matt's pictures

halloween night in Tokyo

So this is a little bit later that night, going to the big square in Shibuya. We didn’t really get to see it that night; the whole place was cordoned and under police control after riots earlier in the evening. The funny thing was: there could have been a riot across the street and I don’t thing we’d have been able to tell the difference. Just a bazillion bodies jammed in next to each other.

Posted on 2019-05-10T23:55:27Z GMT

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.