I thought this was a cute moment between a father and son, so I snapped their photo while waiting for a train in the Tokyo subway. I love the almost matching hats and the identical “Asian crouch”. Good stuff.
Stop And Hear The Music
September 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Grandma came through with another great story for the blog today. A couple years ago, the Washington Post came up with an idea. Place a world-renowned violinist in a DC metro station, have him play a highly complicated piece of music on an antique violin worth millions of dollars…and see if anyone stops to take notice.
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?
On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
It really is a fascinating little social experiment. I wonder, though, if the disinterest shown by most of the commuters was more a function of their lack of familiarity with the musician, and classical music in general, than a genuine lack of appreciation for everyday beauty.
Whatever the case, a cool story indeed.
The Japanese Take On Failure
September 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Read an interesting article yesterday about the stifling role shame can play in the Japanese economy. It also does a good job of describing why I sometimes refer to Japan as a socialist country, a notion that may grow more overt with the recent DPJ victory.
In Japan…failure traditionally carries a deeper stigma, an enduring shame that limits the appetite for risk, in the view of many of the nation’s cultural observers. This makes the Japanese far less comfortable with choices that increase the prospect of failure, even if they promise greater potential gains.
