SLOW Movement

Boing Boing: The elephant in the testing room

Saw this on Boing Boing. For laughs :)

===

POSTED AT 9:44 AM December 11, 2009

The elephant in the testing room

Hemant Mehta, "The Friendly Atheist", is also a math teacher. This is what he found on one of the tests he was grading this week. The ol' Elephant Excuse. Pretty crafty. So how does a responsible educator of young minds respond to such a stunt? The answer is after the jump ..

If you're going to throw a Hail Mary Pachyderm on your final exam, you damn well best get your artwork correct.

FT: Triump of the ordinary

Triumph of the ordinary

By Jackie Wullschlager

Published: December 5 2009 00:09 | Last updated: December 5 2009 11:00

Andy Warhol
By Arthur C Danto
Yale £18, 162 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14.40

Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol
By Tony Scherman and David Dalton
Harper $40, 510 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

Andy Warhol: The Last Decade
By Joseph D Ketner II
Prestel £45, 223 pages
FT Bookshop price: £36

Andy Warhol Giant Size
Introduction by Dave Hickey
Phaidon £24.99, 624 pages
FT Bookshop price: £19.99

New York, early 1969: Andy Warhol, recently shot by Valerie Solanas because “he had too much control of my life”, is recovering. At a party, he spies Willem de Kooning and hurries to pay homage. Instantly, de Kooning spins round so that the two great artists are face-to-face. “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, you’re even a killer of laughter. I can’t bear your work!” he shouts. The other guests are stunned but Warhol, turning away, merely shrugs, “Oh well, I always loved his work.”

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Books - Nov-24

Art critic Arthur Danto relates de Kooning’s rant in his incisive, essential account, Andy Warhol, just published by Yale as part of its “Icons of America” series. Tony Scherman and David Dalton’s Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol is packed with similar anecdotes: for instance, a star-struck Andy, persistently ignored by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whines, “Why don’t Bob and Jap like me?” – only to be told by a mutual friend, “How could they? You’re too queer – and your work is so commercial. It probably makes them uneasy.”

It took a long time, Danto argues, “for Warhol to become intellectually respectable in America. Instead, he became an icon.”

Warhol is now the most famous American artist of all time, and among the most expensive. But many viewers still sympathise with the responses of de Kooning, or Rauschenberg and Johns, or even Solanas. All the more so because since the 1960s Warhol’s control over our visual experiences has indeed been indisputable. Collapsing the gap between high and low culture, his silkscreen methods brought printing techniques into painting, while his subjects – from Coca-Cola bottles to Elvis – took commercial art into fine art. Like Picasso, he revolutionised how art is made; like Duchamp he revolutionised what we consider art can be. But unlike Picasso and Duchamp, who were both European intellectuals from privileged backgrounds, Warhol came from a working-class immigrant family and his blue-collar sensibility created an aesthetic aimed, for the first time in history, at mass audiences.

As with all seminal artists there will probably be a Warhol for every epoch. In terms of biography, Victor Bockris’s account, published in 1989 two years after the artist’s death, stands unrivalled. These four books, however, testify that debate continues to rage around Warhol’s contribution – his early versus his late works – and his role as Pop artist versus philosopher versus celebrity.

No interpreter of Warhol can escape the influence of Danto’s uniquely perceptive understanding. Both artist and critic were born in the 1920s, grew up in America’s industrial heartland – Warhol in Pittsburgh, Danto in Detroit – to be shaped by the Depression before hitting New York in the 1940s.

Danto became professor of philosophy at Columbia, but his Damascus moment came on seeing Warhol’s “Brillo Box” in 1964. “It turned me into a philosopher of art,” he says. His book distils a lifetime’s thinking about Warhol and modern aesthetics, which “is more or less a response to Warhol’s challenges, so in an important sense he really was doing philosophy by doing the art that made him famous”.

When Warhol displayed facsimiles of Brillo cartons in an art gallery – piled high, in neat stacks, as in the stockroom of a supermarket – he was rephrasing an ancient question: “Given two objects that look exactly alike, how far is it possible for one of them to be a work of art and the other just an ordinary object?” With his urinal, “Fountain”, Duchamp had playfully asked this question half a century before; Danto argues that Warhol was a more political and also a religious artist. Was Jesus man or God? “Imagine that there was a man just his age in Jerusalem, who looked enough like Jesus that the two of them were often confused for one another ... The difference could not have been more momentous than that! Confusing a god with a mere human being is ... like confusing a work of art with a mere real thing – a thing defined through its meaning with a thing defined through its use.”

With priestly genius, this theological Warhol mesmerised his non-intellectual congregation by using images that transfigured the commonplace. His Campbell soup cans and Coke bottles speak a vernacular language anyone can understand; like Joseph Beuys’ fat and felt, they resonated too with widespread memories of cold and hunger for a postwar generation. Their repetition, and Warhol’s obsession with working in series, are not just formal devices – though they were a slap against the individualism of abstract expressionism – but emblems of political equality. As a child, face pressed to the windows of downtown stores packed with desirable, unaffordable products, Warhol had known real want: here were his dreams of assembly-line plenty and security.

All religion is based on suffering and its radical relief; Warhol’s art evolved on two levels, “the level of fears and agonies, and the level of beauties”: car accidents, plane crashes, suicides, executions – and Liz, Jackie, Elvis, Marilyn in gold, glimmering like the Byzantine icons at the Orthodox church where Warhol’s Ruthenian family had worshipped. Danto concludes with a powerful picture of the coherence of Warhol’s work: “a dark world with radiant beings, whose presence among us is redemptive, and into whose company Warhol sought to insinuate his own ungainly presence, and to make stars of us all”.

That ungainly presence is the centre of Scherman and Dalton’s gossipy, illuminating account of Warhol’s 1960s transformation from an “undesired, homely” commercial illustrator, “languishing at the bottom” of New York’s gay hierarchy, to the “ashen-faced mothlike ghoul fixed in the collective mind” as the world’s first celebrity artist. Scores of interviews bring alive his complexity in this most fertile period: Andy the party addict (“he would go to the opening of a drawer”) living chastely with his mother and 17 cats (“the place smelt – you wouldn’t believe how terribly”); the fey attention-seeker (“I was going to bring my butterfly on a string but I couldn’t find him”) who was also a weightlifter (“to build up his chest, mainly ... and to check out the boys”); and the career opportunist who spent Sundays helping in soup kitchens.

Crucially, Warhol was the voyeur (“Andy said ‘Ohh I want to draw it!’ and before I knew it ... I was sitting with my pants down, with a daffodil wound around my dick. That was my first meeting with Andy”) who could not bear to be touched – “he told me he’d had sex a few times, he had tried it and didn’t like it, too ‘messy and distasteful’ ”. Scherman and Dalton suggest that as emotional, aesthetic and social outsider, Warhol was able to see instinctively that “comic strips and ads were in fact contemporary folk art” and that the fan magazine idols adored in the “blue collar woman’s world” of his mother Julia Warhola could be transmuted – via his own repetitions, off-register printing and deliberate lack of nuance – and served up to sophisticated New York taste.

The photographic sources were a masterstroke. They allowed Warhol to bypass illusionist dilemmas, just as Johns did by painting already-flat subjects such as “Flag” and “Target”. In this context, the well-known aperçu “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it” becomes a metaphor for his grasp of a major formal issue confronting painters of his era.

Scherman and Dalton’s account stops at 1968, when they believe success destroyed Warhol’s originality. “It had been his poor-boy’s fascination with the offerings of 1930s Pittsburgh showrooms and movie theatres that gave Warhol’s Pop paintings their glow, his bitterness at the elite’s snubs that largely fuelled his early Pop images’ abrasive inelegance. But he was an insider now; his 1960s authority, rooted in marginality and transgression, was extinguished.” In Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, however, Joseph D Ketner takes the opposite view, arguing that in his final years Warhol brought his oeuvre full circle, sweeping his previous images into a “complex dance of painting and printing, abstraction and representation, surface and meaning”.

Certainly the 1970s and 1980s presented Warhol with a new challenge: each artist had to find his own way and the pluralistic art scene began to anticipate that of today. Warhol’s diverse range of references, as explored here, suggest some desperation: performance art, and an ironic jest at Pollockesque physicality in the “Piss Paintings”; Picasso’s cartoonish late canvases in the drag queen portraits; the collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat. “I wasn’t creative since I was shot” became a mantra.

The Whitney Museum’s 1979 exhibition of his portraits was critically mauled: the exchange of Brillo-box austerity for flattering likenesses in psychedelic colours suggested a sell-out. Robert Rosenblum hailed Warhol as “court painter to the 1970s international aristocracy”. Warhol replied that the canvases were the same size “so they’ll all fit together and make one big painting called Portraits of Society. Maybe the Metropolitan Museum would want it someday.”

The Met hasn’t so far but when the group was shown at Paris’s Grand Palais this spring, it looked stunning. And if Warhol’s late fright-wig self-portraits, based on Polaroid snaps with his hair swept up, Basquiat-Rasta style, are not comparable to Rembrandt and Picasso’s final self-depictions, to which Ketner compares them, they are nevertheless among his greatest works: at once stage performances and hollowed-out death-masks.

“Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you, just measure it in inches”, was a famous comment by this lifelong chaser of fame. Andy Warhol Giant Size is a condensed edition of a 420mm-high visual biography published in 2006. Now shrunk to more manageable but still impressive size, it is a celebrity album. It opens with little-known childhood photographs and closes with the order of service for Warhol’s memorial mass and images of his Pittsburgh gravestone (it does not, as he once demanded, say “figment”).

“I never fall apart because I never fall together,” Warhol remarked; the abundance of detail and scrapbook format here perfectly reflect an overcrowded life which was never distinct from his art. It is dotted with apparently throw-away remarks by himself and others – “I don’t really believe in love. I sort of believe in liking” in the context of 1950s male nude drawings; Ed Ruscha’s “Andy was like no artist I had ever met because he was for everything and nothing at the same time” alongside his “Race Riot” series. It conveys persuasively how Warhol was at once America’s 20th-century Everyman and an artist who depicted ordinariness with exceptional visionary intelligence.

That democratic agenda haunts all these volumes. Their authors are all American and each has a patriotic undertow; Danto’s is dedicated to the Obamas. Even if you don’t agree that Warhol was America’s most significant artist, they leave you in no doubt that he was, as Danto calls him, “the laureate of the American soul”.

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s chief art critic and author of ‘Chagall: The Dream of Life’ (Allen Lane)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Boing Boing: Satellite photography alphabet

Cory Doctorow

POSTED AT 9:32 PM November 3, 2009

Art and Design • Photo • Space

Satellite photography alphabet

The Google Earth Alphabet has upper and lower case and numbers and punctuation formed inadvertently by geographic features visible from space.

Upper case

Lower case

Numbers and punctuation

(via Making Light)

FT: Art for body, mind and soul

Art for body, mind and soul

By Harry Eyres

Published: October 24 2009 00:44 | Last updated: October 24 2009 00:44

The slow suppleness and gravity-defying lightness of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre from Taiwan

I once embarked on training in something grandly styled Integrative Arts Therapy.

The idea went back to the 1920s when the psychiatrist Hanz Prinzhorn achieved remarkable results by encouraging profoundly disturbed patients to paint and draw. Prinzhorn, an art historian-turned-doctor who was close to the Surrealists and Dadaists, became convinced that the spontaneous productions of mental patients were “the eruptions of a universal human creative urge”. Reconnecting patients with this urge could do as much as, or more than, words or drugs. His collection of the artworks of patients fortunately survived the war and is now on display at the University of Heidelberg. From his experiments emerged the now institutionalised discipline of art therapy.

