Welcome To Tokyo

(from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil)

Planet Manga

He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wire she shows her veins. They say that television makes her people illiterate; as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets. Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to read—these yellow men. I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku. The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope ten centuries before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines, victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship. Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls. The entire city is a comic strip; it's Planet Manga. How can one fail to recognize the statuary that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central? And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers, pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.
At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.

Excerpt from Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, photo by Matthieu Kasimiri

Full script can be found here

Bye Bye Pride

A white moon appears

Like a hole in the sky,

The mangroves go quiet

In la brisa de la palma

A teenage rasputin

Takes the sting from a gin,

When a woman learns to walk

Shes not dependent anymore

a line front her letter, may 24...

And out on the bay

The current is strong

A boat can go lost.

(Words by The Go-Betweens, photo by Stefano Orazzini)