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Mansory Range Rover Autobiography LWB (2015) Engine Engine 5000cc V8 Supecharged
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The Mansory version of the Range Rover has a new bonnet, radiator grille with horizontal slats, quad fog lights, LED daytime running lights and new air intakes. he wheel arches have been flared at both the front and the rear while extended side skirts have been fitted resulting in a vehicle 60mm wider than the standard offering.
Internally Mansory offers hand crafted leather with decorative stitching, electrically controlled curtains to separate the driver and front passenger from the rear passengers. New tinted windows and numerous alacantra surfaces, customisable with ornamental wood, piano lacquer and carbon fibre accents available to order.
The vehicles rides on 22-inch wheels with 305 tyres. Ride height can also be lowered by 45 mm if requested, the rear gets a large rooftop spoiler, new bumper and bespoke dual tailpipes.
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Shot 19:05:2015 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany - Ref 110-187
Tereska Torres - Women's Barracks
Gold Medal Books 132, 1951
Cover Artist: Baryé Phillips
Originally published in 1950, this account of life among female Free French soldiers in a London barracks during World War II sold four million copies in the United States alone, and many more millions worldwide. Women's Barracks is based on the real-life experiences of the author, Tereska Torres, who escaped from occupied France, arrived as a refugee in London, and joined other exiled Frenchwomen enlisting in Charles DeGaulle’s army, then stationed in Britain awaiting an invasion of their homeland by Allied forces.
But Women’s Barracks is no ordinary war story. The grim setting of an urban military barracks—with its freezing dorms, rationed food, and unbecoming regulation underwear—became the setting for one of the steamiest novels of its time. Leaving “normal” civilian life behind, the women enter an all-female realm, where passionate attachments soon form—between older experienced women and young innocents, between butch officer types and their femmes subordinates. And for those with more traditional leanings, there was a city full of soldiers to be had—sometimes two or three at a time.
Despite a tone that is frank rather than lurid, Women’s Barracks was banned for obscenity in several states. It was also denounced by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952 as an example of how the paperback industry was “promoting moral degeneracy”; not one of the committee members could even bring himself to read the offending passages aloud for the Congressional record.
But the novel became a record-breaking bestseller, and inspired a whole new genre: lesbian pulp.
Last image I posted referred to my 11 plus pass. Well my mother wanted me to go to Cardiff High School but that was for posh and clever kids, I wanted to go to Cathays High it was near where I lived but ended up here. This is the school I went to, although for the first two years it was located in Fitzalan Place/Howard Gardens next to the Cardiff City Centre. The school was then relocated to Leckwith Common. In my time it was an all boys grammar school.
Have very few memories of my school years none good. Recall there was an initiation for the new boys we had to run the length of a shelter while everyone else kicked you up the backside. Also there was a competition to see who could pee highest up the wall in the outside toilet. It was a strict disciplinary school all the Masters wore cloaks and mortar boards and we wore green and yellow blazers and caps. We were caned quite regularly.
I recall that shortly after moving to the new school tragically a student fell down the centre of the stairwell and if my memory serves me right he died.In the old school we were not allowed to play soccer only rugby. Only positive point I had a good education and left with 10 'O' levels.
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This is a book cover I illustrated for the Folio Society. The original portrait of Gandhi was made using linocut. For more info on my illustration work, visit www.nickmorley.co.uk
I learned fairly early that in wildlife rehabilitation, it is easy to bite off more than you can chew. The emus walked out of their box and into our living room with all the assurance of a pair of aristocrats returning to their ancestral seat, and looked very determined to take up residence. Endearing as they were, they would, of course, have to be moved on to more spacious accommodation before they put on a growth spurt. Fortunately, there were two wildlife parks in Canberra, and these were well equipped for raising larger birds and mammals and preparing them for release, and to one of these they went. I remember their striped heads looking out at me from the top of their box as they were carried away.
There were other tasks which were best undertaken in small doses. My experiences of rearing baby possums and kangaroos were usually limited to a single week, often when I was sick at home. More than this was quite impossible for a schoolboy, for marsupial babies are every bit as demanding as human ones, albeit a good deal less raucous. The most exciting of these was Norman, a young grey kangaroo who, by the time he went on to his next foster-parent, was capable of leaping the fourteen steps to our back verandah in a single bound.
Once, the vet to whom I obsessively apprenticed myself every holiday received a wedge-tailed eagle with a broken wing: far too dangerous a proposition for me to handle. The proprietor of the same local wildlife park and two of his burly assistants were called in to wrestle the bird to the floor whilst the vet examined its fractured wing. I remember the fixed and malignant glare in its eye, and its talons as big as a man’s hand.
Some of the animals that I did take on nevertheless taxed me to the utmost. Amongst these, the friar birds were perhaps the most remarkable. I have already mentioned the unspeakable agony I experienced on more than one occasion after inadvertently allowing a friar bird to grasp my hand with its claws, but after treatment, a new and equally taxing challenge arose. Friar birds are honeyeaters, and are so named because their vulturine heads and necks are completely bald, as though their monkish barber had grown a little overenthusiastic with the tonsuring shears. The exposed skin is black, and the eyes are a deep orange. At the base of the beak, in front of those eyes, there is a knobbly lump. This combination of characteristics lends the friar bird a rather demonic appearance, which is augmented by the bird’s yobbling, subtly human-sounding voice.
