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Celebration time for Pakistan Cricket

2012-01-30T04:25:00.000-08:00

Celebration time for Pakistan Cricket as they are unbeaten for last six series. They have defeated inform England team to win the series. Here is some of the celebration pictures for the Pakistani cricket fans.

Free Nature Wallpapers for Desktop

2012-01-30T04:08:00.000-08:00

Free Nature Wallpapers for Desktop. High quality pictures that makes your desktop looks beautiful. "Right click" the image and click "save as" to download it for your desktop.

Mountain view

Sea and water

Pink

2012-01-29T09:13:00.000-08:00

Trees into logs into smoke

2012-01-28T11:08:00.000-08:00

Last night I watched Michelangelo Frammartino's film Le Quattro Volte on DVD and have been boring people all day trying to convince them how wonderful it is. Reviewing it last year in The Independent, Jonathan Romney wrote that Le Quattro Volte 'will set you musing on matters natural and metaphysical, using little more than some Calabrian hillsides, a stack of logs, some snails and a herd of goats – and barely a syllable of dialogue. The film is an extraordinary achievement – beautiful, moving, mysterious, and, at times, extremely funny. In its self-effacing way, it's nothing short of a miracle – one of those rare works that break all the rules about what cinema "should" be in order to demonstrate what it can be.' He goes on to explain that 'the title – literally, the four "turns"or "phases" – refers to the world as described by Pythagorean philosophy, with its theory of a cycle of eternal transformation and reincarnation. What this means in practice is that Le Quattro Volte isn't about story, or character, or even action. Rather, this is a contemplative film about things changing into other things – like trees into logs into smoke – and about the cycle of natural changes, the internal clock by which the universe keeps time.'

In an interview for the DVD, Frammartino said, "I've tried to make the landscape the protagonist. I tried not to use it simply as background but to make it become something more important, to bring it out and elevate it to the level of protagonist. For example, in the film there's a moment in the first part, when our protagonist is still a man, an old shepherd. He's lying in the grass minding his own business when an ant starts walking over his face, over his cheekbones and up towards his eyes. The ant steals the scene and the man's face, in close-up, becomes a landscape. There's this reversal of roles. And then, a few scenes later, there's a landscape with the roofs of the village and a big tree emerging, the protagonist of the scene, with a little man climbing up it, as tiny as an ant. The man is like an insect and the landscape reminds us of a man's face. This game, this shifting of levels, which can provoke laughter, I've tried to employ it in the relationship between close-up and landscape, this game of scale, this reversal of importance."

We're Watching You!

2012-01-27T11:19:00.000-08:00

Water flows inward underneath a cottonwood tree

2012-01-27T08:36:00.000-08:00

In the video clip embedded above the environmental philosopher David Abram talks about the way landscape no longer speaks directly to us. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, he writes that in oral cultures, ‘human eyes and ears have not yetshifted their synaesthetic participation from theanimate surroundings to the written word. Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder-strewn fields, or grovesof trees have not yet lost the expressive potency and dynamism with which theyspontaneously present themselves to the sense. A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just apassive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It isan active participant in those occurrences.’ These conclusions come after a description of the importance of location for Western Apachestorytelling. An ‘agodzaahi narrative always beginsand ends with a statement explaining where it happened, using one of thelanguage’s evocative place names (which read like compressed poems). Abram cites the work of linguisticanthropologist Keith Basso, who found that these place namesoccur with remarkable frequency in Apache discourse. I was intrigued by this, so I looked up theoriginal Basso article (in CulturalAnthropology, May 1988), where photographs of specificlocations are reproduced to demonstrate how well their Apache place names fit: “Water flows inward underneath a cottonwood tree”; “White rocks lie abovein a compact cluster”; “Water flows down on top of a regular succession of flatrocks.”

According to Basso, ‘the great majority of Western Apache place names currently in use are believed to have beencreated long ago by the “ancestors” (nohwizá’ yé) of the Apache people. The ancestors, who had to travel constantlyin search of food, covered vast amounts of territory and needed to be able toremember and discuss many different locations. This was facilitated by the invention of hundreds of descriptive place names that were intended to depict their referents inclose and exact detail.’ What's particularly interesting about these names (for readers of this blog) is that they assume aspecific point of view, like a landscape: 'Western Apache place namesprovide more than precise depictions of the sites to which the names may beused to refer. In addition, place names implicitly identify positions for viewing theselocations: optimal vantage points, so to speak, from which the sites can beobserved, clearly and unmistakably, just as their names depict them. To picture a site from its name, then,requires that one imagine it as if standing or sitting at a particular spot,and it is to these privileged positions, Apaches say, that the images evoked byplace names cause them to travel in their minds.’ This travel is both “forward” (bidááh) into space, and, following the memory of their ancestors' wanderings, “backward” (t’ aazhi’) into time.

Turtle Rising!

2012-01-25T07:04:00.000-08:00

Ponting and Clarke partnership demoralise India again

2012-01-24T11:58:00.000-08:00

Ricky Ponting

Some wine beside the white clouds

2012-01-21T10:48:00.000-08:00

Landscape can be a solace to the exile, but it can be hard to contemplate the beauty of lakes and mountains without thinking of home, or the bitter circumstances and long journey that have led from there. When the An Lu-shan rebellion broke out in 756, the poet Li Po travelled south to Kiukiang to escape the turmoil and fighting. There he made an ill-fated decision to join Prince Lin, the Emperor's sixteenth son, whose flotilla was making its way down the Yangtze. Instead of heading off to fight the rebels, Prince Lin was aiming to set up his own independent regime. According to Arthur Waley (in The Poetry and Career of Li Po) it seems unlikely that the rather unworldly Li Po knew what the Prince intended - he would later claim to have been virtually kidnapped: "I allowed myself to be deceived by false pretences and was forced by threats to go on board a transport." At the time though, he wrote poems like 'Watching the dancing-girls at a banquet on board Marshal Wei's transport; written while with the Fleet', indicating that he was thoroughly enjoying himself on this adventure. This pleasant time came to an end near Yangchow, where Prince Lin's forces were met by government troops and his generals abandoned him - Li Po probably jumped ship as well at this point (the prince was captured and executed). On his return to Kiukiang, Li Po was arrested as a traitor and imprisoned for several months. After being set free he made his way to Wu-ch'ang, near Hankow, where he stayed for a while, hoping for a pardon, before continuing again, north, to Yo-chou, near the famous Tung-t'ing (Dong-ting) Lake. There he met two friends, both exiles like himself. Chia Chih was a writer (he had actually composed the Emperor's deed of abdication in 756) and former Governor of Ju-chou who had been demoted after being judged to have fled south from the rebels too hastily. Li Yeh was a relative of Li Po's, banished to the south after being charged with perverting the course of justice. One day, the three friends decided to take an evening boating excursion on the lake...

Hermit Fisherman on Lake Dong-ting, Wu Zhen, 14th century

'The bright moon, the autumn wind / the waters of Lake Dong-ting, / a lone swan, the falling leaves, a tiny skiff.' Thus Chia Chih conveys the beauty and the underlying sadness of the occasion. In his Anthology of Chinese Literature Stephen Owen provides translations of the poems that resulted from this outing. Li Po 'wrote a series of five of his most famous quatrains celebrating the beauty of the moment.' But Chia Chih's are 'every bit as memorable. Both poets called to mind echoes of exile and death beyond the edges of the vast lake, places like Chang-sha, where the Han intellectual Jia Yi was banished.' Li Po imagines riding the currents in the water up into the night sky and buying 'some wine / beside the white clouds.' In the centre of the lake there is a mountain called Jun-shan (the source for one of China's ten famous teas) which Li Po pictures on a 'mirror of jade' - the 'bright lake, swept calm and clear.' Chia Chih describes more turbulent waters, swollen with autumn floods. The friends let the waves guide their light boat, 'no care whether near or far.'

So in eight short poems we have a record of an evening in the autumn of 759, a moment of reflection before events, like waves on the lake, swept these men up again. Climbing Pa-ch'iu Shan that autumn, Li Po glimpsed another fleet mustering and wrote in one of his poems of the rebel forces approaching Lake Tung-t'ing. It was only near the end of the year that peace was restored to the Yangtze region and the poet was finally able to leave, making for Wu-ch'ang where he again expressed his hopes of one day being given a posting back in the capital. But by this time Li Po knew that any such post would be his last. He fell ill while traveling to Nanking and in 762 made his final journey to see the great calligrapher, Li Yang-ping near T'ai-p'ing. Meanwhile Chia Chih had also made his way back and, a year later, on the accession of Emperor Tai-tsung, regained his former position, going on to serve as Vice Minister of War before his death in 772. Li Po seems to have died at the home of Li Yang-ping, to whom the poet entrusted what writings he still had after his years of wandering in exile. According to the well known story, he took another nighttime boat excursion, and this time, drunk on wine, fell into the river and drowned whilst trying to embrace the reflection of the moon.

Note: As always the sources vary in spelling Chinese words and here I've generally stuck to the older Wade-Giles system - for me the poet will always be Li Po rather than Li Bai. The pinyin version of Chia Chih is Jia Zhi. As noted above, Lake Tung-t'ing is now generally called Lake Dong-ting.

RED DUSK WITH TALLPAUL #335

2012-01-20T19:16:00.000-08:00

AERIAL MULTI-FIRER, RED DUSK, AS DISPLAYED BY T-P IS A 10-SHOT MARVEL THAT WILL PLEASE YOUR CROWD.

Rihanna Hot pictures

2012-01-20T11:57:00.000-08:00

Wallpapers for desktop

2012-01-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

Car at night Wallpaper

Bright Sun wallpaper

Home Wallpaper

Busy City wallpaper

Caption not needed lolz

Bright sky wallpaper

Facebook Timeline Cover Photo

2012-01-18T11:52:00.000-08:00

Sea beach Facebook timeline cover photo 2

Sea beach Facebook timeline cover photo

Life is like a road, running ....

Facebook timeline cover photo

Edgelands

2012-01-15T14:40:00.000-08:00

The Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge is going to mount a small exhibition later this year, showing prints by two of the artists mentioned in Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts' book Edgelands. 'George Shaw's series, Twelve Short Walks, 2005, is drawn from revisited scenes of his childhood on the Tile Hill council estate in the suburbs of Coventry. Michael Landy's Nourishment, 2002, features life-sized images of weeds, or 'street-flowers' - the overlooked and neglected vegetation of Edgelands.' Shaw's Humbrol-painted views (which made him the favourite to win last year's Turner Prize) and Landy's equally painstaking illustrations of groundsel, toadflax and thale cress represent two different approaches to the edgelands - one an attempt to depict the visual experience of these elusive, marginal spaces, the other an investigation into a particular defining feature: electricity pylons, cooling towers, sheds, containers, litter.

