Since the 1980s, Itsuo Kobayashi has drawn a picture of every single meal he eats. However notable we find this practice now, it would surely have struck us as downright eccentric back then. Kobayashi began drawing his food before the arrival of inexpensive digital cameras and cellphones, and well before the smartphone combined the two into the single package we now keep close at hand. We all know people who take camera-phone pictures of their meals, some of them with the regularity and solemnity of prayer, but how many of them could produce lifelike renderings of the food placed before them with only pen and paper?
“The Japanese outsider artist and professional cook, born in 1962, first began keeping food diaries as a teenager,” Artnet’s Sarah Cascone writes of Kobayashi. “In his 20s, he began adding illustrations of the dishes he made at work, and those he ate while dining out.” When, at the age of 46, a “debilitating neurological disorder made it difficult for him to walk, leaving him largely confined to his home,” Kobayashi began to focus on his food diaries even more intensely.
His subjects are now mostly “food deliveries — sometimes from restaurants, sometimes from his mother. And though his day-to-day existence rarely varies, he’s been pushing his practice in a new direction, creating a new series of pop-up paintings.”
After 32 years of making increasingly detailed and realistic overhead drawings of his every meal — including such information as names, prices, flavor notes, and faithfully replicated restaurant logos — Kobayashi’s work has caught the attention of the American art world. The Fukuyama-based gallery Kushino Terrace “gave Kobayashi his US debut in January, at New York’s Outsider Art Fair,” Cascone writes. “His works sell for between $500 and $3,000.” That makes for quite a step up in prestige from his old job cooking at a soba restaurant, though his copious experience with that dish shows whenever it appears in his diary.
But then, after decade upon decade of daily practice, everything Kobayashi draws looks good enough to eat, from bowls of ramen to plates of curry to bento boxes filled with all manner of delights from land and sea. Though hardly fancy, especially by the advanced standards of Japanese food culture, these are the kind of meals you want to savor, the ones to which you feel you should pay appreciative attention rather than just scarfing down. Or at least they look that way under Kobayashi’s gaze, which even the most ardent 21st-century food-photographing hobbyist must envy. Many of us wish to eat more consciously, and the work of this cook-turned-artist shows us how: put down the phone, and pick up the sketchbook.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
It is no arbitrary coincidence that Margery Williams’ classic The Velveteen Rabbit involves a terrifying brush with scarlet fever. Published in 1922, the book was based on her own children. But all of its first readers would have shuddered at the mention, given very recent memories of the global devastation wrought by “Spanish” flu. The story earns its fairy-tale ending by invoking catastrophe, with images of the poor rabbit nearly thrown into the fire and then tossed out with the trash.
The Velveteen Rabbit recalls Oscar Wilde’s 19th century children’s stories, in which “loss is not a pose; it is real,” writes Jeanette Winterson. All may eventually be restored, “there is usually a happy ending,” but “Wilde’s fairytale transformations turn on loss.” The author of The Velveteen Rabbit did not share Wilde’s contrarian streak, nor indulge the same sentimental fits of piety, but Williams’ intent was no less profound and serious. The specter of fever still haunts the book’s Arcadian ending.
Williams’ major influence was Walter de la Mare, whom the Poetry Foundation describes as a writer of “dreams, death, rare states of mind and emotion, fantasy worlds of childhood, and the pursuit of the transcendent”—all themes The Velveteen Rabbit engages in the narrative language of kids. Do children’s books still recognize early childhood as uniquely formative, while also regarding children as sophisticated readers who can appreciate emotional depth and psychological complexity?
Do Disney’s modern franchises take loss as seriously? What about Paw Patrol? Were Wilde and Williams’ stories unusual for their time or did they mark a trend? How do children’s books serve as codes of conduct, and what do they tell us about how we filter life’s calamities in digestible narratives for our kids? How can we use such stories to educate in the midst of overwhelming events?
For those who find these questions intriguing for purely academic reasons, or who struggle with them as both parents and newly minted homeschool teachers, we offer, below, several online libraries with thousands of scanned historical children’s books, from very early printed examples in the 18th century to examples of a much more recent vintage.
These come from publishers in England, the U.S., and the Soviet Union, and from names like Christina Rosetti, Jules Verne, Wizard of Oz author Frank L. Baum, and English artist Randolph Caldecott, whose surname has distinguished the best American picture books for 70 years. For every star of children’s writing and illustration, there are hundreds of writers and artists hardly anyone remembers, but whose work can be as playful, moving, and honest as the famous classic children’s stories we pass on to our kids.
