chronofile

bye bye tokyo

2005-05-02T19:46:00.000+09:00

last weeks in tokyo

2005-04-30T21:27:00.000+09:00

last weeks in tokyo, spent as much as possible in the real world. some pictures, in retrospect.

cafelatte break with seiko at eva, her colorful vintage boutique in daikanyama. seiko on the phone, planning her promo photo shoot.

a classic for who knows my brother, a good introduction for who doesn't - pieter working his way through a chunk of nan with four chopsticks at the malaysian expo pavillion, undisturbed by a team of nagoya television.

only recently I found this underpass, an alternative route to bypass the shinagawa train tracks on my way to work. with its length of a couple of hundred meters, its with of roughly one car and a bikepath, and its height of not more than 1 meter 50 (5 feet), this tunnel is a very bizarre space. extra scary when trains are rattling overhead... a favorite with cabdrivers, and at rush hour with walking salaryman - the usual outfit of smart suit and suitcase, but with heads tilted. the tunnel connects the reclaimed islands of industrial konan on one end with the hilly part of shinagawa - trees, temples, old residential quarters - on the other end.

"Tokyo is a place-by-place place - how each location relates to the last remains obscure. Lacking vistas and grand plans, you have no sense of travel between points: rather, you leave an experience and start another somewhere else. The intervening motion is out of place and time."
(Thackera, 1989)

sneaking out a day into bozo hanto, the peninsula that encloses tokyo bay. biking through deep shades of green, and through japan's fascinating countryside.

nagisa party in odaiba, and sushi for lunch during facade engineering sessions, piloted by tim, our glass facade specialist from australia.

yoyo walking to the dressing rooms for the taishi nobukuni fashion show at the national stadium, and a snapshot at roppongi hills. below, two more shots of the nobukuni show.

early morning shots in shinagawa

shrines and rural vending machines in bozo hanto

sant'aichan in castello

the third floor of robata, just a long staircase removed from busy blade runner streets of yurakucho, yet a distant universe of surrealistic paintings, multiple stages of delicious food, stacks of books, and the eponymous fireplace.

with virginie, polle, tomi and pieter at the world expo in aichi.

fuji view from the shinkansen on the way to the expo - most convincing display of nature's wisdom during the entire day...

seiko knows what she wants as she's dressing up one of the models for the photo shoot. a well conserved secret where she keeps finding those clothes...

early shot at sayonara party. appetizers and men in concentrical circles around the flower in aichan's hair.

sunset over aichi. night falls, also at the expo.

shinagawa sequens

2005-04-28T05:44:00.000+09:00

kind of lookalikes

2005-04-09T05:22:00.000+09:00

sometimes I had the feeling that for everyone I know, there's a japanese version out there. usually the subway is a great place to spot lookalikes - not the best place to record or document them though.

so what about this one?
the construction site manager of the jibica clinic versus françois pignon, actor from "le dîner de cons"...

annoying

2005-04-08T03:11:00.000+09:00

growing old
even the cherry blossoms
a bit annoying

haiku by Issa, 1811

flowery

2005-04-07T11:15:00.000+09:00

"Cherry trees all over Japan will burst into clouds of pink blossoms in early April to thrill once again the hearts of the Japanese people with their ancient glory and liveliness."

trying to find out more about sakura as turning point in the traditional japanese calendar, I came to this page, answering most of my questions in romantic, innocently nationalistic yet informative prose - this is where 'flowery' got its original meaning - as native to japan as the sakura itself. let me slice it up for you and add essential imagery of postprandial scenes around meguro river shidarezakura (weeping cherry trees).

people gather on a bridge over meguro river

"Sakura trees are planted on mountain sides, parks and gardens and most notably along many river embankments. When the blossoming season comes, these trees on winding river embankments turn into gorgeous belts of blossoms extending many miles. It is said, ancient people started to plant sakura trees on river banks, so that people would be lured to come and their walking on the embankments would solidly pack the earth to make it strong enough to withstand the flooding water in autumn."

a glass of sakura champagne at hanezawa garden

so far in japan I hadn’t noticed any more cherry yogurt or jam or coke than anywhere else - made me wondering what happens to all those japanese cherries... yet

"Beautiful as it is in bloom, the Japanese cherry tree does not yield fruit like other cherry trees. A critic once remarked that the Japanese cherry tree does not have to produce a market crop because it is a born aristocrat and its single mission is to be beautiful."

"The true lover of cherry blossoms is more particular in his enjoyment of this seasonal offering than the general public. He feels the season is at its height when the buds are little more than half open - for when the blossoms reach full-blown maturity there is an intimation in them that bespeaks the beginning of the decline of their beauty."

samurai with sword in horizontal position

"The cherry blossom symbolizes the national character of the Japanese. This is because the life of a samurai of feudal times was proverbially compared to the short-lived cherryblossoms, which last 'no more than three days', for our samurai was always fully prepared to sacrifice his life at any time in the cause of his master."

"The Japanese people would never have been essentially so jubilant, cheerful, optimistic and youthful were it not for the beauty of the cherry blossoms."

pink perspectives

during times of the gates, rennie reported a remarkable increase of orange in new york's streetscape. same here with unavoidable pink during sakura season...

hanami at 5:30 am, marginal advantage of overnight drawing work

"When the cherry blossom season begins, many people who wish to enjoy flower viewing in a quiet atmosphere, make visits as early as 8 or 9 AM before the regular crouds arrive to begin their boisterous merrymaking."

[elders]

giant life size fashion chimp

2005-04-06T04:45:00.000+09:00

sakura not only marks the traditional turn of the year - school's out, taxes due, rice to be planted - but also the presentation of tokyo's fashion collections for next autumn and winter.
it all started a month ago, when taishi nobukuni walked up to me in a restaurant around the corner with the question whether I'd be ready to "walk" for the takeo kikuchi show. an extra audition, a couple of fittings, a visit to the model agency (hobbies: urban design) and a hair styling session later, I ended up doing two shows: avant-garde street- and surfwear for nobukuni/kikuchi (on the running tracks of the national stadium), and the more classy catwalk outfit for mon tsuki. big fun - lots of new (exclusively foreign) mates (some faces strangely familiar... from ads around town), flashing polaroids, flamboyant stylists ("more... intensity") - and some extra bucks.
grabbed this sequence with fitting shots from the montsuki make-up table - hope professional pix of the shows follow... find the amateur chimp!

later that day

2005-03-30T23:40:00.000+09:00

on the verge

2005-03-30T11:13:00.000+09:00

it's been pretty cold the last couple of days, and dark and rainy, so it looks like we need to wait just a little longer for botanical fireworks. this morning, skies over tokyo burst open, sakura buds along meguro river almost. it's all in the dna...

"In especially popular places it is common practice to reserve a picnic spot long before the party is held. The typical praxis is to spread one's picnic sheet early in the morning and either mark it with the group's name and party's starting time or to have somebody positioned there during the whole day until the rest of the group arrives after work."
Beginner's Guide to Cherry Blossom Viewing

[elders]

soccer

2005-03-27T02:10:00.000+09:00

akira (behind the lense) rented a car and brought us out of the city, to watch the iran - japan soccer game at the place of mori, his iranian friend.

tomo (soccer freak, second from left) came all the way from osaka for the event - first he had considered flying to tehran... to get us in the mood, mori (left) dished up persian sweets, fruit and tea.

after the match (iran won 2-1, decent match, deserved winner) we watched the video of moki's wedding. for more then ten years, moki used to live with mori, in this same tiny room north of tokyo, but he returned to iran last year. akira went to teheran for moki's wedding, mori couldn't... one day, rather sooner than later, mori will return too. here you can download akira's documentary about moki and mori.

caroline (right) runs a macrobiotic table d'hôtes in brussels. through wwoofing she spent a month at different organic kitchens around japan to master the gentle arts of kaiseki, food cutting and presentation, slow food, and even chaji, the traditional tea ceremony. a very effective way to discover japan in depth - appetizing stories from the fascinating west. caroline was frying tamagoyaki at the time last week's earthquake hit kyushu, in a kitchen only a couple of kilometers from the epicenter. "het begon met een diep gerommel en dan begon alles te beven in de keuken, we moesten ons vasthouden aan de muren. alle glazen en borden vielen uit de rekken en het duurde enkele minuten. het was een grote ravage want echt bijna alles was gebroken."

next game for iran is against north-korea - soccer along the axis of evil... and next one for japan is bahrain.

choose a logo

2005-03-25T16:06:00.001+09:00

pj productions made it to the front page of De Krant van West-Vlaanderen aka tkortriksandelsblad. read more on page 7.

and pieter made it to korea (and back) where he met up with rod and gladys. and redbook buddy tomokazu made it to new york where he met up with dida and silvia at krista's stain. we're all astronauts aboard a cozy little spaceship called earth.

lesson number two

2005-03-24T00:44:00.000+09:00

breakneck speed

2005-03-24T00:03:00.000+09:00

"Today, architects are often involved in gigantic projects going at breakneck speed, whether they like or not."
maki must be talking about projects in asia...

wouldn't call our yakitori tower a gigantic project (recent changes made it dip just below 100 meters), but designing speed flirts with breakneck. whether we like it or not. competition won in december - yet construction drawings due mid april, six weeks earlier than initially planned. engineers and specialists even contractors have joined in - lots of hungry mouths to feed with a continuous flow of updated plans. right now I'm working on the joint details of the glass facade. 't is ne keer wat anders...

still yakitori dynamics are no match for the regular surprizes from our projects in china. the civic center we designed (at breakneck speed) over the summer for a new town near wuxi, is currently under construction.

the construction drawings for every chinese building have to be produced in china. therefore, as a foreign firm, we can only develop our chinese projects up to schematic design, which we have to hand over to one of the official 'design institutes', remnants of china's strictly centralized planning machine. riken yamamoto and koolhaas shortcut this regulation (to maintain control over their chinese projects) by setting up shop in beijing. as we were expecting some bureaucratic delay from the drawing institute, picture our astonishment when the stack of construction drawings for wuxi arrived barely two weeks after our submission.

for the shanghai headquarters of our chinese developer/client, we haven't finished schematic design yet. our latest submission included a model, rough plans, area calculations, some shady perspectives. only days later they sent us the creations of their in-house renderers... click to enlarge - it's worth it.

view on an interior courtyard

flyover from southwest

those images are product of the full-force-ahead chinese workforce (in my mind a huge assembly line with thousand of uniformed renderers), definitely, but also of the romantic chinese, masters of illusion (look at their gardens and decorated temples). a good match with japanese austere detailing + building efficiency and european conceptual design approach? in theory, yes.

"The Chinese Architect is the most important, influential, and powerful architect on earth. The average lifetime construction volume of the Chinese Architect in housing alone is approximately three dozen thirty-story highrise buildings. The Chinese Architect designs the largest volume, in the shortest time, for the lowest fee. There is one-tenth the number of architects in China than in the United States, designing five times the project volume in one-fifth the time, earning one-tenth the design fee. This implies an efficiency of 2500 times that of an American architect."
from Great Leap Forward (Koolhaas + Harvard Design School Project on the City)

back to work. let's close the gap.

sakura forecast

2005-03-17T15:54:00.000+09:00

even the frog's eyes
can't turn away...
cherry blossoms!
haiku by Issa, 1805

in between allergy sneezing salvos, lately the word sakura has been heard regularly around aichan's bar. with almost magical effects - allergy masks are put aside, moisty eyes widen, irritated faces lighten up, spring memories are shared, party plans are made. no measures are too modest for sakura worship. the other day, a suited guy invited me with a voodoo like performance to one of the upcoming under-the-blossom parties - standing up from his barstool, eyes to the sky, arms up like branches, shaking his stretched out fingers like unfurling cherry blossoms. in any case the enthousiasm is contagious - hope my first sakura season will live up to the expectations...

stay tuned with weekly updates from the 2005 sakura front at japan meteorological agency. and look, some early blossoms hovering over my siesta spot in a daikanyama park. definitely not cherry, maybe plum?

