Flying Bird from Samantha Culp on Vimeo.

The start of the Year of the Tiger was icy but beautiful in Berlin… Full set here.

Before I headed to Tokyo, I did a Google search for “Shimotakaido,” the neighborhood where my friend Patrick Tsai lives and where he was graciously allowing me to crash. One of the first results was this awesome 1987 photo-series by renowned Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama – fitting, as Patrick is also a photographer and a big Moriyama fan.

During the trip, I was lucky to get a copy of Patrick’s latest project, a zine called “Growing Up” which is based on his blog of the same name in collaboration with New York photographer Coley Brown. The snaps on the site and in the zine capture a feeling of raw youth (a staple of Pat’s photography), but now underpinned by a weird and apt sense of farewell. It’s funny since I’ve known Pat since we were 16, and to acknowledge beyond a doubt that we have now “grown up”, is a strange thing.
Produced for an exhibition in Montreal a few months back, the zine is now available for sale here (alternate link).

(Patrick Tsai & Coley Brown, “Growing Up” Zine, 2009)

Note: In regards to the Moriyama image, there are three versions I’ve found online, all similarly turning a fishnetted crotch into stark geometrics. My favorite is probably this one, particularly because of how seems to most directly reference L’Origine du Monde, but the one above is a bit tamer. Another less scandalous version is here.

(Samantha Culp, Patrick Tsai at Nekobukuro, Sep 2008)

Since Beijing was preoccupied with military parade mania over the October holiday, it seemed like a good time to escape to Tokyo.

Full set here.
Bonus: learn Chinese from an animated panda on Japanese television.

Where was I during the longest and most complete solar eclipse of my lifetime? On the Bund, in a rainstorm. If we didn’t see the sun, at least we saw the darkness.

Recommended soundtrack

(It’s cool, once I get the flux capacitor working again I’m headed here)

Taken from the window of a passing taxi a few weeks ago. Near impossible to believe, but somehow I had never passed it since moving to Beijing last summer (there was the requisite tourist visit years ago, of course). I kept expecting it to happen on some gloriously mundane day, and by the time it did, I had almost forgotten. But suddenly one evening, I looked up and was struck by a sight so familiar, so unreal, that I knew what it was before I knew.

It still seems stuck inside my mother’s little pink TV on the kitchen counter that summer. Like all things from the past, tiny and infinite at once.

Wandered around ART HK 09 (lamely attempting to play paparazzi for Scene & Herd), saw friends, drank on rooftops, went to the track… the usual.

Full set here.

Just in case you weren’t aware, it is not possible to enter Chaoyang Park at West Gate 1 and walk north to West Gate 3 within the park. Well, it is possible, but only if you are willing to scale chain-link fences and sneak through restricted horse stables and climb over the padlocked metal gates at either end of a decommissioned bridge…