Whether we’re parents, scholars, teachers, curious readers, or all of the above, we find that the best children’s books show us “why we need fairy tales,” as Winterson writes, at every age. “Reason and logic are tools for understanding the world. We need a means of understanding ourselves, too. That is what imagination allows.”
When I became the Kennedy Center Education Artist-in-Residence, I didn’t realize the most impactful word in that title would be “Residence.” —illustrator Mo Willems
Even as schools regroup and online instruction gathers steam, the scramble continues to keep cooped-up kids engaged and happy.
These COVID-19-prompted online drawing lessons and activities might not hold much appeal for the single-minded sports nut or the junior Feynman who scoffs at the transformative properties of art, but for the art‑y kid, or fans of certain children’s illustrators, these are an excellent diversion.
Once the design is complete, he rolls the dice to advance both his piece and that of his home viewer. A 5 lands him on the crowd-pleasing directive “fart.” Clearly the online instructor enjoys certain liberties the classroom teacher would be ill-advised to attempt.
Check out the full playlist on the Kennedy Center’s YouTube channel and download activity pages for each episode here.
#MoLunchDoodles
If the daily LUNCHDOODLES leaves ‘em wanting more, there’s just enough time for a quick pee and snack break before Lunch Lady’sJarrett J. Krosoczka takes over with Draw Everyday with JJK, a basic illustration lesson every weekday at 2pm EST. These are a bit more nitty gritty, as JJK, the kid who loved to draw and grew up to be an artist, shares practical tips on penciling, inking, and drawing faces. Pro tip: resistant Star Wars fans will likely be hooked by the first episode’s Yoda, a character Krosoczka is well versed in as the author and illustrator of the Star Wars Jedi Academy series.
DRAW A MAP: When we think of treasure maps, we think of sea monsters, islands with palm trees, pirate ships, anthropomorphic clouds blowing gales upon white-capped seas. YOUR map can be of anywhere: an enchanted wood, a dystopian suburb, your backyard, your apartment that has never felt so small, all of the above, none of the above. Or your map can be a traditional treasure map leading to a pirate’s hoard. It’s totally up to you. Three things that you MUST include are: a compass rose (very important—look this up if you don’t know what it is), the name of the place you are mapping, and a red X.
DRAW THE TREASURE: The first part of this assignment is to draw a map with a red X to mark the location of hidden treasure. The second part of this assignment is to draw the treasure. I don’t know what the treasure is. Only you know what the treasure is. Draw it on a separate piece of paper from the map.
BONUS POINTS: If you’re going to post this on instagram, I recommend formatting it with two images. Post the map first, then the treasure which the viewer will swipe to see. This will create what we in the kids book world call AN IMPACTFUL PAGE TURN. That’s the thing that happens when you’re reading a picture book and you turn the page to discover something funny or surprising. It’s kind of hard to explain, but you know a good page turn when you’ve experienced one.
#QuarantineArtClub
Wendy McNaughton, who specializes in drawn journalism, also likes the Instagram platform, hosting a live Draw Together session every school day, from 10–10.30 am PST. Her approach is a bit more freeform, with impromptu dance parties, special guests, and field trips to the backyard.
Her How to Watch Draw Together highlight is a hilarious crash course in Instagram Live, scrawled in magic marker by someone who’s possibly only now just getting a grip on the platform. Don’t see it? Maybe it’s the weekend, or “maybe ask a millennial for help?”
And bless E.B. Goodale, an illustrator, first time author and mother of a young son, who having counteracted the heartbreak of a cancelled book tour with a hastily launched week of daily Instagram Live Toddler Drawing Club meetings, made the decision to scale back to just Tuesdays and Thursdays:
It was fun doing it everyday but turned out to be a bit too much to handle given our family’s new schedule. We’re all figuring it out, right? I hope you will continue to join me in our unchartered territory next week as we draw to stay sane. Tune in live to make requests or watch it later and follow along at home.
(Her How to Draw a Cat tutorial, above, was likely intended for in-person bookstore events relating to her just published Under the Lilacs…)
#drawingwithtoddlers
Our personal favorite is Stickies Art School, whose online children’s classes are led not by multi-disciplinary artist Nina Katchadourian, whose Facebook page serves as the online institution’s home, but rather her senior tuxedo cat, Stickies.
Stickies, who comes to the gig with an impressive command of English, honed no doubt by frequent appearances on Katchadourian’s Instagram page, affects a diffident air to dole out assignments, the latest of which is above.
He allows his students ample time to complete their tasks—thus far all portraits of himself. The next one, to render Stickies in a costume of the artist’s choice, is due Wednesday by 9am, Berlin time.
