways of exotic protection, and got throughly soused after beating one of my professors in foosball. This was a big deal because he’s from MIT, where they have foosball tables in practically every lecture hall. After Canada I started a shoestring trip to Tampa to meet some of my fraternity brothers. I flew from Seattle to Vegas to Detroit to Tampa, all in ten hours overnight, with a cutthroat 30-minute layover for connection designed by the University Travel Agent.

In the spring of 2001, on my red-eye from Seattle to Las Vegas I met my first single-serving friend. Her name was Rose and she was from Seattle. Though she was only 21 like me, she’d been married for four years. She was a special education teacher and knew absolutely nothing about computers. I thought it was kind of interesting how very different our lives had already become at such a young age. She was really scared about flying, and only going because she got roped into attending someone’s wedding in Vegas. Her husband and friends (who looked like they were off the set of Almost Famous) were traveling with her, but they were on the other side of the aisle.

She looked quite apprehensive as the engines started up, whining and squeaking profusely. I told her this was standard far for an Airbus and that’s just the way they build planes in Europe. That seemed to calm her down somewhat, but she swore she couldn’t fly until she had her Budweiser. This about cracked me up, she needed her Budweiser. As the plane rocked about during our ascent to thirty-thousand feet, I assured her that 95% of plane crashes were due to mechanical failure, not the turbulence. This made her a little more relaxed. Still the plane continued to lurch from side to side, and I started to worry if she’d be all right until the drink service started. Then I noticed her husband holding her hand, rubbing his fingers consolingly. That’s one of this things that you see and it just makes you feel good that you’re human.

今日九月の大撮影会が引き続きました。朝一番に元気なるためは納豆でしょう？

午後に久しぶり河童橋を経て浅草にモデルさんの写真をとりました。

写真教室の後にちょっとだけBREASPHEREに行って踊りました。YOZOは気持ちよくて、クラブなのに野外の盛り上がり雰囲気だった。

One time, I was walking from Kappabashi to Akihabara taking pictures. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but I think maybe 2007 or 2008, in the autumn. On my way through one of the many charming, quiet backstreets of Taito-ku I met the gum kid. He was playing by himself outside just before dusk. We had a small conversation.

Me: こんばんは。 (Good evening.)
Kid: [僕のルックのワッペンをみる]どうしたの？マリオ好きの？ ([looking at the patches on my bag] You like Mario?)
Me: そうだよ。僕はゲームを作っている、仕事。 (Yeah, I make games. It’s my work.)
Kid: 何のゲーム？(What games?)
Me:「応援団」知ってる？(Do you know Ouendan?)
Kid:DSを持ってる。聞いたことある。(I have a DS. I’ve heard of it.)
Kid:チップ見せて。 (Show me the cartridge.)
Me:今無い、会社にある。(I don’t have it now, it’s at work.)
[子供はガムを出して渡す] ([Kid takes out a piece of gum and hands it to me.])
Me:これは何？ガム？ (What is this, gum?)
Me:ありがとう。(Thanks.)
Kid:じゃあ、またね。(Ok, see ya.)
Me:またね。(See ya.)
Kid:バイバイ。(Bye.)

The gum kid was so nonchalant, so cool. But not in an intentional, prepared way. He was just so natural and quiet, like it was the most obvious thing in the world to talk to me, and that we could understand each other, and that I liked gum.

The gum kid blew my mind. I want to be like him.

今日も有難うございました。これだけで幸せ過ぎます。

感謝です。

Thank you.

This week is an off-week artistically. I was hoping to have the house spic-n-span to hit the ground running next Monday, but work this week has slowed things down a little bit. Tomorrow is a big day at the office, and it’s looking like I’ll miss out on the Sumidagawa fireworks festival again this year… really wanted to go, but, duty calls.

MOST important this weekend is getting thank you cards in the mail for each and every person that took the time to come out and see my show. One thing that my mentor Randy Pausch always stressed was the importance of hand-written thank you notes for people. In this day and age especially, the personal touch counts, and an artist is nothing without his audience.

Thanks guys again, I promise to have as beautiful Japanese as I can muster in the mail for you this weekend.

Keiko, have a lovely time in Thailand, scout it out for me!

今週があっという間に終わって、もう週末と信じられない。先週と同じに、仕事が終わったら飲みにいって、心の底から疲れました。筋肉が痛い。頭がふわふわ。11時まで寝ていたけど熟睡できなかった。

今の問題が80％ストレスと分かってるけど簡単に直せない。今日楽しめるように努力します。

So I’ve already written more in the last week than I have in the last month, and I’m not even on vacation. What is the cause of this you may ask? Well, I’ve been lugging the VAIO around with me a lot in the lately, so I can manage my exhibition notes on the fly. I’ve also been riding on trains a lot, with all these trips back and forth from Enoshima.

The weather has been flip-flopping the past week, spring to winter. Tomorrow are forecasts of snow. I’ve caught a cold. The website’s database server has been misbehaving (it’s miracle if you’re still around to see this). Work is bearing down on me. I’m woefully behind schedule for all of my big three projects for the year.

Things could be better.

But then again, things could be much, much, worse.

So, we do what we can. We do our very best to apply time management techniques to our time, and strive to make life better in at least one way, for ourselves and for others. Every day.

Tip: Start in ProPhoto, deliver in AdobeRGB.