Puente del Kursaal, Donostia, Guipúzcoa, España.

Puente de tramos rectos de hormigón armado, recubierto por piedra de Motrico y mármol rosa, con elementos decorativos de estilo modernista. Construido sobre grandes pilares, de donde arrancan las seis características farolas que contienen a esta obra su marcada personalidad.

A comienzos del siglo XX. El ayuntamiento apoya la construcción de un tercer puente sobre el Urumea "en el que se armonicen la solidez y la resistencia con la monumentalidad y belleza del conjunto".

El ingeniero Ribera presentó al Ayuntamiento una importante modificación: el puente de la Zurriola, proyecto inicialmente con arcos, será construido con tramos rectos.

El 14 de Agosto de 1921 numerosísimo público acudió a la inauguración.

El barandado metálico y los obeliscos que hacen de farolas son obra de Victor Arana. Las cuatro esfinges de bronce pertenecen a la reforma de 1993. Tienen 120 metros de largo como el puente de Santa catalina con el que mantiene cierta armonía de líneas y es algo mayor que el Puente de María Cristina, de 100 metros.

Años de realización: 1918-1921

Autor: J.E.RIBERA

Bridge of straight sections of reinforced concrete, covered by motric stone and pink marble, with decorative elements of modernist style. Built on large pillars, from which the six characteristic lanterns that contain this work its marked personality.

At the beginning of the 20th century. The city council supports the construction of a third bridge over the Urumea "in which solidity and resistance are harmonized with the monumentality and beauty of the whole".

Engineer Ribera presented the City Council with an important modification: the Zurriola bridge, initially with arches, will be built with straight sections.

On August 14, 1921, a large audience attended the inauguration.

The metal balustrade and the obelisks that act as lampposts are the work of Victor Arana. The four bronze sphinxes belong to the 1993 reform. They are 120 meters long, like the Santa Catalina bridge, with which it maintains a certain harmony of lines and is somewhat larger than the María Cristina Bridge, which is 100 meters long.

Years of realization: 1918-1921

Author: J.E.RIBERA

Monument to the King's Liverpool Regiment. 1905. Sir W. Goscombe John. White stone with central bronze wreath, helmet, flag, sword etc, a standing soldier at each side, and figure of Britannia on central pedestal. Drummer boy at rear. Commemorates the service of the regiment in the South African War.

The King’s Liverpool Regiment monument is the centrepiece of the Gardens. The main frontage of the large Portland stone construction, facing outwards from St George’s Hall, has a bronze statue of Britannia on a plinth, flanking figures of two soldiers representing the Regiment at different periods, and is inscribed on the wall between them with the names of their most recent exploits: Afghanistan (1878-80) and Burma (1885-87), and South Africa (1899-1902). Between them, also in bronze, is a heap of weaponry, flag and a palm leaf, above the several steps to the ground; a wreath is just in front of this, two steps down.

The sculptor was William Goscombe John, and the statue of Britannia is an excellent example of his work at its best. Britannia stands facing slightly downwards, heavily draped over her armour – we see a solid breastplate and chainmail arms emerging form wide sleeves – and wearing a helmet, with tiny boat-wings and a prow at the front, and a crest in the form of a seahorse, all this to recall Britannia’s maritime associations. Little inscribed waves run round this helm, and more swirly waves are on the base of the statue. Her shield on her left arm faces backwards, and she carries an olive branch in her shield hand. Her other hand, rather than holding a sword, is empty, raised, and palm outwards, for this is a Britannia of Peace. There is a tremendous solidity and mass to this statue, so that with the armour, even a peaceful Britannia is rather warlike.

The soldier to our left as we view the monument represents the typical soldier of the Regiment in 1685, with long gun and some sort of narrow sword behind him, and standing in a lively pose, one foot forward, one hand on the low wall. The other soldier, of 1902, has a rifle and a band of bullets over his chest; he stands more at ease, in what is almost a swaggering lounge. Both rest the butts of their guns on the ground, indicative that the battle is won and peace has been achieved.

But this is a three-dimensional memorial, and completely hidden from this side, round the back is one of the most famous Liverpool statues, and a figure which alone would give Goscombe John a claim to greatness as a sculptor. It is the Drummer Boy; a youth seated on a cannon and trophy of flags and so forth, his drum sticks active in his hands, his figure twisted to one side and face serious: a work of immediacy and urgency contrasting with the peacefulness of the other side. The full sized model for this work is on display in the Walker Art Gallery nearby.

Description in english below.

More photos on my page.

Plus de photos sur ma page.

Modèle uniquement utilisé par les pilotes de l’Amiral Zsinj.

Parlons du gars. Si Timothy Zhan s’est inspiré de Sherlock Holmes pour le grand Amiral Zahn, je suspecte fortement l’auteur responsable de la création de Zsinj (Aaron Alston ?) de s’être inspiré d’Hercule Poirot. Petit, moustachu et ventripotent, adepte du ridicule pour être sous-estimé, et redoutablement intelligent et cultivé. Moi ça me fait furieusement penser à Hercule Poirot.

Bref, Zsinj a peut-être été responsable du design du Tie Raptor. Objectivement, c’est le design de Tie le plus logique que je connaisse. Mieux armé que le Tie classique (4 blasters, 2 lances missiles) il est plus rapide (entre le Tie classique et l’interceptor) et tout aussi maniable. Autre point fort du Raptor : La disposition et la taille de ses ailes, donnent un meilleur champ de vision au pilote, tout en offrant une cible plus petite à l’adversaire. De plus certains modèles furent équipés d’un boulier, mais pas d’Hyperdrive cependant.

Si la forme en x des ailes peut rappeler les X-wing, celles-ci ne sont cependant pas mobiles contrairement au X-wing.

Concernant le moc proprement dit. J’ai un peu galéré. Ce qui passe sur le logiciel studio, ne passe pas nécessairement irl. La boule centrale dut facile à faire, mais les ailes étaient trop en pression contre la courbure du cockpit, j’ai du modifier mes plan initiaux.

Question solidité : Pas terrible…

Cela tient en place, mais il ne faut pas trop remuer l’engin sous peine de voir les ailes se décrocher.

Model only used by Admiral Zsinj's pilots.

Let's talk about the guy. If Timothy Zhan was inspired by Sherlock Holmes for the great Admiral Zahn, I strongly suspect that the author responsible for the creation of Zsinj (Aaron Alston?) was inspired by Hercule Poirot. Short, mustachioed and a little fat, adept at ridicule to be underestimated, and fearfully intelligent and cultured. It makes me furiously think of Hercule Poirot.

In short, Zsinj may have been responsible for the design of the Tie Raptor. Objectively, it's the most logical Tie design I know. Better armed than the classic Tie (4 blasters, 2 missiles launchers) it is faster (between the classic Tie and the interceptor) and just as easy to handle. Another strong point of the Raptor : The layout and the size of its wings, give a better field of vision to the pilot, while offering a smaller target to the opponent. In addition, some models were equipped with an shield, but no Hyperdrive however.

If the x-shape of the wings can remind the X-wing, they are not mobile unlike the X-wing.

Concerning the moc itself. I had a little trouble. What goes on the studio software, does not necessarily go well irl. The center ball was easy to make, but the wings were too much pressure against the cockpit curvature, I had to modify my initial plan.

Concerning the moc Solidity : Not so good...

This holds in place, but you shouldn't shake the gear too much or the wings will fall.

The above photo - ' Haggs Farm in Summer ' . The small farm on the Barber Estate was a place that D.H.Lawrence always remembered .

The picture was taken on a summer day in 1959.

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Below

Text - ` You Haggites see the Best of Me ! ' - is lecture material text used by Prof.John Worthen of Nottingham University to aid understanding and appreciation of Lawrence's 1928 letter to David Chambers . The text was used as the basis of his lecture to the Haggs Farm Preservation Society's annual David Chambers Memorial Gathering in Eastwood , Nottinghamshire in October of 2003 . )

Note : D.H.Lawrence would refer to the Chambers family as Haggites .

___________________________________

Lecture notes commencing : " What the Haggites did not see - was something Lawrence was very, very aware of all his life - his capacity to be cold, objective and judgemental . "

A picture of D.H.Lawrence when a pupil-teacher and a welcome visitor to the Haggs is on-line in this Flickr photostream .

LECTURE .

" I am very honoured to have been asked to be your J. D. Chambers lecturer this year; I've known the name of Jonathan David Chambers ever since I started looking into Lawrence's life, about forty years ago, and I always depended heavily on his writing about his family and about Jessie as a kind of counterweight to what Jessie herself wrote. To be asked to give this lecture is, to me, to be given an opportunity to speak gratefully and sympathetically in memory of a man whose life's work and life's writing it is natural to honour: and whom oddly I think of personally (though I never knew him) with great respect and affection: I have learned so much from him.

I'm very conscious of the possibilities lurking in my title, `Ah, you Haggites see the best of me!' Lawrence said it (according to Jessie) more than once: he said it `whimsically': and it leaves me not only with the question `why was that? why did they see the best of him?' but with the more worrying question `so what was Lawrence like when you didn't see the best of him?'

I am going to start by looking again at one of the famous documents of Lawrence's relationship with the Chambers family: the letter he wrote on 15 November 1928 about the Haggs - wrote it, of course, to J. D. Chambers himself. This is what Lawrence wrote, from the island of Port Cros in the Mediterranean:

Quote : " Dear David

Postscript : Lawrence gives a postscript with his London agent's address.

However lovely the letter, whenever I read it I am struck all over again by the kind of powerful, overpowering, even devouring, nostalgia in it, of a kind in which Lawrence very, very rarely engaged (I can only actually think of one other example: it doesn't even occur in his writing about the ranch, which he regretted long and deeply. ). The letter is also fascinating for what it leaves out: for example, any mention of Jessie Chambers: or even actually saying how dearly Lawrence still remembered the Chambers family. He says in Italian - and not many of the family, if any, would have understood that - that there are times past: how dear, you will never know. Which he couldn't say in English. I do find that odd.

The lack of reference to Jessie is very striking. It was perhaps tactful; he couldn't have helped realising that how he had treated her, even so long ago, might still be a sore subject in the Chambers family, who must have seen him - for a while at least - as someone who had in effect been engaged to Jessie, and who had then abandoned her for another woman. (I'm not saying that that was what had happened: but that was how they might well have seen it.) The family understood the letter well enough, of course: enough not to dare to tell Jessie what he had written. They only told her about that letter the week after his death in 1930. They were right. She confessed on 10 March 1930 that if she had known about it, `I could not have kept from writing [to him]. But they never told me until now.'

But why did Lawrence swear such undying love for the place and the moment, and the memories, in that letter, not having (so far as I know) written anything enthusiastic about the Haggs for 15 years?

I want to do two things. The first is, to sketch in quickly an account of Lawrence's relationship with the Haggs and the Chambers family: and then to examine that letter in the context of what Lawrence was feeling and writing in 1928.

