Sucrette – My Brilliant Summer feat.Hitoshi Koizumi（soda fountains）
I had been so busy the weeks before, I managed to arrive in Tokyo without giving it a single prep thought. I hadn’t made a sigle plan, looked up anything, or thought to bring any of the amazing books I had purchased from earthquake relief fundraisers. Luckily, I remembered that back in the day, I bought both paper AND digital copies of the Tokyo zine, made by one of my FAVORITE bloggers, Hello Sandwich! I was able to dig the digital version out of an ancient email and get to to a neighborhood that I had never been too! Shimokitazawa, was full of adorable shops, punk rock records and coffee shops…it was perfect and turns out all I had time for ^-^
I was lucky enough to spend some time in South Korea for work, recently!
We were on a pretty tight schedule, but we had one afternoon to explore the Korean Folk Museum in Seoul and Gyeongbokgung Palace which translates to “Palace of Shining Happiness.” This of course, left me wanting more….
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In the world before the sun and the moon, only the stars existed.
It was in these early days that there lived siblings: Haesik (해식) the older brother and Dalsun (달순) the younger sister.
Their mother was a poor peasant woman who sold rice-cakes for a living.
The mother was returning from the village one day when she was encountered by a tiger perched on a hill demanding a rice-cake in exchange for sparing her life.
She gave it to him and the tiger went away, only to appear before her at the next hill; this time demanding two rice cakes.
She gave him the cakes, only to find him again on the third hill, this time asking for four rice cakes.
When the mother finally ran out of rice cakes to feed him, the tiger threatened to devour her.
The mother pleaded, saying she was the sole mother of two children. Upon hearing this the tiger’s hunger grew even more vicious.
He devoured the mother and then took on her clothing as a disguise. He then made his way to the house where he knew the children awaited.
At the house the children were worried that their mother was not returning.
Haesik suggested they lock the door, when he heard a voice calling them from outside. Dalsun, the younger, thought it was her mother, but Haesik knew the voice was different and sensed that something was not right.
The tiger urged them to open the door, but Haesik staunchly refused.
Not giving in, the tiger used some of the powder left from the rice cakes and applied it on the back of his hand, making them look white.
When he inserted his fingers through a space in the door, Dalsun became convinced that it was their mother and immediately opened the door.
The tiger chased them until the children climbed up to the safety of a tree.
When the tiger found an axe in the house and began chopping down on the tree, Dalsun made a prayer asking the heavens to send down a strong rope if they should be saved and a rotten rope if they were to be damned.
A strong rope was sent down, and both siblings climbed up until they reached the heavens.
Seeing this, the tiger made a similar request, but the rope he got was rotten and he fell in a millet field. His blood stained the millet and this is why millet stalk is said to be red.
In heaven, Haesik became the sun (Haennim 햇님) and Dalsun became the moon (Dallim 달님), but later Dalsun complained that she was afraid of the dark.
Thus Haesik decided to stand in for her so that Dalsun could become the sun.
I recently went to a week-long, UGL training course at Näsby Slott in Taby, Sweden. I found myself listening to these two Sin Fang covers all week, as I wandered around the historic grounds of the manor.
Now that I have had time to process it, UGL was more of a training course in group dynamics than leadership. It was an incredibly valuable but bizarre experience (at least for me). I was with 11 other people from six different countries, who all worked for Swedish companies. Some from big companies, some from small, all with different motivations in work and life. I suppose, since someone at some point had chosen each of us to attend the course, we are all predisposed to achieve, and I think that this was maybe the one common thread with everyone there. Everyone wanted success or to achieve the desired end-result. It then quickly became a week-long debate in, what is the desired result? Who determines was success means? What is the quickest way to get to success and at what expense?
The objective and values of the course are everything that you would expect from a leadership training course: effective communication, feedback, handling conflict, etc. but I think that the most valuable part of the experience was the amount of emphasis put on reflection, both individual reflection and group reflection. I thought of myself as an introspective person before the course, but this was at a whole different level. To me introspection was something that had to happen naturally – you don’t plan time for introspection.
