The other day I went over to the home of one of my students for a group lesson over lunch. A lesson over lunch is how this particular lesson has been carried out for over six years now — my longest standing private lesson “contract” as it were. However, the three to four students plus I usually meet (twice a month) at the same Chinese restaurant, eating lunch with general chit-chat for the first hour, and having a lesson over the second hour. But once in a while one of the students invites the group over to their house for lunch, and this was one of those occasions.

When these occasions come up, I have enough experience now to know not to eat anything for breakfast, and to tell my wife dinner won’t be necessary, since there is always an incredible amount of food, all of it delicious. And the student who prepared this particular lunch has a good friend who is vegetarian (of the strict variety, as opposed to the psuedo variety I belong to), so not only can I partake of all dishes, but she is quite creative when it comes to making things that normally would contain meat just as tasty without it.

A case in point were these little open sandwiches. The ones on the far left featured a slice or raw salmon over a bed of — actually I wasn’t sure what the spread was except that the whole thing was delicious. It turned out the intention was a spread of avocado, but the avocado she had was not the best. She saved the salvagable parts, and made a spread of avocado and banana mashed together. It tasted heavenly although I kind of wish she hadn’t shared how it got that way. (By the way, the black stuff on the second row of sandwiches is caviar from Mongolia, on top of scrambled egg.)

Besides the bountiful quantity of food, the other nice and guilt-inducing aspect of these lunches is that any pretense of a lesson is dispensed with as a matter of course. Not only that, but the Japanese to English speaking ratio — not very much in favor of English at the best of times — gets heavily tilted in the Japanese direction, so it basically becomes a Japanese listening and vocabulary lesson for me.

Some of the new words I learned on this day include:

酒豪　(しゅごう, shugou) — a heavy [hard] drinker. The English seems to have a negative tone, but the Japanese is used more to convey someone who can handle their liquor well.
しょっちゅう (shocchuu) — all the time; always. It always surprises me that I can still come across for the first time such seemingly indispensible, everyday words such as this one (although, given the late 60s/early 70s age of my students, it could well be that their vocabulary features words that have gone out of favor with a younger generation).
老婆心　(ろうばしん, roubashin) — kindness, goodwill. The word is made up of the Chinese characters for old, grandmother, and heart, respectively.

The main course (which came after five different “appetizers” that would have been plenty for lunch) was a “tomato nabe”. “nabe” is basically a hotpot dish of vegetables, tofu, fish, and/or meat, and comes in many varieties. However, I had never had a tomato-based nabe before. Little did I know that later when searching Google, it apparently is quite trendy at the moment (this Japan Probe post complete with a video from Japanese TV program should get you up to speed).

What we did after we had had our fill of the nabe ingredients (which included mushrooms, shrimp, red peppers, and scallops) was remove the uneaten ingredients and fill the pot with rice, parmesan cheese, a raw egg, and some parsley sprinkled on top — a kind of risotto. Not sure if that is part of the trendy tomato nabe being eaten by the young office lady set, or an added flourish from my student, but it was certainly delicious (for me, more so than the tomato nabe itself).

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Lance McCord under a Creative Commons license.

I finally switched to the Mac platform earlier this year, buying a new (at that time) iteration of the iMac line. On the whole very pleased with the new way of life, though of course there have been many hiccups and annoyances along the way (not least in part because I’m still on Windows XP at work).

One of the things I love is that I can keep a bunch of applications open, go for a week without restarting, then open Photoshop or something similarly bloated, and it still reacts quickly. I realize that were I to buy a new Core i7 Windows PC perhaps the same should apply, but my PC experience tells me that Windows just isn’t good at clearing out stuff from memory even after the application is closed. Anyway, I love not rebooting for weeks on end.

However, when I do reboot, an annoyance with my iMac comes to the fore — the iMac I have always starts up with the screen set at its brightest point, even though when I shut down or restart it was at its dimmest point. In other words, the system isn’t remembering my monitor brightness setting. I sort of assumed this would be addressed in a OS update but to date some 6 months later it hasn’t (not on Snow Leopard yet, not sure that would fix it but I kind of doubt it). At any rate, since I don’t reboot that often, not a big deal.

However, recently I’ve realized that even keeping the iMac at it’s dimmest setting is still too bright. I’ve had a couple of freelance jobs of late that have required me to spend long hours in front of the computer (this on top of what is normal for me, which is probably too long as it is), and my eyes are feeling the strain. The way my home office is laid out (practically, unchangeable since the desk is built into the room), I can’t put the device any further away from me. Recently I went in search of some kind of anti-glare device, not liking the idea of draping something over an admittedly sleek form factor but not seeing any other choice.

