the new emotional blackmailer's handbook

Friday, June 21, 2024

the old become blind to change sez me ... because we often think that everything we learned in our twenties may have been sufficient ... darwin teaches us that those who survive are often those who can best adapt to change ... i thought i understood quite a lot about colour but i knew nothing about colour coding for screen displays ...

i had been puzzling for years over the way that myself and other people have different notions or understandings of the colours we call PURPLE

bluebells look purple to me, so do violets, so does lavender ... each in their different ways

some time ago i had settled on the vague notion that the purples occupy a borderless territory BETWEEN THE REDS AND THE BLUES

my own understanding was that purple is akin to VIOLET

but others might visualize a hue closer to MAGENTA

how is that borderless territory MAPPED ?

it turns out that the knowledge i lack has been in plain view for half a century, or more !

i set out to search for a web designer's colour-swatch ...

i quickly got a reminder that screen colours are never universally consistent ... much depends on the chemistry of your display pixels

and the notions of actually defining colours are inhibited by the mode of control ... 8-bit or 16-bit for instance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors

Color Chart — HTML Color Codes

Color Picker — HTML Color Codes

and then there is the difference between display colours and real-world colours ... coloured objects and substances in the real world have texture and density

nevertheless, it is helpful to understand how screen colours are controlled and generated

the crux of the matter comes down to COLOUR SPACE

COLOUR SPACE seems to be the portion of visible colours that a particular system can define and project and control ... the problem is there are many systems and they all occupy their slightly different and unique portions of the available colour map

the second part of that problem is that many internet processors automatically streamline and reduce that colour space during transmission

here's a lucid explanation ...

sRGB or AdobeRGB Color Space? | Ask David Bergman (youtube.com)

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

I have a question about Bob Dylan’s song LIKE A ROLLING STONE

LIKE A ROLLING STONE is a memorable song with a lot of drive, but what about those lyrics ?

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you ?

People’d call say “Beware doll, you're bound to fall”

You thought they were all kidding you.

You used to laugh about

Everybody that was hanging out,

Now you don't talk so loud,

Now you don't seem so proud,

About having to be scrounging your next meal …

How does it feel, how does it feel?

To be without a home

Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone ?

Ahh you've gone to the finest school, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it.
Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street
And now you're gonna have to get used to it.
You say you never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home,
A complete unknown, like a rolling stone ?

Ah you never turned around to see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you.
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you.
You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat,
Ain't it hard when you discovered that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal ?

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone ?

Aah, princess on a steeple and all the pretty people
They're all drinking, thinking that they've got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts
But you better take your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe.
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him he calls you, you can't refuse
When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose,
You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel, ah how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone ?

My question is long and poorly structured because it lurked in the back of my mind and festered for about fifty years without me ever wanting to write it down.

People of my age will quite possibly have heard the song hundreds of times. It certainly was novel when we first heard it. So clever. Witty. Articulate. Coherent. PENETRATING.

But it was part of a long line of Dylan’s songs about women that were bitter and complaining, in which his rhetoric seems whiney and self-pitying and borderline misogynistic. Too often, after losing his youthful sense of fun, he seemed to become cynical, as if cynicism was an art rather than a vice. Too often, it slowly dawned on me, he thought he was right about everything, and that the women he sang about were shallow and uncaring. Of course, many women were just so, but as they say down in Buenos Aires, “It takes two to tango.”

Of course, song-writers, like dramatists and novelists, don’t always write about themselves and the singer of the song might be a fictional third-party.

So now we come to my question, which is for the women of my age that have survived …

Did you ever come to a point where this song suddenly became suspect, possibly tiresome, and did it make you question all of the thoughts and the principles of the men who loved it and knew its words by heart ?

That’s all.

Sunday, June 16, 2024

a NYMPHS & SHEPHERDS ScrapBook ... beginning with PICART ...

... to be continued ...

Wednesday, June 5, 2024

Albert DECARIS ... engraver and etcher.

I'm intrigued and often perplexed by this artist's works.

He was famous in his lifetime.

He seems to be largely forgotten already.

He has a deep knowledge of classical myths and legends.

This is my favourite.

The title given on the internet is ANIMATED RURAL LANDSCAPE ... well, that might be a cataloguer's functional description but I doubt Decaris would have given it such a title.

The only decent internet image was presented slightly askew and the bottom left corner had been cropped.

The print was made towards the end of the Second World War when there were battles all around and the Whole World was filled with TERROR, and so I wonder if it isn't ( possibly / maybe ) some kind of allegory of PEACE ?

Am gonna have to do more research.

here are some links to his background ...

Albert Decaris - Wikipedia

Albert Decaris | Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection: Artists | Sacred Art Pilgrim

there is a huge kind of catalogue written by his daughter which is available to purchase online ...

