Apparently even the intellectually deficient can become president of RISD, probably the best design school in the US. I hope he can draw good.
There is an article in the NY Times about extravagant Japanese lunch boxes, or bento. I am well aware of these, and tremble at the thought of having to compete with all those Japanese moms willing to get up an hour early to craft their little one’s piece of art for the day (I know people who do this).
In this NYT piece, various luminaries (or not) give their opinions as to why Japanese people seem to care more about the aesthetics of little things. Anyway, the president of RISD gives this little piece of wisdom:
“I would say that Japanese culture is particularly attuned to the appreciation of beauty because it springs from an island nation with limited natural resources. Japan has always had to get by with less wood, metal, fuel and so on, so its culture has evolved around how to make less into more.”
Now, this is a worn out piece of Japanese cultural theory that Japanese people (and the guy appears to be Japanese, or at least of Japanese heritage) trot out to explain just about anything about Japan.
The thing that always bugs me is…The world is full of island nations. A fact that Japanese people never seem to have caught on to. And, if the world has many island nations, then offering “Japan is an island!” as a primary explanation for anything that doesn’t also apply to all those island nations, is just blather.
Does Brittain have ornate bento? How about Jamaica? New Zealand? That this little piece of Logic 101 appears to be be beyond so many cultural commentators never fails to astound me.
A week or so before our yearly, much anticipated vacation back to the States I take it upon myself to cut my own hair, which I’ve done for years with a trusty pair of electric clippers. They betrayed me this time, though, because I forgot in the middle of the process that I had taken off the length-adjustment guard to clean it, meaning that when I applied the clippers to the very front of my head they cut away everything, resulting in the absurd half-reverse-Mohawk you see here. Looks like I have some serious hat-wearing in my future.
I loathed field day when I was a kid, but undokai, the Japanese variant, is actually pretty fun. They practice lots of different kinds of dances and stunts, and the oldest kids at our particular daycare put on a great drum routine (which you’ll have to wait until next year to see).
Here is Genbo (he’s the tall white one in yellow shoes) dancing with his class.
So today was the second day of my photography group’s exhibition, and my day to go and “mind the store.” It was the first time I saw my pieces printed and framed, and I was very pleased. Here I am hamming it up in front of my piece, Mountain Storm, which is an abstract macro of a piece of pottery about 5 mm (1/4″) across.
Now that I have a mountain, I want to continue the series and see if I can make interesting depictions of rivers, oceans, or or the sky using similar techniques. The hard part is to make it interesting and somehow emotionally impactful. Yes I know that isn’t a word.
Here is my piece next to another tryptic of some Kabuki actors. I described the process of how these three photos were selected here. I like how they placed the most abstract piece next to the most dramatically human and concrete.
This is the sensei’s piece. The location is Izumo Jinja, a huge shrine. The tree is white because people have tied thousands of fortunes to it. When you’re at a shrine or a temple in Japan, you often buy a fortune for a dollar or two. People usually bring the good fortunes home, but tie the bad ones onto a nearby tree, from which they are collected once a year and burned en masse.
Today there was no daycare because there was a huge typhoon moving through. Ultimately is was pretty anticlimactic, at least where we are, but the kids got a play day out of it. These pictures are all taken in the “Kids’ Room” of our building, which is really nice to have on rainy days like this. I’m going to select a few of the best photos for a regular post later, but I figured I would try out the slideshow functionality of Zenfolio, which will let me put more photos up without making ridiculously long blog posts.
(Outfit selected by, in fact vociferously insisted upon, by Zoe herself.)
So, after I went to my photography teacher’s place with a single pottery macro and he told me to reshoot it as a nature-inspired tryptic, this is what I came up with. I won’t bother posting a thumbnail here, since the image is so long. Click on that link and then expand the browser window to see the whole thing.
The title of the piece is 山嵐, or “Mountain Storm,” although it sounds more dramatic in Japanese. Each piece in the tryptic will be printed on A3 size paper, which is 16.5 inches (420 mm) across. The length of the pottery shard (graciously given by my friend Koji Kamada (鎌田幸二)) pictured in all three frames is smaller than the width of my thumbnail.
I can’t wait to see them hanging on the wall along with everybody else’s pieces!
One challenge I had while shooting is that a very slight change in angle of the light (from an LED flashlight) completely changed the characteristics of the image, since the glaze has all different kinds of metallic crystals, reflections from which are very sensitive to changes in direction of light source.
Here are two shots representing today. I spent it, like I do all Saturdays, with Genbo and Zoe (since Maki works on Saturday, her days off being Wednesday and Sunday). This is just a shot of them at the front of the train. I love Genbo’s protective arm around his sister.
Here is my new macro setup. You can see the ultra-sophisticated use of the sandbag instead of the tripod. Yes, this is primarily because I don’t have a real tripod, but also because in this case a sandbag really is the best way to go. I have two extension rings and a teleconverter attached to my lens, which means one long piece of equipment including four joints. This means that it should be supported all along its length to prevent sagging, and the best way to do that is a sandbag.
I was shooting some abstract macros of my friend Kamada-san’s work. Tomorrow the guy who leads my photo group and I will work on them, deciding what to print for a group show. I’m pretty happy with what I got, and I’ll post what we decide on later. (Here are the shots I am going to bring tomorrow. Somehow we’ll figure out how to arrange them into a triptych. I was thinking about portraying them as a mountain with clouds, but they also look a lot like a breaking wave to me as well. There’s also a cool shot in that gallery that shows me holding the shard, so you get an idea of scale.)