[elders]

downtown countryside

2005-03-15T16:18:00.000+09:00

as green usually comes in pots in tokyo (or in bags), it didn't take me long to notice this small stretch of countryside, close to the office, on the slope behind hillside terrace. back in july, on one of my first lunchbreak walks, I remember wondering how this triangle could resist tokyo's building pressure. nine months later, it's on my drafting board...

maki sensei, designer of hillside terrace (the the highly acclaimed low-rise trigger development for the area), is still regarded as some kind of architectural godfather of daikanyama. big development plans in the hood pass through his hands for approval, giving him the position of an unofficial city planner. by contracting maki's son-in-law kobayashisan to develop a first conceptual urban design scheme for the triangle, the city and district governments (land owners) try to "smoothen" the process.

for a program of cultural facilities, senior flats, retail, public spaces and parking, I developed the three basic schemes you see flipping by below: one with a tower on the southeastern corner, one with building volumes perpendicular to the slope, one with buildings parallel to the slope. all have an FAR (floor area ratio) of 1.3. the blue variants of each scheme (bottom right) represent a maximum buildup of FAR 2, making it significantly harder to capture and reframe the feeling of countryside with slope and green.

pj productions

2005-03-07T20:28:00.000+09:00

some 'forces' in my home town kortrijk are bored with the city's current logo and decided to launch an alternative version - a logo displaying a golden spur, the symbol of the city.

een 'bruisende' stad moet beter kunnen, en ik kan de forces eigenlijk geen ongelijk geven. een eerste opdracht (en een kleine moeite) voor pj productions - enkele ideetjes uit brussel (het gulden spoor verder verbasterd tot een knipoog naar het texas van vlaanderen) en wat knutselen in tokio - een wereld van verschil?
heb er vanhieruit geen zicht op of de apocriefe brouwsels al zijn opgedoken in het kortrijks handelsblad/straatbeeld. hou me op de hoogte.

haiku

2005-03-05T23:46:00.000+09:00

spring rain
the ducks that haven't
been cooked quack
haiku by Issa

"A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition."
David Lanoue's webpage

for those who are getting worried about my recent interests in blossoms and japanese poetry - both sakuramania and haiku actually speak of the same thing: the experience of seasonal change, unavoidably present in a daily life in japan, right under tokyo's neon surface. kana told me that up to today, every japanese letter is opened with a reference to the season - “as we are eagerly awaiting the cherry trees to bloom, ...”

the big horse
rubs his butt
on cherry blossoms
haiku by Issa

issa kobayashi, one of japan’s most famous haiku MCs, crossed the country two centuries ago, producing thousands of haiku poems. the funny associations, direct imaginative language, and fascination for animals that ring through issa’s poems come very close to “the sheer excitement and unaffected honesty about every cultural phenomenon” I like in the songs of wesley willis. both issa (°1763) and wesley (°1963) are truly original rock and rollers, impossible to imitate in their joyful celebration of the ordinary.

The electric eel shocked the hell out of me
He also blew me out of the water
He did, thanks to his ass
Wesley Willis

"The haiku has this rather fantasmagorical property: that we always suppose we ourselves can write such things easily. The haiku wakens desire: how many Western readers have dreamed of strolling through life, notebook in hand, jotting down ‘impressions’ whose brevity would guarantee their perfection, whose simplicity would attest to their profundity (by virtue of a double myth, one classical, that makes concision a proof of art, the other romantic, which attributes a premium of truth to improvisation)."
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

sake drinken
en haiku schrijven
geliefde zonden
gevonden op wikipedia

join me and download hundreds of haiku to your iPod. here you can find some of wesley’s lyrics.
and through a recent movie called Koi wa Go Shichi Go (love is five seven five), high-school haiku is on its way to become cool again.

hakone

2005-02-19T10:55:00.000+09:00

we took rennie and louis to hakone, region of steaming valleys dotted with hot springs and hiking trails - the well-established resort area for tokyo shoguns. after a month of touring around in china, they could use a relaxing bath we thought, and some fresh air before kicking off a new life in san francisco.

tomo introduced us to the holiday life of a tokyo real estate agent, recovering from a week at the company in the members-only resort hotel... of the company. a real treat though, including in-house onsen, a tatami room with floor to ceiling views over the valley, and yukata for all. on the balcony at night (strong smell of pine trees) I thought the last time I saw a sky full of stars must have been from a mongolian haystack.

after breakfast we met up with akira, the guide for the hike, at gora station.
on a first break, in a clearance after a steep climb through bamboo forest, with the view of the picture above in front of us, we were wondering in which direction mount fuji was hiding. we decided it was still behind the hill we were climbing, until all of a sudden we focused and saw this. like finally finding your glasses right on your own nose...

soon we came to a ridge, offering views on both sides, leading to the top of the 'bright star mountain'. clouds refused to dissolve - so hazy fuji belonged more to the sky than to the earth for the rest of the day.

on top of bright star mountain

going down - back to the bright valleys of the inhabited world

with subways and trains and buses and cable cars smoothly interconnecting it feels like public transportation can take you to virtually every corner of the empire - making day trips from tokyo perfectly worth the hassle. the switchback trainride to gora is the steepest in the world.

zonnige groetjes uit shinagawa

2005-02-15T09:13:00.000+09:00

and shaky greetz from shinagawa... heaviest earthquake for me so far, shaking me up this morning at 5 o'clock. simply no way to get used to those creepy surprizes... in magnitude not as strong as the one in niigata last fall, but significantly closer, in ibaraki prefecture, just an hour by train northeast from tokyo. appetizer to the big one locals are expecting? there's something like the 70 years rule for big earthquakes, and the last one was in 1923.

lesson number one

2005-02-12T15:55:00.000+09:00

counting in japanese is notoriously complicated.
japanese uses ‘classifiers’ to count or quantify specific families of objects. the ‘three’ in three pens (family of the cylindrical objects) is different from the ‘three’ in three cakes (family of the small chunky objects). classifiers roughly equal english words like ‘glassful’, ‘sheets of’, ‘pieces of’...

the list of families looks long and kind of whimsical to western minds. years of age, machines, floors, times, persons, animals, small chunky objects, cylindrical objects, glassfuls cupfuls, books, letters, days of the month – are all counted with different sets of numbers.

a couple of examples, for clarity.
sheets of paper and tickets, from the family of the ‘thin and flat objects’, are counted with ichimai (1) nimmai (2) sammai (3)... pizzas, however deep pan, belong to the same family. calzones (those folded pizzas no one ever orders) on the other hand are counted with hitotsu (1) futatsu (2) mitsu (3) ... the set for non-classified objects.
animals have a different classifier (ippiki (1) nihiki (2) sanbiki (3) ...). birds yet another one (ichiwa (1) niwa (2) sanwa (3) ...). but, rabbits are counted as birds – according to aichan because their ears resemble wings. wonder if it works the other way around for skiing ostriches... roadkill rabbits are again counted as thin and flat objects, like deep pan pizzas and tickets.

fortunately there’s minimix and point it around the bar for easy communication...

naive

2005-02-04T14:51:00.000+09:00

lots of new residential towers under construction around my new place, on reclaimed land in shinagawa. one going up right in front of us... only narrow slices of sea and shinkansen sliding by are left, as long as it lasts.

(tokyo, undepletable source of funky Tshirt prints)

(click)

miura hanto

2005-01-31T01:39:00.001+09:00

don't know about you, but I filled my international internet-free sunday with a walk along the coast of the miura peninsula with tomo, pieter and kana, lots of birds of prey and kitesurfers.

for a late lunch, we walked up to a small port, where waving hands invited us inside the clubhouse of what looked like the local guild of independent fishermen's women. for the hawaii style new year's party, with live music and well prepared flower dances.

intriguing how in the end those really local habits are the same all over the world. the faces of the women, the group dynamics, the way everyone is prepared and bound to have a good time ("there's only one new year's party a year" said one of the ladies to kana, while adjusting her make-up in the bathroom mirror) - we could perfectly picture similar scenes in a random parochial center in flanders.

kana and pieter, a little mashed after classic onsen at the end of the day. in a hotel this time, close to the southern tip of the peninsula, with a well designed outdoor bath, overlooking sagami bay under darkening skies.

water no get enemy

2005-01-29T18:33:00.000+09:00

two years ago, the columbia urban design squad passed through kao lak, on a bike trip from chumphon to krabi in southern thailand. I was flipping through some pictures the other day, wondering what has become of the places and people we met along the road. kao lak is one of the towns on thailand's andaman coast that suffered a lot under the tsunami.

while I had been on the road for two weeks (on the east coast), this was just day two for the buddies, on their first ever bike trekking... most of the day we stayed close to the ocean, for a relaxing ride on relatively flat coastal plains, scenery of chunky limestone outcrops in the distance.

jan and rennie during a shady break on the road, john and tomo on the beach at the end of the day, and marc with a mysteriously agressive itch-attack in the hut at night...

we rented two huts at one of the many resorts in kao lak - and more under construction as we noticed along the road - catering more specifically to the diving crowd, still less crowded and less concrete than nearby phuket.

the next morning, before heading down south to phangnga, we followed a rough guide suggestion and biked through several miles of rubber plantations for a superb breakfast. in a superbly peaceful place, on the edge of the water.
water no get enemy sings fela kuti...

silk route

2005-01-21T14:58:00.000+09:00

the life of a sweater... from the musty sports bag of an early eighties after hours soccer player of fc izegem, to the shelves of a vintage shop in tokyo today, waiting to be bought by a hipster for 9,000 yen.
the in betweens are left to your imagination...

you can find the vintage shop on a second floor gallery in a side street in nakameguro... the red building on the other side of the street is redbook, for those of you who need a point of reference.
izegem on the other hand, twenty kilometers north from where I was born, is known as the town of brooms and shoes ("stad van bustels en skoen"), and famous for its juicy dialect.

[elders]

risotto

2005-01-17T23:09:00.000+09:00

so great to find out that the magnetic table at the faramarz/margery mansion still works... ingredients are simple yet success guaranteed.

same goes for the risotto. let me pass you the recipe here - with the risk of no one showing up next time...

whirlwind

2005-01-13T10:05:00.000+09:00

a late xmas break takes me to new york for the weekend... stay tuned for some moblogging straight from my new hi tech cellphone! east west whirlwind symmetry - exactly the same days I exchanged new york for istanbul last year, I’ll fill in this year.

here I found a useful disclaimer. please read it before I give you a state of the art on my japanese… dutch and japanese are so far apart “in use of words, rhythm and structure” even rats can tell the difference!

and snow at mekkah is one of the search words combinations that leads to this chronofile, apparently… welcome beautiful stranger! talking about mekkah - this is my first hit from saudi arabia.

and talking about snow - there's this Japan Snow Project ad on the small screens inside JR trains for a while now. three ostriches skiing, nothing unusual, been seeing them go down the hill over and over. still they keep puzzling me... japanese hi tech 3d max animation? details too perfectly random, shadows too realistic, ostrich movements and body parts too natural. old school disguise tricks? human knees don't bend that way... to me, even with my nose to the screen, more than anything else it looks like three ostriches skiing. in the summer, I saw a monkey doing pretty amazing tricks on the boardwalk in odaiba, so why not? here you can see for yourself - go for the 'triple jump' version...

toyo & celle

2005-01-07T16:59:00.000+09:00

today, after the weekly yakitori tower meeting, we bumped into toyo ito. close to his brand new tod's building, on omotesando, the hall of fame of japanese architects - buildings of sejima, ito, ando, isozaki, kuma rubbing shoulders (like in the magazines). kobayashi and ito seem to know each other, so jansan (berugijin) got introduced… scroll down here to find out how many pets ito has.

en kan me iemand vertellen wat er met ledegem aan de hand is? nogal moeilijk op te maken van hieruit...