In the early 1890s, the Chambers family were living along Greenhills Lane near the Breach (while the Lawrences were living there). The father, Edmund Chambers, a native of Eastwood (his father, `Pawny Chambers', and mother had run a pawnbroker's shop), had a smallholding and a milk round in Eastwood. Edmund's wife Ann was, like Lydia Lawrence, a stranger in Eastwood, and a woman who never seems to have been especially happy there; she struck up acquaintance with Lydia Lawrence at the Chapel in Albert Street. Both of them disliked the mining communities to which their husbands had brought them, and J. D. Chambers would later suggest that they `found in the Chapel . . . the only place in which they felt really at home in an otherwise alien world'.

The Chambers family went out to the Haggs in 1898, and Lydia Lawrence had a standing invitation to visit them, but it was not until the early summer of 1901 that she and Lawrence first followed the field paths out there, on a half holiday in his last the early summer term at the High School: he a `tall, fair boy' with a `swiftly changing expression', she a `bright, vivacious little woman'. Those are the words of May Chambers, always an acid commentator, who recognised how the Lawrences came `from the bricks and mortar of streets of houses where bay windows and front room furniture and new clothes were so very important'. That was the world which some at least of the Chambers family prided themselves on having left, but which the Lawrences had risen into: the bay-window in Walker Street, the suite of mahogany and horse-hair chairs, the Brussels carpet rather than the usual rag rugs of the miner's house, the mahogany chiffonier and the oval table. But whereas Lydia Lawrence had always fought the dominating male figures of her world, whether her father or her husband, or her sons, Ann Chambers felt dominated by her men-folk; she had had her last child at the age of thirty-nine and would `shudder when the subject of sex was mentioned'. Mrs Morel, on an equivalent visit to the farm in Sons and Lovers, pities her friend: `I'm sorry for her, and I'm sorry for him too.'

Lawrence's joy in going to the Haggs was not only, however, a reaction against the ugliness, narrowness or conventionality of his home in Eastwood. Lawrence first made friends with the two younger boys, Hubert and Bernard, and then with Alan; years later he would tell a friend that the nearest he had ever come to `perfect love' had been at the age of `about sixteen', with another boy, which would be before September 1902. He was certainly thinking of one of the Chambers' boys: I am almost sure he meant Alan. May was in the middle of a prolonged adolescent extraction of herself from her family, and rejected the High School boy's offer of help with her homework; but the younger daughter, Jessie, seems to have been drawn to Lawrence from the start. Although his relationship with her would develop into one of the most important of his young life, when he first started going to the Haggs regularly in 1902 she was no more than a rather immature fifteen. He was both better read and better educated, as well as eighteen months older, and did not spend much time with her. Her reaction to being surrounded by brothers who were physically active, and rather contemptuous of her, had been to shut herself away in a world of her own in which she was the heroine of poetry and romance; her younger brothers despised this and `took delight' - again, J. D. says this - `in bursting in on her rhapsodical moods and shattering her poetical day-dreams in a wild scrimmage of slaps and bangs'. J. D. remembered her, though, as `equal to anybody'; nearly as tall as her elder brother Alan, as photographs show, she was equally broad-shouldered; solidly built, disciplined, dedicated, yearning. J. D. also recalled how she would stand up to her younger brothers: she would `wind a scarf round each fist and challenge them both to a fight'. Her `lighter moods', however, were rare. More often, she was simply angry with boys and men for bossing her about or ignoring her. By contrast with her brothers, Lawrence was someone serious; the realisation seems to have come around 1903, when he and she found themselves talking increasingly, and Lawrence entered her life as the person she believed would save her from her family. Eventually he offered to teach her; and together they worked on the very subjects, `algebra and French', which distinguished ordinary education from advanced. (You will remember Paul Morel being ribbed by a miner on pay day for doing nowt at school except `algìbbra an' French', and thoroughly resenting it. ) This was the period of Lawrence's intense attachment to the Haggs. He's coming up to nineteen years old.

III

But it is hard to overestimate how important the Haggs family was for Lawrence, both before and after he became close to Jessie. The coincidence of his return to life in the spring and summer of 1902, after the illness of the winter of 1901 in which he had nearly died, with this discovery of another family to which he eagerly turned, and individuals whom he loved, strongly suggests the extent to which he was reacting against the intimacy of home and mother which made such demands on him in Eastwood. Not for the last time in his life, a passionate emotional involvement (in this case with his mother) had grown up in Lawrence simultaneously with a powerful desire to break away from the very object of his love. What many, even most people feel to some extent, in love and relationship, about attachment and a need for some distance, Lawrence lived through with an intensity that was surprising and often shocking. The way he turned to the Chambers family around 1902-03 is perhaps its first clear instance.

For the laughter, anger, outbursts and loud quarrels of the Chambers family would have felt very different from the moralising, critical and emotionally stifling atmosphere of Walker Street. In Eastwood Lawrence was up against a household dominated by women: his mother and Ada (and until her marriage Emily), with his father largely absent or silenced. The Haggs Farm offered a simpler, old-fashioned world, in which men took precedence if they could, and women argued back: were not simply morally superior. The Chambers boys looked down on their sisters and tried to order them about; the girls fiercely resisted. But, for adolescents in particular, other people's families are nearly always easier to deal with than their own. The Chambers family probably felt more emotionally secure to Lawrence because of their constant quarrels, their overt affections, their singing and boisterous intimacy, their jokes and laughter: `He used to say that our laughter was Homeric.' He `made us even happy with one another while he was there, - no small achievement in a family like ours!'

From 1902 to 1906, he discovered how much and how happily he could be `at home' there. Ann Chambers loved him `like one of her own', and he loved her; he was clearly devoted to Alan; and with the Chambers family he could be the lively and cheerful son he found it so much more difficult to be at home. It is never too late to have a happy childhood; and Lawrence found his at the Haggs. He could be an exhilarating companion, and probably first discovered this, too, at the uninhibited Haggs. Nearly fifty years later May recalled `Bert with his mischievous grin': his vivacity, his sense of adventure, his capacity for games and mimicry and fun were what he brought to them.

It all feels to me rather like Arthur Lawrence escaping Lydia Lawrence, and leaving behind the strictness of home and its moral absolutes for the country, and the mine, and the `wholesome happiness' of uncritical companionship. May Chambers's fiancé Will Holbrook recalled how Lawrence `loved to come where he could do and say just what he pleased, even to using strong language to win his point'. That's Arthur, unrepressed. And it was at the Haggs that Lawrence seemed most like his father. He sang with the family (his father had been in the choir of St James's Church at Brinsley as a boy), and he also demonstrated how he could dance `in our little kitchen, and once while we paused for breath he said: “Father says one ought to be able to dance on a threepenny bit”.' Jessie, knowing Lawrence's hatred of his father, was surprised at that little revelation; but Lawrence also demonstrated to the Chambers' family his talent (his father's too) for mimicry. One set piece was a long-drawn-out row between his father and his mother, about a ham which Arthur had brought home and then stopping payment for it each week out of the housekeeping money; in the end the story took Arthur's side (`Woman, how'd tha feaace') and reduced its listeners to uproarious helplessness. J. D. Chambers, again, remembered: `I think everyone loved him at this time; he combined with his vivacity a sweetness of disposition that was quite irresistible.'

It was hardly surprising that his mother and his sisters grew jealous of his constant visits. Very soon after he started going, he confessed to May Chambers that, though he wanted to come one Saturday, `They won't let me'; while Jessie recalled: `He told us rather shamefacedly that his mother said he might as well pack his things and come and live with us.' Mothers always say things like that. The Lawrences naturally resented his concentration on a family so unlike themselves; and they would in the end come to be deeply suspicious of the amount of time he and Jessie spent together (it was a way of focussing their disapproval of the Haggs). Lawrence was acutely aware of their disapproval but commented, sadly, `If it wasn't this, it would be something else.' They'd always be morally critical of something. Emily once even insisted on coming out to the Haggs with him, to see what was so special about it, but all she found memorable was `that awful walk'.

These visits to the Haggs remained a problem for years; the fact that Lawrence kept going shows how necessary they were for him. In Eastwood, he felt valued and centred at home. But home for him never simply meant being cherished and sustained by a mother's love: it was also a terrible strain, growing up the beloved son of Lydia Lawrence, and carrying for her the burden of her unhappiness and her anger with her husband and what she felt was the waste of her own life.

Between 1902 and 1906, then, Lawrence lived a kind of double life: hard at work in Eastwood during the week, as a model son, pupil, teacher and family member, but going out to the Haggs every weekend. It was the period in his life when, perhaps above all else, the Haggs offered both devotion and companionship in equal measure: something for which he went on looking for the rest of his life. We can hear it in that letter of November 1928: `Then I'd sit on the sofa under the window, and we'd crowd round the little table to tea, in that tiny little kitchen I was so at home in.'

Let me come back to the letter. The context in which it was written helps us understand quite a lot about it. Lawrence and Frieda had left the Villa Mirenda near Florence in June 1928 and spent July and August at altitude in Switzerland - where they were visited by Peggy and her mother Emily. Lawrence had actually had a wretched summer, with small bronchial haemorrhages continuing: the place they'd chosen to go to, Gsteig bei Gstaad, at 4,000 feet, was incredibly steep in all directions. Once up there, in the chalet Kesselmatte, Lawrence was in effect marooned: and they were there for more than two months, over July and August down to September. Finally, they came down; they went to see Frieda's mother in Baden-Baden; and while there the Lawrences finally decided to give up the Villa Mirenda, their current home near Florence. Although they had at first enjoyed living there, the Mirenda was now irresistibly linked in Lawrence's mind with his bronchial haemorrhages of July 1927. Places he associated with illness (like Oaxaca and Mexico City, and now Florence) he never wanted to go back to, so he was now convinced that the Mirenda `didn't suit my health'. Frieda returned to the Mirenda to see to the packing up of their belongings; Lawrence waited for her in the Mediterranean port of Le Lavandou. They had been invited for the winter to the island of Port Cros, where old friends - Richard Aldington, his partner `Arabella' (Dorothy) Yorke and Brigit Patmore - had acquired a house. This must have particularly appealed to Lawrence, after the failure of altitude to do him any good: sea air, the Mediterranean, would surely be better.

Aldington was, however, both malicious and discreet when he commented that Frieda's task of giving up the Mirenda was `a complicated process, since it involved a journey to Trieste'. Frieda had seen rather little of Angelo Ravagli (now stationed at Gradisca, near Trieste) since April, and it is my understanding that - by now - she had started her affair with him: perhaps around April 1928. In Le Lavandou, therefore, Lawrence could do nothing except sit and wait for her.

La Vigie was the house at the top of the island of Port Cros: another place with the most marvellous view, of the kind that Lawrence chose to live in, time after time. But his health was, by the autumn of 1928, a real problem. The steepness of the road from the harbour up to La Vigie meant that he was `perched, as at Kesselmatte', and could not go with the others when they went down to go swimming each afternoon. Aldington would listen to Lawrence's `dreadful hollow cough at night, and wonder what on earth I should do if he got worse'; they agreed that one of them should always stay with him when the rest of the party went off for the day or the afternoon. Frieda had come back from Italy (and Ravagli) with a cold, which of course poor Lawrence instantly caught. He also had `two days hemorrhage' and felt `rather rotten': `this is worse than the Mirenda', he found himself thinking.