Among the artists who, like George Shaw, convey a sense of the actual landscape, there is David Rayson, who has executed a set of canal path paintings, From Ashmore Park to Wednesfield, where 'there are no people about, just their traces in the old leaden water, the missing railing, the litter...' Then there are the motorway verges that Edward Chell has made the focus for his paintings, even going so far as to exhibit them in Little Chefs. And there are the photographs Keith Arnatt made after leaving behind performance art in the early seventies: Abandoned Landscapes, A.O.N.B., The Forest. In the tradition of Samuel Palmer's detailed jewel-like images, Arnatt has made a series of 'polythene Palmers' - colour images of a rubbish-strewn path, Miss Grace's Lane. But unsurprisingly it is easier to name artists who have chosen to isolate details, like Michael Landy's weeds, than show a wider prospect, since the edgelands tend to fail to live up to even our post-industrial ideas of the picturesque.

Of course some parts of the edgelands have themselves been landscaped, as Farley and Symmons Roberts observe of a new university campus and various retail sites and housing estates. They visit an East Midlands business park where 'shrubs and flowers don't just decorate perimeters, they read like spreadsheets. Thriving businesses have bigger teams of gardeners' and one software company has a lake surrounded by bulrushes. At this point, after a digression on poets and the sub-genre of deer roadkill poems, the authors imagine a wild stag wandering into the business park and ask 'Who would notice? Who would write the poem?' Well, why not one of those software company employees, I wondered. This was one of those moments where the authors seemed to look down on the inhabitants of the landscape rather like eighteenth century tourists (as Robert Macfarlane noted in his review). But aside from that, Edgelands is an engrossing read, scattered with memorable images - like the railway embankment (to pick just one example) which they compare to a glacier, its litter 'caught like till in the ice, inching slowly towards earth with the general tumble of each season's growth.' I also find it impossible not to like a book that references Mark E. Smith's magnificent (and overtly misanthropic) 'Container Drivers'... on which note I'll end this post, playing out with the mighty Fall: '... Look at a car park for two days / Look at a grey port for two days/ Train line, stone and grey/ RO-RO roll on roll off...'

One of the best fast bowler from Pakistan Umar Gul

2012-01-14T12:33:00.000-08:00

Umar Gul is one the best fast bowler of present time from Pakistan. He has produced some incredible deliveries to dismiss the batsman on crucial moments. Picture from Cricinfo

3D Wallpapers

2012-01-14T03:41:00.000-08:00

Animation Wallpapers

2012-01-14T03:34:00.000-08:00

Kieron Pollard and Yusuf Pathan

2012-01-13T03:12:00.000-08:00

Kieron pollard the West Indian batsman and Yousuf Pathan from India will be playing in Bangladesh Premier League. They are the most dangerous batsman of T20 cricket at present time. Keep and eye on BPL for the latest updates.....

Kieron Pollard

Yusuf Pathan

Nature is the most beautiful thing around us

2012-01-13T03:06:00.000-08:00

Birds in the tree

Horses running

White bird (U know the name? Write on comment box....)

HAZEL & TALLPAUL PARENTS OF THE OWNER #334

2012-01-11T14:13:00.000-08:00

HFS & TP SHOWN WITH THEIR RED COLORED PRIUS PRIOR TO VISITING ONE OF GREG'S WAREHOUSES IN ROBERTSDALE, AL
IN ADDITION OCT 30TH WAS THEIR 57 WEDDING ANNIVERSARY.

Four Cool Wallpapers / Backgrounds for you

2012-01-10T13:07:00.000-08:00

Golden Hair Looks gorgious

Guitar with white backgrounds

Cool Wallpaper

Stylish Wallpaper

SRR2Q2KJX4TN

Barcelona's Lionel Messi awarded his third Ballon d'Or

2012-01-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

Barcelona's Lionel Messi awarded his third Ballon d'Or

Lionel Messi has won the Fifa Ballon d'Or prize for the best player of 2011 at a ceremony in Zurich, Switzerland.

Apocalypse

2012-01-07T06:30:00.000-08:00

John Martin, The Bard, c1817

As the Tate Britain exhibition John Martin: Apocalypse comes to the end of its run, it would be interesting to know how well it has done. There was talk beforehand of the way that Martin's critical reputation has risen and that his spectacular paintings should appeal in a world of 'proliferating IMAX cinemas and giant plasmas' (Ian Christie in Tate Etc. magazine) and contemporary photography framed on a Sublime scale - Edward Burtynsky, Florian Maier-Aichen, Andreas Gursky (Jonathan Griffin also in Tate Etc.) The Tate's familiar Last Judgement Triptych was accompanied by a new 'theatrical display' intended to evoke the way these paintings were seen around the world in the late nineteenth century. Looking round the exhibition I found it easy to see why John Martin's work has been mocked - "huge, queer and tawdry" was the verdict of William Makepeace Thackeray. Martin's shortcomings are more evident when you see the paintings up close: The Bard for example often gets reproduced in books about Romanticism but I'd not previously been able to see how unconvincing some of its details are - Edward I's army a line of little tin soldiers trailing all the way back to the castle gate. Yet there's still something awesome about these blockbuster paintings (at least that's what the adolescent Chris Foss fan I used to be was telling me) and the exhibition was also fascinating for the way it highlighted Martin's less well known activities - as a decorator of plates, an illustrator of prehistoric creatures (Gideon Mantell's The Wonders of Geology) and a painter of modest topographical water colours, like some views of Richmond Park where, like Edmund Spenser in Ireland, he had an oak tree named after him (how many writers and artists are commemorated in this way I wonder?)

Perhaps the most surprising exhibits were two examples of his schemes to improve the city of London. The first, which might have been drawn by a 1970s land artist or a 1990s psychogeographer, was his plan for a London Connecting Railway - a beautiful curving form superimposed on a map, like the outline of an octopus. The other was a drawing of a sewer housed in a new Thames embankment, stretching from 'the Ranelagh Outlet to the Engine Station': a proposal considered seriously at the time but easy to view as one more facet of Martin's capacity to dream up imaginary cities. (It made me think of today's urban explorers, uncovering tunnels like these and scaling buildings to view the city below from a John Martin perspective.) An excellent article in The Guardian by the John Martin expert William Feaver mentions these engineering projects and claims that Martin 'was ecologically prophetic. In his 1833 A Plan for Improving the Air and Water of the Metropolis he raised an issue such as had been dismissed by the scoffers who ignored divine warnings and were swept away in Noah's flood: "Is it not probable that a too ignorant waste of manure has caused the richest and most fertile countries such as Egypt, Assyria, the Holy Land, the South of Italy etc to become barren as they now are?"'

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841

A litlle information about Valentine's day

2012-01-07T01:16:00.000-08:00

Valentine's day card

Saint Valentine's Day, commonly shortened to Valentine's Day, is an annual commemoration held on February 14 celebrating love and affection between intimate companions.The day is named after one or more early Christian martyrs named Saint Valentine, and was established by Pope Gelasius I in 496 AD. It was deleted from the General Roman Calendar of saints in 1969 by Pope Paul VI. It is traditionally a day on which lovers express their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionery, and sending greeting cards (known as "valentines"). The day first became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished.

Modern Valentine's Day symbols include the heart-shaped outline, doves, and the figure of the winged Cupid. Since the 19th century, handwritten valentines have given way to mass-produced greeting cards.
Source: Valentine's Day From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Valentines day Wallpapers

2012-01-05T11:32:00.000-08:00

Love for all, Love from heart. Love makes life beautiful, so in this valentines day don't forget to wish your lover with your warmest LOVE. So, you want some Love wallpapers here are some.......enjoy

Fine More:

Valentines day LOVE special pictures

Love For Everyone

Seven Sexy wallpaper Ubuntu

2012-01-04T12:38:00.000-08:00

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu ("humanity towards others.) Ubuntu is designed primarily for use on personal computers, although a server edition also exists.
So, Here are seven sexu Ubuntu wallpaper free for you.....
Sexy wallpaper Ubuntu

Need More:

New Ubuntu wallpaper for everyone

Animal wallpapers: Ubuntu

Ubuntu Wallpapers

Free Blue wallpapers: Ubuntu

The Dawning of Music in Kentucky

2012-01-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

I recently came upon a nice short essay by Kyle Gann called 'American Romanticism: Music vs. Painting'. It discusses nineteenth century music in relation to the paintings of artists like Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade, mentioning in particular three early orchestral works inspired by landscapes: 'The Ornithological Combat of Kings (1836) by Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861), the Niagara Symphony (1854, though it doesn’t seem to have been performed before the current decade) by William Henry Fry (1813-1864), and Night in the Tropics (1861) by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869). All three were based on New World subject matter – South or Central America in Heinrich’s and Gottschalk’s cases, like so many of Church’s and Heade’s best paintings. All three offer effects unknown to European music of the time – particularly Gottschalk’s pop-music syncopations and the rumble of eleven timpani with which Fry evokes Niagara’s cascade. All three are marked by a technical ineptitude that any sensitive amateur could pinpoint – Heinrich’s marching-band momentum badly needs a rest now and then, Gottschalk’s harmonic rhythm is deadeningly predictable, and Fry lapses into Wagnerian banality whenever he’s not being onomatapoetically athematic. They seem today like brave but Quixotic figures, would-be heroes whom the passage of time reduces to clowns.'

Frederick Edwin Church, Niagara Falls, 1857

Anthony Philip Heinrich is a particularly interesting figure: a Bohemian wholesale dealer in linen, thread, wine, and other goods who settled in America and only decided to take up music after the failure of his business and death of his wife. According to David Barron, he travelled to Kentucky and in the spring of 1818, where, in a move that anticipates Thoreau, 'he withdrew from the musical society of Lexington, Frankfort, and Louisville and went to live in a log cabin in the woods around Bardstown. This was a significant moment in Heinrich's life, for here he paused to study and instruct himself in the art of music by improvising on the violin, and finally to write down these expressions as vocal, piano, and violin compositions.' His first major publication, a collection of songs and pieces for violin and piano, was called The Dawning of Music in Kentucky or the Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitude of Nature (1820). Like William Henry Fry, he composed a noisy piece inspired by the Niagara Falls, The War of the Elements and the Thundering of Niagara. He was friendly with John James Audubon and in addition to the The Ornithological Combat of Kings mentioned above, composed The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons. Heinrich's music was performed to acclaim in New York in the 1840s and there were successful concerts back in Prague in 1857, but four years later the old man died in poverty.

