Ikebana (生け花), literally “live flowers,” is the traditional Japanese art of flower arrangement. Its deceptively simple name hides years of history and cultural upheaval that began during the Meiji Restoration. I won’t go into all the details, but suffice to say that ikebana today is quite different from what it used to be! There are [...]
DJs today get a bad rap. People seem to think that being a DJ nowadays means simply pressing play and letting the music ride. That’s not always the case though. A lot of DJs around the world still work hard at their craft, and it’s a lot more complicated and nuanced than just pressing play. [...]
The internet has really helped a lot of people unleash their creativity on the world. It’s easier than ever to create something by yourself and share it with an audience of billions. It’s also created art forms that weren’t even possible twenty or thirty years ago. While animated GIFs were once simply just another file [...]
In the 60s, a Japanese song became incredibly popular not only in Japan but across the world. In Japan, it was called 上を向いて歩こう or roughly, “I Will Walk Looking Up.” It was an emotional song about the defeat of a popular Japanese protest movement against American military bases in Japan. But people in English-speaking countries [...]
Tyler MacNiven is an easy guy to spot in a crowd. He’s tall, with bright hair and extremely outgoing. His charisma has taken him all over the world, including a win on the TV show The Amazing Race (season 9), and Iran, where he filmed his documentary I Ran Iran. Despite traveling all across the [...]
When the seasons change, my personality always seem to shift as well. The type of food I eat, the types of things I like to do, and the types of music I like to listen to change when one season gives way to the next. Here in the US, we’re heading into the dog days [...]
The internet has been awesome for amateur artists everywhere. Now anybody anywhere can upload their painting, photographs, videos, or writing to the internet for the world to see. Fortunately for everyone, that means a lot of less conventional artists get more exposure. There’s probably no better example of this than a Japanese artist I stumbled [...]
