Louis Vuitton presumably only want all-consuming insects made from real products, not fake

In what seems a comment on the product-consuming culture of a (declining?) part of Japan's population, or a look at fakeness in our lives, Mitsuhiro Okamoto made large models of locusts out of Louis Vuitton and other labels' faked goods and exhibited them at Kobe Fashion Museum. Only to have the fake Louis Vuitton ones removed at the company's request – for damaging the company's image. How they can succeed in having artworks not made from their products removed isn't explained!

Story here. Images on the artist's site here.

Power English

This current subway poster advertising Mount Takao – an attractive, popular mountain destination at the end of my subway line – shows a small point about how English language is used in Japanese design. The poster uses the word "power" for Mt. Takao's impact. Simple – yet slightly "odd" to a native speaker. Although slightly out of context. it quite obviously means "The Power of Mt. Takao" or "Mt. Takao's power". But literally, in English the slogan would mean "power up" or "charge" Mt Takao. It doesn't matter, we know what is meant, but it does call to mind the book I'm reading now – Globish – a somewhat-too-positive look at the spread of English worldwide, and how it changes and perhaps becomes more than one language as it goes global.

On the poster, there's one further design "oddity": the three font-uses – lowercase, condensed and uppercase. Possibly, an English-speaking Japanese friend says, the "Mt" is condensed to help it "disappear". Because "mount", or its abbreviation, is not an especially familiar word in Japanese while "power" and "Takao" are quickly read. The power of English.

Can't help liking this guy

Sorry you get an ad before the video. But after that: I can't help liking a guy who got out of Apple 11 days after it was founded because he says he could see the dollar signs flashing in the other founders' well-focused eyes. He designed the first Apple logo. Though he was an engineer not a logo designer.

The nature of lives

More rather wonderful photographs given exposure in the NewYorker's photo pages. Childhood cousins living out life in rural Argentina by Alessandra Sanguinetti. So full of human life. (And quite full of other animal life.)

Available as a book.

Facing death and other stories

London's National Portrait Gallery is one of my favourites in London (when I'm there). Twice a year there are regular award exhibitions – the BP Award for painted portraits (sponsorship that could end soon!) and the Taylor Wessing Award for photographic portraits (which used to be the John Kobal Award – I had a portrait exhibited in that some 15 years back)

Always rewarding shows from an always rewarding gallery. The BP Award is on now – I'll just have to make do with seeing this small selection on The Guardian's site. The winner, Daphne Todd's, memorable painting was of her mother, deceased.

This year's photo show was earlier this year.

Update, Friday 25th: I thought the sponsorship might end because BP falls apart, but it seems people are protesting BP's sponsorship on some "principle". Difficult – where would London art be without the Tate Gallery? Where would the Tate company have been without sugar? Where would sugar be without slavery? You don't want to take blood money, or environmentally-challenged money, but …

Wish you were here?

One for the Strange Maps website. (An excellent site, by the way.) Is this scary or fascinating? Eric Fisher took data from Flickr (either stated by the photographer or via the camera's or phone's GPS data in the file) to map who was taking photos in many cities round the world. Photographing in the same place for more than a month suggested a local (blue), photographing somewhere for less than a month suggested a tourist/visitor (red) and the occasional photographer (or rather uploader) was left as undetermined (yellow). Lines join where people took photos within a short time in two different spots.

It is curious, but at the same time makes me think – once again – there is too much information around. I've never uploaded to Flickr and rarely look there. To me it's another information-overkill site, one which you can look into should you be seeking some information, but otherwise, on a regular basis, somewhere to steer clear of.

My curiosity is piqued by the maps, but my comfort disturbed by the continued accumulation of information as though it reveals more and more about us. I don't mean the information of the maps themselves, just the fact that the cameras are storing more information and that our own uploading constantly piles up the information. (Like on this and most blogs.)

By the way, an aside: a friend tells me that there is now a tour company in Japan which organises bus tours to places which, at certain spots, adds points to your mobile phone in a kind of collectors' game. He reports that a TV programme showed people on the bus checking their mobiles for the points accumulated with barely a look at the place they'd visited. A different kind of tourist map, and another very strange prioritising of information over knowledge.