The friar bird with whom I grew most familiar was, predictably, christened Friar Tuck – a name which delighted some of my friends, who were just discovering the appeal of spoonerisms – and he had an insatiable appetite for honey, fruit and insects. Honey, mixed with warm water, was tied in test-tubes to the side of his cage, where it could be conveniently lapped by his black and feathery tongue. Soon, I discovered that he was partial to bottled baby food, particularly ‘fruit and honey breakfast’, and shopkeepers began to look quizzically at this fifteen-year-old boy and his basketfuls of baby-food purchases. So far, so good: fruit and honey were in abundant supply. The insects were the problem. Anyone who has worked in wildlife rehabilitation will confirm that insectivorous birds are peculiarly demanding. I had the requisite colony of mealworms, but it was impossible to induce them to reproduce at quite the exponential rate that was required. In any case, friar birds cannot live on meal-worms alone: they require variety, or else they get bad-tempered. My parents invested in a glowing purple blowfly-zapper for their kitchen, and I found myself constantly checking the tray beneath it for the half-fried remains. The bird didn't seem to object to the blackened bits. I turned over stones looking for Christmas beetle larvae and worms, but usually only found red-backed spiders. There were innumerable woodlice, of course, but most birds (chickens excepted) seem to find these distasteful. Soon, I was devising insect traps with all the inventiveness of a trap-door spider, enslaved to a bald-headed bird with evil eyes which gobbled everything I offered, and then squawked expectantly for more.
Perhaps, after all, it would have been easier to take on the emus.
Photo hand-tinted by Leslie Watson, c. 1986.
Pictorial Autobiography
This is 'King's Weston House' in Bristol where in 1979 I attended my 10 week C.I.D. Course. We had to work hard but you were certainly taught to play hard as well. There were 3 monthly exams. The first I came joint 1st, out of a class of 30. Mid way I came 9th and the final exam I passed but came 19th. If before you went you weren't a good drinker you certainly were when you returned. I can distinctly remember a couple of episodes from the course. We got invited to a Pernod presentation night in the infamous Mandrake Club, where everything was half price, I remember walking out of the club feeling okay and suddenly the sky fell in and apparently I fell over a wall and came to in the back of a Police Van.
I was in those days a good card player and myself and a lad from Manchester used to return early on a Sunday evening and call in the local pub where we'd play the locals at Don and Poker, most weeks I'd make enough to help with the cost of the social side of the course ( and a little help from the Bank Manager).
Good times : great memories.
PICTORIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I have decided to post an image per week depicting a certain memory I have of my life : together with a short narrative
In this episode I would have been about 13 years old. This is the allotments at the rear of my old house in Gabalfa, Cardiff. I recall it being a lot more overgrown. Anyway one afternoon we decided to explore the allotments, I climbed the fence (which I believe was about 100 foot tall) I jumped off into the undergrowth and landed on an old fire-grate fender. It had an exposed 6 inch nail which when straight through the bottom of my wellie and out of the top. An ambulance was called and they did not remove the fender as I was not bleeding much. I remember travelling to hospital with this enormous piece of wood attached to me. Then due to the risk of infection from the rusty nail they cut open my foot from top to bottom and cleaned the wound. I still, after 50 odd years, have the scar to remind me.
All my images are © All Rights Reserved, and must not be used without my expressed permission via Email: jazzspicey@btinternet.com
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Plug-in Hybrid
1.997 cc
4 in-line
404 pk
640 Nm
Vmax : 220 km/h
0-100 km/h : 6,8 sec
96° Brussels Motor Show
Autosalon Brussel
Salon de l'Auto Bruxelles
Brussels - Belgium
January 2018
Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2012
Street is a stage of real life drama
Street is a story of emotion and reality
You, me we all are the silent participants.
We have come to stay for a while and then we are gone for forever
But streets remain forever, conserving all the memories of those forgotten footprints.
Find me at Getty Images and 500px
The arrival of our first kookaburra heralded my own adolescence, and at the same time, immediately inaugurated a period in which I started to feel that my interests and priorities had become radically different from those of many of my high-school peers. My friends dwindled, not by design, to a handful of individuals, all of them eccentric to some degree (the closest were a would-be Georgian architect and a would-be scientific illustrator), all of them high achievers at school, and nearly all of them subject to bullying of one kind or another. My kookaburra became the personality who dominated my life, sitting on our clothes-horse in the evening, thrashing her food before swallowing it whole, following us on our coastal holidays, unperturbedly watching the passing scenery from her cage in the back of the Land-Rover, or riding magisterially on our shoulders – and it was difficult, on returning to school, to have any sense of connection with ‘normal’ adolescent pastimes.
“What did you do on the holidays?”
“Went to Lake Tabourie and watched tiger beetles on the beach. My kookaburra came too. What did you do?”
“Played Aussie Rules and mucked about with my mates. See you later.”
And behind that See you later, other words common in the Australian lingo were left unspoken: weirdo, loser, or even drongo. Too bad. If I could have had a drongo in my aviary as well, I would have done so.