„De laatste brief aan Remmery van vorige woensdag was een handgeschreven enveloppe met een kogel erin. Twee dagen na de laatste brief pakte de Kortrijkse federale politie Marcel W op. W werd plaatselijk beroemd nadat hij voor het goede doel het wereldrecord koprollen brak." (de Standaard)

celle is onschuldig. wat van johan "rund van vlaanderen" museeuw en bijhorende vetmester niet kan gezegd worden.

> the ledegem story finally on BBC world (celle didn't make it though)

omedeto

2005-01-01T22:52:00.000+09:00

Great Japan -
a foreigner also attends
the new year's service!

haiku by Issa, 1793

while new year's eve passes almost unnoticed, in japan the first day of the year is at the same time the first event of the year, centered around family and fortune.
with pieter I share a colorful list of new year's celebrations abroad, but little did we know, on a couch in brooklyn exactly one year ago, about the forces of fortune that would bring us together again this year, on this side of the globe... in yokohama, with kana, and her family.

a festive day stuffed with shinto rituals, too many to even start explaining...
just remember
>> whatever you do on new year's day sets the mood for the rest of the year (that's why for example the food is preprepared on the 31st - who wants to cook the whole year?) >> every vegetable on the new year's table has a meaning >> the special new year's sake is so sweet you only need to wet your lips >> to make black beans more shiny, boil them for ten hours in a broth of iron nails >> still more fatal than beans with nails is mochi, the typical new year sticky rice cakes >> through the hole in a coin you can see the future >> it takes hours and a license to help a girl into a kimono

>> bad luck for shinto men turning 25, 42, and 61 in 2005, and for shinto women turning 19, 33 (povera kana), and 37

>> good luck for those who see fujisan on new year's day (even better luck for those who climb it to see the first sunrise of the year from the country's highest spot) >> 'omedeto' means happy new year

click on thumbnails for some yokohama classics

after lunch and temple visits (sake at both) we strolled along yokohama's waterfront, the cruiseship terminal, all the way to the old city and chinatown. walking, talking (italian), laughing, drinking coffee - a comforting idea this is waiting for me in the rest of 2005...

snow on omotesando

2004-12-31T11:13:00.000+09:00

the trees behind harajuku station

prada store

omotesando, tokyo's champs elysées

and look who I met, on snowy omotesando...
(lots of) sharper images later in 2005!

redbook

2004-12-22T14:52:00.000+09:00

this is aichan. ai means love, that's what she said when I first walked into her bar, someday last summer. and chan is diminutive. aichan runs a bar called 'redbook', a tiny stain in nakameguro (coolest tokyo neighborhood according to wallpaper*), just down la rampetta from the office, where she dishes up a great carbonara, good old hoegaarden, and some gainsbourg now and then... she's a living database of good tunes and movies and belgian fashion designers. and just like krista in brooklyn she loves painting walls and doing things herself.

from that first day, I like hanging out at redbook - guess I've become a regular by now. there's only one small table for two and a couch close to the window, but plenty of seats around the bar. just great to sneak out of the office, walk down from hilltop daikanyama into nakameguro, and find regular or new faces around the bar, or just aichan, for lazy talks about nothing in particular. redbook is the bubble where stranger jansan finds familiar minds and thoughts and sounds and tastes, feels less stranger.

aichan beeru kudasai / crab pasta (oishi) / kamidekun

fuzzy coulds over la rampetta

miss q'n

2004-12-17T01:53:00.001+09:00

zap mama at blue note tokyo yesterday night
with "the soundtrack to your imagination" as marie daulne described it herself...

Zap Mama gibt Soul und R'n'B die Ursprünglichkeit zurück. 'Ancestry in Progress' ist demzufolge der vorläufige Höhepunkt eines Prozesses, der hoffentlich noch lange nicht abgeschlossen ist. Denn 'extrem funky und soulig und mit starken Anleihen im HipHop ist [das neue Album] ein wahres Kraftpaket.
ein kraftpaket... couldn't agree more with the buddies from darmstadt.

and beatboxing behind the turntables - reprazent - wim "dj Grazzhoppa" verbrugghe! great to see that (baby)face again, grazzhopping around, mit starken Anleihen im HipHop...
check out the video on his site.

meanwhile, at kmdw...
imagination without soundtrack with kasorix' prehistoric viewmasters.

maki sensei

2004-12-15T16:59:00.000+09:00

on yesterday's schedule was the long awaited reviewing session with fumihiko maki. for the shanghai office project.
pretty interesting for me, maybe not in the first place for what the master said (my japanese is still far from business meeting level), but for experiencing another chapter from the japanese customs book - "how to host a sensei" (a master).
everyone in the office - so not only who is working on the office project - was expected to attend the tributary gathering in the annex. initially only maki was sitting, surrounded by two concentrical belts of vassals. the samurai - chinese client mister fu, kobayashisan, tsushimasan, and naomisan (daughter maki/mrs kobayashi) - bringing the gifts and doing the talking, with kmdw warriors (katosan, kamidesan, kasorisan (in utmost "yokataaa" admiration), antoniosan and jansan) bodyguarding around, legs a little apart, hands together behind the back. later the inner circle could take a seat. the meeting lasted one hour and went well, as we could witness laughter and consent around the table.

a kmdw extended family picture.
now you know everyone... (katosan behind the lense)

so fu back to shanghai, with an updated draft for the Vanke headquarters, and, at least as valuable, with pictures of the meeting.
while making an interior view of the entrance lobby, I played around a bit with ImageReady (after PhotoDeluxe the most underestimated graphic software around) - click on the images for low-fi animation...

dag op dag

2004-12-14T15:17:00.000+09:00

tien jaar magik magda...
moet er daar een frietje biezin?
tel het juiste aantal houthakkershemden en win een raider, u backstage aangeboden door fan van het eerste uur odile depreutere.

en net zoals toen in 94 - het volgende nummer wordt opgedragen aan de moeder van pieter, vandaag jarig. take this waltz...

kata

2004-12-12T16:09:00.000+09:00

a couple of primal screams from kobayashisan, just before the friday afternoon clean-up, way earlier than 'expected'...
“jansan!”
“we won!”

soon the “kataaaa” (we won) phonecalls, tsushimasan rushes back to the office, everyone with an improvized beer in hand, faces with ear to ear smiles but radiant with disbelief. slowly (but quickly) we try to realize what’s going on... baby duck kmdw kicks the combined asses of pelli, rogers and ban, and wins a project for a one hundred meter tall tower, downtown tokyo...
let’s print the email. and reread it.

tsushimasan and kobayashisan with a preliminary victory sign during model pix session

only a day before, the four of us had carried the model, projector and booklets to omotesando to present our project to the developer and his engineers. we were not even sure if they would conclude the review sessions before the end of the week...
after imagining and drawing and presenting a lot of invisible buildings and cities over the last couple of years, it’s hard to believe this one now really gets built. somehow the logic escapes me...

some more thoughts as the dust has settled.

XII 5

2004-12-07T01:16:00.000+09:00

knew there was something more going on between funky weather and december fifth... and indeed - first snow of both my new york winters arrived on december fifth. left 2003 (picture taken on december sixth), right 2002.

fujimi fire stairs

2004-12-05T18:17:00.000+09:00

this ain't no cheap photoshop, but twenty four degrees on december fifth. for real.
tokyo’s not on the equator (35ºN), only a little closer than rome and new york. last week had been pretty cold actually – up to the point I got me some pairs of socks with separate toe compartments (a new sensation). but there he was again, superbly scheduled on a lazy sunday morning, the föhn, gusting down at 74 km per hour from the slopes of fuji and hakkone.
amazing how a surprize like this – a summer day in winter – makes your body wave like the bandy bandy snake, walk out the door and forget about deadlines.

last week kobayashi invited me to sit in a review of an urban design class, as a guest critic. next to me was professor jinnai, who turned out to be a friend of both grahame shane and bernardo secchi… il piccolo mondo. the students (exchange students from washington university) were asked to investigate the history of specific sites in tokyo and make urban design proposals. while commenting on the way they translated their initial observations into design ideas, I learned a lot about the invisible structures of tokyo, since the students eagerly used jinnai’s very revealing black and white drawings in their analyses.
just to tell you that street patterns of a lot of neighborhoods (even ginza’s) and samurai hilltop mansions of edo (tokyo before it became tō kyō, “eastern capital”) were laid out according to mount fuji view corridors. hills that slope to the west were often called fujimi zaka, “fuji view hill”. a mountain to look at, not to climb, remember?

to the left an edo period view of of the fudo temple grounds and the hills around fudōmae, and to the right an 18th century view of fuji as seen from one of those hills, by hiroshige (both images from jinnai's "ethnic tokyo").

so why not trying to catch a glimpse of fuji today? sunday afternoon dérives around fudōmae had taken me to hilltops before, to rise a little above narrow tokyo, to catch a stretch of horizon in a city lacking large river banks or monumental boulevards. with mixed success, as the hills are no longer a match for the surrounding highrise… and skies were never chrystal clear as today.

so this time I start walking up fire escape stairs of residential buildings, a lot of which have no locks nor doors - inviting upward extensions of the sidewalk. each roof terrace offers nice views – people like high places. crisp light on roofscapes, even stronger warm gusts through my dreads - but no clear views of fujisan. always a taller structure in the way, always another staircase to climb…

same view (opposite of hidden fuji) - down there up there

then finally, from a thirteen story building…

my first view of mount fuji.
not in full glory, but hey, it's a start.
needless to say I got lost by then...

220 degrees panorama (fuji flashed out by sunlight)

shinjuku blowup

nakameguro, later that day, on the way to the office...

koppen

2004-11-28T22:20:00.000+09:00

with kamide to kumade

2004-11-27T02:29:00.000+09:00

coworker kamidesan is a shinjuku regular. shinjuku at night, with its neon jungle and seas of people, is probably the image you have in mind when you think of tokyo. kamide has a lot of images of shinjuku, as he likes to roam around there for hours, at night, with his camera, while waiting for the first train home. one day, he showed me a stack of letter size black and white pictures, mainly portraits, he had made in shinjuku over the course of a couple of years. an amazing collection, disturbing at times.

tonight he takes me and heinrich to hanazono jinja ("flower garden shrine") for the kumade festival. kumade ("bear hand") means rake (hark), used in this season to move dry leaves. for the festival, the rakes are decorated with flowers and objects refering to popular beliefs, and sold. with those special kumade you can collect luck and fortune instead of dry leaves. echt iets voor oma.
tonight is this year's third (and last) kumade festival at hanazono jinja. next year there'll be only one, and the year after two, then again three, and so on.

sets of stairs lead up to the 'flower garden' shrine, completely surrounded by shinjuku highrise. but japanese style high density design leaves not one square inch of the temple grounds underutilized. the amount of food stalls and people strolling around is staggering. and the lantern scaffolds manage to give the place a certain grandeur. the garden with the flowers might have disappeared, still it's a different world at the heart of shinjuku.

a decorated kumade and heinrich. heinrich is working for the german embassy. his one year long intensive language course was paid for by 'the german taxpayer'. he speaks japanese fluently, even understands the food vendors, and writes some kanji... che invidio!

the outside wall of the flower garden.

a warm wind blows me home - part of the summer atmosphere at the festival? twenty degrees at the end of november... feels like forty if you ask me. makes me think of the föhn in milan, the warm surprize allowing short sleeve outdoor breakfasts in december.