John James Audubon, Passenger Pigeon, from Birds of America (1827-38)

The article by David Barron quoted above includes an amusing description of an occasion on which Heinrich was introduced to President Tyler, written by John Hill Hewitt, the piano teacher to Tyler's daughter:

'The composer labored hard to give full effect to his weird production; his bald pate bobbed from side to side, and shone like a bubble on the surface of a calm lake. At times his shoulders would be raised to the line of his ears, and his knees went up to the keyboard, while the perspiration rolled in large drops down his wrinkled cheeks.
The ladies stared at the maniac musician, as they, doubtless, thought him, and the president scratched his head, as if wondering whether wicked spirits were not rioting in the cavern of mysterious sounds and rebelling against the laws of acoustics. The composer labored on, occasionally explaining some incomprehensible passage, representing, as he said, the breaking up of the frozen river Niagara, the thaw of the ice, and the dash of the mighty falls. Peace and plenty were represented by soft strains of pastoral music, while the thunder of our naval war-dogs and the rattle of our army musketry told of our prowess on sea and l`nd.

The inspired composer had got about half-way through his wonderful production when Mr. Tyler restlessly arose from his chair, and placing his hand gently on Heinrich's shoulder, said;
“That may all be very fine, sir, but can't you play us a good old Virginia reel?”'

Valentines day LOVE special pictures

2012-01-03T05:15:00.000-08:00

Valentines day is a special day which is celebrated as a day to share LOVE among all, but particularly it is a day on which a couple celebrates specially. According to some of my friend its a day to propose someone whom you love to stay with. Here are six Valentines day LOVE special pictures for you.

I love you pictures

Boy and Girl kissing

Couple sitting very romantic picture

Red heart picture

Blue heart picture

Love quote picture

Fine More:

Valentines day LOVE special pictures

Love For Everyone

Happy Birthday to You Pictures

2012-01-01T05:01:00.000-08:00

Boy with balloons wishing Birthday

Five beautiful candles

Happy Birthday pictures

Happy Birthday circles

Birthday cake

Happy Birthday Pictures

ROBERTSDALE, AL FIREWORKS WHSE #333

2011-12-30T13:49:00.000-08:00

ROBERTSDALE, AL FIREWORKS WAREHOUSE

SITTING HALF WAY BETWEEN MOBILE AND PENSACOLA, ROBERTSDALE AT EXIT 53 ON I-10 STANDS READY TO SERVE THE WHOLE AREA FOR ITS NEW YEAR'S FIREWORKS SHOWS.

CUSSETA, AL FIREWORKS WAREHOUSE #332

2011-12-30T13:46:00.000-08:00

CUSSETA, AL FIREWORKS WAREHOUSE

GOING SOUTHWEST OUT OF ATLANTA, YOU WILL COME TO THE GIANT SHELTON FIREWORKS WAREHOUSE AT CUSSETA, AL AT EXIT #70 ON I-85. THIS AERIAL VIEW SHOWS YOU THE SIZE OF THE WAREHOUSE AND ITS PARKING LOT. THIS WAREHOUSE IS FULLY STOCKED FOR YOUR NEW YEAR'S SHOW.

FAIR PLAY, SC FIREWORKS WAREHOUSE #331

2011-12-30T13:41:00.000-08:00

FAIR PLAY, SC FIREWORKS WAREHOUSE

AT THE SOUTHERN END OF I-85 IN SOUTH CAROLINA, YOU WILL FIND SHELTON'S GIANT WAREHOUSE AT EXIT #2. FAIR PLAY HAS ALL THE KINDS OF FIREWORKS YOU WILL WANT FOR YOUR NEW YEAR'S SHOW.

BLACKSBURG, SC FIREWORKS WHSE #330

2011-12-30T13:38:00.000-08:00

BLACKSBURG, SC FIREWORKS WAREHOUSE

SHOWN IS OUR GIANT FIREWORKS WAREHOUSE AT EXIT 104, I-85 WHICH IS READY FOR ALL OF YOUR NEW YEAR'S SHOW NEEDS. COME AND LET TOM SUDEK, OUR LONG TERM MANAGER, HELP YOU WITH YOUR SELECTION.

MS GAMBLER YELLOW 12 BOX #329

2011-12-30T13:17:00.000-08:00

MISSISSIPPI GAMBLER'S YELLOW BOX

AN ALTERNATE FOR YOUR HOLIDAY SHOW MIGHT BE THE MS'S YELLOW BOX OF 12 SHELLS WITH DIFFERENT EFFECTS ON EACH ARTILLERY SHELL $27.95 FOR THE KIT. WE CARRY APPROXIMATELY 60 DIFFERENT KINDS OF MORTARS AT ANY GIVEN TIME. YOU CAN FIND JUST WHAT YOU WANT FOR YOUR PARTY. GIVE US A TRY.

MAD HORNET YELLOW ARTILLERY KIT #328

2011-12-30T13:11:00.000-08:00

MAD HORNET'S YELLOW ARTILLERY KIT

ASSORTED EFFECTS ARE FOUND IN THE YELLOW BOX WITH ITS 6 SHELLS. PRICE $7.95 PER KIT.

JUMBO CANNON SHELLS #327

2011-12-30T13:07:00.000-08:00

JUMBO CANNON

12 SHELLS IN THIS JUMBO CANNON SHELL KIT. YOU WILL ENJOY A COLORFUL PRESENTATION AT YOU NEW YEAR'S EVE PARTY. $20.95 PER KIT.

EVIL WARLOCK #326

2011-12-30T13:04:00.000-08:00

EVIL WARLOCK

FOR NEW YEAR'S EVE, YOU CAN CHOOSE THE EVIL WARLOCK, BLOG #326 WHICH GIVES YOU 6 SHELLS WITH RISING TAILS ON EACH WITH DIFFERENT BREAKS. $8.95 FOR THE KIT.

A Book of Migrations

2011-12-30T07:52:00.000-08:00

Rebecca Solnit's A Book of Migrations (1997) was reissued this year and classified as history/memoir rather than travel, though it is ostensibly about a month spent in Ireland. The book circles round the themes of landscape and memory, place and identity, journey and exile, as Solnit ranges across the history and culture of Ireland from the flight of the cursed King Sweeney to the bitter experiences of Travellers in contemporary Ireland. The ways in which Ireland has been viewed through the prism of English cultural attitudes are illuminated by the frequent reminders of her own radically different experiences growing up in California, with its arid landscapes and long, straight roads, short historical memory and assumptions about the possibility of an unpeopled wilderness. At the Cliffs of Moher she looks out at the sea, 'a deeper blue than my own churning gray Pacific, blue as though different dreams had been dumped into it, blue as ink. I imagined filling a fountain pen with it and wondered what one would write with that ocean.'

Cover photo by Dave Walsh who reviews the book on his website.

I'll try to convey here just one of the many interesting points she makes on landscape and culture, although I should stress that the elegance of her argument is difficult to convey out of context. In describing the sixteenth century suppression of Ireland by English colonists and its deforestation for shipbuilding and metal smelting, she also talks about the concurrent campaign to suppress the Gaelic poets, whose rhymes in praise of military successes were seen as a kind of propaganda. But 'what is most peculiar about the war against the poets and trees in Tudor era Ireland is the close involvement of the two greatest English poets of the age, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser.' Furthermore, these were the two writers who practically created the English tradition of pastoral poetry. You might think, she wryly observes, that 'a country of wandering poets and pastoralists should have enchanted the English rather than appalled them.'

Sir Philip Sidney's father was Lord Deputy of Ireland and urged the English to 'spoil' and take the goods of any 'rhymers' they caught. Sidney himself would later go on diplomatic missions to Ireland for Queen Elizabeth. Spenser went over in 1580 as secretary to Sir Henry Sidney's successor Lord Grey and wrote a lengthy report A View on the Present State of Ireland, which recommends subduing the Irish by starving them. He took over an estate in County Cork, formerly the seat of the Desmond family, and 'immediately became unpopular with the neighbours'. It was targeted by rebels in 1598 - Spenser was lucky to escape to England, where he died later that year. Back in 1589, when Sir Walter Raleigh visited him, Spenser's home 'was surrounded with woods of "matchless height"; a few years later only bare fields surrounded the castle.'

The remains of Spenser's Kicolman Castle, County Cork

Photo: Early Modern Whale

For Solnit the shadows of Spenser and Sidney's political lives in Ireland lie across their artistic merit. 'The exquisite poetry of Spenser's masterpiece The Faerie Queene is inextricably linked to his brutal prose A View on the Present State of Ireland ... Should the magical trees he celebrated in the poem be weighed against the trees he uprooted in County Cork? Can one have the latter without the former, since Ireland's lack of a landscape tradition is rooted in its scarred landscape? Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature? Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter? Is England gardenlike because Ireland was prisonlike? Does the English pastoral, and the security and abundance it represents, depend on the impoverished land and people of other lands?'

Three special wallpapers for kids

2011-12-29T11:59:00.000-08:00

Cartoon Wallpaper for Kids

"Kids night in" Wallpaper

"Garbage pall Kids" wallpaper

Katrina Kaif "Chikni Chameli" Item song of the year 2012

2011-12-29T10:28:00.000-08:00

After the super dupar hit "Shila ki Jawani" Bollywood sensation Katrina Kaif has again hit the heart of the millions of fan by her latest song "Chikni Chameli" in movie Agneepath 2012. The song sang by Shreya ghoshal. Here is some pictures of the song.

Click here to watch the song

Katrina Kaif

Katrina Kaif dancing

Katrina Kaif looking gorgeous

Katrina Kaif is naughty

Four great pink wallpapers

2011-12-29T10:19:00.000-08:00

Love pink? Then its for you....

2011-12-29T05:20:00.000-08:00

For those who love pink. Pink wallpapers/backgrounds for your desktop, laptops etc.

Pink love wallpaper

Backgrounds with pink color

Star in pink background

Pink and black make it awesome

GRAND FINALES #325

2011-12-28T14:54:00.000-08:00

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2011-12-28T14:34:00.000-08:00

EL TORRO GIANT MISSILE AND 2 MOBSTER SMALLER ONES. THEY WILL ALL GOT 500 FEET AND EXPLODE WITH A BANG.

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2011-12-28T14:29:00.000-08:00

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ROMAN CANDLES

2011-12-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

WE OFFER A WIDE SELECTION OF ROMAN CANDLES FOR YOUR HOLIDAY SHOW. JUMBO, VIKING & WHISTLING JUST TO NAME A FEW.

AERIAL ROCKETS

2011-12-28T14:22:00.000-08:00

NIGHT TRASHER, ASTEROID, & TURBO ARE JUST 3 OF OUR VERY BEST ASSORTMENT OF AERIAL ROCKETS FOR YOUR HOLIDAY SHOW.

