Of course Mr. Mizuno can afford two mistresses. He deserves it. After all, he works sixteen hours a day with unenviable dedication (plus an hour and a half commuting).
As a matter of fact, he could afford this sort of erotic honeymoon in Madrid with more than two if he wanted. He will pay boob plastic surgery for both. And a very expensive stay at the Ritz. And then, back in Tokyo, he will go to the gardens and meditate on really profound things, purify his body in the public baths, then home to kiss Akiko and the children, and return to his normal habits. An year of sleep deprivation won’t let him enjoy other carnal pleasure than just looking at them, naked on fancy satin sheets. He will sleep long siestas while they go to their appointments with the surgeon (with a hired translator, also paid by him), or they burn the Visa in Serrano.
The only thing off limits for them is taking photos. No mementos, no souvenirs, no cameras allowed in this Spanish trip.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Borderline Karoshi
On photography and other dangerous pursuits
Even though some days life is a shit storm and most of things wet paper, I consider myself one of the richest and more fortunate human beings in the world.
Wonder is leading and I’m in the good direction.
The click must go on.
May love take your eyes by storm
I love her more than I love photography.
I’m not composing a visual memoir of our relationship.
I refuse to get personal here. Your gaze is up to you.
I walk by her side, sometimes delaying my steps to fall behind, just to gain a better perspective of her tender, absent minded and quiet beauty.
If Internet didn’t exist, these shots would be in a shoe box for my secret and private solace.
She appeared into my life when I was totally lacking the hundred layers of protection that had cushioned my soul for decades and since then, every photo is a long kiss behind the curtain.
We walk the dog together as John and Yoko laid in the white bed and you see what your memory tells you to see: your own unedited feeling of passion.
Six degrees of separation (Take One)
The girl with the dark glasses doesn’t know she is a swine flu carrier.
The older woman with the white bag standing behind her is the mother of the emergency room doctor that is going to diagnose her tomorrow.
The absent minded boy with a hand in his pocket is going to fall in love with the Peruvian girl that works in the bakery along with the man walking towards him across the street.
The black urban surfer with the black bag was once helped by a volunteer when he arrived to the coast of Cadiz in a patera, and the volunteer happens to be the father of the girl in white boots by his side.
The boy and the woman to the right of the photograph have stolen food at the supermarket where the girl with dark glasses works as a cashier.
The doctor in the emergency room still dreams about melting beneath the hands of the girl in white boots, who works as a masseur in a gym.
We all fit together in the endless slideshow of the One who will never let go anything unseen.
Disjuncture
We don’t live in the land of plenty any more.
I turn on the television and see the queues of the unemployed.
Every few days people close to us are fired from their jobs.
I’m dissolving throughout urban wandering. A moment at a time, a shot at a time is all I can manage. The feeling that whatever I portrait turns to be unreliable haunts me, leaves me at the periphery, no matter the aesthetic prism I filter the raw material throughout, no matter my good intentions.
Most of the days, I sort the pictures trying to assemble a coherent whole, and can’t pick enough of them to tell a story, but I stubbornly try, although knowing that most of them are too private, that they spare the viewer nothing, that I shouldn’t have shown the poignant truth of human despair. It reminds me Buenos Aires in the time of the corralito: sleepwalkers, men and women with sad and worried sick eyes, pedestrians prowling around the trash containers, skinny dogs.
Then I go to Annie Leibovitz’s photo call, and I find all this much-a-do-about-nothing about her private exhibition (Susan Sontag dying, father dying, late pregnancy, domestic snapshots of questionable intimacy and artistic value), perhaps a bit fatuous and flat in a time that claims for the dignity and sobriety of Dorothea Lange’s style of work.
I can’t help asking myself what would Susan think of this baloney if she were among us.
Artifice
The movie takes place over a single day. From the very first moment you know that you are about to be the witness of an imminent downfall. Both want to be loved, or maybe it’s all about the contrary.
‘What the fuck’, he says in one of the first scenes. ‘Without you, mine would be a life of absolute misery’. Then he points a loaded gun to his own head, trying to make her change her mind. But she doesn’t. It scares the shit out of you, it seems so real.
The girl walks towards the guy, as if going barefoot across a death defying tightrope. She gives him a knife and says ‘go ahead’. He takes the knife but does nothing.
I think ‘It takes balls to document the end of an affair with a steadycam’.
It is supposed to be autobiographical so you stay there, stuck to the theater stall, expecting something gruesome to happen as the girl was stabbed in a motel two years ago. You wonder if it’s all true, some kinda snuff, some kinda psychological violence like Albee’s.
Try to stop seeing, if you can. That’s the texture of morbid vérité.
And in the midst of that high impact dramatic climax, the girl starts talking about a fantasy she has with fucking machines. People roar with laughter.
No blood, no anything. An hour and a half of shadows and a voice-over.
I’ll tell you something, man: owning a camera doesn’t make your freaking movie worth viewing.
Guinea Pig
The goal was to create emotions in the game, the ultimate ludicrous experience and she was one of the human subjects of the control experiment.
The first check was spent at Zara and the second at a Mac Store.
She only had to play two hours a day non stop in a lab, to report any changes in perception or behavior and to keep the secret, obviously.
The game slightly reminded her of Second Life or The Sims, but in just a minute of play she was rushed into her childhood or her teens, and an impolite, blatant alternative self had taken over the control of everything, making brutal amends or satisfying forbidden desires and needs.
On the other side, just out of the screen, reality warped totally out of proportion and she loved that.
She loved the universal permission to freak out in a borderline way, her bizarre, nameless hunger left out like a wild beast, the tingling flood of happenstance kicking inside her central nervous system. After a few weeks she had turned into a female version of House M.D. Ill-mannered, brutally honest, witty, disrespectful, brilliant.
Things started to go awry. At this point, she was having atrocious fantasies I can’t even describe in these pages, even though she was still able to constrain ill drives and maintain a sense of reality.
Now, in the aftermath of her suicide, her latest battered boyfriend is trying to sell the exclusive of her diaries to the tabloids and the white-robe men in the lab have sent their bullyboys to get rid of the problem.
Figure that.
The Vanished
“You will soon travel far and away” said the gipsy, carefully examining the lines of her hand. Amelia looked straight to her eyes with a frown forehead, as if it sounded ridiculous, allowing the ritual only because she had always been superstitious about gipsy spells.
The weird and chunky woman agitated a small bunch of rosemary tied with a string all over her body while murmuring and humming some sort of cryptic litany. Then she spit to the ground and opened a rough, cracked hand for money.
Amelia was annoyed with the unexpected nuisance and so eager to go on with her errands that she gathered the small change of the wallet and the pockets and gave it to her, vanishing through the corner of the street, wrapped in a shabby brown overcoat.
A street cam captured the last trace of her at half past eleven. Nothing unusual, except for two arrows pointing directly to the figure, as if she were chosen.
Apparently, this is not the first and last case so far. Authorities are being cautious about it, to avoid social panic.
Lola, the eldest of her daughters and the only one that keeps her mother’s secrets doesn’t know about the others yet, so she fakes concern assuming that she has finally found the courage to leave. In her wildest fancies she could never have foreseen such a dauntless determination.
Tomorrow, checking the secret drawer where she has saved money for years -what an operative to change pesetas to euros when they run obsolete- she will change her mind and start to wonder where is Amelia, what happened to her, and what if she doesn’t come home.
Who is going to hang in there with Dad then.