An Artist of the Floating World
Tokyo was a place of a lot of firsts for me.
The first first was its urban-ness. It was the first ‘real’ city I had lived in. Irvine, CA is technically municipal, but a city it is not: one must drive from his or her suburban rue, from a home that is a facsimile of all of the others, down wide asphalt avenues to a Costco to load up on enough toilet paper and olive oil to support a platoon under the unchanging flawlessness of a China-blue sky. For anyone who has never lived in Southern California, it is a paradise to move to. But for the few born there, it is a Hades of Homogeneity to escape from. In going from Irvine to Tokyo, I was exchanging the quintessence of suburbia for that of urbanism. For me, it was the catch and release I hadn’t realized I had been waiting for my entire life; I had been born and raised in what had amounted to captivity only to discover, in my early twenties, the freedom of the environment I had been meant to inhabit. “How is the water?”, Wallace’s older fish asks. I was fully aware and swimming meaningfully for the first time.
The first of five cities that begin with the letter “T”
Tokyo would also be the first of five cities that begin with the letter “T” which would somehow house me, or in the case of Tacoma, represent the promise of a house for me: Tokyo, Tempe, Taipei, Tacoma, and Tourrettes-sur-Loup. Tokyo, I fell in love with you. I fell in live while in you. If you have read Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and the introductory front-matter, you might recall a passing remark that the books are a love letter to a city, among other things. If you have ever loved a city, you know what it means to fall in love with one. It is possible that you can love others, but the first will always be special. You will learn a lot. About yourself. About your environment. About being creative. About feeling secure. About the readiness for death. The city gives all of these things—and yet, you will sojourn. You will go to Hakone. You will find your own narrow roads. Tokyo and her millions of people—a unity, a collective humanity, a body with so many cells all hustling to serve their purposes whilst secretly harboring ambitious delusions of transcendence, of adding and surpassing the greatness of the maw—eventually, this to shall come to pass, and shall pass. Harold Bloom talked of the city of the dead which the strong poet comes to inhabit. This, and Basho’s journey and Mishima’s Sun and Steel, I feel are all inevitable if you suffer enough loneliness.
I wish I could unpack every reference. I could spend a thousand lifetimes writing a thousand books each with a thousand chapters and yet I feel like this would be the beginning of an entropy of self, a speeding up at the edge of things, rather than a fermeture of a library of self. Unfortunately, language seems infinite to me. And we have created AI. Why? Why deprive ourselves of the greatest feelings we are capable of? Writing. Mathematics. Charity. Las Meninas. It doesn’t matter how we are creating—espousing in characters or currencies—it all ends up in the same place: the mecca of the mind…the fifth level in Maslow’s mound—it all comes to an unbearable rightness of being. Yes, that is a pun. Good for you for catching the reference. Again, if there were only time to write for all time, and then somehow cheat time itself and split it in a prism into infinitely more times, again, it would be a pleasure to write during all of them.
My first real job
I had been interviewed twice. At my own expense, I flew to San Francisco to meet the Vice-President of the branch office who was transiting back to Tokyo. I wore a suit and was nervous. There was always a lot of doubt in me. Not doubt about doing the job or contributing. But just doubt. I didn’t feel cool enough or confident enough. There was a kind of low self-esteem borne of misplacement. I was literary, inclined toward the anthropology and cultural deconstruction of the workplace in order to see its luminous social ligaments. I was interested in the theory of management, its mapping onto structures of the tribe, the family, the nation. Not with any judgement of those telescoping institutions. I am a free spirit who believes in freedom, including the freedom of making money. For me, however, the purist freedom was achieving the summits of Howard Bloom and Harold Bloom and Ibrahim Maslow: the freedom I enjoyed was supra-planetary and meta-corporate. It was Chagall’s painting of a man in a suit floating above Tokyo with a laptop writing about it all. I didn’t mention any of this at the interview.