[seems like the föhn (scroll down for full definition) is a world wide phenomenon - and a powerful one, messing up winter olympics and creating polynyae]

the antidote

2004-11-24T11:32:00.001+09:00

as long as it lasts - download "W" by BC400
four good reasons
> hyped on boombasticradio
> featuring SEG from Starflam, belgium's finest
> "in a world of Bullsh*t...people kicking fatness about the place with grins on their face... are all that matters"
> featuring W

>> antidote update
talking about belgium's finest... keekske just sent me the new zap mama, ancestry in progress, waarvoor dank! by far daulne's best, breathing streets and beats of new york. with (better than?) soul sister badu and ?uestlove. top-notch production by other members of the roots.
"marie, now you do american music?" - "no, I share"

drafts

2004-11-21T18:28:00.000+09:00

some of you ask what's on the drafting board these days.
a couple of drafts, as always.

coming back from china, I worked on the shanghai headquarters for vanke, our chinese clients for the wuxi project. we presented them a first draft for a low-rise office complex, with large courtyards, based on traditional chinese siheyuan architecture.

while we're waiting for their comments, kobayashisan put me on a competition for a restaurant tower in tokyo. a set of simple but unusual requirements: ten restaurant spaces, each with a ceiling height of 7.5 meters (!), stacked on top of each other. on a relatively small plot, "210 tsubo of land" (210 tatami mats, ca 700 sqm) in akasaka, a downtown business district. apart from the lofty spaces not so unusual for tokyo, where ground floor locations for retail and restaurants and bars are scarce luxury.

feels great to work on a tall and slender building, urban design in three dimensions - four facades, elevator cores, public sky lobbies, tension structures - back to my vertical shopping mall graduation project in a way. zin in wat bijklussen eveline?

yesterday I finished a first study model, by virtue of its core and snake-like structure immediately dubbed by tsushimasan and kobayashisan as the 'yakitori building'. I think we got a concept.

the hong kong based developer initially invited cesar pelli, richard rogers, shigeru ban, and SOM. looks like they want a big name, something fancy. but since there's no fee for this first phase, SOM decided to chicken out, leaving a gap cunning double agent kobayashi managed to fill in. needless to say we're the baby duck in the bunch - even 'underdog' would sound like we've got a chance...
presentation on december 8th. looks like I'll miss rod's second wedding as well (dec4th/church/seoul)... bummer!

right on time for inspiration information, there's a tiny buckminster fuller exhibit in omotesando (second floor).

>>
meanwhile, in scandinavia, looks like tomo is enjoying her research project - "some of their eyes are really really blue like an advertisement of contact lenses "...

>>
en er is een vliegtuig van eastern china airlines neergestort in een bevroren meer bij baotou, door de standaard nogal klungelig gesitueerd "in het binnenland van Mongolië, in het noorden van China". in binnenmongolië dus.

century

2004-11-20T16:01:00.000+09:00

yesterday after a phonecall during lunch, katosan hurried to catch a shinkansen to tottori. he will join his family there, as his great-grandmother (mother of mother of mother) is exchanging the temporal for the eternal...
born on december 18th 1904, she would have turned one hundred years old in a month. still she already celebrated her first century, a while ago, in presence of the local governor, kobayashisan told me. www confirmed that

the traditional way of counting age in Japan was different from what we do now. When a baby was born, its age was counted as one year old. People did not celebrate on their actual birthday; instead, everyone added one year on New Year's day. In an extreme case, when a baby was born on December 31st, he was considered two years old on New Year's day when he was only two days old.

strange you never find this in life expectancy studies...

onsen

2004-11-14T01:59:00.000+09:00

even though tokyo can compete with legoland for the world's most exciting theme park, still it’s always a good idea to just sit back on one of the trains, fall asleep, and wake up at the other end of the line, in the middle of japan’s fairy tale backcountry.
especially on a day like today, with blue skies, and two girls leaving the country soon.

last weekend in japan for anouk, a san francisco friend of taiwanese columbia classmate anderson. she’s been crossing japan from north to south during the past month, and has three more months of traveling in asia ahead... anouk kluyskens by the way, (like brother pieter) born in gent in 75, from two flemish parents who emigrated to montreal when she was three.
and tomo’s flying out on tuesday, joining jan gehl’s public space research lab in copenhagen for a month.

nikkō, two hours north of tokyo, is famous for its temples and for kō-yō, the fall foliage season, when the maple trees on the surrounding hills turn bright red and yellow. colorful leaves have almost disappeared though, along with most of the tourists, and we decide to skip the town and its temples alltogether in favor of a hike up to yumoto onsen village. so we end up having the fresh air, the wooden boardwalk and the volcanic scenery most of the time for ourselves.

yumoto at the other end of the mirror

two lakes, three waterfalls and a marshy wetland later, we arrive at yumoto. the sulphur is hanging in the streets of the town. so how can we resist to a traditional dip in a real outdoor onsen? the japanese are serious about bathing, especially about their ‘onsen’, natural hot springs in volcanic areas. even in our shabby ‘hole in the ground’, everyone dutyfully respects the (un)dresscode, the cold and hot water cycles, the obligatory chat with the fellow males, the salty green tea afterwards.
a superb ritual - great to get something in return for all those earthquakes lately...

body sinks willingly into a greenish vinaigrette of 69°C, mind on sulphur sails off to vals, ranong, damascus, idaho, istanbul.

evolutions

2004-10-29T01:58:00.000+09:00

tokyo's architecture crowd - reprazent - at the opening of the SOM Evolutions exhibit last night... dominated by men, uniformly pinned up business cards, and suits.
ultimate master fuhimiko maki is the man with the white hair on the right (in a spotlight he designed). left of maki is rizing star kengo kuma. both without name tag, kuma even without suit.
find wally...

more pictures below, featuring mc kobayashi, david childs and his freedom tower, and wally. all credits to katosan, photographer of the evening until he got knocked out by a tiny salmon toast (buckwheat allergy).

achikochi

2004-10-24T17:14:00.000+09:00

to keep you warm with updates from japan: check out achikochi, blog by vincent van den storme, belgian legal alien in yokohama for seven years now. an informative playground full of links and articles, short stories, sharp pictures - rod you'll love the 'now and then's - and a gigantic list of japan blogs.

what else?
helped kobayashi setting up an SOM exhibit around the corner in maki's hillside terrace today, unloading a container of presentation models and boards, shipped all the way from wall street new york. worth a lunch with the two corporate architects that came along with the boxes - funny how SOM keeps paying for my lunches, even back in tokyo...

and then those earthquakes... yesterday the building shook at least five or six times over a span of two hours. every single time, this feeling of complete helplessness, this fear of death I'll never get used to. before and after, my japanese buddies claim they do, but whenever we're shaking (like a polaroid picture) I can see the fear in their eyes too. today we heard almost 20 people died in niigata, 250km to the north. japan's strongest earthquake since kobe, ten years ago.

> fabre op ladeuze
> singhsons (from anat)
> save bernd (van de kepsens)
> pong (van francis)
> eminem's mosh (from dida)
> bill hicks in zomergasten (van bie)
> what if the world could vote in the US presidential election?
> transnational statistics (from louis)
> moving south

that's china...

2004-10-19T15:23:00.000+09:00

dear all

this chronofile is off limits in china – bounced back by the firewall of the chinese government (the great wall AD 2004). long time no hear... but with a head full of stories and a camera full of images, I hope we can catch up soon.
it’s been a long trip. and really far away. tokyo looks different, the japanese look and sound different... an essential china chapter to the asian experience... little did I know. hard to catch in a single paragraph (feel the hidden disclaimer).

a long trip, huge contrasts - a powerful mix of urban and rural china.
first two weeks on a bike through inner mongolia, desert radar on. expansive grassy adventures, days feeling like weeks, further away than I had ever been, as lonely as the planet gets I guess… slowly sliding through fragile highlands, sometimes stunningly beautiful, sometimes hardly surviving under the weight of organized overpopulation.
once back in beijing, just time enough to wash the dust out of my dreads and get dressed for a business trip to shanghai, a glamorous destination for a business trip, especially from under the wings of our chinese clients. fancy hotel rooms, buffet breakfasts, french chansons on rooftop bars, de krab met de gulden scharen, waterfront grandeur. even some tourism in jiangsu province, china’s città diffusa. interesting sino-japanese dynamics. topped off by a visit to the construction site in wuxi…
back to beijing for the last week, comfortable home base, capital of Earthly Tranquility. always a pleasure...

from cabbage storage room to 'eyes wide shut' resort

some say china is making its great leap forward. that’s not really how I felt it. instead of leaping, I saw thousands of chinese steadily moving. transporting huge loads of stones, coal, sheep, silk, cellphones, oil, cabbage, coke, reinforced concrete - on their backs, donkey carts, blue trucks, trains, barges, planes. on and off, back and forth, day and night, it never stops…
china is not jumping from a rural society to a postindutrial market economy. all the in betweens considered logical by our history books – nomadic / agrarian / industrial / hi tech / informational / postfordian societies wha’ever – are developing too, at the same time, right next to each other. destruction and construction are sweeping through all these layers, through cities as well as through the countryside, at an incredible pace, at an unprecedented scale, apparently.

simultaneous china - a shepherd herds his flock of sheep around wind energy turbines, high on the mongolian grasslands. the mound in the distance is a rarely visited section of the great wall, made of earth.

and I mean apparently unprecedented.
however fast china is developing nowadays, this trip has shown me that nothing is really new under the chinese sun. only now I can see the past fifty plus years of communism as just one of china’s inward-looking, undemocratic dynasties (of foreign ideology), even a relatively short-lived one...
and the last decade as an accelerated dawn to times of open borders and unlimited opportunities, in which anachronic communist rhetorics and great firewalls are nothing but annoying side phenomena. it’s just a matter of time to see china become the world’s leading economy – again, anything but unprecendented...

all these lines are marked on the face of beijing. and on the faces of the old guys in the hutongs, beijing’s crooked greystone alleys. those faces have seen it all come and go, dynasty after revolution after uprising after decadence after dynasty… they squat on their doorsteps, with their birds and pipes, and smile. and spit. just like they’ve been doing for centuries.

pictures on a screen only give a vague idea of what it all really looks like – again, my powershot lense prooved too weak for close ups (exception below), and too narrow for highland horizons, for the masses in train stations. sure francis will tell me the pictures could have been taken anywhere… anyway, I’ll post some, au fur et à mesure, under the day of the action. hope you like.

