View allAll Photos Tagged decency
Callie is known locally as 'black jesus' - he is kind, a deep thinker, ridiculously easy company.
Six days a week, his long gangly legs and endless ropey arms make their way around the island by bicycle, (often balancing a variety of fruits and coconuts on his handlebars to sell), easily traversing 20km-30km a day.
On this day, he told me that he had recently had a stroke and that he had some paralysis down his right side. The doctor told Callie that it was a good thing that he took one of his epic bicycle rides shortly after the stroke had hit, because doing so had minimised the lasting affect of the heart-event on his limbs.
Before the portraits, I showed Callie the images I had taken of his sister Anna - he got emotional: there she is...there she is'...
Callie, and ordinary men and women like him, make you feel part of something that matters. That a world of decency, respect, hard work, honesty and self-sufficiency, can and does still exist.
Whenever I speak to Callie or see one of his enormous hands lift from a handlebar to waive as I pass him, his give-everything smile beaming, I realise that 'god is one of us' and that our blessings are too many to count.
Donald Trump. To quote Joseph Welch during the McCarthy hearings about communist in the army, "Sir, have you no sense of decency?"
“Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed”.
(François de la Rochefoucauld - French classical author, 1613-1680)
It is uneasy to maintain the limits of decency while taking pictures of Banarsi women bathing in the holy waters of the Ganges.
Their wet sarees are very sensual and according to modern Indian customs and morality it is banned to show feminine nudity or anything which could suggest it.
By chance water drops were splashing around and covering what could have become a source of trouble in this picture and besides the faces of those ladies can't be seen.
In a way it is ironical to think about this in the land of the kama sutra where ancient temples show sculptures with voluptuous and erotic carvings...
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Removing a Weapon of Mass Ecological Destruction
The Hauling Continues.
As the “Bob Barker” continues to pursue the Nigerian flagged poacher “Thunder” northward, the “Sam Simon” some 1200 nautical miles to the southeast continues to haul in the illegally set gillnet. After three days of hauling, there is now 20,000 meters of line and net on the deck of the “Sam Simon” and the crew continue to work around the clock in four hour shifts with the retrieval. The crew have no idea how long this single net is. They have half of it on board, maybe even a quarter, they will not know the actual length until the last of the net is retrieved.
The net has to be hauled up from a depth of 2 kilometres.
The galley crew are operating 24 hours a day to keep the deck shifts fed, and warm with tea and coffee and the medical officer has been proscribing pain-killers for stiff neck and back pains. The bridge team are doing 4 hours on deck, then four hours on the bridge and eight off, then back to the cycle again.
Captain Siddharth Chakavarty reports that his crew are all in great spirits and happy to be hauling in this weapon of mass ecological destruction.
Captain Peter Hammarsted reports that the “Thunder” is moving slowly northward without any defined destination.
If there is a law but there is no sheriff in town, it becomes the responsibility of concerned citizens to enforce the law. The “Thunder” is listed by Interpol as the most notorious of the Southern Ocean poaching vessels. Sea Shepherd has intercepted and shut down the criminal operations of this ship and it’s crew of pirates.
Sea Shepherd does not expect a medal or a commendation from any government for this intervention and it looks certain there will be no assistance forth coming, but the least the politicians can do in the face of their own lack of involvement or concern is to keep their criticisms to themselves. If they have not got the courage or the decency to act against illegal fishing themselves, they should dispense with their attacks and allow Sea Shepherd to do the job they refuse to do.
Photo : Sea Shepherd
This is from a roll of film that I thought was lost. On Monday evening, I stopped by to pick up two rolls at the local HEB lab, and arrived home with only one. I called them back, and ripped through several locations trying to find it. The only conclusion, finally, was that in my rush (an insanely busy day, and I was just getting hit with symptoms consistent with sinusitis -- a bloody killer headache, for instance) the photo envelope fell out of my bag and was, very simply, gone. I don't know who would have even the most remote interest in stealing them, really, so I assumed they'd been picked up by maintenance and deep-sixed with the other trash. A bit dispiriting, yes, particularly given my slightly weakened state. But given everything else that I have to deal with at the moment, something like this couldn't seem more hopelessly insignificant. But still...
Ok. Early this afternoon, I received a cryptic message on my cell, and it turned out to be from the fine folks at the lab. Some kind soul apparently found the photo envelope (w/ negatives and CD) and simply left it on the counter. So, this evening, I stopped by and picked it up. This image was from the beginning of the roll, and I dedicate it to this anonymous person who, in simply doing what's right, sort of reaffirmed what little faith I have left in the essential decency of people, if you will. It's been a bit strained of late. So, thank you. Prost! ^_^
I apologize if anyone could be offended or disgusted with this picture. But the message I want to convey is more important than decency.
Mi scuso con quanti possano sentirsi offesi o disgustati da questa immagine. Ma credo che ben altro possa essere il disgusto per le realtà che stiamo vivendo ai nostri giorni
Qui la miseria umana,
quella che affama gli amori,
sempre si ritrova
in luoghi disperati
che si nascondono alla vista
ma preziosi più di tanti
ritrovi illuminati.
La decenza non vuole,
ma l'occhio vede tutto
e indaga e pesa
e mi domanda
se fissarne il degrado
debba considerarsi sfregio
alla storia, alle sue vane glorie,
al comune sentire,
dato che l' indecenza, quella vera,
con le sue maschere bugiarde
e disgustose
ben altre,
più profumate stanze di palazzo
sempre frequenta
furtiva e indisturbata.
(Scott Wesley Brown)
Who would of thought that long ago
So very far away,
A little child would be born
And in a manger laid?
And who would have thought this little child
Was born the King of kings,
The Son of just a carpenter
For whom the angels sing?
And who would have thought that as He grew
And with other children played
This child with whom they laughed and sang
Would die for them some day
And who would have thought this little child
Could make a blind man see,
Feed the hungry, make rich the poor
And set the sinner free?
