After going to the Moriyama exhibition, I wanted to see how my T2 performed with some B&W film, so I bought some Fuji 1600. The shots are obviously quite grainy, but I like how they turned out. If anything, the grainyness adds something to them. The first one below is my favourite, but I think I will need to experiment a little more before I can really get to grips with it. Not bad though at 900円 a roll to develop.
Tag Archive for '日本' Page 2 of 6
Eri has a hidden talent for seeing shoes that she likes, trying them on and liking them, procrastinating about buying them and upon finally deciding to do so, discovering that they have sold out. She had a bad experience a few years ago with a pair of Miu Miu boots, and the other week we saw a pair of Nike x Liberty Dunks that she (and I), really liked and when we returned to the shop to buy them, found they too had sold out. Yesterday, on going to the Nike Store in Kichijoji, we were pleased to see that they had started to stock them there too, after not having had them when I went to check the other week. I really like these. We're just trying to work out whether to keep the white laces or change to the included purple pair. Decisions, decisions.
This weekend, Eri and I realised that about 3 separate exhibitions that we had meant to see for ages were all ending, and with an impending hangover on Sunday, Saturday was the only day we had free. So, five exhibitions in a day then...
First up was the double Moriyama Daido exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. The exhibition, in two parts was a retrospective of his work in one gallery and then large prints of his Hawaii series in the second. I found that his photos generally got more interesting the older they were. I found a lot of the exhibition a little confusing and realised that I don't really have any idea what made certain shots "good" or not, but a lot of the older ones, particularly the Light and Shadow series, were beautiful.
I wasn't as impressed by the Hawaii series. Some of them are quite nice, but on the whole I find Moriyama's style doesn't work as well outside Japan. I found some of the Buenos Aires ones a little dry for the same reason, although Eri said she liked the Buenos Aires ones most of all, and, being a lot more artistically inclined than me, she could well be right.
After Moriyama, we went down to the basement of the museum for the World Press Photo 2008 exhibition. I enjoyed this far more than the Moriyama. I prefer photojournalism to "art" photos, so this was always going to be far more suited to me. Some of the shots on display here were awe-inspiringly good. I think the photo below is probably the one I liked most; there is a very strange and ominous atmosphere to the position of the men in it that I really love. Click to see some of the other highlights.
After the photos were went to Omotesando for Eri's Blythe Once Upon A Wonder World Exhibition and Beauty Contest. Eri has come out recently as a bit of a Blythe fan, despite hating herself for doing so. Girls and women who like Blythe in Japan have a (deserved) reputation as being on the verge of the goth-loli cosplay kind of scene that Eri loathes, but nonetheless, she finds herself liking the doll itself. I can't really complain, considering my own interest in toys though. The Blythe exhibition was properly wierd. There were six areas where Blythe dolls had been dressed up in costumes to represent characters in Fairy Stories (Little Red Riding Hood etc), and then in the middle of the room were are hoardes of Blythes all in costumes designed by international fashion houses. Serious looking women were walking round with voting ballots choosing the costumes they liked best. There's a big gala event in July to crown the winner...which just kind of beggars belief. (Photo by Bubujojo)
Last was the yearly Medicom Exhibition in the Parco Art Gallery in Shibuya. I thought the gallery space itself was a little less nicely designed than in previous years, and there seemed less on display too. The highlights for me were the (much lauded) wooden Bearbricks, the new Star Wars figures, and the Mick Jagger doll. I didn't win a prize this year though, which somewhat ruined the event for me.
I can't remember quite what I said to my Vice-Principal when he asked me if I was a fast runner, but whatever it was, it can't have been sufficient to persuade him of my complete sporting ineptitude, because when Sports Day rolled around again, my name was in the roster for the teachers and PTA team in the 100m relay.
I enjoyed our Sports Day for once this year. The sun was out, the kids were well behved and the parents were friendly and in good voice. In short, it was a little like something from the Stepford Wives. I did make a massive mistake with my photos though. My camera has a thing on the viewfinder where you can adjust the focus for people with bad eyesight. The problem is, that if you have good eyesight (which I now do with my new specs on), it throws the focusing off completely. I realised at lunchtime, that the tiny dial for this was not quite centred and at f2.2 and above, it meant that about 100 shots were slightly out of focus. Really, really annoying. Oh well, you live and learn and all that.
There was a new (to me) event this year, which, like with so many of the events at a Japanese school sports day, would never, ever be allowed to be done in England for reasons of health and safety, mores the pity. This event, the name of which I forget, involved two teams, each of which had a giant ear-cleaning-bud thing to protect, which they surrounded, so that one end poked out of the centre of a circle of about 20 students. The other team then had to jump onto/through/above these kids and try to grab the ear-cleaning-bud thing and pull it to the ground, (thus also crushing the students around it). It was brilliant. The kids just leapt at eachother, knees into faces and arses on heads. Hilarious. It really should be a part of every school's violence repertoire.
