Link to set on Flickr.

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)

“No Dabbling.”

[Sign on decorative waterfall/pond, PVG Airport, Shanghai]

Beijing was still covered in snow when I left, and grey when I returned. Just like “The Wizard of Oz,” BKK remains the Technicolor in the middle.

Full photo set here.

By now, everyone knows about the break-neck pace of development in Chinese cities—the construction cranes looming over old neighborhoods like Grim Reapers of progress, the jack-hammers and pylon-drivers filling the air with a rhythmic cacophony worthy of Merzbow. But due to hyper-speculation, corruption, and other problems, not every building that is begun gets finished. As a result, China has seen the evolution of the lan wei lou, buildings aborted before their completion, which now stand like eerie totems to hubris and the absurdity of development as the city rages on around them.

Hong Kong artist and designer Stanley Wong, better known as Anothermountainman, is well-known for his work utilizing the red-white-blue plastic bags that are a part of Hong Kong and urban Asia’s visual vernacular, and used them to construct an entire teahouse during the 51st Venice Biennale. Now he turns his gaze to these abortive buildings and the unsettling questions they pose. A few of the photographs are featured in the massive pan-Asian show currently up at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, entitled “Thermocline of Art- New Asian Waves” and curated by Wonil Rhee, but the entire series will open at Hong Kong’s Goethe Institut this weekend. In all likelihood, the photos will outlast these ghostly building-shells, which will eventually be torn down to make room for new construction—some of which may even get used.

Lan Wei/ Abortive Buildings
Photographic works by Anothermountainman/ 又一山人 (Stanley WONG Pingpui)
Exhibition opening
7:00pm, 17.8.2007 (Fri)

Exhibition
17.8. – 22.9.2007
10am-8pm (Mo-Fr); 2-6pm (Sa)
Goethe-Gallery, Goethe-Institut Hongkong
14/F Hong Kong Arts Centre, Wanchai
http://www.goethe.de/ins/cn/hon/en2384195.htm

“Thermocline of Art – New Asian Waves”
15.6- 21.10.2007
ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany
Curated by Wonil Rhee
http://hosting.zkm.de/thermoclines/stories/storyReader$7

Title: “Kodachrome Cowgirl”
Publication: The Cowboy Issue
Date: 2005
Full Text Below

(Juanita Kelley Gardens: September 17 1928- July 4 2005)

My grandma wasn’t a cowgirl. That is to say, she never wrangled cows, nor worked with them in any way for that matter. The closest she got to the cattle industry was probably setting cocktail glasses down next to rib-eyes on the gilt tables of Hollywood and Las Vegas nightspots in the 1950s.

Of course, she didn’t start out there—she was born in Kingman, Kansas, but like everybody else, kept moving West. First, as a child, to Arizona (I want to see a taut canvas bow blocking out the sun and wooden wheels nearly missing the horns of a bleached skull, but it was probably by cheap all-night bus). Then, shortly after graduating Yuma High School (the yearbook pictures show an almost even split between pale and dark faces, the transplanted Okies and the Mexicans and the kids from the reservation—my grandmother hardly the only Juanita in the captions, though she had already taken to calling herself by her surname, Kelley), she married a young man just back from the war, and moved to California. In Santa Barbara, her new husband picked fruit (Watermelon? Cantaloupe? Strawberries?), until they went back to Yuma to have the baby, and soon after that, the divorce. When she left again, it was in pursuit of her child, kidnapped by her ex-husband, and presumed to be hidden somewhere in California. Her career as a cocktail waitress began here, as she scrambled to cover the private detective fees by serving drinks to movie stars at The Dollhouse in Palm Springs. A car accident in downtown Los Angeles, a Herald-Examiner reporter with a good memory for missing-child posters and some phone calls later, mother and baby were reunited after almost two years.

As a single-mother in Hollywood, she worked at The Melody Room (much later when it was called The Viper Room, River Phoenix would overdose there), and attended secretarial school, which briefly led to bookkeeping for a janitorial company where a giant bulldog named Jiggs would sit under her desk and pass gas all day. She soon went back to cocktails. The night’s uniform: fishnet stockings, black taffeta skirt, starched white shirt, high-heeled gold wooden clogs. She had to wear contact lenses too, but it being the 50s, these were big slivers of glass that lined her lids pink and trapped hours-worth of cigarette smoke in her eyes. Sometimes she’d take her daughter to work, where the little blonde girl would be plopped onto the top of a baby grand and sung to. She married again, to a movie-magazine photographer who was about to become the assistant publicity manager for the Flamingo Hotel, and in 1958 they all headed back into the desert. Las Vegas at this time was little more than a few hotels in a line (the nascent “Strip”), run by gangsters, filled with glamorous people, with coyotes skulking at the edge of the floodlights. It was in its own way a frontier town, and celebrated this every year with something called Heldorado, a week wherein the entire city would dress in Western clothes (spurs and all), send silver-saddled horses down a parade route, and spend time in a carnival jail to raise money for the Junior Chamber of Commerce. You can almost hear the Patsy Cline drifting out of the casino speakers, while Kelley delivers and clears shots of red-eye.

There was another divorce and another marriage (this time to a craps dealer who came from a family of croupiers), and another divorce, and yet another marriage. Her fourth and last husband swept her out of the cocktail lounge and into the high country; she never had to work again.

Max Gardens was an unusual kind of cowboy— former professional bowler (some of his Bowling Hall of Fame records have never been broken), owner of adult theatres in downtown L.A., Jewish—but he fit the part. He had owned a dude ranch in Pinedale, Wyoming called the Flying A, which was now sold off except for a little patch of land. This became the Little Flying A, where Max and Kelley would spend about four months each year when not in Encino, building a small house and then a guest-house, having guests over for drinks, fishing, buying turquoise jewelry and fine silver work from Indian artisans.

I imagine it was Max who took this photograph, on some clear afternoon in big sky country, in the days spent “up at the ranch.” The sun is bright, and she squints a bit as she smiles. She looks so happy here, in her white Stetson and faded jeans, her shining copper hair, her turquoise and silver.

Later, when the Little Flying A went the way of the Big, they moved to Mission Viejo and slowly began to reflect the place’s name. Later, of course, came breast cancer, radiation, chemotherapy, double-mastectomy, emphysema, Alzheimer’s. Later Max died, and Kelley lived with her malicious Persian cat, Taz, and after the cat died, a ceramic bust of a cat that looked slightly similar. Later she went alone on senior citizen package tours with names like “The Sentimental South,” and had just confirmed the trip of a lifetime to China when she was mugged inside her Beverly Hills apartment’s parking garage, and could never fly nor drive a car again. Later she couldn’t breathe without an oxygen tube, she spent one week out of every six in the hospital, and wasn’t allowed to eat her favorite foods (Mexican) or drink her favorite beverages (Mai Tais). And later, actually less than three months ago, she died.

This is not to say that nothing good ever happened after the photograph was taken. Many things did—she discovered a passion for oil-painting, took a newly-arrived Vietnamese refugee family under her wing, traveled Europe, had grandchildren and great-grandchildren, donated to charities, charmed shift nurses, saved every bit of wrapping paper from every present she ever received. In this picture, though, the sad things are, miraculously, only in the past or the future. I like to see her like this, still in her long mountain honeymoon, weight on one hip, leather satchel slung. She doesn’t know yet that the West is lost in the very same moment it is won; that she will someday run out of continent. But none of us ever do.

Here she is, for a second, standing in the sunshine. She is waiting to laugh until the shutter releases.