Statues and buildings float, Slinkys connect articulated buses, and carnival rides get supersized in Vienna, Austria with help from Argentine director Fernando Livschitz of Black Sheep Films. Animation and live-action blend fantastical sights with reality in Vienna is like…
Watch the Upper Belvedere levitate in layers, dancers magically don colorful dance clothes mid-jump at the Wiener Staatsoper (Vienna State Opera), St. Stephen’s Cathedral becomes a swing carousel, and more. Livschitz specializes in transposing “fantasy elements into meticulously captured contemporary backdrops.”
In Oregon, it must be noted, frogs cannot and do not sit in chairs, nor do they read. Please, don’t come to Oregon looking for frogs who care about the news.
Later in the video, an elephant-sized rabbit bounds through a field of tulips, carrying children on its back. The tulips are accurate but do not attempt to ride the rabbits.
A wooden framework and curved plastic pipes provide a solid structure for ‘knit’ bundles of wara or rice straw, the byproduct of the season’s rice harvest. As volunteers work together to tie and wrap the bundles into place, an oversized straw animal is revealed. It’s one of many specially designed sculptures created for the annual Wara Art Festival (わらアート) in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture. Spoon & Tamago provides some background:
The Wara Art Festival all started in 2006 when the local district reached out to Musashino Art University to seek guidance on transforming their abundant amount of rice straw into art. And in 2008, the very first Wara Art Festival was held. Since then, every year the school sends art students up to Niigata to assist in creating sculptures made out of rice straw. The festivities have ended but the sculptures are on display through October 31, 2017.
Hidden in western Copenhagen‘s forests and open fields are six friendly wooden giants. They were created by Danish artist Thomas Dambo and built from recycled scrap wood by local volunteers. Described as “an open air sculpture treasure hunt”, the Six Forgotten Giants can be discovered by surprise in areas that were previously off the beaten path… or search for them in Rødovre, Hvidovre, Vallensbæk, Ishøj, Albertslund and Høje Taastrup with a treasure map.
The Japanese have a word for it: kuidaore, "to eat oneself bankrupt." This has risen to some combination of tradition and aspiration in Osaka, Japan's second-largest city, a former merchant enclave once referred to as the country's "kitchen." You can see exactly what empties Osakan bank accounts on Al Jazeera English's series Street Food. Its episode on the city (part one, part two), embedded above, seeks out the stands that most efficiently cater to the citizenry's characteristic busyness, the source of the freshest sushi around, the barbecue counters of Koreatown, the poisonously-livered fugu fish, the ideally controversial dish that is whale meat, and a range of food writers and critics to lay down some culinary insight. The program finishes its journey with one visit to a culinary academy and another to the poorer side of this Japanese metropolis. Being a Japaneese metropolis with more poverty than most but also one a greater love of eating than most, Osaka has produced street food even among its street people.
There you have the basic form of a Street Food broadcast, each of which takes on a different world city, all of which operate under the theory that the best path into a culture runs through its alleys most dense with comestible commerce. In the episode just above (part one, part two), Montreal's meeting of English and French sensibilities, a slightly uneasy coexistence in the best of times, turns into an all-out ideological conflict on the subject of how to eat. One particularly important skirmish occurs over poutine, the French fry, cheese curd, and gravy dish essential to any investigation of Montreal cuisine. In the episode below (part one, part two), we see the elements of Spanish and Andean eating finally converging on the streets of Lima — aided, in a big way, by flavors brought in by the Peru's many immigrants from Asian. Admittedly, the convergence isn't complete, not will it be until Limeños not of native descent come to enjoy the city's most popular item of street food, with 65 million eaten every year: the guinea pig.
All episodes of Al Jazeera English's Street Food on YouTube:
Cookpad bills itself as having the "Best Japanese recipes from the largest cooking community in Japan." And that's not just your usual web site hyperbole. Established back in 1997, Cookpad houses 1.5 million recipes created by a base of 20 million users. And it's now a publicly-traded company on the Tokyo stock exchange. This week, Cookpad did everyone in the Anglophone world a favor by releasing an English-language version of its site. Right now, you can navigate your way through 1,500 recipes and find dishes like Udon with Thick Egg Soup, Very Delicious Stir-fried Tofu with Shimeji Mushrooms, and Pan-Fried Autumn Salmon with Ginger Sauce. And if you're patient, you'll soon find another 30,000 recipes added to the site. It's worth noting that all recipes are translated by humans, not computers, and the translators are apparently compensated for their efforts.
Geographer turned Software Engineer, looking to shape the invisible systems that guide our world. Professionally interested in mapping, data visualization, values-based programming, and STEAM evangelism. Personally interested in crochet, knitting, textiles, and archery.