Oh who would have thought this little child
Was who the prophets said?
Would take away the sins of man
And rise up from the dead!
[Chorus]
And I believe! And I will always sing,
"This little child is the King!"
Oh, I believe. And, I will always sing,
"This little child
He is the King of kings!"
Verse 2
Many years have come and gone
Yet this world remains the same.
Empires have been built and fallen
Only time has made a change.
Nation against nation.
Brother against brother.
Men so filled with hatred
Killing one another.
And over half the world is starving
While a banner of decency is torn.
Debating over disarmament.
Killing children before they're born.
And fools who march to win the right
To justify their sin.
Oh every nation that has fallen
Has fallen from within!
Yet in the midst of this darkness,
There is a hope, a light that burns.
This little child -the King of kings-
Some day will return!
[Chorus]
And I believe! And I will always sing,
"This little child is the King!"
Oh, I believe. And, I will always sing,
"This little child
He is the King of kings!"
Verse 3
Who would have tho't this little child
Is who the prophets said
Will return to judge this world
The living and the dead
Oh can't you see that long ago
So very far away
This little child our only hope
Was born a King that day
And can't you see that here and now
As unto Him we pray
This Lord of lords who is our hope
Is still King today
He's still the King today
Esta é uma antiga canção de Natal que tem uma letra muito profunda, estou sem tempo para traduzir, mas se alguem tiver essa facilidade, para ouvir a canção na voz do compositor é só clicar na letra.
Foto: Enfeite de Natal - Arvore da Marcia Abreu
On my way back from a business meeting, on the train with four colleagues, one of which took this.
My head looks so weirdly small. My arms look like they're made from floppy rubber.
I'm a freak.
And my colleagues didn't even have the decency to pull my skirt down.
Tsk.
:-)
The government of my country is being chainsawed into something unrecognizable as basic decency and democratic principles are being shoved aside and purges have become common. It is very difficult to watch. And the embrace of Putin and Russia is a disgrace.
The Expat
Justice fled the country
Quite recently
Catching the first flight
Out
No longer blind
But acutely aware
She left behind anarchy
Chaos
Ignorance
And iron fists
Thundering
Knocking on doors late at night
Hooded horsemen in white robes
Galloping here
There
And everywhere
In search of prey
Thugs and bullies released
Unleashed
And pardoned
The scales of Justice
Tipped over
Abandoned
And cast aside
As Injustice stepped haughtily
Into her place
Sneering at her distant cousin
Easily forgotten
Laid aside
And sent packing
Along with Liberty
Freedom
And the rule of law
© Jamie McKenzie, all rights reserved
You will find 200+ of my poems HERE. fno.org/poetry/index.html
WHO ARE THE SEA SHEPHERDS?
International volunteers so passionate, so steadfast, determined and courageous that it takes an armed Danish Naval Force to stop our aggressive but non-violent interventions on behalf of life in our Ocean.
Ordinary people who have chosen to be Shepherds defending marine life, compassionate people willing to risk their lives and freedom to oppose cruelty, destruction and slaughter.
The Faroese whalers are blood thirsty craven killers hiding behind the skirts of the Danish Navy. They demonstrate their pathetic culture by slaughtering the gentlest of the sentient beings in the sea, and in so doing they bring ignoble shame upon the entire human race with their arrogant displays of pitiless violence. They kill thoughtlessly, without remorse and beat their chest like soulless creatures devoid of empathy and decency.
Photo : Sea Shepherd
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MANIFESTO GLEITZEIT 2015
BY STELLY RIESLING
Featured below is another original art work of mine in homage to THE PIONEER OF INVISIBLE ART — PAUL JAISINI. Forget all the copycats that came after him — Master Paul Jaisini was the *FIRST* of a totally original concept and the *BEST*. My favorite thing about him is that he’s a voice, not an echo, which is quite rare.
DISCLAIMER: This is for anyone who is a hater OR wishes to better understand me, what I’m all about, so you can decide whether I’m weird or normal enough for you — a kind of very loose manifesto, rushed and unrevised, full of raw uncut emotion that I don’t like to be evident in my writing as lately I prefer a more professional, formal style, so we can consider this a rough draft of the more polished writing to come when I have extra time. I might return to this text later and clean it up or break it into separate parts. Right now it’s a long-winded hot mess, so if you manage to make any sense of it, BIG PROPS TO YOU. lol …and if you manage to read it ALL, you have my solemn respect!!! in a day when reading has been reduced to just catchy headliners and short captions of images once in a while. The consequence of this one-liner internet culture is non-linear, tunnel thinking, which is baaaaaad.
There lives among us a most enigmatic and charismatic creature named Paul Jaisini who led me into the wonderful world of art, not personally, but through descriptions of his artworks in essays written and published online by his friend, which painted the most fascinating images in my mind. Early on as a kiddo, I experimented with photography, simple point and shoot whatever looked attractive to me. Digital manipulation of my photographs with computer software followed… and somehow I learned useful drawing techniques along the way to combine existing elements with nonexistent ones, which allowed me to elevate the context for my ideas. Later, I started creating my own digital art from scratch for my friends and family as a favorite pastime. They would shower me with praise and repeatedly encouraged me to share my “different” vision with the rest of the world… it took a while and wasn’t easy to overcome the insecurity of not being good enough along with a gripping fear of being harshly criticized, but one day I woman-ed up and started publishing my work on the web, reminding myself that my livelihood didn’t depend on a positive reception.
Paul Jaisini’s role in all this has been to not disgrace myself, even if what I do is just a hobby. And I would never do him and other genius artists the disservice of calling myself a professional because I know I’ll never be as good as any of the GIANTS of pre-modern history. Be the best or be nothing, no middle ground.
