MICHELIN Guide (January 26, 2024) – Every morning, Chef Hisao Nakahigashi ventures into Kyoto’s countryside, exploring the forest and mountains where he has spent his entire life. He gathers fresh vegetables, herbs and flowers for his restaurant’s daily menu.
With the credo of “eat all of what is edible”, this restaurant embraces the concept of fully-use all the parts of ingredients. True advocate of the local producers he works with, chef Nakahigashi’s philosophy transpire in the hassun he plates every day, expressing the rustic beauty of the country through all five senses.
In this Green Star in action episode, we dive into the world of chef Hisao NAKAHIGASHI whose restaurant Sojiki Nakahigashi (草喰なかひがし) – literally ‘herbivorous cuisine’ – is awarded a Green Star and Two Stars in the MICHELIN Guide Kyoto & Osaka 2023. Dining here means reconnecting with the environment, fostering a commitment to an eco-conscious life. It offers not only flavorful dishes but also culinary creations that embody mindfulness and a profound respect for nature.
FRAMES (January 13, 2024) – Wayne is a New York City-based photographer. His education includes a BA in physics from the University of Mississippi and a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.
He was a late-comer to photography, buying his first camera when he turned forty and studying black-and-white technique at the International Center of Photography. His interests expanded to color imagery when he adopted digital photography in 2001.
He also reviews photography exhibitions for the New York Photo Review. He is a long-time member and past president of Soho Photo Gallery.
Christie’s (January 11, 2024) – The Rocket Man singer and his husband, David Furnish, discuss the Peachtree Road residence where the pop legend became a ‘serious collector’ of exuberant art and objects.
In 1991 when Sir Elton John bought a duplex-apartment at Park Place on Peachtree Road in Atlanta’s coveted Buckhead neighbourhood, he couldn’t have imagined the extent to which the city would transform him personally and professionally.
Louisiana Channel (January 4, 2024) – When writing, Joyce Carol Oates writes about people, often about a family, because “the family unit to me is like the nexus of all emotion, and people derive their meaning from the position in families,” she says.
Video timeline:0:00 On preferred subjects for writing 3:20 On Karen Blixen /Isak Dinesen 4:24 On families 6:54 On the mother figure 9:00 On the novel ‘Babysitter’ 17:27 On the novel ‘Night. Sleep. Death. And the Stars’ 22:48 How traveling resembles writing 28:47 On Donald Trump
“What is so exciting about the novel is that it mimics life and that you end up doing something you never thought you would do,” says Joyce Carol Oates, one of America’s greatest living novelists, when looking back on a life of writing.
It might be a violent event or something politically relevant, or it could be a racist experience that sets off a novel. In her storytelling, Oates finds it interesting to focus on girls at the beginning of puberty: “There’s a kind of wonderful neutrality of childhood that gets conditioned out when girls get to be 12 – 14 years old. And then, from that point on, when they’re so shaped by what we call the male gaze and the expectations of others that they grow into being someone who is this female image.”
But today, the family is very different and there are all kinds of families: “There are families of same-sex couples who got married and they may adopt a child or they may have a child of their own, but then there may be families that are like communes where people are living, sharing a house, but they are a family and they may have dogs and cats who know who they are. […] The so-called nuclear family – which is just a father, mother, and children – still exists, of course, but it’s not the only example of any longer, which is wonderful. It all begins with the emancipation of women”, Joyce Carol Oates concludes.
Oates feels attracted to writing because writing is storytelling and “what’s interesting about storytelling is that you have to have revelations. That you start off with a situation, and a little bit of a mystery evolves, and then you have to follow the tendrils and the roots of that mystery, like an investigator. And then there has to be a revelation.” This means that Oates focuses a lot in her writing on the pacing and the suspense and the movement, like “how long is a paragraph, how short is the dialogue, and how much dialogue is there in proportion to the exposition, and the craftsman side of writing is actually where many people write.“
CBS Mornings (December 23, 2023) – After writing “The Grapes of Wrath,” author John Steinbeck explored the Gulf of Mexico in a famous boat called the Western Flyer.
Since then, the boat has inspired adventurers and scientists for generations, but the original ship was nearly lost. CBS News’ Jeff Glor reports on the person determined to give it new life.