Isabel Boussard-Decaris, Jean-Marc Boussard : Decaris le singulier, Éditions de la Nerthe, Ollioules (France), 2005

Monday, June 3, 2024

Concert of the Birds ... Language of the Birds ... and Parliament of the Birds

Antwerp, 1629-ish

Concert of Birds - The Collection - Museo Nacional del Prado (museodelprado.es)

"This subject actually antedates the baroque custom of aviaries; it began in the Middle Ages and Snyders was not the first to explore it in paintings, as there were numerous representations of Aeolus with the Birds in the final years of the 16th century. Northern European collectors used these works as decorations above doors or windows, or in front of fireplaces, and the fashion later spread to Spain. Their symbolic significance is linked to representations of Franciscan birds associated with the worship of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of the Birds, which began in 13th century. Legend has it that birds flocked to a beech grove outside Brussels, drawn by an image of the Virgin resting among the tree branches. As a result, that city, which is the capital of Flanders, had a Franciscan chapel with this avocation. It was destroyed by the Iconoclasts in the 16th century but rebuilt at the end of that same century, with birdcages hanging from the ceiling so that their inhabitants could contribute to the temple’s particular liturgy with their song. This affinity has often been mentioned in relation the Snyders’ desire to be buried in a Franciscan habit. The Concerts of Birds have also been considered allusions to the sense of hearing, although that interpretation is unclear. Other readings allude to the possibility that they represent wisdom via the owl ... in Western painting, owls frequently symbolize that concept ... who sometimes seems to be directing those bucolic concerts. Moreover, these concerts of birds symbolically refer to concerted order in nature, a sense of balance with nature embodied by the musical systematization of birdsong. Thus, in general, their meaning involves the political and social order enjoyed by the owners of these paintings under the rule of Archduke Albert of Austria and Isabel Clara Eugenia."

Written in Nishapur around 1177

Illuminations probably from Isfahan, 1600-ish

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/451725

The Conference of the Birds - Wikipedia

The hoopoe tells the birds that they have to cross seven valleys in order to reach the abode of Simorgh. These valleys are as follows:^[3]

1. Valley of the Quest, where the Wayfarer begins by casting aside all dogma, belief, and unbelief.

2. Valley of Love, where reason is abandoned for the sake of love.

3. Valley of Knowledge, where worldly knowledge becomes utterly useless.

4. Valley of Detachment, where all desires and attachments to the world are given up. Here, what is assumed to be “reality” vanishes.

5. Valley of Unity, where the Wayfarer realizes that everything is connected and that the Beloved is beyond everything, including harmony, multiplicity, and eternity.

6. Valley of Wonderment, where, entranced by the beauty of the Beloved, the Wayfarer becomes perplexed and, steeped in awe, finds that he has never known or understood anything.

7. Valley of Poverty and Annihilation, where the self disappears into the universe and the Wayfarer becomes timeless, existing in both the past and the future.

Written in England, 1382-ish

Chaucer wrote an allegorical PARLEMENT OF FOULES exploring the topic of free will.

Parlement of Foules - Wikipedia

https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/English/Fowls.php

the full Kelmscott Chaucer can be viewed online ...

Full Pages | Kelmscott Chaucer (kelmscottchauceronline.org)

ADDENDUM ... a Japanese folding screen, late 1500s

https://collections.artsmia.org/art/34414/crows-and-cryptomeria-unknown-japanese

A crow's cry is considered an ill omen in China and Japan, yet crows became a standard theme among Japanese artists from the 1500s onward. They may have been inspired by imported Chinese paintings of myna birds, which are not native to Japan, substituting the native species of crow instead. Painters of folding screens (which usually come in pairs) often paired a scene of raucous black crows with a quiet image of white egrets—the contrast heightened by the birds' coloration. Artists of the Hasegawa school, which originated with the celebrated painter Hasegawa Tōhaku (1539–1610), specialized in the impressionistic handling of ink brushwork seen here in the sketchily rendered branches.

Assisi, painted around 1297

Saint Francis of Assisi is said to have preached a sermon to the birds, the essence of which was ...

"My sweet little sisters, birds of the sky," Francis said, "you are bound to heaven, to God, your Creator. In every beat of your wings and every note of your songs, praise him. He has given you the greatest of gifts, the freedom of the air. You neither sow, nor reap, yet God provides for you the most delicious food, rivers, and lakes to quench your thirst, mountains, and valleys for your home, tall trees to build your nests, and the most beautiful clothing: a change of feathers with every season. You and your kind were preserved in Noah's Ark. Clearly, our Creator loves you dearly, since he gives you gifts so abundantly. So please beware, my little sisters, of the sin of ingratitude, and always sing praise to God."