play as haiku

liza's wonderful post about jello inspired my thinking, once again, about how artists, in the early part of the 20th century, brought illumination to the mundane -- the blurring of the line between fine and commercial art, as we have seen before as influenced by the japanese.

somehow i suddenly thought of the end of a play by thornton wilder:

From Our Town: Emily, a young mother who has died, has come back to earth for one day to spend time with her friends and family, who don't know she's there.

Emily: I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. But first, wait! One more look. Good-by; good-by, world; good-by, Grovers Corners. . . Mama and papa.

Good-by to clocks ticking. . . and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. (She looks toward the stage manager and asks abruptly through her tears) Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? -- every, every minute?

Stage Manager: No. (Pause) The saints and poets, maybe -- they do some.

Emily: I'm ready to go back.

it suddenly occurred to me that this was about consciousness, living in the moment -- in short, the teachings of buddhism.

"Opening in the first years of a new century, Our Town still speaks to us about the beauty and transience of life," says one critic. hmmm -- isn't that the essence of buddhist thought? the description of a haiku?

"Thornton Wilder, in his play, The Skin of Our Teeth, written in 1942, had one of his characters say this: 'My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate -- that's my philosophy.'" and thich nhat hanh says, "Do not lose yourself in dispersion and in your surroundings. Practice mindful breathing to come back to what is happening in the present moment. Be in touch with what is wondrous, refreshing, and healing both inside and around you." he might as well just have come out and said ice cream.

wilder spent much of his childhood in china, and felt that japanese drama was a strong influence on his own, both in thought and in the minimalism of staging. he, along with the new poster artists, did one thing clearly: ennoble the everyday.

the romance of the rails

what is it about train whist- les? they create a sense of wistfulness in the human heart that may be difficult to explain. the romance of the rails. they're featured in country songs, and there're several different guys on youtube who want to teach you how to create it on your harmonica.

i've always thought that it had to do with the ways it resembles the human voice, with it's multi- harmonics and its ability to wail. maybe it's how we're programmed: to respond to babies. like the sounds of accordions and, yes, harmonicas, that sound goes straight into the human heart. or could it be a response that's been manufactured?

as we've discussed here before, railways were instrumental in creating destinations -- national parks, resorts, etc. the early train posters were about the trains, but soon after they became about those wondrous places you might go. "audiences were eager for images of the territory west of the Mississippi. Paintings and sketches of places like Yosemite and Yellowstone suggested that America possessed scenery more majestic than Europe's and that despite the chaos of the Civil War and its aftermath, America was still destined for greatness. The founding of the National Park idea in these two very different Wests was a process by which images of the West were inserted into the national imagination.

Yellowstone and Yosemite were dedicated with the idea that wilderness formed an integral part of the American identity, but they were also places sponsored and promoted by the railroads to court investors and maximize profits. From the earliest days of discovery to the crucial National Park Act of 1916, the process of park development was shaped by needs of the railroads -- from acquiring investors to selling mass-market tourism, they modified their advertising strategies to win the patronage of new passengers with the promise of fulfilling their expectations of the West in 'America's playgrounds.'" 1

it was the same in great britian. " it was holiday travel that the railway poster came to be associated with—a world of sunshine, sandy beaches and endless fun. Growing prosperity led to increased demand for travel.

However, some companies had not always been keen to cater for holiday traffic, but it gradually came to be seen as an important source of revenue. Before the First World War, the railway companies were fortunate in having few competitors for this traffic. The train was quite simply the best and often the only way to travel.

"The rapid growth of seaside resorts owed much to the expansion of the railway network. Sea bathing increased in popularity during the nineteenth century and railways were able to provide fast access from the towns and cities for many more people who had the luxury of leisure time and paid and public holidays. The railways opened up parts of the country which had been previously inaccessible.

New resorts sprung up on Britain's coasts. However, the new visitors that the railways brought were not always welcomed with open arms. At Bridlington, in Yorkshire, day visitors were disliked by regular visitors and residents alike and the station was sited well away from the sea. Most of the larger resorts came to cater for all classes of visitor but others tried to retain a more select clientele.

"In some cases, railways created resorts where little had existed before. In 1871, Skegness in Lincolnshire had a population of less than 500. A railway line was opened to the town 2 years later and a large station was built with the hope of attracting holiday traffic to the sandy beaches. The crowds came and the facilities grew. By 1907, Skegness was attracting 300,000 visitors a year, mostly from the industrial towns of the East Midlands and Yorkshire." 2

we'll never know; this is the greatest success of modern advertising creating a need since platinum hair. aww, who cares. we seem to like longing, and at least they all had the good sense to emulate the japanese, whenever possible.

plakatstil & hand-lettering

in order to understand the evolution of japonisme into what was called plakatstil in germany (and which occurred, as a look, mainly in germany, england, and the united states), we need not think image, we need to think calligraphy.

we have seen the numerous art nouveau lettering styles that so closely imitated the japanese brush-made letters. the important thing was that, in the flurry of the industrial age, this stress on hand-lettering.

one of the first to take the hand- lettering beyond the purely japanese- brush look was toulouse- lautrec. his hand-lettering is a bit awkward at times (look at the 'd' in aristide's name) but always quite charming, and maintains the feel of the japanese calligraphy. there is just nothing hard-edged about it. an itc font has been created to honor it, and you've been looking at it at the top of this page for a year and a half now; it's called 'le petit trottin' after a sketch lautrec made of a trottin, a shop-girl.

