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October 2011 One of my short stories was a finalist in the Cincinnati Review's 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Prose Prize.
September 2011 Photographs from my Tokyo Crossing Series will appear in the fall issue of The Adirondack Review. I was also named a finalist in their 2010 photography contest.
August 2011 My novel, The Hashimoto Complex, received an honorable mention in Starcherone Books' 2011-12 Innovative Fiction Contest..
July 2011 One of my short stories was short-listed in the 2011 Faulkner-Wisdom Short Story Contest.
June 2011 The Heart Is a Lonely Drummer, one of my long stories, was named a finalist in the 2010 Long Story Contest.
April 2011 The Hashimoto Complex is a finalist for Black Lawrence Press's Big Moose Prize. • One of my stories was a finalist in Third Coast Magazine's 2011 Fiction Contest. Writer Brad Watson judged.
March 2011 One of my short-short stories will appear in SpringGun Journal this spring.
January 2011 One of my short stories is a finalist in Third Coast's 2011 Fiction Contest. Novelist Brad Watson will pick the winner next month.
August 2010 On August 15th, my novel The Hashimoto Complex was named a finalist in the Santa Fe Writers Project 2010 Literary Awards. • Pocket Smut has just published my twisted, perverse short short story called Please Don't Eat the Sausage.
July 2010 One of my long short stories, The Heart Is A Lonely Drummer is a finalist for Ropewalk Press's Thomas A. Wilhelmus Fiction Chapbook Prize. The press is a University of Southern Indiana imprint. Its website is here.
May 2010 One of my recent short stories, Protection has been "honorably mentioned" for the 2010 E.M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award.
March 2010 A selection from my Suburban Geometries series is entered in Leica's Oskar Barnack Prize competition
February 2010 I've donated a triptych to art auction benefit for the victims of Haiti's devasting earthquake which takes place on Wednesday, 2/10 at 7pm.
December 2009 At 7pm on Sunday, December 13th, I will give a reading at one of NYC's only leather biker cafes, Motorcycle Federation. Organized by Madeleine Beckman, the reading will also feature Roberta Bernstein, Jean Monahan, and Nicole Sprinkle. More details later.
November 2009 I will have a couple of stories published in the Brooklyn Writers Space first anthology, The Reader. The launch party is on Thursday, November 5th at 7pm at BookCourt, 163 Court Street, in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
October 2009 The Hashimoto Complex won 2nd Runner-Up in the 2009 William Faulkner–William Wisdom Novel Competition. • I will be attending an artist residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts with Antonya Nelson.• Photos of my friend LuLu LoLo's 14th Street Newspaper Boy performance appeared in Domus Web. • My short-short South of the Border is favorably noted in The Review Review.
July 2009 A photograph from my collaboration with LuLu LoLo, Pierrot 2.0, was included in an Italian mail art exposition here.
May 2009 My short story Back Trouble is a semi-finalist (top 27 out of 654) in Nimrod's Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. • Photos from my Suburban Geometries series are published on Polar Inertia's Spring 2009 (#34) issue at the end of May.
April 2009 4/8: Max's cousin Elena Takeuchi was born at 5:24pm Tokyo Time! • My long story The Heart Is a Lonely Drummer is a finalist (top 30 out of 900) in Summer Literary Seminars-2009 Unified Fiction and Poetry Contest judged by Lynne Tillman. • A photo from my Visual Haiku series was published in Shots's Spring 2009 issue (#103).
February 2009 My short short story South of the Border was awarded 3rd Place in the Sonora Review's Third Annual Short Short Contest. The judge was Aimee Bender.
January 2009 My short story Second Act is a finalist won Honorable Mention in Cutthroat Journal's 2008 Rick DeMarinis Short Story Competition. The story will be published in February.
November 2008 Brooklyn Writers Space Reading at Union Hall, Sunday, 11/9, 5-7pm. BWS.
September 2008 Final LMCC Reading at U.S. Custom House, Thursday, 9/18, 6-8pm. RSVP is mandatory because of security. RSVP at LMCC's site here. Map of Bowling Green here.
August 2008 Our Baby Boy Is Due! 8/15 is the due date of our unnamed boy. HE'S HERE! Max Miles Takeuchi was born on Friday, 8-22-8 at 3:33pm! See tons of pix here.
April 2008 Excerpt from Tokyo Crossing appears in Redivider. Readings at LMCC Open Studios 4/26 at 92Y Tribeca, 4/27 at 200 Hudson St. Studios.
March 2008 Short story Please Don't Eat the Sausage appears in WordRiot. Awarded a 2008 Fellowship from the Urban Artist Initiative/New York City. March 28 & 29: LMCC Workspace Open Hours.
February 2008—2/11 Reading at the Telephone Bar. 2/25 Reading at Union Hall with Brooklyn Writers Space writers Amy Sohn and Alex Tilney.
October 2007—Awarded 1st Place Lucie Award (Abstract Nature Fine Art Category) from the International Photography Awards 2007.
August 2007—Awarded 9-month residency at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
July 10, 2007—Short story Please Don't Eat the Sausage read by British actor Alex Woodhall at the Liar's League Sex & Death reading series, London.
October 2006—Artist in Residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL.
Another Digital Manipulation Controversy
Left, the “original”; right, the “altered” as it appeared in print.
Since my weekend NYT subscription is on hold, I missed this brouhaha at the Times Magazine over a series of digitally altered photographs. The photographer in question, Edgar Martins, presented his photos for a story called “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” as actual documentary, unretouched images to his editors. The story ran on July 5th, then the pixel peepers started deconstructing the images, pointing out perfect symmetries and cloned pipes and staircases that went to nowhere. The Times retracted the story, apologized to readers, and banished Martins from practicing journalism at its paper. On July 31st, since the controversy ignited a great debate in imaging circles, Martins was generously invited to defend himself on Lens, the Times’ photography blog. Not much of what he says elucidates anything about why he did what he did, nor does he seem to understand the contract with viewers of documentary photography. The problem stems from Martins being an artist rather than a journalist, however much he seems to lie that his photographs are an actual depiction of reality. He is clearly more interested in aesthetics and theory than in pure documentation, something which I tend to share. The Times photography manipulation policy is very general:
Images in our pages, in the paper or on the Web, that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping to omit extraneous outer portions).
It does not take into account selective sharpening, blurring, color balancing, dodging and burning, high dynamic range photography, and the dozens of other techniques, aside from cloning and montaging, which photographers use to enhance their images everyday. I’m sure we will be revisiting this issue many more times as technology matures. Very soon digital still and movie cameras will be able to montage and manipulate on the fly, further blurring the definitions of reality and beauty.