There have been so many conversations at NYU Gallatin where I’m on the faculty about online teaching, how to do it, how to think of a studio course in this new form, etc, and I think perhaps that crossed over with the desire to cheer up some people with kids, many of whom are already Stickies fans, or so I have been told.
His child proteges are no doubt unaware that Stickies looked ready to leave the planet several weeks ago, a fact whose import will resonate with many pet owners in these dark days:
Maybe a third element was just being so glad he is still around, that having him actively “out there” feels good and life-affirming at the moment.
Stickies Art School is marvelous fun for adults to audit from afar, via Katchadourian’s public Facebook posts. If you are a parent whose child would like to participate, send her a friend request and mention that you’re doing so on behalf of your child artist.
Searching on the hashtag #artteachersofinstagram will yield many more resources.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Given the cancellation of everything, she’s taken to Instagram to document her social distance strolls through New York City’s Central Park, using the hashtag #queenoftheapeswalk Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Dick Cavett excelled at turning the late-night talk show format into a showcase for genuinely revealing conversations (and the occasional wrestling match). Of the many riveting guests he had on throughout the 60s and 70s, some appearing multiple times, few could match Orson Welles for sheer storytelling prowess. As if in a contest to outdo himself, Welles appeared on Cavett’s show three times in 1970, and once more in 1973, as an amiable, gruff raconteur who lived a life almost impossible to believe actually happened.
Welles met everyone. He even met Hitler, he says in the clip above from a July 1970 appearance on the show, his second that year. In those early days, he says, “the Nazis were just a very comical kind of minority party of nuts that nobody took seriously at all” except Welles’ Austrian hiking instructor, who brought the legendary actor and director to a Nazi dinner with the future mass-murdering dictator. Welles was seated next to Hitler, who “made so little an impression on me that I can’t remember a second of it. He had no personality. He was invisible…. I think there was nothing there.”
By 1938, everyone knew who he was: Hitler was named “man of the year” by Time magazine, who wrote, “lesser men of the year seemed small indeed beside the Führer”—and Welles was named “Radio’s Man of the Year.” His “famous The War of the Worlds broadcast, scared fewer people than Hitler,” the editors wrote, “but more than had ever been frightened by radio before, demonstrating that radio can be a tremendous force in whipping up mass emotion.” Welles’ never met Stalin, he tells Cavett, unprompted, but knew Roosevelt “very well.”
In a later appearance on the show, in September 1970, Welles claimed Roosevelt told him no one believed the Pearl Harbor announcement because of the War of the Worlds hoax. Here, in this twelve-minute clip from July, he has many more stories to tell and excellent questions from Cavett to answer (if he went back to school, he says, and “really wanted to get good at a subject,” he would study anthropology). Towards the end, at 9:00, he talks about another world leader who did make a distinct impression on him: Winston Churchill. “He was quite another thing,” says Welles. “He had great humor and great irony.”
Welles tells a story of Churchill coming to see him play Othello in London. “I heard a murmuring in the front row. I thought he was talking to himself.” Churchill later came to visit Welles in his dressing room and began to recite all of Othello’s lines from memory, “including the cuts which I had made.” Years later, after the war, when Churchill was out of office, Welles ran into him once more in Venice, and their prior association came very much in handy in the financing of his next picture. (He doesn’t name the film, but it might have been The Stranger.)
No one experienced the 20th century quite like Orson Welles, and no one left such a creative legacy. Always entertaining, his Cavett appearances are more than opportunities for name dropping—they’re televised memoirs, in extemporaneous vignettes, from one of history’s most engaging storytellers.
Since the first stirrings of the internet, artists and curators have puzzled over what the fluidity of online space would do to the experience of viewing works of art. At a conference on the subject in 2001, Susan Hazan of the Israel Museum wondered whether there is “space for enchantment in a technological world?” She referred to Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on the “potentially liberating phenomenon” of technologically reproduced art, yet also noted that “what was forfeited in this process were the ‘aura’ and the authority of the object containing within it the values of cultural heritage and tradition.” Evaluating a number of online galleries of the time, Hazan found that “the speed with which we are able to access remote museums and pull them up side by side on the screen is alarmingly immediate.” Perhaps the “accelerated mobility” of the internet, she worried, “causes objects to become disposable and to decline in significance.”
Fifteen years after her essay, the number of museums that have made their collections available online whole, or in part, has grown exponentially and shows no signs of slowing. We may not need to fear losing museums and libraries—important spaces that Michel Foucault called “heterotopias,” where linear, mundane time is interrupted. These spaces will likely always exist.
