Father and Son, Prada, Tokyo

Father and Son, Prada, Tokyo Photograph by pmorgan.

Notes on Japan

Nanzen-ji Temple, Kyoto Photograph by pmorgan.

20 Nov 05 Nozomi Shinkansen Car 7 Seat 12A Depart 15:15 Arrive 17:33 Distance 533km (avg speed = approx. 230 km/hr). One-way ticket cost 135 $CDN. Check-in via bilingual machines or agents, downtown to downtown.

iPods to be sold in 7-11 convenience stores.

Extreme liberalism

What is the problem with being liberal these days?

On Friday morning, as Bush was meeting the leaders of Southeast Asia, his press secretary issued an unusually blistering statement responding to Representative John Murtha's call for a pullout from Iraq. The statement charged that Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who had often backed Bush's military initiatives, was endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore, whose movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" attacks the Bush administration, and "the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party."

Source: International Herald Tribune

Hu helped guide China's initial market-oriented economic reforms, rehabilitated many people who had been purged or disgraced under Mao, and pursued ideas for deeper political change through much of the 1980s. He left power under pressure in 1987, accused by party conservatives of having "bourgeois" tendencies that undermined stability.

Political analysts said that the rehabilitation of Hu was unlikely to lead to policy changes, noting that President Hu has tightened controls on lawyers, journalists, human rights activists and intellectuals and warned about the threat from "liberal elements."

Source: International Herald Tribune

Photography, Architecture: Tokyo City Hall and Kenzo Tange

Tokyo City Hall

A 20 second exposure of Tokyo City Hall and clouds. The building cost more than $1 Billion US. The architect was Kenso Tange.

Tange's early thinking was influenced by Le Corbusier, as evidenced in his urban philosophy calling for comprehensive cities filled with megastructures that combine service and transportation elements. Other artistic influences included Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo and 20th-century German-American architect Walter Gropius.

"Tange, in turn, was influential on the next generation of architects. His practice expanded to employ 130 architects around the world by the late 1980s, including architects now well known, such as Fumihiko Maki and Arata Isozaki.

"Tange came to international attention in 1946 when he designed the master plan for rebuilding Hiroshima after its devastation during World War II. His design included a memorial and museum complex where the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945.

"A recent review of his life by Reuters reports: '...Tange's trademark was a boldly spare and elegant style, blending Japanese and Western aesthetic principles... [He] captured the spirit of a rapidly developing Japan with his swooping 1964 Tokyo Olympic Stadium, often described as one of the most beautiful structures built in the 20th century.'

Source: ArchitectureWeek

More detailed information is at GreatBuildings. Here is a google search for relevent images

Still another aspect of architecture and cities in our informational/communication society is inter-architectural relations. In the industrial society, strong emphasis on costs and intense demand for functional sufficiency of individual buildings meant that less thought was given to large functional units, including the building's neighboring structures and surroundings. I think it is difficult to determine which of the two is more important, but in a society that places great stress on communications, relationships with the surroundings probably deserve as much consideration as the functional sufficiency of the individual building.

Source: Pritzker Prize Acceptance Speech

His firm's website has a nice line drawing on the main page:

Planning: Radical Tactics

Precise site with good insight about following ones dream; being organized.

Knowing your dream and living it--this is the whole purpose behind simplifying your life. By knowing your dream, you have a powerful motivator to make changes in your life. By starting to have pieces of your dream, your life takes on a joy that makes the sacrifices of simplicity worth it.

Source: Live Simple: Radical tactics to reduce the complexity, costs, and clutter of your life

Google Cheat Sheet

Site: Google Guide Quick Reference: Google Advanced Operators (Cheat Sheet) by Nancy Blachman

Education: Instructional Design Models

Martin Ryder has compiled a comprehensive and instructive list of instructional design models.

"Models, like myths and metaphors, help us to make sense of our world. Whether derived from whim or from serious research, a model offers its user a means of comprehending an otherwise incomprehensible problem. An instructional design model gives structure and meaning to an I.D. problem, enabling the would-be designer to negotiate her design task with a semblance of conscious understanding. Models help us to visualize the problem, to break it down into discrete, manageable units.

"The value of a specific model is determined within the context of use. Like any other instrument, a model assumes a specific intention of its user. A model should be judged by how it mediates the designer's intention, how well it can share a work load, and how effectively it shifts focus away from itself toward the object of the design activity."

Source: Instructional Design Models

The defintion referenced in the work:

Instructional Design is the systematic development of instructional specifications using learning and instructional theory to ensure the quality of instruction. It is the entire process of analysis of learning needs and goals and the development of a delivery system to meet those needs. It includes development of instructional materials and activities; and tryout and evaluation of all instruction and learner activities.

fail! This is because the defintions put the focus on the instruction rather than on the learning. I suggest the definition above be modified:

Instructional Design is the systematic development of instructional materials using learning and instructional theory to ensure that the highest possible quality of learning takes place. It is the entire process of analysis of learning needs, setting of goals, the development of a delivery and support system, design and production of appropriate materials and the use of coherent instructional strategies to meet the needs of the learner. It includes tryout and evaluation of all instruction and learner activities.

