I have known Sarah Towle since my early days of writing. Back before I moved from Nice to New York and she moved from Paris to London. One day we may actually end up living in the same city! We … Continue reading
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Blog: Miss Marple's Musings (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: children's books, education, Historical Fiction, New York, London, Roxie Munro, Paris, eBooks, Florence, Michelangelo, Mary Hoffman, Nice, Emma Dryden, Sarah Towle, Marcie Coleen, kidlit TV, Time Traveler Tours & Tales, Kickstarter Campaign, BEWARE MME LA GUILLOTENE, IN THE STEPS OF GIANTS, Julie Gribble, media platforms, Add a tag
Blog: Shelley Scraps (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: watercolour, studio, Michelangelo, The Stone Giant, illustration, picture book, Add a tag
I've been quiet on the blog of late, in fact all social media, largely due to work on my latest picture book, Jane Sutcliffe's renaissance non-fiction The Stone Giant - Michelangelo's David and How He Came to Be. It's been an involving project in the pipeline for quite a while, with several interruptions (like an unforeseen house move!) but I'm happy to say the art work is now complete! Currently awaiting final approval before posting the art off, I'll be able to share some images shortly.
Desktop debris, in the middle of wrestling with Michelangelo! |
Blog: DIANE SMITH: Illo Talk (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: girl, flowers, mural, DVD, Renaissance, Michelangelo, panel, strawberry, contrat, Santa Maria Sun, Add a tag
Well, lots to tell today. First of all, I did a phone interview with the Santa Maria Sun last week (a local weekly paper) and it is in this week's issue! Exciting stuff for me - you can check it out here.
Secondly, I was pretty frustrated with yesterday's progress - or lack thereof. I didn't really have the time that's needed to spend on the strawberry girl, so I had to leave her in a pretty poor state - I hate to walk away from something without some degree of resolution. Then, this morning we ended our history study of the Renaissance for the school year with a biography DVD on Michelangelo. To see his amazing work and then go out to the garage to my mural was rather humbling as an artist.
Anyway, I am happy to say that I was able to solve - or at least improve - several issues on the strawberry panel today. I fixed skin tones, proportions, and adjusted contrast (particularly the background wave vs. figure's skin tone). I spent a lot of time trying to get her arms and hands in believable positions - grrrrrr. I worked on the flowers and strawberries, but there is work to be done there still - in this case, I need to tone down the contrast and have the seeds blend in a bit more.
One of my favorite details today is the hair - I gave her some curls and I like the color (I thought the strawberry girl should have red hair).
Blog: OUPblog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: chapel, pope, michelangelo, ceiling, sistine chapel, higher education, this day in world history, all saint's day, pope julius II, the last judgment, vatican city, sistine, michelangelo’s, chapel’s, scaffold, Add a tag
This Day in World History - On November 1, All Saint’s Day, Pope Julius II celebrated a mass in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City for the first time in at least four years. Those who attended were the first people to see one of the most celebrated works of Western art—the magnificent frescoes painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti on the chapel’s ceiling.
Blog: Gob Wrote A Book (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Newbery Award Winner, Michelangelo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, silly challenges, Add a tag
Which got me to the idea of reading all the Newbery Winners.
I printed out the list today. It's a lot of books. The first Newbery was given in 1922 to The Story of Mankind by Henvrik Willem Von Loon. 87 years later, and Neil Gaiman got his for The Graveyard Book. I have only read eleven of the titles of the eighty seven, which leaves (this will be the most math that will ever appear in this blog) seventy six titles. I can't imagine that all will hold up as well as the mixed-up files. Several, such as Daniel Boone, have gone out of print. And I don't intend to reread all the titles that I have read. Some I read so recently that the point would be moot, but others I just don't care to. If I read one a week, it'll take more than a year. If I read one a month it'll take over six years. I'm not exactly sure how to pace this, but one way or the other, I've got a lot of reading to do.