Integrative arts therapy had the noble aim of going beyond art therapy and bringing the resources of all the arts to bear on the work of soul-healing, or psychotherapy. Unfortunately, I found that in practice this aim led to infantilism: the turning of the therapeutic space into a kids’ playground full of fluffy cushions and painted in cheerful colours (no gloomy or disturbing art allowed). Art, I felt, was losing its edge and its full, uncanny power by being pressed into service as a therapeutic aid.

I gave up the training but not the idea that the arts are profoundly healing for the soul. Maybe that sounds a little bland or sanctimonious. Who could disprove such a claim – but then who could prove it, in a scientific age which has little time for soul? Or perhaps it sounds embarrassing; I have the feeling that nowadays most look to art not for profound soul-searching or soul-healing but for amusement, titillation, brain-teasing, sensation, outrage, disgust – all the kinds of emotion evoked by the Young British Artists and their American counterparts.

So if I claimed that art is profoundly healing, not just for the soul but also for the body, I might just get a better hearing. Two recent experiences have confirmed me in this view. A few weeks ago I went to see a friend’s chamber opera at the Bridewell Theatre off Fleet Street: a small-scale production by an outfit called Opera Engine with a jazz combo standing in for a full orchestra and (unpaid) singers who were either students or just embarking on careers. I wasn’t feeling ill but tired and aching in back and limbs and wondering how I would cope with a longish evening in an uncomfortable seat.

Jacko’s Hour is a dark tale of revenge and a daughter’s love for her father set in a Yorkshire fairground – Verdi meets High Noon with a touch of Puccini and Brighton Rock thrown in. Both libretto (by Tim Satterthwaite) and score (by Elfyn Jones) are finely worked, and give opportunities for singer-actors to voice full-blooded emotions, those inconvenient by-products of being human which are so unfashionable in the post-modern world.

I was moved by the performances of the principals and came out feeling like James Bond’s favourite cocktail, not simply stirred but shaken. My stagnant emotions had been thoroughly agitated. The result was the opposite of the physical exhaustion I had feared: I emerged newly energised and also grateful to the creative team who had given so much for so little tangible reward.

My second experience happened more recently at the Barbican, where, in the latter stages of flu, I attended Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Wind Shadow. Of all artforms, dance is the one I have least affinity with – classical ballet generally bores me (no doubt because I do not understand the grammar or syntax). But I had heard Lin Hwai-min, the founder and choreographer of Cloud Gate, speak at a seminar and been impressed by his charm and modesty and the extraordinary beauty of the filmclip of Cloud Gate he introduced.

Wind Shadow might have seemed a gruelling proposition; nearly two hours of contemporary dance without obvious narrative or recognisable characters and a score consisting more of sound effects than music. Some critics accused it of being merely spectacular. The visual impact was certainly arresting: dancers covered in black gauze appeared as the shadows of the others, sometimes dragged around by them, clogging their movements, sometimes taking charge. Figures, alone or in small groups, writhed in pools of light, as if paintings by Francis Bacon had come to life, but shorn of grotesqueness and harking back to statues of discus-throwers.

Those who dismissed the work as empty spectacle had missed the three-dimensional aspect of the show, the inspiring way the dancers communicated with their bodies. These remarkable performers are trained not just in the arduous disciplines of ballet but in the subtler arts of tai chi and meditation. Watching the slow suppleness and gravity-defying lightness of their movement seemed to unlock something in my own body. I could not unfold like a flower with the grace of the dancers, but I could reach towards the light.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: A High-Tech Hunt for Lost Art

October 6, 2009

Findings

A High-Tech Hunt for Lost Art

Kalpa Group Project

PAINTINGS Maurizio Seracini, on scaffolding, and the “Battle of Marciano” mural.

By JOHN TIERNEY

Florence, Italy

If you believe, as Maurizio Seracini does, that Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest painting is hidden inside a wall in Florence’s city hall, then there are two essential techniques for finding it. As usual, Leonardo anticipated both of them.

First, concentrate on scientific gadgetry. After spotting what seemed to be a clue to Leonardo’s painting left by another 16th-century artist, Dr. Seracini led an international team of scientists in mapping every millimeter of the wall and surrounding room with lasers, radar, ultraviolet light and infrared cameras. Once they identified the likely hiding place, they developed devices to detect the painting by firing neutrons into the wall.

"Leonardo would love to see how much science is being used to look for his most celebrated masterpiece,” Dr. Seracini said, gazing up at the wall where he hopes the painting can be found, and then retrieved intact. “I can imagine him being fascinated with all this high-tech gear we’re going to set up.”

Dr. Seracini was standing in the Palazzo Vecchio’s grand ceremonial chamber, the Hall of 500, which was the center of Renaissance politics when Leonardo and Michelangelo were commissioned to adorn it with murals of Florentine military victories. On this July day of 2009, it remained the political hub, as evidenced by the sudden appearance of Florence’s new mayor, Matteo Renzi, who was rushing from his office to a waiting car.

The scientific lecture ceased as Dr. Seracini moved quickly to intercept the mayoral entourage. He was eager to use the second essential strategy for retrieving a Leonardo painting in Florence: find the right patron.

That has always been a good tactic in the home of the Medicis and bureaucrats like Machiavelli, a friend of Leonardo’s who signed the contract commissioning the battle mural. Dr. Seracini, an engineering professor at the University of California, San Diego, had spent years in bureaucratic limbo waiting to try his neutron-beam technique, but he saw this new mayor as his best hope yet for finding Leonardo’s work.

The quest had begun more than three decades earlier with a clue fit for a Dan Brown novel. In 1975, after studying engineering in the United States, Dr. Seracini returned to his native Florence and surveyed the Hall of 500 with a Leonardo scholar, Carlo Pedretti.

They were looking for “The Battle of Anghiari,” the largest painting Leonardo ever undertook (three times the width of “The Last Supper”). Although it was never completed — Leonardo abandoned it in 1506 — he left a central scene of clashing soldiers and horses that was hailed as an unprecedented study of anatomy and motion. For decades, artists like Raphael went to the Hall of 500 to see it and make their own copies.

October 6, 2009
	Kalpa Group Projec

Then it vanished. During the remodeling of the hall in 1563, the architect and painter Giorgio Vasari covered the walls with frescoes of military victories by the Medicis, who had returned to power. Leonardo’s painting was largely forgotten.

But in 1975, when Dr. Seracini studied one of Vasari’s battle scenes, he noticed a tiny flag with two words, “Cerca Trova”: essentially, seek and ye shall find. Was this Vasari’s signal that something was hidden underneath?

The technology of the 1970s did not provide much of an answer. Dr. Seracini went on to make his name with scientific analyses of other works of art, and to found the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology at U.C.S.D. In 2000 he returned to the hall with new technology and a new financial patron, Loel Guinness, a British philanthropist. By taking infrared pictures and laser-mapping the room, Dr. Seracini’s team discovered where the doors and windows had been before Vasari’s remodeling.

The reconstructed blueprint, combined with 16th-century documents, was enough to locate the spot painted by Leonardo. It also offered a potential explanation for Michelangelo’s failure to do anything more than an initial sketch for his mural: He must have been miffed that Leonardo was assigned a section of the wall with much better window light.

“This room is huge, but it wasn’t big enough for both Michelangelo and Leonardo,” Dr. Seracini said. (Visit nytimes.com/tierneylab for more details.)

The new analysis showed that the spot painted by Leonardo was right at the “Cerca Trova” clue. The even better news, obtained from radar scanning, was that Vasari had not plastered his work directly on top of Leonardo’s. He had erected new brick walls to hold his murals, and had gone to special trouble to leave a small air gap behind one section of the bricks — the section in back of “Cerca Trova.”

But how could anyone today know what lay behind the fresco and the bricks? How could anyone peer six inches into the wall without harming the historic fresco on the surface?

Dr. Seracini was stymied until 2005, when he appealed for help at a scientific conference and got a suggestion to send beams of neutrons harmlessly through the fresco. With help from physicists in the United States, Italy’s nuclear-energy agency and universities in the Netherlands and Russia, Dr. Seracini developed devices for identifying the telltale chemicals used by Leonardo.

One device can detect the neutrons that bounce back after colliding with hydrogen atoms, which abound in the organic materials (like linseed oil and resin) employed by Leonardo. Instead of using water-based paint for a traditional fresco in wet plaster like Vasari’s, Leonardo covered the wall with a waterproof ground layer and used oil-based paints.

The other device can detect the distinctive gamma rays produced by collisions of neutrons with the atoms of different chemical elements. The goal is to locate the sulfur in Leonardo’s ground layer, the tin in the white prime layer and the chemicals in the color pigments, like the mercury in vermilion and the copper in blue pigments of azurite.

Developing this technology was difficult, but not as big a challenge as getting permission to use it. Dr. Seracini kept running into political and bureaucratic dead ends. So when he saw the new mayor dashing across the Hall of 500 that July afternoon, Dr. Seracini rushed at the chance for a personal to appeal to Mr. Renzi, who had been a fan of the project before his election.

With the politesse of a Medici, the mayor paused and listened, then promised to further this artistic endeavor once he had dealt with his first batch of election pledges.

“My dream is to see this discovery very soon,” Mr. Renzi said. “Soon” can be a highly relative term in Italian bureaucracies, but the mayor did indeed go on to restart the approval process and meet with one of the current patrons of the project, the National Geographic Society. Last week, the mayor said he expected it to proceed shortly.

“We are very willing to give Professor Seracini permission,” Mr. Renzi said Thursday. “The only issue that remains concerns timing — who does what. Within a week or two it should get the go-ahead.”

Once he gets permission, Dr. Seracini said, he hopes to complete the analysis within about a year. If “The Battle of Anghiari” is proved to be there, he said, it would be feasible for Florentine authorities to bring in experts to remove the exterior fresco by Vasari, extract the Leonardo painting and then replace the Vasari fresco. Of course, no one knows what kind of shape the painting might be in today. But Dr. Seracini, who has extensively analyzed the damages suffered by many Renaissance paintings, said that he was optimistic about “The Battle of Anghiari.”

“The advantage is that it has been covered up for five centuries,” he said. “It’s been protected against the environment and vandalism and bad restorations. I don’t expect there to be much decay.”

If he is right, then perhaps Vasari did Leonardo a favor by covering up the painting — and taking care to leave that cryptic little flag above the trove.

Jessica Donati contributed reporting from Rome.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Boing Boing: Stuck Tic Tac gallery

Stuck Tic Tac gallery

Posted by David Pescovitz, September 25, 2009 6:18 AM | permalink

There's something pleasing about finding your last Tic Tacs wedged inside the dispenser and freeing them. The creator of this "Collecting Stuck Tic Tacs" gallery seems to agree. (Thanks, Dean Putney!)

There's something pleasing about finding your last Tic Tacs wedged inside the dispenser and freeing them. The creator of this "Collecting Stuck Tic Tacs" gallery seems to agree. (Thanks, Dean Putney!)

Stuck Tic Tac gallery

There's something pleasing about finding your last Tic Tacs wedged inside the dispenser and freeing them. The creator of this "Collecting Stuck Tic Tacs" gallery seems to agree. (Thanks, Dean Putney!)

Boing Boing: Church converted into magnificent bookstore

Church converted into magnificent bookstore

Posted by David Pescovitz, September 23, 2009 8:42 AM | permalink

This breathtaking place is a former Dominican church that was converted into a new retail location for bookseller Selexyz Dominicanen. The architecture firm was Merkx+Girod. From Design Top News:

The store demanded 1,200 sq m of commercial area where only 750 were available.

The initial idea of the client to install a second floor within the church was rejected by the designers, because this would completely destroy the spatial qualities of the church. The solution was found in the creation of a monumental walk-in bookcase spanning several floors and situated a-symmetrically in the church. In doing so the left side of the church remained empty while on the other side customers are lead upstairs in the three- storey ‘Bookflat.’

The ground floor gives room to several different book displays, information desks, magazine-stands and cash registers, all made of standard sheet materials in different colours and surfaces.

