January 10, 2006
A Preference of Proportion
In "Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture," the art and architecture historian Heinrich Wolfflin concludes:
Therefore, the golden section with its proportion between restful matter and ascending force perhaps presents an average measure conforming to man. In fact, I think I have observed that thin people, constantly on the move, generally prefer slender proportions, while strong, stocky people select the opposite.
Wolfflin believed that psychology played a primary role in understanding and appreciating architecture, and he tightly connected "bodily habit" with "favored proportion." When I read his "Prolegomena," I felt that I had been intellectually vindicated.
You see, I am five foot nine, I have just passed the minimum weight requirement for donating blood... and I like tall, thin things.
I first remember this self-mirroring preference manifesting itself in my freshmen year art classes. My professor looked at my magnified, Georgia O'Keefe-esque painting of an anthurium, looked at me, and then rolled his eyes in mock exasperation. It showed up everywhere in drawing class. Objects in still life arrangements stretched upwards, bottles growing disproportionately long necks and the folds of fabric curving slowly and langorously. Even the cow skull was smoothly pulled into a longer, narrower form. One self-portrait I drew -- framing my neck and collarbone -- boasted proportions that would have made Parmigianino proud. We called my drawing "Elissa with the Long Neck" in honor of Pargmigianino's Mannerist masterpiece. Though I managed to dampen this unwitting elongation in my later paintings, hints still remained.
Sometimes, I wonder if it's getting worse. Our wedding invitations and programs were long and thin. Even our Christmas letter this year squeezed into a narrow, vertical format. When Noel and I are on walks together, I run to stand among the tall, swaying grass, and point out the tallest, thinnest buildings as my favorites. Friends buy me tall, thin gifts: panoramic picture frames, narrow-necked vases, and ridiculously long scarves.
According to Wolfflin, though, I can't help it. This...strong preference...for things of lengthier proportions is simply and understandably a function of my psychology. So, maybe we can go ahead and get this light sometime soon...
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October 24, 2005
Confession: I Hold Sumo Dear to My Heart
A recent article in the Times combined two dearly cherished things (food and sumo) and reanimated my inexplicable delight in this odd and ancient sport.
Wait, I take that back. It's not inexplicable.
Growing up, sumo was a *big deal* (pun unavoidably intended). The large Japanese population in Hawaii and the success of a string of Hawaii-bred wrestlers, combined to form the perfect atmosphere for sumo to be taken quite seriously indeed. So it had a touch of the bizarre: men with rolling, flopping stomachs, drooping pectorals, and corpulent thighs, wearing nothing but a top knot and an elaborate thong, lunging at each other with fearsome momentum. We knew that. But our island hearts still warmed towards these ponderous giants. Highlights from sumo tournaments slipped into the local sportscast between baseball and football results. Recaps or human interest stories were a regular sports page feature. We even had Hawaiian music superstars like Bruddah Iz (Kamakawiwo'ole) writing tribute songs to our local sumo wrestlers, Konishiki, Akebono, and Musashimaru.
The Hawaii-bred sumotori were both the "us" and the "other." Those jiggling biceps could partly be at least partly attributed to Zippy's incredibly fattening curry and chicken katsu. But, on an island filled primarily with petite citizens of Filipino, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese ancestry, their generous girth set them apart. Their distinguishing size was almost mesmerizing. Then, too, even though they themselves were not Japanese, they somehow connected the Japanese-American and traditional Japanese experiences for us. Even when each of the wrestlers became Japanese citizens, Hawaii still stubbornly claimed them as their own. They were local boys who "made good" by succeeding in another nation and culture's sport.
And, sometimes, I miss it. Mawashi loinclothes and all.
Posted by elissa at 05:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 10, 2005
The Intrepid Fashion Explorer Discovers...The Sweater!
I broke personal fashion ground today.
This is my fifth year of living at a latitude where a sweater is actually necessary from October to March. Those of you who have grown up with cycling, seasonal closets may not realize just how difficult this climate adjustment is on one's personal sense of style. When your entire fashion life thus far has been one of matching t-shirts with shorts and swimsuits with slippers, moving to a cooler climate presents a host of wardrobe crises.
First, there's the mystery of layering. Weather-wizened friends strongly advise piling on a tank-top, shirt, sweater, scarf, and coat in tight succession. But layering also means that the number of articles needing to be matched or otherwise coordinated increases exponentially. Sure, this could be easily solved by either "not caring" or only wearing shades of a single color, but I live in perpetual dread of looking like either an Olsen twin or an Old Navy twinset spokesperson.
Secondly, tripling the amount of clothes one wears at any given moment significantly alters one's silhouette. An inch and a half overall coating of wool and fleece will hide and create curves in all the inappropriate places. Suddenly, my conception of the human form merged with my knowledge of a bag of jet puffed marshmallows. Disconcerting? Yes.
Finally: covered shoes. My freshman year of college, I obstinately resisted wearing anything other than open toe slippers or sandals until temperatures literally dipped below freezing. My rationale was, quite simply, that I would rather have unconstricted (albeit numb) toes than warm, confined ones. Even after I caved and succumbed to the shoe-wearing culture my troubles were far from over. I realized that I completely lacked any kind of aesthetic for closed-toe footwear. Were pointy toe shoes chic or witchy? Did those mules look too nurse-like? Will sparkles be too trendy in two months?
All that to say that, today, I wore a sweater over a button-down shirt for the first time in my life. Fall, I welcome you with an open closet.
Posted by elissa at 08:52 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 24, 2005
Confession: there's a 20lb bag of rice and a 1 gallon container of soy sauce in my kitchen
Even more than the beaches, Hawaii ex-pats miss their food.
"Local food." Local food is not the same as "Hawaiian food." It is not something with pineapple on it. It is not organically-grown natural produce.
When uttered by someone who grew up in Hawaii, those words conjure up a world of plate lunches, crackseed, spam, and lavish potlucks. Sure, sushi is Japanese, manapua is Chinese, and laulau is Hawaiian, but they're still all "local food." It's a designation that covers a multitude of ethnic foods and their resulting combinations, a cultural hodgepodge impossible to distill into completely separate categories.
Let's consider, for example, the "plate lunch." My pet theory is that the "plate lunch" emerged when a Japanese wife realized that the diminutive, artfully arranged bento (boxed lunch) did not have enough food to satisfy her larger, Chinese-Hawaiian husband. Today's plate lunch is similar to a bento on cross-cultural steroids. Arriving in a partitioned styrofoam carryout box, it consists of three main components: the meat, the side, and rice. The meat is a heaping serving of anything from Chinese sweet sour pork to Korean barbecue ribs or Filipino chicken adobo. The side is macaroni salad, an inexplicable cultural anomaly that has nonetheless become an iconic part of the plate lunch. Finally, there's the rice: two exceedingly generous scoops of sticky white rice. The plate lunch has no discernible ethnicity. It's just "local."
Local food emerged from a blended community and continues to fuction as a kind of cultural glue. The test of acceptance for a mainland visitor is whether or not he will try the poke (raw, seasoned fish) that we offer him. For those of us who went to school on the mainland, homesickness was battled by eating bowls of rice and nori (dried seaweed) or digging into a stash of dried fruit or candy sprinkled with li hing mui (Chinese five spice, salt, and sugar). When I meet another displaced local, the conversation inevitably drifts to the foods that we miss. And you'll understand, then, if I find the mainland potlucks (read: casserole row) a little disheartening.
That said, Fridays will be my self-indulgent day to revisit my culinary roots and encourage Chattanoogans to find that neglected and often understocked "Asian" section in their grocery store. And I promise I won't include any recipes where spam *must* be used.
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