Found Objects
JJ and I went to Xi'An Famous Foods on the East Broadway side of Chinatown last night. It's a growing chain that's basically an excuse to dunk lamb meat into chewy noodles and spicy sauce. My delicate Cantonese palate can only stomach the stuff in controlled doses, but man does that hit the spot on a fall-like summer evening.
Afterward we hopped on the F to Observatory, an art space near the Gowanus Canal dedicated to ... the history of the Gowanus Canal. There's also a library dedicated to out-of-print materials that aren't first editions. Plenty of hilarious material. I especially enjoyed the books on ninjitsu, carnivorous dinosaurs, becoming a star soccer player and a random number generator.
We were there to see a presentation on manga kamishibai, a form of picture storytelling that found its zenith in postwar Japan, influencing the career of Osamu Tezuka (who in turn is more or less credited for pioneering much of the modern manga we see today). The author/lecturer brought his own hand-painted "slides" (for reasons unknown, pictures weren't mass-produced), a story about a monkey, a girl and a King Kong-like ape. There was a fight against some samurai. In other words, not much different than your average series in today's Shonen Jump.
Afterward we hopped on the F to Observatory, an art space near the Gowanus Canal dedicated to ... the history of the Gowanus Canal. There's also a library dedicated to out-of-print materials that aren't first editions. Plenty of hilarious material. I especially enjoyed the books on ninjitsu, carnivorous dinosaurs, becoming a star soccer player and a random number generator.
We were there to see a presentation on manga kamishibai, a form of picture storytelling that found its zenith in postwar Japan, influencing the career of Osamu Tezuka (who in turn is more or less credited for pioneering much of the modern manga we see today). The author/lecturer brought his own hand-painted "slides" (for reasons unknown, pictures weren't mass-produced), a story about a monkey, a girl and a King Kong-like ape. There was a fight against some samurai. In other words, not much different than your average series in today's Shonen Jump.