昨夜搬入帰りながらかなり重要なことを気づきました。最近写真展の客さん評判を心配したけど、気づいたら、評判は重要じゃない。そもそもこの写真展の趣旨は大切な友達を感謝するためです。そして写真展を準備しながらその人たちのことを愛情込めて賛辞として作りました。それでもう成功です。

This is important so I’ll say it in English as well.

Recently I’ve been worrying about the critical reception to my show since I’ve invested so much time and money into it. But when I was on the way home from the installation last night I realized something: it doesn’t matter what sort of critical reception I get. The original motivation behind this exhibition was to celebrate my friends; the ones that pulled me up and helped get my feet under me here in Japan. And when I was preparing for the show that’s what I did; I fondly thought of the people in the pictures, all they’d done for me, and I made these photographs as a tribute to them. So the show’s already a success.

Thanks for helping make it one. 皆さん本当に有難うございました。

今日色々作品を整理して、写真ワークショップ久しぶり出席した。夜にマイちゃんの誕生日会．．．カラオケ、ボウリング。なっくんが居た。古い友達と楽しめた。新しい人と知り合った。

心の中で、懐かしい好奇心が生えた。思案しています。

やわらかくて刺激的。

Waiting is.

Come on, my star is fading
And I swerve out of control
If I, if I’d only waited
I’d not be stuck here in this hole
Come here my star is fading
And I swerve out of control
And I swear I waited and waited
I’ve got to get out of this hole

Stuck on the end of this ball and chain
And I’m on my way back down again
Stood on a bridge, tied to the noose
Sick to the stomach
You can say what you mean
But it won’t change a thing
I’m sick of the secrets
Stood on the edge, tied to a noose
You came along and you cut me loose
–Coldplay

They were sitting
They were sitting on the strawberry swing
Every moment was so precious

Could be blue
I don’t mind
Without you it’s a waste of time
– Coldplay

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.

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.

Do you remember my eyes? How they shift between blue and grey depending on the weather? The amber ring in the center that catches the sunlight?

Yes, the circumstances have changed, but my eyes and the soul behind them are still the same.

Cheers!

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.

At 1:25 this morning I stared into the flowing Kandagawa and I saw the past. I saw it rushing by awash in garish fluorescent light, unnoticed and trivial. But leaning on the aluminum bridge railing with a crumpled Camel hard pack in my breast pocket, nursing the wounds of my termination, I knew there was nothing to be said or done. I knew it before the night had even started; I knew it in winter last year as I undertook the most visceral and pure session of my limited photographic career.

I have been, and always will be, a lover; born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.

And I’m sorry it had to drive us apart.