Luminaries

On This Day In History
1997: Pathfinder lands on Mars

Quote Of The Day
"By my reckoning, I'm about 100 kilometers from Pathfinder. Technically, it's called "Carl Sagan Memorial Station." But with all due respect to Carl, I can call it whatever the hell I want. I'm the King Of Mars."
(Andy Weir, The Martian)

I went to Kyoto today, ostensibly to visit the Bowie x Kyoto x Sukita exhibition of photography at Eki in Kyoto Station. To be honest, I was rather disappointed with the exhibition; less than half of the photographs were of David Bowie. In 1980, Masayoshi Sukita spent a day with David Bowie wandering around Kyoto photographing the Thin White Duke in a very relaxed and candid style.Two years ago he returned to many of the sites where he had photographed Bowie and took photographs of those locations to see how much they had changed in the intervening years. Most of them have barely changed at all.

Masayoshi Sukita is the photographer who did the photo shoot for the iconic Heroes album cover, and Bowie clearly held him in high esteem.

From the Bowie exhibition I went to the Kyoto International Manga Museum. That was very interesting. The extras show a magnificent carving from akamatsu (red pine) of Osamu Tezuka's Hinotori (Phoenix.) There were also many plaster casts and signatures of famous comic book artists on display, and I took photographs of two of my favourites; Yoshitaka Amano and Jean Giraud Moebius. I also spent a happy couple of hours immersed in Volume One of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's thrilling Death Note because you are allowed to read most of the thousands of manga on the shelves. Oh, I wish I had time to read more!

Life On Mars?