What I didn’t figure on was that there were software solutions to solve or alleviate the brightness problem — nor did I figure on the fact that this is a common complaint among iMac users. The solution I stumbled onto has proven to be very elegant — Shades, a freeware application from Charcoal in the UK. Shades is very simple, it installs into your system preferences, and gives you a little “menulet” or Menu Extra at the top of your screen — you know, where the small icons for things like Time Machine, Bluetooth, Wireless and Spotlight are (other options for displaying the slider exist). Click on it and you get a vertical slider that allows you to adjust the brightness as a percentage of what your System Preferences brightness setting is. Voila, now I can dim the monitor to a lot lower (higher?) level than I previously could.

Needless to say if I’m working on a Photoshop file or seriously viewing someone’s photography on the screen, I will brighten the display, but for most other applications — like typing this post right now — I need the screen to be easier on the eyes. Being able to adjust this with Shades, without the need for some clunky plasticky thing hanging over my beautiful display, or some film-like stick-on thing I wouldn’t be able to affix properly, is the perfect (so far) solution, especially since glare itself is not a problem in my environment.

In the process of resurrecting this blog I upgraded Wordpress from something like 2.2 to 2.8.6. However, when I finally got around to making a post, all of a sudden I no longer had the ability to post in Japanese. All the Japanese I typed in the WP admin interface for new posts would turn into a series of question marks upon saving, and appear live on the site in the same way.

To fix I first tried following the step-by-step instructions found at a well-referenced post at Japan It Up which explains how to go into one’s SQL database and changing those fields that have Collation to something other than “utf8_unicode_ci”. This turned out to be quite a few, over several databases — rather tedious. And it didn’t work a bit. Japanese was still being rendered as a series of question marks.

More googling turned up a post at WordPress Support Forums suggesting removing or commenting out the

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

line in the “wp-config.php” file. Seemed counterintuitive to the OP and to me as well, but I tried it and lo and behold, I can once again type Japanese with no problems.

Have no idea if I needed to do the first thing in order for the second to work, or only doing the second thing would have been enough. But hopefully this post will help someone similarly stuck.

For a while there, I was having bad memories of the early-ish days of (my) blogging with Movable Type when there was no easy way to input Japanese nor have it rendered properly.

Anyway, I was in search of a Tenya (a cheap tempura chain) which I had been to once before, but it was nowhere to be found. Instead, I ran into this rather startling site — the Jimbocho Theater, which is owned by the publishing house Shogakukan (”Magazine and book publication, etc., including 66 magazines, 9,000 books, 13,200 comics, 850 mooks and 5,000 videos and DVDs (as of 2006)”) according to their English website. Apparently it opened in 2007, though hell if I knew.

Of course, this being Tokyo, right opposite on one side was this scene of corrugated tin and vending machines. You win some, you lose some.

On view at the moment is a season of old Japanese films called 日本文芸散歩 (nihon bungei sanpo, or literally, “Japan Literary Walk”). Looking over the films listed on the theater’s site, the movies date from between 1939 (the biopic 樋口一葉 (higuchi ichiyou) about the Meiji-era novelist Ichiyou Higuchi) to 1986 (Kinji Fukasaku’s 火宅の人 (Kataku no hito, “House on Fire”)), and are divided into four thematic groupings like “Writers in the Landscape” and “Student’s Tokyo”. Some of the directors featured, besides Fukasaku, include Kon Ichikawa, Yasuzo Masumura, and Nagisa Oshima. Looking down the list of films and film stills brings back many a fond art-house memory, and a regret my Japanese is still not at a point where I could truly appreciate these.

Lead architect for the theater building was Nikken Sekkei. The exterior was supplied by Takahashi Kogyo, a company with roots in the shipbuilding industry (read this inspiring interview with the founder, a 7th-generation shipbuilder). World Buildings Directory has more background and information about the building. And lots more photos at Got Arch?

On the way to work I read “The Bible” by Marguerite Duras. I don’t have much intelligent to say about the story itself except that I liked it, and I marveled that I could feel as if I knew the female character completely in the space of two pages (the male character less so, but he was more a symbol of something, a foil for a shoe store clerk). I mentally dragged my highlighting pen over this passage:

In a sense, she was lucky; she told herself that she learned things when she was with him. But those things brought her no pleasure. It was as if she had already known them, so small was her need to learn them.

But more than the story itself I found myself thinking about the short story, and how much I love the form. Short stories are like traveling on a puddle-jumping airplane: when the journey is over, you think “wow that was quick” but all the same, you are in a different place than when you started.

Short stories appeal to my sense that it is impossible to tell the whole story, so why even try.

On the way home I read (or rather started — I finished it at home) “My Father’s Suitcase,” by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist. This isn’t a short story but rather the text of a 2006 Nobel Lecture (available online here). Though a speech, it reads like an essay — another beloved form.

