autumn tactics

The summer that never was continues and life passes me as I sit in a puddle of convenience store sandwiches, canned coffee, and unshaved Fridays.

I will be working like this for probably another five weeks. I am stalling on using the GPU to export pixel shader contents directly to memory. Thread safety and frame rates follow me into my dreams where I ask my artists once again, are they _sure_ that the alpha is cleanly feathered in all of the UI textures?

Sample photographs are back from the ST801, and unfortunately it seems that the iris blades will not close, leaving the camera perpetually locked at F1.8. This did cost me a roll of Centuria 400 and I should have checked the mechanics of the camera before taking any pictures. Now I have the task of dismantling the lens in hopes of repairing the aperture control.

I am going to try very, very, hard to get to a highly talked of party at the end of the month, which as my good friend Futoshi says will provide, “some really great photographic material.” It is the weekend before _the_ milestone though, so my hopes of making it are waning.

A significant period off is rumored to occur in the next two months. The thought I could stop working and actually go somewhere seems unreal; I am hesitant to believe and even if it did manifest it would most certainly fall dramatically short of my expectations for the fabled multi week time off game developers supposedly get after a big project. Nevertheless, I am starting to study Italian again…my first instinct was a multi-country crawl through central Europe.

Today I am going out to the east side of town to get some precision tools for the Fujinon lens, and see an exhibition of the Japanese master painters. I also need some honest to goodness epiphany for planning my next collaborative show. We meet today and hopefully will make some significant headway towards a concept we can be invigorated by.

So…tired…natsubate.

I have some writing from Taico Club, but it’s on scraps of paper right now and I’m still disorganized. However, the photos are up, so please have a look. For some reason the gallery RSS isn’t working right now it seems.

The longer I spend wrapped up in work, the more disheveled I become and the more frustrating the moments of free time are. It’s when I take a step off the merry-go-round that I realize how much time has passed and how many virtual dishes have piled up in my personal life.

How many dozens of rolls of negatives are piled up on my desk?
I haven’t replied to that person in three months?
The friend’s concert I missed was when?
…
Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t put too much stock in our relationship either then.

Every time I wake up on a Saturday at noon and do a quick mental check on how many promises to myself I’ve broken, I feel sick to my stomach and roll back over, pulling the blankets over my head once more.

Why can’t I have the strength to be able to sort through all the perishable parts of living and consume them by value, in turn?

せっかく日記を復活したけど、二ヶ月が過ごして、連絡していないね。ごめん。普段は毎月10-15回くらい書きますが、今年はなかんか余裕がない。来月はまた展示会があります。しかも、固くて決心しても今回が一番中途半端になっています。仕事はきつい、毎日23：30ごろ家に到着してる。なぜか、ライフがもっと複雑か、年取っているか、毎日～6時間の睡眠が足りなくて、だるい。

とにかく、今日も、明日も、仕事ですが、深夜製作中．．．

1983. Annie closes on Broadway after 2,377 shows. Gandhi wins Best Picture as Return of the Jedi picks up steam. Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the solar system. The De Lorean Motor Company ceases production, and the McNugget is introduced. I am three years old and love Ernie. Konica also produces a charming little pocket rangefinder with auto focus, shutter, and film winding, all for the low, low price of 47,800 yen.

For some time now, I have wanted a lightweight “junk” camera that I can always have with me and throw in any number of bags. The A-1 is too versatile and valuable a piece of equipment to have jostled around in my backpack all the time. The 70-210mm zoom lens is also intimidating to a lot of people.

Anyway, I didn’t want to put a lot of money into said camera because that would defeat the purpose. So I’ve been coming flea markets and Akihabara back alleys for a couple of months. I finally found what I was looking for last weekend while helping out the Nihon Furosato Food Festival. I bought shiny, black, brick from a kindly, well-traveled old man who spoke way too much like a used car salesman. But the camera was impeccably well kept, spotless and hardly a scratch on it– inconceivable for a 25 year old consumer shoot-and-forget camera.

Though I have had a decent array of camera bodies for a while, this marks the first time I’ve ever had film bodies at the same time. I realized today how nice this was when shooting the annual hanami raves in Yoyogi park this afternoon. The weather was a real drag, frigid, raining, and dark. But having 1600 Natura pushed to 3200 in the A-1 and 400 Presto in the Konica, I felt confident that I could handle any number of shots without feeling the pressure to finish a roll for switching stock.

