Related: Gabriel is one

A few years ago on lensculture Marc Feustel posted excerpts of an interview with the great Hiroh Kikai. This week Feustel finally posted a fuller version of the interview. If you're a Hiroh Kikai fan (and how could you not be?), please click over there.

If you don't own Hiroh Kikai's book Asakusa Portraits and you're reading this blog, well, you probably should.

My friend and 20x200 colleague Sara Distin will be running her first marathon in support of First Descents, a charity providing guidance and support young adults with cancer. The date of the race coincides with the anniversary of her dad's death. Of the charity she writes:

Had First Descents been around in 1984 when my dad was diagnosed at the age of 37, I imagine he would have been quick to sign himself up. A lifelong outdoorsman, he kept on hiking, windsurfing and skiing as long as he was able. When doctors forbade it and common sense probably should have stopped him, he slipped out of the house in the middle of the night to windsurf and wander. He lived with cancer for 11+ years. Along the way, he imparted his love for life, the outdoors and adventure to me and my sweet sister, Katie.

(Read more from Sara

about the race and the charity

.)

My incentive to you to make a donation is this: everyone who donates more that $500 towards Sara's goal will be in the running to receive a 20x24 print of mine titled "Father and Son" (#2 of 7, signed). Of my own images, this is one of my favorites.

I will award the 20x24 print to a person selected at random from the pool of contributors after the race in April. Additionally, every person who makes a $500+ donation via this web post will get a signed 8.5x11 print of my choosing.

To be entered in the pool:

1) Make your donation.

2) Let me know about the donation by emailing me: RAUL *A-T* MEXICANPICTURES.COM. Then let me know whether you'd like your name publicized and send me your shipping address.

3) I'll compare notes with Sara at race time and we'll select the winner of the 20x24 print from the pool of entrants. The small prints will also be sent out at this time.

By entering you help young people with cancer, sponsor a lovely human being running her first marathon, get a tax deduction, and receive a free print - possibly a 20x24. This methinks is not bad deal.

Last year I decided each month should be marked by a project.
January Project:Shine light on the mysteries of the F train.

January 4: Saw a guy with a pinky ring and remembered a friend of mine who said she had a boyfriend who wore a pinky ring and did "pinky ring kinds of things". I never knew what that meant exactly, but I wondered if this guy would know what she was talking about.

January 5: Do women with with extremely dense, extremely curly hair use their hair as pillow on the road?

January 6: I've seen many of people in this car before. How long does one live in New York before every day is an encounter with the vaguely familiar?

January 7: The subway car is quiet, but the loudness of people's thoughts is deafening. Wonder if any people here saw Wings of Desire and are thinking the same thing?

January 8: Guy in a nice suit. Drunk. 10am.

January 11: Where does one find blue jeans decorated with AK47 silhouettes? And bullet holes! They have manufactured bullet holes.

January 12: Guy with mismatched socks. Actually not much of a mystery because the guy is me. **Bonus mystery: Why is it that one always sees people reading Marquez novels in pairs?

January 13: French people telling knock knock jokes.

January 14: On the ride home in a mostly empty subway car a girl who is about 20 sat down next to a guy who is about 20. They want to talk. Maybe when I exit

January 15: Fellow with a new Zune.

January 18: Saw a guy who reminded me of a kid I knew in kindergarten named Roderick Ross. Wondered if this guy might be Roderick grown up? I didn't ask.

January 19: A girl in a yellow coat is crying quietly.

January 20: How does a person smell like fish and peppermint at the same time?

January 21: Woman with a violin case decorated with stickers for The Cramps.

January 22: Man wearing 2 scarves.

January 25: A lady is eating black licorice on purpose.

January 26: Black coats all around then a woman in a red coat enters. Everyone turns.

January 27: Girl literally whistling Dixie.

January 28.: Fellow with mullet. Of you mulletman I ask: Where does one go to acquire such a stunning mullet cut these days?

January 29: A woman drew X's, O's, and hearts all over her hand and up part of her arm.She looks tired — not the hand drawing type. Maybe she didn't draw them. Maybe it was one of her kids. She looks too young for kids. Looks like she's going to work.

Talked to a photographer friend today who had never heard of Yasuhiro Ishimoto. A situation I feel I had to correct:

Ishimoto was born in San Francisco, moved to Japan at 3, and then moved back at 17 only to be put in an interment camp a few years later. After being released he lived in Chicago from the late 40's to the 60's where he made many iconic photographs. While he returned to Japan in the 60's and has been there ever since, his his best known for his Chicago work. You can get a small taste of Ishimoto's sharp eye by scanning this gallery (unfortunately on an aggressively awkward-to-navigate website). A few images can be also seen at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. To really give Ishimoto his full due you have to grab one his books. A Tale of Two Cities is a good place to start.

I love this image by Hanna Pierce-Carlson. Hannah and her husband Michael recently moved Taiwan and she's obviously been inspired by the place. Hannah blogs about the transition on insig.ht, a group photography blog. It will be exciting to follow the work and see where it goes.

I've always been something of a space geek (Many of my childhood bookplates are signed, Raul A. Gutierrez, Future Space Pilgrim) so Vincent Fournier's Space Project hits me squarely in the solar plexus. Fournier travelled to space centers worldwide including the Yuri Gagarin Space Research Center, The Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, The Guiana Space Center, and the Atcama Desert Observatories in Chile and came back with a set of pictures that tells me Vincent is a pretty big space geek himself.