It was while they were on the island, too, that Lawrence got a letter from his agent, which included the responses to Lady Chatterley which had appeared in the English press during the autumn. There were at least two: a piece in the Sunday Chronicle, and John Bull's notorious review. These had both appeared in mid-October. This is Brigit Patmore's account:

`My God!' one of us gave a shout. `Here, in this one, Lorenzo, one of them calls you a cesspool!'

He made a grimace which might have been a smile or slight nausea.

`Really? One's fellow creatures are too generous. It's quite worth while giving of one's best, isn't it?' Then, as if speaking to himself, `Nobody likes being called a cesspool.'

But various things were going wrong at La Vigie, apart from Lawrence's illness and those reviews, and the fact that Lawrence would now have known for certain that Frieda was having an affair with Ravagli. It was at La Vigie that Aldington - partnered to Arabella Yorke for ten years - would start an affair with Brigit Patmore, and both the Lawrences sided with Arabella, of whom they were very fond. Lawrence ended up violently angry with Aldington: and the party broke up months earlier than originally planned. But worst of all, Lawrence was thoroughly depressed and miserable on Port Cros. One afternoon when the three others were off swimming - they all bathed, Aldington recalled with relish more than thirty years later, `naked daily together on one of the plages of Port-Cros, and then lay in the sun' - Lawrence told Brigit Patmore (staying with him that afternoon) a little about his desolation: `When you think you have something in your life which makes up for everything, and then find you haven't got it.' She tried to tell him that his writing had mattered immensely to her in re-establishing her own sense of herself after she had been ill; but found she was only making matters worse. He replied: `Yes. Once I could do that. But I can't any more.' In the past, he could convey his experience of the body and its desires directly in his writing. He felt that that no longer happened; such writing was now inevitably either nostalgic or reminiscent.

And it was at just this point that the letter from J. D. Chambers came, and Lawrence wrote the famous response. Its nostalgia - for a time when he was well, active, young, hopeful - is palpable, and inevitably added to by many of the things that were happening round him. Its desperately nostalgic reminiscence of the old days - `whatever else I am, I am somewhere still the same Bert who rushed with such joy to the Haggs' - is that of a man who had left all that terribly far behind him, and who must have wondered whether he really was the same Bert any more. It's an odd formulation: `Whatever else I am' - as if he feared that he had indeed changed, into something he didn't like much. He actually uses the technique twice in the letter: `whatever else I am' and `Whatever I forget': suggesting that there was also a lot that he would forget, if he could.

What is most remarkable, however, is how the letter keeps stressing how much at home he was at the Haggs. The whole subject of `home' is central in Lawrence's life and writing. On the one hand, he would, so to speak, come home repeatedly in his writing, as he recreated the people and the landscapes of the Eastwood region, even when living and writing hundreds of miles away: acknowledging how intimately he belonged to his family and its loving mother, even as he wrote his way out of it (declaring that he rejected any idea of home, or love, and hated Eastwood and the past). But belonging to `home' was always intensely problematic for him. Frieda `craved for a home and solidity': Lawrence insisted he never did. Back in August 1923, about to sail to England with Frieda from New York, he told Murry that, now it came to it, he could not bear the thought of `England and home and my people': and he did not go. When he eventually did, in December, one of the first things he did was write the caustic essay `On Coming Home' for Murry's Adelphi. In 1925, he insisted that coming back to England was not `coming home': `I won't say home, it isn't home.' And when he was finally back in 1925, and had seen the Midlands again, he had written, despairingly, `Nothing depresses me more than to come home to the place where I was born.'

So, in 1928, where was Lawrence now at home? He and Frieda had, literally, just given up their home at the Mirenda; they had no home. And though he was with a group of friends at Port Cros, he still felt horribly isolated and cut off. The Haggs farm had been one of the very few places in Lawrence's life where he had felt at home, and he never forgot it: now it felt as if it were the home he wanted to be in, as opposed to the Eastwood family home to which he belonged and continued to fight with himself about (and which he was still resenting in 1928). He had actually reacted badly to that visit from Emily and Peggy to Gsteig a couple of months earlier: Emily had, for example, called him `our Bert', thus claiming him for the family: but he insisted that `I am not really “our Bert”. Come to that, I never was.' He had once been, for sure; but (I agree) he was so no longer. On the other hand, he was sadly struck by the gulf between him and his sister, `always yawning, horribly obvious to me': `somehow it depresses me terribly'.

For in another mood from the one in which he wrote to J. D. Chambers, he would have rejected the whole idea of home, or feeling nostalgic about the past. On his last visit to England, a couple of years earlier, in September 1926, he had been for a walk with Willie Hopkin, and they had come in sight of the Haggs. We can reconstruct what happened then from what Hopkin remembered, and from what Lawrence used of that walk in the second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, where Connie and Parkin also come in view of the Haggs, on the last page of the novel. They stop `above the grey-green country. Across was Haggs Farm. Beyond, Underwood, the mining village and the mines.' And the narrator comments: `Dead as Ninevah . . . the mill-ponds at Felley lying so still, abandoned, abandoned like everything that is not coal or iron, away below. The dead country-side!' Hopkin and Lawrence, however, went even closer; and Hopkin watched Lawrence when they got to Felley:

he stood still and looked across to the Haggs. I went and sat by the pond. After a few minutes I turned and looked at him. He stood stiffly as a statue, and there was an expression of dreadful pain on his face. After a while he told me to come along. For ten minutes he never spoke a word, and then he broke out into a lot of brilliant nonsense. As we neared his old house [the Lynn Croft house, perhaps, but possibly the Walker Street house] he never gave it a glance. I asked when he was coming over again. His reply was “Never! I hate the damned place.”

In another version of his account of their time at Felley, as Lawrence stood looking across to the Haggs, Hopkin wrote how `I have seen sadness on many a face, but nothing like Lawrence's at that moment.'

This is especially interesting in the light of that letter to J. D. Chambers. The warmth of the Haggs family and the time there glowed all the more vividly in November 1928 not only because of the weakened physical state in which Lawrence now existed, but because it was tantalising as an idea of what belonging to a group of people, at home happily together, might after all be like: and because it also made him despair (`whatever else I might be . . . whatever I forget'). He had spent his life fighting away from love, especially familial warmth and love: he had always insisted he did not want it. But now, on Port Cros, at all times living the life of an invalid, cut off from the lively everyday concerns of the people he was with, with those reviews of Lady Chatterley reminding him how much hatred was waiting for him in England, he must have felt more torn between home and a lonely present than ever. The reaction between belonging and independence was very actual to him. He didn't go swimming naked every day on Port Cros: he wasn't one of the crowd. And he was more cut off from Frieda than he had been, since 1912: in one way, he really was on his own again. Well, he had always wanted to be independent. But oh to be nineteen again . . . Thinking about the Haggs thus took on an intense nostalgia not just for the Haggs but for something missing in his life: call it home, or family, or warmth, or love.

His response to J. D. Chambers tells us, in fact, a great deal more about Lawrence in 1928 than about the Lawrence of 1904 (when he was nineteen). Both the nostalgic joy and the despair underlying the letter belong to that very difficult complex of feelings around home, and belonging, and being independent, cold and detached, which had gone on in him since he was a teenager.

So what had he meant, so many years earlier, when he had said to the Chambers family, `Ah, you Haggites see the best of me'? What was it that he was all too aware of, but which they didn't see? What would it have been like to see the worst of him? What was the worst of him?

We all get involved in the myths of our own lives; we start to enact the feelings which we ought to have had; the feelings we tell ourselves we should have had, because this WAS a time of sheer, unalloyed joy, this time at the Haggs. But there was a side of Lawrence, as he very well knew, which was utterly different from his loveable, loving, nostalgic side. It's horribly easy to show this. Almost exactly eleven months before writing the letter to J. D. Chambers, Lawrence had written - for the early experience of Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover - an account of a relationship which in its details is taken exactly from Lawrence's experience of Jessie, as he had known her at the Haggs between 1902 and 1910. How could the person who could write with such nostalgia and love about the Haggs, and his feelings about it, also have written this?

I'll tell you . . . The first girl I had, I began with when I was sixteen . . . I was a supposed-to-be clever sort of young fellow from Sheffield Grammar School [for which read Nottingham High School], with a bit of French and German, very much up aloft. She was the romantic sort that hated commonness. She egged me on to poetry and reading: in a way, she made a man of me. I read and thought like a house on fire for her. And I was a clerk in Butterley Offices, then, white-faced fellow fuming with all the things I read. And about everything talked to her: but everything. We talked ourselves into Persepolis and Timbuctoo. We were the most literary-cultured couple in ten counties. I held forth with rapture to her, positively with rapture. I simply went up in smoke. And she adored me. - The serpent in the grass was sex. She somehow didn't have any - at least, not where it's supposed to be. I got thinner and crazier. Then I said we'd got to be lovers. I talked her into it, as usual. So she let me. I was excited, and she never wanted it. She just didn't want it. She adored me, she loved me to talk to her and kiss her: in that way, she had a passion for me. But the other, she just didn't want . . . And it was just the other that I did want. So there we split. I was cruel, and left her.

Yes, this is a novel. But the novel is taking a piece of autobiography and re-creating it, to make it something both absurd and cruel. In one way it's a monstrous lie: all the warmth and tenderness and love and inexperience of these years, what Jessie called `those years of devotion', being summed up and dismissed so crudely. If Jessie ever read that - and I fear that she probably did - then I think she would have been as hurt by it as she was by Sons and Lovers.

What the Haggites did not see was what Lawrence was very, very aware of all his life: his capacity to be cold, objective, judgemental: the very opposite of that warmly, richly emotional person he was in the letter to J. D. Chambers. I am not saying that the letter to J. D. Chambers was somehow hypocritical: no, it reproduces something very important in Lawrence, a desperate need for home and warmth and belonging and love. But that meets its match, if you like, in the cold paragraph of scorn from Mellors: which says `what a fool I was' and `what a waste of time that period was'. That is another of Lawrence's voices: I must say that I hear a maternal voice in it. It's not what the Haggites saw: the best of him: which was young, and so hopeful and loving. It was certainly hard for the young Lawrence to show the best of himself: but with them he managed to.

The Chambers family never forgot him: when he died in 1930, `We all, as a family, mourn him, for the memories of old days were unspeakably dear to us all.' Lawrence himself never forgot, perhaps never got over, his experience of the Haggs. It was the model for the occasions, time after time, when he tried to create a life, often in the country with a group of other people: at San Gaudenzio in 1913, in Zennor in 1916, at the ranch in 1922, at the Mirenda in 1926. In a life so full of radical changes, it was vitally important to him that, somehow, neither he nor the Haggs should change: meaning that he, too, could somehow remain that sociable and loving person, although he obviously had changed, and was now capable of such detachment, such control, such cold difference. The remark `I am somewhere still the same Bert who rushed with such joy to the Haggs' was nostalgic about himself too: he needed to go on being that person: needed to be the person the Haggites would go on seeing the best of, even in 1928. "

Lecture by John Worthen , Eastwood : 18th October , 2003

[Note - Lenton Sands and the Haggs Farm Preservation Society is grateful to Prof.Worthen for permitting the use of his material . The text was originally placed on-line as part of the now defunct "dhltohaggs" Geocities website of the Haggs farm Preservation Society . ]

( Flickr slot - plus 9 )

___________________________________________________________________________

THE TENANTS OF THE HAGGS .