Kookaburras are Australian icons, appearing on tea-caddies and cricket-balls. One of the first songs children learn to sing in primary school is “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree/ Merry, merry king of the bush is he.” Bush people need no alarm clocks; they are woken at dawn every morning by the laughing of kookaburras. Everyone knows that kookaburras eat snakes, even venomous ones. Despite this, hardly anyone really knows kookaburras, and even now, I am not sure whether I do. But to become even superficially intimate with a kookaburra is to enter a new and complex world, and one which sometimes makes human society seem absurd. Gavin Maxwell’s books on his life with otters, which I was reading at the time, communicate a similar social dislocation: a sense which can make his writing seem arrogant or misanthropic when it is in fact nothing of the sort. Living with an animal of peculiarly high intelligence and independence of spirit, especially at an impressionable age, teaches the lesson – and it is not a lesson that is easily unlearned – that human beings are merely a species, and there are other species whose qualities are undoubtedly more noble than our own. One discovers this, to a certain extent, by keeping a dog, or a duck, or a rabbit, but when one lets a wild animal into one’s home, human priorities suddenly become rather meaningless.
Kookaburras are large kingfishers: the shape of the bill and the azure wing-coverts are the most obvious signs. Like kingfishers, they perch and wait for their prey to pass beneath them, and are most commonly seen by passing motorists, adopting this ground-gazing position on power-lines and telephone wires. The neck is very flexible, and the head seems to be equipped with an invisible plumbline which helps it to maintain a constant position relative to the ground, no matter how much the body, and the branch or wire beneath it, is blowing about in the wind. Perch a kookaburra on your wrist, and move your hand up and down as though shaking someone’s hand. The kookaburra will fix you with her eye, and her head will remain absolutely still. There is something as uncanny and predatorial in this ability as there is in the habit owls have of swaying from left to right when assessing the distance between themselves and their prey. Clearly, in the case of the kookaburra, it is a prelude to the groundward plunge and the clack of the harpoon bill on an unsuspecting mouse or snake.
Remarkably, this experiment can be tried with almost any injured kookaburra taken direct from the wild, for one of the surest signs of a kookaburra’s intelligence is its adaptability and its ability to assess situations. It is impossible to perch a wild hawk, owl, magpie or currawong on your arm at the first meeting: all of these will instantly launch themselves into the air, and if a wing is broken, flap helplessly about on the ground, damaging tail feathers and primaries in the process. Try the experiment with a honeyeater, and the look of the very devil will suddenly come into its eyes, and its claws will dig into your flesh like little needles, and tear at you in the most excruciating way as the wings flap like fury. My father brought our first kookaburra home from a field trip in a cardboard box. One of her wings was badly broken, and he had found the bird on the side of the road, where she would surely have fallen victim to a fox or a feral cat had she been left unattended for long. When I opened the box, the kookaburra did not bate or scrabble: she assessed me with one eye, decided that I was there to help and not to injure, and allowed me to perch her on my wrist, the picture of decorum.
That moment was, and still is, a defining one in my life. This sudden understanding between a human being and a wild creature changed my whole perspective, just as, I believe, the kookaburra’s whole perspective was changing. Both of us were adapting at a thousand miles per hour.
So there is my father, half way from Canberra to the South Coast, with Kooky the First on his shoulder, eating a strip of meat, and very politely declining to thrash it against her perch, as was her normal custom. I am behind the camera, blissfully aware of my freshly-confirmed weirdo status.
New Range Rover Evoque Autobiography
Land Rover is introducing the Autobiography name to the Range Rover Evoque for the first time with two new premium derivatives to the line-up for 2015: the luxurious Autobiography tops the range, complemented by the more powerful, more agile Autobiography Dynamic with its 285PS turbocharged engine and optimised chassis for enhanced performance and sharper handling.
PICTORIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I have decided to post an image per week depicting a certain memory I have of my life ... together with a short narrative.
This is where it all began 64 years ago. St David's Hospital Canton Cardiff. The hospital is now a housing estate but the front facade was retained.
All my images are © All Rights Reserved, and must not be used without my expressed permission via Email: jazzspicey@btinternet.com
Please leave a comment.
One of the the sections of my living room bookshelf indicates why I need to build more shelves elsewhere in the house. Dunno why the photo is so distorted; phones really make lousy cameras.