Merkx+Girod Architects: Bookstore Selexyz Dominicanen in Netherlands (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Previously:

• Neat organization at new NYC bookstore - Boing Boing
• Awesome kids' bookstore in China - Boing Boing

FT: What Van Gogh's letters reveal of his life

What Van Gogh’s letters reveal of his life

Review by Jackie Wullschlager

Published: September 19 2009 00:18 | Last updated: September 19 2009 00:18

Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Sower’ (1888)

The Letters: The Complete Illustrated Edition
By Vincent van Gogh
Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker
Thames & Hudson £325, six volumes, 2,240 pages

Even if van Gogh had destroyed every canvas he painted, his letters would still fix his place in history. The most complete, vivid, authentic and agonisingly frank account of the creative life ever written, the letters, like his drawings, form a day-to-day record of what passed before his mind and eye. Compulsively set down, dashed off and posted as soon as the ink was dry, they were composed – without a thought to publication – by an artist who lived and died unknown and isolated, too grim and cantankerous to manage social relations in person, but determined to communicate in his own way. “I can’t count on living a great many years”, he writes to his brother Theo in 1883, “but I have a certain obligation and duty – because I’ve walked the earth for 30 years – to leave a certain souvenir in the form of drawings and paintings in gratitude.”

After van Gogh’s death in 1890, his correspondence was discovered almost as soon as his paintings, and became famous with them. A selection appeared in 1893; almost all 900 extant letters were published in the Netherlands in 1914 and translated into English in 1958. They have always been an essential academic resource and, like all the artist’s work, entrance everyday readers for their immediacy and dizzying emotional accessibility. Intimate, compelling and comprehensive, the letters make a serious formal biography both redundant and impossible.

Nonetheless, a century after first publication, cultural and biographical references are obscure and, in the case of foreign editions, translations have dated. This new sumptuous, scholarly international edition in six volumes is, therefore, enormously welcome. The product of 15 years’ work by experts at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and at the Huygens Institute, it is the most important art publication of 2009, if not of the decade. Its innovative approach and ambitious scope significantly deepen our understanding of the great founder of modern art.

Reproduction of each known work among the 2,000 paintings by various artists that van Gogh mentions gives for the first time a full picture of his musée imaginaire. All his own paintings and drawings are excellently reproduced, too, whenever he refers to them, enhancing his commentaries on his work. A fresh, lively translation – modern without being gimmicky – reasserts his unadorned, evocative idiom.

In addition, annotations that are pertinent but not overwhelming provide a backcloth of bright quotidian detail: the popularity of a dish of milk and eels on the Hague’s Rijswijkseweg; the family of the Marseilles railway postman, Joseph Roulin, who modelled for “Sir and dear friend Vincent” in Provence; notes of prices for the paints, tobacco, chocolates sent by the selfless Theo – financial supporter, moral bedrock and metaphorical “travelling companion” through his brother’s life.

Best of all, the 242 letters which van Gogh illustrated with sketches are reproduced in their entirety, at actual size. Sent mainly to prove his progress to Theo, they offer sharp insights into his development and are also an emotional barometer. His handwriting changes, sometimes from line to line, from fastidiously neat to wildly chaotic; one envelope is entirely covered with drawings, others are returned because van Gogh, hopelessly impractical, has wrongly addressed them.

“I’m sending these three scratches that are still awkward but you’ll nonetheless see that there’s gradual improvement,” he writes in 1881. Van Gogh, like Matisse, was not a natural draughtsman, which is why the hard-won resolve and daring of his mature works is so triumphant. From tentative beginnings, his own bold, simplified style emerges, first in drawing, then on canvas as he applied paint with the same dynamic, graphic strokes. By the time of the great Provence work in 1888-1890, Theo was receiving reed-pen drawings of finished works alongside prose descriptions that cannot be bettered, and that demonstrate incontrovertibly that when van Gogh painted he was not mad but extremely lucid. From the asylum in St Rémy he writes, for example, of the 1889 “Cypresses”: “The trees in it are very tall and massive. The foreground very low, brambles and undergrowth behind, violet hills, a green and pink sky with a crescent moon ... thickly impasted, tufts of bramble with yellow, violet, green highlights.”

The intense looking by a voracious eye never wavers. “Do keep me constantly informed about whatever you see, that always gives me pleasure,” 19-year-old Vincent tells 15-year-old Theo in January 1873, when the brothers were juniors in different branches of Goupil print publishers, a company with family connections. Soon after, Vincent was transferred to London. “Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful,” he advises Theo. Tissot, Millais, Israëls, Boudin, Meissonier and other academic pompiers, as well as Constable, “a landscape painter who lived around 30 years ago, whose work is splendid”, are all praised in one London letter.

The plurality of his taste surprises. So do references to Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot, both still alive during van Gogh’s London sojourn, as “men and women who may be considered to stand at the forefront of modern civilisation”. The 20th century, obsessed with creative individuality, revered van Gogh as lone pioneer; this has clouded how crucially he was shaped by 19th-century social upheaval and idealism. The new volumes explode that myth and return him to a cultural context whose masters included Millet, mentioned 200 times, and gritty social realist Zola, the most cited writer here.

Vincent van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo (1881)

The last thing van Gogh wanted was to stand as solitary genius. “I still hope not to work for myself alone. I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour, of drawing and – of the artistic life. And if we work in that faith, it seems to me that there’s a chance our hopes won’t be in vain,” he tells Theo in 1888. That insistent “we”, and the religious allusions, are fundamental. Son of a Calvinist pastor, van Gogh disastrously tried jobs as teacher and minister: “I would see less of a problem in the future if I were less awkward in dealing with people”. He then turned to drawing, with the initial aim of becoming an illustrator in order to depict the lives of the suffering masses.

He practised what he preached, too: among his most painful misjudgments was to set up home with Sien Hoornik, a lazy, avaricious, manipulative, syphilitic prostitute and model. She was already pregnant and a single mother when they met. Van Gogh romantically tried to empathise with and improve “this ugly wasted woman. To me she’s beautiful ... Life has given her a drubbing and sorrow and adversity have left their mark on her – now I can make use of it.”

One volume here chokes with Biblical quotations, appended to letters during his most fanatically religious phase. Slowly, however, van Gogh came to reject Christian doctrine – only to replace it with as fervent a belief in the sacred power of nature. The task of modern art was to set down this truth with a new expressiveness, based on a fresh response. “What is drawing?” he asks. “How does one get there? It’s working one’s way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How does one get through that wall? – since hammering on it doesn’t help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently ... The great isn’t something accidental; it must be willed”.

He began, as art students had done for centuries, with figure drawing, but from the start, landscape claimed him. Sense of place is a recurring joy. “You must imagine me sitting at my attic window,” he tells Theo from The Hague at four o’clock one summer morning in 1882. “Over the red tiled roofs comes a flock of white pigeons flying between the black smoking chimneys. But behind this is an infinity of delicate gentle greens, miles and miles of flat meadow, and a grey sky as still, as peaceful as Corot.”

Pollard willows suggest to him a procession of beggars, trodden grass looks tired and dusty as slum-dwellers. Eventually he left potato-coloured Holland for Arles in search of southern light and, with it, spiritual illumination. He painted, at shrill emotional pitch, exactly what he saw: “The stretches of water make patches of a beautiful emerald and a rich blue ... pale orange sunsets making the fields look blue – glorious yellow suns.”

Nothing could have been further from van Gogh’s mind, when he painted such incandescent works as “Sower with Setting Sun”, “The Painter on the Road to Tarascon”, “Starry Night”, than the landscapes of pleasure, fully liberated from the restraint of realistic colour, which secular modernism evolved from them. “Man is not placed on this earth merely to be happy; nor is he placed here merely to be honest. He is here to accomplish great things through society ... to outgrow the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on,” van Gogh warned. Nevertheless, “the uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant colour, well arranged, resplendent”.

These pages thrill with that hope, tremble with van Gogh’s lack of reserve and thin skin and thud with his anguish. With our hindsight, we fear for him when he writes, during a defiant infatuation that “it’s just as impossible for someone who loves to take back that feeling as it is to take one’s own life ... [and] I really don’t think I’m a man with such inclinations”.

We share Theo’s anxiety, as febrile masterpieces speed from Arles to Paris, about “how hard your mind must have worked and how you endangered yourself ... Even if my heart isn’t as sensitive as yours, I can sometimes imagine the distress that you feel.”

But despite van Gogh’s volatility, suicide does not look inevitable. Right to the end he plans, makes arrangements, follows the fortunes of family, neighbours, other artists, almost jokes – “I prefer to make fun of myself than to feel lonely” – while always yearning for transcendence: “Just as we take the train to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.”

Above all, through the paradoxes of his character, these marvellous volumes, with their interlacing of words and images, convey as never before the unity of his artistic project – social, aesthetic, emotional, spiritual – and his search for his destiny: a quest that reads here with the personal urgency, validity and vitality of a great novel.

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s art critic

‘Van Gogh’s Letters: The Artist Speaks’, October 9 2009-January 3 2010, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; www.vangoghmuseum.nl

‘The Real van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, January 23-April 18 2010; www.royalacademy.org.uk

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans

September 9, 2009

Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans

By SAMANTHA STOREY

ARMED with kittens of molded rice and sweet potato flowers, Sheri Chen took aim at her 2-year-old daughter, Lucy — a picky eater.

“I have to make her food look like something she recognizes,” said Ms. Chen, 42, a stay-at-home mother in San Leandro, Calif. “If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she’ll eat it.”

With cookie cutters Ms. Chen makes her daughter star-shaped vegetables; and with decorative skewers, a plastic top hat and pieces of nori (dried seaweed), cherry tomatoes become smiley faced, mustachioed creatures.

Her ruse includes assembling each meal in her version of a bento box, a Japanese lunch box, decorated with cute cartoon characters.

It might seem like silly kids’ stuff, but that sense of fun has helped make bento boxes — obentos as the Japanese call them — increasingly popular with grownups in the United States, too.

For dieters, they are an eye-popping form of portion control. Artistic preparation of ingredients can act as a pleasant distraction for health-conscious parents. For others, bentos are a way to make lunch pretty or indulge their love of things Japanese.

In Japan, compact, compartmented bento boxes are traditionally filled with rice, pickled vegetables and fish or meat. Japanese mothers take pride in their obentos and hope they outshine those of other mothers, said the Japanese cookbook author Hiroko Shimbo.

“Obento making is a kind of cult,” she said.

It’s approaching cult status in the United States. On Saturday in Central Park, as part of its Crossing the Line festival, the French Institute Alliance Française will be handing out bento boxes with components made by some top French and American chefs — including Inaki Aizpitarte, Pascal Barbot, Alexandre Gauthier, Michel Bras, David Chang and Wylie Dufresne.

On a more plebian level, Amazon.com said sales of the boxes and accessories like egg molds, rice shapers, plastic skewers shaped like animals or flowers have been growing.

But toothache-inducing cuteness is not the only appeal.

Jordan Smith, 20, a junior majoring in East Asian studies and political science at Yale University, started making bento boxes in high school in Port Orange, Fla.

“I was on the football team,” Mr. Smith said, “so I tried to have a balanced diet and eat healthy as much as possible.” He would group protein, rice and vegetables. “I would usually use snap peas, tomatoes, carrots; basically things that were relatively colorful and not too bland tasting.”

He endured a bit of ridicule — “like, look at that white person pretending to be Japanese” — but that didn’t stop him.

“Japanese culture here is getting more popular by the day,” he said.

He’s still making bento boxes, but now they’re mainly a way to save money by making his own lunch.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, a quality-assurance engineer from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day.

So in June she started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

“If I had to price out all my ingredients,” Ms. Littlejohn said, “each box would probably cost $2.”

She likes to find artistic ways to present the food.

