Monday, January 28, 2008

篆刻(tenkoku) the carving of seals




篆刻is the carving of seals in the 'seal script':篆書 If your computer displays those characters properly, you will see that the first character is the same. The two different ones are carve and write, so one is carving the script and the other is writing it.

Anyway, I can explain all that much better in Japanese, so I will just show those pictures, which are the seal pressed, and then the pressed and the real thing.

oh, I carved that.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Unexpected




I got an 'award of excellence' in a calligraphy competition!

Friday, January 25, 2008

...and that's raw politics.

"With Sylvester Stalone backing John McCain and Chuck Norris in Mick Huckabee's corner, for the first time in history, the Republican Candidate might be selected by an iron-caged fight to the death"

An other CNN quote.

http://www.mikehuckabee.com/?FuseAction=Blogs.View&Blog_id=724

"My plan for defending the border, two words: Chuck. Norris."


You know the world is coming to an end when shit like this happens.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Another Actor I liked.

He starred in 10 Things I Hate About You with Heath Ledger, this is also a really cool video.

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=FRsupt216892

and a funny Frank Gehry thing. TED is awesome

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/13

"Once a shit, always a shit!"

News Indigest.

I just spent a week riding trains. People often say things about "no destinations, only road" but I will say with experience that hurts your feet, butt, and soul.

I enjoyed the announcement on the train from Hakata to Hiroshima, "We are now traveling at 300 kilometers per hour"

In other news, it snowed in Tokyo today. It didn't stick, which made it really wet and cold.

And what the fuck, Heath Ledger died. That is really terrible.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

CNN

OJ Simpson, Britteny Spears, and dead Americans.

Can you even find Kenya on a map?

What a stupid channel.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

変わり者だな!



変わり者(kawari mono), when put into the dictionary.com translator, comes out as 'eccentric'.

I'll admit it!

I bought a train ticket today, for about a hundred bucks, which is good for 5 days straight, and good on any and all local trains in the country. As soon as college apps are over, I'm getting the fuck out of here!

Oh, pity I don't know where I want to go yet!


I kind of an urge to publish a book.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Dammit!

Well, I got invited to help work on a (graduation?) project for an architecture student at GeiDai and so I did that all day today, and because of that, was unable to do any calligraphy! Which was the first time I have not used a brush in like, 2 weeks.
I will also work tomorrow, and have been asked to stay the night at the school to work overnight on the project! SUCK!

Monday, January 07, 2008

A Gray Day in January

I bought the latest Kanye West album yesterday.

No work until the 23rd.

Nothing going super well, I haven't written a decent character since my post about Kenya, I pick up the brush and all that comes out is the character 'angry'.

Fuck I haven't slept well in a week.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

And then it hit me.

Actually, as usual, as me, the question hit me.

Here I am, sitting on the floor of my rooming writing calligraphy. I intern at an architecture firm building models of opera houses in foreign countries, and 300 people are being killed in Kenya.

What am I doing?!

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Happy New Year




The first character is 'bright', it can also mean to 'open' as in 'congratulations on opening the new year'.
Let's hope 2008 is a bright year for many. Also, this is the very first character I have written all year! I picked up the brush, and wrote it, first try.

The other character, (like owaru in the post below) is on it's side, but it means 'rat' as in 'year of the rat'. I actually wrote it yesterday.

Greetings from next year!