Yet increasingly we need never visit them in person to view most of their contents. Students and academics can conduct nearly all of their research through the internet, never having to travel to the Bodleian, the Beinecke, or the British Library. And lovers of art must no longer shell out for plane tickets and hotels to see the precious contents of the Getty, the Guggenheim, or the Rijksmuseum. And who would dare do that during our current pandemic?
For all that may be lost, online galleries have long been “making works of art widely available, introducing new forms of perception in film and photography and allowing art to move from private to public, from the elite to the masses.”
Even more so than when Hazan wrote those words, the online world offers possibilities for “the emergence of new cultural phenomena, the virtual aura.” Over the years we have featured dozens of databases, archives, and online galleries through which you might virtually experience art the world over, an experience once solely reserved for only the very wealthy. And as artists and curators adapt to a digital environment, they find new ways to make virtual galleries enchanting. The vast collections in the virtual galleries listed below await your visit, with 2,000,000+ paintings, sculptures, photographs, books, and more. See the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum (top), courtesy of the Google Cultural Institute. See Van Gogh’s many self-portraits and vivid, swirling landscapes at The Van Gogh Museum. Visit the Asian art collection at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. Or see Vassily Kandinsky’s dazzling abstract compositions at the Guggenheim.
And below the list of galleries, find links to online collections of several hundred art books to read online or download. Continue to watch this space: We’ll add to both of these lists as more and more collections come online.
More free music/entertainment to carry you through these bleak, strange times. Dead & Company (the surviving members of the Grateful Dead plus John Mayer and Oteil Burbridge) are making concerts free to stream at home. And the first one gets underway tonight.
Stay at home this weekend and tune in to “One More Saturday Night”, a new #CouchTour series featuring your favorite Dead & Company shows, for FREE. We’re kicking things off with the 12/2/17 Austin show this Saturday at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT on http://nugs.tv and on Facebook!
Click the links above to watch the show. Until then, you can watch a set above, recorded live in Atlanta’s Lakewood Amphitheatre, back in June 2017.
Also find a trove of 11,000+ recorded Grateful Dead shows in the Relateds below.
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An embarrassment of riches for those whose experience of COVID-19 is somewhere between extended snow day and staycation…
But what about caregivers who suddenly find themselves providing 24–7 care for elders with dementia, or neuro-atypical adult children whose upended routine is wreaking havoc on their emotions?
“I know people are happy that the schools have closed but I just lost critical workday hours and if/when day hab closes I will have to take low-paid medical leave AND we will not have any breaks from caregiving someone with 24–7 needs and aggressive, loud behaviors. I feel completely defeated,” one friend writes.
24 hours later:
We just lost day hab, effective tomorrow. My messages for in-home services haven’t been returned yet. Full on panic mode.
What can we do to help lighten those loads when we’re barred from physical interaction, or entering each other’s homes?
We combed through our archive, with an eye toward the most soothing, uplifting content, appropriate for all ages, starting with pianist Paul Barton’s classical concerts for elephants in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, above.
We’ve also got a trove of free coloring books and pages, though caregivers should vet the content before sharing it with someone who’s likely to be disturbed by medical illustration and images of medieval demons…
Readers, if you know a resource that might buy caregivers and their agitated, housebound charges a bit of peace, please add it in the comments below.
When people say things like “the science is settled” or “the science has changed,” researchers tend to grind their teeth. Science can come to a broad consensus, as in the case of the coronavirus or climate change, but it isn’t ever perfectly settled as a bloc on any question. We proceed in scientific knowledge not by attaining perfect knowledge but, as Isaac Asimov once wrote, by being less wrong than those who came before.
And scientists advance in scientific publishing, as Aeon writes, not with certainty, but with “excitement, baby steps and reams of rejections.” As we see in the short film above, The Researcher’s Article, by French filmmaker Charlotte Arene, getting one’s research published can be “a patience-testing exercise in rejection, rewriting and waiting,” demonstrated here by the travails of physicists Frédéric Restagno and Julien Bobroff of the University of Paris-Saclay.
Even before submitting their findings, the scientists must carefully fit their work into the traditional form known as the “letter,” a document of four pages or fewer that condenses years of research into strictly succinct paragraphs, graphs, and references. The “letter” is “one of the most popular formats of articles in physics,” say the physicists, noting the major Nobel prize-winning discoveries to appear as letters in recent years, including the Higgs’ Boson publication that won in 2013, coming in at only two pages long.
Summing up “a massive amount of data,” short scientific articles then go on to prove themselves to their respective fields through a refereeing process in which three anonymous scientists read the work and recommend publication, revision, or rejection. This process can go several rounds and take several months. One must be persistent: Restagno and Bobroff were rejected from several journals before finally getting an acceptance.
