aesthetics of joy

From the moment I found out my friend Mara and her husband Andrew were going to be spending a year in Florence, I started dreaming about a trip. Not that I haven’t been before, but Mara, the calligrapher/journalist behind Neither Snow, has the best taste in just about everything. Yes, Italy is amazing, but Mara’s Italy is quadruply amazing.

So today I get on a plane bound for Italy, for five days in this inspiring world of languid names and soft colors, and I’m pretty much beside myself with excitement. You may have noticed it’s been quiet around here. I realized earlier this week how much I need a vacation. Life has been, in a word, abundant lately. Beautifully so, but the circuits can get overwhelmed, especially if you’re me and you don’t know when to rest or pause. I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve started over the last couple of months, and left hanging unfinished. I’ve learned that for me this is a sign of the need to rest and re-inspire with new images and new places, and new ways to be curious.

These images are all from Mara’s instagram feed. Follow her for more from her amazing eye, and I’ll see you, bursting with energy I’m sure, next week!

Xx Ingrid

For a reserved culture, the Japanese certainly aren’t shy about color. Everywhere in Tokyo you find pops of the brightest hues, on doors and signage, traffic cones and taxicabs. The color comes in broad swathes and little bursts. Sometimes it’s functional color, telling you where to go or what to pay attention to. A big, bold color system like the one above makes an incredibly complex train system effortlessly navigable by non-Japanese speakers. At other times it’s purely joyful, a gratuitous flick of the paintbrush, a little dance of neon whose only purpose is to make you feel good.

Where along the way to becoming a civilized society did we lose color? This is the question I’ve been asking myself since the trip, as I’ve tried to understand the differences in how Americans and Japanese use color in our environment. Seriously, in the West our relationship to color is utterly dysfunctional. In office cubicles, condo complexes, subways, highways, sidewalks, malls — the contexts we spend most of our time in — the palette is a monochromatic blur of industrial taupes and dingy greys.

It would be wrong to say there’s no color in our urban landscapes. But look down a highway or in a city center and take notice: where do you see it? In the ads, of course. We damp down our rooms and streets so that the billboards can pop out, ensuring we can’t miss their consumerist banners. We are stingy with color where it could benefit the collective good; we are profligate with it when it’s a conduit to corporate gain.

In Japan, it is as if everyone understands the value of color, and adheres to a code to use it in a sensitive yet exuberant way.

This “book bar” at the Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama (one of the absolute don’t miss spots if you’re planning a trip to Tokyo) strikes me as a perfect example of relevant, natural color, harnessed in a delightful way.

These to-die-for lamps in the lobby of the Claska hotel are a perfect example of thoughtful color use. It’s so Japanese to put the color on the inside, where it isn’t aggressive and where the light can bring the color alive with its soft glow. More pops of color below (a few of which couldn’t help but make their way into my suitcase): the gallery at the Impossible Project, lighting from the amazing Danish flower shop Nicolai Bergman in Aoyama, a Patricia Urquiola chair in the roof garden at the Tokyu Plaza shopping center, colorful washi tapes at Tokyu Hands, colored pencils at stationery mecca Itoya, and joy stickers from Kiddyland.

The taxicabs! We spent an inordinate amount of time taking pictures of taxicabs, with their vibrant colors and playful stripes, checks, and patterns. They look like giant toy cars driving around the city. I can’t complain, living in a city that paints its taxis cheery yellow, but I do think there is something about the Japanese taxi palette that is really charming.

I saw dots everywhere in Tokyo. The joy of polka dots is probably another post entirely, but I loved seeing these various spots around the city. My absolute favorite was happening upon the red and white spotted packages of Tsumori Chisato outside the store (bottom left), ready for pickup. Can you imagine receiving one in the mail? How boring an Amazon box seems by comparison… On the bottom right is work by Koichiro Kimura, from his quirky and amazing gallery space in Aoyama.

It was also fun to stumble upon a Tokyo installation of Damien Hirst’s dots exhibit in the new Hikarie center. I had seen them at the two Chelsea Gagosian galleries earlier this year, but seeing them in Japan, they just seemed so perfectly at home. I love how even the exhibit key (bottom left) has a charming quality to it.