Those biographies and autobiographies in full, ordered by subject:
o Grand Ventures, by Tom Sitton; about Phineas Banning and his progeny
o Wired, by Bob Woodward; about John Belushi
o Bismarck and the German Empire, by Erich Eyck; about Otto von Bismarck (an abridged version of a much longer work, still extraordinarily boring)
o Bismarck, by A.J.P. Taylor; about Otto von Bismarck
o Chrysler, by Vincent Curcio; about Walter Chrysler (a grovelling hagiography)
o The Magician of the Golden Dawn, by Susan Roberts; about Aleister Crowley (a gift from an unusual acquaintance I had in late 1980)
o Disney's World, by Leonard Mosley; about Walt Disney
o Genius, by James Gleick; about Richard Feynman
o Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard Feynman, et al.; about Richard Feynman
o What Do You Care What Other People Think?, by Richard Feynman, et al.; about Richard Feynman (not actually on the shelf in this photo; on Ingrid's nightstand, I think)
o Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin (autobiography)
o The First American, by H.W. Brands; about Benjamin Franklin
o The Light's on at Signpost, by George MacDonald Fraser (autobiography)
o Doing Battle, by Paul Fussell (autobiography)
o Good-Bye to All That, by Robert Graves (autobiography)
o Wanderer, by Sterling Hayden (autobiography)
o Now and Then, by Joseph Heller (autobiography) (a pretty standard narrative, not what you would expect from Heller; probably took him a week to complete it)
o An Open Book, by John Huston (autobiography)
o Keaton, by Rudi Blesh; about Buster Keaton
o Memoirs 1925-1950, by George F. Kennan (autobiography)
o A Futile and Stupid Gesture, by Josh Karp; about Doug Kenney
o Fighting Bob La Follette, by Nancy C. Unger; about Robert La Follette
o Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence (autobiography)
o Twice in a Lifetime, by Charles Luckman (autobiography)
o American Caesar, by William Manchester; about Douglas MacArthur
o The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley, et al.; about Malcolm X
o The Vintage Mencken, by Alistair Cooke; about H.L. Mencken (not strictly a biography, probably doesn't belong here)
o Girls Like Us, by Sheila Weller; about Joni Mitchell (and Carole King and Carly Simon, but I was only really interested in the Joni Mitchell stuff)
o Jack Northrop and the Flying Wing, by Ted Coleman; about Jack Northrop
o The Passion of Ayn Rand, by Barbara Branden; about Ayn Rand
o Beyond the Outer Shores, by Eric Enno Tamm; about Ed Ricketts (very interesting guy; Johnny Depp should play him in the movie version)
o The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris; about Theodore Roosevelt
o My Years with General Motors, by Alfred Sloan (autobiography) (great book)
o Mr. Republican, by James T. Patterson; about Robert A. Taft (a mediocre book about a pretty unlovable Senator)
o The Proud Highway, by Hunter S. Thompson (autobiography) (again, not strictly an autobiography, it's really a collection of letters going way back to the beginning)
o Palimpsest, by Gore Vidal (autobiography)
o Point to Point Navigation, by Gore Vidal (autobiography) (Gore Vidal wrote two autobiographies; color me shocked!)
o Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, by Martin Stannard; about Evelyn Waugh
o P.G. Wodehouse, by Frances Donaldson; about P.G. Wodehouse
o Many Masks, by Brendan Gill; about Frank Lloyd Wright
I just noticed Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation isn't on this shelf. I guess I put in in the history section, since it's not really a complete autobiography.
Mrs. Harry Austin Deuel
Schenley Apartments
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Autobiography of Dorothy Deuel
When I came to our home to stay I was very tiny I seemed to be a very welcome little stranger, in a loving house with two great big people— They said I brot my love right along with me— So it was a very happy place to live— Those two great big people always seemed to laugh so much— They sang to me— and played with me always—
In all stories the heriones beauty is pen pictured, to create an immediate interest in a person that seems to be very unusual— now that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes— I am only whispering the fact— That my outstanding point of beauty was a baby head covered with real dark tresses— Very unusual for tiny babies— The many curious friends who came to see Harry and May's baby, all remarked about them—
A friend (Mrs. Bullen) loaned my parents— The cunningest "Rock-A-Bye" cradle— Old fashioned and dear— My Muddy modeled it into a love nest— All pink- All point-de sprit— All ribbons— All pillows—
This little house all my own was moved from room to room— where I was given the center of the stage from infancy—
It was December fourth when I was ushered into this wide world— So my first bright lights were on my first xmas tree when I was three weeks old— Daddy was so full of glee— Daddy was getting his first taste of Xmas— so "Jolly and Gay"— That Muddy seemed so blessed with- One really can't tell much about one's babyhood— It is like the bachelor who was constantly being called upon to admire and label a fresh new baby in the homes of old friends— He cleverly made all fond parents so happy by saying: "Well! Well! That IS a baby!!!"
Perhaps my first accident would have an element of tragedy to create exciting reading— The first game I played was "Ball"— So one night I was acting like cheer leaders do now— Attracting attention with deafening yelling— My parents so new in knowing how to care for the young— did everything to quiet me— At last they discovered a tiny hot water bottle had burned my baby leg, very severely— Oh! How guilty my very big nurses felt— So you see I learned in infancy— "Burny! Burny!" Stay away from fire—
Many a time I have heard my Daddy tell of another near tragedy— When it was "Bye-Lo-Time"— and I was trying to keep the sandman away— I would stand up in my new bed— with big high sides— and hold on to the sides— Then to attract attention I would jump a little— then a little higher— higher— Oh! Oh! Oh— One night I pitched— head first over the top— fell in a heap on the floor— So now my point— My Muddy held me close in her arms and rocked me fast asleep—
I was so busy— that I was walking at nine months— I caused another panic— by creeping up the stairs when very tiny— Muddy called me— and my "Goo Goo" came from the top step— I was looking down ready to pitch forward— I was gleeful over how far up I was— Muddy's heart jumped right up into her throat— She thot she would not reach the top of the stairs in time to save me— That may have been a forwarning— I have so often been on the top of something ready to fall head first. When some steady hand pulled me back into safety—
The next few years of my life just seemed to be proper diet— Proper training to make me a model child— Parents have such day dreams over the perfection of their babies— That is why most dreams can't come true. They are based on fairy tale foundations of just alluring hopes—