For the first time in a long time I have a considerable scan backlog now, so once I get through my slides I’ll make an album in the Gallery dedicated to Konnie.

Just a short note to say that this morning I processed and got another album up in Gallery. This time the subject is my walking trip of Kyoto during last New Year’s. A number of interesting posts came out of the trip, so you may enjoy reading them again while watching a slideshow of the photos in the background.

Cheers!

Though I’ve been taking pictures of raves for seven years, I rarely ever post pictures from them. However, last weekend I went to Tenrinsai in Fukushima, and was set on taking a substantial number of photographs. I planned for varying weather conditions (Centuria), as well as extremely low light levels (Super Presto 1600, pushed to 3200). In the end I got through six rolls of film on the A-1 and Macha’s borrowed Holga, with a couple snapshots in between with the PowerShot. There are some very show-worthy shots, though if I can successfully integrate them into a theme is another issue.

I have some reflection to put up along with these, but for now just take a look the pictures, and get a little taste of Japanese country psytrance.

Recently, every time it’s been sunny outside I’ve had the almost overpowering urge to climb on the Enjoy, ride around with a couple of rolls of Super Gold, and get a crackle-cold bin beer at the peak of my adventure. This is most assuredly the natural romantic in me augmented by my swollen loathing of computers. However, as nice as it generating gigabytes of data to archive, it creates a disproportional amount of back stock which may never see the light of day.

You are probably thinking, “Rusty, I haven’t gotten any pings from your Gallery RSS in months. I see a fair number of shots in your blog, but it’s just a tiny sliver from what you’ve been up to with little frame of reference.”

Yes, yes, you’re right. If I don’t improve my skills on the post-shutter click side of things, I’ll never get anything better for the shows. The truth is, I have enough material to produce years’ worth of similarly-assembled appearances at Geisai and Design Festa. But, there are three major problems with it all:

1) it’s unprocessed
2) it’s all unrelated (aside from the relation of my mundane current style, which draws jaded criticism in its own right)
3) the presentation medium is sparse, fragmented, and high school level

So, today despite it being one of the last few hot glorious days of summer, I stayed in this morning and put together two new albums for Gallery. One is touristy (thusly in Travel), and another slightly more artistic (in Tokyo Bicycle Wanderings).

The former is my trip to Seoul which happened only three weeks ago! That’s a pretty good turnaround for me. The latter is a trip to the Arakawa in July. Of particular interest to shutterbugs is that this set is a mix of the A-1 and 5D, and some similar shots are set up around the river, so you can see the differences in the medium and my current mastery of the formats. It’s not very scientific, the comparison factor was probably just in the back of my mind. So keeping this in mind, Ken, have a look and let me know what you think (provided I ever get the damn comments working again.)

on being

what is techno what is love?

to illuminate or fade, so many choices at instants in our life.
unthought, unspoken, unfelt, but in the pit of our souls a gear is turning.

yes today was x, y, and z.
tomorrow I will do great things and be songworthy
but no… yet no…

now we are faced with a challenge as always:
to burn, or to fold.
tomorrow is uncertain, now the blood of time is within you.
so ignite! so shine!
so give every last drop of your beautiful broken life to the stars,
for only in this instant will they weep for you!

on dancing

pulse until you drop thrive shake and spin
do not listen to the music!
run ahead of it!

you already know the next four beats, this is obvious.
they have telegraphed themselves into your brain,
you need only to complete the sequence.
it is a game of chess encoded in the rhythm of raindrops;
you have no choice honestly except to submit to their will.

내일 나는 한국에 가고 있다. 짧은 여름 휴가 이다. 나는 많은 사진을 찍고, 나의 전표안에 쓴다.

여기 한국어안에 몇몇 낱말은 있는다.

사과 차 야구 고기 사회주의 여권 투명한 뜨거운 비 펜 구름 키보드 검정 유리 뚱뚱한 얇은 모자 사진기 말.

당 춤 종 일 생활 죽음 할머니 직물 웃음 외침 사랑.

언젠가, 너는 나를 사랑할 것이다.

나는 너를 위해 아름다울 것이 무언가를 살 것이다.