Images: mine and Erika Lee’s

In May, I went to Tokyo for work. (If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen a number of photos with the tag #joyinjapan.) For some, this might mean sitting in a conference center most of the time, getting to eat some sushi between lectures and walk around Shibuya a bit. But lucky me (and I mean that — lucky, lucky me), my job involves being completely out there, talking to people, experiencing the city’s smells, sounds, and colors, drinking a place in until I’m drunk.

Where do I begin with it all? I felt so joyful in Japan I could hardly stand it. Like when someone is tickling you and you’re laughing and you get to a point where feel like you’re going to explode and you beg them to stop — “Please, please, no more!” — and as the feeling subsides and you’re able to breathe again a quiet little voice pipes up inside you, whispering…

“More. Please, just a little more.”

There isn’t one thing to point to, but a thousand small gestures that accumulate to leave you almost woozy with delight. Tokyo is a relentless layering of vibrant color palettes, cute icons, sweet miniatures, subtle textures, and delicate objects arranged just so. (And also some things that are so crazy they make your head spin around in full revolutions.) It’s a testament to a people that has a true material culture, a people that feels kinship with the objects in their lives and understands that beautiful things are valuable not as status symbols but because they suffuse beauty into the spaces around them.

Alain de Botton writes: “What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.” This is the crux of what I felt in Tokyo. I sensed the beauty that emanated from the perfectly balanced, crafted way of things, and wanted to strive for more of this in myself. A beautifully crafted plate of food or a carefully lettered sign showed care, and it made me want to slow down and appreciate the care my hosts put into these small gestures. My travel companions and I all changed our behavior over the course of the week. We were more polite, we noticed more, we ate more slowly. We let the place change us in a good way.

Every day we walked the city until our feet hurt. At night, I would wake up at about 4am from the jet lag, my feet still pulsing, hoping a few more hours of sleep would ease them. We took thousands of photos. There was a surprise around nearly every corner — we were afraid to put our cameras away. My travel companions, fellow IDEOers Anthony and Erika, and I (all above) were lucky to have some amazing hosts. In some of my photos you’ll see Mike, a good friend of mine since my first day at IDEO, who is now in our Tokyo office. He wins the “host of the year” award, making sure we saw his favorite places (such as the tiny coffee shop pictured top right and lower left, below), ordered for us in places with no English menus, and even pointed us towards very specific observations, like that that gorgeous reflection of the copper sink in Higashiyama’s bathrooms (below).

I was also excited to spend some time with Azusa, a friend of mine from Pratt (you may remember her joyful work from this post a few years back). Azusa took us one night to get yuzu ramen (noodles flavored with yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit) and after, we discovered a tiny little bar with only about ten seats. There, a bartender proceeded to make the most thoughtful screwdriver I’ve ever seen. The screwdriver must be the most thoughtless of cocktails, sloshed together in questionable proportions, often in a Solo cup. But this bartender showed me the screwdriver-as-art-form: squeezing the juice by hand, shaking the drink as if he were in slow motion. I don’t think I will ever see a cocktail performed in that way again, totally simple, yet with honor for its simplicity.

We stayed our last few nights at the Claska, technically the only boutique hotel in Tokyo. The Claska is a wonderful, odd place for many reasons. It is a bit out of the way, but it has a gorgeous sixties modern lobby and the most beautiful gift shop, full of perfect, quirky artifacts. But by far my favorite feature of the Claska is the retro dog grooming salon just off the lobby (pictured above). A long window, positioned at eye level just by the lobby bar, peeks into the space, where you can watch dogs get fluffed to the max by a passel of groomers using humorously space-age dryers. I never saw a dog walk out of there that didn’t look like it couldn’t blow away on a light wind.

A highlight was a visit to Midori Sushi in Shibuya, where you order from an iPad and the sushi is delivered to your table by toy trains. Toy! Trains! You might think that with such an emphasis on precision and self-control, the Japanese would not show much evidence of their “inner child.” But in fact, the inner child is alive and well in Japan, breaking through in an unabashed embrace of cuteness and play, even in serious situations. The toy train idea is something that seems to have been thought up by an eight year-old. Here in the states it would be discarded as ridiculous, but fortunately the Japanese don’t censor themselves in this way.