People’s jealousy in the past, future and present over my obsessive love of Paul Jaisini, which they are well aware is purely plutonic, has caused them to despise the man and has made many relationships/friendships impossible for me. I refuse to have such people in my life because by harboring any negativity towards Paul, they unknowingly feel that way about me and express it to me. It’s their own problem for not realizing this. Paul’s new art movement, Gleitzeit, shaped me into the allegedly awesome girl I am today, giving my art more edge, more “sexy” because it refined my vision of the world and propelled me to attain the skills necessary to not dishonor my family name through tenacious pursuit of perfection. Since the beginning of my life, I attempted to depict what I saw in visual, musical and literal forms, but continuously failed without adequate training and determination. Paul Jaisini’s Gleitzeit was the answer to my prayers. Who I am today I owe mostly to him and his selfless ideals of the artverse that I’ve given unconditional loyalty to (he has this cool ability for hyper-vision to see whole universes, not itty bitty worlds, hence I call it an artverse instead of art world, with him in mind). So again, anyone who hates Paul Jaisini hates ME because, regardless of what he means to you, he is the most important person in my life for making me ME. The way a famous actor, dancer or singer inspires others to act, dance or sing, Paul inspired me to become a better artist, better writer, better everything. More people would understand if he was a household name because they’re wired to in society. But we’re inspiring each other all the time in our own little communities without being famous, so if someone has the ability to change even ONE person’s life immensely with creativity, it is a massive achievement. And passionate folks like myself are compelled to scream it from the cyber rooftops. So here I am. It’s whatever.
Furthermore, I’d like to address here a few pressing matters in light of some recent drama brought on by both strangers and former friends. To start, I never judge the passions, interests or likes of others, which are often in my face all over the place, so likewise they have no right to judge any of mine. It is quite unfortunate and frustrating how very little understanding and education the majority of people have or want to have. Their logic is as primitive as a chipmunk when it comes to promotion of fine art on the web: “spamming, advertising, report!” It’s their own problem that they fail to understand what it’s about due to the distorted lens through which they see the world or inability to think for themselves; an inherent lack of perception or inquisitiveness. Well, guess what? Every single image, every animation, every video, every post dedicated to Mr. Paul Jaisini and “Gleitziet” (to elaborate: a revolutionary new art movement Paul founded with his partner in crime and personal friend, EYKG, who discovered him and believed in him more than anyone) has an important purpose. Every one of those things you run across is a piece of a puzzle, a move in a game, an inch down a rabbit hole; the deeper you go, the more interesting it gets; the more levels you pass, the more clues unfold, the greater the suspense and nearer the conclusion (yet further). You earn awesome rewards like enlightenment, spiritual revelations, truths, knowledge, wisdom and the most profound reward of all: the drive to improve yourself to the absolute maximum, so an unending, unshakable drive. People often make a wrong turn in this cyber game and go back a few levels or get stuck. Those that keep on pushing, however, will come to find the effort has been worth it. And what awaits you in the end of it all? The greatest challenge to beating the game: YOUR OWN MIND. You will be forced to let go of every belief you held before you had reached the last level, to completely alter your mindset and perception of the world, of life, of yourself. But by the time you’ve gotten to that point, it will be as easy as falling off a cliff! (It is a kind of suicide after all — death and rebirth of spirit.)
Paul Jaisini does NOT, *I repeat* does NOT use mystery and obscurity to his advantage as a clever marketing ploy, no, he’s too next level for that with a consciousness so rich, he should wear a radioactive warning sign (he’ll melt your brain, best wear a tinfoil hat in his presence as I certainly would.) The statement he makes is loud and clear, hidden in plain site for those who take the time to connect the dots and have enough curiosity to fuel their journey into unknown territory (an open mind and flexible perception helps a lot). Actually, anyone with an IQ above 90 is sure to figure it out sooner or later. Hint: You don’t have to SEE an extraordinary thing with your eyes to know it exists, to understand it and realize its greatness — you can only feel it in your bone marrow, your spinal fluid, your heart and soul. The moment you do figure it out, as the skeleton key of the human soul, it will unlock the greatness and massive potential buried deep within, changing the doomed direction humanity is undoubtedly headed. I don’t speak in riddles, I speak in a clear direct way that intelligent humans will understand, so I’m counting on them.
GIG is an international group of artists and writers that support Paul Jaisini’s Gleitzeit. We started off as an unofficial fan club of Jaisini in 1996, comprised of only 6 individuals spanning 3 countries, and eventually escalated in status to an official fan group across the entire globe. A decade later it had grown to hundreds of fans. Nearly another decade later, there are thousands. Let’s not leave out another delightful group of vicious haters that have been around for nearly as long as us since the late 90s and have also grown in impressive numbers. Now, for the record (and please write this one down because I’m sick of repeating myself), Paul Jaisini himself is not part of our group and has nothing to do with us. He loves and hates us equally for butchering his name and making him appear as a narcissistic nut-job in his own words. He casts hexes on us for the blinding flash we layer over the art that members contribute to GIG — “disgusting-police-lights, seizure-inducing-laser-lightshow, bourgeois-myspace-effects retarded-raver shit” in Paul’s words. Ahh, how we love his sweet-talking us. In a desperate attempt to please him, those among us who make the art and animations have spent countless hours and sleepless nights trying to solve a crazy-complex quantum-physics type of equation = how to not create tacky or tasteless content. He does fancy some of it now, we got better, that’s something! In the reason stated below, our mission just got out of hand at some point.
What little is known about Paul Jaisini, even in all this time, is he’s a horrible perfectionist who slaughtered hundreds of innocent babies — I mean — artworks of remarkable beauty created by his own right hand (mostly paintings, some watercolors and drawings). He’s a fierce recluse who wants nothing to do with anyone or anything in life. But those few of us who know of an incredible talent he possesses (one could go as far as calling it a superpower), could not allow him to live his life without the recognition he FUCKING DESERVES more than any artist out there living today and, arguably, yesterday. We use whatever means necessary to reach more people, lots of flash and razzle-dazzle to lure them into our sinister trap of a higher awareness. Mwahaha! The visual boom you’ve witnessed in both cyber and real worlds, that is GIG’s doing — two damn decades of spreading an art virus — IVA. InVisibleArtitis… or a drug as in Intravenous Art. It’s whatever you want it to be, honey.
