Back on track for Japan. Still haven’t found a good enough reason not to give it a shot. Booyah.
I’ve noticed something annoying relating to my obsession with quality. A lot of the time (but certainly not always), wanting something of top-quality means laying out a good wad of cash. But with all these nouveau-riche mcmansion-building yuppie freaks and their stupid fuck-trophies running around spedning outrageous sums of money on stupid shit regardless of the actual worth of what they’re buying, people often now assume that if you’re paying a lot for something, you’re doing it just because you can. The joy of investing in something that’s truly well made and of lasting value is being diluted by this popular notion of spending because you have the ability to.
Convincing people of the beauty of quality is hard enough to do as it stands. Most Americans shop at WalMart, buy the 36-count case of 1000-sheet rools of toilet paper, watch shitty television shows on cable, write with disposable Bic ballpoint pens, and regard most everything around themselves as ultimately disposable. Given this, it’s hard for the average Joe on the street to understand why one would do something like spend $100 on a pen when you can get a dozen plastic ballpoints for 99 cents at the gas station. People don’t care about quality – they only care about what’s cheapest and easiest. When people start to pay attention to value, that’s a good step forward, but still not anything approaching actually understanding and valuing quality.
And for most people, I can understand completely why they wouldn’t care about quality things or quality of workmanship, etc. If it gets the job done, fine – there are more important things to worry about. Like feeding your kids or making the mortgage payment.
But for me and a number of other people I know, that element of quality is critical. It is beautiful. It lends a bit of depth and worth to things and activities that are otherwise nondescript and empty.
It’s important to note that quality is specifically not just a product of material objects. There’s quality of character. There’s quality of workmanship. Quality of principle. There’s even the metaphysics of quality, as devised by that beautiful man Robert Pirsig. The pursuit of quality in the things you own, do, think, etc is as much a way of life as anything else. And I love it. If you invest yourself in living with and enjoying quality, nothing can be an empty task. It’s not hard, it’s not expensive, but it does require a little determination and an open mind.
Moving on.
Don’t you hate it when people make unfair and unqualified assumptions about you for no good reason? Right now the manifestation of this that’s bothering me has to do with people questioning my reasons for learning Japanese, wanting to go to Japan for a while, etc. “Oh, are you one of those anime geeks?” Well golly, I like anime, yeah, but that has absolutely nothing to do with my desire to get my masters degree in Tokyo and actually started as an outgrowth of my interest in filmmaking. My interest in another culture is not so shallow as to be rooted soley in animation. “You must like Asian girls.” Of course I like Asian girls….and EVERY OTHER KIND OF GIRL. Grrrrrrr. Contrary to what is apparently popular belief, not every American guy with an interest in something even vaguely having to do with east and/or southeast Asia has an Asian girl fetish. “You’re trying to become something you’re not.” Wait, what? Oh yeah, that’s right, I’m trying to become Japanese. I figure if I try hard enough, I can fit right in and nobody will notice that I’m really a brown-haired, blue-eyed American man of western European descent with massive amounts of body hair and very limited Japanese language skills. I am not now, nor do I have any desire to ever deny or stray from my own heritage of identity. Wanting to live somewhere else for a few years and taking a genuine interest in a culture other than your own doesn’t mean that you want to change who you are. “You’re just a Japanese fanboy.” Oh fuck you.
So now that I’m apparently making an extended entry randomly bitching about things that annoy me, here’s another thing. A great photograph has absolutely nothing to do with the camera and absolutely everything to do with the photographer. I don’t know how many times I’ve shown someone a photograph or shown them my web site or something like that and they say something along the lines of, “What wonderful photographs! You must have a really nice camera.” It’s gotten to the point where, if someone says someting like that, I’ll just say flat out, “that hasn’t got a thing to do with it.” Yeah, having a decent camera is nice. It makes it easier to concentrate on the image, makes it easier to get consistent results, etc. But ultimately, if you suck as a photographer, no camera in the world is going to change that one bit. Photography is not easy. It’s a lot harder than most people even begin to realize. And the popular notion that anyone with a decent camera can make great images and that being a photographer is easy, is not only annoying and demeaning, but quite simply incorrect. People think it’s so interesting that you’re a photographer, but they usually almost instantaneously belittle the profession by making some assertion regarding the apparently critical role of having a good camera.
People suck. You hear me? PEOPLE SUCK!
Anyway, moving on. It was a really beautiful day today. Warm with broken sun and a nice breeze. My father and I took advantage of the nice weather and worked on taking out a big dead ash tree at the side of our yard. We took out a smaller dead tree that was in the way first, and then went after the first half of the ash tree with the chainsaw. This is a big double-trunked tree. The bigger of the two trunks (the one we cut today) was about 18″ in diameter at the base, so it’s fairly large. We felled it, cut it up, stacked the better sections in a pile for firewood for a friend of ours, and put the remaining bits on the burn pile in the field. Also burned the brush pile, got the yard cleaned up again, got all the tools put away, etc. All of this before lunch time. Following lunch, I took a shower, a big fat nap, and then sat on my ass until supper.
A decent day.
Right now I’m flipping through a zine I picked up when I was in NYC. For those not familiar with the concept of a zine, it’s essentially a low-volume esoteric magazine of sorts, generally produced as a labor of love. Some of them are one-off, others last for many issues over the span of years. They used to have a reputation for being rather lo-fi, often being made of bound photocopies and things like that, but in recent years the quality of some zines has really gone up. Many are perfect bound now with high-quality printing and the like. The one I’m looking at right now is as such, and is apparently #142 of 1000 copies. Anyhow, this zine is called Arkitip (pronounced like the word archetype) and is vaguely about printmaking, photography, etc. So it’s my kind of zine. I got it in this awesome record shop somewhere in Manhattan when I was in NYC for PhotoPlus. It’s too hard to find good zines around here. But then, I’m sure I just haven’t found the right place yet.
Time to go to do other shit.
