One of the reasons I travel a lot to southern islands is their charm, magic, or gravitational pull. Tropical islands are fun and pleasant, making everyone happy as if by their magic.
However, when you think about it again, you realize that it is not the islands but our modern society under the spell. For instance, we assume that a life in which we work 9 to 5 and commute on a crowded train or in heavy traffic daily is a reality, but is it?
The real world is more enchanted, to put it another way, in a nightmare. And the southern islands have the function of breaking such an overcasting spell.
Cherry blossoms, a.k.a. Sakura in Japanese, are religiously indigenous in Japan with rice-farming tradition. Etymologically, Sakura means the place where rice spirituals dwell. When cherry blossoms are in full bloom, the Japanese people gather under the trees to share sake with the spirituals and pray for the rice harvest. And they start rice planting. Scientifically, this is pretty much rational.
Rice planting begins when the air temperature gets about 15 degrees Celsius; if it is below 10 ºC, the rice plants will not grow well. In those days, the blooming of cherry blossoms had been empirically a marker for annual fertility.
The spirit of rice paddies has been believed to come down from mountains every spring. The Japanese have offered sake under the cherry blossoms, and the spirituals have been solemnly welcomed. That’s a ceremony. And then, everyone drinks sake and gets into wild merrymaking.
Everyone should experience the totality of a solar eclipse at least once because it is FREE. The Sun never complains about copyright infringement. And yet, it performs such a fantastic show without a fee.
Birds chirping, trees rustling, all sounds faded as if absorbed by the darkness, and it began. The panoramic totality view was extraordinary and eccentric rather than impressive. This celestial cataclysm gave the ancients a bizarre experience and gave rise to many myths and folklore worldwide.
And again, this spectacular shade show is copyright-free, while many more things on earth are being trademarked daily.
American experimental composer John Cage once published a piece called 4’33” in 1952. It is composed of three movements, and Cage’s sole instruction to the performers was “tacet” (Latin: [it] is silent) in each one. So, it is a quiet “4 minutes and 33 seconds” piece.
In 2002, British composer/arranger Mike Batt was accused of plagiarism for the song “A One Minute Silence” and of infringing John Cage’s copyright for including Cage as co-composer. Batt ended up paying an undisclosed six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust. Today, even silence is a trademarked work. Taylor’s Track 3 is just gossip, to be sure.
What is strictly copyright? What exactly does it do to us? It’s high time creators thought about it.
The last non-authoritative objects left to humankind may be natural light and sound. An experience from them, such as a total solar eclipse, is the only greater reality that info media can’t wrap or warp with the secondary reality they create.
Upon such a copyright-free experience, human beings can break through virtual reality because it is always something to which all the genes in each cell respond.
Man taints a chaotic world, and the chaos is merely the human impression. The entire universe is composed of harmony and order. The moment the diamond ring started to light up the sky again, my genetic pulse subsided in relief.
Sound engineers work on positioning top-tier audio speakers to suit the front row for shows like The Paradise Garage in the 80s. The rich sound flows through the latest Dolby Atoms system, filling the show with luxuriance. Sound quality determines the quality of motion pictures. The same goes for fashion shows. It is an industry of looks. Therefore, sounds appeal to the senses.
The track selector you hire and the sound engineer you hire will determine the success of bridal shows because music files and audio players have become standardized.
The songs are the references properly chosen to match the show’s theme, which allows us to understand the designers’ true intentions. It is a privilege for guests to hear the music because it cannot be posted on YouTube due to copyright infringement.
New York Bridal Week takes place after the Fashion Week. The drastic changes in musical tone are a significant part of the fun, and also, the diverse and minute differences in sound from show to show are delightful. As if to show the diversity of the white bridal dress.
A cup of coffee, coffee, coffee, followed by another cup of coffee tasting at every corner is my mission in Portland because coffee tastes excellent here. Portland is now a mecca of the third-wave coffee culture.