One of her recent boxes included a multihued medley of halved figs, curried eggplant, green leaf lettuce and sliced purple carrots.

“I don’t have time to break out the art supplies in my drawer,” Ms. Littlejohn said. “Every evening when I pack our lunches, I get this creative outlet. And if I don’t do something artistic, I might implode.”

Creativity matters as much as taste and nutrition to Jason Miller, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of South Florida.

“It doesn’t hurt to add a funny element as well,” Mr. Miller, 28, said. He recently made onigiri, triangles of sticky rice with various fillings. “Instead of leaving them plain, I cut nori — seaweed — in strips and made the onigiri into sumo wrestlers.” Artistry is what differentiates a bento box from a plastic container of leftovers, said Makiko Itoh, 46, who lives outside Zurich and runs the blog justbento.com, filled with how-to’s, recipes and discussion forums.

“Food presented attractively looks more appetizing, since we eat with our eyes as much as our taste buds and stomachs,” said Ms. Itoh, who was born in Japan but lived for a while in New York. “That’s emphasized more in Japanese cuisine and culture perhaps than in other cuisines.”

She said bentos often reflect the Japanese belief that each meal should have five colors — a version of the food pyramid. It helps people remember to vary their food, especially since the most colorful foods are usually fruits and vegetables.

“You can apply that to any lunch combination,” she said. “For example, sliced bread (let’s call that white, even if you use whole wheat) with peanut butter or cold cuts (brown), a green salad (green) with red peppers and cherry tomatoes (red) and a banana (yellow).”

A balance of flavors, textures and cooking methods also matters, she said.

Sheri Lindquist saw bentos as a healthy choice for her five sons and her husband after he had triple-bypass surgery. “I don’t make them bento lunches all the time,” said Ms. Lindquist, 48, who lives in Denair, Calif. “But if there is something especially yucky or healthy or new I do try to present it in a more fun format.” Like breaded spinach balls with carrot ears and faces.

Acquiring accessories like plastic giraffe picks or star-shaped nori punches, however, proved challenging for Ms. Lindquist, as most of the boxes and tools were sold only in Japan. So in March 2008 she began iloveobento.com, an online bento box store.

Another bento blogger, Jennifer McCann, began veganlunchbox.blogspot.com on her son’s first day of school in 2005.

She made him sushi for lunch in a bento box from laptoplunches.com, which sells Americanized bento boxes with lidded compartments for items like yogurt or dips like ketchup. She took a picture of it and posted it.

“I thought it might give a lot of vegan moms inspiration for other lunches besides PB and J, “ said Ms. McCann, 38, who lives in Kennewick, Wash.

Within months she was getting thousands of page views a day of the boxes she was making, she said. She’s since published “Vegan Lunch Box” (Da Capo Press, 2008) and “Vegan Lunch Box Around the World” (Da Capo, 2009), which includes recipes for a Japanese tiger bento, Caribbean plantain wraps and Indonesian tempeh.

Her son, James, now 11, has outgrown the boxes and no longer takes the bentos to school. “He wants his lunch to be totally normal now, like everyone else,” she said.

Making lunches look cute for children is an art called kyaraben in Japan.

But some bento-ists think cute takes too much time.

Deborah Hamilton, 40, who writes the blog lunchinabox.net, makes boxes for her husband and 4-year-old son of, for instance, tamales, broccoli florets, cherry tomatoes and a strawberry. “You can make these as intricate or fancy as you like,” she said, “or you can make them plain and simple. You don’t have to get all kinds of Martha with it. My regular bento takes 10 to 15 minutes, maximum.”

Ms. Itoh, the author of justbento.com, said the boxes, about the size of a fat turkey sandwich, let her control her portions and helped her lose 30 pounds.

“Generally speaking, for a tightly packed Japanese-style bento, the number of milliliters that a box can hold corresponds roughly to the number of calories it holds,” she wrote on her blog.

Crystal Watanabe, 30, an administrative assistant in Honolulu, used bento portion control when she began a Weight Watchers program in 2007. She lost 22 pounds and wrote about her experience on her blog, aibento.net (Adventures in Bentomaking).

The blog got her involved in the bento community on the photo-sharing site Flickr.com.

“We post pictures and people take ideas from each other,” Ms. Watanabe said. “It’s really a very creative community and fun. Everyone is so supportive.”

Ms. Chen, in San Leandro, one of the more prolific contributors to the photo pools, can be a little wilder when making bentos for Lucy’s brother, Koa, 6, who, unlike his sister, is not finicky.

“He even eats the lettuce I put in his boxes as garnish,” she said.

A recent lunch box for him included teriyaki salmon with peapods, two kinds of sweet potato and golden beet “maple leaves.” On the side: skewered purple carrot discs and a tomato made to look like a frog man. For dessert: a strawberry, champagne grapes, blackberries and a litchi.

“I am not a gourmet cook,” Ms. Chen said, “but when you put anything in a bento box it looks nice.”

Where to Get Boxes and Supplies

BENTO & CO Bentoandco.com (French language site, ships from Japan).

BENTO CRAZY Bentocrazy.ecrater.com.

FROM JAPAN WITH LOVE From-japan-with-love.com (ships from Japan).

I LOVE OBENTO Iloveobento.com.

JAPAN CENTRE Japancentre.com (ships from England).

J BOX Jbox.com (ships from Japan).

KINOKUNIYA 1073 Sixth Avenue (41st Street), (212) 869-1700.

LAPTOP LUNCHES Laptoplunches.com.

BOOKS: “501 Bento Box Lunches: 501 Unique Recipes for Brilliant Bento” (Graffito Books, 2009) and “Vegan Lunch Box Around the World” by Jennifer McCann (Da Capo, 2009).

Sheri Chen, 42, of San Leandro, Calif., fills her version of bento boxes for her children, assembling each meal in a Japanese lunch box decorated with cute cartoon characters. That sense of fun has helped make bento boxes increasingly popular with grownups in the United States, too.

"I have to make her food look like something she recognizes," said Ms. Chen, referring to her daughter, Lucy. "If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she'll eat it."

Ms. Chen's children, Lucy and Koa.

 

Deborah Hamilton, 40, who writes the blog lunchinabox.net, makes boxes like this one for her husband and 4-year-old son.

 

Another one of Ms. Hamilton's creations. "You can make these as intricate or fancy as you like," she said, "or you can make them plain and simple."

Creativity matters as much as taste and nutrition to Jason Miller, 28, a graduate student at the University of South Florida. The bento he created at far left includes onigiri, triangles of sticky rice with various fillings.

Aster Sentiati goes by the name "bentomom" on the photo-sharing site Flickr.com, where she posts photographs of the bentos she makes for her children, like this one at left.

Another one of Ms. Setiati's bentos. 

A balance of flavors, textures and cooking methods matters in assembling a bento, said Makiko Itoh, who runs the informational blog justbento.com. At left, a bento by Ms. Setiati.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day. She started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

Debra Littlejohn, 52, from Edmonds, Wash., estimated that she and her husband were spending $400 a month buying lunch out every day. She started packing her dinner leftovers into bento boxes.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Boing Boing: Classic Penguin books' designs

Classic Penguin books designs

Posted by Cory Doctorow, September 3, 2009 10:28 PM | permalink

Spencer sez, "This guy is a former Penguin Books designer who's posted a couple of collections of images that are downright mouthwatering if, like most designers, you're a fan of Penguin Books' design."

Penguin Books (Thanks, Spencer!)

Previously:

• Penguin books is releasing 200 - Boing Boing
• Classic Penguin covers gallery - Boing Boing
• Penguin books's podcast - Boing Boing
• Penguin Great Ideas -- gorgeous editions of classic philosophy ...

Source: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/03/classic-penguin-book.html

Spencer sez, "This guy is a former Penguin Books designer who's posted a couple of collections of images that are downright mouthwatering if, like most designers, you're a fan of Penguin Books' design."

Penguin Books (Thanks, Spencer!)

Previously:

• Penguin books is releasing 200 - Boing Boing
• Classic Penguin covers gallery - Boing Boing
• Penguin books's podcast - Boing Boing
• Penguin Great Ideas -- gorgeous editions of classic philosophy ...

Source: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/03/classic-penguin-book.html

WSJ: World's Within - The ‘Spirited Away’ animator on his new fantasy film ‘Ponyo’

THE ADVISER
AUGUST 6, 2009, 9:06 P.M. ET

Worlds Within

The ‘Spirited Away’ animator on his new fantasy film ‘Ponyo’

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

In the films of Hayao Miyazaki, the mundane and the magical live side by side. His new film, “Ponyo,” due out Aug. 14, tells the story of a young boy in a home on a cliff overlooking the water who befriends a supernatural sea creature that lives beneath the waves. The filmmaker says he got the idea for the movie when he was living in a house on a cliff with a view of Japan’s Inland Sea.

 

A Scene From 'Ponyo'

0:35

Watch a scene from the animated movie "Ponyo." Video courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures.

The 68-year-old Japanese animator is known for making movies that take place in imaginative settings. His 1986 movie “Castle in the Sky” focused on the search for a mythical flying city; much of his Oscar-winning 2001 film “Spirited Away” took place in a bathhouse for spirit creatures; and his Oscar-nominated 2004 movie “Howl’s Moving Castle” featured a troubled magician who lived in an ambulatory residence.

“Ponyo,” features perhaps the most star-studded cast for a Miyazaki movie, including the voices of Cate Blanchett, Liam Neeson, Matt Damon, Betty White and Tina Fey.

Disney Animated fantasy movie ‘Ponyo’

Disney, the studio distributing the film in the U.S., has marshaled the next generation of its stars to support the movie, which also features the voices of Noah Cyrus (Miley’s little sister) and Frankie Jonas (younger sibling of the Jonas Brothers music trio).

Although Mr. Miyazaki is little-known in the U.S., in Japan he is a household name and his films are blockbusters.

The director said his career path was set after watching the animated fantasy film “Panda and the Magic Serpent” as a teenager. At the time, he was feeling “a lot of pressure” because he was studying for exams. Although the film was only a “cheap love romance,” it made a deep impression on him, in part because the movie was made in Japan. He had been planning to become a writer of Japanese manga (comic books), but instead decided to become an animator.

Corbis Director Hayao Miyazaki

Mr. Miyazaki, who is also a screenwriter, typically works by drawing sketches of the characters in his movies and handing them over to the chief animator to flesh out. His films rely on hand-drawn animation, but he has nothing against computer animation. “The reason hand-drawn is so important is that I am only able to do hand-drawn,” said the animator, speaking by phone through a translator.

Many of Mr. Miyazaki’s films explore the futility of conflict. Mr. Miyazaki said growing up in Japan in the shadow of World War II shaped his outlook about war, but he strives to keep his views from coming across too “overtly” in his films. He said, however, that his opposition to the war in Iraq was one of the reasons why he decided not to attend the 2003 Academy Awards, where “Spirited Away,” won for best animated feature.

The importance of safeguarding the environment is another recurring theme in his work. In “Ponyo,” man and nature are portrayed as out of balance, and the sea is depicted as full of garbage. “All I did is just draw how the sea has become, the way it is in reality,” said Mr. Miyazaki.

Write to Christopher John Farley at christopher.farley@wsj.com

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: The gentle art of bonsai (and my bonsai from FT)

Sigh... if only FT had sent me to this class, my little bonsai from them would have survived (._.)

Foodie

===

The gentle art of Bonsai

By Claire Roberts

Published: August 1 2009 01:56 | Last updated: August 1 2009 01:56

Within minutes of meeting Bonsai tree expert John Hanby, he corrects two common Bonsai myths: first, the term Bonsai does not refer to a specific type of tree but is, in fact, a generic term that means “tree in a pot”. Second, the art of Bonsai originated in China, rather than Japan, and was introduced to the Japanese through Buddhist monks.