>>>
en voor wie (nog altijd) niet is overtuigd - stef kamil carlens in een interview naar aanleiding van zita swoons nieuwe plaat…
“Soms ben ik te veel aan het werken. De voorbije twee jaar was het steeds maar componeren. Je moet ook nog leven. Ik voel dat ik nu grote ervaringen nodig heb, als zuurstof en als inspiratie. Ik zou graag eens rondreizen in Marokko. Of er helemaal alleen op uittrekken met de fiets en een tent. Ik fiets graag. Ik heb twee weken geleden de Mont Ventoux gedaan. Dat is pas een kick: die inspanning, de prachtige natuur, de rust en de goeie lucht.”
en de reste...

a glamorous city

2004-10-11T00:14:00.000+09:00

"The town of Wuxi, the regional center close by the northern shore of the lake, is not particularly attractive. Wuxi served as the capital of the Wu Kingdom for over 600 years until the Han Dynasty, when the tin mines were exhausted (Wuxi means "without tin"). It was the construction of the Great Canal, centuries later, that brought importance to local trade and industry, as it did for so many other canal towns. These days Wuxi is surpassed as a lakeside city by Hangzhou, and as a canal town with traditional gardens by Suzhou. In an effort to siphon tourists away from its more famous neighbours, Wuxi boosters have constructed many "instant tourism" sights in the past few years, most notably a slew of theme parks and the world's tallest Buddha, which smack of revenue-minded artificiality. At 88m high, this bronze-plated giant, stands as a monument to cynicism, built for the record books and to extract yuan from tourists at a spot with no religious significance."
Rough Guide to China

only tomoko decided to join me on a trip to see the site - and the first traces of construction? - of the new town I had been working on over the summer. after a three hours train ride west of shanghai, and after walking in circles in wuxi to find the vanke offices, I heard on the lobby phone that the guide, set up for us by mister fu, wasn't coming to the office today... strange. but soon a stand-in english speaking guide was found, in the marketing department. she took us to lunch, and after lunch to the site. from the car window we gazed at dozens of new or barely finished towers sliding by, along with new roads, a new bridge, and the biggest gymnasium in the world (somehow confirming the image sketched by the rough guide).

new highways already in place

the site looked more or less like I had imagined it from kobayashisan's pictures and discriptions - only closer to the lake - probably because there's not that much around the stretch of flat fields, except for brand new highways and some 'informal settlements' of local farmers that still need to be 'replaced'. our marketing girl added a special edge to the experience - she explained the project to us as if she wanted to talk us into buying a couple of units of the glamorous city ( "a glamorous city" is the litteral translation of the chinese kanji representing the name of the new town). she forgot to change the "potential buyer" tape for the "visiting designer" tape. cute - in the car on the way back, she repeated with utmost sincereness, eyes to the horizon, "this is really going to be a glamorous city"... (thanks)

above the construction site of the entrance buidling to the new town, which will function - in a first phase - as the new vanke wuxi offices and as a model house to sell the units of the project. this building - covered by my right arm on the picture below - is designed by fu himself and serves as a gateway to our civic center, of which construction is planned to kick off around february.

compare the advertising board with two pictures of our most recent model. on both pictures below you can find our section (civic center with shops, restaurants, services, parking, gardens, residences in two parallel narrow slabs) and the model house (currently under construction).

view from northwest (model house bottom left)

view from southwest (model house top left)

shanghai

2004-10-09T10:21:00.000+09:00

everything you hear about shanghai is true

earthly tranquillity

2004-10-07T00:25:00.000+09:00

next time someone asks me about my hobbies, I should remember to answer ‘biking in beijing, in october’. the simple pleasure of going nowhere in particular, like
nani moretti in the opening shot of his caro diario - "mi piace andare in giro colla vespa, guardando le case..."

sometimes I would bike three quarters of one of beijing's a circular ringroads, instead of crossing it, and turning back for a quarter. beijing is like manhattan, only on the first day you need a map. after that, it's just cruising, on the boulevards of big ideas, the wind of progress in the back.

the hutong are the traditional residential neighborhoods in beijing, one storey walled grey brick brick houses leaving a maze of quirky alleways. they fill up the big areas between the ringroads with quintessential china: the old man on his doorstep, the pharmacy stuffed with weird bottles and spices, the charcoal delivery bikes, the pancake makers, the men in their workshops spitting along, the public toilets, a bunch of uniformed schoolchildren.

'hut' in hutong comes from the same root as 'hot' in mongolian cities as xilinhot, hohhot or erenhot, testifying of the mongolian roots of beijing. 'hot' means water, crucial for stationary mongolian settlements on the high and arid grasslands.

hutongs are vanishing at quick pace. at extremely quick pace, since small chinese families without ownership certificates are no match for big corporations with political connections. entire hutong districts are being knocked down as we speak, and replaced by 'cleaner' office headquarters or residential towers. historical preservation and protection are underway but will probably come too late.
and for whom anyway? chen took me to his hutong home - while I was fascinated by their lifestyle (computers with internet next to charcoal fires in a tiny one storey two room brick house with outside bathroom), he and his family are looking forward to move to an apartment building soon... western expats seem to be the strongest advocates (and even buyers where possible) of hutong residences.

the city government is trying to eradicate spitting in beijing by the olympics in 2008...

tien’an men square is a very strange space, ambiguous in nature, attractive and repulsive at the same time. it is probably the only square in china, and the largest in the world.

a square, typology of democracy, in a society that has zero experience with democracy. whereas the european square reminds the rulers of the power of the people - the place of political discussion and the place of free market - the two largest squares in the world (tien'anmen and the red square in moscow) are used to render the opposite effect. with alternating success...

an unusually large square, so large it is almost impossible to conceive it as one space. at a certain point, it was too large apparently, too large to handle for one man. mao's mausoleum - a giant soviet gym - now sits in the middle and breaks it up in four spaces, not really four squares though. unusually inaccessible, too, as it is surrounded by boulevards on its four sides, detached from the rest of the city, and only reachable through underpasses at the corners, secured locks.
all that is solid melts into air...

"Tian'anmen, literally means "Heaven Peace Gate", and is normally translated as "The Gate of Heavenly Peace". However, in Classical Chinese, the word meaning "Heaven", is also used as an epithet for the Emperor; and the word meaning "Peace" more properly means "a state of undisturbed security". Thus "Tian'anmen" - being the main gate to the palace - also suggests "The Gate to Secure the Emperor's Safety", a meaning not present in the English translation."(Wikipedia)

well whatever... after all I found it just great strolling on tien'anmen square during the festivities for the people's republic's 55th anniversary. the sunset, the kites, the crowd, the guards, so cute.

and the duck... was delicious.

beijing, 2005

distorted surface

2004-10-04T01:39:00.000+09:00

desertification in chifeng league

even though I had come down from the more fragile highland ecosystem and had returned to the valleys of traditionally inhabited china, still I found some of the most striking evidence of warfare between the chinese authorities and the encroaching soil degradation here, in the mountainous area around chifeng.
not surprizingly, these valleys form the setting for bruce marcot's alarming story I read while planning the trip. even my pretty old aviation maps mention 'distorted surface'.

as mentioned earlier, the desertification situation on the highlands can be described as a battle at the forefront of chinese cultivation: a recently immigrated population of farmers tries to eek a living out of the land on the inner mongolian plateau. the struggle is tough, as the highlands are arid and cold, and yield marginal crops, while the soil is degrading and the sands are encroaching. both colonization (cardboard settlements, croplands, jaded tourist villages) and protection measures (trees and shrubs) are implemented in a linear pattern, lining the main arteries (highways, train tracks) across the highlands.

in the valleys of chifeng league, however, the problem seems to have an extra dimension. almost literally: lines becoming surfaces. in this once fertile area, squeezed in between the highlands and the coastal plains, the desertification problem is more structural. as more considerable short term losses in cropland are to be feared for the government, remediation measures have been equally more vast in comparison to what I saw on the highlands.

both disruption of the surface and remediation occurs on a vaster scale: huge sand dunes in the distance, dried out rivers, erosion of entire hillsides, valleys chockfull of saplings, huge areas of alternating strips of agricultural fields and protective trees. virutally everywhere in chifeng league, signs of china’s environmental warfare are visible.

sand dunes in the distance

dried out river

saplings

'reforested' valley

biking towards chifeng, thinking about national environmental policies for a country as big as china, about protection walls and inward looking dynasties, wondering whether man in fact can be stronger than nature, I realized mile by mile that combatting desertification in china doesn't equal trying to find a fragile balance between the forces of the environment and human occupation.
it means to fence off areas of economical accumulation, if possible steadily expanding them. it means affirmatively fighting the increasingly exhausted environment, unilaterally, wihtout negociation.

a sign announcing a completed tree planting project

even though they are green, the trees are as much part of the network of cultivation as railways, fences, factories. the trees are not intended to replace cleared forests, not even to help grasslands to recover (how would trees manage to do that anyway?), but to protect the human footprint on the grasslands they enclose.

the fence and the line of trees - loyal companions even in the dryest valleys

drought and depletion of fresh water resources by irrigation and overpumping cause more sandy areas as the topography drops (perspective difficult to grasp)

The main causes of the expansion of the desert in Inner Mongolia are overgrazing, deforestation, overcultivation and drought. As rainfall declines, water is being conserved on the upper reaches of the rivers for irrigation and aquifers are depleted by overpumping.
(from my initial article / june 03)

a roadside ad for sand dune entertainment (probably in a combo package with mongolian food) // checkerboard vegetation on an eroded hillside in the distance

a rough estimate: 85 percent of my 2600 kilometers I biked between two rows of trees.

Up to today, the question remains as to whether the area targeted by the wall is just too arid to support trees. And even if the trees take root, they'll soak up massive amounts of groundwater, which could worsen the problem.
According to environmentalists, Beijing has been largely content to issue proclamations about student-supported tree-planting and green Olympics rather than tackle complicated land uses. They want the government to foster positive behaviour – pay farmers to reduce livestock numbers, raise water prices to encourage conservation, and temporarily relocate locals away from arid areas to allow recovery. Ironically, it was the Chinese agricultural policy of the 1960s, actively populating Inner Mongolia with Han Chinese and encouraging nomadic Mongol shepherds to settle down, which started the assault on the ecology of the region.
(from my initial article / june 03)

biking east

2004-10-03T21:19:00.000+09:00

keshiketengqi – balinyouqi – wangniuteqi – chifeng

early morning view on keshiketenqi from my hotel room - clouds lingering,but the weather looks nice enough to continue

patches of sunlight into stunning scenery

the first foreigners I encounter, more than a month after leaving beijing, step out of a minivan just as I pass by. they seem to be in a hurry, not really noticing me, rushing to set up their cameras. after the train has passed by and shutters have rattled, they explain me they share an obsession for steam trains, and that they've come from all over the world (australia, oregon, mexico, scotland) to this particular valley between balinyouqi and wangniuteqi to take pictures of the "last regularly operating steam train in the world".

typical postprandial scenes around my plate of jaouza in the only 'restaurant' of a small roadside town.

what is on the pictures: little curious george at my lunch table, his parents pointing at the classic "are you married" in my rough guide glossary, and the girls of the town probably with similar questions behind the plastic curtain.

what is equally there, but not on the pictures: a bunch of the town's bullies (usually the ones in camouflage pants or with the dark sun glasses) rushing in and out, bringing their friends over to my lunch table, shouting "hello" in my ear, louder every time as if I'm too stupid to understand, tossing my rough giude around, shoving a cigarette up my mouth, grins on their faces, a shout-laugh-cough hybrid to break the uncomfortable silence once in a while. eventually they end up shuffling back outside, to 'check out my bike'. thumbs (with ferocious nails) go into my tires to check the pressure, clumsy hands grab the frame to check out the weight, brakes are tested, gears shifted in the process.
how many times I started biking and rattled along for a stretch because someone had shifted my gears while I was eating or taking a break? just one example of I never ever encountered in any other part of the world.

it's in the 'cultural hints' section of every guidebook on china: any kind of privacy is a precious ore here, a pushing elbow is more vital than an outstretched hand in this overcrowded society, lack of respect for goods and mental health of your neighbor is socially accepted. still I never really got used to it. no way I can explain in a friendly way I prefer them not to touch my bike. no way to laugh it all away with a buddy. china can be a slap in the face at times, especially for the lonely non-mandarin speaking traveler.

what I did learn though was to avoid the guys with the dark shades and the US army wear. women, children and elderly people usually were better bets, for directions, or for a simple chat. never really understood those army camouflage pants anyway - the guys who wear it usually stand out more than boy george on a clan rally.

leaving towns and bullies behind, alone again with the road, thinking of whether or how all this realtes to the environmental disaster I am biking through...

