Friends,
I hope you’re having a lovely spring. It’s been very nice here with the borders reopened and life in full swing. I’ve been seeing a lot of old friends as well as meeting new ones. Tennbo has started 3rd grade and it’s a sort of bittersweet feeling. Having to keep a kid entertained and fulfilled over two weeks can be challenging with the level of devotion needed, but these school vacation times are often the high tide of our relationship. Tennbo opens up more, shares his thoughts and feelings, and we’re doing things outside, like riding bikes to the park to throw frisbees and kick balls or go on short hikes. When school is in session there’s a lot less time for us to be together and while I enjoy my free time I miss the easy companionship of those brief intervals.
Recently we took a family trip down to Amami Oshima, a small tropical island between Kyushu and Okinawa. Our b&b was on a quiet beach where we could dive down to swim with sea turtles. We drove to other parts of the island for hiking and kayaking in a mangrove forest. While Tennbo is not a strong enough swimmer to see the turtles underwater himself, he had a great time with his cousin building sand castles and scouring the beach for hermit crabs. We bought him some sunglasses and very touristy tropical clothes (button-down shirt and shorts) and he borrowed my phone to film silly videos with him and his cousin that he later edited into an amusing home movie. It really is incredible to me how fast he has mastered tricks with iMovie, making imaginative editing choices with some technical prowess. (I’ll get more into that later in the newsletter.)
KYOTOGRAPHIE: It’s been more than a decade that the KYOTOGRAPHIE photo festival has gone on and while some of the years’ festival themes have had stronger lineups than others, cycling between exhibitions and witnessing captivating and provocative work on display in unorthodox venues remains as exhilarating as it always has been. There are fifteen major artists’ works exhibited in exquisitely-curated spaces and about sixty satellite shows variously held in cafes, restaurants, shops, galleries, old schoolhouses, museums, and machiya (Kyoto’s traditional buildings).
This year’s theme was “Borders,” somewhat apropos as Japan had shut itself off from the rest of the world for nearly three years. Some of the highlights for me were Kazuhiko Matsumura’s “Heartstrings,” a series on dementia; Boris Mikhailov’s “Yesterday Sandwich,” a slideshow of the author’s color slides of Soviet-Ukrainian life in the 1970s (double-exposed in a scan) set to the music of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon; Yui Yamauchi’s “Jinen,” in which the author photographed the tropical island Yakushima’s trees at night; Cesar Dezfuli’s “Passengers,” a dedicated and intimate reportage effort documenting the lives of African migrants after resettling in Europe; Paolo Woods & Arnaud Robert’s “Happy Pills,” a serious but also humorous examination of our global addiction to pharmaceuticals; and Dennis Morris’ “Colored Black,” with its 1970s-era portraits of East-End London immigrant life, its centerpiece a recreated living room from that era, complete with wallpaper, furnishings, and a rotary phone from that era.
One of the great joys of the photo fair is encountering the enthusiasm of amateurs. On my way home from an interesting display of Yuriko Takagi’s fashion and indigenous portraits at Nijo Castle, I stopped at a neighborhood gallery that I’d not noticed before, and on a whim decided to go inside. The photos were monochrome images of Burmese life taken over three visits over the past ten years. I was about to leave when the artist, an elder Japanese woman from Tokyo, struck up a conversation and we talked about Southeast Asia for about twenty minutes. While I was not enamored of her work, it was lovely to randomly speak about journeying with an enthusiastic fellow traveler. This is the point of the festival, of course, a coming together of disparate ideas and persons.
My friend, Lance Henderstein, has a well-written and astute review of this year’s festival in The Japan Times.
The BJP Kyoto Guide online: For those who can’t access the print edition of the British Journal of Photography, my guide for all-things-photography in Kyoto is now online. Hopefully some of you will be able to make it out and visit the venues I talk about.
An 8-year-old’s interpretation of UBI: Last October, my friend, Katoh, who publishes Neutral Colors Magazine (and who published Middle Life Notes and Amoeba) asked me to explain universal basic income (UBI) to my son so that he could illustrate it. Now Tennbo is a sharp kid and a quick learner, but I was rather daunted by the prospect. He really doesn’t understand money much, except it buys nice things and fun stuff. He sort of understands work and jobs and compensation, but he’s too busy playing with his toys to make much of it. There were some animation videos on youtube we watched together that he sort of grokked.
It took some time to get him to do the drawings but when he set himself to the task he did a good job. I asked him to consider a scenario in which he had enough money to cover living expenses and if he did not have to work full-time, how would he spend his time? He decided he would spend his time making movies. He also designed a currency that represented a $1000 bill that every citizen no matter their lot would receive. I summarized how I explained UBI to him in simple, straightforward prose that I hand-lettered and was printed to companion his drawings (with a Japanese translation at the end). It was a fun collaboration for us, my text and his illustrations. He’s into reading these days and we spent a lot of spring break in bookshops where it was nice that among all the literature there on display, his drawings were part of this collective effort towards knowledge, ideas, and art. I doubt he consciously understands it this way, but perhaps he senses something valuable in his efforts and it will inspire him to continue drawing.
Neural Colors Magazine is available in any Japanese bookshop on the islands. This issue the publisher expanded a lot of the text into English so it would attract international readers. You might see their booth at an international book or printing event someday.
