Lemniscate Blues

Chairs in Heaven

                              
Recently I had a chance to sit in a Solis chair designed by the Wilkhahn group of Germany.  It was unlike anything I've ever sat in before.  That sounds a bit dweebish but so does the term "dynamic sitting" lifted straight from the Wilkhahn site.  It all sounds like lip service until you take a seat.  If I could afford it (around 200,000 yen/ just under 2000 USD), I would be sitting dynamically every day at home.  Superb.

Talk Doesn't Cook Rice

If I've been somewhat reticent lately it may have been because I was peering speechlessly into a simmering pot of something or other...

My passion for food (forgive the hackneyed phrase, but there really is no other one that fits) surely began when I was young and still lower in height than a kitchen counter, peering up at my grandmother working her secret mojo into whatever was for dinner.  The smells floating down to my hungry nose, the busy clatter of briefly glimpsed, curious utensils, and the occasional tastes delivered by spoons or fingers and swallowed too quickly to be savored were my clues to the preparations.  As I grew older, my grandmother never taught me how to cook though, at least not in the way that I imagine certain grandmothers teaching their offspring volumes of memorized recipes over long days and nights in a hot kitchen.  But by allowing me to linger there with her, as much of an obstacle as I may have been, as she got things done, she taught me to love the mystery of food and the way it is made.

I'm not going to look anyone squarely in the eye and say, "I love food because it's sexy" (although it can be).  My favorite things about food are the variety, the intimidation factor in both preparing and trying certain new foods, and the challenge and reward of making something from scratch and surprising even yourself.

Despite my grandmother's early yet unwitting encouragement along this path, my development into anything half-competent in the kitchen never really started until I was on my own.  Sometime in college I took it upon myself to start trying things out.  It was simple at first;  something to keep me out of the university cafeteria as much as possible.   

After coming to Japan about three years ago, things really took off.  I wasn't cooking that much Japanese food; it's subtle flavors tend to leave very little room for error.  I preferred to hide behind the bolder flavors of Italy and mainland Asia.  I don't  seem to eat out that much any more, and when I do it can turn into as much of a research trip as it is a meal. 

Anyways, I don't intend for this to become a food blog like the ones in the food porn list to the right, but I'm not going to hesitate to talk about the foods I love and the experiences that they give me.

Yokohama 2005

The Yokohama Triennale ends on the 18th of December, so if you haven't taken the time to go yet do it.  There are offerings from artists, architects, designers, and musicians from all over the globe.  It may seem a tad pricey at 1800 yen, but one can easily spend an entire day exploring the site.

The expansive exibition site was created out of two huge converted warehouses located on the Yamashita Pier.  Before you go home be sure to grab a beer at Atelier Van Lieshout's on-site Bar Rectum.

Have You Seen This Movie?

For the past five years the Association of Independent Creative Editors has organized a contest for its assistant editors.  Their goal is to re-edit a trailer for a major motion picture and have the product look like a different movie from a different genre.  The Trailer Park competition has gained major support from fans, critics, and, of course, editors.  This year's winner is Robert Ryang, a 25-year-old film editor's assistant from Manhattan.  His trailer is an interpretation of Kubrik's Shining.  You can see it here.

Other entries included West Side Story and Titanic.

You can read a short interview with Robert here.

復活 - Back From the Dead

Back from the dead.

Alive and well, I’m sitting in the spacious but cluttered staff room of Ichikawa 7 Junior High School, drawing a salary and punching out a much belated note to open space.

I’ve recently moved from a small farming town of around 10,000 on the Eastern coast of Chiba Prefecture in Japan to a teeming if somewhat polluted city called Ichikawa on the prefecture’s opposite coast that clocks in at around 450,000 plus inhabitants.  Of course I miss things about the countryside (mostly the friends and people I met there), but there is something to be said for the conveniences of city life.

One of the things I’m looking forward to most is my freedom from having a car.  Rural areas are so sparsely arranged that it is almost a necessity to have some kind of motorized transportation, but cities are concentrated, dense.  There is a well-planned, punctual system of mass transit that can take you anywhere you want to go.  Most things are within a quick bike ride’s reach anyways.

City life also lends a certain anonymity to its inhabitants.  You become just another face in the crowd rising out of the subway station and merging with the street’s flowing masses.  There’s no one looking over your shoulder at the supermarket to see what the town foreigner is going to cook for dinner.  It’s a great relief.  Back from the dead.

Gary David Goldberg, No Relation

I was dissappointed the other day when I noticed that the UbuWeb is down until the fall while  a full transfer of its files to a new server is carried out.  The website was a trove of interesting avant-garde films, mp3s, and poetry.  I was getting an education in many artists that I'd only heard about (or hadn't heard of at all), and I was looking forward to delving into their archives a little more.  One of the artists I learned about was the indubitably individual Jaap Blonk of Holland.

