One of the reasons I travel so often to tropical islands is the strange pull they have on me – their charm, magic, or magnetism. Life there feels lighter and more joyful, as if the islands themselves have cast a spell on everyone..
However, when you really think about it, maybe it’s not the islands that are enchanted. Maybe it’s modern society under the spell. We take it for granted that “reality” means working 9 to 5, squzeeing onto crowded trains, or sitting in heavy traffic every day. But is it truly reality?
The nightmare is the world we’ve come to accept normal. And perhaps that’s what tropical islands do for us: they break the spell.
Cherry blossoms, or sakura in Japanese, have deep roots in Japan’s traditional rice-farming culture and folk religion.
According to one etymology, sakura refers to a place where the spirit or deity associated with rice dwells. In earlier times, when the cherry trees came into full bloom, people gathered beneath them to offer sake to the spirits, pray for a good rice harvest, and prepare to begin planting.
Seen from an agricultural point of view, the custom was also quite rational.
Rice planting generally begins once temperatures become warm enough for young rice plants to grow properly. Traditionally, before modern weather forecasting, the blooming of cherry blossoms served as a practical seasonal marker. Their flowering told farmers that spring had advanced far enough for the rice-growing season to begin.
In traditional Japanese belief, the deity of the rice fields was thought to descend from the mountains each spring. People welcomed the deity beneath the cherry blossoms with offerings of sake and ritual observances.
But once the formal part was over, the atmosphere changed completely: people drank, ate, sang, and celebrated under the trees. So hanami was not simply about admiring beautiful flowers. It brought together folk religion, agriculture, seasonal observation, and communal celebration.
Everyone should experience the totality of a solar eclipse at least once in their life, if only because it is free. The Sun never complains about copyright infringement. And yet it puts on one of the greatest shows on Earth without charging anyone a cent.
The birds grow quiet. The rustling of the trees seems to fade. Sound itself feels as though it is being swallowed by the darkness.
And then it begins.
Totality is not simply beautiful or impressive. It is strange. Almost unsettling. For the ancients, an event like this must have felt like a rupture in reality itself, which helps explain why eclipses gave rise to so many myths and legends across cultures.
And once again, this extraordinary show comes with no copyright attached, while more and more things in the human world are claimed, branded, copyrighted, and trademarked every day.
In 1952, the American experimental composer John Cage presented 4′33″, a work in three movements in which the performer is instructed not to play an instrument. The piece directs our attention instead to the ambient sounds that happen during those four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
Then, in 2002, British composer and arranger Mike Batt became involved in a copyright dispute over his piece A One Minute Silence, which credited John Cage as a co-composer. The case eventually ended with Batt paying an undisclosed six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust.
The Sun gives us its greatest spectacle for free. Down here on Earth, today, even silence can be copyrighted. Taylor’s “Track 3” is just gossip, of course.
What exactly is copyright? What does it protect, and what does it do to the way we experience creation? Creators themselves should think about that more seriously.
Perhaps some of the last things left to us that no one can truly own are natural light and natural sound. An experience like a total solar eclipse belongs to that category. No photograph, video, feed, or media narrative can fully contain it or replace the experience itself.
That matters because so much of modern life reaches us through layers of representation: screens, images, commentary, branding, interpretation. But during totality, those layers briefly fall away. You are confronted with something that does not care about human authorship, ownership, or narrative. Your body responds before your intellect has time to explain it.
Human beings tend to project disorder onto the world, but the universe itself moves according to patterns, cycles, and physical laws far larger than us.
And when the diamond ring appeared and the Sun began to return, something deep and almost biological in me relaxed. It felt as if my body had been waiting for the universe to become familiar again.
Back in the days of places like Paradise Garage, sound engineers went to extraordinary lengths to position and tune high-end speaker systems so that music would hit the audience exactly as intended. In film, sound quality can fundamentally change the experience of the images on screen. The same is true of fashion shows.
Fashion is an industry built around the visual. That is precisely why sound has such power: it changes how we experience what we see.
Today, systems such as Dolby Atmos can create an incredibly rich, immersive sound field. Now that digital music files and playback systems have become largely standardized, the person you hire to select the music and the engineer you hire to shape the sound can make an enormous difference to the success of a bridal fashion show.
The music also acts as a kind of reference point for the collection. When the tracks are chosen well and fit the theme of the show, they can reveal something about the designer’s influences and intentions that the clothes alone may not fully communicate.
There is also something special about being there in person and hearing that music as part of the show. Because of copyright restrictions, the complete experience cannot always simply be uploaded to YouTube and reproduced later.
