Michael John Grist

The Red Blossom Restaurant Haikyo on the Lake Tama ring road rests as a peaceful shrine to the yin and yang of Nature, showing in gentle tones both her power to tear down the old, and raise up the new. The restaurant itself sits on a small hill like a rusted old tank, off-kilter, gap-toothed, and leering to the side. Numerous small wooden dining huts ring its sloping hillside like sleeping tors, marking out the seasons’ passage as they slowly slip from their struts and descend in arrested free-fall to the earth. At their center, a beautifully twisted cherry-tree blossoms, splashing its vibrant red petals over the tumble-down roofs and drab rain-mottled floors of the dying dining huts around it.

Read more »

HDR imaging is a fascinating sub-branch of photography that I just became aware of. HDR means High Dynamic Range, which basically means you have a photograph with a heck of a lot of information in it, spanning a range of lights through darks impossible to capture in a regular photograph.

Here is my first HDR effort- taken from my 3rd floor balcony.

Read more »

They love Sarah Jessica Parker in Japan. When Sex and the City came out in Tokyo the city was fire-stormed with an advertising campaign pimping the four women and their lifestyle everywhere you looked, in fashion magazines, food magazines, on buses, on big LCD-and-loudspeaker-packing humvees parading around Shibuya, on TV shows, in books, everywhere.

Did you see Sarah Jessica Parker on a Coke can though? The chances are you didn’t, as to my knowledge these cans were never released for commercial sale- only used as giveaways and incentives for raving Sex and the City fans.

Read more »

The Akasaka Love Hotel Haikyo in Higashi-Yamato, Tokyo, reminds us of the importance of that old adage: ‘location location location’. Situated at the far end of a strip of Love Hotels on the Lake Tama ring road, it’s clear this place suffered for lack of passing traffic. Now its forecourt and parking lot are bouldered with rotten 80’s styled furniture, burnt-out cars, and avalanches of mounded pillows. Inside, its gaudy rooms still sing of forbidden pleasures, the walls plastered with bright helios, lurking cheetahs, and naked Bathsheba’s, though I doubt any lusty couples have joined in their bawdy chorus for some time.

Read more »

Sometimes you just have to know where the knives be at. Sometimes you’ll be cooking a goose, and need to trim that darn bird. Othertimes you need to sew your pants up and you need a darn knife to cut a thread. Other times you just need to stick a knife in a darn tomato and carve it like a jack-o-lantern.

So when I saw this crazy ad in the Shimbashi Caretta mall tourist zone, alongside ads and directions for 100-yen stores, limousine buses, and foreign exchange spots, I knew that something had gone very right in the world.

A man on his way to a stabbing knows that preparedness is everything.

Read more »

The abandoned US Air Force (USAF) base in Fuchu is a vine-slathered memento from the early days of Japanese/American war and peace, built shortly after World War II in co-operation with the still-active nearby Japan Self-Defence Force (SDF) Base, and abandoned in the 1980’s. Its huge twin parabolic dishes are still visible from the exterior- though now half-eaten up by the passing decades, rusted red and bobbing like hole-riddled yachts on the sea of green jungle. Its roads swim with weeds and trees shot up through the cracks, and its barracks buildings glisten with waterfalls of rushes and creepers, windows and doors barely peeping through the shadowy gaps.

Read more »

For the past week everybody has been blogging about Pepsi White, Pepsi’s new Yoghurt flavored Pepsi drink. It appeared on conveni store shelves on Wednesday, and there were blog responses to it within minutes- including this sterling effort, and this extraordinarily deep coverage (yes, he’s taking a photograph of the bottle held between his thighs. I know.)

But how many of those people actually TESTED the drink? The answer is, none! So here I am, with a light-hearted taste comparison test. Here is my hypothesis:

Read more »

The Sports World Water Park in Izu is a well-hidden gem in the crown of Japan’s abandoned theme parks. Tucked away from the main theme park down a slim passage over-awed by rabid weeds, it gallops down the adjoining valley’s steep side in a furious rush, its brilliant blue umbilical water-slides snaking and inter-twining through the verdant green jungle canopy. Around its circumference the huge oval water-flume meanders bleached-white through pathways furred over with prickly weeds. Jutting up from its center and half-eaten by scraggly brush, the five-story speed-slide stands like a silent sentinel over the withered park, its roller-flumes speeding down only into clumps of thorny bush.

Read more »

Cyborgs will have access to a much more massive range of sensory input data than we do. Just as we think nothing now of putting on our clothes to go outside, or getting in our cars to travel long distances, or turning on the TV to expand our direct input streams, they will think nothing of spreading their sense of touch out through the Internet, their sense of vision up through the infra-red or telescopically out into space, their sense of smell into degrees of precision down to the molecule, their sense of hearing spread throughout their whole home or network, and their sense of taste co-opted to sense wi-fi or gamma radiation.

Cyborg brains will be radically re-wired to accommodate these changes, hi-jacked by analog methods to create new sensory feeds through old routing mechanisms, as well as expanded with bolt-ons of whole new sensory apparati via re-programming, genetic manipulation, or straight up fresh motherboard implantation.

Read more »

Cyborgization is the next step forward in the evolution of humankind.

Evolution as we have come to understand it, the blind watchmaker slotting together increasingly complex genetic structures at random, pushed ahead by unwitting external forces, the odds of survival, and success of procreation, is an outmoded and impossibly slow model for further advancement. Any change to the status quo will be responded to far more quickly by our technology than by our own genes.

Technology and the realm of ideas are the new playing field, where idea battles idea for favor, under the pressure of an Earth with finite resources and conflicting ideologies, a hard-wired human desire to acquire ever more and build ever higher, and a biology under constant assault from virulent micro-organisms. Only our technology, blindly and step by step just as with genetic evolution, driven by our ingenuity and genetic-borne big brains, can evolve fast enough to keep up with all these, as well as keep up with its own repercussions.

Read more »