The district of Omotesando is
being rebuilt after the city has decided to replace the aging Dojunkai
Aoyama apartment complex earlier this year, in order to host new trendy
shops in the same league of the ones accross the street, such as Louis
Vuitton, Chaumet, Christian Dior, etc..
Since then, the construction barriers have been covered with different
types of advertisement.
The current one, as I'm writing this, is an advertisement for adidas which decided to cover the barriers
with lawn over 100m.
I'm still amazed by the incredible
come back of adidas, when I think about how uncool it was to wear adidas back
in France 20 years ago!
I sometimes wonder if people remember about that time. As far as I remember,
it is only when Madonna came out with some triple-striped pants from adidas
that the brand really started to shine again, not only as a sports brand, but
also reaching a fashion dimension that I wouldn't even have thought of a few
years before.
Just for the fun of it, the old and the new logo:
This speaks for itself, doesn't it ? ;)
By the way, big boooooooo for adidas.com for not providing a standard
homepage: it does not even load on firebird.
It just remains blank for most of the page.
I'm not sure what the reason really is but as I started to look at the source
code, which included javascripts for popups, saw tables all over the place to
make the layout, instead of properly using css and noticed there was no
document type, I sometimes wonder why big companies like that just forget
about a not so little portion of the Internet users who don't browse with
Internet Explorer...
We had dinner with Fred and
Thierry at "Le
Bretagne" for a change.
It's a very warm French restaurant (although the purists will say
"Crêperie Bretonne"!) serving crepes ("galettes" would
be the appropriate word for the same purists) in Omotesando, Tokyo. I really
like the atmosphere there, as well as the food, although it's not really
compatible with my diet!.
I seized the opportunity to use my camera again (it has been staying without exercise for too long, since I started to be busy in the office) and took a few shots, out of which this one of Fred with a lady in a blurred background looked quite nice to me.
I'm not sure this is street photography per se (picture of a friend, taken in a restaurant, etc.) but there was no particular setup and when I looked at the scene, within a microsecond, everything became so clear (how I should frame the picture, what aperture I should use), that I knew I had to take the shot!
As said in the "Home of Street Photography", it is just about seeing and reacting.
Do you feel the same as I do when I look at this photograph? I feel
frustrated by not seeing what Fred is looking at, by the fact that the lady is
blurred and you cannot tell what she looks like, by the apparent relationship
there is between Fred and the lady which cannot actually exist since they are
on different planes, by the crop that the camera imposes, preventing me from
seeing the rest of Fred's face, etc.
All those things crossed my mind before I took the shot, that's what makes it
so special to me.
How about you?
I have just installed awstats which provides nice web reports about my site's
activity.
The configuration was easier than I thought and it's actually very easy to
use
Plus, I really like the way it looks, much more than the Webalizer available
through the Control Panel of my provider (which prevents me from giving access
to it to my visitors).
The only drawback: I'm now not the only one to notice how low the activity actually is! ;-)
While most of the countries in the world tend to fight against smoking
by restricting the smoking area to some sections only, by using campaigns on
TV or by raising the tax on tobacco (or is that later one a hypocrite way to
steal more money from the average tax payers?), it seems that in Japan, the
proportion of smokers is still amazingly high.
Why are there vending machines selling all sorts of tobacco in the street
(there is a sign which says it's forbidden to smoke until you're 20, but who
cares?)?
Why can you find disgusting public ashtrays under bus stops, from where the
smoke of a still lit cigarette will pollute the whereabouts, while it's so
hard to find a mere trash bin?
Obiousbly, the government is not really helping in that matter, and the
reason is quite clear when you read what the Minister of Finance owns 66
percent share of Japan Tobacco, according to the anti-smoke-jp.com
website.
This website also gathered several facts about absurdities such as a
shameful translation of the World Non-smoking Day Slogan, offices
where smoking is allowed and there's nothing you can do about it,
etc.
Obviously, I am not a smoker. Or so I thought... More precisely, I am a second-hand
smoker, just because having a normal social life and keeping your lungs
clean are just not compatible in Japan.
Or because the only difference between the smoking section from the
non-smoking section (when there is one) in the restaurant is the small
non-smoking sign stuck to the corner of the table. No fuzzy logic involved
here: if you're sitting at a smoking table, it's your right to smoke, even if
the person at the next table is choking (about this, a poll on Japan Today is questionning whether smokers have bad
manners or not. I have already taken sides...).
Or also because I would be sharing a taxi ride with a smoker, and I would have
to spend the rest of my day trying to get rid of the smell on my clothes, in
my hair or even my skin... This terrible smell, so thick that that I can
almost feel it like a whole layer of dirt stuck to me.