This piece is wonderful and beautiful in so many nuanced ways — about father and son, and about writing, and books. A paragraph toward the end about why he writes, too long to quote in full here, could easily stand in for my own sentiments, with the change of a few words here and there:

I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone….I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

Earlier, Pamuk writes about journeys and traveling:

The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people’s stories and books.

Physically I traveled there and back. My material self was grateful for the security of the home I left in the morning and returned to in the evening, and for the salary earned in between.

Spiritually I got on a one-way train this morning and for this I’m grateful to the writers in question, and for coming to them via an American magazine found in a Japanese bookstore and costing less than a dollar.

I recently started to process my own film. I’m tempted to add “again” to the end of that sentence, but in reality I’ve done little processing in my life, just a few rolls in school, and a couple of rolls a few years ago in an ultimately aborted attempt to start processing.

For my benefit, and doubtfully for any others’, I’m going to get fairly anal and document some of my experiments, so unless you’re into agitation (of the tank inversion kind) and dilutions you may not want to click the “Read More” link below.

The pictures and data shown here all relate to Rodinal, that venerable (since 1891) developer from Agfa (available in Japan from Grace Photo of Osaka).

A couple of caveats:

• The pictures are probably meaningless, since they’ve been worked on in Photoshop.
• The pictures are even more meaningless because I’ve been having “color management” issues with my hardware.
• The particular bottle of Rodinal I used for these rolls is actually over four years old. Unopened and all, but still four years old.

General processing consistencies:

• Temperature of developer is always 20°, except where noted below. Temperature of pre-wash and stop bath is more or less 20°. Temperatures of fixer (Fujifix), second pre-wash, Fuji QuickWash, and final wash are not paid close attention to.
• Tank used is Spanish AP 2 reel (135) tank (Patterson clone)
• Developer is always diluted/prepared with filtered water. Both pre-washes and stop bath are done using filtered water as well. But the final wash is tap water.
• Other than the developer, I only agitated the fixer (continuously, 5-6 minutes). Maybe in the future I should try agitating the water stop bath.

Example Roll #1

Film: Agfapan 400 (probably “old” version, bought in bulk form off eBay four years ago, and not refrigerated since, so definitely expired). Rated at 200 EI.
Developer/dilution: Rodinal 1:100
Temperature: 20°
Development time: 15 minutes. I think I got this time from the Massive Chart, and then adjusted it, factoring in that I was going to be pulling it one stop.
Agitation method: Using the plastic swizzle stick. Didn’t take notes, but I believe it was continuous for the first minute, then for 5-10 seconds every minute.

Comments: Weird roll. Rather thin all around. Some shots have so much grain you can barely discern an image, others are workable (with some work!). The swizzle stick agitation method seems to have produced the tell-tale denseness around the sprocket holes (I remember having the same thing happen 20 odd years ago in art school). Maybe I over-agitated. Maybe the dilution was too “thin” (1:100) resulting in only 5ml of developer concentrate in the tank (with 500ml of filtered water). It’s possible the temperature of the developer rose a few degrees during the 15 minutes. Basically there are too many variables (outdated film, outdated developer, pulling the film one stop, a stab at the developing time) and not enough controls to make this roll more valuable as a benchmark.

Example Roll #2

Film: Agfapan 400 (probably “old” version, bought in bulk form off eBay four years ago, and not refrigerated since, so definitely expired). Rated at 200 EI.
Developer/dilution: Rodinal 1:100
Temperature: 20° at the start. (Hell knows what it was when I poured it out!)
Development time: 75 minutes. (I pulled this time out of my ass, just so you know).
Agitation method: Continuous for the first minute (using the plastic swizzle stick). After that, left it sitting there while I watched the French Open.

Comments: One of the reasons I was excited to find the unopened 4 year old bottle of Rodinal was that I could try this thing called “stand development,” which seems tailor-made to a lazy ass such as myself. Since the normal agitate every minute method didn’t turn out so hot on the first roll (not that it was the agitation’s fault, of course), I thought this time I’d just let the Rodinal work on its own. I’m quite happy with the results of this first “standing” experiment, and encouraged to try more. Also a reminder to myself that I should really measure the temperature at the end of the process, and also experiment with ways to keep that temperature stable.

Example Roll #3

Film: Fuji Neopan SS, rated at box speed (100 EI)
Developer/dilution: Rodinal 1:100
Temperature: 19° at the start, 22.5° when I poured it out.
Development time: 45 minutes. Not sure where I got this time, maybe it was arrived at after reading a few different times from other Flickr users.
Agitation method: Continuous for the first minute; stand for a minute; 30 seconds agitation; 1 minute stand; 10 seconds agitation; stand until 17 minutes left on timer; 30 seconds agitation; stand for the remaining 16:30. (I took notes, as you can see). (All agitation done via inversion method).

