Clever Trevor

The other day I went to the Heatherwick Studios exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt and I give it a solid A-.  There was some really great expanding furniture and a goofy rolly chair I spent way too much time rolling around in a design show last summer, and some rather fussy and overthought architecture. There was also MY FAVORITE BUS (there was the tail end of one on display, looking a bit out of place in the grand building):

Literally the best bus in the history of ever

I'd love to work in a studio like that, and I really admire the work as a whole. But it did strike me that some of it was just too clever for its own good. It is really necessary to see if a building can be hairy? 

Yes, buildings can be hairy. This is a Sitooterie, where you go an sit oot if you happen to be Scottish and not feel like being indoors, but not quite outdoors either.

I want my work to justify its own existence in the world, and not just be clever. There are so many things in the world, so much needless stuff, one of my concerns as a designer is to not add to the mountains of clever effluvia. 

Does the world really need another concept boat? I really do not know. 

A lot of people are designing intangibles now, systems and apps and things, and I don't know if that's quite my wheelhouse. I'm bad at thinking abstractly, good at thinking 3-dimensionally, and just vain enough to think I might have a few good ideas buried under all the clever and dash. 

Also, seeing all the Heatherwick stuff made me miss London a whole lot. I wish there was a New York equivalent studio, but we seem to specialize a bit more here. 

Greenwich, off a non-concept boat. Sigh....

My thesis is gonna be about getting around cities, I think, though it will have to narrow down dramatically. I've always been happiest rolling out of wherever I happen to be, and there are plenty of obstructions and annoyances to be smoothed down and made better. I wonder, though, if an unobstructed city is desirable. We thrive on mild adversity I think, and goodness knows I gather substantial energy from a good loud shouting match with the odd delivery guy in the bike lane. Japan had almost no visible obstructions between here and there, yet people seemed more stressed than New Yorkers. I could be underestimating New Yorkers though; even with, say, a functional transit system we will always find a reason to blow off steam in all directions. 

Thinking up something that is clever, useful, universal, clever, sustainable, attractive, clever, and philosophically sound is hard. I should quit fretting and start doing. I think it's important not to lose a sense of delight and whimsey and beauty in design, and if it winds up being clever that's better than being dull. 

Heatherwick's rolly chair-- there is room for the goofy.

Finally, here is a great poem by W H Auden that starts out being clever and ends by giving me cold shivers. I'd forgotten about Auden until the other day, I used to be really into him. 

Who's Who

A shilling life will give you all the facts:

How Father beat him, how he ran away,

What were the struggles of his youth, what acts

Made him the greatest figure of his day.

Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,

Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;

Some of the last researchers even write

Love made him weep his pints, like you and me.

With all his honors on, he sighed for one

Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;

Did little jobs about the house with skill

And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still

Or potter round the garden; answered some

Of his long marvelous letters but kept none. 

Right, now back to work. 

--Isis

So We'll Go No More a-Roving

I've been meaning to update for ages but nothing was coming out in any sense of order. Hence the disorder below. 

Everyone said that spending a year away changes one, makes you better, deeper, keener or some other vague attribute. I'm old enough to feel as if I don't need really dramatic revision, and when I look in the mirror and see the same person I always did (with slightly worse fitting clothes due to London's on-point cheese game). I'm not distressed, just a bit baffled. Surely some visible mark has been made, or should have been. I can't have alighted in Newark the same absent minded dreamer that slipped off to Japan yesterday.

Off Iceland. I love airplanes. 

And now I am back in my dear, grimy oversized New York City, which has exactly one year to convince me that it is the best city in the world and I should stay put. The past year is a lovely long dream from which the waking, while a bit wistful, is neither jarring nor unwelcome.

 Hello, native skyline

My resolute and patient gentleman friend came to London as school ended and we spent a vigorous week sightseeing, and in my case, saying goodbye to the city and art and architecture I love and loved and will always love. We went to Portsmouth and looked at the boats.

The- hrm!- Twilight of British Naval Power (hrm)

We went to Dorset and looked at a hill fort.

Maiden Castle, complete with lurky sheep.

We gaped and admired a (recorded) history so much longer than our own. 