By the time the teachers vs students race came around, it was about 3 in the afternoon and I was knackered after having been responsible for all photo teams and video teams all day. This did mean that my usual lack of speed would be excused somewhat by exhaustion, which was good, although I had a rather nasty feeling that some of the other teachers were actually entertaining the patently insane idea that we might beat the students team, comprising of the fastest kids aged between 12 and 15. It was never, ever going to happen. I ran after the Principal and Vice-Principal, which was basically perfect, as it meant that by the time I got the baton, we were already far too far behind the kids to have any chance of victory. My run was ok-ish, although I had the very peculiar feeling of my feet not quite connecting with the ground, like I was running a few centimeters above it. I have always rather suspected my ability to walk on air and this was a little like confirmation. I also think that my baton exchange with the teacher after me was really rather fine.
It's also interesting that since sports day, my students have all suddenly exhibited a new-found proficiency with English adverbial sentence construction and have seemed desperate to practice it with me:
Student: Hey Olly, nice racing.
Me: Why thank you, young Master Watanabe.
Student: Olly?
Me: Yes?
Student: You run very slowly.
Click for more pictures or click the link for the whole lot.
Incident 1: On Tuesday evening, I had just finished a jog (stagger) round the local park and was walking down one of the little backstreets that leads from the park back to my house. Just up the road were three large crows, the type that can often be seen loitering on the streets of Tokyo. Crows in Tokyo are everywhere and are huge. This is due to an incident in the 60's where nuclear waste was spilled on a pile of rubbish which was then eaten by some crows that mutated and caused a race of mecha-crow that killed all the normal crows and now rule all of Tokyo. They can be seen every money ripping apart rubbish bags, extorting lunch money from little kids and mugging old women.
This time, one crow was walking down the road and the other two were sitting on telephone wires on either side. As I approached, they started squarking, much more than usual. I chuckled to myself, not realising the Tippi Hedren danger I was in, and walked on until I was anout 20 feet from the crow in the middle of the road. Suddenly, I heard a massive swooosh and felt wings hitting my head, as one of the two crows divebombed me from behind and flew only centimeters above me. No sooner had I ducked, pointlessly late, when again, with a swoooosh, the other crow narrowly missed me. A little spooked, I checked to see that no-one was watching, luckily they weren't, and I started walking/trotting a little faster. By now I was only a few feet from the crow on the ground, and suddenly one of the first two blitzkrieg crows swooped down, screaming as it did so and just avoided hitting me again. The crow on the ground then started jumping towards me too, and again, the third crow attacked. This time, I couldn't have given a shit who was watching and I started running off down the street. After about 30 metres, the attacks stopped and I had a chance to catch my breath, exhausted after this extra unwanted exercise. Turning round, I saw the crows attacking another guy walking down the street. Obviously braver or, perhaps, more stupid than me, he was fighting back and aiming punches at the swooping death-birds. I didn't see much after he fell and, screaming, was set upon.
Incident 2: Yesterday, on my way out of school, I was chased by a FUCKING TORNADO. That is all. I think something may be trying to tell me something...
This Sunday was the annual One Love Jamaica Festival. Organised partly by the Jamaican embassy, it is one of the many "international" (Thailand, Brazil, the all-encompassing Africa etc), festivals in Tokyo in the late spring/early summer. The Jamaican festival has lives acts, performances by Japanese dancehall queens (including Junko, the Japanese dancer who - astonishingly - beat Jamaican girls at their own game and won the World Dancehall Queen contest), and an ill-conceived Bob Marley song contest. There are stalls selling general "ethnic" tat, the same ones that were selling the same stuff last week, bedecked with Thai flags at the Thai Festival, here again, this time with their Jamaican flags. Most importantly though, there are Jerk Chicken stalls. Ummmmmmm, Jerrrk Chicken...I love me some Jerk Chicken.
This year, Eri and I arrived late, about 5 o'clock. Honestly though, it was pretty amazing that I felt well enough to go at all as I was pretty hung over after the previous night's stag festivities. Unfortunately, (though I didn't let Eri see how annoyed I was), we missed the dancehall queen show, and arrived in the middle of the Marley song contest which we quickly left. Walking through the stalls, we stopped at the hilarious "Speak like a Jamaican" stand, organised by the Jamaican Embassy people. Here, an "authentic" Jamaican was teaching Japanese people how to speak Jamaican. It was brilliant, like a wierd version of one of my lesson's, with all the embarrassment factor of when one of the elderly teachers asks you to teach the kids "something youthful" and ends up greeting you as "blud" for the rest of your time in the school. The Jamaican teacher was shouting out:
"Repeat after me: Wha gwarn?!"
The crowd shout back: "Eeto Huwa guwarnu?"
Brilliant.
The jerk chicken queue though, was long. It took us about an hour to get to the front of the queue where I found, to my horror, that the proper rice and peas had been sold out and replaced with just white rice. Sacrilege. Still the jerk chicken was good. The other that that we really noticed was that in the years we have gone to the Jamaican festival, the crowd has really changed. At first, the crowd was much more of a roots/reggae style crowd, more hippys and lots of smelly hair. Now though, it's become much more dancehall, loads more girls in little tops and (strangely for Japan), better endowed. As ever though, the larger endowment has been followed by a bit more of an aggressive attitude, not quite as nice as it used to be. Still, everything has its price...