Blog: OUPblog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Food and Drink, Guinness, world, Media, cheese, Gillian Riley, Italian Food, parmigiano-reggiano, whole foods, reggiano, parmesan, umami, parmigiano, all’intelletto, pietrasanta, michelangelo, lump, whole, foods, record, gillian, riley, Add a tag
Over the weekend Whole Food Market attempted to earn a Guinness World Record for “Most Parmigiano Reggiano Wheels Ever Cracked” at the same time. Gillian Riley, author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food weighs in on this cheesy affair.
An almighty crack.
As the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano surges towards the Guinness Book of Records the thought of all those craggy wheels simultaneously rent asunder reminds us of Michelangelo’s labours at the rock face in Pietrasanta near Lucca in Tus-cany in the summer of 1518. He and his team were selecting marble for the tomb of Pope Julius II, and his titanic struggles with the obdurate raw material were as blistering as the clashes between the artist and his client. Using the strength within the marble to detach the desired lump was a prelude to releasing the form already latent in the block, described in a sonnet by Michelangelo:
Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto
c’un marmo solo in sé non circonscriva
col suo superchio, e solo a quello arriva
la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto.
The greatest artist has no concept
that is not already present in a block of marble
beneath its outward form, and this can only be reached
by the hand that obeys the intellect.
The combination of hands on physical skills and sublime inspiration expounded in this sonnet are the qualities deployed in the making of Parmigiano-Reggiano. The great wheels contain the imagined essence of grass and hay and milk and the odours of pas-tures and fragrant byres, released by the tool of the cheesemonger, exploring fault lines in the mature cheese as the sculptor teases form and meaning from the rock. The large heart-shaped tool, a sharp point at the bottom and a stout handle at the top, will prize off a lump of cheese the desired size as accurately as the stonemason’s tools.
The crystalline graininess found in parmesan is umami, a natural flavour enhancer. The concept of umami was unknown to Michelangelo, although he enjoyed the effects of it when parmesan was used as a condiment or as an ingredient in many cooked dishes. This combination of various ingredients to get an enhanced burst of flavour is similar to his use of colori cangianti in the Sistine Chapel, where a loose application of con-trasting colours one on top of the other produces a shimmering intensity.
Although not rejecting Vasari’s claim that he had a mind above material pleasures, Michelangelo cared enough about his food and drink to jot down some menus on the back of a letter, probably during his time in Pietrasanta. These were Lenten menus so no cheese or eggs, [more maybe in some other blog…] Pasta and some sophisticated vegetable dishes, (braised fennel, spinach, a salad) with umami effect from salt herrings and anchovies, show an enthusiasm for simple but sophisticated eating. He would have enjoyed the full impact of parmesan at the banquets organised by Bartolomeo Scappi, where it was served as it often is today in chunks hewn from a larger lump. We too can enjoy the michelangelesque qualities of Parmigiano-Reggiano, towering as it does above all other cheeses as the artist towered over his contemporaries.
Blog: It's All Good (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: children, theater, Darren McGavin, Mary Poppins, ADD, Add a tag
I spent this past weekend in New York City with my wife, the long-suffering Joyce, and my grandson, Jake. Jake is a pretty smart kid, but his frame of reference continues to astound me.
We went to see the musical Mary Poppins at the New Amsterdam Theater on Friday night. Joyce and I had seen it in London a couple of years ago, and thought Jake would be thrilled by the outstanding singing and dancing, and especially by the technical wizardry of the production. We were dead wrong. He was only occasionally interested in the show, and he seemed to be humoring Joyce and me most of the evening. (He was really looking forward to the visit to the American Museum of Natural History on Saturday.)
When I was the same age Jake is now, my birthday present from my parents was tickets to Melody Fair, an entertainment park and summer stock theater near Buffalo, to see The Music Man, starring Kolchak the Night Stalker himself, Darren McGavin, as Harold Hill. I'll never forget how exciting it was to see live actors doing amazing things, and when the North Tonawanda High School Band came down the aisle next to me, playing "Seventy Six Trombones," I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Surely Gabriel's horn could not have sounded as sweet as those trembling saxophones!
Of course, when I saw The Music Man, my family had only owned a TV for about three years. It had a 12 inch screen (the only screen in my life at that time), a set of rabbit ears (children, ask your parents...), and three channels which broadcast for about sixteen hours a day in black and white. I rarely went to the movies, except for the occasional drive-in that went on way past my bedtime.
