I was just admiring the calendars on the CDO site and of course, admiration leads to emulation. Being a cube, this is just a six month calendar, but when July comes, you can open it up, reverse all the folds and there are the next six, ready to go. June and December aren’t the easiest […]
About a year ago, I read a book on Japanese temple mathematics that I found in the local libraries. Well, I didn’t read it completely — there was a great deal of it I couldn’t follow. But the pictures were beautiful and what I understood, I enjoyed. During the Edo period, that is, after the […]
This is the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London, UK. I can’t say I know much about it, but you can read up on it by clicking the photo above — it will take you to the Wikipedia article. I mention it here because someone who works there recently blogged about this blog […]
You have to compare. So you can get a little distance from things. Like Laika. She really must have seen things in perspective. It’s important to keep a certain distance. [audio:PR.mp3|titles=Far jag kan inte få upp min kokosnöt|artists=Povel Ramel] That’s what Ingemar says in one of my favorite movies, Mitt liv som hund. It came […]
Indiscipline I do remember one thing. It took hours and hours but… by the time I was done with it, I was so involved, I didn’t know what to think. I carried it around with me for days and days… playing little games like not looking at it for a whole day and then… looking […]
[audio:DB.mp3|titles=I’m Afraid of Americans|artists=David Bowie] So, I was on the bus the other day, cheerfully folding away and rocking out to an old Bowie/Eno song and got to thinking about culture. The song was ostensibly about culture, you see — Bowie says: It’s not as truly hostile about Americans as say “Born in the U.S.A.”: […]
Our friend and unindicted co-conspirator, origamijoel, said that to me recently and it sounded immensely wise. Joel is a soft-spoken man with an air of affable gravitas and he often says things that strike me as being immensely wise. It’s just his way. When we were sitting on the concrete on 27th Street this past […]
Well, rather a left-handed apology, as the injury to him is largely imaginary and thoroughly unintentional, but an apology, nevertheless. This is a tato box: by which I mean, an origami box with radial symmetry and a closure the resembles that of a tato, a traditional Japanese purse. In the past year, I think I’ve […]
An idea I had, early one morning — a trompe-l’œil tato box, very impure. A magician, perhaps, could work up some patter for collapsing the box, but it would be far beyond my talents. Whist is an old game — I learnt when I was in school — all I remember is that the rules […]
Yesterday, I was at the Smith College Museum of Art, a lovely collection in a building of shocking hideosity, and they had a newish painting that caught my eye — it used a palimpsest technique that a friend of mine once used to good effect. One of the layers was a sketch of the Vitruvian […]
