Friends,
It’s been a long time, nearly seven months! I haven’t so much been neglecting the newsletter, as waiting for some news to accumulate and I definitely have some wonderful stuff in development, including new book news, an upcoming show, and reflections on my first trip back to the US in more than four years.
Puking Rainbows Past and Future: As many of you know, last year I collaborated with Trey Derbes and his publication Tour Dogs to produce a zine called “House of Tennbo” that featured a hodgepodge of his photographs and mine, all of them instant photos shot with a Fuji Instax camera. Well, my publisher here in Japan, Neutral Colors, will be expanding it into a book called Puking Rainbows Past and Future. The title comes from the name of one of Tennbo’s first sketchbooks, early in the pandemic, when nearly every day we were drawing figures, humans, and animals spewing poly-chromatic gorgeousness. Like my previous two books with Neutral Colors, Middle Life Notes and Amoeba, Puking Rainbows will have a long essay by me, snippets of Tennbo’s voice as well as his some of his drawings germane to the title. And while the zine had about 35 photographs, the book will have 80 images, 40 by Tennbo, 40 by me. The book’s design is coming together and will be very playful. We’re looking at a release sometime in the winter in the New Year.
Speculative Horizons: I am very excited to announce that in January I will participate in Speculative Horizons v.1.5 in Kuwait. It’s a cross-cultural collaboration between Australia, Kuwait, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The work I will show at the gallery is from my longtime project Spaceman Lost Your Way, which is my homage to my love of science fiction, particularly Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Flash Gordon, Robert A Heinlein’s A Stranger in a Strange Land, and the 1950s comic series Weird Fantasy. I will be there in attendance to teach several workshops, including one on visual idea generation. This will be my first time in Kuwait and I will also spend two weeks in the United Arab Emirates. I’m extraordinarily excited to explore the region as well as participate in the show. I will have more to say about the event next month.
4-Corners: I finally returned to the US in September, the first time in 4 1/2 years. Tennbo had only been to the States once, when he was six months old, so he previously had no retrievable memories of his father’s home country. This was also his first trip abroad since the pandemic began (and only my second). I don’t really have a hometown to come back to. Though I was raised in Los Angeles I have no family there anymore. While I often took trips back to California, New York and elsewhere, I always made it a priority to visit my mother in Fredericksburg, Virginia, until her passing in 2018. My father lives in Colorado Springs where I have no history. And I still don’t because the day after we landed we were on the road for a long and eventful journey.
I spent a few full days organizing our itinerary, which included a number of national parks, hikes, and scenic drives, ambitious considering my companions would be my 8-year-old son, Tennbo, and my 77-year-old father, Mike. Ariko was with us for the first week, when we drove down to Taos, New Mexico, and then onwards to Santa Fe, as well as Chimayo (a small village with a Mission church), Ghost Ranch (where the painter Georgia O’Keefe resided for ten years), and Mesa Verde, an Ancestral Puebloan archaeological site. After we farewelled Ariko, my father, Tennbo and I continued on to Utah and Arizona taking in Goosenecks State Park, Muley Point, Monument Valley, Antelope Canyon, Grand Canyon’s North Rim, Coral Pink Sand Dunes, Bryce Canyon, Lower Calf Creek Falls, Capitol Reef National Park, Valley of the Goblins, and finally Arches National Park.
And it was amazing. Absolutely wonderful. While I have traveled extensively elsewhere I’ve done comparatively little road-tripping in America. So I wasn’t just introducing these places to my son, but to myself as well. I scheduled our travels for September after Labor Day, so as to avoid crowds and to wander when the temperature would be a bit more comfortable. There weren’t a lot of tourists (and those conversations we overheard were mostly French, German, Italian, Hebrew, and Chinese— the few Americans we encountered were usually on motorcycles). It was hot, in the high 80s most days, but a dry heat, and it was never really an issue for us as most of our walks were in the morning or late afternoon.
We’re hoping to do an even longer journey with my father next year, due north, through Wyoming and across Montana all the way to Glacier Falls National Park and then head back south via the Dakotas. Ideally, it would be marvelous if we could make it out to Chicago, specifically to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs play. It took eight years but he finally became a baseball fan this year (making him a 5th generation Cubs fan, a family-following of a ball club going on a century now!) and was right there next to me and his grandpa on our US roadtrip watching the Cubs collapse the last few weeks of the season (trial by fire!). Upon our return, I bought him his first mitt and bat and we’re playing catch almost every day, which is kind of a dream come true (I know this for sure because I rewatched Field of Dreams with him a few weeks ago and was emotionally wrought when Kevin Costner’s character Ray Kinsella got to play catch with his dad.) Next year, we’ll bring our gloves on our summer trip and find incredible backdrops to throw the ball around.