I could follow some chinese episodes of kuifje (tintin) just by walking through the streets at night and peaking into - everyone seemed to have it on. along with hu jintao, preparing the nation for the festivities of the 55th anniversary of the people's republic

heavenly grassland

2004-09-30T11:34:00.000+09:00

bayanxilemuchang – keshiketengqi

click to load movies

heavy thunderstorms last night, slowly passing, as if they had decided to stay for the night at bayanxile's pasture home too. in the morning, a misty walk to the bathroom, the usual hole in the ground in a separate shack. my room has a big window. dreary bayanxilemuchang and its supersized “enjoy the beautiful grassland and mongolian culture” sign next to the Sinopec gass station don’t make a convincing alternative to the road ahead though – who minds some drops of rain when both a mysterious section of the great wall and dalai nur, a freshwater lake, are on the menu of the day? maybe even migrating birds along the shores of the lake, or some wild beasts? or real yurts, with real nomads, finally? I wrap feet and tent in the plastic cover of the breakfast table – soon I’m biking away, on the other side of the big window.

rain gets worse - amazing how different the grasslands look without towering blue skies. but then, as gradually as the road climbs, the rain gets lighter, up to a point it stops to bother. it’s snowing! I can’t help laughing out loud - de verplanckskes were right! back in sunny beijing, they had warned me (in onvervalst ardoois) for september snow in mongolia…

as long as I keep biking (and laughing) the cold is ok – hands and feet go into permafrost. it’s silent, almost cozy, in my grey bubble with fuzzy white dots. until an overwhelming buzz takes over from the humming of my tires… through the thick curtain appears the slender silhouette of a wind turbine, slowly making its turns… an equally undisturbed shepherd completes the surreal picture. back to the future. the shape of the earth mound in the distance seems regular enough to qualify as that forgotton part of the great wall. dalai nur is off limits.

mud mound or wall of china?

pretty worn out and slightly disoriented when I manage to stop a truck. the driver pulls over, climbs on his load of coal and hoists my bike all the way up. as if he picks up bikers in blizzards all the time. my frozen hands fail to take out extra ropes to secure the bike, but he assures me it’s going to be allright.

thawing hurts, but he has cigarettes and a warm coat, and I have bulk peanuts. another cozy bubble. after noticing my bike through the cabine’s rear window, stable on a bed of coal, I fall asleep. my generous friend brings me eighty kilometers further east, to keshiketengqi, a sizeable city with sizeable puddles, down in a valley surrounded by mountains.

bike on coal through the rear window, and waking up in the next city

4 different sets of characters on MongolTV - cyrillic, latin, chinese, mongolian

hard to tell if here too rain turned to snow today… in any case, magic continues - at night, after winter gear shopping (shoes/gloves/socks for 15 bucks) skies are on fire, and lava creeps through the streets.

the real city of keshiketengqi feels very different from the pioneer outposts of the past week. walking around, I realize the truck drove me back to inhabited china, safely inside the wall. at the same time, chances to come across a real yurt from here are seriously shrinking - getting to know fellow nomads in inner mongolia turns out to tougher than expected… next time I’ll fix myself one of those packaged ‘stay a night in a yurt’ trips.

ironically, back in beijing, I will see a small independent movie called Heavenly Grassland [city boy grows up with mongolian nomad step(pe)parents in unspoilt yet harsh surroundings]. landscapes felt deja-vu, and indeed the closing credits show the movie was shot in the grasslands around keshiketengqi…

arteries of cultivation

2004-09-29T00:55:00.000+09:00

desertification in xilingol league

my inner mongolia

2004-09-28T01:13:00.000+09:00

sanggin dalai – balyinkulunjunmuchang – xilinhot - bayanxilemuchang

xanadu

2004-09-26T10:10:00.000+09:00

zhangleanqi - sanggin dalai

"The greatest palace that ever was … The walls were covered with gold and silver and the Hall was so large that it could easily dine 6,000 people …The palace was made of cane supported by 200 silk cords, which could be taken to pieces and transported easily when the Emperor moved …”

and so on. even though marco polo tends to exaggerate in his reports – we’re not even sure if that cabrón ever made it to china – still xanadu, or shang-tu on this map, the palace of kublai khan where polo arrived in may 1275, seems to have made a serious impression on him.
according to the rough guide "virtually nothing of the site remains” – in any case not enough for directions more specific than “northwest of the modern city of duolun”… which means roughly northeast of the modern city of zhangleanqi (yes lanxie)! reasons enough to set out on a little side excursion today.

a new train line outside zhangleanqi

it was all just a little too perfect… no kanjis, but some directions from a shopkeeper, also shepherds pointing in the same direction. and after turning north, in the distance… a palace! a bright white one, with domes, dramatically approaching on the axis of the road. is this what marco polo saw seven centuries ago? would it have been restored since the rough guys passed here? turned into a marco polo amusement park? where are the busloads of chinese tourists?

palace ahead

once I pass through the gate and come to a halt, no time for those questions. soon I'm surrounded by the mongolian republican guard, and surrender immediately – this time my face definitely at least as astounded as the ones around me. there we stand for a while, silently gazing at each other, some of them casting jealous glances at my horse… a borat style crew member breaks the spell, confirming they are shooting a “moving” there.
after wandering around the set for a while, suddenly I remember what had brought me there. again from borat, I (hardly) understand these white domes serve as a “mongolian style” tourist village outside the movie making season. no remains, no greatest palace that ever was...

so I take off, kind of disappointed yet happy with the surprise, waved out by the whole circus. if you ever come across a boring mongolian dynasty movie with the guards missing or turning their heads collectively in the wrong direction…

but another surprise was waiting ahead. while bending north and trying to reconnect to the road, all of a sudden, a metal gate across the road (open), an abandoned ‘museum’, and a shack with remains of archeological activity: some books and drawings, even some clothes and a bed, the wind blowing through. no one around.
and then a little further down…
xanadu.

what I see are two huge rectangular mounds – grassy remains of the walls polo talks about – the outer one enclosing nothing in particular but the inner one, and the inner one enclosing some scattered stones. still no one around, calvino’s città invisibili blowing in the wind.
a great place, the greatest that ever was.

"le musée est a pàris" / the southeast corner of the outer mound

the rest of the day – powered by a xanadu energy boost – “bending north and trying to reconnect to the road” the sequel…

>01

>01 joe ‘midnight cowboy’ buck cruising on the grasslands
>02 hilly territory // here and there a sandy valley

>02

>03 >04

>03 road narrows to a double track, going up a recently reforested valley // some drops of rain along with doubts if there is a connection
>04 track fades and stops before the pass // slopes on all sides // shit // back to creepy zhangleanqi? // notice the tiny stupa on top of the ridge (mongolians share lamaism with the tibetans)

>05

>05 leaving bike behind for a short hike up to the stupa

>06

>06 stunning 360º views and strong winds on top (more sandy scars ahead apparently)
>07 also from on top, an idea on where to take the pass
>08 hoisting and pushing bike and household through rocky bush // inner mongolia hiking biking foliage trips

>07 >08

on the other side, I make a soft landing in a tree plantation and get picked up by two farmers on a motorbike. they look kind of bewildered (just like me wondering how the hell I got into their plantation) but later they ask if I had been praying at the stupa, laughing… I show them the kanjis for sanggin dalai (reconnection point) and they point west / how far? / showing 6 / 6km? / yes 6. it turns out to be 60… (the first in a series of decimal misunderstandings)

a blessing – instead of pulling into another dusty town’s cabbage room, tonight I sleep on a haystack of a beautiful family. father son and daughters are collecting hay and mom is herding back the cows as I pass their farm at sunset. they smile, take me in, yet hardly interrupt their daily lives (without electricity) for the stranger. what a relief. being ‘stuck’ in the middle of nowhere feels surprisingly relaxing and comfortable.

my hosts for tonight

candle light dinner

for dinner mom dishes up a thick and tasty noodle soup (with beef, ginger, and cilantro), mongolian milk tea, and fruit, to which I add a pasta quattro formaggi – not a stunning success, but recipe for intercultural fun, as I make them eat it the same way they relentlessly refill my cup. later, the girls take out an english textbook, with a small dictionary in the back, from english to chinese. so they have to run through the whole list for every english word they want to ask me, by pointing. but it works. under the light of one candle, we exchange words about their farm, my trip, the price of my camera, dairy products, a dollar bill. dad silently flips through all the pictures on my camera – he’s never been to beijing – and mom gets openly embarrased he's taking so long. in the end, they point at the heartbreaking combination of "back” and “again” and a question mark… imagine...

family portrait at dawn

kanjis of the day

2004-09-25T14:42:00.000+09:00

guyuan - zhangleanqi

a buddy guiding me out of guyuan

behind a coffee in beijing I had already figured out my maps wouldn’t help me that much. thought I was well prepared though – from a specialized bookstore in tokyo I had bought a northern china road map and a slightly more detailed aviation map, supposedly the best one availabe. but comparing both maps to set out a tentative itinerary turned out to be a worrying affair: roads and even place names didn’t coincide. find the seven similarities…
outside of the coffee bar, different worries. apart from being inaccurate and too small for a bike trekking (my daily 100km corresponding with a pathetic 5cm), both maps depict place names in latin characters only, making them completely cryptical for the average chinese along the road. very few locals read latin characters, even less seem to have an idea what their region looks like from above. while I had no tools to decode the average road sign…
speech didn’t help me a lot further either. mandarin is an intonational language, with four tones, (unlike japanese) very hard to transcribe, and impossible to pronounce… being misunderstood is annoying, but being mute while speaking is hopelessly frustrating. even when I tried twenty different pronounciations of the next town’s name, still not a single face out of the full screen collection gathered around me would show a sign of remote recognition. a recurrent nightmare… [jesus, what the hell could I possibly be trying to say, with a map in my hands and a bike under my ass?]

