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I didn't have a map and the written instructions I brought were outdated and said things like 'Pass by the kissing gate on your left and then go through the kissing gate on your left but not that one' so I got  pleasurably (and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

Badaud Dispatch 11-- All Strange Wonders

In a few days I'll be stuffed into a tiny airplane seat, watching all the terrible American movies I've missed for the past five years and absolutely thrilling at the thought of going home.

The past five months have felt like a slighty blurred, pastel colored dream. It seems like only last week I was charging up the stairs to the first shrine I'd ever seen, and only a week before that I was saying goodbye to my gentleman-friend on a Philadelphia train platform and completely freaking out.
Despite every effort to be as engaged and focussed on the world around me as I can possibly be, my mental images of home feel far more real then, say, the view out of the Keio elevator:

On clearer days you can see Mt Fuji

I think once a bit of time has passed I'll be more able to figure out what I have learned and what has changed in my brains. As it stands, it's only my hands that feel different-- doing everything digitally (heh) has given me smooth white fingers and shiny grown-out nails for the first time in my life.

There's a lot of things I won't miss about Japan-- having the vocabulary of a two year old being the biggest. But I will also be so glad to see the chaos and boisterousness of New York, the constant, acceptable blow-off of steam, and freedom to be my own goofy self without offending everyone in a ten yard radius with my laugh.

I've never built up steam so much and so fast as I have in Japan. My friends and I went to karaoke all the time, since sitting in a dark room and yelling for a few hours is one of the few socially acceptable ways to relieve tension. While maybe not apparent on the surface, I think being far from home was a constant, low level stressor for a lot of us. It certainly was for me.

But I will miss a lot, too. I will miss good, cheap food, I will miss immaculate trains, I will miss flawless infrastructure. I'll miss the magic light in narrow evening streets, with the flags filtering the sun.

One of the few named streets in Hiyoshi

I will miss the extraordinary friends I made here and I will miss meeting people from every country and background imaginable on a daily basis. I'll miss being within walking distance to school. I will miss Mt Fuji on the horizon. I wish New York had a sacred mountain. 

I'll miss those blues, too.

Yesterday I went hiking in Kamakura (a town full of shrines near the ocean) and was struck by how old the land felt. The path was worn several feet into the soft rock in some places: 

That's rock, not mud.

I have hiked a lot in New York State and elsewhere, and the woods there feel new, for want of a better word. The trees are younger, generally, and any human artifacts tend to be garbage. Of course there are traces of First Nations here and there, but I think their lack of continuity- of anything in common, really- with the present culture makes them feel much more remote. Here, the weight of thousands of years is in the air, the paths have been walked continuously for centuries, and the caves are undisturbed. 

Some famous guy is in that urn, I think. 

I like that sense of present history a lot. It's what attracted me most about Europe, too. I need to read up on Japanese history and mythology much more. I read some books, but not nearly enough (the English language bookstore situation is dire). 

Today I went to Ueno Park at golden hour and it was particularly golden:

Even the gold bits were gold

I've been re-visiting places I like to say goodbye, and it occurred to me that all my favorite spots are over 100 years old, usually by a lot. Some modern designer I am!

Those colors, though

I still haven't written about those bands in Kyoto. I think I'll do a massive post about all the things I forgot to post about on the airplane. Unless I get a window seat. 

--I

Badaud Dispatch 10-- Finding Magic

Keio is arranged so that the holiday break happens across Christmas and New Year, and then there is another month of frantic classes tacked on before we all clear out in early February. It will take a lot of willpower to apply myself to school till then; I've been here four months now and I do not regret a minute, but it's about time to go home.

My gentleman-friend came to see me and we spent two fantastic weeks running around Tokyo and Kyoto and Nara. For the first time since September my sense of needing to be on guard and alert in a strange place twenty-four hours a day melted away and I truly relaxed- I felt like a hedgehog that had been curled up for months finally straightening out. It was so nice to see Japan through fresh eyes, and to realize that scenery and things I had come to completely ignore were, in fact, extraordinary and exotic.

