Category Archives: arts

amusements, arts, links, medical, science

In Case You Missed …

The usual links to things which have amused me and which you may have missed …

First of all … politics. Never short of an Idiot, and interesting cynical take on James Murdoch vs David Cameron.

And secondly … politics. The politicians are about to remove some of the interest in our lives by having “a bonfire of dead wood statutes” and abolishing some 800 outdated and obsolete laws. Have they really nothing better to do? Oh, sorry, it’s their job to make our lives boring.

So to alleviate that boredom here are a few seriously amazing items …

How long would it take to travel to the moon at the speed of whale? One Minute Physics has the answer.

[Not safe for the faint-hearted!] Turning to biology, entomologists have recently found and described an enormous Warrior Wasp, aka. Waspzilla. Talk about awesome! Yes, I really would love to meet one.

Still on the biological, I discovered The Tiny Aviary, the website of illustrator Diana Sudyka. Gorgeous drawings like the one above.

And finally more stunning art, this time from Dalton Ghetti who carves sculptures in pencil lead. How you even start doing that makes my head hurt!

Enjoy!

amusements, arts

And There's More …

Another selection of the curious from the catalogue of one of our local auction houses.

An antique far Eastern bronze figure of a river cod [sic] having gilt embellishment and raised on an integral base. [Shown right]

An elaborate IBO Nigerian tribal mask, with pointed features and an elaborate headdress.

Two 1950’s Japanese musical compacts, fully boxed, together with two Vogue compacts.

A long natural rawhide whip, together with a shorter example with a black finish.

A set of thirty black and white Edwardian French erotic transparencies …

A collection of miniature African ivory busts, some on hardwood stands, mounted to serve as place setting marks.

An early 20th century trophy mounted stags head on an oak shield plaque.

An 18th century silk embroidered map of England and Wales, showing counties, in oval gilt frame.

A collection of seven antique ethnic and tribal metal items including fish spears, cow bells and weaving implements.

A large of [sic] art glass Menagerie animals, to include a five piece elephant band …

A Spanish infantry helmet with original leather liner (Revolution period), together with an Italian infantry helmet.

A scratch built motorised pond model of the German battle cruiser Gneisenau … [Below]

Five West German Hummel figures, to include a boy playing a horn …

A Roman 2nd century slingshot raised on a modern circular stand.

A modern Eastern style marriage chest, clad in silk mix floral fabric and brown leather studded strap work …

An industrial nut trolley …

arts, history, photography, ramblings, topographical

Awayday

Yesterday we had an awayday. As part of her Christmas present I said I’d take Noreen to Chichester before mid-February to see the Edward Burra exhibition at Pallant House Gallery. I also knew we’d also get at least a wander round the cathedral and a sniff round any bookshops we stumbled across. And of course there’s always lunch and coffee and cake and …

So yesterday was the day. Although we didn’t spend quite as long poking around Chichester as I’d hoped (the decrepit old knees won’t take a lot of it these days) it felt like a bit of a marathon, what with living the other side of London.

We left home just before 8am, took the train into Marylebone and a taxi across to Victoria where we were eventually allowed onto the train to Chichester. ETA 1115. (Coming home took just as long.)

The first stop was the cathedral which was welcoming and actually quite busy for a winter Tuesday. The heart of the building is Norman and there are some lovely decorated arches. But to be honest beyond that I didn’t find it one of the most entrancing cathedrals I’ve visited, although given that there are gardens (not visited) it would probably be much better on a summer’s day.

There is a (Victorian?) stained glass window and a memorial tablet commemorating the Tudor/Jacobean composer Thomas Weelkes and another tablet commemorating Gustav Holst. The stained glass window by Marc Chagall is also worth seeing.

There is also a rather lovely and unexpected piece of Roman mosaic which was discovered under the foundations and is now visible, in situ, behind a glass viewing panel in the floor. The cloisters, with their wooden vaulted roof are unusual and rather rather nice.

Roman Floor below Chichester Cathedral Cloister, Chichester Cathedral
More photos on Flickr

Lunch in the cathedral café was simple, good and welcomly warming on a bitter January day. Noreen had a pasta bake with veg and I had a fish bake also with veg. With a soft drink each this was, I thought, good value at under £18 for the both of us.

After lunch we wandered slowly past the market cross to find the Pallent House Gallery which was staging the Edward Burra exhibition. We hit a day when the gallery were doing half-price admission. Unexpected result!

