Artaware's Blog

It ain’t easy to put together 6 units into an origami whole! Check it out on You Tube.

It’s called an “Executive Toy,” I suppose because if you hold it gently between your palms and blow, it skillfully spins. And any organization that “spins well” is run by a skillful executive? Or, maybe CEOs have nothing better to do than to twirl it?

I work part-time at a State-of-the-Art play care center (at Camden Kroc Center) with kids – ages 6 months to 6 years old. It is well equipped with train sets, action figures, small construction trucks, sports cars, potato heads – you name it. Most of the toys are made of plastic and metal.

But, in addition to the high-tech stuff,  the children use plain old Crayola jumbo crayons to draw pictures and to color 3-D origami figures of birds, boxes, flowers, etc.

They also play with the assembled “Executive Toy” between their palms and love the way it spins so skillfully – even faster than their manufactured, miniature, battery-operated Maseratis!

I’m taking a a Rutgers-Camden film history class with first generation Iranian-American professor, Emud Mohkberi.

The paradox he articulates in class, that Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu, in his films, can focus on the discomfort of family situations while NOT allowing his characters to wallow in it and at the same time he affords the viewers the luxury of seeing the truthfulness of such cinematic intimacy as if it were their own.

I’m enamored of  Japanese films and literature and feel fortunate to better understand my decades-long fascination, hearing the way Mohkberi describes it.

• The above image is of a doll I received in 1966, made by the grandmother of one of my Japanese students who studied English with me at Sophia University in Tokyo.