Eighteen days in Tokyo, I am not is interested in strange people or people doing strange things. How is it people live, how do they behave most of the time,
Making cents of it four sense,
or just looking fore a sign, another leading indicator,
it does not matter if it is a sign from God, or just a gut feeling about the next place to eat and you can get a good helping of sake here.
The separations between us whether physical, imaginable or emotionable, are dis-sustainable, and they can leave us misunderstandable or better yet, happy.
Why wait for others, they are always coming from different places while going to different places, each of these people while waiting are think about something and we do not know what it is they are thinking about, yet we do know, though sometimes we forget, they have thoughts and feelings, they get hungry, need to sleep and have to pee and poop.
You are perfectly right if you think none of this makes any sense, and you are perfectly right when you find that there are many times when you have to make sense of it, i.e. you have to make decisions.
and live with the consequences of those decisions.
Is a photo graph about the visual experience of the viewer or some truth of the record of that 1/125 sec? The moment will never happen again, but is the image of a shutter speed of 1/125 sec a different reality than 1/2 of a second?
Is truth more than a bunch colors, textures and lines? One thing I like about Tokyo is the geometric shapes of the architecture and how they visually juxtapose. Its easier to see when I do it like this.
Its often said when people experience art its a personal experience, different people get different things, and then on the other hand, people refer to “this experience” or “that experience” which is related to the life experiences of a specific group where those in the group “understand it” implying they have the same experience and those outside not only do not understand it, but cannot get it or have no right to get it.
I think the personal experience is better, but then again I find myself not so attracted to “popular art” which is LCD (lowest common denominator).
I do not think of myself as elitist, we live in a free world, a free market, where basically if you are standing on your two feet (financially) you have the right to express what you like and dislike in the market place.
I do not wear non cotton clothes because air between the clothes and my skin does not circulate, I sweat and itch. I used to enjoy playing sports but I am not a fan, and if I watch foot ball its the last five minutes, especially when Joe Montana was QB, but I wold pay even $5 to goto a professional sports event of any sort.
But other people would and I think having a diverse market place is great. (This is not the same “other people” that trump keeps referring to concerning meddling in the election.) Most of those “other people” would think I am an idiot for paying $hundreds for chawan or guinomi but everydayI use them I get great pleasure, and I assure the same is for them when they are using or doing things which I am not interested,
Middle of Tokyo, around Tsujiki. Japan has a different sense of what in the USA we call zoning, here is a large factory right in the middle of sky scrappers and (you cannot see it but about 30 feet behind me is a major retail store street.
And little cafes, so many businesses in Japan, so many people seeking the experience of making a quality product and that is one thing that makes Japan interesting.
Maybe if I sat in one place for too long watching life go buy I would have a different perspective, or maybe I do sit in one place two long and everyone else, leaving me behind, goes on with their life while I sit and watch out the window. Last night I had a long phone conversation with an old friend, just talking about ideas, reflections, two people using words to up the conversation using different twists and turns to envision something new and different.
Kant spent his whole life living in a small village, not married, reportedly have regular Sunday dinners and conversations with guests and yet, concerning “knowing” he was one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived. If you have any wonder about knowing, I suggest spend some time with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. You do not have to read it all, if you are past 30 you have more important things to do with your life, but you will not start to get it until you are past 45.
But why Kant has meaning for this trump thyme is because he and his media supporters when confronted with 2+2=4 always want to say “It might be 5, therefore it is not 4.”
We do not know what we cannot experience, it might be 5 but for the most part and probably for 99.9999999999999% of us during our life time 2+2 =4. When you start making real life decisions based on 2+2 doesn’t not equal 4, i.e. unreal, conspiracy theories such as integrity, ethics and principles are just marketing techniques and everyone has shady ulterior motives (i.e. everyone has their price and can never be trusted) you end up making a worse world in which to live for others as well as for yourself.
People using the internet and the smart phone (generic term) have created new meanings for the photograph in their stills and videos. Photographs are recordings of light. For many years photographs were snapshots or professional and you could get 2 out of 3, now digital images are 3 out of 3, they are cheap, high quality, and instant.
One of the most common types of image is “The Selfie,” the smart phone enable you take instantly express your feelings in a quality photograph and send it someone wherever they are. Perhaps one word that comes to mind is a “normal narcissism,” forget the negative associations with the word, its ok, and healthy, to feel this way at times , people really enjoy looking at images of themselves as well as showing them to others and they do not seem to care whether they know them or not. Here I am, do look like a wierdo? or someone looking for love?