Both the original dwellings were in the range of buildings now known as Old Haggs farmhouse. The first residents were the Anthony and Leivers families, the tenancy of the various generations being documented (from Melbourne estate records & other sources) as follows:- Leivers 1805 to 1821Alice (widow of John) : 1821 to 1836 Joseph (son of John) : 1837 to 1865 (son of Joseph) : 1866 to 1874 Anthony James :1805 Samuel (son of James) : 1817 to 1864 .

After Samuel's death, the tenancy was granted to George Turner who had married the widowed Mary Ann Moss, daughter of Samuel 1866 to 1879.In 1879 Turner was replaced as tenant by John Whittaker and due to the dilapidated state of this part of the property, it was decided to build a new cottage and convert the old dwelling to outbuildings for stock. The new cottage is what is known as New Haggs and from this time the tenancies of the 2 farms can most clearly be shown separately. Old Haggs John Leivers 1878 to 1898\par Edmund Chambers 1898 to 1912 George Ward 1912 to 1936 W Fry 1936 to1941 Albert Rigley 1941 to 1947 Frank Wilson 1949 to 1963 New Haggs John Whitaker 1879 to 1892 William Pearson 1892 to 1916 Albert Granger\b0\par 1916 to 1937\par \par \b H Whitehead\b0\par 1938 to 1941 Henry Clay 1945\par \par \b Alfred Maggs 1946 Albert Rigley,1947 to 1979

The attractive town of Tewkesbury has been dominated by its superb abbey church since the beginning of the 12th century, and we can be forever grateful to its townspeople for purchasing the monastic church in 1540 for £453 for use as their parish church, saving it from the fate that befell countless similar great churches across the land during the turmoil of the Dissolution. It reminds us both how lucky we are to still marvel at it today, yet also how great a loss to our heritage the period wrought when many more such buildings were so utterly plundered as to have gone without trace (the fate of the monastic buildings here and even the lady chapel of the church whose footings are laid out in the grass at the east end).

Tewkesbury Abbey is thus rightly celebrated as one of our greatest non-cathedral churches, and remarkably much of the original Norman church remains substantially intact, most apparently in the great central tower, a fine example of Romanesque architecture adorned with rows of blind-arcading. The west front is dominated by a massive Norman-arched recess (enclosing the somewhat later west window) and the nave and transepts remain largely as originally built, though this is less clear externally owing to the changes made to the windows, nearly all of which were enlarged in the 14th century in the Decorated Gothic style. This century also saw the complete rebuilding of the eastern limb of the church, of a form less common in England with radiating chapels surrounding the eastern apse of the choir (the central lady chapel sadly missing since 1540).

The interior reveals far more of the Romanesque structure with mighty columns supporting the round Norman arches of the nave arcades giving the building a great sense of solidity. The space is further enlivened by the changes made during the 14th century by the stunning vault over the nave (adorned with a rewarding series of figurative bosses) which sits surprisingly well with the Norman work below. Beyond the apsidal choir beckons, and both this and the space below the tower are enriched with stunningly complex vaulted ceilings (replete with further bosses and gilded metal stars), all ablaze with colour and gilding.

There is much to enjoy in glass here, most remarkably a complete set of 14th century glazing in the clerestorey of the choir, seven windows filled with saints and prophets (and most memorably two groups of knights in the westernmost windows on each side). A few of the figures have fared less well over the centuries but on the whole this is a wonderfully rare and well preserved scheme. There is much glass from the 19th century too, with an extensive scheme in the nave of good quality work by Hardman's, and more recently a pair of rich windows by Tom Denny were added in one of the polygonal chapels around the east end.

Some of the most memorable features are the monuments with many medieval tombs of note, primarily the effigies and chantry chapels of members of the Despenser family around the choir (two of the chantries being miniature architectural gems in their own right with exquisite fan-vaulting). In one of the apsidal chapels is the unusual cenotaph to Abbot Wakeman with his grisly cadaver effigy, a late medieval reminder of earthly mortality.

Tewkesbury Abbey is not to be missed and is every bit as rewarding as many of our cathedrals (superior in fact to all but the best). It is normally kept open and welcoming to visitors on a daily basis. I have also had the privilege of working on this great building several times over the years (as part of the team at the studio I once worked for), and have left my mark in glass in a few discreet places.

www.tewkesburyabbey.org.uk/

Destaca la torre de «La Emparedada». Torre defensiva del siglo X, considerada como obra mozárabe, que enlazaría con la muralla que rodeaba la población. El recinto amurallado que rodea la torre albergó el Palacio del Abad de Covarrubias, que hoy es una propiedad privada. Su forma es piramidal truncada y su planta rectangular. Sus medidas son: 10 x 14 m de lado el rectángulo de la base y 7,5 x 11 m en su parte superior. La sensación de solidez que nos transmite no es sólo apariencia ya que se sustenta sobre muros de hasta cuatro metros de grosor en su base.

Por sus pequeñas saeteras los arqueros hacían blanco sobre el enemigo, mientras que desde los matacanes se arrojaba agua o aceite hirviendo. Si recorremos toda su altura, nos encontramos con una cubierta de teja roja, que no corresponde a su estructura original de almenas.

Se accede a la torre por medio de una escalera móvil, a través de una puerta a media altura, que forma un arco de herradura de dovelas desiguales. De este modo, en caso de ataque la escalera se retiraba y la fortaleza era inexpugnable. La torre presenta cuatro plantas y a cada una de ellas se accede desde la planta superior. A la inferior, se entra desde la primera planta a través de una trampilla de madera. Por lo que quizá fuera utilizada como prisión o como almacén. Cuenta la leyenda que la infanta Urraca fue emparedada aquí por su propio padre Fernán González, como castigo por sus amoríos con un pastor.

es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covarrubias

es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torre_de_Covarrubias

The tower of «La Emparedada» stands out. Defensive tower from the 10th century, considered a Mozarabic work, which would connect with the wall that surrounded the town. The walled enclosure that surrounds the tower housed the Palace of the Abbot of Covarrubias, which today is a private property. Its shape is truncated pyramidal and its ground plan is rectangular. Its measurements are: 10 x 14 m on the side of the base rectangle and 7.5 x 11 m at the top. The sensation of solidity that it transmits is not only appearance since it is supported on walls up to four meters thick at its base.

Through their small arrow slits the archers targeted the enemy, while boiling water or oil was thrown from the machicolations. If we go along its entire height, we find a red tile roof, which does not correspond to its original structure of battlements.

The tower is accessed by means of a mobile staircase, through a door at mid-height, which forms a horseshoe arch with uneven voussoirs. In this way, in case of attack, the staircase was withdrawn and the fortress was impregnable. The tower has four floors and each of them is accessed from the upper floor. The lower one is entered from the first floor through a wooden hatch. So maybe it was used as a prison or as a warehouse. Legend has it that the Infanta Urraca was walled in here by her own father Fernán González, as punishment for her love affairs with a shepherd.

I am the zero point, the primal vibration, the one and the holy. I am the mirror and you are me. Ego sees the visible spectrum only, but the conscious mind embraces infinite space and eternity. Hear the tone, arise aware, you will recognise time is the illusion of solidity. You'll be the last poet, the truthseeker, the DNA of immortality. You’ll unravel your ghostly matter, have visions of alchemy. You will smile when you die. You will not name me, I am the prophet and you are me

-Aïsha Devi

I did this on C4D and Adobe Photoshop CS

Rocky cliffs along the shoreline of Lake Superior. Tettegouche State Park, Minnesota.

ValleyManPhotography.com

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Las estaciones de la inconclusa línea ferroviaria Teruel-Alcañiz se construyeron entre 1927 y 1935 con una gran solidez estructural, a base de bloques de hormigón ornamentados por sillería de piedra artificial, con ladrillo caravista en los pisos superiores de algunas de ellas, y tejados apoyados en forjado de vigas metálicas.

Sin embargo solo once de ellas, la mitad de las proyectadas, han llegado hasta nuestros días, la mayoría en relativas buenas condiciones. Otras han desaparecido para siempre. Especialmente negligente fue la demolición total de la Estación de Calanda ya mediados los años 80, supuestamente tras el accidente sufrido por unos jóvenes en la estación.

El Apartadero de Castelserás, cuyas ruinas vemos aquí, es un caso aparte. No acertamos a adivinar qué fuerza malvada destruyó el edificio de viajeros con tanta virulencia (¿quizá la Guerra Civil Española?), pero su fachada permanece obstinadamente en pie. Ignorada, mutilada y dolorosamente bella.

A su izquierda, la lampistería.

CASTELSERÁS

Continuing the Baeza-Utiel train line in its ascent course towards France, the stations of the unfinished railway line Teruel-Alcañiz were built between 1927 and 1935 with a great structural solidity, based on concrete blocks ornamented by artificial stone masonry, with exposed brick on the upper floors of some of them, and roofs supported in wrought metal.

However, only eleven of them, half of those projected ones, have reached our days, most of them in relatively good conditions. Some others have disappeared forever. Especially negligent was the total demolition of the Calanda Station and in the mid-80s, supposedly after a teenagers' accident at the station.

Castelserás sidings (Teruel, Spain), whose ruins we see here, mean a case apart. We can not guess what evil force destroyed the passenger building with such virulence (perhaps the Spanish Civil War?), but its facade remains stubbornly standing. Ignored, mutilated and painfully beautiful.

On the left, the toilette building.

More of this railway line: flic.kr/s/aHsmt4vFrK

{ABC } Saweetie Boosteyay Pink

{ABC} Saweetie Diamond Panties Pink

{ABC} Saweetie Feather HarnessPink

(Freya,Maitreya ,Legacy , HourGlass & BBL)

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Flair%20for%20Events/138/1...

Hair: DOUX Shy Hairstyle

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Secrets/185/155/1362

Nails: Rosary Solidity (Belleza,Legacy & Slink)

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEVEL/140/213/4

Chiaroscuro (English: /kiˌɑːrəˈskjʊəroʊ/; Italian: [ˌkjaroˈskuːro] (light-dark)) is an artistic technique, developed during the Renaissance, that uses strong tonal contrasts between light and dark to model three-dimensional forms, often to dramatic effect.[1] It is one of the four canonical painting modes of Renaissance art (alongside cangiante, sfumato, and unione).

The underlying principle is that solidity of form is best achieved by the light falling against it. Artists known for developing the technique include Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt. It is a mainstay of black and white and low-key photography.

[I can't believe I just did a white vignette. Never say never !!]

"Victoria’s Parliament House is one of Australia’s oldest and most architecturally distinguished public buildings. Facing the intersection of Spring and Bourke Streets, the west façade with its sweeping steps, elegant lamps and grand colonnades project solidity and strength.