Comments: Hmmn, not sure how successful this was. Negs a bit on the dense side. Maybe I should have developed the SS in Super Prodol. I’ve never been a fan of the SS (both film and Nazi versions) but thought the Rodinal might give it a kick. Oh well, no harm gained in trying.

Example Roll #4

Film: Agfapan 400 (probably “old” version, bought in bulk form off eBay four years ago, and not refrigerated since, so definitely expired). Rated at 400 EI.
Developer/dilution: Rodinal 1:25
Temperature: 20°
Development time: 7 minutes. This time is on the data sheet accompanying the Rodinal bottle, though whether this is for “old” Agfapan 400 or “new” Agfapan 400 I don’t know.
Agitation method: Continuous for the first 45 seconds, then for 5 seconds every 30 seconds, as per the data sheet, except it should’ve been a minute at the start, but I had a brain fart. (All agitation done via inversion method).

Comments: After a few rolls done with varying “stand development” times, I thought I would try a more “by the datasheet” approach. And since I was recently able to order a new, bigger bottle of fresher Rodinal, I thought I could afford to not be so stingy with my dilution and went for the more potent 1:25. I’m quite pleased with the results, and keen to try this combo but with fresher film (hence I’ve also ordered some Agfapan 100). There’s still grain aplenty, but it seems smoother. The image of the Rodinal bottle at the very beginning of this post is a 100% crop of a scan from this same roll.

More rolls have been processed in Rodinal (both stand and normal processing) but the above should give a representative sample of results to date. Of course, any comments on the results or the process of my processing would be most welcome.

Kiyoshi has been my private English student for almost 3 years now. He has been playing the accordion for about 14 years, having settled on the instrument after unsatisfying tries at the guitar, piano, and violin. Twice a week he teaches beginning and intermediate students at the community center. Because of the volume of the sound the accordion makes, he usually practices outside in the park as shown here. The accordion he’s playing here cost him around $8,000 USD, and was made in Italy. It isn’t the only one he has (though I think the others were not nearly as expensive). Kiyoshi is the father of two elementary school-age daughters, and works in the marketing department of a large printer manufacturing company.

Also (on color negative) here and here.

Dr. Nello Pace and monkey, December, 1966, UC Berkeley. Photo by Ansel Adams.

Photography. — Photography is permitted almost anywhere. No trouble will usually be experienced in changing plates at night, as most rooms have good shutters. A piece of non-actinic fabric and a few drawing pins will be found useful for covering the little window over the door by which a passage is often lit. Let me assure those unused to long tours with cameras in foreign countries, where they may never be again, that it is very easy to develop as one goes along. I carried half a dozen light unbreakable 7 1/2 by 5 dishes, two boxes of Anderssen’s eikonogen cartridges, a bag of hypo, a folding candle-lantern, a couple of wide-mouthed bottles, a bib, a duster, and a large piece of mackintosh to lay over the table. These reposed peacefully at the bottom of a strong leather box, in company with many dozen of Lumiere’s most rapid quarter plates and other trifles. I used one of Shew’s “Xit” quarter plate cameras, and carried two Goetz lenses, one of six, the other of four inch focus. The latter was invaluable for architecture and interiors. A swing back and rising front are necessary. An aluminum stand proved thoroughly unworkmanlike; it was on the bayonet principle, and as sure as one division declined to pull out, another would get jarred and refuse to go in. Finally pieces of the legs took to dropping off like a frost-bitten nose. I used a light folding wooden tripod the next time. An exposure of about the thirtieth of a second with F 16 is right for a general view of the exterior of a building well lit by the sun of Spain. On my last visit to Spain I used Imperial plates, developed them at home, and obtained very satisfactory results.

Cities and Sights of Spain: A Handbook for Tourists, by Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond, 1904

Keeping his mouth shut and working fast as he had learned to on this job, Prescott got the baby crawling on the dirt floor between pans set to catch the drip from the roof. He got the woman and Dago and the baby and two smaller children eating around the table whose one leg was a propped box. By backing into the lean-to, between two old iron bedsteads, and having Carol, Johnny, and Dago hold flashes in separate corners, he got the whole place, an orthodox FSA shot, Standard Poverty. That was what the Foundation expected. As always, the children cried when the flashes went off; as always he mollified them with the blown bulbs, little Easter eggs of shellacked glass. It was a dump, but nothing out of the ordinary, and he got no picture that excited him until he caught the woman nursing her baby on a box in the corner. The whole story was there in the protective stoop of her figure and the drained resignation of her face. She looked anciently tired; the baby’s chubby hand was clenched in the flesh of her breast.

From “Pop Goes the Alley Cat,” by Wallace Stegner