JFK ON THE GINZA

"JOHN F. KENNEDY" 

ON THE GINZA  

AN AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ICON ... IN JAPAN 

IN HONOR OF JFK, BORN ON THIS DATE 

IN 1917, IN BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

PRESIDENT, JANUARY 20, 1961-NOVEMBER 22, 1963

In 1981, en route to China for my first visit, I had a chance to dash downtown to Tokyo for an hour-and-a-half, and grabbed it. 

I was back in the country where I lived for a year as a child, in the town of Sasebo, and where, at age eight, I had taken my first photographs.

And what did I see but an image of our slain president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in a store front window on the Ginza – being used to sell glasses.

Such is the power of icons and the mystery of iconography, and of cross-cultural exchanges. 

THE PETRIFIED FOREST

THE PETRIFIED FOREST

The Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, including its Blue Mesa trail, will benefit from some federal stimulus funds ($441,000 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it is reported ).

HERE'S TO THE LADIES

HERE'S TO THE LADIES 

"Any nose

May ravage with impunity a rose."

-- Robert Browning

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

NORMAN ROCKWELL AT HOME

NORMAN ROCKWELL 
At Home in Stockbridge,
Masachusetts 

THE PAINTER NORMAN ROCKWELL'S STUDIO HAS BEEN RE-CREATED IN THE MUSEUM HONORING HIM IN STOCKBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS. 

Met a painter ("an amateur painter," she said), who startled me by telling me my photograph of Norman Rockwell (above) looked like a Rockwell painting.

Given that Rockwell (1894-1978) has been gone for more than thirty years, it is fascinating the number of times his name still appears, and his work is used as a ready point of comparison. There has come to be an easy kind of shorthand, with Rockwell's name cropping up in the Stars and Stripes, a local TV station in Salinas, California, and in a political blog: "something a Japanese Rockwell might paint", or "In the Norman Rockwell version, Dad and the kids...", or "Norman Rockwell type Americans who believe in Chevys and Apple Pie."

Picture the politics of it.

Photographs by Gwendolyn Stewart © 2009; 

All Rights Reserved