Plans for Parliament House were drawn in November 1855 by architect, Peter Kerr. The first stages of the building’s construction were the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council Chambers in 1856. The Parliamentary Library was completed five years later, with the Vestibule and Queen’s Hall built in 1879.

Work on the façade started in 1878, and was not completed until 1892 due to a lack of material. The façade is finished in a mix of basalt, freestone and brick."

www.openhousemelbourne.org

The attractive town of Tewkesbury has been dominated by its superb abbey church since the beginning of the 12th century, and we can be forever grateful to its townspeople for purchasing the monastic church in 1540 for £453 for use as their parish church, saving it from the fate that befell countless similar great churches across the land during the turmoil of the Dissolution. It reminds us both how lucky we are to still marvel at it today, yet also how great a loss to our heritage the period wrought when many more such buildings were so utterly plundered as to have gone without trace (the fate of the monastic buildings here and even the lady chapel of the church whose footings are laid out in the grass at the east end).

Tewkesbury Abbey is thus rightly celebrated as one of our greatest non-cathedral churches, and remarkably much of the original Norman church remains substantially intact, most apparently in the great central tower, a fine example of Romanesque architecture adorned with rows of blind-arcading. The west front is dominated by a massive Norman-arched recess (enclosing the somewhat later west window) and the nave and transepts remain largely as originally built, though this is less clear externally owing to the changes made to the windows, nearly all of which were enlarged in the 14th century in the Decorated Gothic style. This century also saw the complete rebuilding of the eastern limb of the church, of a form less common in England with radiating chapels surrounding the eastern apse of the choir (the central lady chapel sadly missing since 1540).

The interior reveals far more of the Romanesque structure with mighty columns supporting the round Norman arches of the nave arcades giving the building a great sense of solidity. The space is further enlivened by the changes made during the 14th century by the stunning vault over the nave (adorned with a rewarding series of figurative bosses) which sits surprisingly well with the Norman work below. Beyond the apsidal choir beckons, and both this and the space below the tower are enriched with stunningly complex vaulted ceilings (replete with further bosses and gilded metal stars), all ablaze with colour and gilding.

There is much to enjoy in glass here, most remarkably a complete set of 14th century glazing in the clerestorey of the choir, seven windows filled with saints and prophets (and most memorably two groups of knights in the westernmost windows on each side). A few of the figures have fared less well over the centuries but on the whole this is a wonderfully rare and well preserved scheme. There is much glass from the 19th century too, with an extensive scheme in the nave of good quality work by Hardman's, and more recently a pair of rich windows by Tom Denny were added in one of the polygonal chapels around the east end.

Some of the most memorable features are the monuments with many medieval tombs of note, primarily the effigies and chantry chapels of members of the Despenser family around the choir (two of the chantries being miniature architectural gems in their own right with exquisite fan-vaulting). In one of the apsidal chapels is the unusual cenotaph to Abbot Wakeman with his grisly cadaver effigy, a late medieval reminder of earthly mortality.

Tewkesbury Abbey is not to be missed and is every bit as rewarding as many of our cathedrals (superior in fact to all but the best). It is normally kept open and welcoming to visitors on a daily basis. I have also had the privilege of working on this great building several times over the years (as part of the team at the studio I once worked for), and have left my mark in glass in a few discreet places.

www.tewkesburyabbey.org.uk/

View "Solidity (Revisited)" on black or on white.

© 2016 Jeff Stewart. All rights reserved.

I met Carlo a few months ago as I was looking for some honey and I discovered this passionate beekeeper lived only half a mile from my home.

As we got to know each other over time, I found out that this amazing 84 years old was a true genius in building anything out of wood and metal in his well-equipped workshops.

I asked him to help me tame the biggest and heaviest lens I own, so that I could finally mount it onto a 4x5 camera and give it some use.

A few years ago I actually devised a way to mount this beastly lens, but I was never entirely satisfied with the results, as they lacked the solidity such a heavy piece of glass demands.

Carlo was able to quickly solder together a metal cone, permanently attached to a clone of a Plaubel lens board (which he cut and carved by hand !) where the heavy 12 Inch Aero Ektar f2.5lens would snugly fit.

The lens was to be further supported by a metal bracket that Carlo created, inspired by a plastic telescope lens bracket I had showed him earlier, but much, much sturdier than the original one.

Now came the shutter: we opted to drill a hole in a pine wooden board the size of the large packard shutter we were going to use (1/10th of a second maximum speed !!!).

To attach the “shutter board” to the lens Carlo hand-carved a slot of exactly the same diameter of the lens front element rim on the back. Once the rim slid into this groove, a couple of elastic bands were sufficient to stabilize and firmly attach the entire contraption to the camera body.

The heavy 12Inch Aero Ektar Lens can be a wonderful tool, giving you a very Shallow Depth Of Field and a Creamy Bokeh at a great Focal Length for portraiture (at 12 Inch FL this lens does cover 8x10 although I prefer using it on 4x5 and even 6x9, something I am able to do on the old Plaubel Supra camera by just changing the back).

It’s just that the lens is freakin’ big and heavy to mount anywhere but on a military aircraft!

Carlo was able to find a really good and elegant solution (in a retro-post-industrial style) that I truly love !!

My heartfelt THANK YOU to this wonderful, genial, inventor friend of mine!

January 1st 2023, we walked to the viewpoint at Craigmony... to discover a lack of view!

Still it is nice walking up through all that history that seeps into the rocks of the old promantory fort that overlooks the village, an ancient place with scant modern investigation and just some old stories and myths attached to the place. There does seem to be evidence of vitrified walls and rock cut ditches though which lends some solidity to the idea of it being a defensive location at the end of Glen Urquhart and Glen Coiltie as they meet the Great Glen and Loch Ness.

43/365

Blue sky, green sea, colours the way they’re meant to be.

1.33 miles to the end of the world. I am alone. Only the waves and the wind accompany me on my walk to nowhere. Water laps against the pillars that support me, this gentle giant with the power to destroy showing me mercy with every step I take. I am interrupted by the clack-clack of the train on its unhurried journey out to sea, and bursts of laughter drifting on the wind as I overtake and I am overtaken. The noon sun reflecting off the calm ocean is blinding as I walk towards it, and I wonder if it is truly the end of the universe that I head towards. There is not the sense of finality I am expecting when I reach my goal and contemplations of afterlives and continuations fill my head. I am surrounded by sea, though I have not been set adrift, tethered to land by a plank of wood. I ruminate some more on the solidity of what it is tying us to this life. Thoughts soon turn to food, and hot chocolate and a ham and cheese toasty await me at the end, along with a brief chance to shelter from the wind that tangles my hair and freezes my fingers. You can tell when the train pulls in because the queue in the café increases ten-fold and I wonder, not for the first time, why people make such a song and dance of the simplest of endeavours and vow once again never to have children.

It is summer in the middle of winter, and whilst I contemplate getting the train back, I figure it would be a waste of the azure expanse before me.

Smoke Photo Art.

"Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters."

Harry Callahan

#365!

Well, here it is. I struggled for a long time trying to figure out what I should do for my 365th smokreation. I tried to think of something new that I could do that would wow people, but you can't force creativity. In the end, I decided to go back to the beginning and do something that reminded me of why I became addicted to smoke photography in the first place. The simple lines and curves, the wonderful shapes, the way color interacts with the smoke, and the transparency and sense of solidity that smoke can have when captured in a photo. My first smokreations were pretty simple, just a single smoke photo with some color added. This one is the same (although I've learned a few new things about coloring along the way!). Over the past year, my work has become pretty complex, but most of my best smokreations start with a decent quality photo, even if you can't always see that in the final product.

For some reason I feel a need to remind myself that I'm a photographer, and that my work is based on a photograph and is not a digital painting. Why should that be important....why do we feel a need to say "captured in camera" as if that makes the work more legitimate? I sometimes feel defensive about my work....is it photography? Is it art? How much manipulation is ok before one shouldn't call it photography? It is unfortunate that we make such distinctions. Somehow we think if a photo is manipulated too much, it is somehow not a photo anymore or is even inferior. Or as one flickr member said "so you start with one photo and then photoshop the living crap out of it? in my opinion that's no longer a photo but that's ok. i love the result!" (I take offense to that comment....on several occasions I have photoshopped living crap INTO a photo ; ) ). Yet we accept the removal of all color from a photo (which resembles nothing in real life) to be the quintessential form of photography.

I have had a hard time knowing which flickr groups to submit my work to, since it doesn't look like most of the other pics in some of the groups. Fortunately, over time I have found other flickr members and groups that don't make such rigid distinctions and have accepted my work for what it is, a creative process that starts with photography and ends wherever I damn well feel like it. : )

Thank you all for accompanying me on this creative journey over the past year. Your feedback has been so encouraging. I'm going to take a short break from smoke photography, but I will be back....I have lots of photos on the hard drive to work on.

THE STATUE WAS COMMISSIONED AS A TRIBUTE TO THE BRAVERY OF THOSE WHO WORKED IN THE GREAT LAXEY MINES HAS BEEN UNVEILED IN THE ISLE OF MAN.

THE ONE-TONNE STONE STRUCTURE, WHICH HAS BEEN ERECTED ON A PLINTH IN THE HEART OF LAXEY, WAS MADE IN BALI BY SCULPTOR ONGKY WIJANA.

CO-ORDINATOR IVOR HANKINSON SAID THE STATUE IS DEDICATED TO THE MINERS WHO WORKED IN VERY DIFFICULT CONDITIONS.

THE GREAT LAXEY MINE EMPLOYED MORE THAN 600 MINERS BETWEEN 1825 AND 1929.

AT ITS PEAK, IT PRODUCED A FIFTH OF ZINC EXTRACTED IN THE UK.

MR HANKINSON ADDED: "THEY WERE AN EXTREMELY HARDY MEN, VERY TOUGH INDEED AND THE SCULPTOR HAS MANAGED TO CONVEY THAT IN HIS WORK VERY EFFECTIVELY.

"WE HAVE ALSO HAD A PLAQUE MADE IN MEMORY OF THOSE WHO LOST THEIR LIVES DOWN THE MINES".

ABOUT 30 MEN WERE KILLED IN MINING ACCIDENTS BETWEEN THE YEARS OF 1831 AND 1912.

SOME DROWNED, SOME WERE CRUSHED IN ROCK FALLS AND OTHERS DIED IN DYNAMITE EXPLOSIONS.

"THE WORKING CONDITIONS WERE INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT," SAID MR HANKINSON.

"SOME OF THE MEN HAD TO WALK MILES TO GET TO WORK IN THE FIRST PLACE. ONCE THERE, THEY HAD A TWO-HOUR JOURNEY ON LADDERS DOWN INTO THE MINES - SOME OF THE SHAFTS WERE A THIRD OF A MILE DEEP."

SCULPTOR ONKY WIJANA SAID HE WANTED TO CAPTURE THE STRENGTH AND DETERMINATION OF THE LAXEY MINERS

THE STATUE, CARVED FROM A FIVE-TONE BLOCK OF CARLOW BLUE LIMESTONE, TOOK MR WIJANA 10 MONTHS TO COMPLETE IN HIS STUDIO IN BANJAR SILAKARANG, INDONESIA.