サヨナラ。

So, Design Festa has ended, much sooner than I expected, actually. Friday night I toiled updating my poems and assembling my concept summary until morning, returning from the Southern Tower Kinko’s as the sky grew light at 4:30 Saturday morning. After sleeping for two hours and being dead to my alarm, the impatient calls from my ride at seven threw me into a dash of assembly until 12:15, over an hour past the show opening. I foolishly thought that being the second time around I’d be more prepared and installation would go smoother, but again this time I had nearly twice the materials as the last, and my booth setup was more complicated than my previous outing. Thank the Lord I had friends with me to put it together. Without them, there would have been no show

Then with a sweat-frosted brow, I stood proudly in my skiing cowboy shirt, eyes alight nostrils flaring, continuing on energy that came from some sort of environmental tap. Balancing on my toes, rocking over my knees I smiled, beamed, and gestured. I explained what Tokyo meant to me, what my goals were for the future, how the buildings and the colors, the stories witnessed and imagined all drove me nearly insane with ardor that simply must be redirected onto these two dozen pieces of coloured paper.

I didn’t eat for thirty hours, just absently sipping plastic bottled sports drinks between the waves of young girls that drifted in and out of my booth. When I sensed someone was not in a hurry and genuinely looking at my wrinkled black canvas, I intruded making a slight bow and offered a headset playing a remixed version of Leonid’s Crater. The ambient river that I coaxed out of the microKORG mingled with samples of clacking heels, passing bicycles, and slowly withdrawing automobiles. Birds warbled and summer cicadas sang: so much shuffled and tinkling green tea powder over a sublime layer of mint cake. The sound was well-received and led to conversations, long moments where I forgot my humility and sped on feverishly, taking every question and using it as a springboard into a clammy reel of my philosophy. Perhaps too emphatic, after finishing a complete revolution of my spiel, conversation often dropped off sharply and my exhaustion precluded common sense, ending each meeting with a weak smile and a passing of my business card.

I sold a dozen or so postcards, gave away a handful more, and at the end of the day had so much in my mind of how I would improve upon it all next time, during packing up and the train ride home I was virtually catatonic.

Already a bushel of future concepts have risen up in my mind like sprouting weeds after a long summer rain. I don’t have time to enumerate them all right now, because this is the stream of consciousness post, and I don’t have the gallery assembled yet anyway. Give me a day or two and then you can see the collective fruits of my efforts (and maybe even hear them).

f-stops, ASA, EV adjustments, push processing, dpi, Kodak paper, Fujifilm, wide angle, telephoto, AE mode, tripod, spot metering, depth of field, manual focus, Sunny 16 rule, black and white, color negative, reprint, enlargement, crop, blower, macro, bulb, zoom, scan, archive, levels, contrast, brightness, unsharp mask, saturation, luminance, highlight, shadow, f/8 and be there…

single. lens. reflex.

Apartment building in Nakameguro just south of my office on Yamate dori; also taken in the weeks before Geisai.

I like Konica Minolta Centuria Super 400 because it gives pretty punchy colors for negative film. Blues, yellows, and reds are well-separated and heavily saturated, giving the images, to my mind, a primary look which reminds me of grade school. Five rolls were included with my scanner. It’s too bad that the company has stopped manufacturing all 35 mm camera products. The only stock left is what’s in the stores now, so it seems that the film will only live on in professionals’ refrigerators after January or so. I have about twenty rolls on hand in my kitchen at the moment.

The key to 30-day trials is consistency. I think in the end, consistency is a lot more difficult than a handful of herculean fits. It’s more respectable, and requires more discipline. If you run every day for twenty minutes for a month, it is much more admirable than four hours on a Saturday or two.

Since this month I am a) not playing games, and b) not eating after ten o’clock, I figure I need to balance out all this not doing stuff with a little something. So each day this month, I will post a photograph I’ve taken, at a fairly decent size here in the blog directly, perhaps with a comment, perhaps just by itself. Think of it as your daily glance through my eyes, like looking out the window on your way to work, except every twenty four hours outside is a completely different spatial location. Something like tags or categories would make this more manageable.

Anyway, here’s December 1st:

This was taken a couple weeks before Geisai 10, somewhere between Ebisu and Nakameguro. I didn’t get the film developed until after the show, so it didn’t make the cut. Next time, though.