Ryder links to the useful A Brief History of Instructional Design by Douglas Leigh.

Another useful compendium of instructional design models has been prepared by Clyde Bassett.

Politics, Technology: Benetton's Colors Magazine on Oppressing Journalists

Grim and unpromising

"“China operates the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad–reaching system of Internet filtering in the world,” according to a recent report by the OpenNet Initiative. Highly sophisticated filters can block up to 500,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) simultaneously, leave some parts of a website accessible while blocking others, and make e–mails disappear. Technological surveillance is backed up with the human kind: Thousands of state employees are thought to monitor web traffic, and 800 Internet Security Monitors will soon be dispatched to cyber cafés. And who is helping in this powerful and intricate clampdown on Internet freedom? Western companies desperate to do business with China: Firewalls and filtering systems have been provided by the American Cisco Systems, while Chinese Internet users wanting to start blogs on a site hosted by US company Microsoft are told that “democracy,” “human rights” and “Tiananmen” are examples of “prohibited language,” and advised to find an alternative."

Source: Benetton's COLORS

Politics: The Flow of Oil Money

Detailed Economist article on where the oil money is flowing:

"Despite the lack of hard data, many economists are sure that a big dollop of petrodollars is going into American Treasury securities. If so, the recycling of money via bond markets could have very different effects on the world economy from the bank-mediated recycling of previous oil booms. If petrodollars not spent flow into global bond markets, they reduce bond yields and thus support consumer spending in oil-importing countries."

Source: Recycling the petrodollars in the Economist.com

Music: Nick Hornby: "Earlier on in the week that I met Bruce Springsteen"

He looked younger than the last time I saw him, and he's clearly incredibly fit. He is one of the few artists I've met who is able to talk cogently about what he does without sounding either arrogant or defensively self-deprecating.

NH: Have you got to the stage where your kids are introducing you to things?

BS: Yeah, my son likes a lot of guitar bands. He gave me something the other day which was really good. He'll burn a CD for me full of things that he has, so he's a pretty good call if I want to check some of that stuff out ... The other two aren't quite into that yet. My daughter's 12, 13, and she likes the top 40. So I end up at the Z100 Christmas show, sitting in the audience with my daughter and her friends watching every top 40 act ... I'm all over the place.

No brilliant insights, but for the believers, its good stuff.

Source: Guardian Interview of Bruce Springsteen by Nick Hornby

Sringsteen's site has a podcast that shows the inner workings of the making of Born to Run. The New York Times has a review of the boxed set version of Born to Run. (Hopefully the Times will leave it publicly available, rather than behind a for pay gate.)

Photography, Film: CBC film on War Photograpers

Riveting

"BEYOND WORDS focuses on the world's top war photojournalists, and attempts to turn the lens of attention onto them. Many have been wounded. Some have seen colleagues die. All have been scarred by what they do: some become disillusioned, even ashamed of what they do, and leave the profession because they feel it's pornographic. Yet some remain charged by the excitement of it, and others committed to the idea that where there are no images, there is no sense of history."

Source: CBC: Beyond Words

A really worthwhile 10 minute version of the documentary is available on the site.

Photography: Sage Adice for Starting Out

"Question: What's the best piece of advice you have for young photographers starting out?"

Source: Editorial Photo.com

Technology: TinyURL.com

"Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then you've come to the right place. By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires."

Music: RollingStone Magazine Chooses the Greatest Albums

Site: RollingStone.com: 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

Politics, Environment, Photography: Thick Smog over Beijing

the scale on the source image (click the picture to go to it) shows this photo to cover an length of area around Beijing of about 1000 km.

"Thick pollution obscured the sky over Beijing and nearby regions on November 4, 2005. According to news reports, the cityÂ?s pollution index reached the highest level on the scale between November 4-5, and residents were warned to spend as little time as possible outdoors. Children, elderly, and those with respiratory conditions were cautioned to be especially careful."

Source: EO Newsroom

There is another image from the same source, this time about Smog and China, which I briefly noted.

Photography, Art: Jeff Wall - Canadian, Classicis

"'A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)' is a large colour photograph displayed in a light box. It depicts a flat, open landscape in which four foreground figures are frozen as they respond to a sudden gust of wind. It is based on a woodcut, Travellers Caught in a Sudden breeze at Ejiri (c.1832) from a famous portfolio, The Thirty-six Views of Fuji, by the Japanese painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Wall photographed actors in a landscape located outside his home town, Vancouver, at times when similar weather conditions prevailed over a period of five months. He then collaged elements of the photograph digitally in order to achieve the desired composition. The result is a tableau which appears staged in the manner of a classical painting."

Source: Tate Collection

Art: Canadian

Useful magazine about the Canadian Art Scene, called, logically, Canadian Art

Photography: "A bleak society that has lost meaning ..."