My school days started in advance of most children— Mostly due to the fact of my insistant bothering everyone around— with many inquiring questions— Partly because it was convenient and agreeable to put me in the most delightful schools known as Gulliford Academy— A school unique- in its being run by a Russian lady of much distinguishment— Her husband an English Professor of selected education— Their two daughters fascinating in their purely English Type— This foursome of great individuality played a very important part in my early education
My mental desires were always directed at home and in school— I was taught concentration— However my versatile inclinations were never sidetracked- neither was I made to walk just in the "middle of the road" Books— dancing— acting— music play— all were used to let me have a creative make believe world of my own—
At an early age my summers were always spent in a Country Home— my parents built way up high in The Green Horn Range— "Cuerna Verde" let me live where I could see the open beauty of a clear sky— High Peaks of "Stately Dignity"— Pines so strong— and smelly of freshness— A breathe of fields of new mown Timothy Hay— Glorious sunshine of Colorado's own variety— Thunder storms spectacular— All nature torn to pieces— A babbling brook— for mud pie days— and wading joys— and lively nooks to read beside— All this seemed to make me visualize real beauty—
Paper dolls were my manikens— On them I designed clothes– Furniture Catalogues— Gave me a chance to play house, with a view to interior decorating— My Crayons were busy with color and drawing— My pen fashioning fairy tales— So all my make believe dreams came to be living vital things— found something not written in books— Tutoring never taught— Just what was in my inner self to thrive—
Let me tell you a wee bit about my really young lady girlhood— It was conventional in having my first real party dress— My first dancing party— My first real beau— My Thrills came from attention of young boy friends— My love of adventure was expressed in shooting hearts from my ever active eyes— and perhaps flirtatious manners— It was always kept me in a constant state of inconstancy. For Absence never makes my heart grow fonder— It only gives me new worlds to conquer—
All that period of my life was interwoven in activities in school and social affairs— Playing in pleasant parts— Displaying my love of dancing— Playing the organ at Sunday School— So my excess energy— and versatile desire were wisely spent in different channels of self expression—
At sixteen I was transplanted from the home of my childhood Into a soft languid air of a Southern Atmosphere— My school life among girls well born— Carefully shielded made me a square peg in a round hole— For their only business in life was love and hopefully marriage— I was a different element with my desire to do and accomplish big things in other fields— In those years a play I wrote— Poems I scribbled— Posters I drew Love I tasted— A tall handsome Prince Charming came into the picture Friends of interest I made— Homes delightful were opened to me— All of this formed another part of me— Perhaps gave me a wee bit of the indefinable something "Charm"—
Now a vacation away out West— Also trips thru the South— and Florida Land— Made my from Coast to Coast sightseeing most valuable, from the days I dug caves in the sand when visiting on the Pacific Coast— To seeing where the ultras idle in the South—
My next change seemed abrupt— For I came East— Found myself placed in a school of Fine Arts— Temperamental and in this Dramatic School— Once again my wings carried me before my first foot lights— to play important dramatic roles—
At the age of eighteen— Into the great melting pot of New York— I was left to dream- and think and push and fight my way for recognition— Those years record stepping stones well trodden by many— and I being always a fortunate creature— Found many ways to use and display my early opportunities— So now I am known as a professional Dorothy Deuel— Having written— sung— played and danced my way into the hearts of a kind and tolerant public— To accept the things I shared happily— and wanted so sincerely— “A Career"— All my own— Thru those years— The devotion, the love, the protection of my adorable sister Eleanor was my richest possession— and greatest privelege— Many love affairs tampered with the lock on my heart— I gave many keys to my Castle— Many Prince Charming's have been housed within that sacred place. Yet no key has ever been able to open The Masters Room— So my Castle is still unnamed— My deepest love is the cherished friendship that lives in me for my darling sister— She is my fairest and most ardent admirer—
All thru this life of mine there has been two other big people I told you about— The people that lived in the house where I was left when so tiny a baby— They have always had a love divine for me— Then a little brother came into my life— He seemed to cherish and cement a family love between all of us– So always I have been surrounded by love— Their praise has been generous— Their devotion untiring— Their pride in any simple achievement so deep— that I must prove their faith in me was worthy of perhaps a sacrifice from them— A tear often caused by me— A worry too— by their over anxious moments not to let me fall from the top step— or the top of the world—
My published cover design on The Episcopal Actors Guild of America— seems to be an answer to all the faith they had in just "poor little me"— They tell me my road is all sunlight— My way easy to find— to do bigger and better things in a career not limited to just one special play world—
So tonight on my last evening of being "just twenty one"— When I kneel down to say:- “Now I lay me down to sleep"— I am going to say— "Please God bless my sister— and make her future life with Larry all beautiful and true"— "Please God— Bless my little brother" Give him an equal fighting chance to win, in this complicated World of ours"— "Please God— Bless my Daddy Dear" Whom I love best of all"—
"Please God: God Bless some dear boys— whom I have known— and hearts, my life has hurt"—
Please God— Bless my Muddy— Who has tried to "see all"— and "know all" that was best for that baby, she has nourished and cared for, for twenty one years— Goodnight dear God— I will be twenty-two tomorrow— God I will be a great big girl then"—
"Dorfy" Deuel—
Written in Pittsburgh on the Second of December, Nineteen hundred and twenty six.
The envelope is marked in Dorothy's hand writing: An autobiography of Dorothy Deuel written by her mother for the first birthday which came after Dorothy knew she would lose her sister Eleanor in marriage.tomorrow— God I will be a great big girl then"—
"Dorfy" Deuel—
Written in Pittsburgh on the Second of December, Nineteen hundred and twenty six.
The envelope is marked in Dorothy's hand writing: An autobiography of Dorothy Deuel written by her mother for the first birthday which came after Dorothy knew she would lose her sister Eleanor in marriage.