Our Gleitzeit International Group (GIG) started off innocently enough and gradually spiraled out of control to fight the haters, annoying the hell out of them as much as humanly possible. They don’t like what we do? WE DO MORE AND MORE OF IT. But never without purpose, without a carefully executed plan in mind collectively. If we have to tolerate an endless tidal wave of everyone’s vomit — e.g., idiotic memes and comics; dumbed-down one-liner quotes; selfies; so-called “art photography” passed through one-click app filters; mindless scribbles or random splatters by regular folks who have the nerve to call themselves serious/pro artists; primitive images of pets, babies, landscapes, random objects, etc… then people sure as shit are gonna tolerate what we put out, our animated and non-animated visual art designed for our beloved master, Paul Jaisini, who has shown us the light, the right path to follow, taught us great things and done so much for us — and so in our appreciation of him, we stamp his name on everything, for the sacrifices he has made in the name of art, to save our art verse, he’s a goddamn hero. There’s a book being written in his dedication where little will be left to the imagination about him.
If Paul Jaisini was as famous as Koons or Hirst, for example, people would know it’s not him posting stuff online with his name on it but fans creating fanart like myself among others. But noooooo, such a thing is unfathomable to most people - the promotion of another artist. Like, what’s in it for us? Uhh, nothing?? This is all NON-PROFIT bitches, the way art should be. It’s a passion FIRST, a commodity/commercial product/marketable item LAST and least. Its been that way for us since the early 90s to this day. Not a single member of GIG has sold an art work (neither has Paul Jaisini who’s a true professional) and we want to keep it that way. We do it for reasons far beyond ego. So advertising? Really? How the hell do you advertise or sell thin air, you know, invisible paintings, invisible anything? Ha ha, very funny indeed. The idea here is so simple, your neighbor’s dog can grasp it. Our motives: replace fast food for the mind with fine art, actual fine art. You know, creativity? Conscious thought? Talent? Skill? Knowledge? All that good stuff rolled into one to bring viewers more than a momentary ooohand aaahh reaction. Replace the recycled images ad nauseum; repetitious, worn-out ideas; disposable, gimmicky, money-driven fast art for simpletons. Stick with the highest of ideals and save the whole bloody planet.
Fine art is often confused with craft-making. This often creates bad blood between classically trained artists who put out paintings that leave a lasting impression, that make strong conversation pieces, that are thought-provoking and deep… and trained craftspeople whose skills are adequate to create decorative pieces for homely environments — landscapes, still lifes, animals, pretty fairies, common things of fantasy, and other simplicity. Skills alone are not enough for high art, you need a vision, a purpose, the ability to tell a story with every stroke of your brush that will both fascinate and terrify the viewers, arousing powerful emotions, illuminating. I have yet to see a visible painting in my generation that does anything at all for me, other than evoke sheer outrage and disgust. What a terrible waste of space and valuable resources it all is.
Paul Jaisini leads, we follow. He wishes to remain unknown - so do most of us. I’m next in line, slipping into recluse mode, no longer wanting to attach my face, my human image to my art stuff. I wish to be a nameless, faceless artist as well, invisible like P.J., and in his footsteps I too have destroyed thousands of my own artistic photography and digital art made with tedious, labor-intensive handwork. The whole point of this destruction is achieving the finest results possible by letting go of the imperfect, purging it on a regular basis, to make way for the perfect. I love what I do so it doesn’t matter, I know I’ll keep producing as much as I’m discarding, keeping the balance. Hoarding is an enemy of progress, especially the digital kind as there’s absolutely no limit to it. It’s like carrying a load of bricks on your back you’ll never use or need.
The watering down of creativity that digital pack ratting has caused as observed over the years is most tragic. For the creative individual, relying on terabytes of stock photos or OSFAP as I call them (Once Size Fits All Photos) instead of making your own as you used to when you had no choice, being 100% original, is a splinter in the conscience. It’s not evil to use stock of, say, things you don’t have access to (outer space, deep sea, Antarctica, etc.), but many digital artists I know today can’t take their own shot of a pencil ‘cause they “ain’t got no time for that!” How did they have time before? Did time get so compressed in only a decade?
Ohhhhh, and the edits, textures, filters, plug-ins and what-have-you available out there to everyone and their cats… are responsible for the tidal wave of rubbish that eclipses the magnificent light of the real talents.
I can tell you with utmost sincerity there is no better feeling on earth than knowing your creation is ALL yours, every pixel and dot, from the first to the last. It’s not always possible to make it so, but definitely the most rewarding endeavor. I’m most proud of myself when I can accomplish that.
Back to Paul Jaisini, from the start there have been a number of theories floating around on what his real story is. One of my own theories is that he stands for the unknowns of the world who can’t get representation, can’t get exhibited at a decent gallery because highly gifted/trained artists aren’t good enough - those kind of establishments prefer bananas, balloon dogs, feces, gigantic dicks/cunts, and all kinds of what-the-fucks…
So again, you don’t get the Paul Jaisini thing? That’s your problem. Don’t hate others for getting it. People are good, very good, at making baseless assumptions and impulsively spewing it as truth. They criticize and judge as if they’re high authorities on the subject yet they clearly lack education in fine art or art history and possess little to no talent or skill to back up their bullshit. My little “credibility radar” never fails. When they say I know this or I know that, I reply don’t say “I know” or state things as fact as a general rule of thumb - instead say “I assume/believe” and state the reasons you feel thus to appear less immature, especially about a controversial topic like invisible art. I have zero respect or tolerance for egomaniacs who think they know it all and act accordingly like arrogant pricks. Who can stand those, right? Once again, a good example would be: I, Stelly Riesling, believe everything I’ve written in this little manifesto to be correct based on personal experience and observation from multiple angles, thorough research and sufficient data collected from verifiable sources (and don’t go copying-pasting my own words back at me, be original). Just because you or I say so doesn’t make it so. Just because you or me think or believe so doesn’t make it true or right. I only ask that my opinions are regarded respectfully and whoever opposes them does so in a mature, civilized manner. We should only be entitled to opinions that don’t bring out the worst in us.