Burnt out church, and I am not making any references to how I feel about religion right now!

Like New York, the solidity of London makes leaving easier. It will, barring something really dramatic, be there the rest of my life and I can return whenever funds and time let me. It's nice to think of Marianna safe in the Tate, always stretching by the window, of the great heavy houses along Regents Park, white and kind of horrible, of generations of obstreperous coots around the narrowboats in the tangled canals.

Au revoir.

But I am home and it is wonderful to see my family and my friends (so calm! So settled! So mature!) and my cat, who is so embedded in my parents' house and friendship with their
fancy abyssinian that I can't take him back to my apartment. I miss his derpy face, crazed meeping and all. I had a burst of domestication and sewed two shirts and made tomato sauce. Which I then spilt on the lighter colored one.

Best friends with not a shred of manners between them

And now I need to find a job that pays me, and get my nifty paper helmet into production (I can finally talk about it! Provisional patent filed, suckaaaaas!)

                            

Here is the Shameless Self Promotion Link

I signed up to volunteer once a week, fixed my hair, pitched a bunch of too-young clothing, grubbed out my apartment, and made the grudging, final decision that it's time to grow up just a little bit. The next year is going to be devoted to thesis, job hunting, portfolio building, and trying to get my careless, haphazard self into some form of self-sufficient order.

Today I went to the Queens Museum, which is remote but consistently great. I looked at the giant model of New York City, which looks like this:

1/1200 scale.

It's nice to be reminded that my home is big and varied, familiar or not. It's good to think of the world in terms of topography, of cities in terms of the underlying land. I forget, with the grandeur and beauty of human made things, that the most constant and fundamental attribute of a place it the land it stands over. 

And it was good to return to the landscapes I know well- the missed and familiar Hudson Highlands,  the hazy overlooks and un curated rock formations, the comparatively warm Atlantic. I expected everything to look pale and brown compared to the fantasy of Japanese mountains the fairytale of English countryside, but no- it is beautiful and I feel peaceful here. 

And in one week school will start and I will not be peaceful at all.

About time.

-Isis

Flaneur Dispatch 5--- Longer Boats

I wrote the following bit ages ago and apparently forgot to post it. I'm a doof. Oh well, coots!

There is a district in London called Little Venice where the long, painted narrowboats tie up for free, so long as they move two locks up or down every fourteen days. They look like this:

There's dozens and dozens, up and down Regent's Canal.

The people who live on them tend to wear tattered waistcoats and hats with hawk feathers and have long hair and fancy mustaches. I don't know how much of this raffishness is studied (I would guess a lot) and how long of the romantic appeal of living on a narrowboat lasts (I would guess not long) but it's still enchanting. There are herb gardens and bicycles on the roofs and beautiful wooden rooms inside. The painted detailing gleams and you can almost completely ignore that they are sitting in a nasty stagnant canal with trash and mean looking coot families bobbing around. 

Zoom out

Zoom in!

I went to a boat festival there a few weeks ago and hung out on a boat that did classes for kids by day (probably--hopefully-- involving the six or so large, exotic reptiles and amphibians roaming freely around) and was a bar by night. The proprietors were tan, grimy and cheerful. Boats had come from all the canals in London and were blazing with light; they tied up three abreast and chugged by in a procession to the sound of a really unconvincing bluegrass band. It was magic and a bit sad, because while living on a boat connotes freedom and detachment from the world, they are all bundled into canals they can't even turn around in. About 40% of me wants to drop everything and live on a narrowboat, and the rest of me sensibly points out that I like long showers and high ceilings and not living with only an inch or two of wood between me and belligerent coots. I also like open water and long sight lines. 

There's only a month left of school, which is depressing. I am learning so much here, and my brain is full, oiled, and pleased. I am not entirely happy with the quality of some projects, but I am making the sort of mistakes I can learn a lot from and it is worthwhile. I started the long, excruciatingly boring process of patenting one of my designs and it's terrible and I hate it and I'd better not think of anything else that is clever until I can afford a minion to do all this nonsense for me. 

I really want to put up a picture of the design in question but I can't so here is a really confused heron.

