matt's pictures

welcome (back) to tokyo

I feel like there may have been a nap or something when we got into town, after checking in to our accidentally swanky hotel (when you book on the internet, it’s hard to tell sometimes). In any case, by the time we left it was dark outside.

I really like the building in the second picture, dead center. I looked up what it was at the time, but I’d rather go with my first impression, that it’s a spaceship stranded on earth pretending to be a skyscraper (and the egg next to it the crew’s efforts to build an escape).

We went to a place called, I shit you not, “Piss Alley,” where we had pretty OK yakitori and interesting sightseeing. I say we went there, but really we wandered and got lost on our way, went to a place that said it was Piss Alley but wasn’t, and then found our friends, Christa and Nicholas, and got some dinner. I had forgotten, but it was also Halloween. So this was just the start of the night.

Posted on 2019-05-09T06:28:07Z GMT

fuji and back to Tokyo

I was going to rant about a thing, but decided on balance that I should just chill. These are photos from getting back to Tokyo and making our way to the overly fancy hotel. We weren’t the only tourists out in Shinjuku.

Posted on 2019-04-30T15:52:41Z GMT

kyoto in the morning

I’m not naturally a morning person, but something about crossing the dateline made me much more of one, at least for the first week. Even after being out relatively late the night before, we were up super early and got ourselves together to go back to Tokyo. A little walk, some cutesy bikes, and a coffee shop that catered to tourist enough that they served a really good scrambled egg. Don’t ask me to remember the name, although I could probably find it on google maps.

I’ve encountered two opposing ideas recently; that of choosing a project that’s doable, on the one hand, but on the other, giving yourself permission to stretch out. The former was on Patreon, David Alan Harvey’s page; he was talking about his work that was keeping him close to home. The other was in Craig Mod’s newsletter Ridgeline #16, the bit about Robert Caro. He worked for 5 years, thinking that was a lot, and then met fellow writers that had been working, seriously, for much longer, which made him realize it was totally fine to be where he was doing what he was doing. The lack of outward progress wasn’t an indicator of failure. Some things are not incrementally successful.

Which tells me that maybe I’m wrong about PROJECT SAN PABLO. It’s not a code name, I just like it in all caps. There’s something to be said for chipping away at something for many years. It’s not done. It won’t be done for a while. It’s yet to be seen if it’s ‘doable’ but it’s something that I can do other things and still have as a going concern, a subprocess, maybe.

Also I bought a new lens. We’ll see how I feel about it. Review images coming sometime in 2022 at this rate.

Posted on 2019-04-26T08:23:56Z GMT

kyoto at night (pt 2)

So, jumping forward a few weeks, to just after the last japan post. There was a bunch of stuff that happened that mid-day, including wandering around a mall looking for food, and I’m pretty sure there was a nap, and then we went for a second night walk. We may have found some whiskey. I know we did, later in Tokyo, but that’s getting out of order, something we obviously don’t do here.

The second and third images are black and white because color balance is hard, especially from lightbulb brands one is not used to, in mixed conditions. Lots of fluorescents mixed indiscriminately with CFL and LED lights. Oh well.

Posted on 2019-04-23T07:05:04Z GMT

sophias birthday karaoke @ the mint

Posting when I’m moderately more coherent than I usually am… what can I say, the thoughts that come out at 1am are a little disjointed. It’s a blog. There’s no peer review, no editor. There’s rarely a proofreader. Anybody can hang a little piece of content on the internet to call their own; that some of it is rough and a lot of it is crap goes with the territory. BUT, the extraordinary freedom that comes with that is really great; you get people being their truest, most honest. The ideas don’t always join up but the photos, being mainly about a feeling, usually still work.

My recollection of this evening is a little blurry, too. It was Sophie’s actual birthday, and we invited a ton of people, made the different friend groups all come together a bit. The Oklahomies, the Cali friends, the work friends; if you didn’t get an invite, it’s solely my fault and the capacity of the room.

The Mint was a lot of fun. Rum and cokes all night, and then I find myself outside having a smoke (don’t worry mom, I don’t inhale) and looking up and taking drunken pictures of the palm trees. And then back inside. Yes, I sang something. No, I was busy, so I didn’t get any photos of that.

Enough rambling. Time to go party.