Bob Gasoi

Robert Gasoi was a product of the last great time. Born in 1932 and raised in Brooklyn, the son of an immigrant milkman, his drawing and painting skills led him to the Cooper Union School of Art, to the Korean war, and then to Oxford University, Rome, Upstate New York, and his final home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Though Gasoi only managed to scrape a meager living out of his art work, he never stopped painting, leaving a large legacy of paintings, drawings, murals and illustrations. When he died in 1997, his daughter Emily traveled to Mexico to collect his few belongings, which included the many paintings, drawings, photos, newspaper clippings, and other detritus that documented his incessantly creative life. After years of work, Emily recently published a lovely tribute to her father on the web, rich with images that convey the love she felt for her Dad, and the wonder he found in the world.

Things to Worry About

In 1933, writer F. Scott Fitzgerald ended a letter to his 11-year-old daughter Scottie with a list of things to worry about, not worry about, and simply think about. It read as follows:

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

Daddy

From the terrific blog Lists of Note.

Flicks for the Kids

Winter's dragging on, but the snow holiday is long over. Perfect timing for the annual Children's Film Festival Seattle, starting tonight and running through February 5 at the Northwest Film Forum.

This year's festival boasts as strong a line-up as ever, opening with the Seattle premiere of famed French animator Michel Ocelot's new film "Tales of the Night." The festival also features a music and movie pajama party for ages 3 and older this Friday night, a retrospective of animation from Russia's famed SHAR Studio and Animation School, founded in 1993 by a group of top Russian animators, and of course the awesome Pancake Breakfast this Saturday morning, with short films from around the world. I don't know who's more excited - me or my 3-year old. Full info on the Children's Film Fest right here.

I have no idea if this film, by Argentine illustrator and animator Santiago Grasso, will be in the festival. But it's winning all kinds of awards at recent festivals, I like it, and my kid does too. What else you want? A pancake? Enjoy.

Up Up and Away

Tell me Luke Geissbühler doesn't deserve to win some kind of Father of the Year award.

This past August, Geissbühler and his young son Max attached an HD video camera to a helium-filled weather balloon that rose into the upper stratosphere. The two spent eight months developing a camera housing that would survive 100 mph winds, temperatures of 60 degrees below zero and speeds of over 150 mph.

The intrepid duo then traveled from their home in Brooklyn to a remote area of Orange County, NY with their camera and a GPS system carefully wrapped in a homemade styrofoam capsule and fitted with a parachute. The balloon reached a height of nearly 20 miles above the earth before it exploded and the camera came spiraling back to Earth.

The result is an awe-inspiring video that sends the viewer into space and back again. Check it out.