flemmings | (no subject)

This week is recycle pickup so I went looking for pointless manga to throw out. The bedroom boxes are pretty much empty by now so I looked in the hall closet. OK, well, not my Onmyouji manga or Yomi Henjo whatever, baffling and annoying as all those are. But a bunch of Belne's version of swinging London for sure. Oh, and maybe some of those magazines stashed away in the long ago Canada Census bag. The Time magazine featuring Nureyev from 60 years ago, now crumbling to dust, and something from the 70s with a not safe for work cover, and some equally crumbling newspaper sheets, and the incredibly heavy French art magazines from, good heavens, 1951, I wouldn't have thought the country had recovered sufficiently by then to be producing luxury artifacts of the kind featured within, nope not throwing those out, and a Classics Comicbook (remember those?) of Rider Haggard's Cleopatra, which tells you quite as much as anyone needs to know about Rider Haggard's Cleopatra, and no, cozy afterword, I don't think I'll be reading the whole thing available in my school or public library. I mean, maybe people did: there was a time when kids read all sorts of things, but does anyone anymore?

But then there were two envelopes of photographs and my god, *here* are the photos I took on my first trip to Japan that I've been searching the house for these last twenty years and more. I take them out and... can pictures taken with a camera, an actual 'adjust the lens and viewfinder' camera, fade? My European pics from the mid-80s are still crisp but these are all dull, washed out, and every one of them has a blank dirty cream sky that leeches colour from the world: even the ones where shadows indicate that the sun is shining. Yes, yes, Tokyo pollution: but evidently Kyoto pollution and Kanazawa pollution and pollution from the Shinkansen windows.

My one hope is that these are the rejects, because I was sure I took more photos than these. But if so, why would I stash them in a safe place, and what happened to the ones taken on the sunny blue-skied days I remember?