PARACHUTE FEVER

2011-12-28T14:16:00.000-08:00

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CAN DO MORRO MORTAR KIT

2011-12-28T14:11:00.000-08:00

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Some different Facebook profile pictures: Smoking

2011-12-28T02:13:00.000-08:00

Smoking kills

Smoking style

Smoke and A cigarette

Boy smoking without hand

Smoke gun keep away

Wish your Friend with a "Happy New Year E-Card"

2011-12-27T08:26:00.000-08:00

Friends are not beautiful as they look, as they walk and as they talk.

Friends are beautiful as they sincere, as they care and as they remember.

Happy New Year 2012

My Friend

Happy New Year 2012 E Card

BUDGETED PRICE AERIALS

2011-12-26T15:09:00.000-08:00

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Winter Journey

2011-12-26T00:00:00.000-08:00

It is ten years since the untimely death of W. G. Sebald and earlier this month there was a special event to celebrate his work and launch Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001. There were contributions from Iain Sinclair, A. S. Byatt, Andrew Motion and others who knew him (like poet Will Stone, whose recollections of studying with Sebald were particularly poignant). It was sad to reflect that the last time I had seen translator Anthea Bell on stage it was next to Sebald himself, reading from the recently-published Austerlitz. The crumbling Victorian Wilton's Music Hall was a particularly resonant setting for the readings, and for the performance of songs from Schubert's Winterreise by Ian Bostridge. Hearing the Winterreise in this context prompted thoughts of all the journeys and sadness in Sebald's writings.

There are many clips online of Ian Bostridge performing the Winterreise - the one I've included above is the opening song in the sequence. I thought it would be interesting to provide here short summaries of the cycle's twenty-four songs, to show how many of them start with some aspect of the winter landscape - the rustling sound of linden trees, ice on a frozen river, a tree's last few leaves trembling in the wind. Many of these natural elements are evoked in Schubert's piano score (for example, in 'Der Lindenbaum', 'the piano’s fluttering triplet figuration in E major which opens the song evokes the gentle breezes and whispering leaves of summer: the figure returns later, altered with chromatic harmonies, to depict the cold wind and eerie rustling of the tree in winter, and the young man’s growing sense of delusion'.) Rather than do a plain synopsis I've turned the Winterreise below into a set of tanka-style verses - I know this is a complete travesty (as Mrs Plinius was quick to point out when she saw what I was doing) but I just found it more fun than writing a set of bullet points... I've based this on the English translation at the Lied, Art Song and Choral Text Archive, using Arthur Rishi's titles; you can follow the link to read proper translations, or the original German poems by Wilhelm Müller.

Good Night

I leave, a stranger -
Remembering the flowers
And the talk of love
As I walk this path in snow
And write “Good Night” on thegate.

The Weathervane

The weathervane blows
Whistling at this fugitive.
In that house, the wind
Plays quietly withpeople’s hearts.
What is my suffering tothem?

Frozen tears

Frozen teardrops fall
Like morning dew turned toice
But spring from a heart
That’s burning hot enoughto
Melt all the ice of winter.

Numbness

No trace of her now
Walking on this once greenfield.
Pale turf, dead flowers.
And if my dead heartshould thaw,
Her image would melt away.

The linden tree

By a fountain, near the gate:
A linden tree. Though it’s dark
I try not to see
The words of love we carvedthere.
Still, I hear the tree rustling.

Torrent

The snow drinks my tears,
But when the grass starts to grow
And the ice breaks up
A brook will carry them through
The town’s streets and past herhouse.

On the stream

Wild stream, with a hard
Solid crust of ice onwhich
I carve her name, and
A broken ring. Underneath
There is a surgingtorrent.

Backward Glance

I’ll not pause until
The town is out of sightwhere
Once the windows shone,
The linden trees wereblooming
And a girl’s eyes wereglowing.

Will-o'-the-wisp

A will-o'-the-wisp
Led me astray. Now I walk
Down a stream’s drycourse.
Every stream will find the sea,
Every sorrow finds its grave.

Rest

Too cold to stand still
I’ve walked this desolateroad.
Sheltering now in
A coal burner’s narrow hut
I cannot rest, my woundsstill burn.

A Dream of Springtime

Dreaming of flowers
And the song of birds inMay,
I wake in the dark
With ravens shriekingabove.
When will all these leavesturn green?

Loneliness

A dark cloud passing
Through clear skies, I make myway
Through bright, joyful life.
When the tempests were raging
I was not so miserable.

The post

What makes my heart leap
At the sound of a posthorn
Coming from the street?
Why would I want to look there?
There is no letter for me.

The grey head

My frost coated hair
Soon thaws and leaves megrieving,
Sad to think that death
Is still far off. This journey
Has still not turned my hair togrey.

The crow

A crow is circling.
It’s been with me since the town
And won’t leave until
The end. Not much further now.
Fidelity to the grave.

Last hope

A few coloured leaves
Are visible on the trees.
If that one I choose
Is caught and blown to the ground
I too will sink down and weep.

In the village

The hounds are barking
Whilst men sleep and dream ofthings
They do not have. Bark
Me away, you waking dogs.
I am finished with all dreams.

The stormy morning

Weary shreds of cloud
Flit across a storm-torn sky,
Red flames among them.
This morning is to my taste -
It is nothing but winter.

Deception

Before me a light…
I follow it eagerly
Through the ice and night
Imagining a warm house…
But it is all delusion.

The signpost

I search hidden paths
Over cliff tops and wastelands -
One sign before me,
My eyes fixed upon the road
From which no one returns

The inn

I reach a graveyard,
Its death wreaths tempting to
The weary traveller.
But all the rooms are taken
And I must go further on.

Courage

Snow flies in my face.
I shake it off. My heart cries,
But I sing brightly.
I have no ears for laments
And stride on against thewind.

The phantom suns

Three suns in the sky –
They seem to stare down atme.
Gone, the best two suns,
And I do not need thethird:
I’m better left indarkness.

The hurdy-gurdy man

Barefoot on the ice,
An old hurdy-gurdy man.
Nobody listens.
Shall I go with him and let
Him play along to my songs?

Rebecca Black Pictures

2011-12-25T11:30:00.000-08:00

Rebecca Black Pictures for you:

Rebecca Black smiling

Rebecca Black is astonished

Rebecca Black with her teeth

Rebecca Black sweet smile

Rebecca Black singing

Rebecca Black with smile

Merry Christmas Pictures

2011-12-24T22:44:00.000-08:00

Find More:
Merry Christmas Wallpaper
Christmas Wallpaper

Rihana Sweet and Cute Pictures

2011-12-23T05:42:00.000-08:00

Melanie Amaro: The X Factor winner of US version

2011-12-23T05:33:00.000-08:00

Melanie Amaro Pictures, She is the winner of X factor of US version (First)

New Year 2012 Wallpapers

2011-12-23T04:52:00.000-08:00

New Year Wallpapers and greetings of 2012

Landscape in the Trésor des Histoires

2011-12-23T01:48:00.000-08:00

Landscape in the Trésor des Histoires, Bruges, c. 1475-80

Image from the British Library's Facebook Pages

The British Library's Royal Manuscripts exhibition includes books made from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries but begins with the extraordinary collection of Edward IV, including this copy of a French historical chronicle lying open at 'one of the earliest known European paintings in which landscape is the principal subject.' I've just found that this image also appears in a list of mill images at the Medieval and Renaissance Material Culture site - a good source for other glimpses of landscape in the Middle Ages. What I like about this sort of list is the way it ignores the subject of the picture in favour of an unobtrusive detail - yes, there's an interesting windmill in the illustration below, but you have to drag your eyes away from the gruesome murder to see it (the windmill here nicely balances the clump of trees in a V-shaped composition pointing to the heart of the Roman Emperor). In other images on the site, mills are quietly grinding corn in the background whilst Narcissus looks down at his reflection, King David kneels before God, Elisha raises a woman's son from the dead, Arthurian knights go head to head in a tournament, Priam inspects the reconstruction of Troy, the Romans colonise Latium and ships navigate the coastal waters of Britain.

The assassination of Vitellius in De casibus, first quarter of the 15th century

BNF Fr. 226, fol. 201v, source: larsdatter

Salman Khan Wallpapers

2011-12-23T01:14:00.000-08:00

Wallpapers of Bollywood star Salman Khan

Ready Movie Poster

Dabang Movie

Salman in Movie Yuvraj

Dabang Smart look

Sunglass Bodyguard Movie

Fore more: Celebrities Wallpaper

Cricket Stars

2011-12-22T23:17:00.000-08:00

Shane Watson (Australia)

Kieron Pollard (West Indies)

Andrew Flintoff (England)

Tamim Iqbal (Bangladesh)

Angelo Mathews (Srilanka)

Want more Sports Wallpapers, Vist Sports Page

Beautiful Lindsay Lohan

2011-12-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

According to Alan Duke, CNN reporter "Lindsay Lohan's nude photo spread for Playboy is helping the men's magazine break sales records, according to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner."

Read it: CNN

Picwall presenting you some of the best pictures of Beautiful Lindsay Lohan

Picwall Blog

More Pictures: Click Here

Lindsay Lohan Play Boy

2011-12-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

Lindsay Lohan's nude photo spread for Playboy is helping the men's magazine break sales records, according to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Lohan, 25, was reportedly paid close to $1 million to pose for the photos taken in a style reminiscent of the nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe that graced the debut issue of Playboy in 1953. Want to read more Click here

Lindsay Lohan Playboy Cover 1

Lindsay Lohan Playboy Cover 2

Find More: Lindsay Hot Pics

Animal wallpapers: Ubuntu

2011-12-22T06:36:00.000-08:00

Check back Picwall Blog http://www.picwall.blogspot.com for more Ubuntu Wallpapers.

Picwall Blog

Animal wallpapers for Ubuntu users....