In the meantime, it may be worthwhile to browse the future home of UbuWeb, New York's free-form WFMU radio.  Their weblog also has some interesting stuff.

Speedy Delivery

Fred Rogers merged with the infinite in 2003 at the age of 74.

He and his show were symbolic of many things that seem to exist in complete contradiction to the state of our modern world: simplicity, honesty, playful creativity, innocence, tolerance.  When Rogers entered his “home,” changed his shoes, and zipped up that cardigan he was crossing the boundary between a frantic, busy outside world and a safe area that he helped us create where ideas were what mattered.

The opening piano lines by Johnny Costa are soothing, relaxing, and shall I dare say hip?  That had to be some of the first piano jazz I was really ever exposed to as a young kid.  Perhaps those emotions paired with that sound cause me to continue to like those solitary jazz-influenced melodies.  I get the same feeling when I listen to Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown Christmas or even some of Monk’s solo stuff.

What got me thinking about this topic were those great factory tours delivered by Mr. McFeely (triva: McFeely is Roger’s middle name). Mr. Rogers would pop the hand-delivered 8mm reels into Picture Picture, and the film would start in its screen and then fade into out our own TV set. For a (somewhat grainy) trip down memory lane have a gander at this small collection of those same films.

In conclusion, some salient words from Rogers :

Of course I get angry. Of course I get sad.  I have a full range of emotions. I also have a whole smorgasbord of ways of dealing with my feelings. That is what we should give children. Give them ... ways to express their rage without hurting themselves or somebody else. That's what the world needs.

Green Over Gray

Emilio Abasz is the head of a self-named industrial design firm that works on everything from consumer products like toothbrushes, interior lighting, and furniture to "durable goods" such as diesel engines and air filters.  The overarching understanding that guides their designs according to Mr. Ambasz is "that, like the ancient people of non-Greek cultures, we should see humanity not in contrast to, but as an integral part of both, the natural and the man-made milieus."

What originally made me aware of Ambasz was not his industrial design but his architectural work.  The Fukuoka Prefectural Hall has won numerous awards, but apart from all of that it is a truly exemplary case of the marriage of a usable community and office block with what was the last green space in the city's center.  A quick click through the Emilio Ambasz and Associates, Inc. site is worth it.  Aside from the simple inclusion of organic shapes to compliment the surrounding natural landscape, Ambasz uses gardens and greenery as actual construction elements integral to his buildings' designs.  His green strategies have also proven financially beneficial to clients in the long run.  However I am curious how the diesel engine designs jibe with the green cityscapes.

Bumps on a Log

I was passed a "musical baton" from my cousin, Kevin, of The Byrdhouse Review.  Strangely enough, it doesn't make a peep itself.  This baton actually directs me, rather, to link to his site and then provide the following information:

Total volume of music on my computer:

10.69 GB

The last album I purchased was:

Ariel Pink's Worn Copy

Song playing right now:

MF Doom's "Gas Drawls"

Five songs I've been listening to a lot recently, from several genres:

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti's "Hardcore Pops are Fun"

Liquid Liquid's "Scraper"

Tom Waits's "Don't Go Into That Barn"

Boredoms' "Seadrum"

Michigan & Smiley's "Nice Up the Dance"

Five people to whom I will pass this musical baton:

Bellamy in Suzu- quite possibly still thawing out from the winter

Jacob in Ichikawa- the He-man to my Man-of-Arms

Antonin in Paris- as Digiki he cooks up  some mean digital porridge in Kitchen

-stay tuned

-ditto

GA Gallery

Last week I took advantage of the long vacation to slip out to the Global Architecture Gallery in Sendagaya.  They have an exhibition promoting the release of their GA Houses PROJECT 2005.  Arranged within the gallery's space, itself a good example of creative architectural design, were works by selected architects featured in the PROJECT 2005 magazine.  Two- and three-dimensional representations of their recent projects were on display along with descriptions of the theories behind them.  While a few of the designs were purely theoretical, most are either set to begin construction soon or are being built now.

A majority of the models were minimal, their landscapes but abstracted topography, and constructed from wood, metal, cardboard, paper, and plastic.  The  structures they described ranged from the outlandish and complex to the simple and sleek. 

I was surprised to see the appearance of a private house by Shigeru Ban, an architect only recently mentioned on LEMBlues.  It was a striking, white boomerang-shaped building with glass exterior walls.  Another design that caught my attention was by Felipe Assadi.  Also a private house, it's largest exterior wall is intended to be used as a hydroponic lettuce garden capable of producing 2600 heads a season.   It sounds quirky, but I think it is a very creative thing to consider the practical functional possibilities of a house outside of purely domestic boundaries.  All in all, there were just too many great ideas to list here.  For the full report I suggest that you get the magazine.  Like the exhibition, all descriptions are given in English and Japanese.

I f you decide to go, be advised not to take large amounts of cash with you because the gallery bookstore is extensive and awfully enticing.