This is NOT a harangue about how much better it was in the old days. Instead, I'm always stunned at how much more of the world Jake has seen, compared to me at that age. His horizons are so much broader.
There was a song that came out either during or immediately after World War I, titled "How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?" The song worried about whether the boys coming back from the front would still be interested in working a plow after they'd seen the lights of Paris. The song sounds like a novelty today, but the farm population of the United States dropped from roughly 35% of the population in 1910 to 1.84% of the population in 2002.
How can a child find wonder in a chimney sweep dancing clear around a proscenium arch, or Mary Poppins flying out over the audience to close the show, when he has seen the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies? So I wonder how we're going to keep people like Jake interested in my two biggest loves (other than the long-suffering Joyce, of course): libraries and theater.
Basically, if it doesn't have a screen, it doesn't hold Jake's interest. I have seen him concentrate for long stretches of time, playing Pokemon or building a room in Webkinz (parents, ask your children...), so I don't think it's ADD, and he loves soccer and baseball with a passion, so I don't think he's simply a couch potato with a proclivity for obesity (like his grandfather).
I don't really have any answers. In fact, after three days of chasing a 7-year old around Manhattan, I'm lucky I've made it this far through Monday. But I think we'd better come up with some answers if either of these traditions is going to survive another generation in any form we would recognize.
Hi George; I'm a libraries and theater fan too (we spent a week in NYC in September and saw 5 shows - and the American Museum of Natural History too!). I'm a little concerned too, noting what seems to be the graying of the theater-going population at all levels of theater (I live in a very small town, but also see shows in larger cities). Thinking of the two in context makes me wonder about doing a theater display in our library display case...
Last weekend, I read "The Season," William Goldman's 1969 polemic about the 1967-1968 Broadway season, and he worries about the graying of the audience even then!
There was also an article in today's New York Times about Broadway appealing to tweens, noting that this demographic alone can't "save" theater. However, musicals like "Legally Blonde," "Wicked," and "High School Musical" have at least given people under 50 a reason to go to the theater again.
And interesting displays in libraries could help people make the connection, so I wish you godspeed, Lorena!
Perhaps the key is your closing sentence: "But I think we'd better come up with some answers if either of these traditions is going to survive another generation in any form we would recognize." Why must they survive in recognizable form? Theatre and libraries (along with everything else) has changed over the course of history... what changes are to come may take us beyond our wildest dreams. (What excites us most is rarely what excites our children/grandchildren, too.) Enjoyed the post; get some rest!
Cyn, this is a good point (although I think our theater would not be all that unrecognizable to Aristophanes) and I need to chew that one over a bit.
Off the top of my head, what I was thinking of was that I'd like to see us preserve the library as central hub of voluntary learning in our communities. But that doesn't quite satisfy me...
I guess it depends on the kid and the show. My 8-year-old son loves Cirque du Soleil (to the point of it being a bit scary). He also liked Blue Man Group, and has asked to see Stomp. And he also loves our Xbox, Wii, DVDs, cartoons, etc. My 5-year-old niece loves ANY kind of live theater, especially if it involves dancing. She's begging to go see Spamalot when it comes to town... though my bro-in-law isn't sure how he'll FF over the naughtier bits, like he does on their CD of the production (from which she learned her love).
I love live theater and have since I was a music/theater geek in school. I would, however, shoot myself thru the neck before seeing certain shows (Cats) and performers (Celine Dionne).
Maybe he just doesn't like the cockney accent? Try "Wicked" next time.
There was an article in the NYT on October 7th "If you discount it, will they come?" that suggests price is a real consideration (imagine that!), and mentions some cool stuff being done with subsidized tickets. I think the bigger issue is the graying of theater in regular cities and towns - the places where people develop a love of theater that goes beyond seeing a Broadway play because you are in NYC, and includes financial support if possible.
That's the truth! My wife is the Executive Director of the Ohio Community Theater Association, and the graying of their audience is a constant concern.
Channels 2, 4, and 7 (WGR, WBEN, and WKBW) right? I soend a summer working tech at Melody Fair many years ago.