On our very last day in Tokyo, Erika and I were wandering around the area near Gakugei-Daigaku station and spotted these beautiful books. Stripped of their jackets, they were selling for pennies apiece, and we spent the better part of an hour looking for ones with interesting illustrations to bring back with us. Inside one were these very simple, beautiful erotic line drawings. (Japan has a long tradition of exuberant erotic art, mostly woodblock prints known as shunga.) Azusa was embarrassed but obliging in translating the chapter headers for us. (Nothing too exciting, or I promise I would’ve written them down to share.)

Hidari Pocket in Naka Meguro is the tiniest, cutest café I have ever seen. The garlands, the little drawings on the side of the van, the tiny weathered stools, the drawings of flowers in the foam on the mocha — it was just too much. In moments like this, we often found ourselves overcome, aesthetically, with the experiences we were having. It was almost as if the circuits in our brains couldn’t handle all the beauty, harmony, cuteness, and cleverness. By a few days in, we actually coined a name for this: design convulsions. Suffice it to say, when three out of four designers at a table have their cameras pointed at a very ordinary object, you can be pretty sure it’s a collective design convulsion.

There is a palimpsestic quality to Tokyo that you start to discover, as you adjust to it and it starts to unfold for you. There are layers that smack you in the face with their daring or their sweetness. But underpinning these are tiers of sensation: patterns, textures, and reflections that are seductive in their simplicity. I came back so filled with inspiration, I was nearly vibrating. I’ll share more in the coming days, about some specific things that just took my breath away. In the meantime, have you been to Tokyo? What joys did you see there?

Images: a mix of mine and Erika Lee’s; most of the better ones are Erika’s!

Some vacations are about the sights you ache to see, the wonders of the world, the foreign landmarks that transform you. Others are much more prosaic, filling a need to slow down, immerse in simple pleasures, and feel human. (Both have their joys, but it is hard to have both at the same time.) Iceland for me was the former. And Ireland is the latter.

I blithely ignored all the must-see lists on this one. Every person who started a sentence with, “But you can’t go to Ireland without going to–” was met with a firm Diana Ross hand gesture. I wasn’t after transcendence. I was after a simple, quiet, textural haven. An oasis in which to hear myself think.

I set as my mission for the holiday (and yes, I had a mission – Type A is Type A, no matter we we are) to say yes to all things lovely, and no to all things taxing. So it’s lucky I ended up at Ballyvollane House, a family-owned inn where there are so many lovely things to say yes to. Yes to a homemade ham sandwich and a pot of tea in the sunny back garden. Yes to reading by the fire in the drawing room. Yes to a soak in the claw-foot tub. Yes to a walk around the grounds accompanied by Dumpling, a hedonistic terrier, who knows all the good spots and can’t resist a splash in the muddy ponds. Yes to orange-yolked eggs freshly laid by the hens out back, yes to rocket and fennel salad that tastes like it just came out of the ground, yes to subtly sweet vanilla-poached pears and cinnamon plums. Yes yes yes to homemade blackberry cordial, afternoon bellinis, and chocolate cookies that appear each night in your room in a mason jar. Yes to magnolias and birdsong and a tutorial in daffodils by Fleur, the youngest of the proprietors’ well-mannered children. (“When they’re new they’re nice and yellow, but then they get soggy.” So true.) In short, yes to the good life, experienced in thoughtful little moments, with no pretension or pressure whatsoever.

As someone who lacks the talent for moderation and has a tendency to forget to step away from the laptop, sleep eight full hours, and engage in activities in the real world, you must know that this place is truly my definition of heaven. There doesn’t seem to be any choice but to go with the flow. Justin and Jenny Green, the owners of Ballyvolane, do everything they can to make the place feel welcoming and intimate, without any of the kitsch of a typical B&B. It makes sense that it was Justin’s childhood home; it feels like a family place, a place with roots. (As a side note, they also do parties, meaning mostly weddings, and you can imagine a pretty magazine-worthy shindig happening here.)

In these days of devices and always-on lifestyles, a good oasis is a valuable find. Many places claim to help you relax, and they can force you to detach from the things that are stressing you out, but few can do the harder thing, which is to softly connect you back to the things that will renew your zeal for making meaning in the world. It’s worth remembering that a place can transform you. Not just in big ways, as when you’re standing at the base of a canyon or under a desert-sky full of stars. But in little ways that create beautiful immediacy. Go towards the beauty, or create it, and it will repay you far more than the cost of your travels.