Third-wave coffee tastes fruity and slightly acidic because the coffee is brewed with lightly roasted beans. But why light-roasted? Isn’t the dark roast only the standard for espresso shots? It is simple: fresh sashimi-grade fish serves for sushi, and subpar fish needs broiling. Light roasting of high-quality beans extracts the fullest of their potential.
In the digital internet world, Jack Dorsey insisted on the importance of real places for people to gather, and he believed that artisanal coffee would play a key role in making this happen. That’s the third-wave coffee, not the third place of the second-wave, which Taylor Clark criticized as “Starbucked.”
The third-wave coffee is a new counterculture originating in the organic movement. It all started in San Francisco and sparked in Portland.
Portland shows us that the time has come for mornings. The idea of fueling consumer activity even at night by twinkling nightlights over billboards is tacky here. GenZer is growing up Generation Dry, who are not choosing to drink such as hard liquor, hazing rituals of alcohol initiation at college, etc. They no longer sit down with a glass of vintage wine for political shenanigans under the moon. Booze is getting out-of-date at an incredible speed because the young are busy with social media on their smartphones.
We get up early in the morning with the sun and a cup of aromatic coffee for health. Health is wealth. Tomorrow, I will stroll the streets and savor more coffee philosophies with a Blue Star donut.
It was the final day of NY Fashion Week 15SS, for which I sprinted all over Manhattan for over thirty brands in a week, and I closed off with Ralph Lauren. Washington Street was overflowing with enthusiasm from fashion editors and fashion victims.
Ralph Lauren has “safari” as the 2015 Spring/Summer collection theme. The final look of the satin safari top and military taffeta ballgown was quintessential Ralph.
Gurkha pants, Rajah pink, etc., were on the runway show on top of Ralph Lauren’s signature cargo, jodhpur, safari, and khaki items. Ralph had some inspiration from his recent Indian escapade.
The essence of the show was announced by the line of chandeliers wrapped in chiffon to dull the sparkle. As Suzy Menkes pointed out, everything was luxurious but subtle in vivid, not violent, colors.
“Ralph Lauren” is a WASP style fashion created by the Jewish designer, which has to do with the rise and fall of WASP people. Polo Grounds at 155 St. and Yankee Stadium nearby are the remnants of the WASP settlement in the Bronx. WASP had prosperity in many fields, including Wall Street, and the Jews replaced the market after the Great Depression.
The Great Gatsby (1976) was also a film that illustrated the WASP dress code of the 1920s, where Theoni V. Aldredge commissioned Ralph to create the gentlemen’s costumes. The film won the 47th Academy Award for Best Costume Design.
This whole thing can be so-called a simulacrum, or may be what the simulacrum has become in reality. Either way, Ralph Lauren is outstanding as media in this respect and goes far beyond branding.
Immanuel Kant defined beauty as “not equivalent to utility or perfection but is still purposive” in his book of The Critique of Judgment published in 1790. And so, I think Ralph Lauren is the purposelessly-purposive fabric of simulacra.
A system from white EF USM with EOS 5DM2 captures vivid colors, but I feel α7 has a better sensor, as evidenced by the fact that almost all smartphones and the DJI Phantom series have this sensor installed. Fashion photographers prefer EOS to D series for colors. But it’s not about which is better but about when to switch the system.
Outdoor shooting is excellent with natural sunlight. The cutting-edge high dynamic sensor with creative post-processing enables us to ditch studio light scenes. “Out there” is a key for paradigm shift because street culture is evolving into travel culture. For that, the compact mirrorless will surely come after bulky DSLRs like surviving small mammals and extinct giant dinosaurs.
The September afternoon sunlight was so beautiful in NY, and it illuminated Exmor with glamorously dry colors with shimmering backlight on the Hudson River.
The leading edge of the times is styling and mixing, and that’s what DJs do.
