I will send more pictures of life on the Hibiya Line.

I hate the way that high-quality black-and-white film looks. There's something off-puttingly sharp about it. It doesn't resemble the way that I see the world. My eyes must be getting worse. I want haze and blocks of color.

She is going to read Yuk Hui's article on technodiversity in CONG (and she has already read my contribution, which is about going out in Guangzhou). This is promotion for a magazine that I'm not sure anybody but its contributors and publishers have read.

This is an old picture. Provia 400X isn't made anymore. A pack of five rolls of slide film in 120 would be more than a hundred bucks. I used to not think much about the price. I had no clear approach to selecting film stock. I lost all of the pictures, anyway.

A note on a bookstore shutter in Jinbocho: "To an unknown Frenchman..."

Someone should at least turn Barthes to enka, if they haven't before. It's beyond me. I had never read this essay before today. I am too late. It must have been done before and more thoroughly.

I have watched this a hundred times. I have watched it a thousand. I wrote about it in an essay on Miyako Harumi. But language fails. Adjectives fail. That is what Barthes says. We are left with "the impossible account of an individual thrill."

I could never explain precisely what I love about the 1966 performance of the song. I appreciate that her growl is clearly not from rokyoku but borrowed through Hirota Mieko from American R&B records. I appreciate the adolescent flirtation in the performance, incongruous with a song of parting.

Since I learned about it a few years ago, I have wanted to read 803. It was described as a Proustian memoir of Third Front industrialization and its aftermath in Guizhou, narrating decades in a monologue sustained across eight hundred pages. It will come out this year.

November, 2022.

November, 2022.

November, 2022. (I can see the Skytree from north of Ueno Park.)