Morning walk

Terrible snow this week. Wet, cold, dark, with thunder and lightning. This morning, the sky cleared a bit and I decided to walk to campus. I left at about 6:30 when it was still a little dark. Very quiet and not as cold as I had thought. It was a wonderful way to start the day.

As I walked to work in the cold silence, I couldn't help to laugh out loud (yeah, I actually did) and smile at how easy and simple life could be if you let it. All my regular worries vanished. Nothing except the rising sun and the crows that flew by seems to have any importance. For the first time in a while I felt that inner tone that has always been there. The one that rings out with good positive vibrations and makes me feel like I matter in this world. Not sure if it is confidence or arrogance, but I just felt like I was special and better than the guy I have been looking at in the mirror lately.

The feeling, like all good things, did not last forever. By the time I got to the office, I was back on the gerbil run-a-round wheel trying to make my fingers crank out something that could pass for linguistic analysis. The walk home was nowhere near as nice. Too noisy and people and cars in my way. But, still, the morning niceness was worth it.

Ok then.

Coming storm

 

View from my office window about a month or so back when the autumn leaves were nice and red. Now they are all gone. The recent weather has been downright miserable. Cold, wet, and dark. 

Recently, I often feel something akin to a gathering storm. I am not sure why or if it is of a personal or worldwide (or both) nature, but it feel like something bad is coming. I am reminded of a quote from the movie Raising Arizona, when the main character voices over this monologue while Tex Cobb rides through the dessert throwing hand grenades:

That night I had a dream I drifted off 

thinking about happiness, birth, and new life but now I was haunted by a vision. He was horrible a lone biker the apocalypse. A man with all the powers of Hell at his command he could turn the day the night and laid to waste to everything in his path...I didn't know where he came from, nor did I know if he was dream or vision but I feared that I myself had unleashed him for he was the fury that would be.

The part that rings true is wondering about if I unleashed some foredooming crappy karma. Again, just a feeling, and it is not nearly as dramatic as the warthog from hell image in the movie, but something is there even though it is hard to articulate. 

Who knows though, it could very well be the effects of the pandemic. I have also gone through a good deal this year and maybe am guilty of suppressing a lot of stuff that is now bubbling up after a long low heat simmer. It could also be struggling with work and trying to write papers. Another movie image to illustrate my feelings is the great scene from The Shining. Sure, there are loads of really scary scenes, but for me the one that really is horrific is when the wife finally reads the stack of typed pages of All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. 

Anyway, like usual, I have nothing to really conclude. I am just writing to try to understand myself, but my current rhythm is just not ready to get into a groove to make any sense to any of you readers. That is if anybody actually reads this. 

Ok then. 

Big red paper bird

These fake birds are set up in fruit orchard that is on my bike commute. They remind me that a lot of things that we see as threatening are not real at all. 

oh, they also remind me of pretentious bozos

 

Blue yonder

 Another Amsterdam photo from my days of wandering. The cat was living the life, just staring up into the blue yonder. I remember this place clearly and was attracted to the beautiful windows as I walked along the major Singel canal. 

Actually, today I found myself staring aimless up at the sky a few times. This morning, after some work cleaning up outside the house, I laid on the sofa and look out the window at the sun cutting across the trees. Not sure if I would say I was living the life, but things felt calm and peaceful. Maybe just having an easy task like cleaning the street gutters on a Saturday morning let me put my worries from the week on hold. Maybe worries isn't the what I mean. It is more like turning the faucet down a little and not having to deal with the usual gush of thoughts that often floods my little head. 

So laying on the sofa, for a very brief moment, nothing mattered. In a good way, that is. Not sure exactly how long this feeling lasted, but the emptiness of it was nice. 

Broken-winged bird

Hold fast to dreams 

For if dreams die 

Life is a broken-winged bird 

That cannot fly. 

Hold fast to dreams 

For when dreams go 

Life is a barren field 

Frozen with snow.

-- Langston Hughes.

Daily Slog

 

Another old 35mm film scan. This one was originally shot with Fuji Velvia. The wrestler is Kotonowaka, who had some massive legs, as you can see. I dig the balance and strength of his morning warm-up squats. He was out there earlier than the others of his rank and created a bit of a stir with all the folks (including me) who wanted to take his photo, so he turned to face the wall to work out in peace. 

I have also been trying to stay away from others and just get my work done. I rarely use this blog to blabber on about details of what I do, but the past few weeks, due to the corona situation, have been a little rough.  I felt a bit like I am wasting energy on speculating how things may work out, when I should just be focused on what I have to do to be supportive. 