Covered in various places, but spotted via mestudio

Watch the skies

Only a week after posting this about sky colour, I find this – a watch displaying colours from the current sky, by Japanese designer Ryohei Yoshiyuki. Yet, as a card-carrying sky watcher, somehow I'm not sure I want its colours reproduced on my wrist…

Drainspotting…

…perhaps not so different to trainspotting. But various local authorities around Japan like to brighten up streets (which otherwise are way too cluttered with the everyday street "furniture" of telegraph poles, road-markings, pedestrian barriers, signage etc) with man-hole cover designs. These are often locally relevant designs, and are captured here by Remo Camerota for his book Drainspotting.

"Having one eye is really just a design problem"

Just an update on this post last month.

Emily is back and reporting on her work as a now-one-eyed artist.

Since one of my eyes never focuses, I'm always a little scared – as a designer – of losing the sight in the other eye.

Crime, suicide, sex, heroes… and treaty-signing

Around 135 years ago, these "tabloid" (to retrospectively impose a modern term) newssheets had a short life. Now they look startling. The publishers took a dramatic event or scandal of the day and printed the report from hand-carved woodblocks to sell as a picture-dominated edition. And they did it daily. By today's daily, instant, paparazzi standard's they're works of art. (Of course, there is no lineage from these newssheets to modern paparazzi, and, further, as illustrations these editions often revealed stories that our modern-day photo-real paparazzi can't even approach).

The examples here are from the Tokyo Nichnichi Shimbun – "Tokyo Daily Newspaper". (There were other so-called news nishiki-e – a term which reflects the style of printing – in Tokyo and Osaka.) There was a Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun in the standard format of newspapers of the time, but this short-lived (1874-1875) picture edition of the same name printed "alongside" the actual paper – although in fact created by writers and illustrators from the paper it was unconnected in ownership and publisher.

This separate, namesake edition took stories from the news, and reproduced them a day or two after the newspaper report. So the carvers worked daily but the news was from a couple of days earlier. The whole woodblock is hand-carved – including the words in reverse for printing, of course. The sheer energy and perverse attraction is stunning.

There's no particular timeliness to this posting. Except, I can't help seeing something of a parallel with modern times. Woodblock printing was declining, and the newspaper nishiki-e gave those craftsmen/artists daily employment and profit (even if for a short time). Just as the newspaper industry in print form is facing threat today (although, last week a report said 90 percent of Japanese still read newspapers in print). Of course, the newspaper industry in general is not exactly an art form like woodblock printing, but what followed these newspaper nishiki-e was not necessarily an "improvement" (even if continuous publishing since then until now might not be a "better" choice either). Perhaps there's just a small reminder that the loss of one form for the inevitable progress to another is not inherently "good", that's all. If the art of newspapers in print is dying out, what could newspaper designers do now to display their talent in print with a bang rather than a whimper?

Click the images below for larger pictures.

Top, sumo wrestlers help put out a fire

Woman thrown from boat, saved from drowning

Disgruntled employee slashes fellow workers

Police catch an armed burglar

Treaty signed in Peking between China and Japan

A couple strangle the officer who'd apprehended them

Physician – who marries for dowries he doesn't return – tortures wife

I first saw these papers in a Chiba Art Museum exhibition in 2008. (Another example of local exhibitions beating the central ones in historical collections.) Pictures here are from Waseda University site. You can find out and see much more on researcher William Wetherall's site. Meanwhile, by the way, the main Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun went on to become the Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan's main newspapers today.

Liking the look

Since I mentioned it a while ago, thought I'd just update the topic with this New Yorker posting on the Impossible Project's instant film.

By the way, there's an iPhone app for getting the Polaroid look. Very cool – but so was Polaroid!

Designing reality

How startling and powerfully disturbing is this: real-world design for dealing with the real world.

We Were in Auschwitz – Auschwitz stories from a survivor, Polish writer and survivor, Tadeusz Borowski – was published in 1946, and designer Anatol Girs reproduced the prison-uniform stripes on the cover, but an unknown number were actually bound in camp-uniform material.

Reprints in 2000 were bound in leather taken from an SS officer's uniform.