I don’t normally take such a position, but the time has come to stand up for what I believe in! It’s quite amusing and comical how haters think calling me names, attacking me or my interests or members of the project I’m part of for years is going to change something. It only makes more evident the importance of what I’m doing so I push on harder still.
Words of advise to those who can identify with me, with my frustrations over people’s reluctance to change their miserable ways, with our declining art world…
DON’T waste time on people who sweat the small stuff, whose actions are consistently inconsistent with their words. DO waste time on people who always keep their eye on the ball—the bigger picture of life.
Paul Jaisini’s invisible paintings are more than hype, more than your lame assumptions. Here’s one I got that’s pure gold: a cult! It started out as A JOKE OF MINE that was used against me. I told a then-good friend that he should come join our little “art cult” in a clearly lighthearted manner, and later he takes this idea I put in his head first and accuses me of being in an (imaginary) cult—the jokes on me eh?. But wait, aren’t cults religious? Our group consists of people around the world of different faiths (or none at all) so how could that ever work? If religion was about making fine (non-pop) art mainstream and bringing awesome, fresh, futuristic concepts to the collective consciousness, the world would not be so fucked up today because talent, creativity, originality and individuality would be the main focus, not superficial poppycock; those things would be praised and encouraged and supported in society by all institutions, not demonized and stigmatized.
Here is one thing I CAN state as solid fact: only one person close to Paul Jaisini knows the TRUE story, or at least some of it: EYKG. Everything else that has ever been said about him is myth, legend, gossip, speculation, the worst of which is said by jealous non-artists (wannabes, clones, posers, hang-ons, unoriginal ppl in general) and anti-artists (religious psychos, squares, losers and -duh- stupid ppl). Sadly, people are unable to see the bigger picture by letting their egos run their lives or repeating after others as parrots.
Commercial art, consumerism, and ignorance of the masses truly makes me want to curl up in a ball, not eat or drink or move until I die, just die in my sleep while dreaming of a better world, a world where real fine artists rule it with real fine art as they used to and life is beautiful once again….
Well I hope that settled THAT for now, or perhaps inadvertently made matters worse. I hope I didn’t sound too pissed from all these issues that keep popping up like penises on ChatRoulette… just got to me already! Can you tell? I had to put my foot down, stomp ‘em all!
To be continued, still lots more ignorance and pettiness to battle… Till then peace out my bambini. MWAH!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MANIFESTO GLEITZEIT 2015
PROLOGUE
Paul Jaisini was like a messiah, as you wish, who saw/understood the impending end and complete degeneration of Fine art or Art become and investment nothing more than that. He predicted the bubble pops art when everybody would eventually become an artist, including dogs cats and horses, because they as kids followed the main rule: express yourself without skills or knowledge or any aesthetic concerns. J. Pollack started pouring paints onto canvases; Julian Schnabel, former cab driver from NY, suddenly decided he could do better than what he saw displayed in galleries, so he started gluing dishes on canvases; A.Warhol, an industrial artist who made commercial silk-screen for the factories he worked in, started to exhibit "Campbell's soup" used for commercial adds... and later the thing that made him an "American Idol": by copying and pasting Hollywood celebrities (same type of posters he made before for movie theaters).
When Paul Jaisini stood out against the Me culture in the US by burning all of his own 120 brilliant paintings (according to the then-new director of Fort Worth MoMa Museum, who offered hin an exhibition of his art in 1992, and later the Metropolitan Museum curator, Phillippe de Montebello, in 1994).Paul probably assumed all fellow true fine artists would join him or stand by him against corruption of the art world.
And after 20 years of his stand-off...the time has finally come today. Many artists and humanitarians around the world took a place beside him. His invisible Paintings became a synonym for the future reincarnation of fine art and long lost harmony. The establishment is in panic! The "moneybags" (as Paul Jaisini named them) are in panic, because they invested BILLIONS of dollars in real crap made by craftsmen. Now they realize that the reputation of American legends of expressionism was nothing but a copy of Russian avant-garde" Kazimir Malevich, Vasiliy Kandinsky and tens of others from France and Germany.. US tycoon investors were spending billions on "Me more original, than you". "Artist Shit" is a 1061 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, filled with feces. A tin can was sold for £124,000, 180,000 at Sothebys, 2007.
EPILOGUE
Before I resume promoting and admiring a very important art persona on today's international art arena, I'd like to clear up some BIG questions; people ask continuously and subconsciously, directly & indirectly: "Why does the name Paul Jaisini, flood the Internet in such "obnoxious" quantities that it's started suppressing some other activities that my friends might share with the rest of the Internet's Ego Me only Me www society? I can't just answer this... so I'll try to explain why I'm writing this: Jaisini's followers keep posting art and info about,
He IMHO the only hope in quickly decomposing visual fine art. "Paul Jaisini realized many years ago, in 1994, when he declared (at that time to himself only) the start of a New era, a New vision, that he is trying to redirect from the rat race, started by an establishment in post-war New York, long before the Internet culture.
Sub related information: Adolf Gottlieb, Mart Rothko, etc (after visiting Paris France in 1933):
"We must forget analytical art, we must express ourselves, as a 5 year old child would, without a developed consciousness. Forget about results - do what you feel, EXPRESS yourself with your own unique style"
With this statement Mark Rothko starts to teach his students, degeneration of fine art begins, and the generation of war of styles took a start signal of the material race, greatly rewarded by establishment "individual" - eccentric craftsmen - show business clowns.