It just makes me sick.
Another "fun" experience is to go and renew your visa at the new immigration office at Tennozu Isle: before you reach the hidden counter on the second floor, you'll have to take the escalator which starts right in front of the smoking section, at the mercy of the artificial fog covering most of the floor.
Things are changing little by little though: there are more and more restaurants where smoking is forbidden during lunch time (I suspect it's more about speeding up the flow of customers than really about fighting smoking, but that's fine with me!) or places where smoking in the open is forbidden, like in Chiyoda-ku.
This reeducation will take some time though, as in many ways, Japan is still a very feudalistic society, where rules dictated decades or centuries before are still in place and will not be challenged anytime soon, and behind which people can sometimes hide their shameful behaviour.
Of all styles of photography, one that I never dared practise is street photography.
I do like the truth captured in the pictures though. The spontaneity of
people, the lack of light setup, everything is real and truly illustrates the
society that the photographer decided to capture.
It is however very difficult to isolate the right element in the frame of the
camera which will transform a mere snapshot into a nice photograph, and above
all, do everything without being intrusive to the people you photograph.
My first attempt is a photograph of a young
lady sitting by the escalator in an old building in Shinjuku, late at
night.
I didn't especially expect to see her face so clearly, but she turned around
right when I took the picture and after all, I'm glad she did: I like the
expression on her face, a mixture of surprise and boredom.
Hoping that I will be able to take more pictures, I have added a new section to my website to gather the results of my new experiments.
For more striking examples of street photography, one of the masters of this style is of course Robert Doisneau, whose photographs illustrate more than 50 years of Paris.
The following links are also very interesting:
- The home of Street
Photography: a website where street photographers can contribute with
their own pictures to promote street photography.
I personally really like the Richard Bram's portfolio: he was able to amazingly make the advertisements in the metro interact with people, all pictures are just breathtaking! - No rules street photography: Great collection of pictures.
The site of photo.net is
wonderful site where you can find a lot of amazing pictures (each photograph
from the photo of
the week is a masterpiece), articles on various photography techniques,
forums, reviews, etc.
It is a also a very scary site if you decide to post some of your pictures
and request them to be criticized, like I did!
As soon as you post your picture, mail alerts are sent to a group of people
and then the hunt is opened! People will start giving marks from 1 to 7 to
your pictures, according to 2 criterias: aesthetics and originality. It goes
so fast, you can almost see your score being updated in real time every time
you refresh the page!
I first tried with one
picture which is quite popular with many of my friends (I personnaly don't
think it's my personal best, although the long exposure gives an unusual but
pleasant look to the picture).
The picture didn't rate that bad so far, but is way below what my friends
would have rated, I'm sure!
I'll have to carefully select the picture I decide to upload ;)
I finally switched from rcthost to
another provider called zighost, after
rcthost froze my homepage for more than day, after I had allegedly exceeded my
bandwidth quota.
I knew my homepage grew in popularity recently, but I was still amazed I could
use so much bandwidth in such a short amount of time so I opened a ticket at
their helpdesk, but they just closed it immediately after, claiming that they
haven't heard of any problem of that kind... hmmm...
In order to bring back my site online, I upgraded my package and bought additional bandwdith: 1Gb for $10 (actually, I had another 1Gb for free, withe promotional offer: what a bargain...) and it took about 36 hours to process that order.
The next month, I looked at the bandwidth utilization and it was already up
to 480Mb within 4 days!
This time, there was no doubt, there must have been a mistake in their quota
program, especially when looking at the statistics, the sum of the bandiwdth
usage for each day didn't exceed 60Mb!
I reopened the ticket, with the same claim about the bandwidth and "just" two
weeks later, I finally got a reply from the helpdesk: "ok, it is fixed now".
Case closed.
Yeah right, tell me about 7/24 helpdesk... What about the previous month? What about the $10 I paid to purchase bandwidth I didn't use? Why isn't the bandwidth usage reset to zero, since they acknowledged there was a problem?
Zighost may be a smaller provider,
however their service is so much better than rcthost's: I now get 700Mb of
disk space, 30Gb of bandwidth, the server's CPU is not loaded so the webstats
are updated everyday and above all, SSH is allowed!
My account was setup with a few hours, it took them less than 30 minutes to
enable SSH and they're fast and reliable (the uptime is so far higher than
anything I could ever get with rcthost!).
Anyway, I've been very satisfied with their service so far and shell access
is sweet!
