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“ Well, if you stood the pair of us [me and my fictional alter-ego, Sam Edwine] side by side and told him to shut the fuck up, you couldn’t tell us apart. His is the higher native intelligence, while I behave better. […] I did, once, however, like Sam Edwine, pass around pirated mimeographs of The Anarchist Cookbook to an excitable bunch of grad students in Red China, resulting in at least one of them being shot in the back of the head point-blank in a public execution. But Sam cackled about it, and I feel like a horrible shit. I never ate way too many psilocybin mushrooms in the Oaxacan jungle, stumbled on a man dying in the road, and failed to remember my Spanish grammar, because, unlike Sam Edwine, I never had any Spanish grammar in the first place. In fact, he speaks a lot more languages than I do. But I write better — otherwise he’d be answering this question about me instead of vice-versa.
— Tom Bradley, perché una citazione ci voleva!
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![William Gibson is describing the haunting elegance of hikaru dorodango. His essay in TATE Magazine, “Shiny Balls of Mud: William Gibson Looks at Japanese Pursuits of Perfection” was my first exposure to this trend sweeping through Japan.
Hikaru dorodango are balls of mud, molded by hand into perfect spheres, dried, and polished to an unbelievable luster. The process is simple, but the result makes it seem like alchemy.
A traditional pastime among the children of Japan, the exact origin of hikaru dorodango is unknown. The tradition was dying out until taken up by Professor Fumio Kayo, of the Kyoto University of Education, as a means to study the psychology of children’s play. In the course of his research, Kayo developed a simple technique for creating dorodango. With the help of Japanese media, Kayo has revived and extended the popular reach of this tradition to the point where it is now an international phenomenon. […] (via dorodango | about)
Insomma che è ‘sto Hikaru Dororando? Semplicemente, l’arte di modellare il fango in palle lisciate fino a diventare lucide: mutuata da un passatempo tradizionale dei bimbi giapponesi e diventata un vero e proprio “trend” in madrepatria. Per chi ha problemi con l’inglese, anche qui da noi qualcuno ne ha scritto; una veloce ricerca trova e.g. cristiancontini, Rammit e Roberto Ravalico. Sembra però che da noi questa simpatica attività proprio non prenda piede… Eppure è tanto economica quando piacevole e suppongo soddisfacente nei risultati, inoltre direi non scevra di connessioni con pratiche zen che tanto vanno di moda!](http://25.media.tumblr.com/2UZ4WDQq4ftmjwx3GYWmf83So1_500.jpg)