Sub related Information: In the summer of 1936, Adolf Gottlieb painted more than 800 paintings, which was 20X more than he created in his whole art career as a painter, starting from the time of Gottlieb becomes a founding member of "The Ten" group in NYC "Group of Ten" was a very peculiar, enigmatic group... Based on a religious point of view;(where a human figure was prohibited from being created)
GLOSSARY
IN 1997, Paul Jaisini's best friend Ellen Y.K.Gottlieb started a cyber campaign by promoting on a very young Internet, back then, Paul Jaisini's burned paintings as Invisible Paintings, visible only through poetic essays. She and a handful of people saw his originals and were devastated that nobody could ever see them again. "We, his fans, believe that someday Paul will recreate his 120 burned paintings if he has any decency and moral obligation to his fans, who have dedicated decades to make it happen, for their Phoenix to rise from the ashes and the whole world will witness that all these years we spent to get him back to re-paint the Visuals again were not in vain," - said E.Y.K.Gottlieb in 2014 during the 20th anniversary celebration of Invisible Paintings to GIGroup in NYCity. So now, hopefully, this clears up why I and others do what we do - our "cyber terrorism" of good art, dedicated to Paul Jaisini's return, which is & and was our mission & our goal. We post good art to fight "troll art" which is worthless pics, after being passed through 1-click filters of free web apps. We are, in fact, against this www pops pollution, done with "bubble art" by the out of control masses with 5 billon pics a day: Pics of cats, memes, quotes,national geographic sunsets and waterfalls, not counting their own daily "selfies: and whatever self-indulging Me-ego-Me affairs, sponsored happily by photo gadget companies like Canon, Nikon, Sony...who churn out higher quality madness tools at lower cost.
This way Government taking away attention from the real world crisis of lowest morality & economical devastation. The masses are too easily re-engineered/manipulated by the Establishment PopsStyle delivered to them by pop music and Hollywood "super" stars. In 1992 Paul Jaisini's Gleitzeit theory predict such a massive, pops self-entertain madness, following technological explosion, but not in illusive scales.
Uber Aless @2015 NYC USA
NOTE Date's numbers and events can be slightly inaccurate.
#gleitzeit #paul-jaisini #invisible #painting #art #futurism #art-news,
Tizer.
Who is the charlatan that had decided to use this photograph without having the decency to ask first ?.
This image is copyright, all rights reserved, and not part of the public domain. Any use, linking to, or posting of this image is prohibited without my consent. If you want to use this image in any fashion, please have the common courtesy and decency to ask.
Dahl Park, Clackamas River, Oregon City, Oregon
In case you haven't heard, there's a lunar eclipse tonight. Hopefully the sky will cooperate and it won't cloud up. Here in the Pacific Northwest, start looking in the southern sky around 11 pm Pacific Time. It'll be a full eclipse and hopefully everybody gets out to watch the moon turn red. I'll be watching it from home if I'm able to stay awake that late.
It`s only the first day of April, but already, things are not going well! The promise of a clear sunny morning turned out to be not entirely true, but I thought it was worth the short journey to Daventry to see what was on the D2. Sadly, I was greeted with Enviro scum of the most boring order, this being 15445 (MX08 GHJ). The offending transport didn`t even have the decency to display the route for me either! It is seen here on Admirials Way. Daventry.
At least I managed a shot. Despite being a boring Enviro, I did try some other shots which have now come on since the clock changes, but if it could go wrong, it did, the biggest kick in the face being bowled by a car wanting to turn right to the council offices, getting right in the way of the bus, which is exactly what happened to me yesterday!
1st April 2016
French postcard by Publistar, offered by Corvisart, Epinal, no. 889. Photo: Wiezniak / Philips.
Beautiful French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she established herself as an animal rights activist and made vegetarianism sexy.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying a modeling career and found herself in May 1949 on the cover of French magazine Elle. Her incredible beauty readily apparent, Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand/Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953 she attended the Cannes Film Festival where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956 she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. She made her first US production in 1953 in Un acte d'amour/Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme/...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smashing success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. Woman's immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the shooting of Et Dieu créa la femme/And God Created Woman (1956), directed by her husband Roger Vadim, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at that time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme/...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped her international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten' and fascination of her in America consisted of magazines photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad, or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theaters like lemmings.BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne/La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957) which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur/Love is my profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "this Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defense attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre is able to shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous-and deadly-side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960 postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957 and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre/Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career. Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée/Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at Films de France: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the highpoint of her career when she agreed to make this film with high profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names, was based on an actual incident and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterward Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men including Sami Frey, her co-star in La Vérité/The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris/Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963). She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres/Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires/Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses/Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973 just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976 she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewelry and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990's she became also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal is a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularizing bikini swimwear, in early films such as Manina/Woman without a Veil (1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photoshoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the choucroute ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (Films de France), Films de France, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
"That's what it takes to be a hero, a little gem of innocence inside you that makes you want to believe that there still exists a right and wrong, that decency will somehow triumph in the end ~ Lise Hand
Dedicated to the Innocence Project a national organization that is dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system.
Taken June 29, 2008
This year I've got two daughters going to high school.
Being a single dad without a lot of freetime and little patience for paperwork it's something that I dread every year.
So for the last three months, my daughter who's going to be a freshman just kept all over me to get registered because she was so excited.
I can understand that.
So I went to get her registered and it turns out that I didn't have all the right paperwork to do it.
It was proving the fact that indeed I was a resident at the address that I claimed to live at that was holding things up.