I’m looking for a hobby that lends a little serenity to my hectic life. Bonsai husbandry takes years to master, and the calm, considered approach needed to nurture and shape these little trees is appealing. I’m here for a two-day beginners’ course at Hanby’s nursery, to learn the art of Bonsai – how to pot and shape a tree from scratch.

Hanby takes me on a tour. I am amazed by the age of some of these neat, vital-looking trees with their glossy green leaves; one is 600 years old. Thankfully, novices work with much less ancient material, and my “blank canvas” is a bushy-looking juniper which, at the end of the course, I am able to buy for £10 and take home.

I learn about the different styles into which a Bonsai tree can be pruned and tamed – from the cascade (kengai) to the windswept (fukingashi) to the most popular, the informal upright (moyogi). Wire is used to manipulate branches or shoots into the desired shape. Branches can also be grafted on to enhance the symmetry. Careful pruning keeps the foliage under control and maintains the general health of the tree.

After potting and wiring my tree, I snip away carefully, delighted by the emerging shape. Bonsai is not for commitment-phobes: many trees will outlive their owners and they need constant TLC. But as a work of art that is always evolving, it is quite the antidote to our quick-fix times.

......................

The details

Weekend courses cost £17.50 per day, 01977 610040; www.johnhanbybonsai.co.uk

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Economist: Totally Tintin

See also: 

ST: Tintin still as popular as ever 80 years on

Economist: Tintin - A very European hero

The Hergé museum

Totally Tintin

May 28th 2009 | LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE
From The Economist print edition

Celebrating one man and his dog

A SPECTACULAR new museum dedicated to Hergé, the pen name of Georges Remi, who created the comic-book hero Tintin, opens in the Belgian town of Louvain-la-Neuve on June 2nd. The museum, a fine addition to a somewhat drab skyline, is best seen at nightfall or under grey skies, says its architect, Christian de Portzamparc. In murky conditions, the building’s structure of angled white planes glows from within, offering glimpses through huge windows of an “imagined landscape” inside.

Hergé-Moulinsart 2008

Champagne opening

The museum, newly built at a cost of €15m ($21m), runs around a central atrium formed of curving walls in bold colours, pierced by high metal walkways. An internal lift shaft at the core of the atrium is painted with a chequerboard pattern, evoking the moon rocket in one of Tintin’s bestselling adventures. The structure stands on stilts in a park and visitors enter across a long wooden footbridge. It feels like boarding a ship only provisionally moored at Louvain-la-Neuve, a symphony in red brick mediocrity.

Within is a landscape of the imagination, brightly lit and coloured, as outside a steady drizzle falls against the windows from leaden skies. If that sounds like a memory of childhood reading indoors, it is no accident. Since Tintin’s first appearance in a Belgian Catholic newspaper 80 years ago, generations have roamed the world vicariously through his comic-book adventures as a trouble-prone (if unusually clean-living) foreign reporter.

In much of Europe, especially in Belgium and France, the stories have gained a devoted following, generating books, academic papers and conferences at which grown men (and it is usually men) debate arcana like the real-world location of Tintin’s Brussels home, or the ancestry of Captain Haddock, his best friend and drunken, comic foil. For less obsessive fans, the books are still an important memory. Some 200m albums have been sold in all, giving children their first taste of the exotic as Tintin fights bullies and solves mysteries from the jungles of Latin America to the mountains of Tibet: a sort of cartoon National Geographic, with the added appeal of car crashes and fist-fights.

Both groups of fans will find much to please them in the new museum. The brainchild of Hergé’s second wife, Fanny Rodwell, who set up the Hergé Foundation in 1987, the museum shows off a rotating collection of original artwork and source materials, laying bare the hard work that Hergé put into his comics, with each speeding car, cityscape or policeman’s uniform inspired by archived photographs and research trips in the field. Back in his Brussels studios, Hergé would spend long hours posing as each character while assistants sketched him as a reference guide for the final drawings.

Mr de Portzamparc—a past winner of the Pritzker prize, one of architecture’s highest awards—confesses that as an adult he rarely thought about Tintin. But the museum commission awoke memories of sketching Captain Haddock when he was a small boy and of doodling the ocean-going ships that fill the Tintin albums. “It was very easy to open the door and plunge back in,” he says.

Yet the museum has another ambition: to cement the claim that Hergé, who died in 1983, was an important artist in his own right, whose talents as a graphic designer, painter and typographer were “somewhat eclipsed by the runaway success of ‘The Adventures of Tintin’,” to quote one oddly grudging sign on display. The reverential tone of such captions, allied to a general lack of larkishness, make clear this is a serious Hergé museum, not merely a Tintin exhibition. It seems fair to predict that many child visitors will be left decidedly fidgety.

At times, the museum seems to be straining to make its argument. One display highlights Hergé’s love of modern art and his friendships in that world (his private collection included works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Alexander Calder). A sign high on a wall quotes Balthus, a Polish-French modern artist, recalling a happy evening with a sculptor friend, Alberto Giacometti, marvelling at the quality and depth of Hergé’s work. Yet the work that the two artists were admiring was a stack of Tintin albums. Quite right too: the Tintin books are by far Hergé’s finest achievement, admired by children and famous artists alike. You would think that would be enough.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

WSJ: The Art You Can Eat

ASIA NEWS
MAY 16, 2009

The Art You Can Eat

In Kyoto, kaiseki restaurants serve Japan's version of haute cuisine

By STAN SESSER

Kyoto, Japan

The meal at famed Kikunoi restaurant was cutting-edge: 12 courses made up of 60 different items, each fanatically sourced using the freshest and highest-quality ingredients available. And in the trendiest fashion, the entire meal, which stretched to almost three hours, weighed in at less than 1,000 calories.

Visit Kyoto's temples and shrines.

Welcome to kaiseki (kye-SEK-ee), the original fixed-price tasting menu, whose roots in Kyoto go back almost 500 years to the Japanese tea ceremony's origins and the practices of meat-shunning Buddhist monks. Today, the tradition is a major inspiration for the multicourse degustation menus now popular in the West, at places like El Bulli in Spain, Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas and the French Laundry in California's Napa Valley. Chefs from world-class restaurants make frequent pilgrimages to Kikunoi to experience the work of the 56-year-old chef, Yoshihiro Murata.

Kyoko Murata, Mr. Murata's wife and Kikunoi's maitre d', says celebrated guests are a fairly regular occurrence there. "Ferran Adrià comes here often and we also eat at El Bulli. They're definitely influenced by kaiseki food," she says. I rattle off the names of a few other Michelin three-star chefs, American and French. "Of course they've eaten here," she replies.

Kikunoi has been serving kaiseki meals since it opened in 1911. Mr. Adrià, whose avant-garde "molecular cuisine" has led many critics to call his restaurant the best in the world, praised Kikunoi in the introduction he wrote for Mr. Murata's cookbook, "Kaiseki: The Exquisite Cuisine of Japan's Kikunoi Restaurant" (Kodansha International, 2006). "While in the West we cook with the senses, the heart, and logic, the Japanese add to this an extra component . . . the soul. Nowhere is this better exemplified than by the work of Yoshiro Murata," he wrote.

A kaiseki dinner.

After spending three days in Kyoto, where visitors can eat variations of kaiseki for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I began to see why this centuries-old cuisine holds so much fascination for the most inventive chefs of Europe and America. Kaiseki is a tonic to the senses from every direction, and something no Western restaurant I've ever dined can approach. It demands perfection from the freshness and preparation of the ingredients to the dishes they are served on. The noise in some New York restaurants makes it impossible to concentrate on your meal; kaiseki diners sit in a tranquil, private room and gaze onto a Japanese garden while polite, efficient waitresses in kimonos cater to every need. The cost, at Kikunoi, is $150 a person -- a bargain compared with, say, the $275 tasting menu at Thomas Keller's Per Se in New York.

Derek Wilcox, a 32-year-old American, has worked in Kikunoi's kitchen for two years at no pay to learn how kaiseki is properly done. His hours -- 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. six days a week -- are grueling. He plans to open a kaiseki restaurant in the U.S. in seven to 10 years -- the amount of time he figures he'll need to learn all the principles and techniques.

Joe LeMonier

Trip Planner

Getting There: The Shinkansen, Japan's high-speed train system, whisks you to Kyoto from Tokyo in just over two hours for about $130 each way. It leaves from Tokyo Station and Shinagawa Station.

Where to Stay: Kyoto is filled with tiny hotels and Japanese inns (ryokans). They needn't be expensive. On my last night, I paid less than $100 at a downtown business hotel for a cramped room and an airliner-size bathroom. On the upscale side, two Kyoto hotels combine luxury with an authentic feeling of being in Japan. They are the Hyatt Regency Kyoto, 644-2 Sanjyusangendo Mawari-cho, Higashiyama-ku (Tel.: 81-75-541-1234; about $350) and Brighton Hotel Kyoto, Nakadachiuri, Shinmachi-dori, Kamigyo-ku (Tel.: 81-75-441-4411; about $280). If price is no object and you want a private kaiseki dinner in your own room at a luxurious ryokan where English is spoken, Hiiragiya Ryokan fills the bill. Nakahakusancho, Fuyacho Aneroji-Agaru, Nakagyo-ku (Tel.: 81-75-221-1136; $300 to $900 a person, including kaiseki dinner).

Where to Eat: Kikunoi is the most famous of the kaiseki restaurants, and the dinner is a good value. Gion Maruyama, Makuzugahara, Higashiyama-ku (Tel.: 81-75-561-0015; $150). For a hip, informal kaiseki, try Guilo Guilo, located in an old wooden house. Nishikiyamachi-dori, Matsubara Sagaru, Shimogyo-ku (Tel.: 81-75-343-7070, $37). The well-known Hyotei offers a kaiseki breakfast. Kusakawa-cho 35, Nanzenji, Sakyo-ku (Tel.: 81-75-771-4116, $45). The bento box lunch at Yasuku Gozen is a generous preview of the kaiseki dinner. Yasaka-dori, Gion Miyugawa Cho, Kyogaki (Tel.: 81-75-531-6600).

Kaiseki's elaborate style dates back to the 16th century and the tea master Sen no Rikyu, who thought the powdered green tea used in the tea ceremony was too intense to be sipped on an empty stomach. He started serving small plates of food to make drinking the tea more enjoyable. With Kyoto home to Japan's great tea masters, kaiseki flowered here, too -- one of the ways food, art and religion have converged to make Kyoto the spiritual and culinary center of Japan.

A visitor could be happily occupied for a month visiting the city's more than 1,000 Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, many with extensive grounds and gardens. Dozens of ryokans -- traditional Japanese inns, some serving kaiseki meals -- are an alternative to traditional hotels. Many of Kyoto's old buildings have been demolished and replaced with ugly concrete boxes, but there are still enough old wooden houses around to turn a walk into a discovery. A day of visiting Kyoto's temples ending with a kaiseki dinner at Kikunoi is an experience visitors won't quickly forget.

The simplicity of a kaiseki dinner masks its complexity. In contrast to Western cuisines, there are no fancy sauces, except for an occasional dipping sauce. Presentations might be elegant, but they're always uncomplicated. Food doesn't arrive in towering stacks; the waiter never says that "Chef" wants you to eat a particular dish by starting with a certain ingredient. And there's no fuss about wine; while a wine list is usually available, the house sake complements the meal perfectly. Your only decision is whether to have the sake warm or cold.

The evening at Kikunoi begins on a note some might find jarring. A young, kimono-clad woman greets you at the door on her knees; as you remove your shoes, she touches her head to the floor. Then she escorts you through the blond-wood corridors to your dining room, which is spacious, carpeted with tatami mats and empty, except for a low, black-lacquer table in the center. You sit on a pillow leaning against a leather backrest, with a view through a glass wall of the illuminated garden. Your legs rest under the table in a pit, heated to keep your feet warm.

