Destiny and The Fates...

It's Sunday and the house is silent.

Silent apart from the sub-human rumbling drone of the tumble dryer...

GJ is off taking his CBT. Nooo, not Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, although he might well benefit from that, particularly in terms of Anger Management I might add -- Compulsory Basic (i.e. Motor Bike) Training --- Silly-billies, mon Dieu! Keep up, why can't you??

He's wearing days' old shabby trousers and a cigar coloured retro Americana leather jacket that I gave him one Christmas when we lived in Inverness. Twenty years ago. ...It's rather a tight fit now to say the least.

I say retro Americana, but I bought it from one of those Gents' Outfitters that you last saw in the Fifties, so it might well have been tres authentique, as opposed to tres retro, I dunno!

I'm sure he'll be safe.

I'm checking his insurance policy as I type just in case.

His mate has now acquired a retro styled bike from a local showroom that I'd rather had my eye on meself, so I'm not jealous, no... ...But, unlike GJ, he's also splashed out on a full set of leathers...

The poser!

Given that I believe most of the CBT takes place in a class-room, I'm hoping he'll be sweating like a Pig in Heat!

I jest, I jest...

The house is also quiet because since Grizz got back relatively safely, although totally skint and blinking in the daylight, from Zakynthos (Xante), he's been practically nocturnal and we've hardly seen him...

He tootled out last night, having spent a some valuable time (allegedly) infecting his girlfriend with a strain of Greek 'Flu, to see his mates in the nearby market town...

I'm back to having very little folding cash in my purse again.

Quelle surprise!

Still, I wanted to just say a few things:

Thanks for all of your kind words, purporting to the fact that I am strong, creative, intelligent and bound to make the best for myself of the woes that lie ahead of me... This is as we face several months of uncertainty while the politicians fight over how to get rid of us in the Public Sector on the cheap, to save the Fatcat Bankers paying back what they owe the tax-payer...

Anyhoo, your dependable kindness is much appreciated.

Sentiments and fond words fully taken on board.

Albeit all too quickly discarded, as I don't have a very strong sense of self-esteem at the mo'...

But treasured quand meme! You are very lovely, decent, intelligent, clever, witty, amazing, brave, beautiful and strong people yourselves... Really.

Je vous aime.

So much - Tant.

Merci mille...

This morning, I'm supposed to be getting dressed to go out to see my friend for a coffee and a chat...

That'll be why I'm still sitting here, on my first coffee, in GJ's T-Shirt, (v. glam, feat. the bulldog from Tom and Jerry), with hair like a 'borst cooch'***, looking like the Wreck of the Hesperus then!

Off to see Sazzy later. Splendiferous... But not Greeny, no.

He's ill, had to cancel, hospitalised, sadly.

Hope he gets well soon.

You see we're fated like that, GJ and I.

First John Martyn. Kippered it later in the year after we'd been to see him...

Next Davey Graham. A couple of months after meeting us he was gone to see his Maker...

I'm only glad that we're next up to see some really young, fit, folk...

Perhaps they'll be strong enough to withstand our very probable curse?

Maybe I'm some kind of modern day Medusa?

I've got the hair for it!

*** A 'borst cooch', hair like the springs peaking out of a burst couch, or rather sofa... (Pitmatic Dialogue).

I Feel Love in MacArthur Park...

That last post was my 400th...

I can scarcely believe it! Thank you for being here. You mean a lot to me. Mwah! This time with ruby-red lipstick - Mwah!

We seem to have segued from country into another land altogether... Hey, it's my blog, tant pis!

I don't do Disco... Not Fhina, no Siree! And yet there are some Disco-era records that I do enjoy - And, again from Jimmy Webb, here we have Donna Summer, la Diva herself, (and let's face it, even the Great Engleesh Actorrrr, Richard Harris. covered this amazing song in the very same millennium (1968)).

Here's the wonderful Donna singing of Los Angeles' MacArthur Park in Holland later in her golden career.

This was a hit for Donna in 1977, again when I was a fair and slender, innocent and naive, Teen:

I know it's not a Country song, like the rest of my travels this week in pictures... But I do love a bit of Donna, and I Feel Love was a favourite of my mother's too, and she jumped off her bus one summer's day in the Haymarket, Newcastle in 1978.

She was a public service bus driver. She transported pensioners and pupils, drunks and ne'er do wells, and she was very good at it.

For some reason, there in the Seventies, she ran into a little indie record store that's since been pulled down (I checked on Friday!) and gave me the UK's Top 3 singles (45s) as a present. It wasn't my birthday, it wasn't Christmas. It was an unsolicited present from her, and I was made up. ...I must have been behaving myself at school, because my mother, early in our lives together, wasn't prone to random acts of affection, particularly with me, although I know she loved me very dearly... I had a particularly closeted working class upbringing...

I remember that I loved Boney M's Brown Girl In The Ring, (and hated Rivers of Babylon, but my grandad who lived with us enjoyed it instead), and I listened endlessly to Donna's A and B sides, ('Can't we just sit down and talk it over?').

...It's annoying me that I can't remember what the third single was but I mustn't have loved it as much.

It was the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee and we had a war-time style tea party in the street, and I was one of the oldest kids to go! I still have the commemorative Fifty Pence piece, a coin and a notebook I was given by the street's residents. I'm sure they're not worth anything.

Apparently they're not!

I'd been to see Star Wars at our local flea-pit, and complained to the usherette because you couldn't see the desert scenes that well because of the layer of ingrained smoke and grime on the screen that had been there since the Thirties! How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!