Letterboxd: I’d probably say cinema is my first and longest love. One of my earliest memories is being five years old at the movies in 1980 or 1981, watching The Empire Strikes Back. The projector had a mechanical breakdown and so the theater gave us free seats to view the movie in the adjoining screen room: Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think that was the day I fell in love. My parents bought a VHS back when it was an expensive novelty. I still have the diary where my mother indexed the films she’d taped off the television— turning the pages now gives me a nostalgic surcharge. We had Showtime and The Movie Channel and until it was shut down, the Z Channel, where I was exposed to all kinds of wild movies. During Junior High and early High School, my mother, sister and I would visit the Fallbrook theater in Woodland Hills on Wednesdays where we could watch double bills of movies before they were taken off the theater circuit. Later, in college at Santa Barbara, I saw Boogie Nights and Pulp Fiction and many other films at the beautiful Mission Revival-constructed Arlington Theater and would spent a good number of Sundays in my twenties in Los Angeles seeing double bills of classic, cult, indie, foreign, and weird movies at the New Beverly Cinema on La Brea. I absolutely believe my photographic aesthetic comes from the movies, how exactly, I don’t know, but we could probably call it subconscious imbibition.
Anyhow, all this is to say that I started a Letterboxd account. Letterboxd is very much an under-the-radar social media site, probably because it doesn’t produce outrage or controversy. It’s a fan’s site for movies. Though I’m more of an arthouse fellow than a popcorn-picture see-r, I’m watching plenty of movies I wouldn’t necessarily view, a consequence of parenting an 8-year-old boy. But there’s good stuff in bad movies just as there are bad things in good films. Cinema is the greatest art form ever conceived by mankind considering how much is involved in its production, its financing, and its capacity to hold us spellbound for two+ hours. Movies make life more worthwhile and that’s a wonderful thing.
I decided to try and write short reviews of everything I watch going forward, using the site as a sort of a diary. They’re like brief writing exercises that help me make sense of my reactions. This is my profile. If you’re there too, please find me, and if you haven’t signed up yet, it’s awfully fun, I swear.
Tennbo’s 90s-era TV commercial spoof: While I never dreamed of being a film director (all that money on the line and associated responsibility seemed terrifying) I’d be thrilled if Tennbo found his way into moviemaking. He loves Mentos candy, so I showed him the genius of their marketing campaigns from the 1990s, how they could fit a silly story into a 30-second bit. So he and I came up with our own Mentos samurai spoof with his cousin. When it came to do the editing on iMovie, he did 90% of the cutting, trimming all the fat down to a 30-second slice. He did a great job and I’m proud of him, and anyone who grew up with the Mentos ads will be doubly charmed. You can see it here.
Posting books: Finally, the Japanese postal system has returned to normal. For most of the past three years, it has been either prohibitively expensive or impossible to post small parcels internationally. Prices were either double or triple what they’d been pre-pandemic and that was when you could even post books at all. It seems that the system has finally returned to normal, if a little bit more expensive than it was before (but the difference in price doesn’t affect those buying from overseas due to the yen’s weak standing). If you’ve been meaning to buy a copy of Sunlanders, this is a good time to get in touch. Please note I don’t have any more copies for sale of Amoeba but I have a few more editions left of Middle Life Notes and The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow.
The Year in Reading: 2023 was a very good year in reading. After a drop-off the previous year I managed to finish reading thirty books for the first time in a few years, and I think this was the first year in some time I eschewed reading on a kindle. I just don't like reading longform text on tablets or phones and have found that the best method for a good night's sleep is thirty minutes' of paper-book reading before bed.
If I lived in the US I would certainly have a library card and be borrowing books of recently published fiction or essay collections all the time. I live in Japan so instead of a surplus wealth of unread fiction available I have reliably affordable health and dental care (which is preferable for me). I recently catalogued and indexed my personal library here in Kyoto and there are about 600 books, about three novels for every two books of nonfiction, which feels not insignificant.
And I've come to really embrace the satisfaction of the reread, especially fiction. This year 26 of the 30 books read were novels or short story collections and of those 26 books, 17 of them were rereads. For the first time in about 20+ years I reread Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and James Baldwin's Another Country and I was overwhelmed by these books' awesomeness. I have been and will continue to reread F Scott's Tender Is the Night, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio every few years-- they are that good and through multiple readings I feel the books become that much more a part of me, as if my love for them makes my life that much more wondrous and meaningful.
If I have any advice going into 2024, I’d say read the books you love and find someone to play catch with. That is what I’m most certainly looking forward to myself.
Wishing you all splendid tidings for the holidays, the new year and beyond.
Thanks for sharing! Always an appreciation for your thoughts and insight. Definitely. I am looking forward to your next book. The Mentos video is hilarious and genius, all in one. Nice to see that the road trip went well (do you feel another books with photos about this trip? 🤔)😉🙏🏻👍🏽. All the best to you and family, Éric