The meal of seafood and vegetables doesn't disappoint. With minimal cooking and seasoning so as not to mask the quality of the ingredients, every bite is a revelation. In one course, nine items are arranged on a plate like a rock garden. Some stand alone (fava beans, salt-pickled squid, lily bulb petals), others in combination (grilled squid with seaweed and egg yolk, a skewer of abalone, shrimp and avocado).

During my visit, much of the meaning of this sophisticated meal would have passed over my head had I not been dining with Yoshiko Isshiki, a curator of modern art who spends a lot of time in Kyoto and has made food her passion. In our first course, as an example, a piece of the grilled squid was coated with finely chopped seaweed and cut to resemble the curled stem of a flower. Several courses later, steamed tilefish was accompanied by a warabi fernhead -- which, Ms. Isshiki pointed out, looked exactly like that piece of squid.

Guilo Guilo serves a hip kaiseki.

Since the essence of kaiseki is seasonality, Kikunoi's menu changes completely every month. "The Japanese really want to get the idea of being part of the season," Mr. Wilcox, the aspiring chef, explained after my dinner in mid-April. "Now they want cherry blossoms on their plate. Two weeks ago, it was buds from the cherry tree, and a week from now they won't want them at all." Bamboo shoots and mountain yams were at their peak when I visited. Kikunoi served bamboo-shoot sushi, with tiny sardines, fried tofu, green pea broth and shrimp cake, and simmered bamboo shoots, with seaweed and the roe of red sea bream. Mountain yam came cut into shapes of butterflies in a salad of seaweed, baby eels and sea urchin.

There are some variations. The restaurant Hyotei serves a kaiseki breakfast, including chicken meatballs covered in chopped seaweed, sushi wrapped in a cherry leaf and the best hard-cooked egg I've ever had. Its only concession to the hour is the traditional Asian breakfast soup of rice with fish broth and pickled vegetables. If you've ever wanted to blow $45 on breakfast, this is place to do it . The kaiseki at Guilo Guilo, meanwhile, is positively radical. In an old house with timbered ceilings, the place hops as waiters bound up steep steps with dishes on their arms. Sea bass roe with coffee-flavored potato sauce, a rice ball topped with foie gras sauce and tofu skin, and a panna cotta of green peas with honey ice cream and deep-fried lily roots -- this is 21st-century kaiseki, and at $37 it's both inexpensive and fabulous.

Write to Stan Sesser at stan.sesser@awsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W7

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WSJ: Reinventing the Magazine

MAY 15, 2009

Reinventing the Magazine

Publications That Push the Boundaries of the Print Medium

By ANDREW LOSOWSKY | Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"When Aspen arrives, you don't just read it -- you hear it, hang it, feel it, fly it, project it, even sniff it."

Such was the sales pitch in 1965 for Aspen magazine, probably the world's first example of what creator and former Ad Age editor Phyllis Johnson called a "multimedia magazine." Each edition arrived at its subscribers' homes in a small box, containing anything from a miniature sculpture to a brightly colored poster to a reel of celluloid film.

A page from Freestyle magazine.

In some ways, Aspen was a product of the 1960s, a time when art was drawing on popular culture and mechanical reproduction to spread its messages. In other ways, it was ahead of its time. There was nothing quite like Aspen, beyond very short-run art projects, for nearly 30 years. But today, at a particularly tough time for magazines, a number of publications are again looking beyond the standard glossy format, experimenting with different manifestations of what a magazine can be. In doing so, they are offering their readers special experiences that Web sites and other free-content digital distractions can't match.

These are publications that revel in their 3D-ness, special objects that demand deeper interaction from their readers than the average print magazine. Taking advantage of recent advances in printing technology, these publications are determinedly nonconformist in everything they do. But they are, in essence, magazines -- curated, regular compilations of content with clear selection criteria, consistent design and an individual voice.

Aspen magazine lasted just 10 issues, and so never produced its promised "Buckminster Fuller issue, with each article folding into a geodesic dome."

Perhaps one of these magazines will take up the challenge.

T-Post

The March 2009 issue of T-Post magainze,on capital punishment, with illustration by David Foldvari.

It's the magazine you can wear.

Every six weeks, T-Post sends its 2,500 subscribers a new T-shirt: It has a true story printed on the inside, chosen to make readers think, while on the outside an artist interprets the story to create a stylishly unique piece of graphic clothing. The idea behind the magazine is that each design will provoke onlookers to comment -- and give the owner of the T-shirt the opportunity to spread the story printed on the inside. The most recent issue, from March, addresses capital punishment and was designed by Hungarian illustrator David Foldvari.

T-Post, which began in February 2004 and is based in Stockholm, prints only enough shirts for its subscribers, and back issues are not available. Each issue costs €26 and there is a minimum subscription of two issues.

Peter Lundgren, T-Post's editor-in-chief, has plans to create future editions in a variety of different genres, from music to science -- but always on T-shirts. "For us, it's a way to use fashion and art to spread the word about things that are important to us and the world, by using one of the best pop culture mediums ever invented -- the graphic T-shirt," he says.

www.t-post.se

Visionaire

Courtesy of Visionaire 56 SOLAR

Cover of the Visionaire 56 SOLAR issue, published in collaboration with Calvin Klein Collection.

At the start, its creators aimed to make "something that people wouldn't throw out, that would be filled with that you wanted to save." And they reasoned that "since ads control mass-market editorial content," they would just get rid of them.

And so began Visionaire in 1991, an almost absurdist creation of limited-edition opulence, involving unusual materials, strange formats and high-profile collaborators. It is also probably the most expensive magazine in the world, with one particular issue costing $5,000.

Editions are often sponsored by big-name brands such as Louis Vuitton, Krug Champagne and Lacoste, and are launched at parties during fashion events. Collaborators are similarly renowned, and have included Karl Lagerfeld, Mario Testino and Spike Jonze.

The latest issue is a book of black-and-white photographs that turn to color when exposed to the sun. Each edition has a theme, and previous issues have included a box of taste strips, a collection of tiny toys and a selection of miniature perfumes. The magazine publishes 3,000 to 5,000 individually numbered copies up to three times a year; a four-issue subscription costs $675. New York-based Visionaire Publishing also produces the more traditional quarterly fashion magazines V and V Man.

www.visionaireworld.com

Courtesy of Visionaire 56 SOLAR

In Visionaire, a portrait of Carmen Kass by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.

Freestyle

Launching this July, Freestyle is the creation of Berlin-based fashion photographer and flying disc enthusiast Jason McGlade. Each issue of the magazine will be printed in ink on paper; however it will be circular in shape, and slotted inside a Frisbee that has been styled by a selected designer or illustrator.

Invented "for creative people who like to play," the magazine will feature art, design, fashion, lifestyle and of course Frisbees. Mr. McGlade, Freestyle's editor-inchief/ creative director, says the Frisbee "appeals to all design-minded people who appreciate a piece of plastic that is so simple yet can fly and inspire people—a true design classic."

Originally from the north of England, Mr. McGlade has shot photos for Vogue and Der Spiegel among others. His catwalk access means that issue zero of Freestyle has already been photographed in the hands of some top fashion models. Issue one, in a limited edition of 5,000 at a price of €15, is about to become available in select stores world-wide and on the magazine's Web site. As the Freestyle slogan says, catch it if you can.

www.freestylemagazine.co.uk

A 2006 edition of La Más Bella magazine, entitled 'La Más Bella Greatest Hits.'

La Más Bella

It's a wallet, it's an apron, it's a vinyl disc with a selection of sleeves, it's a box of games, it's a slideshow, it's a home decoration kit… La Más Bella (translation: "the most beautiful") is many things. Above all, it's an experimental art magazine, published in Madrid by Pepe Murciego and Diego Ortiz. The first issue, created in 1993, looked like a normal magazine. The second issue was a normal magazine with a hole punched through the middle. Then they decided to try something different.

Around 30 editions later, they've worked with more than 600 artists to create unique monographic editions with high production standards. Each issue comes in a limited edition of 1,000; the latest issue, "Tapa," includes specially designed toothpicks, salami badges, a lenticular place mat, a miniature bottle of vermouth, a hand-tattooed plastic glass and much more.

The magazine varies in price from €12 to €50 and is entirely nonprofitmaking: The creators host parties to encourage friends to help compile each copy. They've also created a special "Bellamatic" vending machine to sell back issues, and have run workshops world-wide, one of which led to their most transient edition yet: the La Más Bella salami and cheese sandwich.

www.lamasbella.org

La Lata

Two cans of La Lata magazine.

La Lata calls itself a "magazine object," and is an established favorite among Spanish contemporary art collectors. Its name means "The Can," and that's exactly what every issue arrives in. From restyled food cans to the latest issue, an eight-liter paint can with a fabric fringe, each annual edition is hermetically sealed like a tin of beans—so if you want to see what's inside, you have to break the object you've bought.

It's worth the effort, however— inside each can is a collection of unique artistic objects created around the issue's theme by various artists. La Lata's creators, Manuela Martínez and Carmen Palacios, say they "wanted to decontextualize the object of the tin, and generate an element of surprise" surrounding the sealed contents.

The latest edition is themed "Vice," and includes, according to its creators, 70 pieces that are reflections on everything "fromchocolate to biting your nails." Each issue is published in a limited edition of a few hundred and costs €26. Produced in Albacete, Spain, the magazine is usually launched at the Madrid annual art fair ARCO in February.

www.lalata.es

Write to Andrew Losowsky at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

FT: Think outside the bento box

Think outside the bento box

By Mariko Sanchanta

Published: May 16 2009 02:39 | Last updated: May 16 2009 02:39

As a half-Japanese child in the suburbs of Washington DC, my mother forced me to spend my Saturdays resentfully stuck at Japanese school, while my schoolfriends frolicked in the sun.

The single highlight of Japanese school was lunchtime. All of the students, most of whom were the sons and daughters of Japanese diplomats, would gather in a massive dining room. Then, one by one, they would unwrap and open their bento – those exquisitely packed and presented compartmentalised Japanese lunch boxes.

Bento boxes had humble beginnings. They became popular in Japan during the Edo period (1603-1867), when travellers would carry onigiri – rice balls – in bamboo boxes. Fans of Noh and Kabuki theatre would also munch on their creations during the numerous intervals. During the Meiji restoration in the 1880s, the first ekiben – or bento one could buy at train stations – were born. Ekiben have since become a staple of rail travel in Japan, and even the tiniest stations proudly feature the best of their local produce, all bundled up neatly in a small box, for less than £5.

But at my Saturday school, each bento box was more intricately constructed than the last. The Japanese mums rose at dawn to get started on their miniature masterpieces: slicing vegetables into tiny shreds; coaxing rice into heart and star shapes; piecing together components to create an arresting visual effect that would inspire envy in the other children.

These lunch boxes were so beautiful it was a crime to eat them. One girl’s mother lovingly created a panda’s face out of rice, with a pink umeboshi pickled plum perched on top as the nose. Boys’ boxes contained edible cars, aircraft, and manga characters.

As I half-heartedly bit into my sad sandwich, I looked on in horror as the Japanese children jabbed their chopsticks into their amazing concoctions, destroying in minutes what had taken hours to prepare.

More than two decades later, bentos have gained a cult following, appearing on fancy restaurant menus that stray far from the idea that bento boxes should be relatively cheap (Japanese workers buy them for £5 and eat at their desks). In London, upscale restaurant Sake No Hana features £25 bento boxes for lunch.