I had probably outgrown wearing my burgundy nylon Oxford bags and a cheesecloth blouse with angel sleeves. I had two, one white and pink, one blue. I wore impossibly high platforms then.

...My cankles have never been the same since. I actually tripped up in the street this week and have been hobbling like a Hobbit ever since, with a blister the size of a saucer to match! I blamed the dodgy wonky pavements in the city, but I know that my cankles are to blame.

Back to the past - I had a skateboard then that my dad had made using a plank of two by four with a cast-off roller skate. I recall falling off it a lot and it was not flexible in the slightest.

...My ankles have always been weak. Maybe I need to blame the skateboard?

Anyhoo, Donna was black, beautiful and effortlessly cool, never mind her voice that could melt frozen butter, and I so wanted to be her, glowing, in her golden pleated skirt, her hair all fanned out in a V shape...

When I wasn't playing with my Klackers!

The Great Wave off Kanagawa...

How time flies while the waves, weeks and hours ebb and flow, non?!...

It's been a long winter, hasn't it? I've never known snow fall in March.

And so, I pulled pieces of this article together more than a year ago, during a BBC documentary concerning The Private Life of a Masterpiece. Please forgive the more pseudo-ivory-tower feel of my bloglette today, mes chip butties, but I love this iconic piece of art and used it as inspiration for the first piece of stained glass I ever designed...

This depicts a big fish, possibly a whale, caught between the towering heart-shaped curls of two giant waves in Prussian Blue.

Did you know that, the artist of THE GREAT WAVE, Katsushika Hokusa, was adopted into a family of mirror makers?



The print is now over 170 years old, with much relevance still for our century, of global losses and wins, of waves and loss, amidst landslides and tsunami...

And did you know that the original no longer exists, only the print?

This is a piece of art that has been lampooned in its time, and stands to serve for all of Japanese art, while it isn't really perceived to be representative of Japan at all by those who live there...

In the early nineteenth century, the artist was apprenticed to a well-known artist at an early age, and became adept at flower paintings and Erotica - Pillow Books, among other things...

At a time in his life, believing his best work was behind him, a series of events created the need for him to return to work to create his masterpiece, his legacy - His wife died, his grandson gambled away all his savings, leaving the artist penniless.

He left home with his daughter to live in a temple, and he went back to what he knew best, with renewed energies. The Great Wave was his sun, his moon and his stars. Within it we see the devastating powers of nature, and the relative insignificance of man in the face of nature...

(My husband loves reading the New Scientist and, did you know, in modern science, great waves like this do exist - this is not a Tsunami, a freak wave... Only recently have seamen reporting such terrible waves actually been believed... It is likely that this was a large okinami, an ocean wave).

There had been a distinct tradition of Japanese art for hundreds of years - Called the 'Floating World' (1600 - 1867) - This period invoked art involving sensual indulgence, pleasure-seeking and hedonism: The moon, cherry blossoms, maples, sumo wrestlers and samurai, floating, wine, women, geishas and prostitutes, all evoking a motiveless, rudderless way of life.

All were Edo period symbols of living life in the moment... Of rising at a time of economic boom - This pertained to the citizens' culture... A closed society those who had, and those who had-not...



Images of actors also covered walls in many homes, the Kabuki was very popular - Theatre and what lay on the surface was all - Actors' images were sold cheaply as posters and graced the homes of beautiful women and geishas alike - These were also the female pin ups of the day...



At this stage, Japan had been cut off from the rest of the world. Examples of Western Art came in to the country via the ports at Nagasaki, and the Dutch East India Company - The printer may have studied European prints and engravings, beginning to copy the work and style, even the medium, in some of his works - Learning from oils, and seeing European perspectives in a Japanese setting.

He developed a series of prints showing little waves on beaches with fashionably dressed people enjoying the scene. Waves were to feature in his works for the next thirty years...

In a staggering concept to make some money, landscapes featuring Mount Fuji became very popular, however, the printer's publisher reaped most of the rewards, knowing what would sell to Joe Public, Hokusai's 36 Views of Mt. Fuji in all weathers and seasons, from all viewpoints and perspectives...

These images attracted tourists seeking Picture Postcards of the Divine Mountain - Deemed to be a deity. There were the religious buyers and ordinary folk, farmers, fishermen, wives, servants... Ordinary people. Those with Buddhist beliefs saw oarsmen, going with the flow of life, not fighting the wave. Were they dreaming on mortality?

This print came towards the portent of the end of the Floating World, with its 'too good to last' lifestyle, and disaster waiting around the corner...

It had as its gimmick, its Unique Selling Point if you like, a newly imported pigment which did not fade, Prussian Blue. In the print you can see a variety of shapes, a number of circles and triangles being projected into the picture - To the viewer it seems as if we are looking through a telescope...

The work might have only taken minutes to execute in draft, blocking out every single line, then sticking the image face down on a cherry wood printing block, the paper was then peeled away with the image remaining stuck on the wood, to be carved out by the carver. Hence, the original drawing does not survive the process...


Other colour blocks would then be cut, and printed one by one, so as to be overlaid and to bring the whole design together...

This print influenced impressionists who also owned the print and features from it crop up in many of their paintings...

I wonder when art historians, and ordinary people from the future, look at much of the art of today, such as Tracey Emin's tent and Damien Hirst's pickled half-calf, what stories will they tell of our throw-away and materialistic, hedonistic society?

...I wonder.

Please feel free to tell me what turns you on about art, mes bloggy Rembrandts?