TOBI'S DESK

There is another kind of television. It’s not quite live action, nor purely animated. It exists in three-dimensional space, yet people, in their conventional forms, are absent, and the stories and characters don’t fit neatly into our practical world. It makes sense that we find this kind of television in the children’s category, because that’s where we leave most irrational things.  Toys, especially ones designed for make-believe play, occupy a similar middle ground. Toys are real objects that you can touch, but they don’t work in the way nontoys work. You have a toy elephant, but you don’t have an elephant. You have a toy vacuum, but not a vacuum. If toys are soft, plush, rounded, and malleable, with holes and faulty parts, so are the worlds we create for them. We might watch this happen on TV.   Costume The role of logic in the world of Teletubbies is unclear. Sometimes, the show seems overly dedicated to the principles that structure real life. Po learns that sh...

The squat. Photograph courtesy of Benoit Méry. People stood out front as if waiting: smoking, talking. Of consecutive sets of doors, the first one bore a monogram in stenciled capitals: B-L-O-C. A grille resisted lifting, sticking. Just inside was a foyer, at the back of which stretched a crescent-shaped desk referred to by squatters as the Accueil, “reception.” Watch was kept. Behind that desk a crank could operate the grille. “This is a building of the people,” the squatter Dominique, who had worked construction, told me, referring to its history as a public health agency and its suitability for heavy use. Hard floors swept clean. Banks of cabinets, their material a blond composite, lined the halls, which at rhythms of their own let onto rooms that had been government workers’ offices. These doors, green frosted glass, shut with a clang. They kept in the warmth of space heaters. Open, they let smoke and music circulate; they aired disputes. A squatter who was a woman—women were a...

The rose bush farthest to the right. Photographs courtesy of the author. April 12, 2024 I live on a mountain and am surrounded by mountains and last year I planted five rosebushes. Last year I dug five holes and it took a few days because the ground is hard where I live and it is full of bluestone and other rocks. In the old days they made use of the rocks that they found when they were digging into the ground. They built walls of bluestone to keep the cattle from going past the property line and you can still see many of these walls today and there are even some of these walls on my own property. These days the rocks are not useful to me at all and they were a big nuisance to my digging. Once the bushes were in the ground, four out of the five bushes from last year bloomed once or twice, and they had some nice flowers but it was nothing too spectacular. The blooms were small and the flowers were plagued by bugs and beetles and slugs. The beetles were the worst of the pests in the ...

Izu Peninsula from Mount Echizen. Alpsdake, via Wikimedia Commons . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . Usami, Izu Peninsula November 26, 1980 Dear Shirley and Francis, My thoughts have been very much with you as more and more reports come in about the earthquake in southern Italy. Of course, I know that you are not there, and that is a relief, but I’m sure you must have friends in the vicinity, and (though the reports in the Japanese press have not mentioned Capri) your house may also have been damaged. I hope that the tragedy, unspeakable as it is, has at least not directly affected you. I am writing from my room in a building overlooking the sea. It is dusk and the mountains are dark against the bluish-gray sky. It is one of the loveliest places in Japan I know and I have bought a tiny apartment on the ninth floor of a building recently erected on one of the hills overlooking the bay. Today has been clearer than I have ever seen it here. The islands that are normally concealed by...

Yoko Ono, Half-A-Room , from Half-A-Wind Show , Lisson Gallery, London, 1967. Photograph by Clay Perry, courtesy of Tate Modern and Yoko Ono. Recently, I found myself at the Tate Modern in London, accompanied by my youngest daughter, to see Music of the Mind , a retrospective of the work of Yoko Ono: her drawings, postcards, films, and musical scores. Accompanied is perhaps too easy a word. When told my daughter I wanted to go, she said, “Really?” “Yes,” I said. “Really.”   A myth about Yoko Ono is that she came from nowhere and became a destroyer of worlds. The truth is otherwise. Yoko Ono—now ninety-one—was born in 1933, in Tokyo. Her father was a successful banker and a gifted classical pianist; her mother an art collector and philanthropist. Ono attended a progressive nursery school where the emphasis was on music: the children were taught perfect pitch and encouraged to listen to everyday sounds and translate them into musical notes. In 1943, she and her brother...