Kanonji Matsuri

This past weekend was Kanonji's autumn festival. Almost every weekend in October there is a festival somewhere. The first weekend was Toyohama's. Kanonji's and Siajo's were this past weekend. I'm not sure who's coming up next, but there are still a lot of cities to go. Instead of having a carnival or a fest or Halloween, the Japanese make these large wooden vehicles, with drums, to drive the neighborhood gods around to the city shrine. These vehicles are called chosa, and they are huge! There are several poles that people pull and push them with while others ride in the top, and someone else sits in the middle, drumming. At the shrine there are vendors, with food and toys, and events. Kids get to dress up in kimonos and there have some sort of pageant. We couldn't get a good enough look to figure out what excatly they were doing, but we were more interested in the food anyway. There were candied apples, crepes, corn on the cob, yakitori, taiyaki, squid on a stick, and some other mystery foods. I was not brave enough to try them, but Mark did.

Canstruction

Every year the Society for Design Administration has a contest called Canstruction. Its a food charity donation program where groups of architects and engineers form teams to build sculptures out of canned goods and other non-perishable food items. I'm not sure what the teams win, but at the end of the contest, all the food is donated to local food banks.

San Antonio has been a participating city for several years. One year the sculptures were assembled in the Central Library, which is how I became aware of this project. This year they were displayed at a mall. Mark and I went this afternoon to see them, and, unfortunately, we were not impressed. I remember the sculptures as being very colorful and whimsical, but the ones out there today were not nearly as good. Its possible that food labels have changed so that they are not as colorful. Perhaps the manufacturers are using more white space then they used to; I don't know. I do know that the sculptures were mostly blocky, dull blobs, except for the Norte Dame remake, which actually had some shape and color to it, but was still not quite live up to my expectations. I hope there's better stuff out there next year.

PS We don't know where the sculptures on the Canstruction website were hiding. We didn't see any of the ones posted there, except for Norte Dame.