New York Bridal Week comes after Fashion Week, and one of its pleasures is hearing how dramatically the musical language changes. From one show to the next, there are also subtle differences in texture, atmosphere, rhythm, and sound design.
That variety is fascinating—as if the music itself were demonstrating just how many different worlds can exist within something as seemingly uniform as a white bridal gown.
Coffee, coffee, and more coffee—followed by yet another cup around the corner. That is basically my mission in Portland, because the coffee here is that good.
Portland has become one of the great centers of third-wave coffee culture.
Third-wave coffee often tastes bright, fruity, and slightly acidic because high-quality beans are usually roasted lightly. But why light roast? Why not roast them dark, the way we traditionally associate with espresso?
The answer is simple. Think of sushi. Truly fresh, high-quality fish can be served raw; lower-quality fish often needs more cooking, seasoning, or sauce. Coffee works in a similar way. With exceptional beans, heavy roasting can bury the qualities you actually paid for. A lighter roast lets more of the bean’s origin, variety, processing, and natural flavor come through.
In an increasingly digital world, Jack Dorsey has spoken about the importance of physical places where people can still gather. Coffee shops fit naturally into that idea: not merely places to consume caffeine, but places where craft, conversation, and community intersect.
That is different from the old idea of Starbucks as a “third place”—the space between home and work that Taylor Clark examined critically in Starbucked. Third-wave coffee is not simply about creating another comfortable place to sit. It treats coffee itself as a craft.
In that sense, third-wave coffee also belongs to a broader countercultural lineage: organic food, local production, craftsmanship, transparency, and resistance to industrial standardization. Much of that culture took shape on the West Coast, with San Francisco and Portland becoming especially important centers.
And Portland makes me think that perhaps the age of the night is giving way to the age of the morning.
The old idea of stimulating consumption deep into the night with neon signs, alcohol, clubs, and endless entertainment feels strangely dated here. Younger generations are drinking less alcohol, and the rise of “Generation Dry” suggests a broader shift away from the assumption that adulthood and social life have to revolve around booze.
The old ritual was to stay up late, drink hard, and conduct business or politics over a bottle.
The emerging ritual may be almost the opposite: wake up with the sun, take care of your body, and start the day with a really good cup of coffee.
Health is wealth.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll be back on the streets of Portland, looking for another cup—and probably a Blue Star donut to go with it.
It was the final day of New York Fashion Week SS15. After sprinting all over Manhattan to cover more than thirty brands in a single week, I wrapped things up with Ralph Lauren. Washington Street was overflowing with fashion editors and fashion victims alike.
For 2015 Spring/Summer collection, Ralph Lauren turned once again to safari, khaki, and military references, this time filtered through an Indian fantasy. Gurkha trousers, safari shirts, cargo pieces, jodhpurs, khaki, satin, chiffon, and flashes of Maharajah pink all appeared on the runway.
The entire mood of the show was already there in the chandeliers, wrapped in chiffon to soften their sparkle. As Suzy Menkes observed, everything was luxurious yet restrained, with colors that were vivid without becoming violent.
That contradiction is quintessential Ralph Lauren: military khaki transformed into luxury, safari turned into fantasy, utility clothing elevated into eveningwear.
But there is another contradiction at the heart of Ralph Lauren itself.
Ralph Lauren is one of the great interpreters of WASP style, yet Ralph Lauren himself was born Ralph Lifshitz, the son of Jewish immigrants in the Bronx. What he created was not simply clothing worn by the American establishment. He reconstructed an imagined world of prep schools, polo grounds, country estates, Ivy League campuses, East Coast privilege, and old-money ease.
That outsider position may actually be essential to the achievement. Ralph Lauren did not merely inherit WASP culture. He observed it, selected its signs, refined them, and rebuilt them as a coherent dream that anyone could buy.
The 1974 film The Great Gatsby makes the connection almost perfect. Costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge brought in Ralph Lauren to outfit the male cast. Lauren’s clothes helped construct the visual language of Fitzgerald’s 1920s upper-class America, while Aldredge went on to win the Academy Award for Best Costume Design.
Here the copy and the original begin to blur. A Jewish kid from the Bronx reconstructs the visual code of the WASP elite; that reconstruction is then used to recreate the Jazz Age on film; the film reinforces our image of what that world looked like; and eventually Ralph Lauren itself becomes one of the primary references through which we imagine that America.
This is close to what we might call a simulacrum—or perhaps the moment when the simulacrum becomes more real than the historical reality it was supposedly copying.