I’ve never been sure about Burra’s paintings but he was a friend of Anthony Powell, especially pre-war, so a viewing was a necessity. Having seen the paintings in the flesh I’m still not sure about them; to be honest most of them really don’t do much for me. Many were smaller than I’d imagined, although there were also some which are much larger than expected. One or two of Burra’s late landscapes were rather nice, but his earlier work is extremely “disturbed” being often a cross between Heironymus Bosch (a known influence on Burra) and Salvador Dali. All in all his paintings look better in reproduction. Having said that Burra is probably more important than is often credited, under-rated and under-exposed — but this latter is doubtless because most of his surviving work is on private collections.

By now it was early afternoon and still bitterly cold. A meander through the town unearthed a secondhand bookshop, but nothing interesting to spend our money on. So we whiled away an hour drinking coffee and eating cake then made our way towards the station.

We just missed a train. This meant an amusing but cold 30 minute wait for the next one. I don’t know what it is about this area of the country but the train stations seem to be populated by a peculiarly local inter-mix of teenage school girls, low-life and the inhabitants of the nearest loony bin. At least it makes for an amusing way to waste the time between trains.

Nutter Triptych, Chichester Station
More photos on Flickr

The train back to Victoria was another amusement. It consisted of a 3 year-old who insisted, despite his mother’s instructions, on working the squeaky hinge of the lift-up tray on the seat. Two lads of about 20 who were Tottenham Hotspur supporters going to see Spurs play and who in 90 minutes managed to drink four cans of premium lager each! How they were standing by the time we reached Victoria GOK; but at least they were harmless. Although best of all was a large group of sub-teen French school-kids who at one point broke into a rendition of Queen’s I Want to Ride My Bicycle in cracked English. I was waiting for them to do the ‘Allo ‘Allo version of The Wheels on the Bus but sadly this never materialised. It would have been a fitting end to an interesting day.

amusements, arts, food+drink, links, medical, natural history, science

Links of the Week

Here’s your usual selection of things which interested/amused me and which you may have missed. And do we have a bumper selection this week!

First something useful? There’s a view that “use by” dates on food are a myth which needs busting. So it’s American but I don’t see much being different in the UK. But I do worry whether people have enough common sense to safely abolish “use by” dates.

And now to the very unuseful. Why does the search for the Higgs Boson matter? Actually to most people it doesn’t matter; whether physicists find it or not it won’t change the lives of 99.9999% of the population. That doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t look for it, but in the overall scheme of broken banks and countries it actually doesn’t matter.

Sociable wasps have an eye for faces. But not for caterpillars. And you just thought they were animated automatons sent by the Devil to annoy you!

And talking of the works of the Devil, pyjamas are another … The joys and benefits of sleeping naked. And no, it isn’t colder!

Think you’re good at sudoku? You’ll need a good night’s sleep before you try this! He-he!

A few weeks back we told of these strange paper sculptures left in libraries. Well the phantom has returned, for the last time.

Not got enough to do in the run-up to Christmas? Need a craft project? Make storybook paper roses (above).

And finally … Do you need an udder tug? Well who doesn’t? — Certainly no self-respecting mutt!

arts, books, links, science, thoughts

Links of the Week

A collection of the curious and interesting you may have missed. This week we have a selcetion of the eccentric and the scientific …

First up here are nine equations true (science) geeks should know — or at least pretend to know. No I’d never heard of some of them either!

Why is this cargo container emitting so much radiation? Seems fairly obvious to me but it clearly puzzled the Italians.

Science, philosophy and religion: which best offers us the tools to understand the world around us? Here’s the scientist’s view, which is much as expected but still interesting to read.

John Lennon’s tooth bought by Canadian dentist. FFS why?

And finally … They’re baffling but they’re rather splendid. Who left a tree and a coffin in the library?

amusements, arts, beliefs, medical, quotes, science, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s accumulation of leaf-mould …

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
[Martin Luther King, Jr]

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
[Steven Weinberg]

What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.
[Anthony Robbins]

The idea of monogamy hasn’t so much been tried and found wanting, as found difficult and left untried.
[GK Chesterton]

The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful.
[Carl Jung in a letter to Freud, 30 January 1910]

Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?
[Susan Squire, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage]

If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.
[Peter Ustinov]

When we were kids, our mums used to write our name in our school uniform. Now we are adults, we have other peoples names on the front of our clothes!
[Thoughts of Angel]

amusements, arts

Still Crazy After All These Years

From time to time I go back and look at old Osbert Lancaster pocket cartoons. Lancaster was nothing if not prolific. He effectively invented the pocket cartoon in 1939 when he started drawing for the Daily Express (then a quality newspaper) for whom he drew some 10,000 cartoons — one a day, 6 days a week — over a period of 40 years. This was in addition to writing and/or illustrating many books and working as a stage designer.

Every few years from the early 1940s to the 1970s Lancaster published a selection of 60 or so recent cartoons in small pocket-sized volume. I’m lucky to have been able to collect most of them as they are still available at reasonable prices on the second-hand market.