Images, mine. And thanks to Designtripper for the recommendation that inspired the trip.

The painter of Ireland works with a green brush – this is nothing new. But I was unprepared for the extravagance of it all. On arriving in the Southeast, near Cork, my jet-lagged eyes had to recalibrate to process all the shades of green, all the textures. It is a kind of vegetal madness here, a raucous glut of sun-soaked growth. It is a cliché illustrated in hyperbole.

No surface is uncovered by moss or grass or lichen, no branch left unbowed by a corolla of leaves. The plant kingdom sorts itself messily into layers. Ferns spring out of tufts of olive-hued moss, on tree trunks filmed with algae. Grasses race skyward, indecorously. Duckweed forgets its place; it traces a lacy path up drains onto driveways, a cheery, swampy carpet. Frills of perennials pour out of crevices in walls. Spring got the memo here: It. Is. On.

I walk until I hit a fence, trace it until I find a gate and walk on. My footsteps compress the grass, scenting the air with chlorophyll. A rabbit skitters nervously across the field. Flora own this place; the fauna are just tenants here. And we modern, house-dwelling humans are only visitors – guests if we behave ourselves, interlopers if we misstep.

With fresh memories of winter, it is a joy to be in this landscape of renewal, immersed in such giddy reanimation. Liberated from ice and hard ground, the yellow-green fronds thrum with audible energy. Something in our souls is listening. This verdant quickening is our reveille, a call to slough off winter’s slowness and participate in regeneration. In temperate climates, it’s a profound inflection point in our relationship with our surroundings, marking the moment where the landscape begins to feel alive to us, and to be a source of energy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this after listening to a wonderful interview with the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (on a recommendation from my dear friend Mara). O’Donohue brims with wisdom about the relevance of beauty to meaning in life, and speaking of landscapes, he observes:

I think it makes a huge difference when you wake in the morning and come out of your house whether you believe your are walking into a dead geographical location which is used to get to a destination or whether you are emerging into a landscape that is just as much if not more alive as you but in a totally different form. And if you go towards it with an open heart and a real watchful reverence, that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you.

(Before I go on, I must urge you to listen to the interview because reading the quote cannot give you the feeling you get from hearing O’Donohue’s placid, lyrical voice. I hope you will.)

Now, coming back to the topic at hand, the frenzy of unfurling and blossoming, the green, the growth – these aesthetics of renewal, the reminders of the simmering life in our surroundings. Why should we care about these artifacts of the landscape? Why, as O’Donohue says, should we be bothered with what they might reveal to us? Or rather, in an age where foraging is a hobby rather than a subsistence strategy, why should these inedible, unsellable displays matter to us at all?

Our emotions are often vestigial imprints of our ancestors’ rhythms, and without conscious explanation our neurotransmitters soak our brains with pleasure chemicals in these same cycles. No matter how detached from the earth we are in our workaday existence, our bodies vibrate to its frequencies. The return of greenness feels like a return to life. It’s why we hold festivals to celebrate cherry blossoms. It’s why we freak out about ramps. Spring is our stirring. It rises into us from the ground up.

(Also, a lush environment signals other things that might be beneficial. Clean air. Unpolluted rainwater. Sunshine. Good property values. This practical lens can’t be underestimated.)

Of course, the greenness is just the surface. That lush field is all cell division, pollen, and spores – plants grasping for one another like freshman at a frat party. All this wild greening is nature’s adolescence, and those allergies are testament to a large-scale seduction. These aesthetics of vibrance are also aesthetics of sex. And plant sex brings about all kinds of things we like, such as those that might be baked in a pie, or those that taste best with a sprinkling of sea salt and some Tuscan olive oil.

It’s strange to say from this vantage that I had no particular interest in Ireland before I ended up here. Soul-starved by a winter that dragged despite its mildness, I had a craving for verdure. But despite the platitudes of an emerald isle, sold to us Americans by cereal box leprechauns and intensely scented soap, I hadn’t thought about the greenness in the planning. It was almost an accident that I ended up here: a workshop that never happened, a scrambled plan, an affordable airfare. And suddenly I was here, submerged in it, and grateful.