Need More:

New Ubuntu wallpaper for everyone

Animal wallpapers: Ubuntu

Ubuntu Wallpapers

Free Blue wallpapers: Ubuntu

New 2012 Wallpapers of Justin Bieber

2011-12-22T06:21:00.000-08:00

Justin Bierber wearing a black jacket

Justin Bierber standing

Justin Bierber Wallpaper

Justin Bierber wearing a cool sun glass

Justin Bierber Wallpaper

Never say never wallpaper of Justin Bierber

See more:

Katrina Kaif

Rebecca Black Pictures

Lady Gaga

Selena Gomez Wallpaper

Beautiful Lindsay Lohan

Free Blue wallpapers: Ubuntu

2011-12-22T05:20:00.000-08:00

Need More:

New Ubuntu wallpaper for everyone

Animal wallpapers: Ubuntu

Ubuntu Wallpapers

Free Blue wallpapers: Ubuntu

Kräuterblätter

2011-12-20T23:00:00.000-08:00

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph last month, Andrew Graham-Dixon gave a four star review to the British Museum's Landscape, heroes and folktales: German Romantic prints and drawings, an exhibition 'drawn entirely from the holdings of an extremely discerning English private collector, Charles Booth-Clibborn.On this showing, if his collection could be kept together and perhaps, one day, found a permanent home here, it would transform the representation of German art in Great Britain.' A week later Richard Dormer left the exhibition 'fuming', disappointed not to find 'passion, excess, sweeping emotion' and regretting that the display left 'what must be enormous gaps': his review for The Telegraph gave it just two stars. I found it fascinating, even though I only had a brief amount of time to look round, and like Andrew Graham-Dixon I was particularly intrigued by the work of Carl Wilhelm Kolbe (1759-1835).

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, Woodland pool with a man fishing and bystander, detail, 1793

Kolbe was born in Berlin (his father was a gold thread embroiderer) and pursued a career in philology alongside his artistic activities, composing a long book on the French and German languages. It wasn't until 1789 that he decided to train in art at the Berlin Academy and had to put up with being 'a bearded man in his thirties among a flock of boys, ten to twelve years in age'. He then obtained a post as court engraver in Dessau, publishing prints in Leipzig and Berlin and acquiring the nickname Eichenkolbe (Oak Kolbe) because he was so fond of depicting oak trees (he said 'trees have turned me into an artist'). The exhibition includes several examples of pastoral and woodland scenes with some impressive oak trees My photograph above shows a detail from an early etching with some doodles in the margins (the face in profile is possibly a self-caricature).

I've always thought it would be fascinating to compile a dictionary of the many sub-genres of landscape art - sous-bois for example, the French term for woodland scenes of the kind shown above. Such a book might include micro-genres particular to specific artists and one of the strangest of these would be Kolbe's Kräuterblätter (cabbage-sheets) - scenes featuring over-sized plant life, like his 1801 version of Et in Arcadia Ego. As Andrew Graham-Dixon writes, these etchings 'plunge the eye into vertiginous screens of foliage, spectacularly sculptural blasted trees and writhing, threateningly enlarged clumps of wild vegetation. It is hard to say if these are dreams of oneness with nature or fantasies of being consumed by it.' Kolbe himself came to rather regret these later in life, admitting in his autobiography that he had invented these plants 'completely out of my head, and I acknowledge that I was wrong - very wrong - to do so. Their perhaps not entirely unattractive forms may seduce the eye of the unlearned; the critical gaze of the naturalist cannot bear them.'

Iceberg in Mist

2011-12-20T07:36:00.000-08:00

Between 1968 and 1970 Gerhard Richter painted a remarkable range of 'damaged landscapes', as they are termed by Mark Godfrey, the curator of Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter: Panorama. These include aerial views of cities in thick grey paint, the colour of ash and rubble, that Richter later likened to images of the destruction of Dresden but which might equally be seen as warnings of some future apocalypse. One of these, Townscape Paris (1968), is a painting I referred to rather tentatively in one of my very first blog posts here. At the same time Richter was also painting a very different kind of townscape, reproducing details of architectural models, and these too seem dystopian - windowless blocks showing no sign of life, casting shadows over empty white roads that resemble the patterns on a circuit board.

Another monochrome aerial view from 1968, Clouds, provides glimpses of an abtsracted version of the German countryside - imagery that Godfrey compares to the opening sequence (above) of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). Two years later Richter began a very different series of cloud paintings, this time treating them as isolated objects, white against featureless blue-green skies. They resemble Alfred Stieglitz's famous cloud photographs, Equivalents (1927), which in turn (as Rosalind Krauss points out in that weighty tome Art Since 1900) could be viewed as Duchampian readymades - uncomposed and detached from their environment. Alps II (1968) might be a close-up of a storm cloud and is barely recognisable as a landscape painting, certainly a long way from the heroic image of German mountains celebrated in those early Reifenstahl films.

Seascape (Sea-Sea) (1970) is described in the exhibition as a 'collage of two photographs of the sea, one inverted to appear as the sky. The painting creates a momentary illusion of a coherent seascape, until it becomes clear that the ‘clouds’ in the upper half of the painting are waves. It creates a sense of discontinuity and suggests Richter’s acknowledgement of the gulf separating him from the moment of Romanticism.' It made me think of Rothko's grey paintings, with the patterns of waves replacing Rothko's brushtrokes. Mark Godfrey views them as a cross between Capar David Friedrich and Blinky Palermo: an attempt at the kind of radical abstract statement Palermo was making in his Cloth Paintings using the traditional medium of a seascape. Another point of comparison is Vija Celmins and, like her, Richter also produced images of black and white fields of stars.

In 1971 an exhibition of Richter's recent work, painted in flat colour rather than black and white, prompted various critics to compare him with Friedrich. Landscape near Hubbelrath (1969), for example, shows an empty view with a road sign where we expect to see, in Friedrich, a church spire. Richter said that his art lacked the spiritual underpinnings of Romanticism: 'for us, everything is empty'. However, Mark Godfrey argues that Richter and Friedrich both aimed to create a sense of unfulfilled desire (readers of this blog may recall an earlier post on the way Friedrich composed 'obstructed views'). This approach may have seemed particularly appropriate to a post-war German artist working at a time when the purpose of painting itself was being called into question.

There is one more interesting example of Richter's engagement with Friedrich later in the exhibition, a painting called Iceberg in Mist (1982). I have mentioned various artists here before who went north to paint the Arctic seas - Peder Balke, Lawren Harris, Per Kirkeby - and Richter made his own trip in 1972, looking for a motif as powerful as Friedrich's The Sea of Ice. Mark Godfrey mentions that on his return Richter made 'an extraordinary and little-known book of black and white photographs of icebergs', printed, like the two halves of Seascape (Sea-Sea), both upside down and right side up. In this way Richter rejected the single sublime image and arranged the photographs in such a way that 'their overt subject became more or less irrelevant.' Richter's urge to thwart our desire for spectacular landscapes is also evident in the later painting, where we cannot even glimpse the tip of the iceberg as the whole view is shrouded in mist.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823-4

Frost's Bitter Grip

2011-12-11T13:45:00.000-08:00

About this time last year, influenced by all those end of year lists, I posted ten examples of landscape musicreleased in 2010, along with accompanying YouTube clips (nine of which still work). Here isa similar list for 2011 and once again it is not supposed to be definitive; I'd certainly be interested in any additional comments and suggestions. I did a post earlier this year on Toshio Hosokawa's Landscapes so am not including that. And, as I have discussed it before, I'm excluding RichardSkelton's Landings, another version of which appeared this year (the expansionof this project reminds me of the way Robert Burton kept adding material to TheAnatomy of Melancholy).

(1) The obvious place tobegin is with Chris Watson, whose El Tren Fantasma, based on recordings ofthe old Mexican ghost train, has been widely praised. Thesoundscape is not restricted to the railway tracks, as you can hear from theSoundCloud extracts below (sections 3 and 5, 'Sierra Tarahumara' and 'Crucero LaJoya'). A BBC review describes the wild countryside throughwhich the train passes: 'brushwood and tall grass sway beneath the breezecrossing canyon slopes, while constant cicada chatter is punctuated by thedistinctive calls of woodpecker and crow.' This was not the only ChrisWatson release this year - Cross-Pollination, also on Touch, includes 'TheBee Symphony', created with Marcus Davidson, and 'Midnight at the Oasis' - recorded out in the Kalahari desert and nothing to do with the 1974 Maria Muldaurhit.

Chris Watson - El Tren Fantasma album preview

(2) WaterBeetles of Pollardstown Fen, was released by Gruenrekordershortly before they announced the premature death of its creator, soundartist Tom Lawrence. This is a very specific take on a landscape; as onereviewer says, 'Pollardstown Fen is an ancient, 500-acre,spring-fed alkali marsh in County Kildare, 30 miles west of Dublin, but tolisten to these hydrophone recordings by Irish musicologist Tom Lawrence, you’dthink it was a well-stocked video arcade circa 1985.' Whilst Chris Watson's ElTren Fantasma was directly inspired by Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète,the sense in which a record like this qualifies as 'music' is quite debatable. Richard Pinnell has writtenthat 'aside from some tastefully simple crossfades there isn’t any editing,enhancements or attempts to sculpt these recordings into anything more than theremarkable audio photographs that they are.'

(3) On adifferent scale entirely, I think it is relevant here to mention Björk's Biophilia,a multi-media project of cosmic ambition based on elements ofnature and the landscape, like the sound of thunder and the cycles of the moon.(I think it would be too much of a stretch to include in this list KateBush and her fifty words for snow...) Björk's live shows have featured new instruments devised for the project - the track 'Solstice' for exampleevokes the rotation of the Earth through the rather beautiful sound of a pendulumharp. The accompanying iPad apps makes me wonderhow far these could be used to develop new genres of landscape art. But despite the involvement of SirDavid Attenborough, no less, these still sound limited: the app for'Crystalline' for example comes with 'a game, in which youcollect crystals in a tunnel as the song plays.' We just stuck to buying theactual album.

Björk's Biophilia app introduced by David Attenborough

(4) Earlier this year I wrote here about J. A. Baker's book The Peregrine but had not then listened to the Lawrence English album inspired by it. Matt Poacher reviewed it for The Liminal and identified the way the music seeks to imitate the movement of the hawk: 'the roar of the surface drones do have the feel of the upper air, and the granular detail becomes like the murmarations of desperate starling or lapwing flocks, banking and swarming in the viciously cold winter wind. ‘Frost’s Bitter Grip’ and ‘Grey Lunar Sea’ also manage to portray, using a mixture of high thin metallic and broader cloud-like drones (not dissimilar in texture to some of the sounds Basinki captures in the warping tape recordings of the Disintegration Loops), the shattering cold of the winter of 1962/3, during which countless birds died and significant parts of Essex’s North Sea coast froze for months on end.'

'December 24 - Frost's Bitter Grip' by Lawrence English

(5) Canadian ambient composer Scott Morgan (who records as Loscil) has named allthe tracks on his new album after features of the Coast Arc Range. Although he uses field recordings the music is mainly built up from slow waves of synthesiser. Appropriately enough it was released by the GlacialMovements label, whose mission statement may sound better in theoriginal Italian but certainly makes clear what they are aiming for in their artists' 'glacial and isolationist ambient' music: "Places that man has forgotten...icy landscapes...fieldsof flowers covered eternally with ice... Icebergs colliding amongstthemselves..The boreal dawn that shines upon silent white valleys in the GreatNorthern lands...an explorer lost among the Antarctic glaciers looking for theway home..."

