Old age never comes alone…

I might be turning out like my grand-dad after all … much of his life seemed to be spent criticising and complaining, grumbling about the youth and its culture, and fidgeting with a bible.

As the bus lurched past Clapham Common this afternoon with me slumped against the window on the top deck, I glanced out and noticed a young woman striding away from the stop and wearing some very tight shorts with that common and conspicuous attention-seeker's combination of very long smooth naked legs and longish silky blonde hair that swung with her rhythm.

And then I caught myself thinking, “Dear oh dear ! If Clapham Common were the Garden of Eden, that hair would never even hardly cover her nipples.”

this little bronze statue from ancient crete greets you at the "superhuman" exhibition in the wellcome collection's gallery

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/superhuman/image-galleries/what-is-an-enhancement.aspx

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/superhuman.aspx

photography was forbidden at the british library so i took this picture by the door ... kerouac's scroll manuscript of "on the road" was unfurled ... well not quite all of it as it was too long !

what was particularly enjoyable for a man with new glasses was that you could get right down close to the glass and see the texture of the carbon ribbon in the text, a bit like looking over the writer's shoulder

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19811219

some info about the owner of the scroll ...

http://goodvibesmedia.com/2012/01/20/irsay-insights/

and this borrowed picture gives you an idea of the thing ...

http://www.ashmontmedia.com/releases/release_images/scroll_pics/scroll-layout_lg.jpg

a bit of local colour ...

... and a bit more local colour

i thought it was an exquisite post-modern designer's joke ...

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/superhuman.aspx

... until i saw the date on the label

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/objects/display.aspx?id=92105

they went that'a'way ...

ring of brodgar just a little bit older and just a little bit bigger and more sophisticated than you were thinking, maybe ...

this photo via Jeanne Bouza Rose

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/06/orkney-temple-centre-ancient-britain

http://www.orkneyjar.com/archaeology/nessofbrodgar/

http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/propertyresults/propertydetail.htm?PropID=PL_233&PropName=Ring%20Of%20Brodgar%20Stone%20Circle%20and%20Henge

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

blogger's afterthink ...

cultures and civilizations often dissolve, or are destroyed ... too many to list

usually because of catastrophies such as war, disease, environmental degradation, earthquakes, climate change, etc, etc

ours will possibly become the first one to have been SYSTEMATICALLY DISMANTLED, unnecessarily in the most part, piece by piece, by a bureaucracy motivated, not so much by religious dogma, but by crooked accountants and bankers, and by financial advisers and property owners worrying only about their percentages and their tax bills

last month in barcelona we watched a huge parade of schoolteachers protesting about government cuts which they described as cultural genocide

investment opportunity ...

triple purpose utensil ...

excellent for cooking pasta or porridge

useful as a poor man's ear trumpet

and lastly, if i don't like what i hear ...

speed the plough ...

photographed at ladies mile, just east of withyham, soon after sunrise ... on the morning after the ploughing competition

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVjT1FCfIgg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXkgXLiJH6w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ3mFhoec2U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTV-pRimCf4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NH74ptUDyU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M28g1xfGU7E

bleeping justifiably, samuel L. jackson tells american voters to ..."wake the fuck up !"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/sep/28/samuel-l-jackson-obama-video

adolf wolfli again ... late in life, after about thirty years in the asylum, with one of the paper trumpets for which so much of his music was written

On the Adolf Wolfli Foundation's website, it says ...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Adolf Wölfli, a former farmhand and laborer, produced a monumental, 25,000-page illustrated narrative in Waldau, a mental asylum near Bern, Switzerland. Through a complex web of texts, drawings, collages and musical compositions, Wölfli constructed a new history of his childhood and a glorious future with its own personal mythology.

The French Surrealist André Breton described his work as "one of the three or four most important oeuveres of the twentieth century".  Since 1975, our aim is to make Adolf Wölfli's work known through one-man and group exhibitions as well as publications.

Wölfli's imaginary autobiography and one-person utopia starts with „From the Cradle to the Grave“ (1908-1912). In 3,000 pages, Wölfli turns his dramatic and miserable childhood into a magnificent travelog. He relates how as a child named Doufi, he traveled „more or less around the entire world,“ accompanied by the „Swiss Hunters and Nature Explorers Taveling Society.“ The narrative is lavishly illustrated with drawings of fictitious maps, portraits, palaces, cellars, churches, kings, queens, snakes, speaking plants, etc.

In the second part of the writings, the „Geographic and Algebraic Books“, Wölfli describes how to build the future „Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation“: a huge „capital fortune“ will allow to purchase, rename, urbanize, and appropriate the planet and finally the entire cosmos. In 1916 this narrative reaches a climax as Wölfli dubs himself St. Adolf II.

In the subsequent „Books with Songs and Dances“ (1917-1922) and „Album Books with Dances and Marches“ (1924-1928), Wölfli celebrates his „Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation“ for thousands of additional pages, in sound poetry, songs, musical scales (do, re, mi, fa...), drawings, and collages. 

In 1928 he starts with the „Funeral March,“ the fifth and final part of his great imaginary autobiography. In over 8,000 pages he recapitulates central motifs of his world system in the reduced form of keywords and collages, weaving them into a infinite tapestry of sounds and pictures, a fascinating requiem ending only with his death in 1930.

As a mulitple outsider, Wölfli used the world as a quarry for constructing a complex mental edifice complete unto itself. The „Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation“ was both a kind of wish-fulfillment machine and the result of his obstinate reception and reproduction of turn-of-the-century ideas, values and phantasies. Wölfli created a body of work that was part of its age in terms of content, yet clearly alien to that age's conventions.

http://www.adolfwoelfli.ch/index.php?c=e&level=17&sublevel=0

http://www.adolfwoelfli.ch/content/uploads/vocabulary_of_forms.pdf

and from wikipedia ...

"Every Monday morning Wölfli is given a new pencil and two large sheets of unprinted newsprint. The pencil is used up in two days; then he has to make do with the stubs he has saved or with whatever he can beg off someone else. He often writes with pieces only five to seven millimetres long and even with the broken-off points of lead, which he handles deftly, holding them between his fingernails. He carefully collects packing paper and any other paper he can get from the guards and patients in his area; otherwise he would run out of paper before the next Sunday night. At Christmas the house gives him a box of coloured pencils, which lasts him two or three weeks at the most."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_W%C3%B6lfli

etc etc

goya ... the prado's own goya site is getting started

this'll do, but ...

i'm sure i've seen a similar drawing, of a giant cat reading a book, maybe at a table in a bar, but i can't track it down at the moment

http://www.museodelprado.es/goya-en-el-prado/inicio/

they're gonna be so sorry they didn't set aside more of their student grants for winter clothing ...

images at cave to canvas

http://www.cavetocanvas.com/

there are only straight-ish lines in nature ...

a stay-at-home afternoon ... just look outside; it is dark, it is windy, and it is very, very wet

pianist angela hewitt writes about a daunting challenge

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/sep/19/angela-hewitt-battle-bach?INTCMP=SRCH

and, by way of a change .... stick yer headphones on ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mgw8pV4iPM

... as she scampers through a bit of ravel

cave to canvas

http://www.cavetocanvas.com/

cave to canvas is a treasure trove

i've just visited the most recent 125 pages ... umpteen to go

philip pullman on the delight of engaging with the grimm brothers' style of writing

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/21/grimms-fairy-tales-philip-pullman?INTCMP=SRCH