Lancaster drew a pocket cartoon for the Daily Express every day, and as with Matt (currently in the Daily Telegraph) or the late lamented Calman (in The Times), each pocket cartoon had to be topical. Many insert a rapier to the heart of some current news story; indeed some are so sharp and pithy that you couldn’t publish them in these politically correct times. But what always surprises me is how topical many of Lancaster’s 50 year old cartoons remain. Here is a good example from Lancaster’s collection Tableaux Vivants published in 1955. Sadly the early volumes do not give the specific dates of each cartoon (the later volumes do), but this must have been originally published in the Daily Express some time in 1954 or 1955.

Could one publish this today. Yes, despite some howls of protest, it’s sufficiently anonymous and subtle one probably could. But whether one could get away with calling an Indian lady cartoon character Mrs Rajagojollibarmi I somewhat doubt. And although Lancaster was himself from the upper classes and built his cartoons around the fictional Earl of Littlehampton (Willie) and his wife Maudie Littlehampton, there are many cartoons of the lower orders as well.

Two of the other things I love so much about Lancaster’s cartoons are his ability to pick brilliant names and his attention to detail. For example he invents, inter alia, a chauffeur called Saddlesoap, a waiter (at a gentleman’s club) called Mousehole, an accountant called Whipsnade and peers (many agéd) called Stonehenge, Basingstoke and, of course, Littlehampton. He was also an inveterate observer of people, and had an esepcially keen eye for the heights (and depths) of ladies fashion. So he gets the details deliciously right every time. Here are just two examples:

Delightful!

arts, current affairs, history, memes, personal, photography, topographical

[13/52] Magnolia

[13/52] Magnolia
Week 13 entry for 52 weeks challenge.

This is the magnificent magnolia in the churchyard outside St James’s, Piccadilly, London. Taken against the backdrop of the church, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren but much restored.

The church also contains a small memorial to the poet, artist and mystic William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) who was baptised there on 11 December 1757.

The churchyard of St James’s hosts an Antiques Market on Tuesdays and an Arts & Crafts Market on Wednesday to Saturday. I’ve not been to the former, but the latter is definitely worth a visit if you’re present hunting and especially in the run-up to Christmas. There is also a coffee shop and the church itself is almost always open.

arts

In which Alice Meets an Angel …

Last evening we had a somewhat surreal experience: we ventured out to a slightly unusual theatre: a performance of “Alice” at Little Angel Theatre in Islington.

Little Angel is the home of possibly this country’s première puppet theatre. And it is certainly a different experience. The theatre is tiny, with the auditorium seating only about 90 adults on church pew style benches. The stage is equally minuscule.

“Alice”, one of Little Angel’s current productions, is a puppet musical loosely based on Alice in Wonderland. I use “loosely” in the loosest sense of the word – “imaginative” is the word Little Angel use to describe it! Yes, it was certainly different and rather fun, if not entirely to my taste.

The puppets were brilliant (Alice, the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat especially), as were the four puppeteers. It was certainly an extremely clever production with many amusing little touches. The Cheshire Cat was excellently played with a Cheshire accent and much purring and chirruping; the White Rabbit was suitably and visibly terrified. But northern accents on the Mad Hatter and the March Hare didn’t work for me. The other thing which didn’t work for me was the musical element; the songs were cleverly written but often too detached from the real Alice story – although such is the way of the musical. And, especially towards the end, some of the production was a bit shouty for such a small space. After 1¾ hours (with an interval) the puppeteers must have been exhausted; it was non-stop and all four were on stage most of the time.

Here’s a YouTube video trailer for the production:

Despite the reservations, we’re glad we went. It was certainly different and as a long-time fan of Lewis Carroll it was well worth seeing. Little Angel only rarely do evening performances, which is a shame, choosing to concentrate more on daytime shows when children and schools can attend but most adults can’t. Consequently their productions tend to be more orientated towards children. “Alice” would be excellent for any child over the age of about five – it was in a way a bit like children’s TV – although it is by no means inaccessible to adults.

If you like the Lewis Carroll books, “Alice” is certainly worth seeing. And if you like excellent puppetry Little Angel Theatre run productions through most of the year usually with two shows running in parallel for 2-3 months before the repertoire changes. They also have touring shows, so you may find them popping up in the provinces.

“Alice” runs until 30 January.

amusements, arts, pleasures

DE Graffiti

Nice one Klaus!

Confusing graffiti on Deutsche Bahn
Graffiti artists in Germany have painted part of a carriage side so that one entrance doorway looks like a wide window and the adjacent wide window looks just like a pair of plug doors! The painting is realistic enough to confuse passengers.

[Railway Magazine; February 2011]