Tote Bags

The tote bag charity show that I have the honor of being involved in is live and selling online. There are a lot of great artists on there and most are still available. My wife's was one of the first ones sold so congrats to her! Mine is still up there, but honestly there are a lot better ones than mine. Check them out here.

Back Home

Well we made it back from Japan. It was an amazing trip, probably the best one I have ever had. Tokyo was an amazing, bustling, insane, but so very organized city. Everything just runs like clockwork there, the trains, the roads, just everything is buttoned down and in place. In a place like NYC where chaos seems to run everywhere, it is crazy to see a city with more people, more bustle, but so much calmer still and in control. Kyoto was very beautiful with a modern city center and then the historic old Kyoto districts of tea houses, Geishas, and temples. These two cities and Japan in general have such an interesting contrast between old Japan, with its gardens, crafts, and very conservative traditions; and new Japan, with its crazy colors, ultra-modern feel and a general no-holds barred aesthetic. These two very different sensibilities seem to exist side-by-side without much problem. The people there were also really great. Not many people spoke English, but everywhere we went people went out of their way to make us feel welcome and to help us to understand as much as we could.

Things got a bit rocky towards the end though, when I came down with the flu. It made my last couple days there a bit long and we weren't able to do a ton of things without me getting extremely tired. The flight back was twice as bad while being sick and then I got worse once we got back. I am recovering now though, so that is good.

I put up the photo links before, but here is a condensed version of the photos, since I'm sure the whole lot of them is a bit overwhelming. Click me please.

Konnichiwa

I am writing this from my hotel room overlooking the skyscrapers in Shinjuku, Tokyo. We are having a great time and have fully immersed ourselves in the insane Japanese culture. We have already done exploring of our neighborhood Shinjuku, Ueno, Akihabara, Shibuya, and just got back from a very costly trip to Harajuku. Lots and lots of stuff to buy. Before we left, I talked Starla into letting me get a new digital SLR for the trip and I was so excited to take some great photos. So I got to JFK Thursday morning and realized that I left the battery to my new camera charging plugged into the wall at home. Luckily, I was on my way to Tokyo, the electronics capital of the world and I found a new one and charger the first night. We are here in Tokyo until Tuesday, when we take the bullet train to Kyoto. The first batch of photos are uploaded and we will keep uploading them until our trip is over. Click me for happiness of life.

One Week

Counting down now. One week until we leave for Japan. We still have a lot of planning and reading up to do, this whole thing kind of sprung up out of nowhere. I'm worried about jet lag when we get there, its a 14 hour flight with an 11 hour time difference, don't want to waste any of my time there sleeping. Really excited though.

re*

Starla and I were to get involved with Kalene, Dan and Easton of Thundercut and Open Space to design a Tote Bag for a benefit show promoting using reusable canvas bags instead of disposable plastic ones. I decided to do a typographic version of the reduce/reuse/recycle using re* ( prefix used with the meaning “again” or “again and again” to indicate repetition.) I'm excited to see what everyone else does.