Black Snoman by David Shrigley

David Shrigley is a talented artists, cartoonist, and animator, but of all his talents I love his photos the most..

Raul Andres [age 5]: [looking at a sticker book of planets] This is Earth! This is where we are.

Gabriel [age 2]: What's that one and that one?

Raul Andres: That's Saturn and that one is Mars. Jupiter is over here. And that's Venus. And there's Neptune, Uranus and Pluto. Pluto is so cold.

Gabriel: But where's Krypton?

On this day exactly twenty years ago I lost my mother and my youngest brother. I've written about this on previous January 1rsts. The date because of it's neatness — January 1, 1990 — gives me an absurdly simple way measure the the time from that day this one. Sometimes in conversation someone will ask how long ago they died, and I always resist the urge to give the questioner an exact tally with months and days attached. Stating the elapsed time so precisely seems too intense, but the calculation is automatic and needs no mental machinery. Recalling death anniversaries not just by years but also with months and days was something my grandmother would do. She carried around the dates of her 9 brothers and sisters who preceded her in death. None of her siblings, except maybe Tio Tibero, fell on easily divisible days.

At the age of 22, twenty years would have seemed an eternity to me, and yet nothing about those terrible days has faded. After being told the news and summoned home, I remember standing on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street and hailing a taxi. In the cab I spun one of the buttons on my shirt back and forth until it broke and held that button in a tightly clasped fist all the way back to Texas. On arriving to my house which was strangely full of people, an aunt hugged me deeply and whispered through tears that she would fix my shirt. Wordlessly I handed her the button.

Christopher would be 39. It's hard to imagine he's been gone a year longer than he lived. Back then I was skinny but he was skinnier. We both carried cameras everywhere. I can't picture him thick and middle aged as I am now, still lugging a camera around. When he comes to me in dreams he is always young. Sometimes 19, sometimes 12, sometimes 4. In those dreams am always 3 years older. We play, or torture each other, or look at stars as we often did. My 5 year old son, Raul Andres, with his mad creative bursts of bookmaking and deep love of robots channels him sometimes. And sometimes when I reading to Raul Andres I get the sense memory of myself at 8 reading to Christopher. Often I am reading from the selfsame heavily worn books we read as children complete with our childish crayon annotations. Raul Andres happens to love the same stories and laughs in the same places.

My mom would be 65. She was only 3 years older than I am now when she died. But at 42 my life with kids is just beginning, while at 45, her life with kids was ending. Was she really younger than me now when I left for college? She complained bitterly of empty nest syndrome when I left. The scope and shape of her life versus mine is hard to reconcile. These days in my dreams of her she is always 45 and I am whatever age I am. In those dreams I am going about my life and will suddenly notice her in the corner of the room watching silently. I find myself asking questions, trying to fill in the holes, but she vanishes when I approach. I wonder if she will remain 45 in those dreams when I am an old man.

The deaths left me keenly aware of time and it's strange fluxuations. In the immediate aftermath, my old life, the life of a few days before, was suddenly distant. Thinking a week or a month or a year into the future was impossible. With all my nerve endings exposed, I existed rather than lived suspended in an excruciating endless moment. For some months afterward, the date had a gravity which I orbited at various speeds without regard for anything else. I focused on the timeline. Days would tick by painfully and yet everything seemed to be moving at lightning speed. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, one day it was over. Through a mysterious combination of good friends, travel, art, and love I reached escape velocity. I woke up, blinked my eyes in the bright sunlight, and time itself was righted, the continuum of my own life while disturbed was comprehensible again, and I could appreciate my strange new life without being tethered to a catastrophic moment. I don't know exactly how it happened, but I think it was because I realized at that I had a choice and I choose to move forward.

Someone asked me the other day whether experiencing tragedy at a relatively young age had made me more or less able to deal with tragedy now. I answered, no. You can't compare loss. Each one is uniquely capricious and each one ricochets through family and friends in unpredictable patterns of destruction. The irony of tragedy is that it is the inverse of friendship and love. The more you give of yourself, the larger your network of potential grief, but then again, the more people you have to help pick you up when you fall. We're all more vulnerable than we know, but we're stronger too.

So it's been twenty years. Mom, Christopher, you'd barely recognize me now, but I'd hope you'd be proud of the family I've created. We have fun. I miss you guys.

"We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today."

-Part of a super speech on copyright titled How to Destroy the Book by Cory Doctorow.

I'm intrigued by Samantha Contis' project Between Rivers and Roads but wish I had a bit more context for it. Then again, I feel that way about most work I look at online and of course viewing work online is a poor substitute for seeing it in person. Bet this series is beautiful as a set of prints.

From something my wife is writing:

"You do know, you should remember Ji-Hyon ah – love flows down. From person to person it only trickles down."
I tell her I’m not sure I understand. I’d never heard this saying before.
"It’s an old Korean saying. This is one of the ways we understand love. It moves downward, from grandmother to mother, from mother to child – this is how we take care of each other. But the one below will never understand the love of his parent so he cannot love as much. Love is always greater on top. And so is the pain."

Alec Soth has a new online treehouse... It's every bit intriguing as his old blog. Start with Glass Jars...

Congratulations to Alejandro Cartagena for being selected as a Hot Shot. I've long been been a fan of Cartagena's Lost Rivers project and of his work in and around Monterrey. The image above is actually from a new project titled Between Borders. It's great to see Cartagena on a roll. Hey! Hot Shot is on roll too. Two former Hot Shots were selected for the Whitney Biennial, a very big deal indeed.