Robert Cremean in his studio with the lay-in of the Outer Wall of VATICAN CORRIDOR, A Non-Specific Autobiography, 1975
He wrote:
"…I believe the idea of creating oneself is what we are about. That’s the reason we’re here. That’s the point of life. You can believe that whether you are a Jew, a Christian, or a Buddhist. There are no actual rewards. The real reward is in the creation. Vatican Corridor is about creating oneself."
In 1974 Robert Cremean created his sixty page Preparatory Study for VATICAN CORRIDOR, A Non-Specific Autobiography, 1974–1976, the second part of THE NARCISSUS PENTOLOGY. In the introduction to the publication of the Preparatory Study the publisher wrote: “This manuscript provides us with the opportunity to read the artist’s philosophical concepts for that specific work of art and to understand how these concepts are interpreted symbolically through the human figure. Because the basic philosophy—one man equals all men—is inherent in the work, the artist’s non-specific autobiography contains and is an extension of our own.”The pages of the Preparatory Study usually accompany the exhibition of the sculpture thus marrying the sculptor’s visual and written concepts with the completed piece.
Every artist, no matter the medium, creates an autobiography through his or her work, whether deliberately or not. Whatever ideas and forms, whatever metaphors and historical evidence are made manifest, the entire body of work is an expression of all that has itself formed the artist, an ongoing endpoint of everything previously thought and experienced. The work
of Robert Cremean may be viewed, as it is in VATICAN CORRIDOR, A Non-Specific Autobiography and within the concept “One man equals all men,” as the deliberate creation of
a metaphorical autobiography, a detailed analysis of who and what he is, was and may yet become; it is a metaphorical analysis of everything that has formed him. A study of all subsequent works by him makes clear his continuing analysis in metaphor of himself, of religion, of war, of commerce and of Art, a pertinacious metaphorical exposition of the culture and of “culture-makers,” of how “culture-makers” actually form and bind our culture and how they have, in the process, distorted the very concept of Art, how they ill-used artists, women, homosexuals,
and children—all of us and each other—during the millenia, and a continuing analysis of 8/6/45, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima from which date he has declared “All the metaphors
have changed.”
And it was with VATICAN CORRIDOR, A Non-Specific Autobiography, that he shifted almost exclusively from the making of individual pieces consisting of only one physical element to the creation of major installation works consisting of various individual elements, each executed in diverse media, studio sections that completely filled whatever studio in which he worked. TERMINUS: Studio Section 1981–1983 was the first of the so-named studio sections he created. About the second, he wrote: “With TERMINUS II: Studio Section 1985–1990 began a flow of work receptive to everything I am, enfolding me in Process.” No longer did he make individual pieces, a collection of which would then be exhibited for sale in a commercial art gallery. He chose thereafter to continue the precedent established with the filling of his studio with work that was all of a piece. He wrote:
"I began to use the Wall as a separate voice in the work, setting it back rather like a Greek chorusfor witness and commentary on the action within the sculpture which fronts it: cast shadows,
interconnections of line, color, content, etc."
The “walls” became spaces whereon he recorded his thoughts, wrote essays, made images in bas-relief and in three dimension. Combined with three dimensional sculptures placed in front
of these wall panels and within the center space bounded by the four walls of the studio, these large bodies of work, these studio sections, continued to be created even with the change of
studios. With the exception of only one, its parts dispersed by a collector, all of the studio sections to the present are housed in the permanent collections of various museums.
After many very successful one-person gallery shows, Robert Cremean vowed never again to place his work in a commercial gallery, his reasons clearly explained. The following is excerpted
from his book THE TENTH ARCH, A Sequel to VATICAN CORRIDOR, A Non-Specific Autobiography:
"All of my previous relationships with gallery dealers were oil and water turbulence. Any consideration of continuance within the artist/gallery/collector triangle was precluded by experience and almost physical revulsion. By excluding commerce from the equation, there was the very real possibility for an interchange and complexity almost limitless in scope and service… As artists’ visions differ, so do their needs, desires and ambitions. In this age of exaggeration, celebrity has been given high value. Whoness has replaced Whatness and the culture has adjusted accordingly. The traditional artist/gallery/collector triangle is perhaps the clearest indication of this shift of emphasis: My first one-man exhibition in a commercial gallery was in 1954. The percentage of commission to the gallery was 331⁄3%,with expenses shared equally by artist and dealer (catalogues,
shipping, mailing, brochures, etc.). That percentage now stands at 50% with, in most cases, the artist required to pay all expenses. What has happened here? Obviously, the culture feels that the seller of art is of more value than the maker. This shift of emphasis in a value system is pervasive, touching all aspects of the community. By establishing the purveyor of art with so much importance, it is his product that has assumed priority, placing the artist in remove and creating a hierarchy of parasitic industry: galleries, museums, collectors, auction houses, publications, etc. The artist must pay 20% more of his income for hype. Some artists may find this acceptable in their ambition, and celebrity a valid and desirable reward. Some, however, will not. Despite the seeming all-pervasive control of art by culture-makers and middle men, there remains only one significant triangle for artists and Art: point A being the artifact, point B the artist and point
C the viewer. It is for this kind of artist that, perhaps, a non-commercial, more community oriented form might appeal. Too many of these artists are being abandoned by contemporary attitudes and patterns, causing a drastic disconnection between Art and culture. The parasitic hierarchy has distorted and opacified the significance of Art to a degree beyond definition. It is time for the artist to reclaim his identity within the societal whole; the parasites have virtually destroyed the host. New ways must be found to realign Art and culture into a more tactile symmetry."
