“No kelen kelen” is a West African term meaning, ‘no deception’, and it’s the title of the new CD by JoJo Kuo. (The photos and design of the CD were created by yours truly.) The cover photograph was shot in a little basement club on Houston Street where JoJo was performing. What a fun shoot […]

I can’t believe that the World Trade Center attack was six years ago. Actually, I can, it almost seems like a dream. That’s a cliche, but true. I can remember looking up and seeing those towers fall. Everyone screaming and then, everyone quiet. We didn’t know how to react. We still don’t. I was drawing […]

Well it’s good to be home. Very shortly after my return from Asia I was on a plane to Orlando to teach a reportage class with my friend and fellow studio 1482 member Margaret Hurst. We were in Epcot, and of course I went to the Japanese pavilion. I was mooning around there, practicing my […]

My last night in Tokyo I sit on my sister’s terrace and gaze out at the Tokyo Tower. As much as I miss New York and friends, I will be sorry to leave this town. Tokyo is a fantastically lovely, and loveable, city, and as a (somewhat New York-centric) native of the Big Apple I […]

Kyoto is not exactly what I expected from looking at all those Hokusai prints. It is a mid-sized, fairly modern looking city located about 2 1/2 hours by high speed train from Tokyo. There are trains, buses, cars, crowds, and the usual Pachinko parlors that seem to be everywhere in this country. But the Gion […]

I saw 1,000 toriis in Kyoto. Did you hear me, ONE THOUSAND TORIIS!! Going up the side of a mountain. Creating a tunnel of red, orange, pink and mauve through a forest of green and moss. UNREAL. This is DEFINITELY where Christo and Jean-Claude developed their idea for the Gates in Central Park. C’mon Christo, […]

Coming back to Tokyo felt like coming home to New York. By the time my sister and I got to the airport in Beijing to head back, we were pros at the aggressive, non-waiting-in-lines way of life in China. Going to the money exchange to turn our yuan back to yen required a football style […]

Guilin, in the Guanxi province of China, is in the southern part of the country, unlike Beijing. As such, it is somewhat tropical. It rains heavily every day at 4 pm. The feeling is lush and the landscape is gorgeous. It is really more the China I imagined than Beijing. There are majestic mountains, pagodas, […]

Our last morning in Beijing we hightailed it over to the Temple of Heaven, you know, the one featured in the Chinese pavilion at EPCOT? WEll of course Disney has done it again and reproduced it exactly, with the exception that the Orlando version has iced tea on demand and Western style toilets nearby. (Enough […]

The Hutong are a very distinctive part of Beijing. It’s said that a quarter of the city’s residents live in the hutongs, narrow alleyways made up of somewhat crumbly one-story stone buildings and courtyard homes. A lot of them are being demolished to make way for the new large buildings popping up all over Beijing, […]