Shatter.

馬鹿のは、WordPressのアップグレード手順で、configに新規定数を追加するべきが書いてあるが、DBが既にUTF-8なので、Latin以外表示できなくなった。その他のヘルプに、「新規定数を追加するべきではない」って。アホ。

Thus, the six weeks of work overload retaliation ended. Two raves, two exhibitions, two European countries, one jaded and mildly dissatisfied me. Hertzberg was nice, but I rushed into it and tried to make it more than it should be. Natural Smile was much of the same, but on a grander scale, and I got some good shots (torn through eight rolls). Drop went as well as could be expected, and was probably the most well-rounded of all my pursuits. Europe was different, edifying, and I think I have a couple interesting photographs from the six hundred or so I took. Blog entries and photographs will trickle in over the next several weeks as I water down the diatribes and cut through the massive amounts of awesome repetition.

This iteration of Fukushi was better in some ways logistically (read: experience), but artistically I think it was a significant step backward from my production in the spring. Yet, I had friends there to support me, and I think Hirota-san had a good time. It was good to see him enjoying himself.

So, my muscles are sore, my head aches, my house is in a shambles, and I swear off all photography for a month. This lasts about fourteen hours before salivating at the massive stack of negatives on my desk drives me quite nearly insane.

Everyone should be playing more Disaster: Day of Crisis.

是非、ご来場してください。今回のデザイン・フェスタには色々面白いあると思います。

I am back. For those who were out of the loop I was in Austria and Italy for a week. I have something to the order of 20 blog entries and 600+ shots from the trip. It will take me honestly weeks to get through them all, so please be patient. Right now I have to spend the next 144 hours at least focusing on Design Festa 28, which is this weekend. I am in complete ordered chaos as nothing is done, but somehow I will assemble a show with unique and original content. In the meantime, enjoy this corny picture of St. Mark’s Square and keep your eye on the blog.

Ciao.

This starry-eyed young man in some tavern says goodnight to the girl he’s in love with, and then starts talking to the marionettes in the common room. We have wide screen VHS but Japanese subtitles, and sound that only comes in once every seven seconds or so. So I am watching this grainy fairy tale (some Mother Goose lady is yelling down a well now, the starry-eyed boy is now in some kind of dream land I guess, wearing a toy solidier uniform and moving through a cave of skeletons while the old lady directs him from outside the well). Anyway, no audio I thought I’d put some BGM to the film, and since Russian hop-hop didn’t fit, I went with elevator music. But this channel is now some kind of Tales from the Crypt radio show.

So to summarize, I’m listening to what sounds like a Russian haunted house narrator, watching some Technicolor folktale, and reading very crude Japanese subtitles. And to think I was bemoaning the lack of alcohol for this trip (yes, it’s an all charge system, despite the eleven hour flight).

Old lady danced off, the hero wants to get back up, shoots his musket up at the winch outside the well that lowers the bucket. Climbs out and is now chasing after a cartwheeling grandma while we have closeups of a cat intercut into the film. Old lady’s head is cut off, rolls across the ground, her body replaces it with cabbage. Gold coins fall out of the old lady’s basket, and now the cat is transformed into some Chaplin-looking dude. Maybe he was under a spell or something from the witch.

Money talks. After a song and dance routine involving milk maids picking potatoes in the field and a bunch of chimney sweeps, the soldier returns to the candy colored town and with the aid of some gold coins at the city gate gets into town. Now he’s running around getting all gussied up in the latest pastels and what not, I guess with all that loot he took from the woman he beheaded.

Well, the movie stopped and has been off for about ten minutes or so. I suppose someone complained about the lack of audio and the politburo decided that in the interests of equality no movie was better that movie sans sound.

I like looking at the map of Asia as time goes by. I get to see the names of all of the Siberian cities. A good number of them are familiar to me since I read Farley Mowat’s The Siberians a couple years ago. Talk about your weird media choices. Here’s a book that was written thirty some years ago during the peak of Soviet expansion for natural resource exploitation. Farley Mowat is an interesting guy to start with, but him writing about a time, place, and culture completely foreign to me (and him) adds so many layers of imagination it’s mind-boggling. I’ve never even seen a picture of Siberia, but the images in my mind are fantastic; endless snow, quiet, sparsely populated frontier towns, scrub tree lines, constantly dark, overcast skies, and a cavalcade of vivacious, land-hardened individuals pounding vodka like its going out of style and raving about the future of engineering and the Soviet Economy.

The Siberians is probably the bulk of the reason that I’ve dreamt of going to to Russia for so long. My expectations are so high; actually going there and spending time alone under that great, big, sky is surreal. I think it would be both a long and difficult trip, being off the beaten path as it is. Like China, I have to apply for a visa even to get into the country for a short vacation.