faces turn around, hands keep trading cabbage - a common sight at guyuan's saturday market

but in the end all works out fine, even for a mute traveler with blind maps. pretty quickly I learned to depend on the position of the sun and the shape of the land (the aviation map having topography lines), to change my definition of ‘working out fine’. and to find the kanjis of the day, the chinese characters corresponding with the town I wanted to reach.
one day one of the faces brought me to the local ‘middle school’, interrupted a class without apologizing and had the geography teacher study my map. I walked out of the school with kanjis for a couple of days…

lack of maps turns every day into a little pilgrimage. this one, the first day on the grasslands, in particular, since the town to reach goes under a couple of names, ranging from zhangleanqi (on the map) to something that sounds like ‘lanxie’…
I try “zhangleanqi?” while pointing in a certain direction / question mark faces / get off my bike, show them the kanjis / “aaaah, lanxie!” nodding heavily and showing me the way //// next fork, same story, zhangleanqi and lanxie interchanged /// etc

next fork

lunch in a hui village
with other muslim minorities, the hui make up almost 10% of the chinese population. still I was surprised to find them so far east on the silk road... opposite to the cats, there's a poster of mekkah with a quote from the quran.
here, as in most 'restaurants' during the first week, I had a plate of jaouza, dumplings stuffed with mutton and scallions. a classic, safe, and easy to order. only later I found the kanjis for "house specialty" - a secret code to a way more exotic universe, dished up by proud chefs...

picture the disappointment when at the end of the day, zhangleanqi slash lanxie is just another unhospitable concrete settler’s camp. dust blasting through the town’s two oversized cartboard boulevards. brand new factories on the outskirts. feels like zhangleanqi has been dropped off by a couple of trucks just last week. at night, no one outside, loud laughter from behind dirty windows. the wild west.

this is inner mongolia, just like other ‘autonomous regions’ in china the forefront of state organized han chinese colonisation. until a couple of decades ago these grasslands – roughly beyond the great wall – were used as pastures by semi-nomadic mongolian shepherds, while intensive agriculture stopped at the end of hebei’s fertile valleys. today, the mongolians, of which the majority has been forced to settle down, are outnumbered by han chinese by nine to one. this might explain the disappointing geographical knowledge of the 'locals'. it definitely explains the sand storms in beijing…
towns like zhanleanqi will only get more depressing as I move on north, higher on the mongolian plateau, to colder, more fragile ecosystems.

notice the mongolian style dome on the new building... duck or decorated shed?

hebei northern province

2004-09-24T01:07:00.000+09:00

beijing - shitai - chicheng - guyuan

biking out of beijing at dawn along chang’an jie, cutting tien’anmen gate, entrance gate to the forbidden city, from tien’anmen square, a little further on the right. in good company of humming fellow bikers – there’s enough space for all on china’s number one parade boulevard. I’ll be back.

new construction around the capital consists of pretty depressing stuff, low quality copy/paste with dorky ‘traditional’ roof details. built with the same level of detail as the average highway bridge, but advertized as the versailles of the east. very poor communities too, some gated, most lacking sidewalks and other facilities, all of them designed on cars – preferably volkswagen, “the car of the people”, the nation’s favorite (audi for party officials).

first sight of the great wall, and a crumbled section at huanhuacheng

surprisingly quickly though, only a couple of hours north of beijing, I found myself pedaling around in rural china: big trees lining fertile valleys, the one-size-fits-all brick houses, the village people, the smell of coal fires, donkeys, and the rest of the bucolic painting I would bike through over the next three days. no nature in hebei, every inch I saw of it is cultivated, every valley terraced.

whose motorcycles are these? - see the guys that are finishing the last character on the opposite hillside? it's theirs baby. the wonders of the chinese workforce - look at the picture to the right and notice the distance between the road (left) and the inscription...

chicheng middle school - the whole class sang "my heart will go on" for me...

meanwhile, on the countryside...

the great wall might never have been a waterproof protection system, at least it served as a road, a very steap one, in difficult terrain. seems like communist engineers built their roads on that tradition – hebei roads are good, well-maintained by lots of hands, but steap. before the end of the first day, I was suffering on a strenuous mountain pass. took me only a couple of switchback to discover why beijing (“northern capital”) and hebei (“northern province”) make up the northern edge of traditionally inhabited china...

looking back...

rural delight

on the mountain passes, time enough to get used to loneliness, to wish myself a buddy. in the valleys, the first alienating contacts with the chinese countrymen, more reasons to wish myself a buddy. but then, north of the northern province, well beyond the wall, suddenly the valley widens, mountains flatten out and gently roll onto the highlands. expanding horizons, no more worries, no more wishes.
a pasta marco polo with the first grasslands in sight. at the edge of the pastures of the mongols, looking forward to meet some fellow nomads...

out of office / into china

2004-09-20T04:41:00.000+09:00

sunday night, bike is finally packed – a quick out of office mail...
after a short whirlwind stopover in photoshop skied tokyo, a month full of china is waiting. first I'll be crossing desertification crisis areas on a bike trip from beijing to xilinhot in inner mongolia. then later I'll join kobayashi & co in shanghai and wuxi, for a visit to the site + developers of the new town we’ve been working on during the summer. an essential china chapter to the asian experience...

commercial break – thank you SOM Foundation, kind sponsors of this trip. and in case you wonder why I have developed this sudden interest in desertification crisis areas and great green walls... feel free to check the first (1 2 3 4) pages of my travel proposal, as presented to the foundation.

more on desertification and china’s great green wall
> beijing’s desert storm by ron gluckman
> bruce marcot needs a video or film team... hmmm... anybody interested?
> the wired article, passed on to me by rod eighteen months ago,
that triggered my interest for the green wall
> UN Convention to Combat Desertification (everything on desertification)

live from beijing / xilinhot / shanghai

toto & pie

2004-09-15T17:29:00.000+09:00

11 IX 2004
in images and quotes, as seen and heard throughout two wonderful days...
merci à tous!

“A quoi sert de vivre libre, quand on vit sans amour?”

"K'ad wel geziene, Jowan Sigarre was ol ant tempelieren van ip vworrand..." (oma leenknegt)

click on the image to load the movie (7Mb)

"I got completely carried away by the busride with Los Bomberos... it felt like a wedding in a remote village in the Balkans or in Mexico. Like a gypsy wedding, where people have nothing but music and love of life."

"A cette table, on trouve les invités de Genève dont aucun est Suisse..."

"Comme ils étaient mignons, les DJs Mariko et Mattijs..."

"Piere die boterhams waren goe!"

another mini movie, starring tomi “can’t take my eyes off of you” kohiyama! be patient again (3Mb), it’s worth it – full screen, speakers on 10, and dance with the bride...

"Je déteste dire au revoir."

"Ce mariage était une grande réussite, mélange subtile d'émotions, de cultures et de genres, chacun y trouvait sa place avec décontraction."

>
in case you have troubles with the links to the movies, try this, right click on any of the avi files and download...
>
more pictures and memorable quotes? send them over, so I can include them...
>> webzucht foto kluis

opening night

2004-09-15T16:28:00.000+09:00

dear friends and loved ones
krista is opening her stain in brooklyn on saturday.
respect - share my amazement and get dizzy with some new interior shots.
or make me jealous and go see for yourself...

you are invited this saturday the 18th to STAIN bar's opening night. it is finally OK with gov'ment to practice some pleasure at stain bar. ain't no license for the dancing, but you can certainly drink yourself silly (on wine and beer). we frown on bearing arms but bearing other body parts is encouraged.

drink specials and other exciting surprises. tell your friends and loved ones, tell some pleasant stranger.

10 p.m. onwards at 766 grand street, brooklyn. 718/387-7840. no RSVPing necessary but you best be there regardless. of course if you can't come to party, know that you can make this up to me any night of the week for the next FIVE or so years, except for July 10, 2007, maybe i'll take that off.

peace out.
krista

weekje belgië

2004-09-12T16:56:00.000+09:00

brussel tegenlicht

vijvers van woluwe, vlakbij chinese ambassade

orchestra baobab flou artistique

un moment de relax avec mié et tomi

voor de liefhebbers... keekske? le poète? terminator?

geuze

2004-09-04T13:59:00.000+09:00

dutch urban landscape guru adriaan geuze is in town, piloting a workshop called ”tokyo canal project – reinventing tokyo as a water city”.
and he’s been in tokyo before. during a lecture last friday on some of his water related projects, he kind of confessed that the typology of the borneo sporenburg units is based on tokyo’s narrow patio houses.

borneo sporenburg, amsterdam

ichibangai, tokyo

everyone who ever walked around the peninsula will agree that geuze’s narrow houses do very well in amsterdam’s windy docklands. interior patios instead of big windows. low rise high density.

patio in... amsterdam

no need to tell geuze’s lecture was very refreshing, an essential shot of dutch funky pragmatism. nice to see some cows and polders, also. another one of those shots I enjoyed recently - junkspace by rem koolhaas.

the tower

2004-08-30T09:00:00.002+09:00

mount fuji is supposed to be visible from tokyo on clear days, in southwestern direction. but during those previous two months I could never catch a glimpse of japan’s highest. most japanese I met have never climbed it. “it’s a mountain to look at, not to climb"...

shinjuku station, tokyo, saturday night, around 7pm. it has been raining the whole day, most of japan is covered by the wet tail of a typhoon. but we don’t have much of a choice – the seventeen huts along the six hours hiking trail close after august, so this weekend is our last chance. coworker katosan and and his girlfriend maki join us. from shinjuku, a bus takes us directly to gō gō-me (“the fifth station”), halfway up the volcano, in the dark. just like most hikers we choose to climb fujisan at night, to reach the summit for the classic sunrise. I’ll be on top of mount fuji before having seen it. no one of us has ever hiked at night before. we’re all excited. it’s around ten thirty when we leave the last vending machines behind.

fifth station vending machines

after a while, we switch off our headlights, and let our eyes adjust to the night. pure magic. dark outlines of measureless valleys and slopes, veiled in mist, fresh smell of wet trees and rock, silence, only a light drizzle.

climbing out of the forest, we get a wider lens on the situation. looking back, the lights of other climber’s torches resemble a line of fireflies trailing up the volcano scree. and up, way up, the lights of the huts suggest something huge. impossible to get an idea of depth or height. very hard to describe.

up there

heavy “how did they get those up here” steel bearing walls and stabilizing structures shape the highway to heaven. here and there, steps are cut out of the rock, or handrails are provided. the higher we get, the more fujisan feels like a man made structure, like the steps up to a shrine for giants. reminds me of the tower, one of schuiten’s “obscure cities”, based on breugel’s tower of bable. as opposed to breugel, who presents the tower as a gigantic structure in the distance, schuiten takes us inside and tells the story of giovanni batista, a lonely maintainer of a tiny part of the tower. batista only knows his little world, suspended between abyss and towering heights. he sends regular reports to his superiors on the upper levels, and awaits a visit from them. up to a certain day, when he decides to leave his sector and find out what’s going on above. don’t remember if batista finally made it to the top, but I definately remember the dark and overwhelming power of the unknown ‘up there’.

these are the things one thinks about during the first couple of hours.
but gradually air gets thinner, heads lighter, rains heavier. the path changes from a relatively gently climbing dirt road to a steap staircase of sharp lava rocks. and gets more crowded - you'll never walk alone on mount fuji. tomo loses balance once but holds on.
our ridiculously thin raincoats are no match for the rain. we get completely soaked. another hour or so later, I can only think of the freezing cold, of the next rock to place my foot on, and of the freezing cold.

hiking buddies katosan and makisan

I’ll never forget tomo’s face in my headlight as we’re trying to think straight and decide what to do, under the dripping awning of a hut. superpale, eyes and lips purple, shaking. sure mine looked exactly the same. but we’re lucky. unlike all the previous huts, this one has some empty beds. decision is made very quickly. staying up for the rest of the night in this apocalypse is not an acceptable alternative to a wooden roof, a bunk bed, a sleeping bag, and a dry t-shirt...

sunday morning, 7am, check out time. we slowly realize where we are. eighth station, at 3100m, still at least two hours from the top. it’s still raining, even more... intensity. the air is brighter, of course, but the visibility is hardly better than on the way up. not much of a sunrise we missed.

soon we start the descent. a little demanding for my brandnew right ankle ligaments. agile samurai katosan skips down the path. with a decent eighth station raincoat and my feet wrapped in plastic bags it’s easier to forget the rain though. incredible how badly prepared we were for this trip.

fujinautes trailing back to the fifth station

but no excuses. we're defeated by fujisan. back home, I realize I still haven’t even seen the mountain. revenge next year.

wesley

2004-08-27T16:57:00.000+09:00

wesley willis died one year ago.
recording artist of more than 50 albums, chicago cityscape artist, rock ‘n’ roll working class dog to the max, ridiculed by the howard sterns of this world, loved like a milkshake by the others. introduced to me by transam bike buddy justin as a “thug”, and since then occupying a special place in my pantheon.

