Have yourselves a grand winterval! Posts have been a little sparse of late, have I lost my love of self indulgent photo-blogging? Don’t fear my dear disciples, I have big plans the blog in 2012 (mostly they involve taking pictures and then putting those pictures here… shuttup). See you then!
In the meantime, here’s a picture of a wish fulfilled:
Miyajima, Spring 2008
Crowds come to Highgate East to gather round the ostentatious grave of Karl Marx,
as well they might, no matter what they believe to be sensible. They might then wander on through deaths historic and contemporary. Workers of the world, and all others, united.
Highgate, London, Nov 2011.
What kind of perfect future utopian nightmare would you imagine it to be?
Tate Modern, Oct 2011
ok stop
now go again
go some more
bit more…
ok, that’s fine. You know, I saw all this just walking around this afternoon.
Old Street, Brick Lane and St. Pauls Oct. 2011
Are made of exactly this:
and then this:
Richmond, London. Oct 2011.
Not often, but some days, you’re walking along and a selection of painted Gorilla statues that you last saw in your hometown are arranged outside the mayor of London’s office. It’s just what happens.
City Hall. London. Sep 2011.
Thank you guys, something of a tiny milestone. Here’s a wee bonus!
Kyoto. Autumn 2007.
I took a friend to Heygate not so long back, the first time I’d been there since I posted this several months ago.
It’s changed, all the buildings have been sealed off now. The graffiti I pictured will be seen by no-one now until it gets blown to dust sometime in the next few years.
But something new has arrived. The local community have started using the open spaces of Heygate to grow vegetables, people have cleared away the junk and made a new space for creating, not for dwelling in destruction. More of that another time. Because I found something on this visit that I had missed before. On a small interior block, someone has scribbled messages on the walls, extracts from a narrative on the residents who once lived here.
The cynic in me wondered if they were true. If they are then where did they come from, if not then who would make them up?
Not for me to comment, these authors went for brevity, and the tiny extracts scrawled on breaking walls speak well enough for themselves. Go see them, while the buildings still stand.
Heygate. July 2011.
I don’t know. I found these in the same album and that’s the only congruent theme. Stop yelling.
Fukuoka. Nov 2007.
Can sometimes make up for weak technique and a really cheap lens.
Sometimes.
The Shard, Feb 2011.
Another look back to Nagasaki in this post, the dragon boat race is another imported tradition that the Nagasakians… yeah, Nagasakians, take more seriously than is entirely sensible.
Japan was sealed off to the outside world for 400 or so years leading up to the 1860s. Only a small number of Chinese were allowed on the mainland and only in Nagasaki. They brought the tradition of dragon boat racing with them, and now the harbourside villagers of Nagasaki reignite the practice every summer.
What this involves is every village in a district putting forward a team and making a boat. Every member of the team makes their own paddle, and then everyone gets out on the water and trains like a beast every single night until the race day.
And it is hard. freakin. work.
Props to Motomura village for letting a few of the international students from Gaidai join the team and props to those guys for showing some yamato spirit. Come the day they didn’t win a great bunch of races, but man they learned what the word ‘Gambaru’ really means.
The Japanese say the journey is more important than the destination right? Fair shout.
And now it’s hung on my wall. Isn’t that awesome!?
Having discovered time-lapse… or whatever, I took this on purpose a few days later:
If you want fast moving bright lights, I guess Tokyo is the obvious destination.
Tokyo Tower and Ginza. New year 2008.
in order to get this photo. I’m sure I looked like I was having a great time. Certainly worth it though, sometimes everything in a picture is just pointing in the right direction.
It is quite possible that the Tate was just designed that way however.
Tate Modern. Mar 2011.
The Japanese are world renowned for their reserved, cheerful, polite nature. But if you ever did want to see one kick a policeman in the head, or set their friends on fire, I would recommend the Nagasaki Obon Matsuri.
In most parts of Japan in late August, respectful memorials to the dead are visited by those who have lost a loved one during the year, these are Obon Matsuri, festivals for the recently departed. A small floating vessel is lit with candles and reverentially floated out on a river toward the sea. Quite families calmly remember a great-aunt as a beautiful sea of spirits floats away from them.
Nagasaki, however, is a city that likes to take things a little further.
No. A lot further.
When Portuguese Catholics occupied Nagasaki in the 1600s, they proselytised furiously and successfully, converting the local lord and staking claim to the prefecture. The reaction of the shogunate was to not only send an army to drive the westerners out, but to boil, actually boil, anyone who followed their obscene faith.
So, to avoid getting boiled, the Nagasaki-ites exaggerated their Japaneseness. Every village festival with remote shinto connections became a vast overblown ordeal, if northern Japanese had paper boats, Nagasaki would have giant, multi section, TV laden, wooden barges.
If everywhere else was going to make do with candles, these oh-so-not-Christian Nagasaki people were going to honour their dead times a million by blowing up powerful explosives supplied by their other foreign friends the Chinese.
You know those fire crackers that come in strips of ten, you light one end of the strip and drop it before it starts making noise? Well those strips come in boxes of a hundred or so… and those boxes come in crates… of thousands.
The more noise you make, the more dedication you show. And this is where the affair stops being so light hearted. Families with kids, who lost grandma this year, go early in the day, let off a few fire crackers and parade through town. It’s an act of dedication which holds an extended family together and helps create a feeling of having done the right thing by grandma, she’d be proud.
But after dark things get serious. Some of these are simply bigger families, or richer ones, the floats are more ostentatious and they have more in the way of fire power. But among them are people still in serious mourning, perhaps for someone who was a pillar of the community, or someone who died young.
For the young, this is not a light hearted memorial, this is an explosive catharsis. Drunk teenagers show a violent rejection of death and pour out their grief by going absolutely crazy. And the tourist crowds stand back, half out of respect for a very genuine and tragic display of emotion, half out of fear of physical harm.
That’s what happens when you throw a match into a crate of fire crackers. A man did get set on fire by that last one, he rolled around till he was put out and then carried on marching.
But the police were not happy. One year in Japan and I’d never seen a policeman do anything more than give directions, tonight they had to protect these people from themselves. They had armoured vans to take away arrestees, and were riling up drunk angry kids by knocking the boxes of fireworks from their hands.
In the bottom right of the above photo you can see some high-schoolers riding around on a wagon waving fireworks. That’s a wagon full of fireworks by the way.
The police stepped in, but in the dark and the blur I managed very few good pictures. Punches were thrown, kids who were politely serving behind the counter in Family Mart that morning were dragged away crying and screaming. And people ask me why I love Nagasaki…
