I was very impressed by the Miyako Odori Geisha dance when I was in Kyoto last year. The music was fascinating because of its expressiveness and sophistication, broken purposefully by exclamations that added to the feeling of restrained eloquence. It gave me the idea to post few videos of Japanese music, here they are!
The soundtrack of Akira (1988) had also parts of classical Japanese music…
There are great Japanese music concerts in Europe, I attended to one few months after my trip to Japan at the Japanese Culture Institute of Cologne (it was played then by Kikuchi Naoko and Carin Levine). There seems to be a well established practice of playing the koto in disruptive ways…
Play Time (1967) by Jacques Tati is a relatively unknown movie. It is a more than two hours long and highly sophisticated visual comedy with nearly no dialogues, which probably explains why it wasn’t a big success in the box office. The film is however the best criticism of modern society that I have ever seen, and is still very relevant today. It is also a sharp criticism on modern architecture, both capturing the ideals of modernism and pointing at its delusiveness.
I love concrete and brutalism. Concrete is crude and fits well in a natural environment. It doesn’t need paint and decorative accessories. It is there and fills the space.
Japan is full of beautiful gardens, but none of them impressed me as much as the Ryoan-ji garden in Kyoto. The best is to visit the Zen garden early in the morning before the other tourists come in, and to be alone in front of the masterpiece. The garden itself is small and very simple, but once you have seen it, all other gardens seem gimmicky and missing the essential. Many books have been published about this garden, but one specific aspect that struck me is its relation with the outside. The walled garden is actually within a bigger garden, and even though you cannot see it from the inside, you can hear it and see the branches of the trees. I would even say that the best way to enjoy the outside garden is from the Ryoan-ji garden. It is the essence of any garden, offering a window to the outside world, a meaningful perspective.