Speaking of Tennbo and movies: During Spring Break we watched a number of 007 films, including all the pictures from the 1960s and 1970s (so all the classic Sean Connery and Roger Moore Bonds) and some Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan (interestingly, he didn’t care for Daniel Craig). I guess everyone has their favorite Bond actor. Most will say Connery because he helped found the franchise and is arguably the most versatile actor of all of them, not to mention he was such a marquee star. My earliest Bond memories was seeing Roger Moore in the late 70s and early 80s and I’ve always liked him best. There is definitely an element of nostalgia in my preference, but I’ve always liked Moore’s interpretation— stylish and suave, but also sort of sleazy and lecherous. The villains were fun too and Tennbo’s favorite film has been Moonraker, with the infamous bad guy Jaws played by the very tall actor Richard Kiel.
In spite of some lascivious double-entendres, the Roger Moore era feels more kid-friendly than later Bond films, with more of an emphasis on action rather than violence. Really though if you’ve seen one Bond film, you’ve seen them all, as it’s a successful formula with a replicable template. They are fun and often silly, but there is a brilliance in the franchise with its absurd storylines and extraordinary stunts and travelogue settings. And it’s fun for me to witness over decades the evolution in cinematic color schemes, art direction, social mores, and even pop music (I love Sheena Easton’s For Your Eyes Only and the Carly Simon theme “Nobody Does It Better” for The Spy Who Loved Me best but that could be the nostalgia talking again.)
During Spring Break wanting to fill our time productively, I helped Tennbo in making a 007 spoof called You Only Live Once. We cycled to the Kamo River with his remote control cars and filmed a “car chase.” Then over the next few days we made the short film using iMovie. I was there as a guiding hand, but Tennbo pretty much did everything including the editing, the sound effects, the storyline, the title cards, and the still pictures. He came up with the theme song and sang it accompanying himself on the MOOG synthesizer (we also hummed the theme song together while I played the metallophone). The other night we put it on for some kids who were over and they loved it, which delighted the both of us of course. If you have 3 1/2 minutes to spare, you could do worse than enjoying an 8-year-old’s interpretation of James Bond here.
What I’m reading: I’m rereading a number of books this year and recently finished The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl. Most readers know Dahl only as a children’s author, but he wrote several novellas and four collections of short fiction. Most don’t know of his service in the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot and later as an intelligence officer. He was shot down in the Western Libyan Desert and hospitalized for six months. His stories on his wartime experience Over to You, are beautiful, well-crafted, intense, at times hyper-realistic and others fantastical. Most of the stories are set in the Eastern Mediterranean during the war, but the one that always resonated the most was the story “Somebody Like You,” in which two RAF veterans are sitting in a tavern, getting smashed on whiskey, talking about their bombing experiences, and how they practiced “jinking” in which they’d move the rudder a little bit to the left or right just before releasing their bombs— it was a way they might have agency over the randomness of their destruction, hoping that a little push one way or another might blow up a house of evil Nazis rather than a family home sheltering three generations. They are aware that no one in the lively tavern knows what a burden it is to have killed many multitudes of people, and this bonding of shared horror gets them drunk pretty fast. I’m sure it was one of the first PTSD stories to come out of WWII (Over to You was published in 1946), and something I’ve been thinking about with Hiroshima and the Enola Gay in the news because of the G7 Summit.
One of the reasons I wanted to reread the Dahl collection is because of a story I hazily remembered called “The Great Automatic Grammatizator.” Published in the early 1950s, the story imagines a machine that can pump out wholly derivative pieces of original fiction in minutes. Dahl is brutally satirizing formulaic writing but there is a prescience to the story that reminds one of prompt engineering in A.I. systems:
“First, by depressing one of a series of master buttons, the writer made his primary decision; historical, satirical, philosophical, political, romantic, erotic, humorous, or straight. Then, from the second row (the basic buttons) , he chose his theme: army life, pioneer days, cvil war, world war, racial problem, wild west, country life, childhood memories, seafaring, the sea bottom and many, many more. The third row of buttons gave a choice of literary style: classical, whimsical, racy, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, feminine, etc. The fourth row was for characters, the fifth for wordage— and so on and so on— ten long rows of pre-selector buttons.”
For example:
“With one finger, Mr. Bohlen carefully pressed the necessary pre-selector buttons:
Master button— satirical
Subject— racial problem
Style— classical
Characters— six men, four women, one infant
Length— fifteen chapters
At he same time he had his eye particularly upon three organ stops marked Power, mystery, profundity.”
The inventor, a mechanic who wishes he were a writer but was only capable of bland and empty prose, is able to sell the manuscripts immediately. He hatches a plan to create a "literary agency” in which their automatic grammatizator cranks out story after story with a nearly infinite variety of button prompts. He then seeks out the best-known writers, fills them in on the scheme and pays them not to write anymore, and to instead sign their names to the books made by the fiction-making machine for a percentage of the profits of all book sales. Most commercial writers sign away their voice— it’s only the artists who hold out. In 1953, Dahl’s story was making fun of insipid writing and the writers who were phoning it in, but today it reads like a striking piece of visionary fiction, as popular culture is about to be completely upended by machine-learned storytelling, a cultural transformation that perhaps most consumers probably won’t mind one way or another. The artists with strong voices might survive all right, but a lot of basic craftsmanship, whether in writing, photography, or illustration is likely to be co-opted by our contemporary grammatizators. What a time to be alive.
Wonderful stuff. I'm sure I am not alone in wishing that more fathers took such an active interest in their children's lives, imaginations and development, and how much better the world would be if they did.