My Way: An Autobiography Hardcover -2014
: 416 pages
by Paul Anka (Author), David Dalton (Author)
A teen idol of the 1950s who virtually invented the singer/songwriter/heartthrob combination that still tops pop music today, Paul Anka rocketed to fame with a slew of hits—from “Diana” to “Put Your Head on my Shoulder”—that earned him a place touring with the major stars of his era, including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly. He wrote Holly’s last hit, and just missed joining the rocker on his final, fatal plane flight. Anka also stepped in front of the camera in the teen beach-party movie era, scoring the movies and romancing their starlets, including Annette Funicello.
When the British invasion made his fans swoon for a new style of music—and musician--Anka made sure he wasn’t conquered. A rapier-canny businessman and image-builder who took his career into his own hands—just as he had from the very beginning, swiping his mother’s car at fourteen to drive himself, underage, to his first gigs in Quebec—Anka toured the world until he could return home in triumph. A charter member of the Rat Pack, he wrote the theme music for The Tonight Show as well as his friend Frank Sinatra’s anthem “My Way”. By the 1970s, a multi-decade string of pop chart-toppers, including “Puppy Love” and “(You’re) Having My Baby”, cemented his status as an icon.
My Way is bursting with rich, rollicking stories of the business and the people in Anka’s life: Elizabeth Taylor, Dodi Fayed, Tom Jones, Michael Jackson, Adnan Khashoggi, Little Richard, Brooke Shields, Johnny Roselli, Sammy Davis, Jr., Brigitte Bardot, Barnum & Bailey Circus acrobats, and many more. Anka is forthcoming, funny and smart as a whip about the business he’s been in for almost six decades. My Way moves from New York to Vegas, from the casino stage to backstages all over the world. It’s the most entertaining autobiography of the year.
Cy was named after Cynodon, or, as we children used to call it in south-eastern Australia, Windmill Grass, one of the commonest weeds in lawns and cricket-pitches. He had spent the first half of his life as an experimental rabbit, involved – so far as my childish understanding could make it out – in research into allergens and the production of antibodies. Specifically, I think, Cy’s duties involved sitting in a very small cage and producing antibodies to the pollen of Cynodon. He was so desirable for experimentation because he was a lop-eared rabbit, and therefore had large veins in his ears, suitable for bleeding by syringe. And here – again, remembering that in witnessing all this, I thought and understood as a child – was where the alchemy played its part. When my father reads this, he will explain it all, so that it becomes not alchemy, but science. Here is the childish version:-
The blood – or more precisely, as I knew, the serum (or was it perhaps the antiserum?) was somehow conveyed to microscope slides covered with a clear gel with the consistency of agar. Each slide was like a transparent domino: it had five pits in each half, arranged like tessaries in a mosaic. (I was, incidentally, and still am, a demon dominoes player, which is odd considering my outright, rabbit-dazzled fear of mathematics). This was immersed, along with several other slides, symmetrically arranged, into a gleaming, prismatic glass box, which was filled with the purest lilac liquid. This liquid smelled alluring but astringent, like a chemical absinth. After this, I was at a loss. Things happened, by laws immutable, and the memories are untrappable, as bubbles in an alembic.
And here is the glorious part: my father – who suffers from hay-fever as I do, and no doubt is allergic to the pollen of Cynodon, unable to countenance the callous euthanasia of Cy when he reached middle age, brought him home to me in a cardboard box. In fact, he didn’t just bring Cy: he brought Lo (short for Lolium, a parti-coloured rabbit with different-coloured eyes, and ever a jester), and he brought Z-2 (the provenance of his name eludes me, but he was the most gloriously beautiful rabbit, with precisely the colouring of a chocolate brown Burmese cat, but with more than a hint of purple), and several others whose names elude me, all of them baptised in grass pollen. I am almost certain that my father was in contravention of article such-and-such, subsection so-and-so of the labyrinthine legislation which ties into pretzels almost everything that people try to do in the Australian Capital Territory (a Utopia for bureaucrats), but he brought an excess of delight to the heart of a four-year-old child. The retired experimental rabbits were joined by a more conventionally domestic rabbit, Potterishly christened Benjamin, but it was Cy who lived the longest – at least eight years, and possibly more – and it was Cy who crystallised my thinking on Life and Death.
Cy was, you see, the Black Rabbit of Inlé. Readers whose childhoods were culturally dominated, as mine was, by Richard Adams’ twentieth century classic Watership Down will instantly understand what I mean. Other readers will not, so I beg the patience of the former. The Black Rabbit of Inlé was the Grim Reaper of rabbits: everything that was chthonic and terrifying. In Garfunkel’s song, ‘Bright Eyes’, he is the blank-eyed silhouette who arches across the hedgerows like the shadow of a crow, beckoning caricatured bunnies to their allotted Valhallas. In the original novel, he is much more: he brings myxamatosis, ‘the White Blindness’, the rabbits’ Black Death, and he compels El-Ahrairah, the archetypal rabbit, to substitute his own ears for dock leaves which have to be constantly replaced when they grow limp, for fear of the fleas that spread the virus. He dwells in the bowels of the earth, a bit deeper-down than other rabbits, and his eyes shine like red-hot coals. He would perhaps be a slavish allegory of the Christian Devil if he were not so merciful when the rabbit was at the snare, or in the teeth of a snarling fox. This was no fiction for me: it was an everlasting Truth, stringent as scripture, and Cy was my living, lolloping proof.