My own work with research projects is slogging on. I am not always sure exactly what I am doing, but I am at least putting in some effort. Of the two projects I am managing, one seems to have  clear path, even though it is long and mostly uphill. The other is much more foggy, but mostly because it was planned before corona. I will eventually finish the thing, but do not yet have a vision of how it will all turn out. I guess as long as I just keep to a work routine, something on the positive side may result.

But, such is life. Who knows how it will all work out in the end? 

Been gone so long

More than a year of practicing teetotalism and I am happy to report that I don't miss the sauce at all. Perhaps I got enough of hanging out at bars when I was young and reckless, which was when I took this photo at a small little bar in the basement of building on a narrow street. Never understood why, but there wasn't really a sign for the place. You had to know where it was to find it. It was always my late, late, late night place, when other bars closed and I was still going. I remember a few times in the summer walking out from the place to open the door to painfully blinding sunlight. 

The owner, Kon-chan, was a good guy and always had stories to tell to the handful of people who could fit in the small space, which was covered in posters and little trinkets that he had gathered. If you needed a topic of conversation, something would catch your eye and away the chat would go.

But, those were the days of my youth. Now I go to bed before most of these kinds of bar even open, which is a good thing.

Stand firm

It is a nice peaceful Sunday morning. I dug into the sumo negatives again and found a few orphans to rescue. This one was from a regional tour in Niigata perhaps in 1994. At first look, I thought that it was a rather intense pose of rikishi ready to get it on. However, if I remember correctly, I think these two were doing a slap stick comedy routine. Imagine the Harlem Globe Trotters, but a sumo version. You can't tell from the photo, but probably soon after they got silly and entertained the crowd with some corny humor. All part of the summer tour, which also features demonstrations of how wrestler do their hair, some singing of traditional sumo songs, and usually there is a time when little kids come up to wrestle a pro. Plays well in the sticks and probably has a few hundred years tradition.

Regardless of the comedy that came after, it is not a bad photo if I may say so myself. I feel as they are pushing bad energy out of the ring. They are standing firm and are balanced. That is what I have been trying to do recently. Hoping that I can keep a tidy inner core and focus on things I want to accomplish or at least be ready for any battles that are coming my way.

Carrying someone's water

Circa 1994, Tokyo's Ryogoku

Photo from a visit I made to Tokyo, some 25 plus years ago. The guy in front (Daishoho) was a full-fledged top ranked wrestler, and the guy in the back was one of his minions in the lower ranks, toting a case of water back to the sumo stable. Perhaps the guys in the far back in the trench coat, out of focus, was a reporter. There is a shot on the same roll that shows him talking to another wrestler. Daishoho died of cancer about 5 years later at the age of 32.

Carrying water for others is occasionally something that most of us have to do. I usually do not mind, provided that I am not being taken advantage of. Appreciation and respect for doing grunt work can also go a long way. 

School is now back to full swing after the Golden Week break. I didn't really take much of a break, but I did get a lot of work done with the peace and quiet of an empty campus for a few days. Now there is pretty much no rest until August. Trying just to tread water and not worry too much about the pace of progress of a few projects. I am busy, but I am sleeping well each night knowing that I am putting in the work.

 

Growing in style

Working with my 35mm B&W negatives for a while, it feels funny to post a digital color photos. Felt kinda funny when taking it as well, since I have not been getting out with the camera on a regular basis like I used to. 

I see this tree all year round, as it is on my bicycle commute route, in Tagami, just below the back tunnel that leads to the university. There are a few graves under the tree (you can see two on the left, but the older ones are out of the frame) and I wonder which came first.  Not that I am in need of one anytime soon, knock on wood, but what a lovely place to rest your bones in peace.

If you follow the road a bit downhill, there is a sakura in front of a Shinto shrine, which is also on my route. I didn't notice it until this year, but I always check it out now. If you look carefully, you can see that what was probably a good 60 year-old tree had a rough time and was cut at mid trunk. 

Instead of rotting away, the tree held on, and a branch has triumphantly grown out of the old tree's roots. The flowers remind me that even though you think all is lost, time cures just about anything. Seeing this each morning brings awareness to my desire to stop dwelling on what could have been and just dig what is blooming right now. I have been toting around dead wood for a while and it is time to lighten my load. Easier said than done, but for a few seconds when I ride by, I smile at this little sign that the kami of the shrine has left for me.

So, happy spring to ye.