note also in the lautrec posters the blocks of color, the flat surfaces, diagonal structures, and the asymmetry in their layouts -- all things we have compared with japanese prints in the past.



the next steps the hand- drawn characters took were to still less stylized but no less charming forms. credited as leading this movement were the beggarstaff brothers (the name william nicholson and james pryde took to do commercial work so as nobody would think they were not serious artistes).

while they still borrowed many of the design elements of the japanese prints, they took the lettering to its next step.





and following closely on their tails were edward penfield in the us, and the artists of plakatstil: german advertising posters which are said to have revolutionized advertising (while still richly inspired by the japanese).


among these were lucian bernhard (the instigator), ludwig hohlstein, paul schuerich, emil paul rumpf, julius gipkens, and many more. note additionally, of course, the use of outline, blocks of color, simplicity and solitary focus, and the diagonal lines of their inspiration.

otto heim codified the wonderful fonts, and in our own time, nick curtis has reinvigorated them. to me, they are the most charming fonts available.



why did the rest of europe never adopt this lettering? i'll let you know when i find out.

so many soaps....

Personal cleanliness was one of the most signi- ficant Japanese virtues for the West, and ex- ploited by makers of soap, perfumes, and so on. At a time when a weekly bath was con- sidered adequate for most Americans (and the British Pears' Soap ads promoted daily washing of the face as something desirable but not uni- versal, in a series of ads asking "Have you used Pears Soap today?"), the Japanese were reputed to bathe daily.

Accounts of this practice included such novelties as communal bathing, bathing outdoors with no attempt at screening the body from the sight of passersby, bathing in boiling hot water, and bathing several times a day. This could be seen as disgusting, as in an 1863 article in Harper's New Monthly Magazine ("Pictures of the Japanese," Nov. 1863, anonymous but based on Rutherford Alcock's book The Capital of the Tycoon), where a discussion of prostitution (the "Social Evil") is followed by this comment:

The bath is also a great public institution in Japan. Men and women bathe together in a manner which shocks all our ideas of decency. As far as their persons are concerned the Japanese are certainly a very cleanly people. But this does not hold good of their garments. These are worn day and night, and rarely changed. This, together with the habit of promiscuous bathing, renders cuta- neous diseases extremely prevalent....

A sincere horror at the idea of public or mixed-sex bathing was probably a com- mon reaction -- a sense that promiscuous bathing was intrinsically lewd and must inevitably involve promis- cuous sex. Other, more enlightened observers de- cided however that the nudity involved might after all be innocent, since even young women seemed to be no more aware of indecency than would a child. The Westerner's horror of immo- desty could be the basis of comedy in travelers' tales, as in this passage about a young York- shireman working in the British legation in Tokyo, from Mrs. Hugh Fraser's story "In Tokyo" (in The Custom of the Country, 2nd ed., 1899, pp. 31-32):

Some things shocked his un- tried prudery beyond words. It would be difficult to de- scribe his feelings when, as he was walking, tired and dusty, through a hill village, an old woman, paddling in her bath in sight of all beholders, called out to stop him as he passed.
"What does she want?" he asked of his guide, glancing with a visible shudder at the aged bit of humanity (brown as a last year's oak leaf, and innocent of clothes as a fish in a tank) which stretched an arm to him from a steaming tub.
"She very kind woman," the guide explained, "she say, young gentleman tired, dirty, bath plenty big for two people; please get in!"....
Yet the old woman had offered him the one kindness of which he stood in need, according to her lights.

In the above quotations we see a kind of startlement that the Japanese, heathen as they are, should in this practice be possibly superior -- morally superior, if "cleanliness is next to godliness" (as an 1883 Pears Soap ad quoted Henry Ward Beecher as saying) -- to Western Christians. It seemed necessary to make a joke or find an un-godly aspect about this embarrassing possible superiority. Advertisers could however exploit this by making it clear that Americans needed to "catch up."

...At any rate, in the West the purchase of a bar of soap uniquely for personal cleansing was a luxury. All-purpose soaps, often home-made, were more common; however, by the mid-19th century manufacturers like Pears and Lever in England, and Proctor & Gamble and Kirk's in the U.S., were marketing soaps to be used only on the human skin, promising gentle- ness, softness, whiteness, and other desirable qualities.... 1

(this woman has assembled such an extraordinary, and vast, website; this is but a teensy corner, and no corner is any less interesting. in addition to beauty and scholarship and delight, you'll find fascinating political analysis. there is no small amount of irony in her ostensibly simple comments.)

japan as text in western advertising

to the extent that adver- tising creates needs, one way to accomplish that is to portray something you can never become: the other.

western adver- tising em- braced the image of a very foreign japan, despite the fact that japan had modernized by the time most of these ads came out.

from tea-drinking to travel, from perfume to floor furnaces -- picturing kimono, parasols, fans, or picture scrolls in your ad lent your graphic both an aura of exoticism and one that was très au courant.

many of the citi- zens of japan were seri- ously embracing western clothing, manners, fields of study and work, all to forgo being seen as a backward country, and to be treated equ- ally by the west. western clothing was required by law at many official functions. still, the west remained too "charmed" by this quaint people to let go of the images of the western fantasy of what japan was.

as today, we see many western women in the japanese ads, also the other, we wonder, again, about where the line falls between exploitation and admiration.