Today I went to Ford's UK HQ, which I can't write about much because they make all visitors sign NDAs before even reaching the gates. There was a modest little statue of Henry Ford, that Great American Entrepreneur, standing in a rigidly controlled garden next to the car park. He looked confused. They zoomed us round the test track in some silent electric cars, which was oddly placid. I'd never thought about it before, but the fast car experience is very much tied into a good loud roar. Apparently electric cars in the EU will be required to make noise, which makes sense but seems a shame. I was about to say that I like to ride silently, but I have incredibly loud pawls on my two favorite bikes so never mind that. 

You know what else is loud? Sheep. They actually say 'baa'. With the 'B' sound and everything.

I had another long ramble over the weekend in the endlessly lovely, nonthreatening empty countryside. As I get older and more boring it seems I need more and more time alone, to have nice uninterrupted thinks. I walk along the Monarch's Way, which the route Charles II took while running away from Cromwell. I looked in all the oak trees and climbed a few myself and didn't see any ghosts or even reenactors which was a real shame. 

Resumed 20/06

I've spent today trying to design an interface for a self driving car that I can't post due to NDA nonsense but you're not missing much. Despite my very best efforts, I am beginning to be a bit dazed with England. Maybe it's seeing the sun so rarely or maybe it's always being a bit cold, but my usually boundless energy is flagging a bit. For the first time since I got here I am almost (almost!) ready to go home. I swooned over the Elgin Marbles, I saw the Oldest Known Socks in the World, I learnt a few new programmes and saw my first and probably only penny farthing pace line:

Most of them were taking it seriously! An Austrian won. I wonder how he transported his bike?

I went to cold, windy, slightly creepy Brighton that had so many allusions rolling round in my brain I could barely keep my eras straight. 

Can you see the REAL me, can you? CAN YOU??

I did go in the freezing ocean up to my knees because that's The Rules, but I can see why the act of bathing is seen as a character former rather than something one does for fun. I was hoping to see a bathing machine, but there weren't any. Just some truly ridiculous cakes. 

Because when I think of fancy shindigs I think of military sheep.

Tomorrow I shall go to Canterbury and damned if I'm not gonna make a pilgrimage out of it. I'm trying to approach western religion with the same respectful incomprehension and sense of sanctity that I attached to Shinto and Buddhism, but it's not working at all. I will get a pilgrim badge, but it will not feel lovely in the way that all my Japanese badges and charms do. 

And on a final note, I cannot believe the messes that are unfolding in my own terrible, loved, backwards and beautiful country. It feels wrong to be swanning around abroad and fixating on making things when there is so much horror going on at home. I just spent forever trying to say more, but there aren't really words. It's not been a good year at home; when I get back I want to do something to help but damned if I know what. 

Isis

Flaneur Dispatch 4-- Long Views

Yesterday I went to an after hours drawing session in RCA's art department. It was strange to be covered in charcoal, drawing a dumpy middle aged guy splayed out over a box. It was strange to be under grimy skylights again, after what, almost five years? Wrestling with a tippy easel and insufficient clips and a surprisingly unforgotten skill set, I thought about how deeply entwined my art training is in my better designs. I like things to be beautiful, and for better or worse I know what looks good to me and what doesn't. I really do need to practice, I used to be a lot better.

Putting this up to shame myself into going back next week and doing a better one. 

School remains time consuming and interesting, though there are always strange cultural blips to remind me that I am far from home. The hyper focused work ethic I am used to is almost gauche. Today a prof actually said 'I would never expect you to work on the weekend' which is unheard of in New York. They still expect super good work, just done faster, I suppose. I work comparatively slowly, and do wind up putting in weekend hours, though now I don't talk about them.  

Still, I keep running off to the heaths and hills and parks, and they are amazing. A week or two ago I and had a ramble in Surrey, which looks like this:

Green how I love you green!

I didn't have a map and the written instructions I brought were outdated and said things like 'Pass by the kissing gate on your left and then go through the kissing gate on your left but not that one' so I got  pleasurably (and thoroughly) lost. I ran up a hill to get a better view of where I was trying to go, and came upon an RAF memorial, all solemn and quiet. 