In business we are always moving so fast, the strategist in me really learned a lot from this scheduled reflection time. Sometimes taking a step back (a real step back, and not a quick pause) can before much more efficient and actually the fastest route in the long-term. I am a very macro thinker so, I am excited about exploring this further and incorporating more reflection into my professional life. Of course, all of this planned reflection time was painfully awkward in the beginning (and it still is) but I am believer in iterative creative processes. I don’t think that you can force or plan creativity, but I do think the more chances we give ourselves to create, the more chances we give ourselves to have those “ah ha” moments. I would rather get the the end result through rounds of experimentation then pontificating until I have exactly the right answer. Partially because those round of experience will possibly become valuable in the future when I am working on something else.
So, for me it makes since that reflection could also be something (a bit) scheduled or iterative. I used to be so diligent with yoga, but as my travel schedule has become more and more hectic over the years, I have let it and too many other routines slip. A few weeks ago, in London, I had a good talk with Josh(flâneur extraordinaire) about the importance of establishing routines when traveling. It can be so easy to slip into a place of ambivalence when you are always on the road, floating between the reality of back home and the present albeit momentary state of being.
Do you have any routines when you travel, to always feel grounded? I’ve started packing tea, granola and a yoga DVD in my suitcase and am making a point to always unpack (thanks, Josh).
Thomas, Sarah and I are going to bring the Elderflower soda to Brooklyn and become bajillionaires…
Need this head decoration!
We ordered one, but the chef insisted that Sarah and I each have our own crème brûlée. As I picked up my spoon I couldn’t help to think of this scene, “Amélie is a shy young woman with a pronounced taste for all life’s small pleasures : immersing one’s hand in a sack of grain, craking the crust of a crème brulée with the back of a teaspoon or skipping stones on the Canal St-Martin.” It made me smile inside (and outside) which made blush and hope that people wouldn’t notice and ask me what I was thinking about….
Swoonfest at the Henrik Vibskov shop. Very nervous about my new apartment being so close to his new Broome Street boutique. Eep! Stine Goya and Kron so close to home, now!
Good Morning, London, let’s get this party started…
Now in Karlskrona, Sweden. I walked into a coffee shop and looked into the case and upon seeing this, immediately remembered Maria telling my about these Chokladbollars in Sweden. For those of you (emh, Liza) with time and kitchens, here is the recipe in English.
Someone told me that a popular 80′s movie was shot in the square of Karlskrona (which after Red Square, is the largest in Europe). On the walk from the bar back to the hotel, I may have told a small group of HIMC folk this story, (I was still on the fence about believing). They got very and excited and even asked the falafel cart guy, who corroborated the story! Turns out, it’s not true o.O
<3 <3
Petter cooked dinner in his GIANT apartment. I love that where ever I go in the world, there is always this little piece of home :)
A little sad to only have two days in Stockholm, I forgot how much I love this city….hotel court yard. The good news is, I will be back in a few weeks :)
It will be interesting to see how the next generation defines the word friend. In the last ten years, the internet as made us like, heart, fan, group, list, categorize, star, rank , tag, etc. our friends. Scientists have hypothesized how many friends we can cognitively have and brands, bands, celebrities and dead poets have decided that they want to be our friends too.
In some case, the word friend has become so ubiquitous that it means every person that I have met (in real life or virtually) and everything that I like (or want people to think that I like). This bothers me, so I do my best to separate things by platform – Linked in for business, Facebook for IRL friends,Twitter for anything, but inevitably the lines blur and for various societal perceptions and technical rules you can’t actually control anything, so you have to start grouping and filtering people like cards in a Rolodex.
I feel like I used to be able to separate friends from acquaintances because friends were the people who knew what bands I liked and who I was dating and when I was sick, but if you are reading this blog, then you probably know those things about me, and it’s possible that we have never even met….
I have so many amazing friends around the world, that sometimes missing them hurts. Before the holidays, I was hanging out with my friend Kaarin, who only lives a four-hour train ride away, but I’ve managed to see my friends n Zagreb more often than her, in the last three years. We are both too busy trying to figure out the next chapter of our lives. But she is the type of friend that I can talk to every three years and still manage to never skip a beat. She’s the kind of friend that when she asks, “Are you dating anyone?” and I say, “Er.” I have to explain every date and text message I have had for the last three years, so she knows exactly what that “Er” means.
Kaarin and I met about 5 years ago through a mutual friend and I ended up spending the holidays with her family. We went to visit her grandmother in Queens who, all night, tried to feed me blood-sausage and showed me pages and pages of books on Estonia, where she and her husband had come from more than 60 years before. A few months later, I went to Tallinn, so I could see this fairy tale city for myself.
