primaire impressions du tokyo

summer 2007

Golden Half fallout

Play the video below while you read through this post. It will make sense soon enough. [mike spears if you are reading this, i love CLAM$ CA$INO man, my blog has become like an homage to it over the past two days]

Here are a couple of updates for the Golden Half fans out there, who have been writing in droves (ha) after last week's adoring post.

Ryan of manga supersite SAME HAT! SAME HAT! pointed out that the name "Golden Half" does not actually come from a pun on "Golden Calf," as I had imagined. Instead it has got to be a reference to an all-female band from the 1970's. Here's a clip from an article explaining a little bit about the group's cultural context:

By the time I was growing up, the more offensive postwar view of children of mixed race had largely disappeared. The derogatory term "ainoko" (half-breeds) or its equally loaded successor, "konketsuji" (mixed-blood child), were of the past. The experience of my age demographic is captured more aptly by "Golden Half," the wildly popular 1970s singing group that helped inject "haafu" into the language. The five women, all of mixed Japanese and Caucasian parentage, were glamorized and exoticized.

That's Golden Half above, of course.

So this would definitely explain why the book Life as a Golden Half is made up of photos taken by half-Japanese models. I guess it doesn't make too much sense to name a camera after a pun on "Golden Calf," but maybe I was imagining strange rites performed in tribute to the almost supernatural prowess of this image-making object. (Would that make dumb flickr users or digital dogmatists—need a link for that—Moses, breaking up our fun?)

FADER, in a desperate move to show that they're in touch with the youth of today, moved quickly to react to my wave-making post by writing a Golden Half post of their own. But you read it here first. In your eye, FADER! Thanks to Jessica Petunia for pointing that one out.

Flickr star: mulberry_kei

On the heels of yesterday's Golden Half post, I want to highlight mulberry_kei, who has posted many of my favorite photos to the Golden Half Flickr group. Her Golden Half is very blurry, but it produces a pleasant effect.

"Good things happen when you put the ball in play"

My dad always used to say this about hitting. This was most true when I was in Little League: the 11-year-old fielders were unreliable, so if you could avoid striking out there was always a realistic chance that a "good thing" would happen.

(I apologize if this is not obvious to some of my audience. I'm talking about baseball! I'd also like to make it clear that my dad was not an 'overbearing American sports father,' I'm grateful for the fact that he never yelled at me from the stands like other parents did.)

Maybe the same is true of photography. Instead of 'put the ball in play,' it's 'click the shutter.' I went through almost a whole roll of Golden Half pictures at the recent King Khan show here in San Francisco, and I was surprised to find a couple of pictures that I thought were not "half" bad, if nowhere near great.

In baseball, having a good eye means being able to lay off pitches out of the strike zone. In photography, is it just knowing how to throw out all your crap?

Golden Half x golden hour

Inner Richmond, San Francisco

Estadio Jalisco, Guadalajara

An evening at a Chivas game.

I don't really like using flash in very public places, as it draws attention, but I think being so easily spotted as a foreigner actually made it easier for me to be somewhat brazen with my camera this night. (Of course he would take pictures!) For purposes of discreteness, it helped that I was using the Golden Half, which is small enough to be slipped into a pocket, and also that my companions for the night had given me a Chivas jersey to throw on.

Estadio Jalisco is fairly old, but as Miguel, one of my hosts, told me, "es un templo de futbol" - it's a temple of football. Pele and Maradona both played there in their prime. I like the old-fashioned feel of these luxury boxes. This guy craning his neck to watch a replay on a TV above was the rowdiest fan in our area, at one point he was banging on the ledge with a metallic object of some sort.

Snapshot

I like to think of photography as an instinctive reaction - train a camera on a subject and you should be able to see the shot instantly. Of course that's not true all the time, but there is some unique power to the snapshot that's lost when you start mucking around with tripods. Let's frame it like this: if taking a picture is a matter of instinct, then the most important decision that a photographer can make is to simply have a camera with them! Some photographers carry a camera with them wherever they are. Viewed in this way, the interestingness of their images is then only limited by the range of situations that the photographer decides to enter.

Right now I don't value "refined" images very highly, or I don't like them any better for their refined qualities. I'm happy with the image above because I just barely caught it. A friend and I were sitting in the park enjoying some Chu-His, or Chizzle Hizzles, as he called them. I reached for my camera and got that one shot off just as the skater dudes were separating. (They were having their picture taken by the person at the right, can you tell?) It's far from perfect, but if I'd had any "gear" to deal with I wouldn't have gotten anything.