I may not approve of selfies, but will accept shadows.

We went to the mountains near Nagano, and it was strange to watch the landscape change from the late fall of Tokyo to deep winter from the Shinkansen windows. 

Mountains!!

We stayed in a traditional ryokan (inn) in a snow monkey park, a short walk outside a town whose drains sent up great clouds of steam from the hot springs. Like everything, the path was perfectly groomed and the late afternoon light on the wet snow made a golden, dreamlike atmosphere. 

That my photographs did not pick up.

The ryokan was built into the side of a hill next to a stream and a geyser. I'd never seen a geyser before; it was just sort of there, sending up steam and roaring. It would have been less strange, I thought, if there were barriers and signs and safety tape. I suppose the Japanese approach to geysers is the same as typhoons-- it's a thing that happens, and people are trusted to have enough sense not to jump in them or go out in them, respectively. 

Oh look, there's a geyser. 

I expected to see monkeys, but seeing them sauntering around our feet as if we were furniture was unnerving and amazing. Their faces are so sweet, so human and yet so not, I did not know how to think about them. A cat, I will approach and try to make friends with; a wild beast, like a raccoon I will be quiet around and try not to frighten. These monkeys were neither friendly nor afraid; they did not give a damn. It was a strange feeling, and as cliche as it sounds, humbling. I think it's good to not know quite where you stand once in a while. 

Of course, they were so fluffy I just wanted to hug them; I knew I never could.

We stood outside and watched the night come down and the younger monkeys tumbling around and playing in the snow. It was lovely to be in the mountains watching the day fade without light or noise or air pollution. The ryokan looked like this:

Definition of inviting

After an amazing traditional meal we went and parked in the onsen (hot bath) outside, along with half a dozen monkeys. The water, coming as it did directly out of the ground, smelled like sulfur and felt amazing; it was just this side of bearable to sit in. The snow came down; the monkeys stuck to the edges like fluffy limpets, holding their babies' heads above water with blissed out looks on their scarlet faces. It was quite magical and quite strange. After a while some couples came out with selfie sticks and flash cameras so we went up to our tatami room and slept like peaceful bricks. 

In the morning we went to the designated monkey park at feeding time. There were the gorgeous mountains and the adorable monkeys and dozens of tourists in new winter gear and high heeled shoes snap-snap-snapping away. 

Each speck is a monkey! I was one of the offending tourists, except my winter gear is old.

Here is one more gratuitous geyser picture:

Just a geyser, no bigs. 

We had a lovely New Years Eve in a weirdly subdued Shibuya (the signs announced that there would be NO countdown and there damn well wasn't) and went to Hatsumode, which is the massively crowded, quiet visit to shrines on New Years Day. I bought a charm for Controlling One's Fate and asked Emperor Meiji to keep an eye on me. He was a liberal sort of guy, I don't suppose he'd disapprove of my ill-mannered western tail too much. 

We went back to beautiful Kyoto in the Shinkansen, which was a lot nicer than the Night Bus. In fact, the seats were designed for human spines and the bentos we got in the station were designed by true artists. We passed Mt Fuji, which looked like a painting. 

Hi Fujisan!

And hung out with some deer in Nara:

Messengers of the gods!

These hairy little bastards know that tourists love them and hang around cadging 'deer crackers' and head butting you if you don't deliver fast enough. Like the snow monkeys, they just wander around without the slightest regard or interest in humans (except in their cracker-dispensing capacity). I felt less guilty about their domestication than I did about the snow monkeys; perhaps it was their blank, unintelligent gazes. They stand in the temples, they stand in the roads, they stand around the ponds, they snooze under trees and we saw a few actually bounding through the woods, which was refreshing. 

And they give the best side eye of any beast, human or otherwise. 

I'll have to continue this in another segment; I made a tacit promise to write about some bands and that's its own entry. Soon this time!

-I