130

Laundry clips fade into darkness as the sun sets and the Yuyake Koyake plays.

99

Five days ago in the rain at 12:06 JST I photographed signage of a penguin on the back of a delivery truck, knots of silhouetted telephone pole wires, red, blue, and yellow laundry the same color as the penguin's tuxedo, hat, and cane – so many of my favorite things – all viewed through the blue gradient of a Honda's wet front window. These elements serve to remind me of another simpler photograph made through the Honda's cool tint, then further back in time to old surfing shirts with silhouetted palm trees in front of radiant sunsets. It must be the gradient that smoothly transitions between present and past and triggers reflection and nostalgia

96

Last Tuesday somewhere around 12:50 JST someone outside close to the laundry balcony was whistling something along with the hourly chime – skillfully, like pastel colored birds warbling in an animated Disney film. Either it was a "ten minutes before the hour" chime, or my watch was off. At least I am not saying, as Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush (Groucho Marx) said in A Day at the Races, “Either he’s dead, or my watch has stopped” – not that I really have ever understood what that means. That said, last week while running by Teikyō University Hospital I believe that I saw a body with a sheet covering its face being wheeled out from the back of an ambulance. Perhaps there is a chime, or a song that I have yet to hear.

84

The new array of laundry clips I recently purchased is not quite a rainbow and they do not even make a full gradient between red and green. Still, they will look buoyant and carefree against the restrained and 18% gray sky if I can bear to break up this range of color.

71

The Takinogawa laundry clips align with the afternoon sun so well. The three-color composite film of laundry in Higashi-Nippori from 2005 never really aligned correctly. Filming drying laundry three consecutive times with black and white film shot through a red filter, then a green filter, then a blue filter inevitably encounters the issues of wind and improper registration between the plates when superimposed to make a rudimentary color film. The irony is not lost on me that an almost impossible task utilizes the most mundane of acts as its focal point. I can understand why this experiment was a filmic failure, but I still don't understand why the successful conclusion of the laundry process here in Tokyo results in slightly metallic smelling clothes.