In that sense, Ralph Lauren goes far beyond branding. The brand functions almost like a medium. It does not merely sell clothes; it produces and circulates an image of America.
Kant, in his Critique of Judgment of 1790, famously described beauty in terms of “purposiveness without purpose”: something can appear perfectly ordered and meaningful without serving any determinate practical end.
Perhaps Ralph Lauren can be understood in a similar way.
It is an exquisitely constructed fabric of simulacra: an American dream assembled from signs of class, history, ethnicity, cinema, memory, and fantasy—purposive in every detail, yet without any single original reality to which it finally refers.
A Canon EOS 5D Mark II paired with those big white EF USM lenses could produce wonderfully rich, vivid color. But I always felt that Sony’s α7 series had the stronger sensor technology. Sony image sensors were already finding their way into smartphones, drones, and countless other devices.
Fashion photographers often preferred Canon EOS bodies over Nikon’s D-series cameras, partly because of the way Canon rendered skin tones and color. But the real question was never simply which system was better. It was when the right moment would come to switch systems.
Natural sunlight is hard to beat for outdoor photography. With modern high-dynamic-range sensors and increasingly sophisticated post-processing, photographers can do far more outside without relying so heavily on elaborate studio lighting.
“Out there” is the key.
Street culture was beginning to expand into travel culture. Photography was becoming more mobile, more spontaneous, and less tied to the studio. For that kind of world, compact mirrorless cameras seemed destined to replace bulky DSLRs—almost like small mammals surviving after the giant dinosaurs disappeared.
That September afternoon light in New York was especially beautiful. The low sun over the Hudson created a shimmering backlight, and the Sony Exmor sensor rendered the scene with this dry, glamorous clarity that somehow felt perfectly New York.
At the cutting edge today, it is often less about creating everything from scratch and more about selecting, styling, and mixing what already exists. That is essentially what DJs do.
Fashion is no different.
In the past, designers sat at the top of the hierarchy, and fashion houses were often built around the names and identities of individual designers. Today, stylists have become increasingly powerful cultural figures.
Patricia Field is a perfect example. In Sex and the City, she mixed vintage pieces with contemporary fashion, constantly recontextualizing the past through the present and the present through the past.
The same shift can be seen in music. The relationship between DJs and trackmakers is not so different from the relationship between stylists and designers. One creates the material; the other selects it, combines it, changes its context, and gives it new meaning.
I’ve seen that shift firsthand.
I’ve gone from playing for small groups of anime fans in a New York hotel ballroom, to audiences of 3,000 at convention centers, to events near the White House and even inside an embassy in Washington, D.C.
Ten years earlier, it would have been difficult to imagine someone like me—a gadget geek armed with new technology—being able to perform in such places.
That is exactly why I have always been fascinated by new technologies.
The technologies I find most exciting are not simply better tools. They change who gets to create, who gets to perform, and what kinds of people can suddenly enter spaces that were previously closed to them.
Sometimes you look back at a photograph of a scene that moved you deeply and realize that the image somehow feels flatter than the memory.
That is where HDR becomes interesting.
When you raise a camera toward a scene filled with difficult light, HDR can preserve more of what your eyes actually experienced.
Cherry blossoms glowing in direct sunlight, autumn leaves catching layer after layer of light, or a landscape containing both deep shadow and brilliant highlights.
At night, HDR can also retain fine architectural detail without crushing the shadows or blowing out illuminated signs and windows.
To me, HDR processing feels almost like painting with light on a canvas. Photography literally means “drawing with light,” and HDR extends that idea into digital color space by giving us more control over luminance, color, and tonal relationships.
It can reveal color inside shadows, preserve the faint ambient hues at the edges of a sunset, and turn what might otherwise look like a flat, monochromatic storefront into a surface full of subtle gradation.
As display technology, image sensors, and computational imaging continue to improve, HDR will become increasingly fundamental to both live-action cinema and animation.
The reason is simple: a conventional image often captures far less of a scene than we feel we are seeing in the moment.
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 supreme experiences such as cyberdelics and psychedelics. One such person was Loren Carpenter, the one of the founding members of Pixar, is on Burning Man’s board. He is the fractal-CG guy from Boeing who later joined Lucasfilm through Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull. Photoshop was born in this environment. George Lucas got hit with a massive divorce settlement, and sold off the CG division (marital assets divided into half in California even after his wife cheated on him). Disney fired John Lasseter, Apple kicked out Steve Jobs, and Jobs threw money into these people to start Pixar. So Burning Man is the place for cyber-psychedelics culture in a real life.
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.
