Lotusblog

As always, The Cowboy was absolutely right.
Lens flare makes everything better. The world becomes full of hope again. Melancholy vanishes. Hello hope.

Lens flare makes everything better

Thanks to M and S for modelling for this picture.

So if lens flare can enhance our visual world, then can you imagine what happen if only it could ameliorate our aural world, too? Try to imagine, if you will, Pavement’s Major Leagues or Burt Bacharach’s Pacific Coast Highway with lens flare. The concept alone is bringing tears to my eyes.

For the time being at least, I have my work cut out for me. I am going to go through my photo album and add lens flare to every photo I have.

Many thanks to Mike who posted this scary picture of me at the end of our recent video chat.

Oh dear.

You just wait ’til you’re on video.

***

Anyway, it’s Friday night again. It seems like every night is Friday night. Actually, every night is Friday night. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.
Yesterday I met Momus. He was wandering around our gallery and interviewed me for his audioblog, and also posted a rather scary picture of me on his site which you can find here . It’s interesting to read his thoughts as he travels around what has become my home.
And if you want to know why I am wearing bunny ears… well you’ll just have to listen to the recording.

A bunny boy at gm

Took this picture before I left home this afternoon.

Another self portrait

12:15pm, Osaka-ko, August 4, 2004

Take a deep breath.

"Hanging out with friends rules!"

While we are on the topic of time travel, pictures of the past and so on, let’s take a few moments to learn something from this picture.

For those of you who don’t understand Japanese, the headline on the right reads “Hanging out with friends rules!” (to put it into the young person’s parlance). The boxed caption reads; “Winners of the Exciting Group Award”, and the paragraph below talks about their friendship, their group-shopping, their “mysteriously well-coordinated yet unique fashion tastes” and the excitement, energy and youth they exude.

I managed to get hold of the April 18, 1989 Olive magazine. What a classic. This particular issue is the “National Street Fashion Awards” issue, with a bevy of stylists, advisors and people in the know choosing the most fashionably dressed girls (and boys) from the Japan’s 12 major cities.

This magazine is beautiful. It speaks to the generation that, riding on the coat-tails of their parents, experienced all of the benefits of the bubble economy while not having to deal with any of its subsequent nasty side-effects.

When I look around me now I am mostly thankful the asset-inflated bubble economy didn’t keep going. The logical extension of what these people were wearing is too hard and too disturbing to picture. A good, hard recession brought us back to basics and simple tailoring. However, with the recent upturn (in Tokyo’s economy at least) I fear the history will indeed repeat. Twenty-five years is a long time, after all.

I was looking through my photo album and I am came across this picture of myself that I took exactly four years ago.

The old me

“you are getting sleepy, you can no longer keep your eyes open, you are drifting down a very l-o-n-g tunnel…”