They hacked down the trees on the back of it pretty messily, but it's out of sight so it doesn't matter.

I walked through the silent loggia with my boots ringing too loud, and read the names and the notes and looked at the grainy pictures of the young, square headed men and felt stirred. The place hit the exact right note of martial glory paired with 'don't let's do this again'. 

It was also completely deserted

And I ran up the wonderful spiral stair and got reoriented at once. 

Crap photo, but you can see London.

I had the worst lunch of my life in Runnymede, looked at the Magna Carta memorial which is so boring I didn't even photograph it, and lay in the grass under the ancient pollarded willows and watched the sky and felt slightly ill, but glad. I will never grow tired of these fields and old trees, this sense of civilization running back so far that I don't feel an interloper as I do in the woods at home. I thought that in Japan I was running into the mountains all the time to seek a respite from a culture I didn't understand or feel a part of; apparently I just like being outside. I always come back feeling shining and saturated, like a freshly shed lizard. 

Also the trees have incredible presence

I'm too wrapped up in school to really shatter my romantic conceptions of England properly. It's easy to smile at the yellow brick houses in Battersea and revel in the boats in Greenwich and be slightly condescending about the (really genuinely bad) food. Doesn't help that my new classmates are from every corner of the world but England. I am starting to become immune to the accent though; more and more I can identify nonsense, even if it presented on a beautifully articulated verbal salver. 

I've been to the Tate twice to see the Pre-Raphaelites, and while the paintings make me tingle and sigh, they are quite small and perhaps just a bit overwrought. I saw the REAL Death of Chatterton and just about fell over. They had sensationalistic stereoscopic tableaux of it to look into, too. The actor being Chatterton had a nicer face and worse hair. 

I'm assuming my gentle readers have a accurate mental image of the real one. And if not, I feel bad for you, son. I got 99 holes in my art historical knowledge but Chatterton... 

I'm still not sure whether or not I miss New York. I miss my loved ones of course, always and persistently, and I miss everything not costing double and tasting soggy. But home means staying put and writing a thesis and growing up just a bit more and that's scarier than the most exotic country. 

I'm listening to all kinds of things these days, but here is what was in my head when I was tromping over the fields in Surrey. I thought of the dead airmen and the long hedgerows and the new houses just in sight. I thought of the poppy wreaths in the quiet memorial, and the school children I saw bouncing round a maypole on May Day. I put a forget-me-not in my lapel and went back to the town. 

-Isis

Flaneur Dispatch 3--- Reasons to be Cheerful

I'm too busy to update my damn blog, though not too busy to take a turn round Battersea Park on my ride home every day. The new leaves are the greenest of delicate greens; the cyclists whiz past me in a flash of expensive kit; the coots are nesting and relatively civil for once.

At Hampton Court-- but I saw a nest in Battersea, too.

I'm thoroughly absorbed with school work, more or less all day every day and it's really enjoyable. It's not like the absolutely crushing course load at Pratt last year, since there is only one project at a time. I find it much more manageable- fixating on multiple problems runs my battery down really fast. They don't have classes as such, just a brief and then frequent tutoring sessions for the duration of the project. While that might not work so well for learning something new, it's wonderful to practice and expand on tools already in the toolbox. My brain feels like it is filling my head out completely rather than just rattling around in there.

I don't want to show what I'm working on just yet so here's a rude lion.

Despite the long school hours I have been making a point to get out and see amazing things. Everyone says the glamour of England is going to wear off eventually, but if anything it keeps getting thicker. Everything glows and shimmers with age and layers of history and I love that so much. Last weekend I went to Bath and, even in crowded touristy museum I could imagine the noisy, probably rather squalid place it was almost 2000 years ago. 

Though the reenactors didn't help the illusion any

Then we went to Stonehenge and while the stones were lovely and impressive, what really got me was the way the fields stretched on straight up to the sky. I expect to see trees or buildings in the distance, and to have only the unadorned green land was a strange feeling. I suppose I am used to walking through landscapes, and here it is a sense of walking over them. The canola flowers are in bloom, and their intensity against the green grass and blue sky was almost unbearably beautiful. 

