Instagram is the new vacation slide deck. We actually screen mirrored Christine’s phone on a friend’s TV the other day and talked through our posts just like a bunch of boomers. Our excuse was that they’re planning a trip to Japan soon.
This deck features Japanese Denny’s, @pigment_tokyo, and more from inside the Yumenoshima Tropical Greenhouse Dome. x
We watched Fellini’s 8½ last night, technically a re-watch for me, but, apparently, I could only remember the very last sequence after all these years. It’s a film about filmmaking that I watched in film school, so I’ll forgive the formalism that stayed with me; my surface read made the deeper autobiographical and sociopolitical commentary an even richer mine this time around.
But I do love that final sequence. It comes right after Carini, il critico, whom Guido asks to partner with him on his ill-conceived film — a clear synecdoche for Fellini’s inner critic — launches into his final monologue on the overproduction of imagery: “It’s better to destroy than create when you’re not creating those few things that are truly necessary. And finally, in this world of ours, is there anything so just and true that it has the right to survive? … It’s better to knock it all down and strew the ground with salt, as the ancients did, to purify the battlefields. What we really need is some hygiene, some cleanliness, some disinfection. We’re stifled by words, images, sounds that have no right to exist… that come from the void and go back to the void. Anyone who deserves to be called an artist should be asked to make this single act of faith: to educate oneself to silence.”
What follows is the most over-the-top carnival of Guido/Fellini’s “squalid catalogue” of “mistakes” and “vague memories.”
I find myself oscillating between these two voices when it comes to photography. As the box of my negatives gets more and more stuffed, I wonder what the point of it all is.
“What a monstrous presumption!” And yet, most of the time, it can’t be helped.
More slides from in and around Enoshima, include Benzaiten herself. x