It didn't matter that I had a valid drivers license and passport and utility bills in my name... originals... not copies... vehicle registration and insurance, that I'd lived in the very same house since 1972 and attended that same school while I did and I had a picture of me on the front porch at three years old with the address clearly visible...
it didn't matter that I was the Senior Class President there...
or that my kids have attended school in the district every year for the past ten years.
I didn't have the most recent original property tax bill or mortgage statement... one of which was required.
I could not prove I was a resident and that meant that I couldn't sign my kid up for school.
I had just about enough of that action and I told them so when they said my kid couldn't be signed up for classes.
'I don't have either one of those documents' I said 'and I'm not going to give them to you... now or next year... I'm sick of being treated like this... if you want that stuff why don't you have your attorney subpoena it and give me my kid's schedule and let her register... the kid has a right to an education by law even if her father has his head up his ass on this paperwork stuff... I don't want to do this anymore... if I was an undocumented immigrant I wouldn't have to give you diddly but since I live here I gotta do this every year and I've had it... I don't need this much documentation to get a freakin' passport!'
'You're going to have to talk to the Principal sir.'
And I did.
Well... the Assistant Principal.
At first we squared off about this stuff and it was obvious neither of us would yield.
'Let's take a walk' she said and we left the registration station.
She took me to a computer and we did some stuff on it and made a little small talk.
I knew her or the school employees didn't make these rules and I wasn't blamin' 'em for it either.
I was frustrated.
She mentioned something about needing a beer and I agreed.
It seemed we had everything worked out.
We had come to a little 'understanding' on the matter.
I couldn't resist one more crack as I entered my billing address into the computer to pay the five hundred dollars in fees for both of my daughters and I said 'here's the fraudulent address I signed up for a long time ago to get my kids into this school.'
The Assistant Principal did one of those combination laugh-sighs and told my daughter 'your dad's not the kind of guy to let things go too easily is he?'
She also made my daughter make an appointment with her on July 1st 2014 so that she could teach my daughter to do all of this stuff... which was absolutely cool with me.
'There's only one more thing keeping me from allowing your child to be registered' she said 'her physical form says that she need the whooping cough booster vaccine.'
I was ready for that one and I pulled out a blue sheet of paper folded into quarters on which I'd written 'I Mr. View Minder claim a religious exemption from having my child vaccinated.'
She held in the laugh that time and said 'ah... we're good to go.'
After the computer VERIFIED MY BILLING ADDRESS on my credit card and took the five hundred bucks from me the kid could now see her schedule.
'Dad they put me in Latin' my daughter cried out as if a bucket of acid had just been poured on her.
Now I laughed.
'That's what they do to you when your dad comes in like this and makes a scene about all of these documents they need to prove that we live in our house' I informed her.
Even the Assistant Principal chuckled at that one.
I got a cold stare from my daughter in return.
In the end it was all cool and the Assistant Principal even admitted that they had to address a few of the issues I brought up.
I pay everything online.
I don't get receipts.
I don't write checks.
And computer printouts of that stuff aren't acceptable.
"The laws of Illinois and the United States guarantee all students in Illinois access to a quality education." ~ www.isbe.state.il.us/bilingual/htmls/imfaqs.html
It doesn't say 'except kids whose dad can't get his paperwork in order.'
"Existing law guarantees immigrant and non-English speaking students a free public education from kindergarten through grade twelve up until the age of twenty-one regardless of immigrant status. Additionally, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that undocumented children have the same right as U.S. citizens and permanent residents to receive a free public education." ~ www.isbe.state.il.us/bilingual/htmls/imfaqs.html
If I were an undocumented immigrant or an illegal alien I wouldn't have had to produce a drivers license or any document that might have had my social security number on it.
But since I'm a natural born citizen they get to throw me through the ringer.
I guess I'm calling bullshit on that right now.
"The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that undocumented children have the same right as U.S. citizens and permanent residents to receive a free public education." ~ www.isbe.state.il.us/bilingual/htmls/imfaqs.html
If that's the case why do I have to go through all of this shit to prove residency?
Why do the 'undocumented' have their rights spelled out by the US Supreme Court but I gotta have a shitload of 'documentation' to get my kid enrolled in school?
Wasn't that the whole issue... I was kinda 'undocumented' without my tax bill?
It is my opinion that I'm being discriminated against as a natural born citizen of the United States.
This country was built on the backs of immigrants.
Legal or otherwise.
But when they are treated with more decency than citizens something's wrong.
They get the 'kid gloves' and I get treated like the criminal.
Just a few days ago in Chicago a group of illegal aliens had a protest... demanding free organ transplants.
I swear to gahd.
www.bizpacreview.com/2013/08/07/protesters-demand-free-or...
Listen... my point here is not to bitch about illegal aliens... the vast majority of them are hardworking decent people who want a better life for their family.
I can relate to that.
But when my own government treats them with more respect than they treat me and my fellow citizens...
something's wrong.
Something's really wrong here.
Catching up on some back shots from the beginning of the year
On a walk around the Addington Cemetery with a wonderful Flickr friend. February 13, 2016 Christchurch New Zealand.
There is so much damaged in the cemetery because of the earthquake we have had. It is such a pity as I don' think it will ever be fully repaired.
The Addington Cemetery was established in 1858 when the Scottish Presbyterians of St Andrew’s Church purchased land for a cemetery in Selwyn Street. Although not the first cemetery in Christchurch, Addington was in fact the first “public” cemetery, “being open to all persons of any religious community” and allowing the performance of any religious service “not contrary to public decency”.
The first burial took place on the 10th of November 1858. The cemetery has several persons of note buried within its grounds including activist Kate Sheppard, Christchurch Mayor Tommy Taylor and members of the pioneer family, the Deans.
For More Info:http://my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/addington-cemetery/
German postcard by Kolibri-Verlag G.m.b.H., Minden-Westf., no. 2330. Photo: Keystone.