"THESE GUYS WERE TOUGH BUT OFTEN LOOKED WEATHER-BEATEN, SUNKEN-CHEEKED AND WORN OUT," SAID MR WIJANA.

"HOWEVER, THEY ALSO HAD A SOLIDITY TO THEM AND ALWAYS A DETERMINATION IN THEIR EYES THAT I WANTED TO CAPTURE."

ONCE ERECTED ON ITS PLINTH, THE STONE MINER STATUE STANDS 13FT (4M) HIGH.

[Explored]

shimmering reflections in the glass curtain walls of a Manhattan high-rise contrast with the stone solidity of City Center

Parámetros :: Parameters: Fuji Canon EOS 1100D; ISO 100; 0 ev; f16; 30s; 18 mm SIGMA DC 18-250

Título :: Title :: Titre ::: Fecha (Date): Aquellas pequeñas cosas :: Those small things :: Ces petites choses ::: 2014/11/22 21:46

(Es). Historia: Ciñera, León, España. El Faedo de Ciñera es conocido por la mayor parte de los aficionados a la fotografía en León. Siempre que veo las hojas de otoño recuerdo esa canción de Serrat "Aquellas pequeñas cosas".

Toma: Toma sencilla que se complica cuando Fray está cruzándose continuamente por la escena. Por lo demás, no tiene otra complicación que no sea encuadrar el plano que más te apetece en ese momento. Tuve en cuenta una zona con hojas y musgo para obtener ese contraste del ocre con el verde. Luego exposición larga para evitar todo reflejo cristalino del agua de manera que la nitidez sólo se manifestase sobre las piedras y las hojas.

Tratamiento: Con Aperture. Original en RAW. Mejora básica del RAW con los parámetros predefinidos de Aperture. Encuadre panorámico forzado para eliminar la parte superior que contiene un camino de madera y para dar importancia a la anchura del arroyo. Ligero aumento de la vibración de color y mínimamente la saturación. Aumento escaso del punto negro y la definición a cero. La parte izquierda del histograma se desplaza a la derecha para dar un poco de solidez a los tonos oscuros. Viñeteado.

¡Eso es todo amigos!

(En). The History: Ciñera, León, España. The Faedo Ciñera is known by most amateur photographers in León. Whenever I see autumn leaves I remember that song by Serrat "Those little things".

Taking up: Single shot that gets complicated when Fray is continually crossing the scene. Otherwise has no other complications than frame the most plane you want at that time. I considered an area with leaves and moss to get that contrast the green with the ocher. Then long exposure to avoid a crystalline water reflection so that the sharpness only manifest on the stones and leaves.

Treatment: With Aperture. Original in RAW. Basic improvement of the RAW with Aperture's preset parameters. Forced to remove the top containing a wooden path and to give importance to the width of the stream panoramic frame. Slight increase in the vibration of color and saturation minimally. Little black dot gain and definition to zero. The left side of the histogram is shifted to the right to give some solidity to the dark tones. Vignetting.

That's all folks !!

(Fr). Histoire: Ciñera, León, Espagne. Le Faedo Ciñera est connu par la plupart des photographes amateurs à León. Chaque fois que je vois les feuilles d'automne Je me souviens que chanson de Serrat "Ces petites choses".

Prendre: Tir unique qui se complique lorsque Fray est continuellement en train de traverser la scène. Sinon a pas d'autres complications que le cadre le plus veulent avion à ce moment-là. Je considérais une zone avec des feuilles et de la mousse pour obtenir qui contrastent avec l'ocre et vert. Alors l'exposition prolongée pour éviter cristalline réflexion de l'eau de sorte que la netteté ne se manifeste que sur les pierres et les feuilles.

Traitement: Avec Aperture. Origine RAW . Avec amélioration de RAW d'Aperture base. Forcé à enlever le haut contenant un chemin de bois et de donner de l'importance à la largeur du cadre panoramique flux. Légère augmentation de la vibration de la couleur et la saturation minimale. Peu de gain de point noir et la définition à zéro. Le côté gauche de l'histogramme est décalé vers la droite pour donner une certaine solidité aux tons sombres. Vignettage.

Voilà, c'est tout!

Took a trip to Council Grove, KS today (1/17/25). One of the stops on the Santa Fe Trail. Took a few photos of historical things while there.

_____________

The Madonna of the Trail statues evolved over a period of 19 years. The project was begun in 1909 with the idea of marking the Santa Fe Trail in Missouri. In 1911, the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR) entered the picture, and in 1912 the National Old Trails Road Association came into being. During World War I, work was halted and resumed in 1922.

In 1927, the Daughters of the American Revolution Continental Congress accepted a design by August Leimbach, offered by Mrs. John Trigg Moss, chairwoman of the National Old Trails Committee of the DAR. The Madonna of the Trail Statue, one of the 12 original copies of the statue, was dedicated September 24, 1928. It was the fifth of 12 statues placed on the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway (Highway from Washington, D.C., to California) by NSDAR and the National Old Trails Road Association.

The Madonna of the Trail is a pioneer woman clasping her baby, with her young son clinging to her skirts. The face of the mother, strong in character, beauty, and gentleness, is the face of a mother who realizes her responsibilities. It has feeling of solidity - a monument which will stand through the ages. The figure of the mother is of heroic proportions - 10 feet high and weighing 5 tons. The base on which the figure stands is 6 feet high and weighs 12 tons. This base rests on a foundation that stands 2 feet above ground level, making the monument 18 feet tall. The figure and the base are made of algonite stone, giving the monuments the warm, pink color of Missouri native granite.

Photo taken in Kungsholmstorg at Gärdesloppet, or Prins Bertil Memorial, Stockholm, Sweden.

The Amazon – originally known as the Amason until German scooter manufacturer Kriedler claimed it as a trademark, then officially titled the 120-series – was the first Volvo to be widely exported beyond Scandinavian shores.

Engineered with a solidity that few other manufacturers could match, it set the blueprint for Volvo build quality and dependability.

The Volvo Amazon manages to combine kudos and credibility with engineering integrity and ruggedness. These cars are among the most well-built of their era yet still retain a sporty character thanks to their rally adventures.

You can use the Amazons every day, in all weathers, and they won’t protest too much. They also have typical Volvo practicality, seating five in comfort with room for all their paraphernalia in the capacious boot. The estates are even better at load lugging. Amazons are fun but tough.

www.classiccarsforsale.co.uk/reviews/classic-volvo-review...

The photograph shows a detail of a corner of the telephone exchange building at Friar's Lane in Inverness, Scotland.

This imposing stone-faced building on a prominent site in the city centre was constructed in 1949, which was a time during which very few new buildings were erected in Britain, due to post-war material shortages. The message conveyed, to me at least, was that the provision of such a facility was considered important by the state as part of its reconstruction efforts.

Encountering the impressive sight of the Highlands and Islands Telephone Exchange, as it was then called, is one of the clearest memories I have from my brief visit to Inverness in 1976.

Photograph made Friday 23rd July 2021.

Rosary Fit: Robe & Bodysuit

Rosary Femme _Robe Floral (Belleza Perky,HourGlass,Maitreya & Legacy

Rosary Femme _Bodysuit Green (Belleza Perky,HourGlass,Maitreya & Legacy )

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Flair%20for%20Events/138/1...

Nails: Rosary Solidity (Belleza,Legacy, Slink & Maitreya)

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEVEL/140/213/4

Hair: F.Q. Roscoo

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Kangean%20Star/190/133/26

Hairbase: GirlyCo //Taiey Tan

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Starfall/147/183/3581

Mask: VELOUR Skin Care Pack

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/VELOUR/190/209/1006

Chain: MMXVII Diamond La Fleurs FATPACK

marketplace.secondlife.com/p/MMXVII-Diamond-La-Fleurs-FAT...

No correspondence.

Third photo of the Landwehr-Infanterie-Regiment 124 series, with these 3 fellows having fun on their wooden sled.

This equipment had to be of good solidity to be able to support the weight of 3 adults.

Sans corespondance.

Troisième photo de cette série du Landwehr-Infanterie-Regiment 124, avec ces 3 gaillards qui s'amuse sur leur traineau de bois.

Cet équipement devait être d'une bonne solidité pour pouvoir supporter le poids de 3 adultes.

Here is my Grendizer (Goldrake/Goldorak)! Being a real legend in many countries, this guy truly deserves a proper treatment, so i've made the biggest creation i've ever made so far: 320 mm is a good help while recreating the typical curved surfaces of 80ies Super Robots, but it has been also a challenge, trying to reach a good compromise between aesthetic, solidity and poseability.

Commemorative monument in the Heritage Garden surrounding the Archbishopric of St.Boniface - Appel de l’esprit (Spiritu vocat),

20 June, 2016 was the official opening of the St. Boniface Heritage Garden and unveiling of the Legacy of Care, Courage and Compassion Monument and interpretive panels.

The sculpture is by Madeleine Vrignon who works primarily in sculptural art.

The monument presents two nuns, life size, in bronze. The first is on her knees wears a traditional dress reminiscent of that of the grey sisters. She could also evoke the nuns of the pre-conciliar era.

The second is standing, dressed as postulant clothes more casual reminiscent of post-Vatican II modernity.

The sculpture of the kneeling nun with raised arms gives thanks and recognition to the Spirit through her gesture. She is the first Grey Nun to arrive here bearing that mission; her traditional habit suggests this historical element.

The standing nun with the outstretched hands represents a postulant who has heeded the call and is here to serve. Her clothing reflects the more relaxed post-Vatican II attitude.

A second element of the monument, more abstract, is made of stainless steel to emphasize the brilliance and solidity of the work of the nuns.

The monument pays tribute to 51 Catholic Women Religious congregations who since 1844 have served, and of which 24 orders still serve in Manitoba.

These pioneering women established Manitoba's health system and were major players in the province's social service and education systems.

The Sisters monument and interpretive panels are a lasting legacy that inform and educate the general public on how they have always been there to respond to needs of the community, the unfortunate, sick and impoverished.

The IIIg was the last of the screw-mount Leicas. It was manufactured until 1960 in parallel to the much more expensive, and of course more modern bayonet-equipped M3 that many people see as the best Leica ever.

This particular body was manufactured in 1958. It has significantly more bulk than my pre-war IIIa, but the changes in handling are, at best, incremental. The larger finder is useful, and so are the parallax-corrected frames, but to me, the camera feels less "just right" than the 2 decades older model. But that is just my personal feeling.

Yes, of course she's complicated to use. Her design was obsolete even when she was new, But her build quality is beyond doubt and also, almost, beyond belief. Just go for a waltz with one of these ladies and you'll see what I mean.

That's just talking about the body. The lens ...quite frankly, I could never quite warm for the collapsibles. There is something missing there. The feeling of absolute, unflagging solidity. One thing is for sure, the glass is very easily scratched. Watch out for that if you consider buying an old Summicron. Always do the old flashlight test.

James Joyce describing the element 'Water'. It's no wonder he danced.

An iteration.