I say ‘lolloping’ because this was precisely the word my mother used at a moment I can remember, but cannot place in time. It is not a word that in forty years I have encountered in any other context, but it precisely describes the gait of Cy, in which the actions of four rabbit-hopping legs were augmented by a pair of large and flaccid ears. In a surge of testosterone, Cy once fought with another rabbit (Lo, I believe, and Cy unwittingly caused his demise when the wound became infected), and in the course of that epic conflict, one of his ears was ripped, if not from side to side, then certainly well beyond the median line. And so Cy’s ears lolloped even more, like lopsided chandeliers in a ramshackle museum after the Blitz, and my ducks - Waddly and Scratch (the genius of whose naming I can rightly claim, and who came into my life when I was four years old) - were decidedly exhibits. They sat there, staunch and starched as Tenniell Dodoes, as Cy snitched the bread from under their bills. They chuntered “tus-tus-tus” (as Muscovies often will: they do not quack) when he ran them ragged while the wheat was winnowed out for the chickens. (My ducks were, incidentally, lesbians by necessity, and used to almost empty the garden pond in their love throes, much to my childish amazement; Scratch, the big white one, was invariably on top. Cy cared nothing for this.)
For the life of me, I cannot remember the time when Cy died. He lived by human terms to be a Harry Patch at least, but the details are lost to me. But I do remember digging up his bones a few years later, deep in the vegetable patch where my new passion for herbs was in its embryonic phase. And this was the curious thing: his bones were deep red, as though sprinkled with ochre, and the orbs of his skull gazed at me with an omniscient vacancy. In a life in which digging has been a recurring theme, and in which uncloseted skeletons have played a preternatural part, I confess that I have never before or since, when arrested by the face of kindly Death, re-buried the bones so quickly.
Photograph by Giles Watson, aged about 10 years.
My father has added the following notes:
Dear old black rabbit Cy had been used to produce antiserum for the pollen of CYNODON DACTYLON, colloquially called 'Couch' in Australia (where it is used for cricket pitches), and Bermuda Grass in Britain (where it is rare) and in the USA (where it originated). We demonstrated via the antiserum from Cy and friends that hay-fever sufferers sensitized only to the pollen allergens of Cynodon were unlikely to be allergic to pollen from (e.g.) the main lawn grasses used in England (Lolium, Agrostis, Dactylis), and vice versa; and drew attention to the undesirability of medical allergy specialists and commercial suppliers of grass pollens intended for medical applications using colloquial names (since 'Couch' means different things on different continents). The point being that you can be sensitized if they 'desensitize' you with the wrong extract!
Last couple of stories from Blackmill before I move on.
1. One summer's day I was on duty and walking back from a remote farm.On the way I started to pick and collect 'Cob nuts" to take home. When I arrived back at the station sat in my chair was a Chief Inspector (a bully and a particularly unpleasant man) who had called for a routine inspection. I am now standing in front of him in shirt sleeves with all the nuts I had collected inside my helmet on my head. Quick salute and I paid a very hasty visit to the toilet.
2. During our time we had a little Jack Russell terrier as a pet. One Sunday someone had found a stray greyhound and handed it into the Police Station. We had to keep this dog till Monday before the pound would take it. We didn't give any thought and allowed the dog into the house where it easily was able to reach the kitchen work surface and devoured our sunday roast before we had chance to carve it.
3. One of the major events in my life occurred at Blackmill. One Sunday morning I had been paying football only to return to discover my ex wife to be in the throws of labour. A rush to hospital in what I believe was a car borrowed from one of the friends from the Junction. Then 7 p.m. on 1st February 1976 my first born Gareth arrived.
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Continuing the series of my pictorial autobiography. This is Grove Road in Bridgend. As previously stated when I left Police Training School I was posted to Bridgend, so I needed somewhere to live. I was put in touch with an elderly widow who was looking to take in a lodger for the first time to supplement her income. Mrs Cooper was a wonderful woman and one of life's angels who treated me like the son she never had. I lived there for 12 months. Unfortunately after I left and got married her next lodger (another Policeman) was a bit of an A*se and took advantage of her generosity. He didn't last there for long and alas she never took in another lodger.
One of the great disappointments of my life was she passed away suddenly and was buried whilst I was abroad on a summer holiday and I never knew until I returned.
All my images are © All Rights Reserved, and must not be used without my expressed permission via Email dai.jazz42@gmail.com
Please leave a comment.
Anonymous - Madeleine: An Autobiography
Pyramid Books G627, 1961
Cover Artist: Mort Engel
"What makes them do it?"
Still from my advert for Toyota, see the full version here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI0BRTWbEM0&p=25359A30EDFF599...
Still from my advert for Toyota, see the full version here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI0BRTWbEM0&p=25359A30EDFF599...
Delay, well, travellers must expect
Delay. For how long? No one seems to know.
With all the luggage weighed, the tickets checked,
It can't be long … We amble too and fro,
Sit in steel chairs, buy cigarettes and sweets
And tea, unfold the papers. Ought we to smile,
Perhaps make friends? No: in the race for seats
You're best alone. Friendship is not worth while.
Six hours pass: if I'd gone by boat last night
I'd be there now. Well, it's too late for that.
The kiosk girl is yawning. I feel staled,
Stupefied, by inaction – and, as light
Begins to ebb outside, by fear; I set
So much on this Assumption. Now it's failed.