I was able to work directly on the server, writing csh and perl scripts to
convert all my pages to valid XHTML
strict 1.1.
There may be one or two pages with some mistakes I didn't check, but most of
them should be ok. I know that Bruno won't miss a chance to let me know which
ones are not valid, so I'll just let him find them and I'll correct them
then!
The shelf where my CDs are located at is rather small. As a result, the CDs
have to be split on several levels, on several rows. Of course, the CDs which
I listen the most to are most of the time in the front, while some of them
barely get to get out from the hidden spaces of the shelf.
Once in a while, I dig those in forgotten spaces to find CDs I hadn't listened
to for a long time and try to shuffle them around to renew the musical wave in
my apartment.
This time, I had the funniest experience when I found the CD of Utada Hikaru and started to
play it.
From the first sounds of drums of "Automatic", the huge hit when I came to
Japan, I was sent 4 years back and all the memories and the feelings came back
as if I was still there...
I remembered about the parties at the bar "Isn't it" in Shibuya (entrance fee 1,000 yens, one drink included, the place has closed since then though) with Fred and Seb, dancing or just trying to fight sleepiness until dawn. Then we would slowly head to the train station, altogether with other young people, all tired and with that whistling sound in your ears after a night spent in a club...
I remembered about the Sunday afternoons spent in my apartment, not knowing what to do, watching some TV program I wouldn't understand, listening to this CD of Utada Hikaru in loop and trying to call Fred to know what he'd like to do for the rest of the day. Most of the time, Fred would wake up around 5pm on Sundays, so that wouldn't leave a lot of choices for things to do then (Fred has kept a very bad memory of this 5pm music played in the streets of Tokyo since then, which reminds him too much of those weekends when there just wouldn't be any Sunday...).
All that would remind me of my second apartment, the one in Roppongi where
several generations of students had stayed before me: an aging apartment, on
the street level, noisy at night because of the taxies which were taking a
shortcut through Roppongi.
Nothing would work properly: the window wouldn't slide properly, the air
conditionning system was a huge and quite alarming block which looked like
it'd die any time you used it, buttons were coming off the different doors,
the huge and ugly wooden table borrowed from the stock of my company was
simply occupying half of the room but still, it was my apartment and I
remember how much I enjoyed the first time I stepped in it four years
ago.
The excitement was short after I realized how old everything was, and how
small the apartment actually was, but it was really a pleasant surprise,
compared to the first place Fred and I had to stay at (Fred actually managed
to stay there for 6 months, I don't know how he could survive!): the room was
about 25m2, the walls were revealing any noise from the next room, and when
the nuisance didn't come from the next room, you could be sure that someone or
something would keep you awake, like people shouting in the corridor, fire
alarms triggered by some guy who wanting to have some fun or just the sound of
crows in the morning in front of your windows.
The bathroom was also quite depressing: a room made of pink plastic walls (or
at least, that's what I remember of it), separated from the rest of the room
by a 20cm wall to prevent water from spreading into the apartment, with a
light so dim that it made you feel like in the uncomfortable capsules you can
see in science fiction movies.
Yet, I think it was maybe the most interesting time of my life, lost with the
excitement of being in Japan with new friends in the same situation as
me!
I cherish those great moments when your memories catch you up, refill your mind with all those feelings to finally bring you back to the present time and to make you realize that a lot of things were accomplished within just a few years, the most important one of all probably being to be just a few days away from getting married with Eiko, with whom, in a few years from now, we may tell that kind of stories again about the great experience we are going through right now.
I'm happy to announce that I'm going to get married this coming September with Eiko, after having played seek and hide for more than 2 years, fearing to be seen by our colleagues!
I guess we were quite good at it, looking at the astonished face of people
in the office when I announced it a little more than a week ago!
Only a few people knew about us, and even fewer knew that we were going to get
married so it was really fun to announce the good news!
The marriage will take place in Tokyo, very officially on September 4th,
when we're going to drop our application form at the city hall...
The choice of September 4th has been recommended by my mum, who checked the
Chinese calendar and called a friend of hers, who herself checked with a
Chinese monk in Taiwan. It was confirmed to be a good omen by a Japanese
fortune teller according to the Japanese calendar, so I guess it has to be a
good one!
We thought it would be great to go to France for my brother's wedding (yes, him too!) as a married couple and I'm quite thrilled about this idea too :).
The ceremony with families, relatives and friends will on the other hand be
held in spring 2004, maybe we'll be lucky enough to have the cherry blossoms
accompanying us :)
One thing I'm a little concerned about is whether I'm going to be available
enough to take pictures of my own wedding party !