If this had been the only thing he had ever written, I would love him forever for it:

"What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its

capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances

including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow

erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs

and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric

instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at

Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap?"

'Ulysses', Chapter: 'Ithaca', P.624 (1922 Text), James Joyce

Oilbar on wall by streetartist ELBOW-TOE.

The yellow splatter actually makes all the violet in the hair sing. It was nice that the paint sort of stippled on this so that the areas that did not get as covered have a real solidity to them.

56096 crosses the Afon Cefni at Malltraeth with the RHTT.

The Viaduct - Grade ll listed in 1998 by CADW because it is an important structural component of the Chester and Holyhead Railway and an important feature within the surrounding areas of reclaimed marshland.

A bold design using masonary detailing to give the impression of solidity and permanence.

Robert Stephenson the Engineer and Francis Thompson of Derby the Architect. The earliest work started in 1845 and

the viaduct opened on March 31st 1848 and consists of 19 Voussoir arches which now have internal structural linings.

I stand in the distance

I view from afar

Should I offer some assistance?

Should it matter who you are?

We all get hurt by love

And we all have our cross to bear

But in the name of understanding now

Our problems should be shared

- Confide in me, Kylie Minogue

Location: Kiyori | TAXI

Guest model: "Blu"

Head: Lelutka - Fleur

Body: Legacy

Boobs: [Misfit] - Project Bimbo

Face skin: TRES BEAU - LELUTKA BLAISE SKIN (SUMMER)

Body Skin: itGirls - QUEEN Body (SUMMER)

Body Tattoo: DAPPA - Melody Tattoo

Face Tattoo: DAPPA - Crybaby

Hair: Foxy - Baby

Nail: Rosary. - Solidity

Eye makeup: VELOUR: - Mary HD Eyeshadows

Lipstick: TRES BEAU - LELUTKA "NICE TO MEET YA" LIPS [2]

Dress: MOXY - NIYA CORSET DRESS [CAKEDAY October 2020]

Bag: .: ryvolter :. - Layla Box Croc Bag

Whip: .: ryvolter :. - The Crop Whip

Gun: : CULT : - Hold up

Shoes: : CULT : - Baby Girl Heels

Necklace: [VEX] - Queen 18k

Earring: [VEX] - Cassie Hoops 18k

Rings: KUNGLERS - Grazia

Bindi: {Sakura} - Moon Bindi

Choker: Asteria - "Hope"

Boo! October tarot forecast out at: themessyoracle.com

Commentary.

A blanket of dimpled snow covers the lawns and ramparts of this Early Victorian Castle building.

Christmas looms with the decorated tree and other festive illuminations.

The floodlit Castle projects its warm, but imposing, reddish sandstone façade.

Battlements and towers remind us that such a strategic

site for a town, has led to numerous battles, skirmishes and disputes.

The statue of Flora MacDonald seems to peer south-west, into distance, seeking sight of her exiled and fugitive, “Great Pretender,” Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Poignantly, at this time, this mirrors our keen anticipation of an imminent Christmas.

There is a solidity and permanence about this scene.

Indeed, in a town with a history going back at least 1,500 years, former castles or forts have stood on this site, or near to it, for almost 1,000 of those years.

The present building has acted as County Hall and Sheriff Law Court in recent years.

The highest tower is now used as a viewpoint of the whole area.

The Castle Ramparts have been used as a viewpoint for many years.

Few visitors fail to take shots of the castle, and/or from the castle.

It always seems to crown the beauty, position and history of this majestic “Capital of the Highlands,” Inverness.

German vintage camera fans refer to the slightly clunky look favoured by Zeiss Ikon designers as the "Zeiss briquette". In the English vernacular, I guess one might describe it as "built like a brick ****house".

On the plus side of course is the mechanical solidity. With all that size and weight it should at least be solid. And it is, though not on par with a Leicaflex. As long as you don't use the on-board light meter, you might even like the ergonomics.

It's a Zeiss Ikon Voigtländer Icarex 35S TM body with a Voigtländer Color Ultron 1.8/50 M42 lens, in case you're curious.

I actually quite like it, but in its time, few others did. Not enough to keep its maker afloat, at any rate. Adding insult to injury, I photographed it using hardware made by its major German competitor.

Shot with:

Canon EOS600D

Leica Bellows R (16860)

Leica 100mm f/4 Macro Elmar-R, bellows version (11230)

Taken from a Great Linford Parish Council leaflet.

Commemorating the legacy of Gyosei International School UK. The Japanese co-educational boarding school and playing fields closed in 2002 and the site at Willen Park South was redeveloped as Lovat Fields Village and Barret Homes Gyosei housing scheme.

Developer funding paid for eight artworks in Phase 1, which

are related to the themes of; Japanese Connections, Canal

History, Fish, Fowl, Insects and Invertebrates.

The trail is located on both sides of the Grand Union

Canal from H3 Monks Way to H5 Portway and is accessible

from the local redway network.

Life sized Shire horse in steel.

For the Gyosei Art Trail, Andrew has created a powerful

Shire Horse whose steady toil propelled the barges of yesteryear along the towpaths of the Grand Union canal. Andrew says he has tried to capture the huge strength and solidity of a Shire, while also suggesting the animals’ calm,

resolute approach to the task in hand.

My Labradoodle Whispa decided to pose as I was taking the photo. I left her in as she is doing a good imitation of the horse and gives a good size perspective !

“Being empty makes me whole sometimes. I wonder if every hollow hole has its own solidity of fulfillment”

― Munia Khan

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQPcYbMklYY

Blog Post

sllorinovo.blogspot.ca/2015/09/beautiful-free-queen-gaga-...

Fenton Cenotaph

The war memorial has grade II listing status.

An obelisk springs from the base of the memorial.

On the side facing Christchurch Street the figure of a private soldier stands with reversed arms. The old Fenton coat of arms is carved on the side of the monument facing the Town Hall, with the motto ONWARD and UPWARD carved in raised letters.

On each of the other three sides are carved laurel wreaths and festoons, under which the words HONOUR SACRIFICE and COURAGE are incised. On each corner of the monument are prominent supporting diagonal buttresses with moulded base and plain caps.

In its overall composition the memorial conveys an impression of solidity and strength.

Here is my Grendizer (Goldrake/Goldorak)! Being a real legend in many countries, this guy truly deserves a proper treatment, so i've made the biggest creation i've ever made so far: 320 mm is a good help while recreating the typical curved surfaces of 80ies Super Robots, but it has been also a challenge, trying to reach a good compromise between aesthetic, solidity and poseability.

Poem.

Like a military parade of trees,

Commercial Spruce, in bottle-green uniform,

stand to attention on the lower slopes, mile upon mile.

Golden Larch, like Red-Hot Pokers,

frame plantations in spectacular contrast,

acting as expendable fire-breaks in order to sustain the bulk of the forest.

Delicate fronds of the Silver Birch droop and waiver in the breeze.

Lower branches speckled by what seems countless golden doubloons “sparkle” with an iridescent glow.

Millions of leaves metamorphose into their Autumnal apparel.

The deeper, richer bronze of the bracken adds to this awesome, multi-coloured tapestry, but Broom and Gorse hang on to their now, flowerless, green foliage.

Blacks and greys of leafless bushes and the scaffolding of straight, deeply grooved pine-tree-trunks, gives an architectural solidity to the scene.

The richness of colour and texture is momentous, mesmeric and moving.

It is a joy to behold.

I met Carlo a few months ago as I was looking for some honey and I discovered this passionate beekeeper lived only half a mile from my home.

As we got to know each other over time, I found out that this amazing 84 years old was a true genius in building anything out of wood and metal in his well-equipped workshops.

I asked him to help me tame the biggest and heaviest lens I own, so that I could finally mount it onto a 4x5 camera and give it some use.

A few years ago I actually devised a way to mount this beastly lens, but I was never entirely satisfied with the results, as they lacked the solidity such a heavy piece of glass demands.

Carlo was able to quickly solder together a metal cone, permanently attached to a clone of a Plaubel lens board (which he cut and carved by hand !) where the heavy 12 Inch Aero Ektar f2.5lens would snugly fit.

The lens was to be further supported by a metal bracket that Carlo created, inspired by a plastic telescope lens bracket I had showed him earlier, but much, much sturdier than the original one.

Now came the shutter: we opted to drill a hole in a pine wooden board the size of the large packard shutter we were going to use (1/10th of a second maximum speed !!!).

To attach the “shutter board” to the lens Carlo hand-carved a slot of exactly the same diameter of the lens front element rim on the back. Once the rim slid into this groove, a couple of elastic bands were sufficient to stabilize and firmly attach the entire contraption to the camera body.

The heavy 12Inch Aero Ektar Lens can be a wonderful tool, giving you a very Shallow Depth Of Field and a Creamy Bokeh at a great Focal Length for portraiture (at 12 Inch FL this lens does cover 8x10 although I prefer using it on 4x5 and even 6x9, something I am able to do on the old Plaubel Supra camera by just changing the back).

It’s just that the lens is freakin’ big and heavy to mount anywhere but on a military aircraft!

Carlo was able to find a really good and elegant solution (in a retro-post-industrial style) that I truly love !!

My heartfelt THANK YOU to this wonderful, genial, inventor friend of mine!

Bauhaus Museum Weimar, Germany

German architect Heike Hanada designed a minimalist concrete museum to celebrate the Bauhaus in Weimar, where the design school was founded 100 years ago. The building is dedicated to the design school creates a physical cultural presence for the Bauhaus in the German city where it was based between 1919 and 1925. Located near the Nazi-era Gauforum square and the Neue Museum Weimar, the Bauhaus Museum is a simple five-storey concrete box broken only with its entrance and a couple of windows. The enclosing shell of light-grey concrete lends the cube stability and dynamic solidity. Equally spaced horizontal grooves run around the facades of the museum, with the words "bauhaus museum" repeated in a band near the top of the building. Hanada designed the museum to be a public building for the city and has attempted to clearly connect it to the neighbouring park. With elements such as plinths, fasciae, portals, stairways and a terrace to the park, the architecture incorporates classical themes that underscore its public character.

The museum contains 2,000 m2 of exhibition space, which will be used to display around 1,000 items from the Weimar Bauhaus collection. A shop and entrance hall is located on the ground floor, with a cafe and toilets below, and three floors dedicated to telling the story of the Bauhaus above. Each of the galleries overlooks double-height spaces and are accessed from a long ceremonial staircase that stretches the height of the building. The visitors ascend a succession of interchanging open spaces and staircases until they finally arrive at the top floor where they are presented with an unobstructed view of the park. The cascading staircases are encased by ceiling-high walls and function as free-standing, enclosed bodies in the interior space. The collection is arranged to inform visitors about the history of the design school, with the gallery on the first floor dedicated to its origins in Weimar and the Bauhaus manifesto that Walter Gropius wrote in 1919. The second floor has exhibits that show how these ideas were implemented, with galleries dedicated to each of the Bauhaus directors – Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe – at the top of the building.

