On this day one year ago, Dean and I were on our honeymoon in Japan. Specifically, it was day 6 for us in Japan... the day we trekked from Shinjuku to Hakone. We had planned to take the Romance Car Express Train there, but it wasn't running because a typhoon had just passed, so we ended up taking the regular train, making several stops along the way. We then had to take a long bus ride up the windy mountain roads to our hotel. When we got to our stop in the middle of a deserted road with no signs, we didn't know which direction our hotel was... we ended up getting lost for a bit... but eventually, with some help from the very friendly hotel workers nearby who graciously offered to pick us up, we found our way there. Here are a few pics I took of our room while we were there... we had a private onsen outside our room with a gorgeous view of Mt. Fuji. I wish I were there right now...
Hotel Green Plaza Hakone
Photos taken with my Canon 5d Mark II
50mm f/1.4
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
The day is going by so darn slow...
Photo taken with my Canon 5d Mark II
50mm f/1.4
... time to sit back, enjoy an ice-cold beer, put in a dvd and RELAX!
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Photo taken with my Canon 5d Mark II
50mm f/1.4
I thought I would pay tribute to SNL's Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy today by quoting some of my favorites...
Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy
"Children need encouragement. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling."
"I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they chose a king, they don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas."
"I think a good product would be "Baby Duck Hat." It's a fake baby duck, which you strap on top of your head. Then you go swimming underwater until you find a mommy duck and her babies, and you join them. Then all of the sudden, you stand up out of the water and roar like Godzilla. Man those ducks really take off! Also Baby Duck Hat is good for parties."
"I wish a robot would get elected president. That way, when he came to town, we could all take a shot at him and not feel too bad."
"I wish I had a dollar for every time I spent a dollar, because then, yahoo! I'd have all my money back."
"I'd like to see a nature film where an eagle swoops down and pulls a fish out of a lake, and then maybe he's flying along, low to the ground, and the fish pulls a worm out of the ground. Now that's a documentary!"
"I'd like to see a nude opera, because when they hit those high notes, I bet you can really see it in those genitals."
"I'm not afraid of insects taking over the world, and you know why? It would take about a billion ants just to AIM a gun at me, let alone fire it. And you know what I'm doing while they're aiming it at me? I just sort of slip off to the side, and then suddenly run up and kick the gun out of their hands."
"If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is "Probably because of something you did."
"If you ever catch on fire, try to avoid seeing yourself in the mirror, because I bet that's what REALLY throws you into a panic."
"If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone."
"If you're robbing a bank and you're pants fall down, I think it's okay to laugh and to let the hostages laugh too, because, come on, life is funny."
"It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man."
"Life, to me, is like a quiet forest pool, one that needs a direct hit from a big rock half-buried in the ground. You pull and you pull, but you can't get the rock out of the ground. So you give it a good kick, but you lose your balance and go skidding down the hill toward the pool. Then out comes a big Hawaiian man who was screwing his wife beside the pool because they thought it was real pretty. He tells you to get out of there, but you start faking it, like you're talking Hawaiian, and then he gets mad and chases you..."
"Maybe in order to understand mankind we have to look at that word itself. MANKIND. Basically, it's made up of two separate words "mank"and "ind." What do these words mean? It's a mystery and that's why so is mankind."
"One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to DisneyLand, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh, no," I said, "DisneyLand burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real DisneyLand, but it was getting pretty late."
"Sometimes I think you have to march right in and demand your rights,even if you don't know what your rights are, or who the person is you're talking to. Then on the way out, slam the door."
"Sometimes when I feel like killing someone, I do a little trick to calm myself down. I'll go over to the persons house and ring the doorbell. When the person comes to the door, I'm gone, but you know what I've left on the porch? A jack-o-lantern with a knife stuck in the side of it's head with a note that says "You." After that I usually feel a lot better, and no harm done."
"Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, 'It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than to be selfish and worry about my liver.'"
"The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death. What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alchohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months warm, happy, and floating…you finish off as an orgasm."
"To me, it's a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, "Hey, can you give me a hand?", you can say, "Sorry, got these sacks."
"When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they ever press charges."
"Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant, and she fell on me. Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny."