The fashion industry is no different. In the past, designers were at the top of their game and had many brands named after designers. Nowadays, stylists are at the top. Patricia Field styled Sex and the City with an inversion of the past and present through fashion. The same goes for DJs and trackmakers.
From a huddle of anime lovers in a NY hotel ballroom and 3000 audiences at a convention center to an avenue to the White House and in an embassy of Washington DC, it wouldn’t have been possible just for a gadgeteer to play on stage this way ten years ago. That’s why I always love novel technologies that bring us paradigm shifts.
When you look at a photo of your heart-moving scene, oftentimes, you realize there is not much to it. That’s when HDR comes in to capture the beautiful moment when you hold the lens up to the light.
Cherry blossoms are genuinely blooming, and Autumn leaves are truly burning with layers of sunlight with incredible dynamic ranges.
Also, it grasps detailed structures of night architectures through accurate color intensities.
HDR processing feels like light painting on canvas, which is “photon-graphing” in digital color space.
And it creates colorful shades, captures the dimming ambient color of the peripheral sunset sky, and enriches the consistent monotone color of a show window by its gradation.
Animation and live-action movies will implement HDR on all the scenes with breakthrough silicon ware shortly. It is all because the human eye is far superior to cutting-edge camera sensors.
It is my third visit to Burning Man, where a city of tens of thousands of people from all over the world suddenly appears in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada for one week.
A few core principles guide this countercultural gathering, such as no spectator, gifting/decommodification (no business), “the Man” burnt to the ground in the end, and leaving no trace.
You can’t use the money to buy something except coffee, ice, and water in the center. You bring everything you need yourself and live together with other burners for one week with self-reliance, communal effort, and civic responsibility.
You stop by a joint and receive a free ice-cold beer on a bright, hot day in the desert and drink with radical artists chatting about political approaches against climate change. That’s a slice of life here.
Participants range from famed DJs and scientists to lawyers and investors, but titles don’t matter here. It all began with a huddle of hippies on Baker Beach near San Francisco in 1986.
Management and ranger staff, representing 10% of the participants, are teamed up almost entirely with volunteers and are responsible for everything from road maintenance to public safety. This gathering is an experiment of future “small government,” showing the city is functioning without problems.
This outdoor ghost camp can be similar to online communities in terms of bringing people of the same tastes together and living together. Bringing the internet to the real world, this town on the sand is a real-virtual.
In the future, we can create anonymous selves in real life, which is genuinely an alias.
Until the late 1990s, Burning Man had many people trying to enhance their ability to transform themselves through a supreme experience. One such person was Alvy Ray Smith, who used to be a board member of Burning Man. He was one of the founding members of PIXAR and is known as the father of Hollywood VFX today. His “Genesis Simulation” of Star Trek ll proves the great experience.
Burning Man was a gathering of eccentrics, but now it is becoming just another festival business. The 2011 art theme was Rites of Passage, which sounds like a message to the event itself.
The great experience I had this time was iPad. I swiftly ripped 100 movies from my BD/DVDs, scanned my 300 books and comics with a document feeder, and brought all of them with me on the iPad. Reading hundreds of mangas through the glowing screen at night in the desert feels like a future scene envisioned once has finally come true. You can carry Netflix and Barnes & Noble together to turn any place anytime into a mobile comic/internet café as Burning Man does to this town.
What concerns me is a town called Empire, a traditional corporate castle town, and it has been the last stop for the burners to the Burning Man. The town closed in 2011, and all the employees lost their gypsum-mining job that was considered lifetime employment, and the property values of their to-be-permanent real estate have reduced to zero. The townspeople have started life as precariat, and some work at Amazon Fulfillment Center in Reno as workamper. Were they only destined to have no choice but to survive classic extractive capitalism, followed by harsh neoliberalism?
Driving through the desert at night on my way back, I spot a few lights in the distance. They were the workampers living in trailer houses. Are they the future of the burners or the reality of a nomadic lifestyle? This contrast tells us something important for our future.