The museum in Weimar has opened to coincide with the centenary of the Bauhaus, which was established in the city in 1919. The school was forced to relocate from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed a new school building for the institution. Following a short time based in Berlin the school closed for good in 1933. Although only open for just over a decade, the Bauhaus is the most influential art and design school in history. The ideas and people associated with the school had an incredible impact on design and architecture, and to mark its centenary we created a series exploring its key works and figures.

Monsanto. Portugal. La solidez de la piedra. 6

Fuji X-E2 | 35mm f2.8 Elmarit-R v.1 (1970)

Cambria, CA | 2020

I don’t actually understand this photo.

It was just a quick editing experiment while going back through this day, a warmup on what I considered a failed shot. I thought the result was a so-so shot, with a decent edit for how quick, from a spectacular lens, and liked it enough to stick it on facebook. And then I kept coming back and looking at its textures, tones, and chaotic mess of lines undulating within the boundary of rock solidity.

I don’t think it works, but I keep looking. Maybe it’s just that it reminds me of some Weston seaweed photos that I think also didn’t work, so I’m fooling myself into studying it and trying to understand.

(203 DSCF0216c)

Monument to the King's Liverpool Regiment. 1905. Sir W. Goscombe John. White stone with central bronze wreath, helmet, flag, sword etc, a standing soldier at each side, and figure of Britannia on central pedestal. Drummer boy at rear. Commemorates the service of the regiment in the South African War.

The King’s Liverpool Regiment monument is the centrepiece of the Gardens. The main frontage of the large Portland stone construction, facing outwards from St George’s Hall, has a bronze statue of Britannia on a plinth, flanking figures of two soldiers representing the Regiment at different periods, and is inscribed on the wall between them with the names of their most recent exploits: Afghanistan (1878-80) and Burma (1885-87), and South Africa (1899-1902). Between them, also in bronze, is a heap of weaponry, flag and a palm leaf, above the several steps to the ground; a wreath is just in front of this, two steps down.

The sculptor was William Goscombe John, and the statue of Britannia is an excellent example of his work at its best. Britannia stands facing slightly downwards, heavily draped over her armour – we see a solid breastplate and chainmail arms emerging form wide sleeves – and wearing a helmet, with tiny boat-wings and a prow at the front, and a crest in the form of a seahorse, all this to recall Britannia’s maritime associations. Little inscribed waves run round this helm, and more swirly waves are on the base of the statue. Her shield on her left arm faces backwards, and she carries an olive branch in her shield hand. Her other hand, rather than holding a sword, is empty, raised, and palm outwards, for this is a Britannia of Peace. There is a tremendous solidity and mass to this statue, so that with the armour, even a peaceful Britannia is rather warlike.

The soldier to our left as we view the monument represents the typical soldier of the Regiment in 1685, with long gun and some sort of narrow sword behind him, and standing in a lively pose, one foot forward, one hand on the low wall. The other soldier, of 1902, has a rifle and a band of bullets over his chest; he stands more at ease, in what is almost a swaggering lounge. Both rest the butts of their guns on the ground, indicative that the battle is won and peace has been achieved.

But this is a three-dimensional memorial, and completely hidden from this side, round the back is one of the most famous Liverpool statues, and a figure which alone would give Goscombe John a claim to greatness as a sculptor. It is the Drummer Boy; a youth seated on a cannon and trophy of flags and so forth, his drum sticks active in his hands, his figure twisted to one side and face serious: a work of immediacy and urgency contrasting with the peacefulness of the other side. The full sized model for this work is on display in the Walker Art Gallery nearby.

... The 10th of March ...

Shot with an M42 Tele-Ennalyt 135mm prime.

Vast chromatic aberation problems from shooting into the direction of the sun - I was unable to remove them all in RAW so had to addition eyedropper and HSB in PS. Even after, there are still some blue and orange threads too close to the fine structure to make a gain. The lens was in a box of camera detritus in a hanger for objects that were between life and death. It was decomposing with caps, early digital cameras, small vinyl pouches and flash bulbs. I took the lens apart and cleaned it up and turned on an adapter. The bokeh is smooth and it has a solidity to its focus that is agreeable. It's not mad sharp but is reassuring. I think I payed 10 euros, so 14 with the adapter. A new spring for an old lens.

AJ

No. 410 East Ridge Street.

"This fifteen-room house stands on a beautiful site overlooking Marquette Harbor and Lake Superior. The nearly square Italian Villa with Second Empire detailing has a projecting central tower topped by a concave mansard roof. A wrought-iron balconet at the center of the tower is covered by a bracketed hood. A porch, supported by simple columns and ormamental scrolled brackets, wraps around the east and south sides at the ground floor. The house was designed by English immigrant Gregory (1833–1921), who, steeped in the stone building tradition of his native Devonshire, built it of roughly dressed, evenly coursed, variegated reddish-brown and white sandstone. The interior is fitted with woodwork finished in Marquette shops. The house was built for Merritt (b. 1833), his wife, and five children. Merritt was a pioneer industrialist and employee of the Lake Shore Iron Works (owner of the Iron Bay Foundry and Machine Shops), as well as an investor in mining companies, banks, and land. The Biographical Record: Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens of Houghton, Baraga and Marquette Counties, Michigan (1903) noted, “It is equipped with all modern appliances for pleasure and comfort, and is not only a pleasure to the eye and a haven of rest, but is also the seat of much hospitality.” The house in its solidity seems to demonstrate the financial and social success of its owner and the skill of its builder." - info from SAH ARCHIPEDIA.

"The Arch and Ridge Streets Historic District is a historic district located in Marquette, Michigan, running along Arch and Ridge Streets from Front Street to Lake Superior. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The district includes the Call House.

The residential core of the district is defined by ridge running east-and-west (known locally as simply "the Ridge"), which gives Ridge Street its name. The district includes spectacular residences built for some of the leading citizens of Marquette, as well as more modest houses for white- and blue-collar workers. Two public structures, the Peter White Library and First United Methodist Church, are also located within the district.

Seven of these structures are built from local sandstone. These include the Daniel Merritt House and St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral. A small cottage in the neighborhood was the inspiration for Carroll Watson Rankin's 1904 novel, The Dandelion Cottage.

The first construction in the Arch and Ridge Streets Historic District was in 1867, when Peter White built the first house on the Ridge. Most of the construction in the district took place over the next 35 years as other leading citizens of Marquette followed White's lead, including pioneer businessman and industrialist Hiram A. Burt, Charles H. Call, Daniel Merritt, Andrew Ripka, David Murray, Josiah Reynolds, Frank Bennett Spear, and James Jopling.

Marquette (/mɑːrˈkɛt/ mar-KEHT) is a city in Marquette County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 20,629 at the 2020 United States Census, which makes it the largest city in the Upper Peninsula. It also serves as the county seat of Marquette County. Located on the shores of Lake Superior, the city is a major port, known primarily for shipping iron ore. The city is partially surrounded by Marquette Charter Township, but the two are administered autonomously.

Marquette is the home of Northern Michigan University. In 2012, Marquette was listed among the 10 best places to retire in the United States by CBS MoneyWatch.

The land around Marquette was known to French missionaries of the early 17th century and the trappers of the early 19th century. Development of the area did not begin until 1844, when William Burt and Jacob Houghton (the brother of geologist Douglass Houghton) discovered iron deposits near Teal Lake west of Marquette. In 1845, Jackson Mining Company, the first organized mining company in the region, was formed.

The village of Marquette began on September 14, 1849, with the formation of a second iron concern, the Marquette Iron Company. Three men participated in organizing the firm: Robert J. Graveraet, who had prospected the region for ore; Edward Clark, agent for Waterman A. Fisher of Worcester, Massachusetts, who financed the company, and Amos Rogers Harlow. The village was at first called New Worcester, with Harlow as the first postmaster. On August 21, 1850, the name was changed to honor Jacques Marquette, the French Jesuit missionary who had explored the region. A second post office, named Carp River, was opened on October 13, 1851 by Peter White, who had gone there with Graveraet at age 18. Harlow closed his post office in August 1852. The Marquette Iron Company failed, while its successor, the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, flourished and had the village platted in 1854. The plat was recorded by Peter White. White's office was renamed as Marquette in April 1856, and the village was incorporated in 1859. It was incorporated as a city in 1871.

During the 1850s, Marquette was linked by rail to numerous mines and became the leading shipping center of the Upper Peninsula. The first ore pocket dock, designed by an early town leader, John Burt, was built by the Cleveland Iron Mining Company in 1859. By 1862, the city had a population of over 1,600 and a soaring economy.

In the late 19th century, during the height of iron mining, Marquette became nationally known as a summer haven. Visitors brought in by Great Lakes passenger steamships filled the city's hotels and resorts.

South of the city, K. I. Sawyer Air Force Base was an important Air Force installation during the Cold War, host to B-52H bombers and KC-135 tankers of the Strategic Air Command, as well as a fighter interceptor squadron. The base closed in September 1995, and is now the county's Sawyer International Airport.

Marquette continues to be a shipping port for hematite ores and, today, enriched iron ore pellets, from nearby mines and pelletizing plants. About 7.9 million gross tons of pelletized iron ore passed through Marquette's Presque Isle Harbor in 2005.

The Roman Catholic Bishop Frederic Baraga is buried at St. Peter Cathedral, which is the center for the Diocese of Marquette.

Lakeview Arena, an ice hockey rink in Marquette won the Kraft Hockeyville USA contest on April 30, 2016. The arena received $150,000 in upgrades, and hosted the Buffalo Sabres and Carolina Hurricanes on October 4, 2016 in a preseason NHL contest. Buffalo won the game 2-0." - info from Wikipedia.

Now on Instagram.

I well remember drawing this a couple of years ago with a simple writing pen while sitting on my couch in Toronto one evening. I had taken a trip to Spain a year or so earlier and had visited 3 main cities on the pilgrimage route to Santiago - Burgos, Leon, and Santiago.

This was an "impressionistic" conjuring of my memories of Santiago de Compestela in simple sketch form, It's one of the most interesting cities I have ever visited, Burgos and Leon were also deeply interesting to me, with very high quality gothic cathedrals in each (simply not present in the Americas). I suppose the idea came from a Paul Klee sketch/painting called "city of churches" I think.

I added watercolour to the pen sketch tonight and due to the fact that the pen was not waterproof, it smeared and smudged a lot. I kept going because the muddy colours were feeling something like my memories of the wet granite stone of the city. (I must say I wish I would have photographed it before I added the colour, but c'est la vie...) I added coloured pencil and pitt pen highlights to try to offset some of the muddiness, and also "tweaked" the colouration in "iphoto" a bit.

I'm not entirely happy with it, but it does capture some of my impressions of the city. The Cathedral dominates the old city, as does a large square with many small side streets leading into it. I recall many arcaded buildings, the green hills of Galicia in the distance, many steps leading into and away from the square, and of course the massive solidity and heavy decoration of the cathedral. The city impressed most at night I thought and that is why the sky is a deep dark blue.

I subsequently walked the pilgramage along a different route - the Portugese route from Porto - and the city was just as mysterious the second time I visited. I stayed for a few days afterward and basically wandered around the city and drank beer in the pubs.

I'd still like to visit this place again, it has a presence about it that has stayed strongly in my memory.