Exalting the Useless and Derelict

On a recent trip to Takamatsu to renew my visa, I came across this old map in the window of a redecorating store:

What does it depict? A section of the town I presume, but I was more attracted by the shapes and the orientations of the writing, radiating outward from the center, than trying to decipher its historical significance.

Its artistic sensibility made me think of an old This American Life episode I had heard about mapping; how "every map is the world seen through a different lens."

In that show, Ira Glass interviews a geographer named Denis Wood who maps unconventional aspects of ordinary neighborhoods, like pumpkins on porches or "patterns of leaf light on the neighborhood."  He wants his maps, bundled together as an atlas, to be seen as a "collection of patterns of light and sound and smell and taste and communication with others."

Ira, ever the realist, points out that maps by and large are functional tools. They have a purpose. They are a way to describe the world. They get us from point A to point B.

Wood, not to be deterred, says he is on a mad search for a "poetics of cartography," that he exists "in a dream of maps" where "useless knowledge is exalted."

And that's right where I think I stand sometimes — exalting the useless and derelict.

In Praise of Shadows

Parking Lot

More Good Design

You see corrugated sheet metal barns and warehouses all over the place out here in the "countryside." Usually they are in some state of rustiness and/or dilapidation. Utilitarian structures to the extreme, they are fairly quick and cheap to put up; fairly quick and cheap to tear down.

Normally I pass by without giving them a second look. But this one was special. This one had style.

A simple wooden door — made from cedar I'm guessing, the hills are lined with the stuff — and everything square, level and true.

Echosquirrel likes the tiny recessed handles. I like the ensemble. The flimsy and the solid existing together. A craftsman's paean to simplicity.

Map of Shikoku: Blue is the Seto Inland Sea

Good Design

For the same reasons I'm attracted to Apple and Ryoanji — clean lines and uncluttered spaces — this magazine caught my eye in the local bookstore:

Each month the publishers explore a different theme, animal or vegetable — this month it's turnip, next month it's lettuce — following the thing from seed to plate.

Kabu opens with fire — farmers in some areas burn hillsides to grow the crop — with some really nice pics of local farmers working in the ash.

The numbers tend to sell out quickly, and I doubt it's available widely abroad, unless you happen to live near a Kinokuniya.

Next issue レタス　coming out mid-March.

Ate & Ape

Negotiating the visual and textual landscape in Japan can be perplexing enough: not only are there the Chinese characters, or kanji, but there are two syllabaries — hiragana and katakana — the latter reserved mostly for loan words from whatever language; additionally there is a large smattering of words from English written in Roman characters, romaji, which are sometimes English and at other times English-ish. This last category often is the most perplexing.

Simple enough, right?

Not really, because it makes no sense in English. In Japanese, it is nicely ambiguous, since "a té" could mean an aim or an end (当て）or, with another character, (あ、手）it would read "Oh! a hand."

"Este" （エステ）is short for the French esthetique. In Japanese it means beauty salon or in some cases cosmetic surgery.

So there's some pretty hard mixing going on here.  

Same day, different location:

It's French, or a kind of French I guess, but for the English reader it's comedic because we immediately associate it with the animal who sadly has no opposable thumb with which to bake. The Japanese pronunciation, like in the first example, turns the e into a long a. A pays. (But don't pronounce the s. In French. And I'm sure I'm missing an accent mark somewhere.)

Ah, language. C'est comme manger un singe.

Sabi and Sabi-iro

 Sabi¹

In Niihama

Sabi-iro²

In Matsuyama 

¹rust
²rust-colored