Like that, but more intense

We walked across the fields, and sometimes I ran for a bit because it was windy and wildly beautiful, and I kept nearly stepping in mole holes and apologizing to the moles. I can see why whoever built Stonehenge chose this place; I felt a sense of holiness that was more like Japanese shrines than English cathedrals. 

Obligatory Stonehenge picture. It's roped off in such a way as to make great pictures without people in them; in reality it was surrounded by selfie sticks and polyglot chatter. 

Then we went to Avebury (when you rent a car you have to take FULL advantage of it) and that was my favorite. The henge may not be quite as magnificent, but there are no crowds or barriers, just the magpies the soft crush of your boots in the grass and the big, long shadowed stones. I wanted to stay longer, jumping the stiles and striding over the hills till I saw a White Hind or a Seely Court or something, so it's probably a good thing I didn't. One advantage to the long, rolling hills is that you really don't know if you are surrounded by towns until you get to the top of one. It's easy to feel unstuck in time. 

There is totally a saxon encampment over that ridge. 

I think I had better make an effort to see things outside exquisite landscapes and exquisite museums and exquisite ruins. As it stands, I'm getting the equivalent experience to studying in New York and never leaving Manhattan (or venturing above 110th St) except for the odd venture into the curated part of Williamsburg. I was going to go to Brixton today, but it's all rainy and dreary so I'm going to go to the Tate and see the Hogarth show instead (even I am aware of the irony there). I don't want to take home a vague, pastel dream of England like I did of Japan. I want to know everything about everything, which, while easier on the surface due to a common-ish language, may be just as quixotic a desire. 

NYC hasn't anything like this, above or below 110th

I have been, finally and reluctantly, thinking about my thesis. It's hard to decide what to focus on. I know what I would love to do (cool urban transport solutions) and I know what I am good at (pretty, not too practical things with curves). I'm trying not to be anxious yet, and just to absorb as much as I can for future use. It's hard to be anxious here, really. Everything is so interesting. 

One! Two Three!

Ok, it's off to the Tate. I am gonna swoon at the Pre-Raphaelites and alarm the passerby. 

-Isis

Flaneur Dispatch 2--- The Order of Things

It's amazing how much information can be absorbed when it is presented clearly, logically and visually. On Monday I had a nine hour class on physical computing (we're making robots again-- real ones this time) and I actually understood everything. I am used to thinking non-linearly, and it's a pleasant surprise to find that I can think linearly too, at least to an extent. I'm making a badly behaved catbot called Moggy who knocks stuff off the table.

A render. The real one is clear and moves.

The other day I went to an event at the science museum about UPGRADING THE HUMAN. It was weird. It was headlined by a woman named Evelyn Musk who is the CEO of the (oddly absent from the internet) company called UNET and here is a video about it. Ms. Musk was wearing a ton of green eyeshadow, pink hair and a very old school Star Trek dress, and went scooting round a catwalk with sound effects and fake smoke. According to her, it is our right as a species to accelerate our evolution with pills and prosthetics and become super humans. According to the pre-recorded self-described Moral Majority, that concept only makes us jumpy because we are afraid and can't afford it. Despite Evelyn Musk's assurance that money havers liker her (?) would make shiny new brains and bits available to everyone, I felt, if anything, more jumpy. 

Oh well, there were some great prosthetic hands. 

They spin 360 degrees and are just killingly cool looking.

I went back during regular hours and spent a happy afternoon looking at steam engines and tiny reproductions of Industrial Revolution machinery. The one below took up about the same footprint as a smart car, was fully functional. It made my simple little robot look pathetic, especially given these machines were made on full sized versions of themselves, with no laser cutting or CNC or anything. 

Those tiny tools... be still my nerdy heart!

School takes up a great deal of pleasurable, if stationary time. I do ride nearly every day, to and from and sometimes along the Thames when I have time. Other cyclists are highly reflective fitness animals. They all pass me. I have no idea which traffic laws to obey, as cycles seem to have a separate set with no signage. They do all stop at red lights, unlike at home or in Japan. It is a wonderful feeling to ride across Battersea Bridge in the blazing sunset with the Thames all glittery and the astonishingly old skyline in silhouette. Every sightline has a song or a poem connected to it in my mind. 