People tend to believe that photographic images have some Reality even though for centuries science and philosophy are not in agreement on what is Reality. Here is an image of people and this is what they were actually doing, Yet the image was manipulated using photoshop, for example detail has been generalized and colors have increased saturation,
Doing this gives me an image which is a visual explanation of my feeling(s). “Photoshopped” as a verb implies that the image one is viewing has been manipulated such that the Reality has been distorted or mi- represented.
Yet most photographic images you see in media have been “photoshopped.” For professional use in print or on the internet the image is generally opened in Photoshop and at the very minimum adjustments are made on the image to “optimize” the image for reproduction in the specific media.
Often these “photoshop” manipulations are technical adjustments for production limitations in the specific media to enable the image to look as close to the original as possible, but then again what is the original? An image on film? a digital RAW image? etc…
Is this a real image of someplace where people live? A property worth million dollars because of the land because it sits between two tall commercial building?
Some people who live in houses in Tokyo may have no place to park a car while for others an empty lot is money maker. Fortunately most people in Tokyo respect the property others.
Construction is ongoing everywhere in Tokyo, I make this comment everytime I have been to Tokyo, yet things just go on almost as normal…
I like to wear a vest with pockets, who cares about this man or that man
sitting together…
or walking alone
Sometimes its just the colors, textures and shapes
In our life photographs are always backward looking and futures are unknown, plans while a necessary effort have their drawbacks.
And I still miss, perhaps there is more “Reality” in the line quality of a Matisse drawing than in any of my photographs.
Now I’m just a bartender, and I don’t like my work
But I don’t mind the money at all
I see lots of sad faces and
lots of bad cases
of folks with their backs
To the wall
[Chorus]
But I need four walls around
me to hold my life
To keep me from
going astray
And a honky-tonk angel
to hold me tight
to keep me
from slipping away
Still if you cannot hear George’s voice, it may halve little meaning. But that is audio! The words are good but the George Jones voice is a qualitative difference.
What about visual?
Daruma (the little red and smaller blue, yellow and grey head)—
is a mythical person—i.e. There are separate historical recordings concerning this person who brought Dhyana to China where it was called Chan and Dogen brought Chan to Japan where people practice zen.
When the editors develop the titles to books want to make to suggest the books a a “basic, down to the nitty gritty— they say “The Zen of this” or the Zen of that, ” as if zen is just the basic elements of doing something. But very basically, what is “it” not being done.
Anytime something is not the some thing it should be, then how can you know it not being the thing is thing it is being.
No discrimination? no yin and yang? no opposites? well then a “Universal? A 1ne knot a 2wo?
I cannot say this as well in words, people and their everyday behavior ( and then of course add in their feelings, or what you think are their feelings) is so interesting!!!
What is it that pointing a camera can move a man to smilingly salute? If you can answer that you will have an insight into making the USA a better country.
Seeing this Tokyo I have come to better appreciate R.Scott’s visuals in BladeRunner. There is a certain juxtaposition of WWI visual and modern, perhaps even SCI-FI , visuals that has a unique feeling. I would not want to wear this kind of uniform at fyi work, but where in our society these workers would be low level status, in Japanese society they are not. (This is not say what they are, just to say they are not.)
Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people living for today
Out for an after lunch walk with my mother, she had a stroke, lost her memory and suffered from aphasia,
Out for a walk one day after lunch, she lost most her memory and suffered with Expressive Aphasia.
Would you think a photograph is different from an illustration?
This image is made of photographs, yet the overall feeling is of something un real but still the basic visual texture in a photograph.
Or this, a B&W film image of my shadow on a tree trunk, then manipulated as a duatone in photoshop
TwoMe. tooKnotTwoMe
To me or not to me
But then I remember,
Reaching in, reaching out,
When I have failed to understand what I was seeing,
Or am I randomly missing out on the advantages of being human?
On a busy Sunday afternoon in Asakusa, a neatly, dressed in polysynthetics was busy directing the pedestrian flow,
voicing commands,
inspecting packages
managing the flow . . .
It was fun to watch, fake or reel? I absolutely adore the rain catchers (pants cuffs). A nice sketch for Asakusa visitors on a Sunday afternoon.
Off the Metro at Asakasa, came in this entrance—NOTE: these red gates would be associated with Shinto—up the hill,
and left on the other side, down the hill,
encounter construction.
Common to see young women with child, child seat, or two child seats, back and front, and two childs, or some have one child and use a second child seat as a container for packages, (this one has a basket however) on a bike, though generally not this fancy of a bike.
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