 

Vast bleakness

Photo taken from the Shimogiku-hashi, the bridge one upstream from the Sakura-bashi, which is whited out in the top of the frame. Maybe about 15 or more years ago, I was attracted to patch of blackness in the bottom of the frame and then was lucky to have the lone figure walk into the negative space. The footprints are a nice bonus, something that I could never quite get right when I printed it on silver-gelatine photo paper.

The image fits my mood. I have that sense that I am walking into a vast bleakness without a clear path in front of me. Maybe it was just a rough work week. Actually, with the annual university admission related duties, I had to work 12 days without a day off. I aim to decompress over the weekend.

The act of forging a path reminds me of the concept of desire lines, which made it into a conversation with an old acquaintance earlier in the week. Paths take a while to be beaten into existence, but there has to be a frontiersman who makes the first trek. Desire lines actual show where the designer didn't do such a good job, so the concept is not really applicable if you are walking into nothingness. And that brings me back to what I was pondering in the last post about how I have been feeling that I need to spend some more effort on investigating the systems that define me. But it could just be that part of that system is to put desires aside and drift for a while.

I also like the simple composition of the photo. The idea of studium and punctum have been floating around in my head and may get around to a post about photo composition one of these days. Until then.

 

Shine on me

This street used to have these wonderful lamps that you see in the photo, but a year or so ago, they were all replaced with ugly little LED ones. I guess that the old ones ate up a good deal of electricity, but they sure were pretty. The bike light is nice and just by chance it lit up the manhole cover to create an additional ball of light. I didn't even notice it until later.

I have some good memories of the shops on the street. The square light in the lower right is for an izakaiya that I used to be a semi-regular at. You don't need a members card or a secret knock or anything, but there is small sign on the door that says only those with a proper introduction are welcome. I was introduced around the turn of the century by a friend who took me there, and the master said I would be welcome to come on my own. Not sure why, but I always went there to start the evening off and never found out who the late night clientele was. I have some ideas, but will keep them to myself. 

There was also a kind of convenience store. This was before convenient stores were like mushrooms, popping up all over Japan. The place was called Lics, short for liquor. I think it started out as a place that sold booze, but then started selling food and other stuff. Lics was the last chance for me to buy something on my way home from a night on the town. I occasionally scarfed down niku-mon, washed down with beer that I scored there and they stumbled back home to Teramachi. There was also a proper sakaya-san (like a package goods shop, just booze) further down the street. I remember for years they had a massive faded billboard of Randy Bass drinking Maltz Beer. The owner used to give me dirty looks, so I only shopped there a few times.

The street also had a simple two story apartment building where a girl I knew lived. I walked her home a few times and had an incredible crush on her, but she shot me down. This was like in 1995 or so, way before I met my wife.

Anyway, that is all the memories I got for today. The bike light is nice and just by chance it lit up the manhole cover to create an additional ball of light. I didn't even notice it until later.

 

Windbraggery and humblebrag

I enjoyed this piece by Fiona Merrideth. In some ways, it is what I was thinking with my fake plastic blowfish post a while back. It is the first time I have heard of the term humblebrag, and plan to add it to my lexical pallet, as I often encounter what she describes as "an ostensibly modest or self-depreciating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud." This little video also crossed my radar and make me chuckle. Funny, because it is so true, especially for aspiring musicians, but you could imagine the same for writers, artists, photographers, poets. and just about any creative field.

Speaking of attention seeking, many years ago, I picked up a book by the legendary advertising executive Paul Arden that made an impact on my hard head. He pointed out that awards create glamour and glamour creates income. However, awards, he argues, are given to things that are fashionable. If you create in order to be praised, you are chasing a fleeting thing. Being original means that nobody has had the time to judge it as fashionably accepted. 

Not sure exactly what I am getting at, so let me shift my attention to the photo. It was taken on a slope just on the Teramachi side of the Sakura-bashi (bridge) of the Saigawa. The roofs in the background are no longer there. They once topped some banquet type restaurants, but were torn down about 18 years ago. I am not sure, but I think that the old man was a retired doctor who lived somewhat close to me. It had just stopped raining and he was closing his umbrella when I made the exposure. 

I remember around that time, I got a call from a newspaper that was interested in having me take some photos for a story about noh theater. I can't recall the details, but I was introduced by a graphic designer, and I met two writers at a family restaurant (actually, it was the infamous Gusto branch in Kanazawa, that was later the scene of a yakuza murder...but that is a different story). I brought 20 or 30 prints to show and I specifically remember that the two guys both stopped and looked at the above photo a long time. This to me was validation that it was a good piece of work.  I wound up not doing the assignment (they wanted color and indoor lighting), but the value I got from watching them react to my photos was worth it.

