Shoe shopping

Last week I went shoe shopping, and I didn't even leave the house.

I was thinking about what shoes I'll use when I walk the Koshu Kaido later this year, and decided that of all the shoes I've walked in over the years, the most comfortable were probably the New Balance 748s I wore on the Nakasendo in 2007. The only drawback was they weren't waterproof. So I checked out Amazon to see what they had in the way of waterproof New Balance walking shoes.

This pair of Gore-Tex-lined 977s caught my eye. I thought they looked pretty cool. At US$100, the price wasn't bad either. With the New Zealand dollar so strong at the moment, even with shipping included they shouldn't be more the NZ$200, I thought. On further inspection, however, I discovered that Amazon wouldn't ship them to this part of the world.

I then checked the US New Balance online store. They had the 977s for US$140, but they wouldn't ship to New Zealand either. After trying various other US-based online shoe retailers, none of which would ship New Balance shoes here, I checked New Balance's New Zealand online store. Knowing that a couple of years ago New Balance had drastically reduced the range of walking shoes they sold here to just a couple of models, I didn't hold out much hope, and sure enough they had very little, and nothing waterproof.

There was an 0800 number, so as a last resort I decided to give them a call to see if there was any chance of getting hold of some 977s. To cut a long story short, the answer was no. But when I explained what I needed them for, the man on the phone recommended some 967s instead. I hadn't heard of these before. It didn't take long, however, to work out that they were the replacement for the 966s, a pair of which I'd worn last year when I walked the Tokaido. (You may recall that these were actually women's shoes that I bought on sale. I think they were actually too narrow, because my left little toe took quite a beating on the Tokaido walk, and I ended up loosing the toenail.)

The funny thing was I hadn't seen the 967s either on Amazon or on any of the New Balance websites. When I mentioned this to the man on the phone, he said he'd have a word to the people in charge and that they should appear the next day. I was a bit skeptical, but sure enough when I checked the US and New Zealand online stores the next morning the 967s were there.

So, I put in my order and a few days later they arrived on my doorstep. I was a bit nervous about buying a pair of shoes without trying them on. Then again, rarely have a tried on a pair of New Balance shoes that don't fit. Also, I knew they came with a 30-day unconditional returns policy. I needn't have worried, however, because they fit perfectly.

The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and fact in documentary cinema

LESSONS OF DARKNESS

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can't legislate stupidity."

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog

Tentative Koshu Kaido schedule

Day 1: Shimo-Suwa - Chino (18.8km)
Day 2: Chino - Araki (21km)
Day 3: Araki - Nirasaki (26.7km)
Day 4: Nirasaki - Kofu (14.2km)
Day 5: Kofu – Komakai (21.7km)
Day 6: Komakai - Otsuki (23.1km)
Day 7: Otsuki - Uenohara (21.1km)
Day 8: Uenohara - Hachioji (28.6km)
Day 9: Hachioji - Chofu (20.7km)
Day 10: Chofu - Nihonbashi (25.7km)

Order tracking

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My next walk

I've started planning my next walking adventure: the Koshu Kaido. One of the gokaido, or five main highways of Edo-period Japan, the Koshu Kaido (labeled C on the map below) is just over 210km long and connects Tokyo with Shimo-Suwa in Nagano prefecture.


Shim-Suwa is also on the Nakasendo, which I walked in 2007 (you can read a bit about it here and here). Since I started both that walk and last year's Tokaido walk in Kyoto, I thought it would be nice to start in Tokyo this time. However, I changed my mind after looking at the following graphic from the glorious Papa Walks the Koshu Kaido website showing the change in elevation along the way (Shimo-Suwa is on the extreme left and Tokyo on the extreme right). So for the third time in four years I'll be walking to Tokyo.

The Imperial Hotel

They say you should stick to blogging about things you know something about. I don't know much about architecture, but I know what I like, and I like Frank Lloyd Wright. So this post is about the Imperial Hotel.