Louisiana Channel (December 8, 2023) – “If I didn’t write, I’d go nuts because I wouldn’t have a single reason to exist. The pleasure of bringing something together is so intense,” says British Ian McEwan, who would love to live forever and discover how we’re doing in 10,000 years.
Ian McEwan is considered one of the most important British novelists alive today. When he writes, characters and plot are difficult to separate because “often characters arise out of plots, often plots drive characters into existence”, he says. What is crucial to McEwan when writing is that “circumstances make the character and the characters generate possibilities. That sense of possibility is always so important. So characters can create their own waves.” The novel Lessons (2022) is McEwan’s most personal novel. It was written in lockdown when he was entering his 70s and beginning to take a look back at his existence. People who know him well can always connect what he is writing with things in his own life, he says.
In Lessons, McEwan wanted to create “the emotional truth of certain rather sad, tragic, disturbing things that happened in my family”, he says. “And the reflective element was also the movement towards trying to understand the circumstances, not only of my life but my generation’s life.” Ian McEwan enjoys reading biographies, but “if you want to know everything it’s possible to know about a great poet, you’ll need to read three or four biographies written over maybe a century or two centuries”, he says. He admits that fiction does not influence him like it did when he was younger.
“We have very little sense of how to generate on the page an open-ended character until the writing of Jane Austen” and he adds that it was the great Russian writers who taught us how to write characters as if they were real people. By the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, there was a great artistic revolution; McEwan points out and emphasizes that it was especially James Joyce who taught us “to understand characters from the flow of consciousness, right from the very inside”.
RFI English (December 7, 2023) – 2023 marks the death centenary of Gustave Eiffel. To mark the occasion, an exhibition titled ‘Eiffel Higher and Higher is being held at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Savin Yeatman-Eiffel, who is exhibition’s curator and a descendant of Gustave Eiffel, spoke to RFI on this occasion.
Graphic design Patte&Besset, stamp “Fêtes du cinquantenaire de la tour Eiffel”, 1939, creation by Henri Cheffer (c) adagp Paris ; Stamp “Gustave Eiffel 1832 – 1923” creation by Marie-Noëlle Goffin.
Eater Films (November 13, 2023) – Nels Leader is the CEO of Bread Alone, an upstate New York bakery founded by his father in 1983. Today, the bakery is committed to the idea that everyone should have access to good bread — a goal it tries to achieve by baking 150,000 loaves every week.
BBC Scotland (November 9, 2023) – “This is my reality of Govanhill.” Street photographer Simon Murphy has been taking pictures of the of the Govanhill Community for 20 years. We follow him as he takes the final images for first major exhibition and accompanying book publication.
Govanhill is a residential district in Glasgow, Scotland, known for the cluster of gourmet delis, trendy cafes and curry houses in the Strathbungo area, along with traditional-style pubs offering brunch menus and craft beers. Pop concerts and football matches bring crowds to the Hampden Park stadium, while the edgy Tramway theatre hosts films and plays. Queen’s Park has ponds, woods and a Victorian glasshouse.
Louisiana Channel (November 7, 2023) – Japanese artist Mariko Mori shares a look into her studio and home as well as her own artistic practice. Mariko Mori was born in Tokyo, Japan, but has lived for several years in both New York and London. Her mother was an art historian, and the young Mori was introduced to art through her.
“It seems to me that a lot of our conceptual ideas are already carried out in the past. And we’re at a point to inherit those ideas to the future.”
“When I was nine years old, I was looking through her collection of postcards of all the Western art,” Mori remembers: “Somehow I found Jackson Pollock’s no. 13 painting. And I was so thrilled. I didn’t know what abstract painting was, but I really felt freedom.” Today, Mariko Mori works in various mediums, from photography and sculpture to installation and architecture. Her studio – and home – was the first architectural project she did. The house is located at Okinawa, a tropical island south of Japan.
Inspired by the surrounding nature Mori wanted “the house to be an extension of that. A part of nature.” The untraditional shape of the house is eye-catching: “Originally, I was thinking of just building an architecture building, but it became more like a sculpture or form,” she says and continues: “The shape tried to accommodate the wind coming from the north.” This explains why the building is smaller in one part and bigger in another.
Mariko Mori is a Japanese multidisciplinary artist. She is known for her photographs and videos of her hybridized future self, often presented in various guises and featuring traditional Japanese motifs. Her work often explores themes of technology, spirituality and transcendence.
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