Shed Your Skin Like the Golden Cicada
When you are in danger of being defeated, and your only chance is to escape and regroup, then create an illusion.
—The 36 Strategies
Summer afternoons in Texas with a 5 and 3-year-old have me at my wits’ end. Yesterday, their mom was off on errands, so I suggested the grossest activity I could think of: Let’s go around and collect the cicada shells stuck all over our porch, fence, and trees. We wound up collecting over 50 of them, and then we were trying to decide what on earth to do with them.
Twitter alerted me to a Japanese high school student who made a cicada monster:
A few summers ago, we put them on the kids’ chalkboard and tried to make comics with them:
Then we put them in one of the boys’ cars and made a timelapse video out of them (which I lost, sadly):
After all this, I was reminded of Ladislav Starevich, who made stop-motion animations using dead bugs, like The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912):