Landscapes can wake us up, recall us to ourselves, stir us out of apathy, heal pains. They absorb tremendous anxiety and radiate energy. We are just starting to understand the emotional impacts of nature, but they seem to parallel the physical effects of plants, which complement our physiology, breathing in our effluent carbon dioxide, and exhaling oxygen. In seeing some rare, wild landscapes this week, I’m reminded of the destruction we are bringing to so many of these sacred places. I hope through a deeper understanding of what they give us, we might feel inspired to take better care of them.

Happy new year from Iceland!

Beginning a new year in this magical place has me brimming with energy and excitement for the year ahead. It’s been a beautiful and comforting trip, filled with new discoveries, friendships, and moments that simply took my breath away. I have thousands of photos to sort through, and stories aplenty to share with you in the coming days.

I feel restored in a way I haven’t felt in a long time, and this trip has afforded me many chances to reflect on what gives me inspiration and energy to compose and create. As I look back at 2011, I realize that at times I was guilty of living through my laptop, instead of placing myself in the circumstances of the joys I write about, and writing from the feeling. There are times for self-discipline, but that can have its own inertia, and it can lead to writing by brute force, rather than affection. Coming to Iceland, in search of light and magic, was an inspiring way to start a new habit. It will not always be international adventures (if only!), but in 2012 I’m resolved to spend lots more time outside the studio. I hope Aesthetics of Joy will be better for it.

Through the vicissitudes of work and life, across time zones and seasons and continents, I find myself ever grateful to have found such a solid source of happiness in writing this blog. I’ve met more kindred spirits through Aesthetics of Joy than I believed existed when I started. (New Year’s Eve was a perfect illustration of this, but more on that to come.) Thank you for the joy you’ve brought me in 2011, and here’s to even more joy for you all in 2012. Gleðilegt nýtt ár!

I’m  still trying to put my finger on what exactly is so joyful about Bzzzpeek, a site where you can play recordings of what children think animals sound like in different parts of the globe. Is it the sweet, earnest quality of the children’s imitations? The general cuteness of the site design? Or just the charm of being able to travel the world via quacks and ribbits? I don’t know, but the moment it appeared in my inbox (thank you, Jon), it brought a smile to my face.

The deeper question here is why we feel the need to imitate animal sounds when we have words to describe the animals. Before we had language, “Moo,” was a good way to alert neighbors to a food source. Now, when we can say, “There’s a herd of cows grazing just over the grassy knoll,” “Moo” seems terribly obsolete. Of course, there are still a few functional reasons to make animal sounds: birders do it to attract different species to look at, pet owners do it out of some empathic desire to connect with their pets. But why do children do it? I wonder if there’s some innate pleasure in imitation, or if there’s some other reason why we simply enjoy making animal sounds. Thoughts?

I’ve taken many plane rides before, but never seen a landscape quite like this. I recently stumbled upon this article showing Holland’s tulip fields from above. Can you believe there’s a landscape that actually looks like this? It’s like agricultural earth art. I had to dig up some more images for inspiration. Let’s hope all these April showers will bring us some, well, you know…

Images: livetowander, Daily Mail, powerfocusfotografie, Daily Mail, Samuel_Leo, _Darek, heavenuphere.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good things for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I’ve been dreaming about this house, on the island of Elliðaey in Iceland, since I saw it here. Apparently the house was a gift from the government of Iceland to singer Bjork for raising the country’s global profile. Then I saw this quote by Bachelard and started to feel a little better about the fact that I don’t live in it. I may never get to live in anything quite as remarkable as this, but I find great joy in the houses of my daydreams, and it makes me wonder if sometimes there isn’t as much joy in desiring as possessing.

Painted by street artists El Tono and Nuria in Cordoba, Spain, these doors look like portals to somewhere special. And they probably are.

Cordoba is known for its courtyard gardens, of which the occupants are famously proud. I remember when I was there meandering the winding alleys, a good-natured young man a few years older than me and speaking no English insisted on leading me somewhere. I was 21 and wary, but he was headed the direction I was going anyway and so I followed at a distance. After a few minutes of walking this way, me suspiciously noting street names, him laughing at my suspicion, we arrived at a house with door wide open, framing a lush garden with an old woman sweeping the tiled floor. His home! After I greeted his mother and admired the courtyard, I was free to go, giddy and bewildered by the surprises that lay behind those foreign doors.

{via Unurth}