So, without much of a conclusion, I bid you peace.

Walk, don't run

Still struggling with getting the 35mm film scanned properly. It is not as easy as I had imagined. This one is from the Saigawa, the river most closet not only to my home, but to my heart. My wife has promised me that if I pass away before she does, that she will dump my ashes in the river some dark night during a heavy rain. Night time, since it is probably illegal, and hopefully the rain will scatter my dust properly. Not that I am planning on taking that ride anytime soon, mind you. 

This workday is drawing towards an end. I am permitted to be flexible with the hours I keep, and since I love the morning, I like getting here about 6:30 and heading home about 4:00. I used to be most productive during my first few hours, but recently I seem to need the morning to loaf and have been kicking into gear after lunch.

Nothing to pontificate on today. My mind has strolled through the day and not tried to sprint around getting stuff accomplished. I wish most days could be as slow. Slow is good. I do have some ideas brewing for a deeper post, but y'all just have to wait. Until then, may your flame burn bright.

Ages hence

The above is the real deal:1950 or so Mercury. The name is not really important. The machine needs no name. Seeing this car, in this century, still cruising, is just a wonderfully authentic thing. They don't make em like this no more. It transcends the evolution of automobile design and still stuns. Like the great shark that she be.

Authentic is what we all try to be, right? Nobody wants to be a poser. I love the look of the car, but if I drove this around town, I would certainly feel like a phony, as I know nothing about cars or how much work it must have taken to keep this one alive. I am not worthy of the  title of ownership. Apart from that, it is just not my look. I love and respect the design of this beast, but it would certainly not fit my somewhat preppy upper-main-line Philadelphia aesthetic sense.

So, on the subject of worthiness, I have been wondering about my own. As the blog's subtitle says, this space is about the beginning of the the end of the middle of life, or in other words, I will soon no longer to be able to claim rights to a mid-life crisis. As I get old and crusty, there are times when I wonder if I was sold a bill of goods in junior high English when presented with Frost's The Road Not Taken. Now that I am somewhere ages and ages hence, has my journey made all the difference? And...do I really care?

Waiting to be called

Another photo from my vaults. Guessing about 1998 or so. It was at a regional tour, which the sumo world makes in between the six official tournaments each year. These younger wrestlers were all standing around the ring, trying to get called to be the next sparring partner of senior rikishi in the center. They all were calling out to be chosen, eager to get into the action and show what they were made of. I think I may have posted a similar photo years ago. (I did indeed, a wide shot, about 9 years ago)

I used to feel a bit like them. That is, I was always looking for someone to make me the center of their attention. I always wanted the floor. I thrived when holding court and telling stories and jokes. Now I am just as happy to stand on the outside. 

Anyway, not sure what I am trying to say. The photo itself has something going on that I cannot put into words. I usually try to post an image and find some connection to my own human experience, but maybe this is one of those days when the creative gods do not call on me. So, I will just leave it at that.

  
 

Logical choice

 

Since April of last year, I have abstained from alcohol. The halt came after taking a walk with my son and, with a bit of a hangover, I mentioned that I should take a few days off from drinking. He replied with the question of why not just giving it up all together. His tone was more of an inquiry than any kind of judgement. It seemed that he didn't care that much if I drank or not. It was an honest question of my logic of continuing to do something that made me feel bad the next day. I don't remember exactly how I answered, probably something like, "yeah, maybe I should just give it up." I had no intention at that point of going more than a few days.

But his question remained even after I resisted the urge for the rest of the weekend. What logical reason could I have for continuing to drink on a daily basis? I do not want to get into any definitions of what being an alcoholic means; living in Japan makes that a more complex thing to define, as it is socially acceptable to drink, even alone, everyday.  So, putting addiction aside, why was I drinking? To help me unwind? But what does that mean? Most of what I unwound was all wound back up the next evening.

Was I drinking because of something connected to the actual taste? When I quit, I was into bourbon, but did sipping some good whiskey really give me some connection to happiness via my taste buds? Maybe the taste just became an association with the feeling. The aroma of say Maker's Mark triggered off the hundreds of other times I had drank it on my way to drunkenness. Did the ability to attach some ridiculous adjective to a certain type of alcoholic beverage make me a deeper person? Does drinking a buttery, velvety, salty, smokey, woody whiskey with a hint of peat and nutmeg make me as deep and complex as that sounds? Sure, good whiskey is preferable to bad, but mostly because it is easier to deal with the next morning. I never woke up feeling more cultured and that my world view had expanded because I had a shot of some really expensive booze. You could apply the same for wine and nihon-shu. There are loads of folks out there that think they are experiencing some culturally significant act if they let some special alcohol pass their lips. Being an aficionado of anything, I guess, can just be a hobby, but for some reason I have never been impressed with one who spouts knowledge of the characteristics of alcoholic beverages. If anything it seems a bit like someone bragging about how many books they have read or how many countries they have visited, as if such vanity will prove they are intelligent or worldly.

