Consortium of Seven: Year 4

A photoblog featuring clouds and blue light, the blue that comes after sunset with a certain cloud coverage.  Cute cart Not a fan of McMansions but the clouds and exterior lighting are nice.  Earlier in the week…Cute notebooks! Artist JL. I am always appalled by this R.  Not sure if this brick washed up on the shore or if it came from a beachfront demolition. No blood in it that I could see. I moved it away from barefooted people.  Loveliness.  Florida is big sky country, too.  ❤️

I quite often write quotes or little notes for the blog into my phone. I’ve often used them. But I have to remember to type in where I heard them or the credit will never be given. I thought I was definitely watching something on TV when someone said, “It’s very important to look great if you want to make a point.” It might’ve been drag queens on YouTube but whatever, I didn’t write down who said it. It’s going to annoy me because it’s true. You at least might feel more confident if you looked your best & knew it. In any case, portraits don’t always have to be making a point. Sometimes they’re just a record of a person who was here. Frans Hals (1580/5-1666), Verdonck , c. 1627 Anyone that likes a portrait surely loves a Frans Hals. It’s the honesty & good humour in most of his subjects. You can tell he likes humanity in all its flawed glory. He finds beauty, fun & interest in the ordinary, wrinkly & downtrodden. His paintings are wonderful & lively, often humorous. ...

      The final days of April this weekend, here in Eastern PA nature seems intent on holding to those showers. Trying to keep a glass half full perspective on another damp weekend, I've plenty to do indoors and it appears I'll be given another weekend's excuse for not starting on those yard chores. If I want the glass to be full, I can just leave it on a windowsill.       Arriving yesterday on Netflix, just under two years since season one, is the eight-episode second season of Sweet Tooth . ( I'd first mentioned the series back in early June of 2021. )       An adaptation of a 40-issue comics series of the same name, written and drawn by Jeff Lemire back in 2009-12. It tells of an event that comes to be known as The Great Crumble, a decade before the main events of this series, where a pandemic comes close to wiping out mankind, while at the same time some children begin to be born as human-animal hybrids. These t...

 THIS IS A WEIRD ONE, FOLKS.  The fourth movie in the Universal Invisible Man  series, this is so so  the basic story of the invisible man formula crammed into a WWII story that it's almost hilarious.  No, it is kind of hilarious.  Frank Griffin Jr (Jon Hall, probably best known for the John Ford movie The Hurricane ) is the grandson of the original IM and somehow has the formula.  So naturally, he gets recruited in Manhattan by the Allies to use the formula, become invisible and spy on the Axis. Does Griffin use his abilities to play tricks on various German and Japanese leaders?  Oh, of course he does.  Is a lot of the movie just excuses to have various objects flying around on fishing lines?  Totally.   Is this a great entry?  Oh, absolutely not.  It's goofy and overcomplicated and way too long; but am I ever going to not recommend something with Peter Lorre as a villain?  Heck no.  Plus it has Ilona Mass...

Hello, my Lovely Readers and welcome to our next George Smiley adventure and the only one that is only tentatively connected to the world of the Circus. Are you ready?? Let's go!! An Agony Aunt (think Dear Abby) for a Christian magazine and a school teacher being forced into retirement have one thing in common: a dead woman. Carne is all abuzz with the story, but no one seems to know the truth. George Smiley enters our story from stage left in this tale of murder most foul. Our story begins with Terrence Fielding . It's his last half at Carne School where he has held his post since the end of the War. He is making a point of having everyone to dinner, the boys all to tea before he leaves. Then we meet Miss Ailsa Brimley, the aforementioned Agony Aunt, as she is going through her work mail. Miss Brimley hasn't always been an advice columnist. She used to work with George Smiley in the Circus during the War. And it is to George Smiley she turns  when one ofher l...

True, this is Episode 39 of 40, but you haven't missed the boat. All episodes to date can be found at the Facebook Page "Freedom Island - modern suspense."    

Last week, I wrote about Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas and the six tracks they recorded for the Paramount label in Grafton, Wisconsin, in the spring of 1930. As I noted in that piece, Wiley’s given name was Lillie Mae and Thomas was actually called L.V., her initials. Since then, thoughts of the two and the piece I wrote have been tumbling around in my head, reminding me of things I maybe should have included and of things I may have left unclear.  I failed to mention that although little is known about Wiley, more is known about Thomas. Research by blues historian Robert “Mack” McCormick presented – perhaps not all that ethically, but that’s another story – by Jeremiah John Sullivan in the New York Times tells us that Thomas was born in Houston, died there and is buried there and much more as well. Thomas, in Sullivan’s “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie,” come more fully to life, with tales of being a young musician, of the recording sessions in Grafton, and of her long life in...