From the Venus febriculosa web site

Japan heads list…

Above, Distance 

Empire magazine has their 100 top films not in the English language. Categorising films is often difficult, but "not in the English language" always seems a particularly strained category. Nevertheless, it's a curious list to look through and a decent selection.

Except… no. 1 is Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and his films appear a few more times. Am I alone in wondering what the attraction of Kurosawa is? Never really got it myself. In terms of Japan, Kore-eda doesn't get a look-in, although both Nobody Knows and Distance would make it for me. Studio Ghibli gets a couple (Totoro should be higher up, but the Studio's Tombstone for the Fireflies, which doesn't appear and is not directed by Miyazaki, heads its output for me). No Suzuki Seijin either – Gates of Flesh? And In the Realm of the Senses would be in there, as would Woman of the Dunes.

Otherwise, from elsewhere in the non-English-language-speaking-world (see the difficulty in even writing the category down!), I'd include Etre and Avoir; Talk to Her; The Return; The Turner of Pages; Spring, Summer Autumn, Winter… and Spring; Tropical Malady; The Scent of Green Papaya; and not some of the "classics" which do make it in, like Suspiria or Wages of Fear. But that's just me. You can see my 100 top films, for what their worth, here.

Of course, that's the thing with lists – they're there for you to disagree. Meanwhile, each web page on the list doesn't fit on my 24-inch screen, there's no overall view of the list, and clicking through 100 pages takes time even on my super-fast, optical connection. Ah, the downside of the joys of the internet.

Spotted via Watashi to Tokyo

Found kanji/found fonts 4

"Ten" (天 – heaven/sky) upside-down in Shibuya

The art of commerce

Commerce: there's a whole area of study for the splits and joins between "art" (and tradition) and "commerce" (and modernity) in Japan. OK, the lines are always blurred everywhere, and there have to be the inverted commas. Still…

The whole foreign celebrity + advertising is well documented (from a website noting who has made appearances to the unappealing film Lost in Translation). At the moment Tommy Lee Jones continues in a ubiquitous, successful, tongue-in-cheek (by him and the makers) and long-running association with Boss can coffee, for example. Quentin Tarantino recently made a guest appearance for mobile carrier Softbank, as another example. But, from abroad, many think that the Japanese have a special interest in using foreign celebrities. Not so – domestic "celebrities" flood domestic advertising, and the "talent" (or tarento) industry is depressingly dominant on commercial TV generally. Even outside of so-called "talent", lauded teenage golfer Ryo Ishikawa advertises so many products all I remember is him and barely a single differentiated product. After the success of the Cannes-winning film Nobody Knows, the actors who played absent mother and abandoned child in that moving and tragic story appeared in a 2007 ad for Daihatsu in which the mother drives off enjoying her car, leaving her son with only delivered pizza to eat. Such direct commercialism (or "taste") would be largely unconsidered in the UK, for example.

The actor who played the mother – You – is a regular on game shows etc (which in Japan mainly star velebs – tarento is actually a career definition) so her joining-line between art and the commercial is fairly straightforward and somewhat repeated worldwide. The most-quoted "split" is still "art" filmmaker and TV "clown" Beat Takeshi.

Anyway, this is merely a blog, not a study of commercialism and art, So, in the general spirit here's two recent examples. The foreign celebrity allegedly "cashing in": in this ad, featuring currently prominently in World Cup coverage, Jamiroquai lends his Virtual Insanity video to Cup Noodle, with dubbed phrases including hara heta ("I'm hungry"):


Or the press launch of the George Romero zombie movie Survival of the Dead with two comedians and the famous-for-their-breasts, Kano sisters. Click through to 1 minute and 20 seconds to see decent comedian Yoshio Koshima perform what, outside of Japan, would surely be seen to have no connection to promoting a zombie movie:

World Cup

You can't even escape it on this blog. Meanwhile, Japan is geared up in its coverage (which I will be watching).

This week, Time magazine had a spread of all the World Cup posters since 1930. Looked good on the spread. And is viewable on a slightly clunky click-through online. Combinations of world, pitch, player and football in fact haven't changed dramatically.

"Reports of my death…

…have been greatly exaggerated." (?)