(An Olsen twins movie dubbed in Russian started and then was promptly abandoned after about a minute of opening credits.)

One thing that came to mind while trying to find a sleeping position that didn’t involve a steel protrusion into my back was how does immigration work on trains in Europe? The reason it occurred to me is because I haven’t been able to get Lindsey Buckingham’s “Holiday Road” out of my head for the last three days. There’s that intro to National Lampoon’s European Vacation where Chevy Chase’s passport starts out crisp and new but as the credits are displayed it gets progressively more chewed up until it’s a barely tenable mess of stamps, tears, and coffee stains. If I enter Austria via the airport, then get on a overnight train to Italy at Westbahnhof, do I have to go through emigration before I board the train? Or does it happen near the border, or, what? The same goes for entering Italy at like five in the morning, sometime when I’m asleep presumably. It’s not like they’re going to come into the compartment and wake us all up and ask us if we have anything to declare.

I’d say that the train ride is probably the biggest dodgy part of this whole trip. I read there is a train overnight from Vienna to Venice, the Allegro. However, knowing only that I booked (I think) a ticket in a sleeper car and paid with my MasterCard via the Austria rail system’s website, which I can’t even pronounce. The English version of the page didn’t seem to work for international travel so I just fumbled through it running the text surrounding the form fields through Babelfish. There were probably any number of “You must agree to be informed of this” sections that I just completely ignored.

After I received what looks like a digital ticket via email I considered my blind groping validated and immediately claimed complete victory. I really have no solid proof that I actually succeeded in producing anything other than a perceived waste of forty-nine euros, so hopefully someone at the hostel registration will be knowledgeable and kind enough to let me know if I’ll be walking to Italy or not.

This is no minor joy for me. When I went to Thailand, I had a small collection of stereotypes involving Anna and the King, Kickboxer, and Sagat. However, the former Soviet Union was a virtually limitless source of intrigue and propganda for the duration of the Cold War. A record score of James Bond and Tom Clancy films has provided me with Siberian-sized expectations of what and who to encounter, to say nothing of Rocky IV and virtually every male-targeted cartoon series from the 1980s.

Right now my obsessive imagination has reached a fever pitch while listening to the magnificent crescendos of The Hunt for Red October. The captain has just come over the PA in classic, on-the-mark, beleaguered Russian drawl, informing the crew of today’s flight time and destination. I will pepper the rest of my writing all the way to Vienna with a nearly endless tirade of heavily accented movie quotes.

“Most things in here don’t react well to bullets.”

It’s amusing, because you see so much of the stereotypes of Russian characters in film and then when you actually run into real people, it’s so entertaining to find copious amounts of evidence to back it up. This plane is full of tall, thin guys with fair skin and blindingly blond hair or burly comrades with dark hair and beards thick enough require a machete for shaving. Even the CG passenger on the safety video looks like Ed Harris. I wonder how long until our complementary 3-euro Stoly.

Apparently the alcohol isn’t the only thing that costs extra when traveling Aeroflot. The vinyl backing from the seat in front of me seems to be separating from the chair proper. Though this isn’t a huge deal, I just hope Vginny the grinning Aeroflot maintenance technician spends more time checking the avionics than the cabin amenities. I haven’t flown on a 767 in a long time, most of the international flights I run into these days are A320s. My seat doesn’t recline as there is a wall directly behind it, but fortunately this isn’t a huge deal as I am the only person in my row. I may do the pull-up-the-armrest-and-lay-across-three-seats thing in a bit. The dearth of provisions (my inflight-snack was a wet tissue) on the flight will make it hard to get through the full ten and half hours conscious. I anticipated something like this and brought a litre of oolongcha and some Pretz to ration. I wonder what we get to see on the crusty CRT monitor hanging near the lavatory. I hope it’s more than just the Aeroflot commercial presumedly designed to make me feel better about my airline selection (read: the only airline with seats available two weeks’ before departure). The blankets, oddly enough, are quite nice, a retro quilting in UVa orange and blue with the hammer and sickle logo. I may have to have a rare ethical blackout while one finds its way Kenderlike into my bag.

“Brainstorming is one of the best products of American thought. All the modern gangs use it.” Object modeling.

Valentin: “Do you have any idea how long the winter lasts in this country? Tell him, Dmitri.”
Guard: “Well, it depends…”
Valentin: “SILENCE!”

Who just totally made a European train ticket reservation COMPLETELY IN GERMAN?

Me. That’s who.

Damn, this language stuff is EASY. Give me a stopwatch and a map, and I’ll fly the Alps in a plane with no windows.

Japan is SOO polite, that even the toilet paper rolls thank you for using them when you’re done.

“まいどありがとうございます。” == “We appreciate your business.”