Mar
22
…how the itch is scratched with beauty a la Japan
…at a recent open-source conference in Atlanta (itself a techie declaration of superior taste), I witnessed numerous instances of techies making little walls of iphones, mp3 players, digital cameras,etc as a declaration of status. This is very similar to Butcher’s photos of people in sod houses in Oklahoma who piled all their valuable possessions in front of their crude houses and posed with them. The universal human need to say, “I am here, and I have marked my presence” is not so different than the way that cats, bears and wolves do it. (an amazon review of “A tractate on Japanese Aesthetics” by Donald Richie)