While on our honeymoon in Tokyo, Japan this past October, Dean and I were fortunate enough to visit the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi Hills, where Ai Weiwei's largest solo exhibition entitled 'According to What?' was being shown. To be honest, I hadn't heard of the Chinese Contemporary Artist/Architectural Designer/Bad Ass Activist before then. 'According to What?', a title which was derived from a painting by Jasper Johns, featured 26 of Ai's works made since the 1990s, including six which were made specifically for the exhibition. The exhibition was organized into three sections: 'Fundamental Forms and Volumes', 'Structure and Craftsmanship' and 'Reforming and Inheriting Tradition', exploring the connections between Ai's work and its artistic, cultural and historical backgrounds. We were amazed at his works of art and really enjoyed the entire exhibition. Here are a few photos I took while I was there:
I was particularly drawn to his piece entitled "Snake Ceiling" (pictured above).
Snake Ceiling l 2009
Approximately ninety thousand people were killed or went missing in the May 12, 2008, Sichuan Earthquake. Many school buildings collapsed in the quake, killing many children and leaving their backpacks scattered across the quake areas. This work is a serpentine row of students’ backpacks laid out as a requiem for the souls of the children who died in the disaster. These characteristic backpacks in various sizes, for both elementary and junior high students, form a giant snake hanging from the ceiling.
Something about that piece really made an impression on me... so much that I decided to do a paper on it for my Art class. While researching Snake Ceiling for my paper, I learned about the "Sichuan Earthquake Names Project", Ai Weiwei’s guerrilla investigation. ARTINFO had some very interesting details about it in an article:
“To protect the right of expression is the central part of an artist's activity. ... In China many essential rights are lacking, and I wanted to remind people of this,” Ai told ARTINFO in a conversation at the Mori Art Museum.
Using his widely read blog as a platform (he has 17 million readers, he says), he charged that the high number of school fatalities was due to local officials siphoning money from school building costs. Grieving families said the structures were badly built and collapsed easily during the quake. But officials refused to list the names of the dead students, which could be used to unveil a possible cover-up, so Ai formed the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project with researchers and volunteers who discovered the names of 5,190 students. (The official government figure became 5,335, possibly thanks to pressure from Ai’s campaign.)
According to the project’s findings, some 3,500 (80 percent) of the students perished in 18 of the 14,000 damaged schools, a result that supports Ai’s theory about a building scandal. His blog posts were systematically censored or deleted throughout his investigation. On May 26-28 he wrote about being followed and about unknown persons visiting his mother’s house. On May 29 his blog was shut down.
“They shut us down because we were too active, so much heat, everybody coming into the discussions. We caused an Internet riot,” he says. “Even after 30 years of opening up with such an economic boom, the government doesn’t want to change the political structure. There are so many hidden problems — corruption, total loss of ideology, the tendency of the judicial system to stick to party lines. There’s no fairness or justice.”
Crazy stuff! Read the full article here!
p.s. I want to go back to Japan...
Photos taken with my Canon 5d Mark II
50mm f/1/4
15mm Fisheye f/2.8
Well, I'd like to HOPE that the weekend will be a relaxing one.
I'll be catching up on my school assignment since I missed class last week due my sickness!
I'll be catching up on my school assignment since I missed class last week due my sickness!
Hope you all have a great one... Happy Weekend!
Photo taken with my Holga 120CFN
Location: Tokyo, Japan
... Feels like I'm caught in the middle of it all...
Photo taken with my Holga 120 CFN
(Click on image to enlarge)
I apologize again for the lack in posts. I've been busy trying to catch up with school projects since I had taken some time off for my recent honeymoon to Japan. I thought I'd share my most recent Digital Arts project with you. This project was to work with Adobe Photoshop... we had to create a movie poster using PhotoShop exclusively. I decided to base my project on Tokyo Bikes. While I was in Tokyo, for some reason, I was obsessed with all the street bikes and bikers (you may have noticed this obsession with the countless amount of bike photos in my day by day Tokyo blog posts). It made me want to hop on a bike despite the fact that I haven't been on one in over 10 years... no joke! The two main images that make up my movie poster consist of two separate street photos I took in Japan. One was of a random biker on the street waiting for the red light to turn green... (check him out by clicking here!) The second main image I used was a long shutter photo I took of cars passing by on the streets of Shinjuku... (click here to see it). Once I extracted the biker, I was able to work him into the other image as the background, and after experimenting with some adjustment layers, blending modes and color corrections, everything started to come together. Overall, it was a very fun project to work on! Hope I get a good grade... and a new bike for Christmas... hahaha.. I kid, I kid!
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