Flowers Flowers Flowers - And It's Still Winter, Well, Just

After a reasonable amount of smugness over recent-ish post about winter flowers in our garden, we decided today to go a bit more public ... and so trotted off to the Botanical Gardens for a bigger canvass.

Actually we had to bolt for the exit gate after our thousandth wildly burgeoning flower bed - the little floras were just blooming and busting out all over the place - but these are some of the photos we did take before we fled - with flowers which practically jump out (VERY BIG INDEED) into your living room/office/sling room/wherever if you click on the image ...























'You likey?'

Reversing Empathy Fatigue

We all know it's easy enough to fall into empathy fatigue with respect to world poverty - but every now and then you see something that re-sensitizes you - perhaps through a specific situation.

Like this set of photos of school buses - with the initial three in first world Asia ...




... and the last in New Delhi, India ...


Of course it easy enough to respond to the lack of opportunities for kids but such re-sensitizing can be the way into something more general.

In fact, I had a double exposure this week.

Pressing my dentist for an explanation for the difficulty in getting an appointment with him, he confessed he spent part of each year in Central America giving free dental care to those who could not other-wise afford it.

Mmm ... .

Thomas Edison - The Universal Exposition, Paris 1900

Paris - Highlighting the Pavilions and Sites of the Universal Exposition of 1900

Rummaging round my computer I found I had quite a lot more Thomas Edison footage of Paris in 1900 at the time of the Universal Exposition ...


So I thought I indulge myself - and try your patience - and put together another small video of some of the various bits I have.

Each of the titled photos below is for a section of the film ...

Eiffel Tower from the Trocadero Palace

La Place de l'Opera

L'Esplanade des Invalides

Les Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower 1

Les Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower 2

Dancing in Les Champs de Mars

Ascending the Eiffel Tower

So - again - sit back ... you know the drill by now!

Okay?

London 1903 - Thomas Edison Film Footage

Thomas Edison was (among many other things) traveling and filming in various parts of the world round the turn of last century.

He was in Paris for the Universal Exposition of 1900, catching a myriad of angles on the city, such as the carriages, buses and pedestrians at the Place de L'Opera ...

Paris 1900 - Thomas Edison Film Footage

... and in London in 1903 - again catching the life of the streets, though now in much clearer film footage due to the technological advances in film stock over the three years. Though - curiously - the camera is much more static.

Both these productions are (for me at least) like serious time traveling - you get up close and personal with ordinary people going about their daily business, like taking a taxi at one of the entrances to Hyde Park ...


... and catching boats at the Embankment on the Thames - perhaps to work ...


There's the general bustle of the traffic, with individuals occasionally moving into the middle or into the foreground to make a more human connection ...




There are familiar landmarks, such as the Law Courts ...


... James Gibbs's St Mary-Le-Strand ...


... and St. Margaret's Westminster and Big Ben ...


Familiar brand names flash up every so often, like old friends - just to bring this world a little closer to our own - such as Nestles ...


... and Lipton's Tea ...


And there's the (perhaps unexpected) chaos of the traffic in often dust-clogged streets ...




So sit back, relax and enjoy the show ...

London 1903 - Thomas Edison Film Footage

Any of the landscape familiar to you who know or visit London?

I remember more than I thought I would from my time there in my teens and early twenties.

David Hockney - Return To Simplicity

'Andalucia. Courtyard, Seville' (2004) - Watercolor on paper 29.5 x 83

I've long been interested in David Hockney, as much for his being gay and out as for his art work - the paintings, etchings and photographs.

So I'd been wondering what he was doing in the new millennium and was happy to find this video of him chatting with art historian Robert Hughes about the ideas underlying some of his latest work.

The discussion focuses around work done in Andalucia in Spain in 2004 - in Cordoba, Seville and Granada.

Hockney says he's currently interested in certain simplicities, at least in one aspect of his production. As a technical program, there's no pencil under-drawing - just painting directly onto the canvas with 'as few brush strokes as possible' and a limited palette. Sometimes of only four colours. And he's exploring how to create space with only a few lines.

This links to an abandoning of his sometime use of photography as the intermediary between what he sees and a painting. He now feels that many things are 'unphotographable' - suggesting that with a camera you miss patterns apparent when painting or drawing directly from the subject, such as those made by the internal columns of the mosque in Cordoba ...

'Andalucia, Mosque, Cordova' (2004) - Oil on canvas, 136 x 48 in

... patterns you'd not be aware of working from a photograph back in the studio. A photographic image can make you more aware of what's at the edges and so direct the construction of a work with respect to this phenomenon.

'Andalucía Fuentes Córdoba' (2004)

Much the same could be said of work produced in Norway and Iceland in 2002 ...

'Tujfjord Nordkapp II, Norway' (2002) - Watercolor on paper, 36 x 72 in.

'Mountain and Cloud, Iceland' (2002) - Watercolor on paper, 18 x 48 in.

One thing is certain - Hockney never seems to run out of new things to explore and so continues inexorably to excite the art loving public - both professional and dilettante.

I'm in!

Fanny Brice (1891-1951) - Straight From The Heart

I was curious about the original of 'My Man' - it was sung by Fanny Brice in the 'Ziegfeld Follies' of 1921.

Blew my socks off!

The period sentimentality of the arrangement and style of singing was irradiated away by being sung so honestly straight from the heart - the intimate almost-just-talking towards the end is particularly powerful and affecting. I think.

So I looked for other things and found, in a complete change of pace, the next clip, more in the vein of ...


... in which Fanny Brice does a 'cuckoo, swan wanna be' number in the film 'Be Yourself' (Barbara Streisand did somewhat of a re-make of this in 'Funny Girl' as everyone knows) ...

Finally, a satire on an opera singer ...

... which would get the crowd going, super big time ... in any gay club I've ever known!

Intellectual Teaser

Look at the following seven words carefully ...

banana
dresser
grammar
potato
revive
uneven
assess

... and cudgel your brains to see if you can determine what it is that they all have in common.

Other than having at least doubles of one or more letters.

MMM!

The thinking bit!

How are you going?

Okay - what they also all have in common is that, if you take the first letter, put it at the end and reverse the word, you end up with the same word.

Something silly (I know) but it helped pass the time with my first coffee of the day!