Loscil - Coast/ Range/ Arc album preview

(6) Guitarist Jon Porras records drones with Evan Caminiti as Barn Owl and has put out solo recordings as Elm. Undercurrent is the first release under his own name and is described as 'California Gothic set to the tidal rhythms of the Pacific and tuned into the metabolic pathways of the northwest coast ... a love poem to the mist, a prayer cast in ghostly reflected guitar and deep pools of distortion'. Opening with 'Grey Dunes' (clip below), the album moves on to tracks with titles like 'Seascape', 'Shore' and ends gently with 'Land's End' and 'Gaze'.

(7)Following last year's round-up, Matt Poacher (whose blog Mountain 7takes a particular interest in landscape and music) left a comment referring me to TheLowland Hundred. I was therefore interested to read hiscomprehensive review this year of Diffaith, a project by The LowlandHundred's Tim Noble. 'East of Aberystwyth is a tract of wild country, windblown and empty.Colloquially it is known as the desert of Wales – not because of a lack ofrainfall but because of this character of emptiness...' Diffaith (Welsh for 'wilderness') comprises sixtracks and three complimentary short films (you can explore it further on Tim Noble's website).According to Matt,the album's centrepiece 'is a vast, monstrous thing, named for the blastedvalley floor of ‘Llawr-y-cwm-bach’. The track is dominated by long periods ofnear-silence, punctuated with huge walls of Stephen O’Malley-like guitar thatthreaten to tear the fabric of the track apart. If Noble’s aim was to make itsound as if the very land were voicing some primeval shriek then he hassucceeded. Christ alone knows what went on down there, but this sounds like ahowl from the void.'

'Llawr-y-cwm-bach' by Tim Noble

(8) Tim Noble , The Lowland Hundred (whose new album Adit has just been released) and Hallock Hill (whose music Matt locates 'at the intersection between landscape and memory') release their records through Hundred Acre Recordings. Another small label whose name would lead you to anticipate music with a landscape theme is Wayside and Woodland Recordings, run by epic45, who been recording pastoral indie pop for some years now and this year released an album called Weathering. Tracks like 'With Our Backs to the City' (below) have reminded reviewers of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs - 'yet where Mercury Rev seemed to find what they were looking for in the Catskill Mountains, the best epic45 offer is a fleeting glimpse of salvation; the occasional burst of sunlight through a blackened sky.'

(9) It is now five years since I first discussed the Ghost Boxlabel on this blog and excellent new releases continue to appear - this year's highlight was As the Crow Flies, an album by Jon Brooks (The Advisory Circle). Also this year, Jim Musgrave, who works with Ghost Box's Belbury Poly, put out an album as Land Equivalents called Let's Go Orienteering which he describes as 'half-remembered educational films, imagined landscapes, foreboding woodland trails and a last minute dash towards a promised utopia'. This combination sounds very familiar now but there are still more musicians wanting to follow these foreboding woodland trails. The Ley Hunter's Companion by Sub Loam for example is packaged as another piece of aural psychogeography and described as 'two extended synthesiser and sequencer tripsover the summer countryside.'

Sub Loam - Ley Hunter's Companion album preview

(10) As I reach the end of this post I realise it's as much a list of record labels as artists, and the final label I want to mention is Another Timbre. Their recent releases featuring field recording include Tierce, with Jez riley French, and a CDr from Anett Németh ('A Pauper’s Guide to John Cage' and 'Early Morning Melancholia Two') which Richard Pinnell praised highly on his excellent website. But the album I'm highlighting here is Droplets by the trio of Dominic Lash, Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes because it includes a performance of Maria Houben's 'Nachtstück' recorded out in the landscape (a wood near Hathersage in Derbyshire to be precise). Dominic Lash says that they didn't anticipate in advance accompanying the sound of a rainstorm: 'The plan was simply to record the piece outdoors; we were hoping for a rain-free window. But when the rains came, some way into the piece, they weren't especially heavy so I decided to keep on playing, hoping it would just be a brief shower. It turned out to be a little bit more than that...'

So we stood, alive in the river of light

2011-12-08T02:00:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday I attended the dedication of the memorial to Ted Hughes in Poet's Corner. Poems were read by Juliet Stevenson, Seamus Heaney and Daniel Huws (the Welsh writer who knew Hughes at Cambridge); there is a Channel 4 news clip which gives a sense of the atmosphere there. The readings took place in front of Chaucer's tomb, which brought to mind that poem in Birthday Letters where Hughes remembers Sylvia Plath declaiming Chaucer to a field of cows, who seemed enthralled, 'ears angling to catch every inflection.'. Perhaps it would have felt more apt to have heard Hughes's poems out in the landscape, but there in the Abbey, he was connected to a tradition of English poets that began with Cædmon, who found his voice whilst caring for the animals at the monastery of Streonæshalch. Seamus Heaney made a short speech in dedication, invoking the closing lines of Beowolf where a memorial mound, high on a headland is built for the dead hero, 'far-famed and beloved'. The inscription on this new memorial comes from one of the poems in River (1983), 'That Morning', in which Hughes recalled standing solemnly 'in the pollen light / Waist-deep in wild salmon.' It seemed a moment of blessing, as if the fish had let the world as it is pass away: 'there, in a mauve light of drifted lupins, / They hung in the cupped hands of mountains...'

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2011-12-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

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apprx 40 miles to shelton fireworks warehouse at robertsdale, alabama
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HALL OF FAME BOB FELLER GUNNERY CAPT

Impressionism 2.0

2011-11-27T06:31:00.000-08:00

"As my work was often compared to the French Impressionist movement, I decided to follow their traces in Normandy. Filming on the same spots where Monet or Corot used to paint, I will create a kind of Impressionism 2.0" - Jacques Perconte

Impressions / teaser n°1

2011, Normandie : Impressions, 26'
2010, Corse : Après le feu, 7'
2009, Fontainebleau : Annette, 9'
2009, Poitou-Charentes : Le passage, 6'
2008, Médoc : Pauillac, Margaux, 10'
2007, Médoc : Le soleil de Patiras, 3'
2005/7, Landes : uishet, 13'
2003, Périgord Noir : uaoen, 29'

Impressions: Voyage en Normandie is the latest in a series of digitally manipulated landscape films made by Jacques Perconte. The 'actual' view (at least as seen through the camera lens) gradually pixelates and transforms into something more strange. The films enter a kind of 'Impressionist' phase where light patterns and subtle motion in nature are slowed and attended to. But the moving images soon start to resemble Symbolism, Fauvism and eventually Abstract Expressionism - trees turned into jagged patches of colour like a Clyfford Still painting, the horizon flickering like a Barnett Newman zip line. 'We no longer see the image of the landscape, we see the landscape of the image' Perconte says. Violaine Boutet de Monvel has written of a moment in Après le feu, filmed from the back of a train, where a gap appears to open up under the tracks, transforming the real topography. Perconte is interested in this re-imagining of the familiar - as he followed in the footsteps of the Impressionists, he sensed that their landscape was still present, despite the constant movement of clouds and restless activity of the sea. This process tends towards the dissolution of familiar landscape elements into a vision of pure colour. In Perconte's notes on Impressions he quotes Rousseau, losing himself in a reverie and feeling objectes slip away so that he feels nothing but the whole: 'Alors tous les objets particuliers lui échappent; il ne voit et ne sent rien que dans le tout.'

The artist has posted numerous Vimeo clips, photographs, production notes and comments on his own site and his technart blog. I'll end here with a recent film I'll be thinking of on my next train journey: a view of nondescript fields under a grey sky which briefly disappears as the train enters a cutting, only to re-emerge partially smeared away, as if to reveal the software behind this fake landscape of tree forms and wind farms, then progressively changes until we are left with just a few remnants of distorted colour before the screen goes white.

Silence lurks, 2011

11 BONUS FIREWORKS SHOTS 11-25-11

2011-11-25T16:04:00.000-08:00

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A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain

2011-11-25T03:40:00.000-08:00

Three years ago the Folio Society published a new edition of William Daniell's A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain. The original book came out in eight volumes between 1814 and 1825, contained 308 hand-coloured aquatints and sold for £60 ('one and a half times what a fisherman or sailor aboard a merchant ship could expect to earn in a year at the time'). A second hand copy of the Folio version (in the excellent Much Ado Books shop) cost me rather less than this. It includes only 114 of the best aquatints and cuts out almost all of the rather dry commentary Daniell wrote, replacing it with extracts from the writings of contemporary travellers. The original intention was for Richard Ayton, an aspiring writer and friend of the family, to accompany Daniell on his travels. But the two of them parted acrimoniously after the first year, having got as far as southern Scotland (the Voyage commenced at Land's End). Daniell pressed on alone, returning to his coastal journey every summer, delayed only by famine in Scotland (1816) and economic crisis and fear of revolution in England (1819). Ayton never did become a successful author and his short life came to a sad end the year Daniell finally completed his great project. The cumulative achievement of the Voyage was recognised by the Royal Academy, who elected Daniell a full member in 1822 - as C. J. Shepherd notes in his introduction, 'the artist that he beat to secure his lifetime's ambition was John Constable'.

Among the texts assembled to accompany Daniell's aquatints in this edition, the most vivid impressions of the coastal landscape are provided by writers like Keats, Southey, Scott and Dorothy Wordsworth (whose travels in Scotland I have discussed here before). But the book encompasses many other interesting voices - Joanna Schopenhauer at Lancaster, Jane Austen at Lyme, the 'exquisitely fashionable' Hermann von Pückler-Muskau in Brighton, James Johnson, author of 'An Essay on Indigestion; or Morbid Sensibility of the Stomach and Bowels', in Liverpool, a gentleman called Charles Cochrane who for some reason went to Margate disguised as an itinerant Spanish gypsy guitarist, the ornithologist Charles Fothergill who visited Flamborough Head 'resplendent in 'white and green hat; a Belcher neckcloth with my short collar appearing over it; a dark green jacket with silver buttons; [and] sky blue pantaloons'', composer Felix Mendelssohn, who sent home a few bars of music which would become the Hebridean Overture, and the 'excitable young Polish tutor and future revolutionary' Krystyn Lach-Szyrma, who was so overwhelmed by Fingal's Cave, a 'glorious cathedral made by nature's hand', that he threw himself into the sea.

