On the receding shores of Central Asia's Aral Sea, a Chinese man known as "the King" lives alone in a tent, digging for shrimp eggs. By Liu Zichao, a bold new voice in travel writing, translated by @dylanleviking.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/kin...

I will send more pictures of life on the Hibiya Line.

I hate the way that high-quality black-and-white film looks. There's something off-puttingly sharp about it. It doesn't resemble the way that I see the world. My eyes must be getting worse. I want haze and blocks of color.

She is going to read Yuk Hui's article on technodiversity in CONG (and she has already read my contribution, which is about going out in Guangzhou). This is promotion for a magazine that I'm not sure anybody but its contributors and publishers have read.

This is an old picture. Provia 400X isn't made anymore. A pack of five rolls of slide film in 120 would be more than a hundred bucks. I used to not think much about the price. I had no clear approach to selecting film stock. I lost all of the pictures, anyway.

A note on a bookstore shutter in Jinbocho: "To an unknown Frenchman..."

3. "Eastern Promises," @dylanleviking.bsky.social @thebafflermag.com "Reading a delightful essay on clutter in Japan made me realize how I’d held a romanticized version of Tokyo in my head for 20 years. Dylan Levi King’s Baffler piece challenges me in a similar way." thebaffler.com/salvos/easte...

I have still never heard Charles Panzéra and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, so I would like to rewrite "The Grain of the Voice" about the Miyako Harumi singing "Anko tsubaki wa koi no hana" on Furusato no uta matsuri in 1966 and Miyako Harumi singing a duet on the same song with Ishikawa Sayuri in 1971.

Since I learned about it a few years ago, I have wanted to read 803. It was described as a Proustian memoir of Third Front industrialization and its aftermath in Guizhou, narrating decades in a monologue sustained across eight hundred pages. It will come out this year.

I would like to write about the enjoyment I felt standing at the kitchen counter this morning, fishing with a set of long kitchen chopsticks the desiccated chicken skin, gristly meat, and brittle, black bones out of my jar of Lao Ganma Chicken Oil Chili. I can turn this into something productive.

November, 2022. (I can see the Skytree from north of Ueno Park.)

I am comforted sometimes by the thought of the contents of the internet being slowly deleted. I always hoped that certain confessions could disappear. It's not that I am ashamed but that I would like to make them again, in a more artful way. Well. But it's still a terrible thing to contemplate.

Temple bulletin boards display for passers-by devotional art, calligraphy, updates on maintenance of the cemetery, schedules for ceremonies, or material from the sects they are affiliated with, so, I was surprised to note one down the block taken over by warnings about mRNA vaccines.

Although I should love Shintani Noriko, whose maudlin ballad about a Parisian self-immolation sold nearly a million copies in 1969, I agree that her inability to choose songs led to her exit from show business, rather than her Catholic social conscience and left-wing politics. God bless her.

My most significant musical memory occurred during a Friday afternoon art class in eighth grade. We were required in turn to bring in CDs to play. A girl named Megan brought in Live Through This. I had never heard it before. There were many things I had never heard before. I lived in a small town.