Skytone [©]

This was on my work web site a while ago, but wasn't around long before I changed the site. I found it again the other day and thought I should re-upload it.

Looking at the sunset from the balcony of my place I thought – not very originally, it's true – "You can't get those colours in print." At that time the sky was turning a bright yellow via a strip of green, all accompanied with fantastic cloud colour. Then I realised I have taken many sky and cloud photos (being a card-carrying cloud appreciator), so I do have those colours. The colours above are cropped from photos of the sky and clouds. All these colours are, therefore, actually from the sky, from unaltered sky photos. And one unchanged clipping of Fuji at sunset, on the horizon just visible from the balcony. Still think the sky is only blue?

Click for a larger image.

(…the © is not serious.)

Wired/Tired – ?

An interesting take by Information Architects on Wired magazine as it appears on the iPad. Seems to contain tips that make sense.

Eat, drink (or, at least, just drink) and be merry

(Notes on Japan through design: 4 - Drinking beer)

 

I haven't written a Japan-specific post for a while. So thought I'd mention this current poster for the Tokyo Metro "Enjoy Tokyo" series.

Japan is a country that likes beer. (And it's not alone in that.) For an average office worker, drinking beer is almost a must. Drink-sodden Friday-night commuters are a given in Tokyo. (According to a couple of friends' morning-commute experiences – being freelance I avoid the morning crush – drinking on the commute IN on the train isn't unknown.)

You'd perhaps think that celebrating massive beer consumption wouldn't necessarily be high on the subway's "to do" list, but the Metro shows itself happy to encourage the drinkers it transports home en masse on Friday nights – and not-quite-so-massed on other days of the week. (While the sober – in this case me – might be in their seat keep a watchful eye on the guy standing in front of them, asleep with his arms in the air thinking he's holding the straps on the train when he's just holding air.)

Drink is often a communal affair (even if some of the after-hours office visits to bars are a must for some workers). But despite it all, Japan almost completely avoids the laddish drink culture that at times can make many a city centre in the UK, or even London's West End, an uncomfortably aggressive place to be. Mostly, drinkers just get happy (and/or oblivious) in Japan. So, indeed, why not celebrate drinking huge pint-glasses of lager-style beer as in this drawing – along with the illustrated monkey, cat and bird? Click on the image to enlarge. Apologies for not knowing the illustrator.

A week in publishing

Three (ageing) authors. Where do you feel at home?

"This book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen"

(Garrison Keillor, Chicago Tribune, May 26)

"With a gadget you are always dependent on a battery and on power of some sort. A book won't fall apart; you can read it as easily on a mountaintop as in a bus queue"
(Nadime Gordimer, The Guardian, May 30)

"Ohh… I like this"

(Stephen Fry, The Guardian, May 28)

Art/attack

Robert's work, left. A piece by Emily, right

My "home" country, the UK, is a pretty tolerant place on the whole. But that's not a comfort to any who experience its frightening opposite. A racist attack, perhaps – of which there are thankfully fewer and fewer – or in the case of 20-year-old Sophie Lancaster, being beaten to death for dressing differently. It's an almost unfathomable thing in most people's everyday life, but not on that occasion for Sophie and her boyfriend Robert Malby who were beaten by teenagers simply because of their Goth appearance. Sophie tried to protect her boyfriend from the attack taking place on him, and "succeeded" in that he survived his injuries while she did not.

Robert currently has an art exhibition in Manchester of moving paintings he made in response to the attacks and her death, ‘Crimson Iris: The Art of Sophie’.

On a somewhat "connected" theme (any detail of the issues involved is beyond the range of this blog), American student and budding artist Emily Henochowicz was in Israel where she was protesting the attacks on the flotilla to Gaza yesterday when she was shot in the eye by troops and had to have her eye removed. Her art is on her blog: the last entry, on Sunday, before she was hospitalised is here. By a saddening coincidence, the logo for her profile, naturally enough for an artist, was the eye below.

Best wishes to both artists.

Death of Louise Bourgeois

Artist Louse Bourgeois died yesterday, aged 98. On her passing, an excuse for this gratuitous pairing of images – her hand and Bowie's leg