art

The Belt Is a Map, Not the Mountain

Coiled black martial arts belt on tatami mats in a traditional dojo
~ Rich Pascual ~ Leave a comment

I like a belt because it makes growth visible. Someone walks into a dojo as a beginner, practices for a while, and eventually a teacher says: you are ready for the next layer. The color marks work already done, and points toward work still ahead. That is a generous little idea.

The history is newer and messier than the belt might suggest. The International Judo Federation’s account of judo’s ranking system says Jigoro Kano developed ranks because the old gaps between recognitions could be too long to keep students motivated. Even the exact date of the belt system’s arrival is uncertain. The familiar range of student colors—from white through brown—came later, developing in England in the mid-1920s and spreading to France through Mikinosuke Kawaishi in 1935. A belt is not an eternal measuring stick passed down unchanged. It is a teaching tool people shaped.

That tool gets something right: growth needs landmarks. A vast practice can feel less mysterious when there is a next move to learn, a form to improve, or a small test to prepare for. A visible rank can help a student notice progress on the days when progress feels like doing the same thing again, only slightly less badly. (This is how many of us learn to fold a fitted sheet, too. Slowly. With witnesses.)

But a belt gets it wrong when we ask one colored strip to tell the whole story. It can show that a student met a school’s expectations at a particular time. It cannot measure every quiet thing that practice may be forming: patience under frustration, care for a partner, willingness to begin again after a mistake.

Judo’s own promotion practices are broader than color alone. The IJF describes teachers considering technical skill, competition or event participation, attendance, behavior, and respect for the art’s code. And a study in Japan’s Budo journal explains that, in the system it examines, promotion up to sixth dan draws on competition results and kata, while higher ranks weigh depth of knowledge and contribution to judo. Even the ranking system admits that progress has more than one dimension.

There is a familiar temptation here. We do it with report cards, job titles, savings balances, and habit streaks: let the marker stand in for the whole person. These measures can be useful when they help us keep practicing. They grow cramped when we treat them as proof of worth.

So what happened? A student earned a new color. What did it mean? They had reached a real milestone, not the end of becoming. What can I carry forward? Celebrate the marker, then ask what the practice is making possible: more skill, yes, but also more attention, steadiness, and generosity. The belt is a map. The person is still walking.

Take On Me and the Courage to Leave the Panel

Woman beside comic motorcycle race labeled STARDUST RACING 77
~ Rich Pascual ~ Leave a comment

There is a moment in a-ha’s “Take On Me” when the girl looks up from her coffee and realizes the comic-book hero is looking back. It is a wonderfully 1985 idea: romance as a portal, pencil lines as a doorway, and a chorus that sounds like somebody asking for one brave chance.

Then the video does something more interesting. It refuses to let the two worlds stay separate.

If you have somehow missed it, the video moves between live action and a black-and-white comic drawn in loose pencil. The technique is rotoscoping: filming movement, then drawing over the frames. The BBC’s account of the video’s making says animator Michael Patterson spent 16 weeks sketching roughly 3,000 drawings. That is not a weekend project. That is a small mountain of patient marks.

The official credits at Patterson and Reckinger’s site name Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger as the animation directors. Their work gives the video its strange double vision: the comic feels more alive than the café, while the café feels safer than the comic. One world is exciting but dangerous. The other is ordinary but solid.

That tension is the whole song’s emotional engine. “Take On Me” is not just asking, “Do you like me?” It is asking, “Will you come with me, even though the place I’m inviting you into is unfinished?” The comic hero is literally sketched in. He has no polished edges. He is a possibility with a motorcycle.

And then comes the escape. The girl returns to the ordinary world, but the ordinary world has been altered. The strange thing has followed her home. Or perhaps she has learned to see the room differently. That is what longing often does. It does not simply make us dissatisfied with the present. It gives the present a second outline.

My favorite part is that the video does not treat reinvention as a clean makeover. There is no triumphant “new you” montage with suspiciously good lighting. The transition is messy. It involves fear, a torn page, and a person who has to decide whether the familiar world is still enough.

The song’s public life followed a similar path. Official Charts records a 19-week UK chart run, while the video became a defining example of how an ambitious visual could change a pop song’s reach. The band did not merely release a track; they built a doorway around it.

So what happened? A Norwegian band made a pop song and paired it with an unusually labor-intensive animated film. What did it mean? Millions of listeners were invited to believe that longing could be both frightening and creative. What can we carry forward? Maybe this: reinvention rarely begins with a finished plan. It begins with a line, then another, then the willingness to step through the panel before you know how the story ends.

What is one unfinished possibility you keep treating as if it needs to be polished before you can enter it?

Ukiyo-e and the Courage to Notice What Won’t Stay

Two visitors examining framed artworks and artifacts in a museum gallery
~ Rich Pascual ~ Leave a comment

A prompt landed on my desk about ukiyo-e woodblock prints and the art of fleeting things. Which is a fine way to spend a morning, especially if your alternative is reorganizing the sock drawer for the third time. Ukiyo-e does not merely show a passing world. It trains the eye to receive one.

The word ukiyo-e is often translated as “pictures of the floating world,” or, with a slightly heavier sigh, “pictures of the sorrowful world.” The Library of Congress’s overview places the tradition in Japan’s seventeenth- through nineteenth-century print culture, where artists pictured actors, courtesans, landscapes, stories, and the pleasures of ordinary urban life. This was not art kept at a safe distance from daily life. It was made to circulate.

That circulation required a small orchestra of patience. A publisher organized the project. An artist supplied the design. A carver cut the image into wood. A printer pressed pigment onto paper, lining up each impression with care. As The Metropolitan Museum of Art explains, polychrome prints used a separate carved block for each color—sometimes as many as twenty. The bright final image was therefore a visible record of invisible repetition.

Then there is mono no aware, a phrase that resists being flattened into “everything is temporary.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes it as the pathos of things, a feeling arising from their transience. The point is not to scold us for loving what changes. It is to notice that the change is part of what makes the thing dear.

Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa makes this almost comically clear. A wave rises like a blue claw. Three boats work their way beneath it. Mount Fuji sits in the distance, small and composed. Smarthistory’s account of the print notes how the image turns a split second of danger into something that can be looked at again and again. The wave still falls. The print does not pretend otherwise.

That may be the formation lesson. We often confuse attention with control. We photograph the birthday because we cannot keep the child that age. We save the message because the conversation will move on. We make a plan, then discover that life has its own carving tools. Ukiyo-e offers a gentler practice: receive the impression while it is here.

What happened? A team of makers built images of a world always in motion. What did it mean? Beauty and loss are not always enemies; sometimes they arrive holding hands. What can I carry forward? Today, notice one ordinary thing before rushing past it—the steam from a mug, a joke you have heard before, the last light on the wall. You do not have to make it permanent. Just be there for the impression.