torime said: Hi! Dan I’m not so much into checking my dashboard but reading your writngs very often, what will you write about tumblr next? yuka k
ユカ、久しぶりね。ごめん、日本語で返事書く。。。これから何にを書くのは予定がないけど、ただ「日本語で書いたら意味があるかどうか」という確認したかった。
東京に住んでいるアメリカ人です。下のブログで日本の写真について書いています。
Publishing books as MCV MCV
Street Level Japan - blog about Japanese photography
dan at mcvmcv dot net
torime said: Hi! Dan I’m not so much into checking my dashboard but reading your writngs very often, what will you write about tumblr next? yuka k
ユカ、久しぶりね。ごめん、日本語で返事書く。。。これから何にを書くのは予定がないけど、ただ「日本語で書いたら意味があるかどうか」という確認したかった。
just looking at the quotes i blogged earlier, which you will certainly not see if you are looking at this in your dashboard. of course i’m more or less mocking the quote about tumblr, because it can be so easily filed away under “silly critical theory,” or “art bollocks” or “IAE.” there could actually be something there, but you’re shooting yourself in the foot by writing like that on twitter—it’s not an aphorism, it requires more explanation.
then again, i should hardly complain, as i’ve probably never been less interested in explaining things online.
(Source: adrianharwood)
What starts out as hope soon becomes corroded into a dialectic of lust, leaving only a sense of nihilism and the inevitability of a new synthesis.
about to reblog two highly related things
Shinjuku Mad 新宿マッド (JP 1970) Kōji Wakamatsu - incipit (by marcotass)
I’m working hard to improve my reading ability, and I’m planning to translate more text here (or other places) as I finally become able to read text in Japanese. With that in mind I want to briefly explain something that came up in the Araki essay on Tomatsu I posted yesterday to American Photo 1.
Probably the strangest part of the essay is where Araki writes: “I was invited to the school as a teacher, though not to teach anything about mental thinking, just ‘finger thinking.’”
What’s happening here? Araki is making a joke. First, he says that he couldn’t teach “thought”: 思想, pronounced “shisou,” the combination of the characters for “think” and “thought.” Instead of “thought,” he taught something else, a made-up word: 指想, which is also pronounced “shisou,” but this is the combination of the characters for “finger” and “thought.” (Obviously he’s referring to pressing the shutter.)
Araki’s thinking is not a thinking-thinking; it’s a finger-thinking.
Nobuyoshi Araki published a remembrance of Shomei Tomatsu in the Jan 9 issue 1 of the Asahi Shimbun; I translated it for American Photo 2.
Jeffrey Lee Pierce interview from 1989