'Sweet Thames flow softly'...

And true to its reputation, London sees rain at least once a day, especially when I am just getting on my bike. It's a sort of penetrating, cold, thoroughly unpleasant rain that makes the impulse to stay indoors and write poetry thoroughly understandable. When the sun does come out it is a revelation, a gorgeous shaft of elusive warmth sweeping across the street and everyone smiles. 

Everything feels real here. The building are so solid and permanent looking, more than home, so much more than Japan. I can't help comparing, though the countries are so different. In Japan I saw wonders I did not understand; here I see wonders I think I understand, but probably don't. I love to lay my hand on a bridge rail or wander into a church and think of the hundreds of years of history in the worn stone or soaring over my head in the stained glass. 

Westminster Abbey. Edward Bulwer Lytton had a bigger plaque than W.H. Auden, which bugged me.

With all this loftiness you think I would be listening to at least Handel if not Vaughn Williams, but no, I have been blasting Red Roses for Me and it fits too. I think that's what I love so much about this city. Everything is here. 

All together now.....

Dear dirty delightful old drunken old days...

Not to gush or anything! I ought to buy a sunlamp, when the glamour wears off a bit I will be faced with massive vitamin D deprivation inspired lethargy.

-Isis

Oh yes, there is an Isis statue, and Isis bar, an Isis river etc etc which is delightful BUT I keep seeing my name in the tabloids because of those stupid teenagers who keep running off to join the terrorists. And I get very reserved side-eye when introducing myself and my resentment knows no bounds. Of all the acronyms they could have used they STOLE MY NAME. Not cool, terrorists. 

Flaneur Dispatch 1---- Old Friends

I arrived in London all bleary and disoriented after a strange, brief layover in Iceland where I saw fjords gleaming in the moonlight and some guys in white snowman suits throwing my bike box onto a luggage cart and giving me a heart attack. I also almost probably saw an ice troll. I need to go back to Iceland.

I also shared the plane with lobsters.

I'm rooming in a modern sort of student housing in Battersea which is, disappointingly, not a squalid garret with a rapacious landlady and a priest hole and a lot of rotting silk lampshades. I upended my suitcases on the floor and galloped around the beautiful, ancient (by my standards) streets and reveled in everything being written in English.

The cars are, disappointingly, large. 

I spent the week before school started going to the most amazing museums I have ever seen. I always smugly insisted that the best art and history and science and design museums were in New York City, and now I have to eat carrion crow and admit to being dead wrong. Everything here is absolutely exquisite. 

Saint's heads at the Victoria and Albert

Although I have seen a great deal of the British-owned art in books and reproductions, it is still extraordinary to round a corner and see something I have known and loved my whole life, vibrant and real before me. I don't generally lose it in art museum, but there were a few times I had to sit on an (exquisite) bench and process that I had just seen Dali's 'Metamorphosis of Narcissus' and the only from-life portrait of Shakespeare in the same day. 

Oh, and hello, young John Donne. 

It adds to the sense of blissful overload that so many of the buildings are vaulted and crenelated and graciously laid out and I can wander and wander with my eyes popping out and a lump in my throat. All the streets are mentioned in songs I love, all the neighborhoods feature in books I've read (although I can't recognize them; I need to read more modern stuff) all the statues are of people I've heard of. 

And this guy gets the respect he deserves. 

Cycling is an interesting challenge, as the crosswalks aren't on the corners and the other cyclists are super fast fitness machines. The roundabouts are all backwards and the 'cycling superhighways' are on streets one definitely does not expect them to be on. I'm glad I brought my tourer; since I can take it on the (exquisite) National Rail I can ride out considerably farther than I could in Japan. I visited a few bike shops for all the things I forgot, and the proprietors (all named Ian) couldn't have been nicer. 