After this significant investment of time and effort, the authors may have a readership of maybe twenty people. But crowd size is not the point, they say, “because research is made up of all these small discoveries,” contributing to a larger picture, informing and correcting each other, and going about the humble, painstaking business of trying to be less wrong than their predecessors, while still building on the best insights of hundreds of years of scientific publishing.
The past few weeks have reminded us just why viruses have been such a formidable enemy of humanity for so long. Though very few of the countless viruses in existence affect us in any way, let alone a lethal one, we can’t see them without microscopes. And so when a deadly virus breaks out, we live our daily lives with an invisible killer in our midst. Aggressive testing, as several coronavirus-afflicted countries have proven, does much to lower the rate of transmission. But how, exactly, does transmission happen? In the video above, Youtuber Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer and Apple product designer, demonstrates the process vividly by taking a blacklight into that most diseased of all environments: the elementary-school classroom.
You can’t see viruses under a blacklight, but you can see the special powder that Rober applies to the hands of the class’s teacher. At the beginning of the school day, the teacher shakes the hand of just three kids, touching none of the others, and by lunchtime — a couple of hours after Rober powders the hands of one more student during morning break — the blacklight reveals the “germs” everywhere.
This despite fairly diligent hand-washing, albeit hand-washing unaccompanied by the disinfection of surfaces, cellphones, and other objects in and parts of the classroom. “Even if a virus is spread through airborne transmission,” Rober says, “those tiny droplets don’t stay in the air for long. Then they land on surfaces, waiting to be touched by our hands.” This leads him to the declaration that “the ultimate defense against catching a virus is: just don’t touch your face.”
Rober calls your eyes, nose, and mouth “the single weak spot on the Death Star when it comes to viruses. That’s the only way they can get in to infect you.” Hence, here in the time of COVID-19, the frequent urgings not just to wash our hands but to refrain from touching our faces as well. Increasingly many of us have become hyper-aware of our own “germ hygiene,” as Rober calls it, but the other half of the battle against the pandemic must be institutional: school closures, for example, one of which was announced over the PA system during this very video’s shoot. “Because of this virus, we are going to be closing school for three weeks,” says the principal, not without a note of excitement in his voice — but an excitement hardly comparable to the subsequent explosion of joy among the third-graders listening. Challenging though this time may be, children like these remind us to take our fun wherever we find it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In these times, we need to keep at some kind of routine. And so I’d like to doff my cloth worker’s cap to Denis Shiryaev, who once again has returned from the early days of cinema with another AI-restored clip of film from the early 20th century.
Ah, but there’s something amiss this time, a glitch in the matrix of expectations. Not all sources can be saved by technology. Fans of Shiryaev’s crystal clear journeys back in time (find them in the Relateds below) might find the footage rough. It doesn’t make this film any less fascinating.
Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon started their film business to try to copy the success of similar, earlier filmmakers like the Lumiere Brothers in Paris. Audiences would pay to see short films of how people lived, worked, walked about, and just existed. It was a window into another reality, and by pure chance a hundred of Mitchell & Kenyon’s films were found preserved in a Blackburn, UK basement nearly a century later. This is a compilation of three of them, scored by Guy Jones with mild atmospherics.
More than any of the other films that Shiryaev has “restored,” Mitchell & Kenyon don’t try to hide their camera or pretend it’s not there. Instead, these three films make a point of inviting their subjects to look directly at us, and because of Shiryaev’s work these dozens and dozens of eyes really seem to be watching us from across time. The young boys are cheeky, the young girls shy, the older adults bemused or slightly irritated. There is no particular focus here–we can choose who we want to follow, which indeed was one of the reasons for these films popularity. They were designed for repeat visits.
There are two particular points of interest that happen very quickly. One is at 1:09–the appearance of an Afro-Caribbean man as part of the workforce. People of African descent had lived in Britain since the 12th century, but this might be one of the earliest films of such a person. The other is later at 4:24, which might be the first film of a bloke giving the camera the rude two-fingered salute. This moment is why the British Film Institute dubbed Mitchell & Kenyon “the accidental anthropologists.”
(You might also watch for the fight that breaks out near the end of the film. Real or not? You be the judge.)
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
A heads up to all parents, Audible has announced that they’re providing free stories for kids during this period of social distancing, which inevitably means widespread school closures. They write:
For as long as schools are closed, we’re open. Starting today, kids everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories, including titles across six different languages, that will help them continue dreaming, learning, and just being kids.
All stories are free to stream on your desktop, laptop, phone or tablet.
Explore the collection, select a title and start listening.
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