Cover by David Eccles,

after William Daniell's In Fingal's Cave, Staffa

In his Preface to A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain, Robert Macfarlane writes that seeing Daniell's aquatints leads us to imagine Britain only by its outline. 'The interior falls away, and all that is left is the frame. And what a frame it is! Some 7,500 miles of coastline, forming a continuum from storm-crashed headlands to beach-front amusements, from salt-marsh to heathland, from 400-million-year-old gneiss to endlessly recast mudflats.' With this in mind it is clearly impossible to pick out a typical view - the two shown below I liked for the non-naturalistic regularity of their rock formations and the precisely distributed seabirds and grazing sheep. Yet despite their variety all of Daniell's aquatints have the same harmonious, muted palette of slate blue, grey green and pale browns. He may, as Macfarlane says, portray all kinds of meteorological conditions - 'a doldrummish sea day in Ilfracombe, sails drooping in the heat, gives way to a Force 7 off Holyhead' - but the weather somehow always looks British.

Near view of one of the Shiant Isles

Needles Cliff and Needles, Isle of White

William Daniell's journeys coincided with the rise of picturesque tourism and bathing resorts, the Napoleonic Wars, the Highland Clearances and the rapid development of industry and infrastructure. Robert Southey, for example, toured the Highlands with Thomas Telford, whom he nicknamed Pontifex Maximus, the great bridge builder. In one of this book's extracts from Southey's Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, the conversion of the Marquess of Stafford's estate's into extensive sheep-farms is criticised: 'a quiet, thoughtful, contented, religious people' forcefully transplanted from the glens to the sea coast. At the other end of Britain, Dover had recently been scarred by vast new fortifications to keep out the French, a fact that William Cobbett found perplexing - 'what the devil should they come to this hill for, then?' He concluded bitterly that 'more brick and stone have been buried in this hill than would go to build a neat new cottage for every labouring man in the counties of Kent and of Sussex!' Shakespeare's Cliff (which I have written about here before) was also visited by artist Benjamin Robert Hayden who stood looking at it, 'almost lost in the embruno tint of twilight'. There he imagined 'a Colossal Statue of Britannia' built on top of it, 'surveying France with a lofty air.'

I could go on, but I'll end this post at Lulworth Cove, where Daniell painted the rocky outcrop of Stair Hole with its striking recumbent folds. The book includes an extract from the recollections of the Irish playwright John O'Keeffe who spent a summer at Lulworth with his children. As soon as he arrived, O'Keeffe set off with his son, called Tottenham, to explore the Cove itself and the craggy rocks above. At the end of the day 'we returned to our abode with appetites sea-sharpened, and sat down to a roast loin of lamb, delicate boiled chickens, tongue, green-peas, young potatoes, a gooseberry pie, thick cream, good strong home-brewed ale and a glass of tolerable port-wine.' Next morning they were off again, climbing Hanbury Hill where O'Keeffe recorded two of the local landscape terms - patches of land called 'knaps, larger or smaller, each divided from the other by a grassy rising, termed a launchet.' Tired from the climb, he and Tottenham sat down to look at the view - 'before us, the great expanse; above, the blue serene; around, the melody of birds; scarce a breath from the still bosom of the deep, and the vertical sun shedding his glories on the scene. Neither the scream of sea-gulls, crows, and puffins, could prevent me falling into a slumber, and, in a sort of sweet demi-dream, I could hear the rushing pinions of birds that must have flown by very near me, and felt the rabbits that I fancied ran over me.'

The kill of New York is a brook in New England

2011-11-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

BRANCH – RUN – FORK – BROOK – KILL – STREAM – BAYOU – SWAMP – SLOUGH – WASH – CAÑADA – ARROYO - RIO

I came across Derek Watkins' excellent map, showing the distribution across America of different toponyms for 'river', on the Spatial Analysis blog (where James Cheshire has added his own UK version). It reminded me that I have been meaning for some time to do a post here about Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney and compiled by a team of writers between 2002 and 2006. Robert Macfarlane described this book in a wonderful essay published last year ('A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook'): 'Its ambition was to retrieve, define and organise nearly 1,000 terms and words for specific spects of landscape. Its ethical presumption was that having a language for natural places is vital for two reasons: because it allows us to speak clearly about such places, and because it allows us to fall into the kind of intimacy with such places which might also go by the name of love or enchantment, and out of which might arise care and good sense.'

So what does Home Ground have to say about these river terms? For the first one, BRANCH, the reader is referred to FORK and the entry, written by Bill McKibben, describes some of the geographical variation evident in Derek Watkins' map. Easterners are likely to call forks branches, tributory is used elsewhere, 'and those in west Texas would call smaller forks prongs.' His example of a 'prong' is the North Prong of the Little Red River Fork in Briscoe County Texas. RUN, according to Kim Barnes, always denotes movement and 'can refer to any small stream, brook, creek, rivulet, channel, overflow, or swiftly flowing watercourse.' Early Virginian settlers, naming the landscape, came to think in terms of a hierarchy by size: rivers > creeks > runs. BROOK needs no explanation, but KILL? It is the Dutch word for brook and appears in the name of landforms of the Hudson and Deleware Valleys, most famously the Catskill Mountains. The term is not seen in the lower Hudson Valley, probably because, as Jan DeBlieu explains in Home Ground, the Dutch colony was subsumed into the surrounding English speaking culture after the capture of New Netherland in 1644.

Often the authors of Home Ground include illustrative quotations from American literature, like the 'dark stream shooting along its dismal channel' in Melville's Typee. Gretel Ehrlich's entry on STREAM describes it as a dynamic force that 'receives, and thus reflects, the abuses that have taken place on the land.' The next few terms, BAYOU, SWAMP and SLOUGH, sound aything but dynamic. 'The bayous are spaces of open water, sluggish or stagnant' and a slough 'is a narrow stretch of sluggish water in a river channel'. The city of Chicago is built on filled sloughs. The word bayou is derived from the Choctaw word for a small stream, bayuk. Okefenokee Swamp gets its name from a Creek Indian word meaning 'Land of the Trembling Earth'. A Harry Crews quote explains why: 'most islands in the swamp - some of them holding hundreds of huge trees growing so thick that their roots are matted and woven as closely as a blanket - actually float on the water; and when a black bear crashes across one of them, the whole thing trembles.'

With the word WASH we move into the American Southwest : Carrizo Wash in Arizona, Hunter's Wash in New Mexico. These are areas of land over which 'subtle contours allow water to flow, or "wash", from elevated to lower zones.' ARROYO can be used to describe the same general feature, or, more specifically, a steep-walled, flat-bottomed creek. Either way it is ephemeral, 'carrying water only briefly during such events as spring runoff or the summer monsoons.' Two more Spanish terms complete the map: RIO and CAÑADA, 'a wetland rich with river reeds'. The words RIVER and CREEK are also included but, are so common that they have been coloured grey. Here in Britain, a creek is a saltwater inlet or the estuary of a stream. In the entry for 'creek' in Home Ground, novelist Charles Frazier explains that the term spread to mean any flow smaller than a river. 'In a few places, though, a distinction was retained. M. Schele DeVere, in his 1872 Americanisms: The English of the New World, put it succinctly: "The kill of New York is a brook in New England, a run in Virginia and alas! a crick or creek, almost everywhere else."'

PYROMUSICAL DISPLAYS FROM CHINA

2011-11-18T16:41:00.000-08:00

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Walter Benjamin's Grave

2011-11-13T04:45:00.000-08:00

'The cemetery faces a small bay directly looking over the Mediterranean; it is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.'

- Hannah Arendt, letter to Gershom Scholem, 21 October 1940

Michael Taussig's essay, 'Walter Benjamin's Grave: A Profane Illumination', describes the cemetery of Portbou, the small town on the border of France and Spain where Benjamin died in 1940. Carrying his possessions in a heavy black briefcase, Benjamin was led there over the mountains by a young woman, Lisa Fittko. 'It was the first time she had made the trip. Benjamin was her first refugee ... She got lost. They backtracked. Then they found their way to the summit: "The spectacular scene appeared so unexpectedly that for a moment I thought I was seeing a mirage ... the Vermillion Coast, an autumnal landscape with innumerable hues of reds and yellow-gold. I gasped for breath - I had never seen such beauty before."' But the the Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and on the night of September 25th Walter Benjamin, fearing repatriation, took an overdose of morphine tablets. Hannah Arendt, then still in the South of France, came to look for his grave soon afterwards. Lisa Fittko and her husband Hans continued the dangerous work of escorting refugees across the border. Hans took to wearing a Basque cap and sandals to blend in with the locals. Sometime he would sit for hours on a cliff projection looking out to sea.

Dani Karavan, Walter Benjamin Memorial at Portbou, 1994

The beauty of this place, which so struck Hannah Arendt and Lisa Fittko, seems at variance with its history of displacement and disappearance. Michael Taussig first visited Portbou in 1987 and found the whole town a sad monument to Benjamin's death - 'cold, nasty, and enigmatic.' But now, on returning fifteen years later, he comes upon the new monument to Walter Benjamin, designed by Dani Karavan, an artist from Tel Aviv. An iron triangle forms a doorway leading to steps that take you down the slope of the hill towards the sea. At the bottom there is a thick pane of glass inscribed with Benjamin's words: 'It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.' The words could be taken to refer as much to the victims of Franco as to the Nazis. Looking back up the stairs, the doorway frames a rectangle of blue sky, echoing the view of the breaking waves below.

Later, inside the cemetery itself, Taussig is struck by a virtually identical set of steps, leading from the graves to the chapel. He recalls Benjamin's surrealist conception of the 'profane illumination', where something provides a new kind of experience whilst retaining the trace of the kind of religious illumination it has surpassed. In the cemetery at Portbou there are niches bearing the names of the dead and a common grave, the fosa común, in which Benjamin's remains may actually lie. The monument, by contrast, is a profane illumination, which 'gathers its strength through the open expression of namelessness as empty space, sea and sky. It truly is an emphatic statement on the weighting of the world by its nameless dead.' Standing on the headland Taussig feels the full force of the transmontaña wind. 'Can we imagine a state, a religion, or a community bound to remembrance which would have thye courage or craziness to call a wind a monument?' Walter Benjamin once wrote that the best way to light a cigarette is with a flintstone and fuse. 'The wind blows the matches out, but the harder the wind blows, the more the fuse glows.'

Ice Music

2011-11-09T14:53:00.000-08:00

Terje Isungset, the Norwegian percussionist renowned for his ice horns, is here in Britain again. We went to see him last night at LSO St. Lukes in a concert that began with the solo percussion piece called Tribute to Nature. This was played on his special drum kit, featuring sheepbells strung up with rope, a ride cymbal on a weathered stick, bundles of clave-like arctic birch sticks and pieces of granite. It started quietly with the tapping of sticks and the scraping of stones, grew louder and more expressive with horns and Jew's harp, and ended with a long sigh of breath. He then left the stage to be replaced by the LSO's Wind Ensemble, who performed Carl Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922). A fill collaboration between Isungset and Phil Slocombe, 'The Idea of North', was supposed to be played at the interval but never materialised - instead we waited expectantly for the appearance of the ice instruments. Eventually they emerged - two white blocks carried onto stands and adjusted by a sculptor-roadie, wrapped up in a parka and woolly hat. The ice had been driven here from Norway; the first clip below shows Terje Isungset carving his instruments directly from the frozen landscape.

