Last night was the premiere of my buddy Mike’s art show at the Pink Cow in Shibuya. He had invited a hotch-potch mix of our old frisbee friends, students, work-mates, and also a few guys from the Japan blogosphere. The event was a blast and I believe several paintings sold
Nuclear Craters on the Marshall Islands
The impact was immediate and massive. In a second the fireball of flame, earth and smoke spread almost four and half miles wide, engulfing everything within its path, visible over 250 miles away. After one minute the atomic mushroom cloud reached 47,000 feet high and 7 miles wide.? 5 ships were destroyed, numerous islanders were poisoned by the nuclear fallout, and a whole island was gouged out of existence as a crater 2km wide and 250 feet deep was burned into the earth. It was the 15 megaton 1952 ‘Castle Bravo’ atomic bomb test on Bikini atoll in the Marshall …
Star Wars fans in cosplay dress-off
Makuhari Messe is one heck of a ginormous exposition facility, big enough to accomodate the Millennium Falcon, Jabba the Hutt, numerous Darth Vaders AND Han Solo’s ego all at once. When Star Wars came to Tokyo, I had to go along to help celebrate.
Exploring an Abandoned Japanese Castle-Shrine
Japan is riddled with shrines, both in cities and out in the countryside, huddled in the basin of wintry valleys or perched precariously on top of mountains- often at points of raw natural beauty and power. From time to time though these wooden complexes go bankrupt. The monks pack up and move out like franchisees out of rent money. They didn’t sell enough blessings from the shrine blessings shop, didn’t garner enough inheritance tithes, didn’t bury enough people in the graveyard plots they rent out. They move out and the wooden structure is left to fend for itself against the …
Catman on the loose in Ikebukuro station
Worse than a monkey on the loose in Shibuya station is Catman on the loose with his bag of cats. Catman wanders the station’s underground aisles dropping kittens on various statues wherever he goes.
Ladies for ladies, Bears for men
On toilet doors you sometimes see fancy graphics, stylized versions of the little dude and chick that tell us which little room to go in to do our business. I’ve seen Picasso-esque renderings, melting-egg Dali versions, etc..
Crazy Kei the DIY cosplayer
Kei is a funky if kind of mad old guy I met one night on a random photo-walk through Shinjuku’s skyscraper district (West). I was on the bridge shooting pretty city lights and so was he, me with my dSLR and he with some weirdly contrived home-made compact camera.
Gutterman
by Michael John Grist.
I found him one mad marsh-walking night. I was out in the bogs, I don’t know why, crossing wet rivers and wading through peat mulberry patches, dashings of filth worming their way into the cuffs of my suit turn-ups, smidgeons of muck smudging up and under my fingernails.
Airplane boneyard in the Mojave desert
This is where planes go when they die. Vast hulks of metal that cost millions to build, now grounded in obsolescence, taken out to the boneyard to be shot in the head like Old Yeller. Their long neat lines look a lot like the white tombs of fallen soldiers at Arlington cemetery, seemingly endless in number, waiting for the day they will be hacked open like sheet-metal pinatas to get at the valuable guts within. Fallen soldiers at a final roll call in the boneyard. The boneyard is just one part of the Mojave Air and Space Port, the same …
Not many banana
Raising kids is tough. Ask any parent and they’ll talk to you for hours about the hundreds of daily decisions they face in naturing and nurturing their kids into healthy little human robots.