The annual retreat back into wilderness and the embrace of everything natural continues this year with a 5 day travel itinerary to Takasaki in the Gunma Perfecture, hometown of my very good friend Takeshi. Here ample thanks and gratitude must be appropriated to my hosts Takeshi+Kojima whom without them this trip would never have been possible. We travelled far and wide for hours to distant mountains and waterfalls, cabbage farms so huge and wide it was like standing in the middle of the world; quiet, undiscovered villages that could only have appeared in quaint old Japanese films. One night a miraculously timed, passing glance into the starry skies had us catching a beautiful, long tailed shooting star. What are the odds.

Takeshi’s father is a farmer so every trip back to Takasaki is like a dietary detox session; an astonishing variety of homegrown vegetables are eaten and meat consumption drops to a virtual zero.

Kojima attempts a Kodak moment.

The Ito residence.

No, I didn’t digitally enhanced the colours on these flowers; they were of the very same intensity I saw with my own eyes, but Takeshi quickly informs : “Erm..these are actually the flowers of…weeds.” Killjoy.

Bloody crazies Vol II. Pizzacato5ive art directs a soon to be released print ad for the Takashimaya NAC scholarship. Too radical perhaps for MITA, but stylish nontheless. Photography by Kenneth.

Bloody crazies these blokes. Image courtesy of Pizzacato5ive.

I don’t ever remember seeing a Macdonald’s print ad as hip as this one in our ( Singapore ) Mac’s. Not even remotely close. Simple and clean, yet screaming coolness, its interesting how a mere Macdonald’s tray sheet can tell you about a country’s culture and fashion sense ( or lack thereof ).

Revisits to familiar tourists’ spots like the Meiji Jingu and Shibuya’s 109 junction as I accompanied my 2 friends Gabriel and Waimeng from Singapore had me tuning my accustomed eyes to little hidden nooks and corners, delightful sights I never knew existed; indeed, god is in the details.

Watching Reality Bites (1994) for the first time in its entirety brings back very fond memories of my early secondary days where the nostalgic soundtrack featuring Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” was one of the first CD’s I ever owned, and this was still way back in the early 1990’s where the now mesozoic cassette tapes were been slowly but surely supplanted by CDs, a fate they themselves seemed doomed to reiterate in the wake of digital music.

That aside, Reality Bites is an extremely important film in recent cinematic history not only because its serves as an irreplacable memory bookmark in an early chapter of my life ( the transition from bespectacled, nerdy primary school kid to bespectacled, nerdy secondary school kid ), but more importantly because its the emblematic teen-angsty, quasi-intelligent, 90s era defining film, just as what the Matrix Trilogy had done for the new millenium years. This once again demonstrates the power of the cinema and its ability to change worlds and shape lives, deliberate or not. Now the debate of whether Bites was a good or bad film requires another article altogether, but undisputedly, it had one heck of a bloody good soundtrack, bar Sharona or none.

On location in Minami-Sunamachi. Principle photography has wrapped and editing is in the works for a short film about 2 ladies who start a cat fight over a cheesecake. As the cameraman for the shoot I also got a humble cameo ( actually almost everyone else in the team did a cameo )as an english teacher ( in a TV advertisement within the film )who tries unsuccesfully to instruct proper pronounciation for the word Cheesecake ( read as chee-su-ke-ki in Japanese ). Now that was great fun.