Ice Music, the second part of last night's concert, featured Isungset's regular singing partner Lena Nymark (you can see them on stage together towards the end of the second clip above). She is evidently pregnant, prompting my wife to speculate on the benign influence this music was having on the unborn child. Isungset began by crunching and tapping one of the ice blocks before moving on to an ice xylophone which he played with ice sticks and bare hands (as he says in the clip below, ice has a surprisingly warm sound when tapped with the finger). The ice horns only came out for a short time - but since they melt whilst being played this was not too surprising. At the end of the concert I went up to the stage and held a shard of ice lying on the floor, wondering if this had come from the 600 year old Jostedalbreen glacier. Terje Isungset has said that the instruments he makes are eventually returned 'back to nature where they belong.'

After the concert - ice remnants

Gausta Peak

2011-11-06T05:24:00.000-08:00

I mentioned Peder Balke in connection with the National Gallery's 'Forests, Rocks, Torrents' exhibition but thought I would add another post because he is an interesting example of that not uncommon phenomenon, the rediscovered landscape artist. Christopher Riopelle says in the catalogue that Balke is only emerging now 'in international eyes as a master of Norwegian landscape, the subject of exhibitions, scholarly publications and bidding wars in auction rooms.' The National Gallery recently bought a small seascape The Tempest - the first Balke painting to enter a British public collection. Riopelle compares Balke to August Strindberg, whose landscape painting (see my earlier post) has also only come to prominence in recent decades. 'Like Strindberg, Balke was blithely convinced his work sat squarely in the mainstream,' whilst for us the paintings look more like forerunners of expressionism. From the 1860s Balke gave up trying to make his living as a painter and turned instead to real estate (a sad fate for a landscape painter, one might think). When he died in 1884 his art was forgotten, but in his spare time Balke had continued to produce experimental landscape paintings, drawing on the memories of his travels, and 'small black and white improvisations' like The Tempest.

Peder Balke, Gausta Peak, 1877

Another Nordic artist I've discussed here before, Per Kirkeby, wrote a book about Peder Balke in 1996 which in turn inspired a joint exhibition two years ago. I have not had the opportunity to read this book but the website for Norwegian artist Espen Dietrichson includes a description. 'Kirkeby writes that, by looking at artists such as Balke, Turner and Delacroix, we can discover an alternative historical realism. This depends on identifying a range of painters’ ‘dirty tricks’, such as how texture can be used to create calculated, dramatic effects, and how experimentation with new perspectives can change perception. Kirkeby maintains that the pervading art historical distinction between pure abstraction and less honourable effects has traumatised art in relation to its history. This is why he finds it so important to solve the enigma of Peder Balke and to thereby understand why the elevated and sublime can only be achieved through the ‘dirtiest of means’. For example, Balke’s outsider position as a small-town painter-decorator [i.e. his early background, before training as an artist] allowed him to eschew the codified illusionism of (Norwegian) national romanticism, and hence to make use of techniques that differed radically from those of his contemporaries – marbling, or the use of sponges or combs on wet paint – which would have seemed a profanation of academic dogmas.'

The waving moorland and the level beach

2011-11-04T03:54:00.000-07:00

I have been listening to the audiobook of The Woman in White, read by Ian Holm (whose voice always takes me back to childhood memories of the Radio 4 adaptation of Lord of the Rings). The novel begins with the narration of a drawing master, who is distracted from the landscape by the beauty of one of the young ladies he is supposed to be teaching. 'The most trifling of the questions that she put to me, on the subject of using her pencil and mixing her colours; the slightest alterations of expression in the lovely eyes that looked into mine with such an earnest desire to learn all that I could teach, and to discover all that I could show, attracted more of my attention than the finest view we passed through, or the grandest changes of light and shade, as they flowed into each other over the waving moorland and the level beach.' There follows an interesting passage on Art and Nature which I thought I would quote here in full. You could contrast the closing sentences with the way other writers have taken comfort in the thought that it is the landscape that will outlast humanity (see, for example, my earlier post on Robinson Jeffers).

'At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends? What space do they ever occupy in the thousand little narratives of personal experience which pass every day by word of mouth from one of us to the other? All that our minds can compass, all that our hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal certainty, equal profit, and equal satisfaction to ourselves, in the poorest as in the richest prospect that the face of the earth can show. There is surely a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it, a reason which may perhaps be found in the widely-differing destinies of man and his earthly sphere. The grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel is appointed to immortality.'

- Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, 1860

William Collins, the father of Wilkie Collins,

Children on a Mountain Top, before 1847

Source: Wikimedia Commons

SOUTH CAROLINA FIREWORKS SONG 11-2-11

2011-11-02T14:38:00.000-07:00

RHETT AND LINK'S FIREWORKS SONG FOR PYROS FROM SOUTH CAROLINA. WE OPERATE TWO SOUTH CAROLINA GIANT WAREHOUSE BOTH OF WHICH BORDER ON INTERSTATE 85, FAIR PLAY WHSE IS NEAR THE GEORGIA STATE LINE AT EXIT #2 AND THE BLACKSBURG WAREHOUSE SHOWN BELOW IS NEAR THE NORTH CAROLINA BORDER AT EXIT #104

CLICK BELOW FOR THIS GREAT PYRO SONG

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BLACKSBURG, SOUTH CAROLINA WHSE

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Landscape with Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia

2011-10-28T03:04:00.000-07:00

The Ashmolean Museum's exhibition Claude: The Enchanted Landscape, which I looked round yesterday, provides a good opportunity to compare the artist's drawings and sketches. A preparatory sketch for Claude's last painting, Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, shows the foreground figures standing out from their background and Ascanius (the son of Aeneas) just left of centre. Trees, portico and people are all on a more realistic, less monumental scale. In the painting, as Martin Sonnabend and Jon Whiteley point out in the catalogue, 'everything has been suffused with an air of fantasy. The hunters are impossibly elongated - Ascanius, in particular, is absurdly top-heavy - but even they are overwhelmed by the landscape, lit by a silvery sky, which arches over them and recedes far back into the blue, snow-capped hills.'

Claude Lorrain, Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, 1682

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I was curious to compare the two figures of Ascanius directly and so had a play on Photoshop, as you can see below. It would seem facile to say this shows Claude could have painted more naturalistic figures if he'd wanted to, but the point is worthwhile because contemporaries criticised this aspect of his painting and Claude himself reportedly joked that when he sold his landscapes he threw the figures in for nothing. Of course the figures in Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia can't be seen in isolation (or cut out from their setting); the painting's harmonius colours and soaring forms combine to convey a legendary time and place, dreamed from the poetry of Virgil. Goethe summed up the nature of landscapes like this in 1829, when he said that Claude's paintings 'possess the highest truth, but no trace of reality.'

ENGLISH BONFIRE NIGHT---CHOICE OF LOCATIONS

2011-10-27T17:14:00.000-07:00

BONFIRE NIGHT Conversation with Tallpaul Shelton

ALL OVER THE AREA----FIREWORKS SHOWS---IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRY SIDE. ALL PART OF GUY FAWKES BONFIRE NIGHT. T-P

CLICK HERE TO SEE VARIOUS FIREWORKS TIMES AND PLACES IN CELEBRATING GUY FAWKES DAY WITH ITS BONFIRE ON NOVEMBER 5TH.

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A FEW OF THE LOCATIONS WILL SHOOT ON THE 4TH SO CHECK CLOSELY AS TO THE DATE: HEREFORD; KINGSTON; EWYAS HAROLD; LEOMINISTER; LEDBURY; WEOBLEY; MORDIFORD; AND BREINTON JUST TO MENTION A FEW OF THE LOCATIONS.

AMERICAN VALOR 500 GRAM GRAND FINALE

TSUNAMI WAVE 500 GRAM GRAND FINALE

HIGH ROLLER AERIAL MULTI-FIRER

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The Valley of the Ladies

2011-10-26T14:19:00.000-07:00

"Do not hold back," I cried, "I beg you, by Zeus and by Eros himself! It will give me all the more pleasure if your tale is indeed like fiction."
And with these words, I took him by the hand and led him to a neighbouring grove, where the plane trees grew thick and plentiful, and the water flowed by cool and clear, just as it comes from freshly melted snow. I sat him down there on a low bench, and sat myself next to him.
"Well, it is time to hear your story," I said, "A setting such as this is delightful, and just right for erotic fiction."

- Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, Book 1, 2nd century CE (trans. Tim Whitworth)

What is the best kind of landscape in which to listen to a story? I suppose it may vary according to genre, as Achilles Tatius implies, but a grove like the one Clitophon is led to, a locus amoenus of comfort, privacy and natural beauty, would seem ideal. Here landscape is a gentle backdrop, not a distraction or a subject for discourse itself. In Plato's Phaedrus Socrates is taken to a similar location, but makes a point of reminding Phaedrus as they walk there: 'I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country.' He is nevertheless very pleased with the quiet location they find by the cooling water of the Ilissus, 'full of summer sounds andscents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnuscastus high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatestfragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane-tree isdeliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images,this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful isthe breeze:--so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill andsummerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. But thegreatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to thehead. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide.'

John William Waterhouse, A Tale from the Decameron, 1916

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The history of literature is full of frame stories but the most famous to be set in a locus amoenus is surely The Decameron. In fact Boccaccio's ten young Florentines find refuge from the plague in three such locations: two gardens, described on the first and third days, and then a garden-like landscape, The Valley of the Ladies, which they explore on the sixth. Despite being outside the protecting walls of country villa, this valley has the essential element of seclusion - the only means of entry is a narrow path, beside which flows a clear stream. The valley floor is so circular it seems to have been drawn with compasses, 'though it seemed the work of nature', and the valley's sides are terraced like a natural amphitheatre. Vines and fruit trees grow on the south side, thick trees on the north. The stream feeds a tiny lake so transparent that you can count the stones in it. On discovering it the ladies are unable to resist a swim, the water concealing 'their chaste white bodies no better than a thin sheet of glass would conceal a pink rose.' You can well imagine one of them echoing the words of Achilles Tatius, "a setting such as this is delightful, and just right for erotic fiction." And it is on a grassy spot by this lake that they resume their storytelling the following day.