It was a great adventure. It rained a lot. I made a friend that wore a Strokes t-shirt, who now sends me bands from Canada. I broke my elbow in a club that played Vanilla Ice. I watched a wedding photo shoot where the bridesmaids wore spandex leopard print dresses. I met so many people (and was scared to go on to Russia with my broken elbow) that I stayed an extra week. I am still not really sure why, but I know that it’s a place I will visit again and to this day when people ask my favorite places I have traveled, Estonia is always on the short list.
Recently, Kaarin’s grandmother has had to move in with them, and I went back to Queens to help Kaarin pack up her house. Even though I had only spent that one Christmas night with her grandmother and had never met her grandfather, I felt so close to both of them as I helped pack decades of their history – uncovering flags, english dictionaries, traditional folk costumes, wedding dresses, cabinet maker’s tools and a giant box of Estonian love letter’s written during WWII, as we listened to Mumford & Sons on repeat for 2 days straight.
I am thankful for my friends. This year I am going to be more conscious of staying in touch and collaborating more with you. <3 <3 <3
I managed to get around the city a bit, yesterday, thanks to our first weekend of spring weather. The nice weather came just in time because it was the final day of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s show Multiple Shadow House at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
The first time I saw Eliasson’s work was the epic Weather Project in London’s Tate Modern back in 2003.
Multiple Shadow House was the total opposite experience but awesome, none-the-less. While The Weather Project was epic and overwhelming and breathtaking, his current exhibition was playful and intimate. (Alexandra and I were lucky enough to be the only people on the 1st floor, while we explored.)
Olafur Eliasson’s (B. 1967) sixth solo show at the gallery continues his exploration of and experimentation with modes of perception and the experience of space and time. Focusing on movement, color, and light – and the interplay between the three phenomena – the exhibition involves the viewer in a collaborative creative process. Throughout his career, Eliasson has challenged the notion of the artwork as a static object, instead suggesting that the meaning and generative potential of each work lies in the exchange between the piece and the viewer. It is the visitor’s experience, his or her subjective perception and mediation of the work that activates it; in turn Eliasson’s installations, public projects, photographs and paintings prompt a new awareness in the visitor of his or her own methods of interpreting the world.
Within the main gallery space, an abstract structure outlines a living space, intimate and domestic in scale. The walls of Multiple shadow house (2010) are comprised of a simple wooden framework supporting large expanses of projection screens. Groups of projection lamps cast steady light upon the screens, yet their effects remain unarticulated until visitors interact with the structure. Upon entering, the visitors block the individual sources of light and cast variously colored shadows that change according to their movements. The work is a situation experienced as it is created. The user negotiates and constructs his or her own surroundings, and the architecture is animated by the visitor.
The perception of visual imagery in the form of color and light is also addressed in Abstract afterimage star (2008), installed in the side gallery space upstairs. Six spotlights are synced to project geometrical forms in blue, yellow, magenta, green, and turquoise onto the wall, intersecting and layering, and building towards a narrative of Constructivist abstraction. As the intense projections fade in and out, complimentary afterimages stay on the visitor’s retina and appear to multiply the color compositions. As a result, the film is only partially produced by the spotlights’ projection; the rest is contributed by the viewer.
In the main gallery upstairs, Eliasson exhibits a series of watercolor drawings on paper. Configured in sequences, they use ellipses and circles as narrative exercises on the perception of space and movement. While shades and hues play an important part in these watercolors, the oil painting Colour experiment no. 3 (2009) is part of ongoing research into color conducted at Studio Olafur Eliasson. The studio has been developing a set of handmade oil paints that range through the full spectrum of visible light, experimenting with their physical properties and interactions. Circular in form, the painting expands on the traditional model of a color wheel, wherein each of 360 degrees is painted in one color and corresponds to its complementary afterimage located directly across from itself.
Just wanted to take a second to say that I LOVE BELGRADE! I could easily live there. I don’t know if I was just ecstatic to be done with Romanian food poisoning and blizzards but this city was amazing and I can’t wait to go back! By far, the friendliest people I have ever encountered. To all of the people out there posting on the internet about how dirty this city is, get a grip (or better yet, go spend your holidays in Sweden!)
I didn’t take too many photos in belgrade; I was too busy relaxing, basking in the freakishly warm weather, getting lost in the little streets, deciphering cyrillic and drinking Turkish (I mean Serbian) coffee. Here are a few:
