January 2, 2009
It’s January 2 and this is going to be my motivational video for the year. It’s a Japanese animation featuring Kikkoman, a superhero from Planet Soy. Granted, the battle cry “destroy all foreign sauces!” is pretty iffy in 2009.
January 1, 2009
2009 will be the Year of the Ox in Japan, where some of the most beautiful NY’s traditions are celebrated. This simple New Year’s card, which was posted today on Flickr, shows stylized oxes or “bekos.” The photo below, of new year’s fortune wishes tied to a tree at a temple in Nakashibetsu on Hokkaido, was also taken today.
After weeks of snow in Vancouver I randomly searched for “Siberian interiors” on Flickr, just to see how snowy regions decorate. Maybe it has nothing to do with counteracting the blank endless wastes of snow, but the standard Siberian decorating philosophy seems to be “There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Pattern.” The exceptions were an amazing white shop interior in Novosibirsk, above, almost Swedish in its simplicity, and a museum version of a traditional Siberian wooden house, at bottom.
December 25, 2008
I hope that whichever winter festival you celebrate, it is happy. Here in Vancouver we will remain buried under three unheard-of feet of snow, waiting helplessly for the thaw and staying clear of the roads, since Vancouverites don’t know how to drive in it.
December 24, 2008
In the late 1920s, the modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray designed and built a landmark piece of modernist architecture in the form of a seaside house.
December 23, 2008
Eileen Gray (1878-1976) produced some iconic pieces of early modernist design in a profession and an era hardly designed for women. Raised in Ireland, she trained in London and Paris and worked most of her life in France.
December 21, 2008
Vancouver artist Arni Haraldsson, known for his photographic studies of modernist architecture and his research on Corbusier, produced these three photographs of the house of another artist, BC Binning, in 1994.
December 20, 2008
Nanna Ditzel is considered the “first lady of Danish design,” which is one of those informative yet cringe-worthy labels that just highlights the whole problem of accidentally ghettoizing designers who happen to be women by the very act of celebrating the fact that they’re women designers.
December 19, 2008
Stefan Boublil of the NY design company The Apartment has done a holiday shopping guide for the NYT. Stefan is great because he tends to go for items that are useful, beautiful and clearly thought out.
The customary greeting of the Roman winter holiday season sounded like “Yo, Saturnalia!” (The latin word “io” is the equivalent of the prayerful “Ho” in ecclesiastical English, as in “Ho, praise to Saturn.”) Saturnalia was a carnivalesque winter festival celebrating the god Saturn’s birthday and it encompassed the winter solstice, running from December 17 – 23rd.
