m e g a p e r l s

On my way home on Friday night, this poster caught my eye. It shows a model reconstruction of the Kashiwa station plaza from a bird’s eye view. Sheer brilliance, I thought. I wonder who had this idea and who went through the pain of building this. I spent a lot of time last year taking picture on the station plaza. It is a great place to photograph. I have never really published the results, because I have not had the time to edit them yet. It was supposed to be my major output for 2004, but I never got round to it. I could photograph Kashiwa station plaza endlessly I think. The concentration of suburban Japanese life there is unbelievable and when I cross it without a camera I am feeling pain for not being able to capture it. I have to get back on the job to finish this series!

The poster is advertising the Tokatsu Film Festival in Abiko/Kashiwa/Matsudo in October. Seems to be the first time they do it, and if the poster is anything to go by, a must-see this autumn.

Quintessential Japan

The lack of postings here and a general unresponsiveness to email is what several people have pointed out to me recently. Well, needless to say there is only one person to blame: our little Theobald. In a nice way of course. Add to that being busy at work, my endless first-class business travels (not) and it is easy to see that there seems absolutely no time to sit in front of the computer and write emails and blog entries. In fact, it seems the wrong priority.

After a fair amount of thinking I am starting a “reclaim the time” project. I think it would be a shame to miss out on certain things like staying in touch with people and I need to explore whether or not there is a potential solution to reclaim this somehow, even at some monetary cost.

As a first step I bought an iBook. Absolutely gorgeous piece of equipment it is! My plan is to use it on train journeys into work. Two potential hours waiting to be reclaimed. Since I have changed my commuting route, I have a seat on the train every morning. So I thought I could use a laptop to catch up with emails and other things. In fact, I am typing this on the train right now.

What will be a lot harder is to reclaim time for photography. I haven’t had time to do anything for months, again it is all related to Mr T. While I get around to some shooting and have a dozen of films waiting to be processed, I simply cannot imagine sitting in front of the computer and scanning, editing them as I used to do. I even found my thoughts straying into the land of digital the other day. Let’s see how I can tackle this, but I don’t want to wait to continue picture-taking when I am retired. That would be a real shame.