"This new book The New Life, La Vie Nouvelle, (Twin Palms Publishers, October 2005) ... features a series of fifty photographs by French photographer Lise Sarfati. The photographs were taken in cities like Austin (Texas), Asheville (North Carolina), Portland (Oregon), Berkeley, Oakland and Los Angeles (California), New Orleans (Louisiana) and some small towns in Georgia.

"In each of these portraits, Lise Sarfati dramatizes the complexity of adolescent identity : within unfamiliar territory - both emotionally and physically - where the simplest of feelings become exalted and everything is lived with an intensity that adults will never again be able to feel. We are talking here of a kind of parallel reality, an interstitial territory which doesn't understand geographical spaces or political systems, which no longer belongs either to a completely real reality or to a consciously conceived fiction, but rather finds itself fed by its own rituals and codes of behaviour, where the dividing line between good and bad, happiness and sadness, innocence and perversity or reality and fantasy is extensively blurred."
F. Javier Panera

Source: Lise Sarfati's website.

"After the end of the soviet empire marked by the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Sarfati started work on various projects in Russia, photographing there almost exclusively for the next 9 years. This work formed the basis of her first monograph, 'Acta Est', Latin meaning 'it's over' or 'the play is done'. Her pictures show with small areas of Russian cities, exteriors and interiors, viewed frontally in colour with an often brutal intensity, remarkable for their emptiness. Towards the end of the work we also see some of the people she has photographed, who seem to be mainly dysfunctional families, trans-sexuals and the mentally ill. It is powerful work and provides a bleak view of a society that appears to have lost its meaning."

Source: About.com - Lise Sarfati

Photography: Unconventional Iraq

Intriguing photos by Christoff Bangert

Writing, Poetry, Politics: "I feel your pain, Scooter"

Garrison Keillor weaves parenting, current events and life's lessons in a concise article:

"A person can learn a great deal if you're lucky enough to get into serious trouble and of course it's more beneficial if you do it when you're young. But trouble is a good teacher at any time and it's a shame so many people try to skip the School of Hard Knocks. If only they knew the good it would do them."

Source: International Herald Tribune

Keillor also skillfully selects a daily poem, which one can have emailed, on The Writers Alamanc.

Poetry: Newfoundland's People

A friend's comment about Poet John Ashbery's 'Interesting People of Newfoundland':

This is quite a good prose-poem that really conjures up a little vignette of Newfoundland life. Interesting to see how mundane and basic a lot of the descriptions are: some would not even call this poetry in any kind of a formal sense. I would have to read more of his work, but it appears as if he is deliberately being prosaic and undercutting the lyricism to create a straightforward slice of life. How does a phrase like “worship of the chthonic [definition] powers” end up here?

"Interesting People of Newfoundland"
by John Ashbery from Where Shall I Wander: New Poems (Ecco Press)

Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.
Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners
for a nickel. There was the Russian who called himself
the Grand Duke, and who was said to be a real duke from somewhere,
and the woman who frequently accompanied him on his rounds.
Doc Hanks, the sawbones, was a real good surgeon
when he wasn't completely drunk, which was most of the time.
When only half drunk he could perform decent cranial surgery.
There was the blind man who never said anything
but produced spectral sounds on a musical saw.

There was Walsh's, with its fancy grocery department.
What a treat when Mother or Father
would take us down there, skidding over slippery snow
and ice, to be rewarded with a rare fig from somewhere.
They had teas from every country you could imagine
and hard little cakes from Scotland, rare sherries
and Madeiras to reward the aunts and uncles who came dancing.
On summer evenings in the eternal light it was a joy
just to be there and think. We took long rides
into the countryside, but were always stopped by some bog or other.
Then it was time to return home, which was OK with everybody,
each of them having discovered he or she could use a little shuteye.

In short there was a higher per capita percentage of interesting people
there than almost anywhere on earth, but the population was small,
which meant not too many interesting people. But for all that
we loved each other and had interesting times
picking each other's brain and drying nets on the wooden docks.
Always some more of us would come along. It is in the place
in the world in complete beauty, as none can gainsay,
I declare, and strong frontiers to collide with.
Worship of the chthonic powers may well happen there
but is seldom in evidence. We loved that too,
as we were a part of all that happened there, the evil and the good
and all the shades in between, happy to pipe up at roll call
or compete in the spelling bees. It was too much of a good thing
but at least it's over now. They are making a pageant out of it,
one of them told me. It's coming to a theater near you.

Music: Green Day - Working Class Heroes

RollingStone on Green Day's origins:

"Massive concussive explosions (rigged by the band's pyrotechnics team) periodically shake the house and unnervingly call to mind the attacks in New York, Madrid, London and Iraq. Four songs into the show, the houselights go out and the arena is plunged into blackness. Armstrong, lit by a satanic red spotlight, pans a hand-held searchlight over the crowd and recites, in menacing tones, the Pledge of Allegiance, while bassist Mike Dirnt pumps out a paranoia-inducing bass line and drummer Tre Cool taps his snare rim like a bomb ticking down to detonation. They explode into 'Holiday' -- an incendiary anti-government song in the tradition of Dylan's 'Masters of War.'"

Source: RollingStone.com: Green Day