But this is supposed to be about photography. And Tokyo. And Hiroshima. Those are tall orders. They will, cumulatively, render a portrait of the artist, a set of points that will be revisited again and again as a photographer, an ethos of a flaneur with a Fuji.
The first place I ever took a digital photograph
In a way, this makes Tokyo the birthplace of this museum; it makes that image its birth certificate. Sadly, that image was on a borrowed camera; I had been approached whilst sitting in a café in Kichijoji by two business women who were conducting marketing research. They offered me a digital camera and asked me to keep a record of any images I took and we would meet a week later. The camera was not just any camera: it was a Fuji Fine-pix vertical body camera with a slender little gold-faced memory card. We met at a café for them to explain the project in more detail; my girlfriend at the time graciously conversed with them whilst I took my first ever shot—a dimly lit portrait of a glass teapot with flowers blooming in the amber water within. It was chamomile, chromatic, chemistry, Christmas, Kairos, chaos, and the entire litany of creativity in an instant. You see film photography had always plagued me with a guilt and a restraint—those images required a lot of material waste if you weren’t good at taking photos. With digital, I was free. I could take as many as I wanted (or as many as my image card would store) and see what worked. I am a hoarder who likes to travel lite. This resolved the paradox; simply put, it was the best of two contradictory worlds.
After completing my assignment and surrendering the lent camera, I went to Akihabara to buy the exact same camera. It was the machine the universe had been crafting for billions of years to meet serendipitously at the anthropologically appropriate moment of 2002 when my hand would hold this tool with absolute intuitive savoir-faire. I guess I should tell you, as I am somewhat realizing it as I write this, that the tool I use matters to me as much as the products I create with it. I guess this explains everything about me and my art and the world I wish for: exceptional, uncompromising tools with which to make adjacent, innovative, idiosyncratic art. The first photograph I took was of Christmas lights in the dirt of a private-residence’s fenced in berm around the narrow circumferences of so many junipers or cypress trees. Of course I can’t be certain of the trees, but that is what I imagine such a place to be lined with. In the darkness of my walk home from the train station, this scattered sea of pointillistic light brought happiness and warmth to my soul. It was echoic of the flowers in the belly of the teapot. I didn’t know that low-light photography was less accurate and detailed than what the eye perceived. So the photo doesn’t have the same magic. Instead, it has its own: I will curate odd and off images. There are so many market-collateral worthy images of places. And they tell a story of shiny protagonists in glistening Camelots. I like the notes an idiot scribbles on a scrap of paper to expound upon later into a magnus opus. I like the imagistic marginalia of the lives we live. I like the little things. The details. Occasionally, I like the big picture, too. But more often than not, you will find me obsessed—like Sartre’s character in Nausea—with things on the ground.
Tokyo was other firsts for me as well, but some things are best entrusted to the equivalent of the safety deposit boxes of the universe. In time, all will dissolve. At present, everything resonates, whether boxed or not. I think of Pandora and her box, itself a kind of camera, too, perhaps. Hope, perhaps, is light and its imprimatur on darkness. All those other things? They are what we might want to capture likenesses of. Yes, photography is an art of simulacra—it is so much sampling of the world. And yet, it is more. Each image is at the exclusion of all other depths of field, all that lies outside the frame, all that we did not or could not see. A photograph is a tiny molecule in a mammoth project of identity. All the photos an individual takes are a kind of signature, the scaley skin of a reptilian memoir—and yet, there is a kind of transparency and vulnerability to the armor. The images we take, collectively, reveal the inclinations and the sensitivities that inspired them. They are as much windows as they are opacities. They are as much about what they aren’t as they are about what they contain or seem to be. They are the walls of Pandora’s box which may as well have been made of glass and which we may as well have thrown over the edge of a cliff onto the rocks below for boxes and images are meant to exist outside of their edges, beyond vertice and crop-line, in the infinity of the periphery and the afterlife of the image* so that we may have done more than document a place or a time—so that we may have transcended time and place in the construction of the supercity of creativity itself.