The Imperial Hotel today

The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo is a dour, unimaginative, uninspiring piece of architecture. Looking at it today, it's hard to imagine that half a century ago there stood on the same site one of the most imaginative and inspiring building's ever created.

I can't remember when I fell in love with Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, but it was probably around 1991 when, while a student at Nagoya University, I visited Meiji Mura, an open-air museum of architecture in Inuyama. It was here that the hotel's main entrance hall and lobby were relocated in 1968 when the building was demolished to make way for the present Imperial Hotel. I remember walking around inside and being impressed both with the ornateness of the interior (which features intricately carved lava rock) and with how cool it was despite the heat outside and the lack of air-conditioning.

What's left of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel at Meiji Mura

When Wright was commissioned to build the Imperial Hotel in 1915 he was asked to come up with a design that would withstand Tokyo's frequent earthquakes and fires. He achieved this partly by using floating foundations - an idea that was widely criticised at the time. Who would have imagined that so soon after its completion in 1923 - on the very eve of its official opening, in fact - Wright's design would be put to the ultimate test in the Great Kanto Earthquake. And while legend has it that the Imperial Hotel was one of the few buildings in the city centre to survive the earthquake and subsequent fires unscathed, there was some damage, including slumping and bulging of the floors. This slumping along with wartime damage and the demand for a more modern hotel with larger rooms were among the reasons cited for the demolition of Wright's Imperial Hotel in 1968.

The Imperial Hotel in the 1960s

While in Tokyo last month I stayed just across the road from the new Imperial Hotel and the day before I left I went over to have a look. I was pleasantly surprised to find a small exhibition in the lobby celebrating the 120th anniversary of the hotel, which included quite a few photos of, and small items (chairs, plates, etc) from, Wright's hotel. I learned quite a few things, including that Wright designed not only the building but almost every aspect of the interior design, even down to the dinnerware. In fact the project consumed him, and he spent much of the time between 1915 when he took on the job and 1923 when it was completed living in Japan. But his interest in that country dates back even earlier. He began collecting Japanese woodblock prints in the 1880s, and when he went overseas for the first time in 1905 it was not to Europe but to Japan, which he called "the most romantic, most beautiful" country in the world.

Imperial Hotel coffee service, produced according to Wright's design

Another thing I learned was the derivation of the Japanese word baikingu, meaning a smorgasboard or buffet-style meal. I knew that it came from the English word "Viking", but the exact derivation was a mystery to me. Well, it appears that in 1958 after a trip to Europe, the Imperial's manager decided to open Japan's first smorgasbord restaurant at the hotel. However, the word "smorgasbord" was considered too long and difficult for Japanese to pronounce, so they decided to name the restaurant the Viking. The name became synonymous with this style of dining, and so it was that the word baikingu entered the Japanese lexicon.

The Road

A couple of weeks ago I asked my sister if she wanted to go and see the movie The Road. I remembered she'd read and enjoyed the book, by Cormac McCarthy, and I think we'd even talked about the movie and the excellent reviews it was getting. So I was a bit surprised when she told me she didn't really want to see it. The reason she gave was that she thought she'd find it too depressing.

I first heard of McCarthy when the movie No Country for Old Men came out (he also wrote the novel on which that movie was based), but I only really became interested in reading his work after he was mentioned several times in Don Watson's American Journeys, the book about traveling around the United States by rail which I read last December. This story about McCarthy auctioning his old typewriter, which appeared in various newspapers at around the same time, further piqued my interest.

Anyway, since my sister wasn't keen to see the movie of The Road, I decided to read the book. I found a copy of it on the shelves at the public library and finished reading it the other day. It is very dark, although like American Rust, the novel I read last year in which the protagonists seem to wander from one hopeless situation into another, it was saved by an ending that, while not exactly happy, does provide some hope. Now that I'm used to McCarthy's quirky style of writing (he omits apostrophes in negative contractions like hadnt and isnt and doesn't use quotation marks for speech) I might see if the library has any of his other novels.