the new emotional blackmailer's handbook

Saturday, April 14, 2012

3BT 14th April 2012

Two furiously discordant throstles dispute an invisible territorial boundary in the middle of Clapham Common. For Heaven’s sake, lads, it’s a COMMON !

Two goldfinches, their bonces allegedly tinged with the blood of Christ, chirrup sweetly together whilst they search for nest-building material, and remind me of this solemn kidnapped prince.

http://nicepaintings.org/works/84678

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Sforza_(il_Duchetto)

Dev, born in Bengal in 1932 and literate in Bengali, English, and Sanskrit, a keep-fit die-hard on the Common despite having to take eight prescribed medicines each with their own side-effects, and having five grown up children each with their own set of troubling grumbles, reels off the names of half a dozen of his other films without hesitating when I mention Satyajit Ray’s exquisite film Pather Panchali, and then, after a moment of solemn contemplation, he turns to look at me and whispers one word, gasping as if in reverence of the name and of the beauty it evokes ... "Apu !".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apu_Trilogy

Thursday, April 12, 2012

at school during the cold war, our understanding of history's fabric didn't include the continuous thread of humour ... here's professor peter hennessy ... a sweet voice of reason

a thirty seven minute talk with two grimly funny stories at the conclusion

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/CatchUpHistory.mp3

Monday, April 9, 2012

butterflies of the soul

http://thebeautifulbrain.com/2010/02/gallery-images-from-cajals-butterflies-of-the-soul/

3BT on a dismally wet and windy Easter Monday

In a free exhibition at the National Gallery, a newly restored early work by Titian, The Flight In To Egypt,

(http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/titians-first-masterpiece-the-flight-into-egypt ,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/apr/03/titian-first-masterpiece-national-gallery?INTCMP=SRCH ),

... it is a remarkable painting by a teenager beginning a long career in Venice and possibly already nostalgic for the lush meadows around his home town of Pieve di Cadore in the foothills of the Alps, about eighty miles north of Venice. The accompanying set of naturalistic etchings and drawings by Durer, who visited Venice for the second time just in time to have probably influenced Titian, are lovely, too.

Entering the Ritblat Gallery, a treasure house in the British Library, the narrow doorway is slightly constricted when a young Japanese woman stops in a pool of intense halogen light to check her smart phone and as I pass her I am enveloped in an intoxicating cloud of expensive perfume.

Passing the philatelic section of the British Library I spot a Spanish man and his elderly parents marvelling at the extraordinary collection of stamps and envelopes collected after their Civil War, objects of pilgrimage even ? Earlier I’d been sitting near them in the café when they laughed in disbelief at the awfulness of Peyton and Byrne’s coffee, arguably The Worst Coffee in the Whole History of the Universe, and certainly something that even the most desolate and forgotten and far flung village bar in Spain would be deeply ashamed to serve.