Cioran

How much I love Cioran, you'll never know. And then Cioran, he simply doesn't care. (He's dead, too.)

After another semester of feeling my inaptitude for the profession of TEACHING, I go back to Cioran and I am consoled. Here are only two fragments from De l'inconvénient d'être né:

Toute ma vie j'aurai vécu avec le sentiment d'avoir été éloigné de mon véritable lieu. Si l'expression "exil métaphysique" n'avait aucun sens, mon existence à elle seule lui en prêterait un. (98)

Le paradis était l'endroit où l'on savait tout mais où l'on n'expliquait rien. L'univers d'avant le péché, d'avant le COMMENTAIRE... (193)

Becoming

Tonight I saw a cicada coming out of her former self into a full-grown body, white in the dark, naked, and almost luminous. Into the wild.

This is in the city, in our dirty old neighborhood, where nothing sings, nothing shines, nothing seems to be alive. But then the cicada, purely alive, trying to get out of the shell, trying to be born, at 23 o'clock, alll alone, desperately serious, frighteningly joyful.

As if to designate me as her sole spectator.

The Yoshiharas

My short piece on the Yoshihara family's six-generation saga appeared on a Niigata newspaper. Based in Shibata, they have been running a photography studio for well over a century--the epoch that covers the whole of Japan's modernity.

Now the studio is run by Yukihiro. Formerly very active as a media artist on the Tokyo-NYC axis, he decides to take over his family business after September 11, 2001. Going back to his terre natale and to the work of collective, anonymous memory.
The first result is s series of old photographs compiled from the studio's familial archive.

「吉原家の１３０年」（「新潟日報」２００７年７月２日）