"For decades, Japan simply imported the wares of foreign cultures, but recession has led to invention. The country has begun creating the finest American denim, French cuisine and Italian espresso in the world. Now is the time to visit."

"During the robust economy of the '80s, Japan's exports ruled, and the country would import the best that money could buy from the rest of the globe, including Italian chefs and French sommeliers. Which made Japan an haute bourgeoisie heaven where luxury manufacturers from the West expected skyrocketing sales forever.

But now 20-plus years of recession have killed that dream. Louis Vuitton sales are plummeting, and magnums of Dom Pérignon are no longer being uncorked at a furious pace. That doesn't mean the Japanese have turned away from the world. They've just started approaching it on their own terms, venturing abroad and returning home with increasingly more international tastes and much higher standards…"

[See also Stateside: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/adam-davidson-craft-business.html ]

"David Graeber talks to Lewis Bassett and Richard Houguez while having a haircut at AutoItaliaLive/LuckyPDFTV."

"When you aren't brought up to think it's crazy, it's almost hard not to be an anarchist."

[Part Two: http://vimeo.com/18751385 ]

"A character without specificity is not one."

"To demonize is to become the demon."

"When I say that the Muppets’ art direction is makeshift, I don’t mean that it’s shoddy. But it celebrates human limitation. As we watch one of these movies, we never lose our awareness that these scenes were made by men and women. Craftmanship, the game of how good any one artist can be, is presented—not hidden—and as such it can inspire others."

"What matters in the Muppet universe isn’t perfection, but expression. Dancing across the screen, they embody the philosophy that it is not what you look like that matters, but what you do."

[Great piece by a PSCS parent, plus…]

"Here's what she took out:

“Lest you think I’m praising too much, let me say it's a growing community there. They have their bumps, and they meet challenges head-on. They try. They stay open to learning and growth.”

This, I think, shines a spotlight on a fundamental problem we face in schools, and highlights an area in which PSCS is so remarkable. For generations, school has been about getting the right answer. It has been about getting an “A,” acing the test, being perfect. Take a tour of some other schools in the city and they’ll show you only the classrooms they want you to see, only the shiniest students, and only the teachers who appear to be perfect. It’s all a part of the myth that says, when you’re learning, mistakes should be avoided at all costs.

That’s not who we are. And that’s not what learning looks like.

Learning means stepping outside your comfort zone and trying something new, then reflecting on the experience."

"In the long sticky hours of boredom, in the lonely, unsupervised, unstructured time, something blooms; it was in those margins that we became ourselves…our new ethos of control…contains a vision of right-minded child rearing that is in its own enlightened way as exclusive & conformist…Built into this model of the perfectible child is, of course, an inevitable failure. You can't control everything, the universe offers up rogue moments that will make your child unhappy or sick or ­broken-hearted, there will be faithless friends & failed auditions & bad teachers…All I am suggesting is that it might be time to stand back, pour a drink, & let the children ­torment, or bore or injure each other a little. It might be time to dabble in the laissez faire; to let the imagination run to art instead of art projects; to let the imperfect universe & its imperfect ­children be themselves." [Read it all.]

"Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous & characteristic feature of traditional Japanese beauty & it "occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty & perfection in West." "if an object or expression can bring about, w/in us, a sense of serene melancholy & a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi." "[Wabi-sabi] nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging 3 simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, & nothing is perfect."

Wabi now connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, & can be applied to both natural & human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks & anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness & elegance to the object. Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object & its impermanence are evidenced in its patina & wear, or in any visible repairs."

"In an age of digital perfectability, it takes quite a lot of courage to say, "Leave it alone" and, if you do decide to make changes, [it takes] quite a lot of judgment to know at which point you stop. A lot of technology offers you the chance to make everything completely, wonderfully perfect, and thus to take out whatever residue of human life there was in the work to start with. It would be as though someone approached Cezanne and said, "You know, if you used Photoshop you could get rid of all those annoying brush marks and just have really nice, flat color surfaces." It's a misunderstanding to think that the traces of human activity — brushstrokes, tuning drift, arrhythmia — are not part of the work. They are the fundamental texture of the work, the fine grain of it."

"An oven built by hand, tile by tile. Four pizzas on the menu, with no fancy-pants toppings. Anthony Mangieri does one thing at Una Pizza Napoletana, and he does it the very best way he can."

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

"I think it's more helpful to focus on texture, on interpersonal interaction, on interesting. Interesting is attainable, and interesting is remarkable. Interesting is fresh every day and interesting leads to word of mouth."