AC was not allowed into Westminster Abbey

The first week of school was surprisingly, delightfully intense. It was such a pleasure to actually have a lot to do and I cheerfully worked late and woke early and was glad to see a trace of the haggard look of first year return to my face. The school facility is great and the professors, so far, open and knowledgable. The commute to school is a bit hairy, but I'll find a nice quiet route eventually.  

I'm sure I'll get a more nuanced view of the place with time, but right now everything from my overwhelmed eyes to my overeducated language center is thrilled and happy, though there is always the now familiar ache of missing the people I love at home. I go about quoting poetry to myself or my unfortunate companions, reveling in the early flowers and the rare bursts of cold sunshine. 

And should I have excessive grit, I know where to put it.

Tomorrow I will go to Greenwich and see the boats. Boats!

-Isis

If Knowledge Hangs Around Your Neck like Pearls Instead of Chains...

I wrote the following in various planes and trains with no wifi. I made it to England.

I came home to the sort of chokehold-style winter that I haven’t seen since my childhood when snow meant magic evenings spent sledding rather than grey days of shoveling, ruined boots and late trains.

 This is the way to my parents’ back door, shortly after being shoveled. 

It was good see my family and my cat and sleep in a big western bed and eat crunchy, heavily flavored western food. I did get to do a bit of hiking and there the snow was beautiful. I had been missing my own dear beautiful Northeast woods so much, it was wonderful to be among familiar trees, familiar mountains, familiar sky. I went to Philadelphia three times to see my gentleman-friend and my friends, and how calm and peaceful and static that city is compared to Tokyo! Every time I go back, it seems smaller. 

Frozen Schuylkill! New one on me.

And New York City is, at least as far as I could tell, unchanged— and my view of it is surprisingly unchanged. It was a bit of a shock to see how dirty everything is and how averse to following rules everyone is, but it’s refreshing. The first time a homeless guy dropped some filthy plastic bags on me in the subway I smiled like a doofus. There is a crackly sense of possibility here that I did not sense in Tokyo, or indeed anywhere else. 

From the top of the New Museum

I think one of the reasons my time in Japan seems like a hazy, pearl-edged fantasy is that I never really cracked the surface of the place. I spent most of my time among Anglophone foreigners, and my own status as a foreigner was inescapable. No one was going to open up to me about the joys and anxieties of the place, and why should they? My American lack of reserve, my relentless desire to let everyone know what I think about everything is less universal than I thought. I made a conscious effort to observe as sensitively as I could and not ask rude direct questions all the time, but I suppose it was not enough. That’s why I had to keep running off into the mountains where things were accessible and it didn’t matter that I was a great big rude westerner breaking social taboos all the time. 

Continuing the snow theme, Mt Takao

The above isn’t to say people weren’t kind— I met some of the most civilized, generous and courtly people of my life there. But I never once forgot I was far from home and out of place, and, while welcomed, not entirely welcome. 

And tomorrow I am off to London with two wheelies and a bicycle in a case and a civilian mess bag that I really hope I can pass off as a ‘small personal item’. I have the vaguest notion of what to expect in England, since all the things I know and love, from the pre-Raphaelites to the Clash, are just a bit outdated. I expect everyone to sit in pubs reciting Keats and smashing guitars all the time, but that can’t be right. Word is that the classes at RCA are rigorous and great, which they had better be. And I had better meet at least one pale aesthete strolling down Picadilly with a poppy or a lily in his mid-a-e-vil hand.

Everyone definitely looks like this all the time. 

In a way, it’s a lot less stressful to go away this time. It’s for fewer months, and the great weight of language ineptitude will be lifted. In fact, I expect that for the first time in my life I will be among people who are more verbose than I am. It will be springtime soon, and since I am bringing my touring bike along I should be able to enjoy the countryside a bit. 

I want to see and know everything and I think it is a very specific brand of American entitlement that makes me expect a country’s secrets to be laid out at my feet for inspection. Having grown up on a steady diet of British everything (everything up to about 1985, anyway) I know that I am in for a shock. Living in Japan made me appreciate America far more than I ever had before; we shall see how well I respond to an England that cannot possibly live up to my romantic notions. 

This is me

We shall see, we shall see, we shall see! I think I will promote myself to a Flaneur. 

-Isis