daily life/art/culture/justice and how they merge, clash, & play inside my northern state of mind (set in Hokkaido and Minnesota)
Chie is a sublime cook, and she mixes the spices perfectly every time. I could gush on and on, but simple enough to say our family loves her and her food very much. I think the greatest cooks are often great people, too, as is true of Chie (and Aunt Michele in the D). Chie […]
Tucked down a side street near Kaguraoka park is my favorite restaurant in town. (And you may recall that I earlier wrote about my favorite cafe, Chamomile Cafe, here). The restaurant is called, of all things, Hindi Hipster, and it is run by a single proprieter, Chie, who has homestayed in India maybe 5 times […]
Here it is!
Out back of our dilapidated public housing is an unkempt field of beauty. A sturdy pine tree, in its classic Christmas shape, stands near to where a house used to be long ago. Dragon willow trees spring and curl up tenaciously even though the city workers mow them down, and now patches of daffodils and […]
There are days when the weather gives us something unexpected, a gift of unusual light and depth of color. This morning on our way to my son’s school, we saw storm clouds forming at all four directions of the city, and since we are surrounded by mountains, only half of the world had traces of […]
This piece was made by the sculptor, Mikako Tomotari, in dedication to the Ainu lands submerged by the Hokkaido government-sponsored dam in the Nibutani area of Hokkaido. Her comments and then comments on her comments (in English) are here. She had wanted to throw it into the waters, so that only by the elimination of […]