Photo-sharing and social networking sites have helped home-bento enthusiasts share their creations, creating a cultish fan base for their art and aesthetics. Gemma Cox, 26, launched her blog – www.bentobusiness.co.uk – two years ago. Her site – which features quirky and colourful pictures, recipes, a glossary and links – has an international following. “I think, thanks to the recession, people are looking out for ways to maintain their quality of life whilst cutting back on their expenditure,” says Cox, who has noticed a spike in site traffic over the past few months. “Gardening, cooking and crafts have all become trendy again, instead of being rather old-fashioned. In many ways, bento- making is a combination of cuisine and crafts, because making the finished dishes is only half of the work.”

It was out of this phenomenon that 500 Bento Box Lunches: 500 Unique Recipes for Brilliant Bento (Graffito Books) was born. The book, published this week, has been largely compiled by contacting women who had their own bento blogs. “We were interested in the way that bento recipes are evolving – cooks at home are adapting the original Japanese idea of a healthy balanced meal in a portable box and these recipes now include western cooking styles, from pasta, salad, chicken, curry and are a great way of using leftovers,” says Eleanor Mathieson, creative director for Graffito. “We wanted to reflect the variety of bento being made by people at home: from traditionally inspired recipes to western variations.”

As I look at the pictures in 500 Bento, I feel a pang of nostalgia for those horrible Saturdays of my youth.

Mariko Sanchanta is the Europe editor for the FT’s international companies newsdesk

..................................................

Goose bento

Ingredients
1 cup long-grain white rice, cooked and tinted sky-blue (1-drop blue food colour)
1 cup cooled couscous
1 yellow “pear cherry” tomato
4 Baby Bella portabello mushrooms
⅓ cup apple or pear sauce
1 generous handful green beans, ends trimmed
black decorating gel
1 sheet nori
4 uncooked yam soba noodles
flexible plastic toothpicks
1-tier bento box

Method
Using a rice paddle, press blue rice into upper half of bento tier; fill in bottom half with cooked couscous. Tint apple or pear sauce with two drops of blue food colour. Stir well and spread over most of couscous, leaving a narrow shoreline. This is the pond.
Split green beans lengthwise to form marsh grasses. Arrange around sides and bottom of the pond. Break soba noodles into short sticks; arrange them among green beans as reeds.
Work with contours and shading of mushrooms to carve bodies, wings and tails of geese. Assemble geese on cutting board then move on to rice. Wings of the flying goose are formed from cuts of mushroom, one draped over the goose’s side and another stuck, in a perpendicular manner, into rice.
Use nail scissors to cut necks and heads of geese from nori. Add to box. Use scraps of white mushroom flesh as white feather-flashes on heads. With toothpicks, paint dabs of black gel over the nori to form eyes and beaks. Slice end off the cherry tomato and position cut-side down to serve as the sun.

Created by Amorette Dye, from ‘500 Bento Box Lunches’, Graffito £9.99

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

WSJ: A Tea Ceremony for Today

CULTURAL CONVERSATION
MAY 6, 2009

Sen So-oku

A Tea Ceremony for Today

By MELANIE KIRKPATRICK

New York

The tea ceremony is said to be the essence of Japanese aesthetics -- architecture, ceramics, flower arranging, incense, calligraphy, painting, gardening -- packaged in a formalized ritual that dates back to the 16th century. That's when the illustrious tea master Sen no Rikyu perfected cha-do, or the "way of tea." It's a ceremony -- and, some would say, a state of mind -- that has changed very little in nearly half a millennium.

Fast-forward 15 generations to a young man in a formal kimono kneeling on the floor of a newly constructed tea room at the Koichi Yanagi Oriental Fine Arts Gallery on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Sen So-oku, 33 years old, is the heir to the Mushakoji school of tea, one of the trio of competing schools founded by Sen no Rikyu's three great-grandsons. One day he will succeed his father as grand tea master. For now, he's spending a year in the U.S. as a representative of the Japanese Ministry of Culture and teaching art at Columbia University.

Mr. Sen wants to bring the tea ceremony into the 21st century. The first clue comes as I remove my shoes and step into the tea room that has been designed to his personal specifications. It's a what's-wrong-with-this-picture moment. The floor is covered with the usual straw mats, the kettle is warming on a brazier in the middle of the room, and the traditional tea-ceremony implements are laid out in the proper order near Mr. Sen. But wait -- what's that open trench that runs along one side of the room?

Call it a tea bleacher. Mr. Sen gestures to us to take our seats -- but not in the cramp-inducing, sit-on-your-knees posture that can make the tea ceremony a torturous experience for modern-day participants. Rather, the tea master invites us to sit on the floor and lower our legs into the trench. It's similar to the hole-in-the-floor seating arrangements at many Japanese restaurants outside Japan.

"This type of architectural structure serves two audiences," Mr. Sen says through an interpreter. "One is the new generation that is not necessarily used to sitting on their knees. The other is for people who have already had a long relationship with tea but are getting older [and] having trouble sitting on their knees." He has also designed a ceremony that can be performed in a room with a table and chairs.

Mr. Sen defends his approach, which traditionalists would call heretical. "Change is always a part of this cultural form," he says. The tea ceremony "changes along with the way life is carried out now." When the tea ceremony was invented, he notes, everyone wore kimonos and was used to living in tatami rooms. Today that's not the case. Four hundred years ago, there was "a very small difference between the concept of carrying out tea and everyday life." Today, he says, "The point is to be able to regain that short distance between life and the tea room."

At the same time, Mr. Sen stresses that "there are certain essential elements . . . of Japanese culture that can only be found in tea." He mentions "seasonality." Traditional Japanese culture, he says, "considers the focus on seasons -- understanding the differences between the seasons -- to be very important. So, for example, in Japan there is the concept of hanami, which is the viewing of the cherry blossoms. Or, for example, in autumn there's the concept of looking out at the moon. Of course, the moon is out all the time, but that's a specific celebration."

He tells the story of one of his students, an office worker in her 30s. "She works in Tokyo, a very cosmopolitan place. . . . In her day-to-day life, she gets up in the morning, takes the subway, gets off at a subway station, takes sort of an underground tunnel to work, gets into the office building, works all day and doesn't see a little bit of sunlight. And then, at the end of the day, she goes back and does the exact same thing" in reverse. For her, the tea ceremony "is really an opportunity to feel the seasonality of Japan."

Mr. Sen has woven several seasonal themes into today's tea ceremony. The flower motif on the incense burner is plum, a symbol of spring. The portrait on the scroll in the alcove is of Sen no Rikyu, the founder of the tea ceremony, the anniversary of whose death occurred a few days earlier.

Then there's the bowl in which Mr. Sen whisks the tea for me to drink. It was made in Kyoto in the 17th century, and Mr. Sen says he selected the bowl for me "because I wanted you to feel the historical lineage between it and the tea that we are experiencing today." It is a rustic, handmade Raku-ware bowl. Raku-ware was the first pottery "that was created specifically for the art and culture of tea," he says. "Before that, ceramics from China, as well as the Korean peninsula, were utilized."

The glaze on the bowl "has a very thick surface, but it also has a soft tactile sense," he explains. "As the hot tea permeates the thickness of the tea bowl, it's almost like the tea bowl will take on a sort of bodily temperature. So it's as if the tea bowl and the person drinking it will become one." That effect is further heightened by the bowl's color, he says, which is black. Before electricity, the tea room was much darker. And when someone drank from a Raku-ware bowl, it was as if the "existence of the tea bowl would be removed entirely, and the only thing there was the person drinking the tea, becoming one with the tea itself."

The tea ceremony is closely connected with Zen Buddhism, and Mr. Sen has trained as a monk in a temple in Kyoto. When he meditates, he says, "there is an opportunity for self-reflection, almost as if one sees oneself as well as an objective self viewing the self." This feeling is similar to what he experiences when he is performing the tea ceremony, he says.

"Tea provides an opportunity for self-reflection," Mr. Sen says, "for deepening human relationships. It's also an escape from the everyday." Which brings us to the readers of The Wall Street Journal. "You have a readership of important business people," he says, "who are very busy, who spend a lot of time at work." The first devotees of the tea ceremony were daimyo, or feudal lords, he says, who used the tea room to strike business deals and plot political moves. The modern-day analogue for business people is golf, he says.

But why not the tea ceremony? Tea is actually a "very simple pleasure," he says. Yes, it has a philosophical background, but at essence it is an "opportunity for people to experience good company, good food, good drink and good conversation." This, the master says, is the "charm of tea."

Ms. Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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FT: Prada's new pavilion in Seoul

Prada’s new pavilion in Seoul

By Edwin Heathcote

Published: April 25 2009 03:51 | Last updated: April 25 2009 03:51

The tryst between architecture and fashion has been increasingly heated in recent years. Architects love fashion’s speed and agility, the rapid materialisation of sketch to catwalk, its sheer popularity; fashion yearns for architecture’s intellectual seriousness and permanence. Since the turn of the 21st-century, all the big names – Herzog & de Meuron, Frank Gehry, David Chipperfield, Toyo Ito – have been seduced into remaking fashion stores. Indeed, in the early noughties there was only one radical building to see in New York: the Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s theatrical Prada store in Soho. Now Rotterdam-based OMA and Prada are going at it again.

This time the setting is the exquisite 16th-century Gyeonghui Palace in Seoul; the object, the “Transformer” pavilion. Taking its cue from the children’s toy, this is a building which flips into another, and another, and then another. Admittedly, it takes three cranes to rotate the 180 ton building, but transform it does. The steel-framed structure is designed to be used in one of four ways, depending on which side it is resting.

Currently it is in exhibition mode, sitting on its hexagonal side, but when rotated it becomes a cinema, a circular catwalk or an art exhibition space. And though it seems a deeply inappropriate splurge in a depressing slump, the structure’s sheer ambition lifts it above the more obvious critiques of luxury consumption. There seems little reason to do it other than that Prada can (and the unquestionable marketing value of a project that pushes the brand into the cultural rather than fashion pages). Yet, ultimately, its questioning of what architecture is expected to do and – in a way – its ridiculousness, transcends both product and commercialism.

The building is most easily read as a flattened-out plan, but that also illuminates the surprising similarity of architecture and fashion. Each discipline begins with a two-dimensional plan, and each takes on life through a series of translations that increasingly build the form into three dimensions, until the point at which they are wrapped, intimately or loosely, around bodies.

The opening show in the Transformer, Waist Down (curated by OMA think tank AMO), which has already been around the world, makes this connection manifest. Though the nominal subject is straightforward enough – Prada skirts – the exhibit is anything but. Skirts spin like frenzied dervishes; are illuminated from within like surrealist standard lamps; are blown around by an unseen wind, half-Marilyn Monroe, half-haunted house; and are squeezed between sheets of plastic like forlorn pressed flowers or the undersides of exotic mushrooms. Think of it as an answer to the riddle: When is a skirt not just a skirt?

The building’s steel frame is draped in white fabric and appears, against the intricate architecture of the palace and the clunky white neo-modernism of the Seoul Art Museum, like a huge ventilation funnel for some mysterious subterranean structure. From within, the darkness of the steel frame and the translucence of the fabric begin to evoke a memory of the paper walls and timber structures of traditional Korean architecture but, if anything, it is to the obsessions with platonic form of the early modernists that the building bows most deeply.

Whether in Josef Hartwig’s still-available Bauhaus chess set, the pieces abstracted into elemental shapes, or in Walter Gropius’s Total Theater, a spiralling, dizzying conceptual volume that would have represented both world and auditorium, the inspiration here seems curiously old – from modernism’s first flush. It is a building obsessed with its form (physically) following its function.

OMA’s founder, Rem Koolhaas, is an architect who has never seemed quite comfortable with the limits of building. Despite having realised some of the most extraordinary buildings of the modern age, most notably Seattle’s Public Library and Porto’s Casa da Música, there remains a nagging sense that impermanence suits the restlessness of his ideas. He is impatient, he is uneasy with conventional ideas of beauty and he seems unconvinced by architecture’s power to effect change. He famously stated that shopping was the only truly public activity our cities have left. So this strange event suits him perfectly: a slightly ugly object set in the grounds of a beautiful palace in an ugly city. It is architecture as theatre, just as the big fashion shows are as much about showmanship as product.