Was it to socialize? Perhaps. I was doing most of my drinking at home, but I did enjoy a Saturday afternoon routine of sneaking away to one of the few bars in town that opened from noon. I liked chatting, and the place had a mix of patrons, but it was the booze that kept us there. Most of us would probably bore each other if we were hanging out drinking coffee. Covid also threw a big wrench into any social aspect. Suddenly there were no more work related parties or other chances to go out to an izakaiya to get all liquored up. 

So I really didn't have a good answer to why I was drinking. More importantly, I had loads of reasons not to. Booze, especially bourbon, can get expensive, and I was spending most of my monthly allowance (yes, my wife gives me an allowance) on it. I also drank a good deal of beer, which was making me chubby. And, on occasion,unwinding led to becoming a big ball of knotted up twine and I became a bit more of an asshole than I usually am. I sometimes did or said stupid stuff that I regretted the next day. Most of the time it was just silly stuff, but I certainly crossed over into being a mean drunk on occasion, especially when the so-called unwinding hit a snag halfway through the process and I had to confront some nagging stuff that the booze couldn't wash aside.

So, that is where I stand now. I have promised myself that I will go a full year. When the cherry blossoms bloom this year, I am reserving the option of rethinking this experiment, but the way I feel now, it makes sense to just stay away. By the way, I hold no judgement at all on those who do drink, and am not preaching sobriety for all.  It just seem to be the most logical choice at the moment.

Leaving it behind

 

I touched on the idea of letting go of dreams before, but now that I have a few days off, I'll revisit it to see if it still bugs me. It has been on my mind as I continue, sometimes, to go through the boxes of 35mm negatives that I have amassed. The image above came from one of those boxes, which I scanned and fiddled around with the exposure, playing with some of the numerous tools in photoshop and just eyeballing it. I guess it looks ok, but I have noticed that sometimes what I post here looks like crap on a different monitor, often too grey or washed out.

Anyway, back to old dreams. For a long time I had hoped that I would be able to design a life that would somehow include enough resources to invest in taking photos that would be worthy of publication or exhibition. I wanted to be Henri Cartier-Bresson and travel the world and wait for my decisive moments to occur. When I was single, it was easy to actually attempt this.  I had few responsibilities and had enough money to do what I wanted and had up to 4 months a year vacation (unpaid, mind you) if I wanted to follow this dream on my own terms. 

I think in those days, printed photography books were the golden standard. And by looking at some of them, often in bookstores, I started to feel that I was just as good as some of the stuff that was being published. I won a few contests, had some exhibitions, got published occasionally, and then self-published a small book, more like a high-end zine. I did manage to make a profit, but overall it was not worth the leg work. Collecting money from the owners of little shops here and there was a pain in the ass.  But, I was never really focused on money. I wanted to be ...a bonafide creative person, I guess. I was never comfortable with calling myself a photographer or, god forbid, an artist, but I also cringed when people asked me if taking pictures was my hobby. It seemed to be something more than that. 

At the time, I was teaching English part-time at an art college and was around creative people, which I think in a sense rubbed off on me and I started to feel that there could be a path for me to be accepted as part of the community. The idea of a full time  position, teaching English and maybe a little bit of photography, became my dream. And for a few years it seemed that it was in reach...until suddenly, and painfully, it wasn't. I prefer to avoid the details, but I was overlooked when the time came. It hurt and took a good long time to really understand why, but I eventually did. I also made a good recovery and managed somehow to fall up, not down, and land perhaps a better position at good university. Better in terms of employment, but lacking the connection to the creative atmosphere of being around art school kids. I missed that terribly for a while, but now I am over it...I guess.

So, without much of a conclusion, that is what I have been trying to let go of for a long time. I am no longer looking back at the disappointment. The scar has healed nicely and the bitterness is not really there anymore. The current challenge, which will be saved for a later rambling post, is what is my dream now? Or could it be that part of growing old and (maybe) wise is that you realize that you do not really need to have a perfectly defined dream? I have been feeling that just getting through some small projects feels good enough. Sometimes just having a good day is enough of a dream for me.