My Hometown - Bronx, New York
Break dancing came about in 1969 when disc jockey, record producer and visionary Afrika Bambaataa convinced the members of the Bronx street gang of which he was warlord to challenge rival gangs to battle with macho dance routines, in lieu of guns and knives. Its popularity literally hit the streets of New York City in the mid 70's where more emphasis was placed on groundwork involving stylized leg movements, with spectacular hand-gliding, windmilling, back and head spinning power moves.
Hoofing marks the realization that almost everything I paint involves circles. Check for yourself, if you don't believe me. As shapes go, circles are satisfying, and they keep dropping in on my artwork, unannounced. They symbolize harmony, wholeness and the non-linear nature of life and time; the four seasons, for example - birth, life, aging and death. Of course, somewhere in the middle of all that spiritual stuff, we throw a big piece of cardboard on the ground, crank up some Grand Master Flash and BREAKDANCE! Yeah!
It’s been a while since we read any fairy tales but our local library has recently added a goodly number of fairy tale books to its collection so we thought we’d delve in. We came home with an armful… some of them are traditional, others are modern (re)tellings or parodies.
I knew that Jon Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and The Frog Prince Continued would both go down well – they are funny and wittily illustrated (by Lane Smith and Steve Johnson respectively); and both depend on the kind of superior knowledge that children delight in - all the stories would be somewhat lost in the telling if you didn’t already know the originals.
The Lost Happy Endings by Carol Anne Duffy and illustrated by Jane Ray was visually irresistible. Duffy’s rich eloquence also lives up to all expectations: but a word of caution. Although this is a new story, she takes the fairy tale genre back to its grass-roots level. No wishy-washiness here. The retribution meted out to the thieving witch is absolute. It is more suitable for slightly older children: and should be cherished for that, for it sometimes seems that the older children get, the harder it is to find beautifully illustrated picture books for them. Certainly both my children relished both the pictures and the wonderful, descriptive language and each bore the book off to read independently after I’d read it to them.
There were several anthologies of traditional fairy tales to choose from and I have to admit I was slightly dubious as to how my boys would take to several nights in a row of traditional “happy-ever-after” tales: they assure me every time romance is mentioned that all that stuff is yeuch… But of course, I had fallen into the trap of equating fairy-tale with romantic and there is so much more to the traditional stories than that. Anthea Bell’s name is a talisman for me so her translation of Henriette Sauvant’s selection of Rapunzel and other Magic Fairy Tales was the obvious choice (helped by the surreal cover illustration)– and has been bourne out. We have so far enjoyed stories we know well, as well as come across some new to us all.
I like his move, very nice!