“His songs are simultaneously disturbing, hilarious, blunt, and intoxicating. Wesley's sheer excitement and unaffected honesty about every cultural phenomenon, from a city bus ride to McDonald's, coupled with a refreshingly wacky sense of humor, define his music as truly individual.”

wesley’s page (with free mp3s) at alternative tentacles records
wesley willis lyrics
wesley willis tribute “Loved Like a Milkshake”
wesley willis paintings

a night in ginza

2004-08-27T16:55:00.000+09:00

tokyo international forum, designed by rafael viñoly, a ten years old bubble economy fantasy. again a clear concept at work: a giant glassy wedge of public nothingness, with vertiginous overpasses (gloriously empty), combined with a high density complex of meeting rooms and auditoriums and related facilities (hyperfull). all of this crammed into one of tokyo’s busiest shopping districts, but very fluently connected to all the different levels of the surrounding city. from around, the roof structure looks like a giant whale skeleton..

just a couple of steps from viñoly’s whale, robata (“near the fireplace”) is known as one of tokyo’s most atmospheric restaurants. indeed, the wood of the interior and the staff all seem to be aromatized by the steaming dishes. was all of japan like this a hundred years ago? is this real?

robata is organized as an open kitchen, big wooden bowls full of delicacies displayed around it. but don’t get me started on food guys. tokyo food is worth a serparate blog, with two postings a day.

yurakucho (“fun town”) has tons of small yakitori restaurants under the train tracks. feels a lot like bangkok. close but opposite to ginza, high end long established shopping district, rather dead at night according to tokyo’s standards.

around midnight, a ginza pachinko (slot machine paradise) closes for the day. customers in white shirts queuing all around the coffee bar to cash their fortune.

kashi 911

2004-08-22T13:45:00.000+09:00

moore - "I won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival"
bush - "I lost Best Actor"
"in newspapers, on television, on the radio, in magazines - don't believe what you're told about bush. go see this movie"
"for all the japanese who believe in freedom"
kashi 911 official website

get ready for the republican convention in new york and download cleaned up high res graffiti templates of bush and moore!

lofts in translation

2004-08-20T14:09:00.000+09:00

corey (left) and alex (right) in a nutshell: graduated from mArch columbia in may, infamous from the NY architectural league housing exhibition (remember spending half a day along that huge timeline running through the whole show, well that’s alex and corey), now on asian travels with a kinne scholarship. ‘capitalizing’ on their new york housing experience, they’re comparing SOHO units in beijing and tokyo. SOHO stands for ‘Small Office at HOme’, a popular apartment typology for emerging economies and capsular societies. or for hiding mistresses and drugs and yakuza monkey fights, as they are finding out... lofts in translation. kinne deluxe actually – while setting up contacts in asia, they were offered a job for june and july in chengdou, central china. after japan, they’re going back to new york (eyes to the ground, slightly sighing), to start working with the league on the publication of their timeline.

but yesterday no capitalizing, just some beeru and grilled delicacies in the shibuya yakitori places, next to the train tracks, hardly big enough for two new york giants.
great talks, familiar sounds, strikingly parallel experiences - in suspension between new york and asia and housing projects in china...

la strada

2004-08-20T13:53:00.000+09:00

pieter asked me to “keep my eyes open” for possible business plans in tokyo. an interesting perspective – I don’t really look at the world through business glasses. of course, everything already exists here. maybe more so than anywhere else. still the margin seems large enough for initiative – I see a lot of relatively young people setting up their own business. a couple of stains for example, especially in daykanyama and nakameguro, trendy neighborhoods around the office.
for a while I thought a good take out pizzeria could be something to start with for pieter. preferably around the office. tomo agreed, as long as he would capitalize on his "wild" (sic) physical assets... but the other day, pizzeria "la strada" landed right outside our front door, its small sign saying “fresh hand made pizza, please allow ten minutes for preparing”.

45°C where katosan is walking

300°C where the pizzaman is working

check out the details... two pizzas are ready, neatly wrapped in customized bags

and... the pizza was delicious, without mayonaise, unlike most of its japanese nephews. but don’t give up hopes pieter - from krista and fara I know competition is good for a business.

on a bus ride to immigration, I talked to an australian guy who set up business in tokyo a couple of years ago. he’s selling fresh dutch cookies, mainly to hotels and restaurant buffets.
he confirmed that strong concepts and good products go a long way here.

jan's guide to tokyo business
> choose a specific concept (a parisian bakery, a leuven bar, an upper east side chocolate house, an milanese risotteria) and make no compromises
> don’t translate, even if the result is completely cryptical to most of your potential customers
> invest in design to construct your concept on a couple of square meters

hanabi

2004-08-16T01:10:00.000+09:00

this morning heavy summer rains passed through the city, and temperature dropped to 28.5°C. a row of 40 consecutive manatsubi ("real summer days", with maximum temperatures higher than 30°C) has been brought to an end. still a record in the history of the empire.

seaside skyscraper
tokyo gets hotter every year, according to long term inhabitant kobayashi. and the statistics seem to prove him right (1995 held the previous record, with 37 manatsubi). there's very few green holes in tokyo's huge concrete and asphalt slab. air conditioners heat up the outside air. and chunky skyscrapers at the seaside (one by 'green architect' rogers by the way) prevent ocean winds to come in. add this up and you get 'tokyo heat island'. but today no complaints...

update! kijk eens daar, de standaard leest mee, of "my name is kobayashi. I work for de standaard" hotspot tokyo!

wakisan, next to tomo, in yukata
on saturday, we went firework spotting from wakisans balcony. some of you might recognize my mojito mixing shirt - unfortunately no fresh mint in town so no mojitos, and no tokyo budina launching event. made pineapple cocktails instead... hanabi ("flower fire") festivals are big here, almost every weekend you can hear mute explosions in the distance, and tons of excitement closer by. and the one of saturday was apparently tokyo's biggest. yachts lining up in the canal below, trains packed, with girls in yukata, boyfriends in... shorts.

this one goes out my buddy rod and his spanking new wife gladys, fireworks couple to the max, married in new york a couple of hours before this spectacle was unleashed over tokyo bay.

backdoor to buddha

2004-08-15T02:39:00.000+09:00

daibutsu, kamakura, 750 years old

styrofoam stories

2004-08-15T02:29:00.000+09:00

we work a lot with models here. the model room is one of the busiest corners of the office, and I guess this is the case in a lot of japanese architecture firms. real study models, in all sizes and scales, a constant third dimension check. at a certain time, I was cruising at an average of a model a day.

for most talks, we sit around a model, and discuss with knife and glue, casting different options directly in styrofoam and cardboard. from these modified/mutilated models, plans are composed – unusual (for me) but fresh to work in this direction. design happens in three dimensions here, not on drawings, let alone on computer screens.

tiny spaces big model
apartment typologies are simulated on a scale of 1 to 20, more or less the scale of the barbie house.

picture taken from within the model

big spaces tiny model
urban design decisions are made on 1 to 500 scale models – like the one you can see on the top picture.
also useful for quick but effective renderings – close-up pictures of the model, add photoshop sky and inhabitants, done.

compare with more time consuming renderings (drawings, based on a digital 3d model, rendered with 3dsmax and photoshop).

meeting

2004-08-13T03:53:00.000+09:00

another meeting last night. a little longer than the previous one, 5:30pm through 11:45pm this time, but more food, less opinions so more decisions, and wet-type tissue.

the business card

2004-08-11T10:06:00.000+09:00

it was unavoidable, and kind of urgent. a couple of times, I had failed to offer something in return of a skillfully presented business card. even failed to say something.
so, time to make me a company business card, my first one ever. kobayashisan insisted on giving me both a name in japanese characters (purely phonetic), and a set of chinese kanjis, adding meaning to the sounds. finding a phonetic equivalent for alien sounds like the double e, ‘kn’ and ‘gt’ of my unpronouncable last name was only a minor obstacle for the flexible japanese language. “ja nu lin ku ni hu to” might look a little off, yet pronounced by a random japanese it sounds surprisingly close to the original. much closer than any french ever got.

agitation in the office with the selection of ‘my’ chinese characters. multiple chinese characters correspond with each sound, so combinations are endless. everybody in the office took a break to shoot, kobayashisan refereeing professionally. at a certain point, both ‘agony’ and ‘disease’ were in the running (everyone cracking up), but the kanjis that finally made it say ‘arrow’ ‘open sky, peaceful’ ‘wheel’ ‘country’ ‘man’. the guy from the country of the bike shoots an arrow to the open sky.

“yoroshiku onegai shimasu” accompanies business card exchange, equivalent of “nice to meet you”. also acceptable is a simple “jan desu”, “I am jan”. “jan desu” could also be translated as “this is jan”. kind of prefer to think of this last interpretation, while offering my card, with both hands, text rightly directed, bowing.

couple of days ago, antonio from torino joined the firm...

fudōmae

2004-08-08T13:49:00.000+09:00

stress on the ‘o’. love it when the voice in the train announces my stop. fudoooomae – only one stop ‘outisde’ of the yamanote line, the circular trainline that somehow defines central tokyo. still, shinjuku and shibuya, tokyo’s times square districts, are only a couple of stops away.
like a lot of tokyo neigborhoods, fudōmae hides – on the backside of the big expressways and traintracks – a labyrinth of tiny alleys, small shops, restaurants, lowrise residences, old trees, and here and there a temple or a shrine, hardly visible at the end of a long set of steps. on top of that, fudōmae has retained a certain rural feel to it. a great place to live – fort greene of tokyo... maybe east village.

people lining up at the neighborhood’s favorite eel place

old and young and motorbikes

fudōmae means “in front of the fudo”. the fudo, “he who doesn’t move, he who doesn't change his mind”, is a mythical knight who protects the neighborhood from evil spirits. a friendly guy, easier to approach than a temple or a shrine, even though he doesn’t move and looks kind of angry.

today a festival lured us into the fudo grounds. a drummer on a tower, dotted with lanterns, the elderly women of the neighborhood performing dances around the tower, kids joining in. tomo told me the dances were originally performed to entertain the farmers during the lazy hot and humid days of the summer season, before harvesting work starts in september. the movements of the women, neatly dressed in black yukata, resemble different types of field work. foodstalls serving octopus on skewers, the “isn’t it hot today” speech of the local mayor, strolling families, chriping criquets, happy faces, no cellphones. hard to imagine we’re in tokyo, only a couple of stops from sinjuku.