I love my commute, driving in the darkness, listening to my audiobook. It’s relatively passive activity. True, I’m focusing on the road, driving and listening, but that’s it. It’s not active, not hands on,I'm  above the ground racing onward.  My mind occupied with someone else’s story. Sometimes I listen to music. By the time I get to school the sun is coming up and all the neighborhood roosters are crowing. It’s funny to me that it’s my favorite time of day. It made me think about AI and what it may eventually bring. AI can think for us, write for us, even work for us.  It can drive a car for you.  For how much longer will someone say their favorite part of the day is picking fruit? Sewing clothes? Cleaning the house, rocking a baby? Walking their dog, Riding a horse? Climbing in bed with someone they love?  How important is it that so much of our lives is experienced in our minds? In our opinions? In being absorbed with video and audio, in being passive? Is my...

Today is Earth Day 2023.  Protect and support our environment.  Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967.

        Too much else on my plate at the moment, on the entertainment side it's likely going to be about as much as I can spare just to keep up with the shows I'm following. Most of the new(er) item's I'll touch on farther below I probably won't find the time and/or focus for this weekend or into next week.       This Wednesday saw the season finale for The Mandalorian over on Disney+. With a minorly flawed but nonetheless welcome in tone close-out for the season. Some people are complaining, but some people seem to live to complain. While I chafed a little at some of the staging, I think I needed happy resolutions enough to see the decisions favorably. We're left in a good place for the start of season four, which has already been written and is currently well into pre-production.        Thursday saw the series finale for Star Trek: Picard , mostly bringing some characters' stories to a close -- or close enoug...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Beautiful weather this week in Richmond, everything is blooming nicely and....Chicago had snow.  But I was there last weekend for Easter and to see the family and I actually got around to some of my favorite stores back home.  (Shout out to Reckless Records, especially; Plan 9 Music here in Richmond is also pretty fantastic and I was so happy to discover them.)  So let's get into the first batch of things I found. _________________________________________ Starting off with something I picked up at the Book Table in Oak Park, this is a book about Black horror cinema over the decades from a professor of communication studies at Northwestern and an entertainment journalist, both of whom were featured in the excellent documentary Horror Noire .  Was I delighted to open it up and find a section on terrible hip-hip songs in horror movies?  Absolutely.  Because that means they're both serious about their subject and also that ...

History is near the top of the list for non-fiction I read most.  Biography is a close second, and today I'm showing you a couple of historical biographies I've been reading.  In the photo below, the large book behind the other two is a coffee table book I borrowed from the local library. It looks at the big new events of the 20th century. When I got to the summation of the Rosenbergs' trial, I was horrified by just this brief summary of the events. I knew the couple had been railroaded and made examples of, but holy cow.    This led me to buy the fairly-recent Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy by Anne Sebba at our local bookstore. I also found a used copy online of a slightly older book, The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case by Sam Roberts. I was lucky enough to find the Talking Books version too so that's ideal for me. (The physical book has photos and it's easier to take notes from a book I don't need to fast-forward through.) Here's a ...

 After today, only one more regular episode and then the epilogue!  All episodes to date can be found at the Facebook Page "Freedom Island - modern suspense."    

 So, Geeshie Wiley . . .  I happened, in 2014, on a piece from the New York Times Magazine , a fascinating and long multi-media exploration titled “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie” by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It begins:  In the world of early-20th-century African-American music and people obsessed by it, who can appear from one angle like a clique of pale and misanthropic scholar-gatherers and from another like a sizable chunk of the human population, there exist no ghosts more vexing than a couple of women identified on three ultrarare records made in 1930 and ’31 as Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great, but in none does the Venn diagram of greatness and lostness reveal such vast and bewildering co-extent. In the spring of 1930, in a damp and dimly lit studio, in a small Wisconsin village on the western shore of Lake Michigan, the duo recorded a batch of songs that for more than half a century have ...

A photo blog of Naples, FL from this week's activities. Prize box hits and fun in the sun, nature walks and happy hours…

When my head is clear, I like doing lists of artists, works or themes on Facebook. Sometimes these lists will appear in the blog, because if I’ve done the finding of images, the words will follow. The picture collection is the time-consuming bit (which doesn’t say much about the writing, but never mind).  Last September, I was beginning a new list. There’s always a sense of hope & excitement starting a new list. Sad, I know but art is EXCITING. “I’m doing a ‘100 Scottish Artists’ list.” “Okay…” “You can get an easy fifty & I’d say eighty if you think about it. Without looking anything up.” Surprised, “Really?!” “Yes! Try it.”  “Nah.”  Exactly. Why would he? I had just said I was going to. Despite both being arty types, this is the level of chat around this list that my partner & I had. He could think of an easy fifty, you know.    & he’ll read this & not remember the conversation, haha. William Strang (1859–1921), Janet Elizabeth Ashbee (1878...