For Prada’s part, the structure marks the first time Prada the label and Prada the art facilitator have come together. Unlike previous Prada Foundation installations, like London’s Double Club (half hip Islington bar, half Congolese restaurant), conceived with artist Carsten Höller, the Transformer has brought the fashion world’s unparalleled sense of spectacle to architecture, whilst OMA have brought that fluid, intellectual vibrancy to fashion. No one knows what’s happening to the pavilion next – it looks likely to be dismantled and reassembled somewhere in Seoul – but the result is an elusive blend of art, architecture and happening that leaves the simplistic tropes of iconism behind. Not one icon but four, and for a single season only.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Form and social function

Form and social function

By Edwin Heathcote

Published: March 23 2009 22:23 | Last updated: March 23 2009 22:23

Brit Insurance Design Awards, Design Museum, London

Design may once, in the high modernist period, have been perceived as a fait accompli, a thing that needed no explanation other than its being. The idea was to be as useful and as clear as possible; the function would shine through as if this were the only reasonable solution. At least, that was the idea. In fact, design has always been bound to fashion, mythology, pop culture and politics. It is just that today, the pretence at permanence, at universality, has been dropped. Today, the story is everything.

‘Progress’ by Shepard Fairey (2008)

There could be no clearer expression of this moment in design than the winner of the Brit Insurance Design Awards, announced last week at London’s Design Museum. The Obama series of posters by the former graffiti artist Shepard Fairey is a phenomenon, a strikingly beautiful and instantly memorable piece of work that exemplified an unforgettable campaign. There was a palpable wave of pleasure as the result was announced. But how much of this is delight in design and how much is relief at the election of an articulate, liberal, black president?

There is no separating the two. What the Obama poster does is confer a kind of glow on design: it not only basks in the glory of Obama’s victory but also confirms the idea that design matters. The poster was not commissioned by the Obama team, rather it was a grassroots response to raise awareness and funds. Los Angeles-based Fairey raised more than $400,000 for the campaign by selling limited-edition prints and, just as importantly, associated his brand of street hip with the Obama movement.

None of this detracts from the design, which is as striking and memorable a piece of work as the Che poster or “Uncle Sam Wants You”. Fairey points out that he didn’t want to portray Obama as black or white but as a patriot, so the colours are the red, white and blue of the stars and stripes. He also notes that its “viral” success counteracts apathy by showing how an individual can make a difference.

Konstantin Grcic’s Myto chair

The other categories were also populated by this “Yes We Can” ethic, each wearing their social conscience with a swagger. There was Italian Vogue’s Black Issue, the wooden Magno radio designed by Singgih S. Kartono and manufactured in villages in Java, and the J-Line cable car that takes hillside shanty-town dwellers down to the centre of the Colombian city of Medellín. It was almost a relief to see Konstantin Grcic’s Myto chair, which has no social conscience and is just a well-designed, beautifully manufactured and functional product, although Snohetta’s Oslo Opera House seemed to have turned up on the wrong night – too bourgeois by far.

What these awards attempt – the comparison of every branch of design from fashion to transport to architecture – is unique but it is also uniquely odd: how do you compare a poster with an opera house? Still, there is an encouraging lack of star objects here, of design-art. Each winner attempts to redress a social inequality, to change things for the better. Even if you need to read the label to get the full story, each of these winners contains a narrative that rewards the effort.

Exhibition continues until June 14
www.designmuseum.org

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

WSJ: Singapore Lightens Up

Singapore Lightens Up

The restrictive city-state relaxes some limits on theaters in a bid to become an arts hub

By TOM WRIGHT

OnAsia

The Esplanade Theater

Singapore

Hollywood actor Ethan Hawke stars in a production of Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale," staged here this week by British director Sam Mendes. Meanwhile, across town, the curtain is rising on Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," with an all-male cast.

These are the latest marquee productions in Singapore's ambitious bid to claim status as a global performing arts city on a par with London or New York -- even if it means relaxing some long-held taboos. Theaters here increasingly are allowed to take on risqué social and political themes, a sign this tightly controlled Southeast Asian city-state is starting to loosen up.

As Singapore lost electronics-manufacturing jobs to China and India, it repositioned itself as a global center of financial services, a kind of Dubai in Asia. Now, it is working to make itself attractive to more international tourists and foreign expatriates, by creating a climate where theater and other performing arts can thrive. "The arts and a vibrant culture are needed for Singapore to develop," says Huzir Sulaiman, a Princeton-educated playwright and actor who runs Checkpoint Theatre, a local drama house. In 2006, Checkpoint staged "A Language of Their Own," a play about Asian-American gays by Chay Yew, a U.S.-based Singaporean dramatist. The play was banned here as recently as the mid-1990s.

Wild Rice's production of "The Swordfish Then the Concubine."

A former British colony, Singapore gained independence in 1965 and today is a democracy with tight restrictions on freedom of assembly and expression. The government, led by one party since independence, requires public political gatherings of five or more people to get a police permit. The arts also have faced state control. A decade ago, theater groups were ordered to cut scenes that offended censors or else face withdrawal of funding. The government banned some plays outright. Television and films were also restricted: The TV show "Sex and the City" was blacklisted until 2004.

Just recently, though, authorities have been permitting a few mainstream theaters to explore subjects that were off limits. TV and film are still strictly regulated, but dramatists say they are getting some leeway to tackle sensitive political, racial and sexual issues. The homosexually-themed production of "The Importance of Being Earnest" -- staged by Wild Rice, one of Singapore's leading theater groups -- is a milestone and a bold statement in a country where homosexual sex is illegal and local TV stations have been fined for running shows about gay couples.

Singapore's efforts to foster the arts include the state-run Singapore Arts Festival in May and June, which attracts 700,000 people from around Asia to performances of theater, music and dance by local and international artists. In 2007, the number of plays staged in Singapore jumped to 620, almost double the number from a decade earlier, according to Singapore's National Arts Council, which funds the arts. Local performing-arts companies increasingly attract the notice of international critics.

Trip Planner

Where to Stay: The Fullerton Hotel is a luxury hotel in an old colonial-era post office on the Singapore River. In April, it has special room rates of $200 (299 Singapore dollars) weekends, $215 (328 Singapore dollars) weekdays (www.fullertonhotel.com; +65-6733-8388). The Novotel Clarke Quay hotel has rooms on its club-floor level from $170 (260 Singapore dollars). Higher up, rooms have views of Boat Quay and the Esplanade (+65-6338-3333).

Where to Eat: Boat Quay, Clarke Quay and Robertson Quay—all on the Singapore River—have al fresco dining with all kinds of cuisine. A meal for two, without alcohol, starts at $65 (100 Singapore dollars) and goes up fast. IndoChine Waterfront Restaurant, in the Asian Civilizations Museum, close to the Arts House, has a mix of Vietnamese and French cuisine and a patio with great views of Boat Quay and the financial district. Try the spring rolls and beef stew ragout. Dishes cost $12 to $25 (20 to 40 Singapore dollars). (+65-6339-1720). Or sit on plastic seats under fans and dine at one of Singapore's ubiquitous "hawker centers," serving noodles with roast duck or Malay curries. Meals start at $2.50 (4 Singapore dollars).

What to Do: Visit Singapore's Chinese, Indian and Arab quarters to get a flavor of this multi-ethnic trading port. Singapore's museums are also expanding. The National Museum of Singapore, which houses a permanent exhibition on Singapore's history and interesting temporary shows, is an architectural gem that combines a colonial building with modern glass-and-steel extensions. Plans are afoot to turn the British-era Supreme Court, near the Singapore River, in to a new National Art Gallery by 2012.

Don't miss Singapore's award-winning zoo or shopping on Orchard Road. Or take a trip to Sentosa, a resort island joined by bridge, monorail and cable car to Singapore's mainland. A Universal Studios theme park and a major casino will open on Sentosa in early 2010.

Serious, complex plays by local writers about issues like individual rights "have placed theater at the center of social discussions" in the city-state, says Paul Rae, a British citizen who teaches theater studies at the National University of Singapore. Plays by local groups like the Necessary Stage, TheatreWorks and Toy Factory Productions have been allowed to push the envelope while still receiving state funding.

New arts venues are being built in the tourist-friendly zone around the Singapore River and Marina Bay. Opened in 2002, the Esplanade Theater, where Mr. Hawke will perform, is a complex of theaters and concert halls under a roof shaped like a spiked tropical fruit. Across the bay, a $4 billion casino-leisure complex built by Las Vegas Sands is set to open later this year with a theater and museum.

At the river's mouth, in the heart of the old British colonial district, stands the neoclassical Victoria Theater, which still houses plays. Next door, Singapore's old parliament, another whitewashed colonial building, is now the Arts House venue. Elsewhere in the city, the 615-seat Drama Center opened a few years ago in the National Library, a modernistic steel-and-glass structure filled with tropical plants where the Oscar Wilde production is playing.

Ivan Heng, one of Singapore's most popular actors (he plays Lady Bracknell in "The Importance of Being Earnest"), founded the Wild Rice Company in 2000 and set up the Singapore Theatre Festival in 2006. Irreverent and privately-run, the festival has showcased a number of works lampooning Singapore's paternalistic government. These include "The Campaign To Confer The Public Service Star On JBJ," by Singaporean writer Eleanor Wong, which became one of modern Singapore's most controversial plays after its 2006 premiere. "JBJ" are the initials of J.B. Jeyaretnam, a leading opposition politician who died last year. The play is the fictional account of a political scandal stemming from attempts to award a public service star to a man with the same initials.

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Joan Marcus

"The Winter's Tale," with Ethan Hawke at right.

"Angel-ism" made waves with its 2008 premiere at the festival. Featuring a leader who's resurrected to save a nation from destruction, the play was widely construed as an ironical allusion to Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's first prime minister who, before he stepped down in 1990, famously said he'd come back from the grave to help Singapore if he felt something was going wrong. The Necessary Stage, a small, popular theater in a community-center basement, last year staged "Gemuk Girls" (gemuk is a Malay word for "fat"), about a woman whose political ambitions are complicated when she finds out her grandfather was detained as a Communist in the 1960s.

Singapore's Media Development Authority, which oversees theater, film and TV content, says it has allowed plays in big venues like the Esplanade to be staged without prior government approval since 2005. Instead, theaters self-regulate by applying content ratings to plays based on government guidelines, says Amy Chua, the authority's director of media content. The result, she says, is that fewer than 150 plays each year now have to seek performance licenses from the authority. The strategy has "enabled the theater scene here to grow and provide more choices for consumers," Ms. Chua says.

The state is also boosting other art forms. Trying to position Singapore as a film hub, the government is offering to pay up to half the costs of foreign productions that film on location in Singapore. The state has managed to lure a number of animation studios here, including one owned by U.S. producer George Lucas, with the offer of generous tax breaks. Local films also are subsidized. "My Magic," a Tamil-language film about an alcoholic father and his son, last year was the first Singaporean entry ever to be nominated for a Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

The government, now under Mr. Lee's son, Lee Hsien Loong, still keeps a close eye on TV and film content shown in Singapore. Last year, the media authority fined a state-controlled TV channel the equivalent of $10,000 for airing an episode of the home-decorating show "Find and Design." The authority said a gay couple in the episode "normalizes and promotes a gay lifestyle."

"Television goes into people's living rooms. We get away with a lot more," says Alvin Tan, founder of the Necessary Stage company. Its recent productions have dealt with pedophilia and a cancer patient who uses marijuana to ease pain and faces the death penalty. Neither one was cut by censors or faced a withdrawal of funds. There are still boundaries, Mr. Tan says, but "we take the limits as creative stimulation. You can feel a sense of opening up."

Write to Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com

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