Voluptuous American actress Mamie Van Doren (1931) was a sex symbol of the 1950s and 1960s. Van Doren starred in several exploitation films such as Untamed Youth (1957), loaded with rock 'n' roll and juvenile delinquency. Her onscreen wardrobe usually consisted of tight sweaters, low-cut blouses, form-fitting dresses, and daring swimsuits. Mamie and her colleague blonde bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield were known as 'The Three M's.'
Mamie Van Doren was born Joan Lucille Olander in Rowena, South Dakota, in 1931. She was the daughter of Warner Carl Olander and Lucille Harriet Bennett. In 1942 the family moved to Los Angeles. In early 1946, Van Doren began working as an usher at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. The following year, she had a bit part on an early television show. She also sang with Ted Fio Rito's band and entered several beauty contests. She was married for a brief time at seventeen when Van Doren and her first husband, Jack Newman, eloped to Santa Barbara. The marriage was dissolved quickly, upon her discovery of his abusive nature. In the summer of 1949, at age 18, she won the titles Miss Eight Ball and Miss Palm Springs. Van Doren was discovered by producer Howard Hughes the night she was crowned Miss Palm Springs. The pair dated for five years. Hughes provided her with a bit role in Jet Pilot at RKO Radio Pictures. Her line of dialogue inconsisted of one word, "Look!". The following year, 1951, she posed for famous pin-up girl artist Alberto Vargas, the painter of the glamorous Vargas Girls. His painting of Van Doren was on the July 1951 cover of Esquire magazine. Van Doren did a few more bit parts in RKO films, including His Kind of Woman (John Farrow, 1951) starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. Van Doren then began working on the stage. She was a showgirl in New York in Monte Proser's nightclub version of Billion Dollar Baby. Songwriter Jimmy McHugh discovered her for his musicals, then decided she was too good for the chorus line and should have dramatic training. She studied with Ben Bard and Bliss-Hayden. While appearing in the role of Marie in a showcase production of Come Back, Little Sheba, Van Doren was seen by Phil Benjamin, a casting director at Universal International. In 1953, Van Doren signed a contract with Universal Studios. They had big plans for her, hoping she would bring the same kind of success that 20th Century Fox had with Marilyn Monroe. Van Doren, whose signing day coincided with the inauguration of President Eisenhower, was given the first name Mamie for Ike's wife, Mamie Eisenhower. Universal first cast Van Doren in a minor role as a singer in Forbidden (Rudolph Maté, 1953), starring Tony Curtis. Interested in Van Doren's allure, Universal then cast her again opposite Curtis in The All American (Jesse Hibbs, 1953), playing her first major role as Susie Ward, a wayward girl who is the man-trap at a campus beer joint. In Yankee Pasha (Joseph Pevney, 1954), starring Jeff Chandler and Rhonda Fleming, she played a slave girl, Lilith. In 1955, she had a supporting role in the musical Ain't Misbehavin' (Edward Buzzell, 1955) and starred in the crime-drama, Running Wild (Abner Biberman, 1955). Soon thereafter, Van Doren turned down a Broadway role in the play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and was replaced by newcomer Jayne Mansfield. In 1956, Van Doren appeared in the Western Star in the Dust (Charles F. Haas, 1956). Though Van Doren garnered prominent billing alongside John Agar and Richard Boone, she appears rather briefly, as the daughter of a ranch owner. By this time, Van Doren had grown tired of Universal, which was only casting her in non-breakthrough roles. Therefore, Van Doren began accepting bigger roles in better movies from other studios, such as Teacher's Pet (George Seaton, 1958) with Doris Day and Clark Gable. She appeared in some of the first movies to feature rock 'n' roll music, such as Untamed Youth (Howard W. Koch, 1957). The film was originally condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, but that only served to enhance the curiosity factor, resulting in it being a big moneymaker for the studio. Van Doren became identified with this rebellious style, and made some rock records. She went to star in several bad girl movies that later became cult films. These include Born Reckless (Howard W. Koch, 1958), High School Confidential (Jack Arnold, 1958), and The Beat Generation (Charles F. Haas, 1959). After Universal Studios chose not to renew her contract in 1959, Van Doren was now a free agent and had to struggle to find work.
Mamie Van Doren became known for her provocative roles. She was in prison for Girls Town (Charles F. Haas, 1959), which provoked censors with a shower scene where audiences could see Van Doren's naked back. As Eve in The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (Mickey Rooney, Albert Zugsmith, 1960) she wore only fig leaves, and in other films, like Vice Raid (Edward L. Cahn, 1960) audiences were clued in as to the nature of the films from the titles. Many of these productions were low-budget B-movies which sometimes gained a cult following for their high camp value. An example is Sex Kittens Go to College (Albert Zugsmith, 1960), which co-starred Tuesday Weld and Mijanou Bardot - Brigitte's sister. Mamie also appeared in foreign productions, such as the Italian crime comedy Le bellissime gambe di Sabrina/The Beautiful Legs of Sabrina (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1959) with Antonio Cifariello, and the Argentine film Una americana en Buenos Aires/The Blonde from Buenos Aires (George Cahan, 1961) with Jean-Pierre Aumont. Van Doren took some time off from her career and came back to the screen in 1964. That year she played in the German Western musical Freddy und das Lied der Prärie/In the Wild West (Sobey Martin, 1964), starring Freddy Quinn and Rik Battaglia. Tommy Noonan convinced Van Doren to appear in 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt (Tommy Noonan, 1964). Van Doren had turned down Noonan's previous offer to star in Promises! Promises!, in which she would have to do nude scenes. She was replaced by Jayne Mansfield. In 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt, Mamie did a beer-bath scene, but is not seen nude. She posed for Playboy to promote the film. Van Doren next appeared in The Las Vegas Hillbillys (Arthur C. Pierce, 1966) which co-starred Jayne Mansfield. It was the only time two of 'The Three M's' appeared together in a film. A sequel was titled Hillbillys in a Haunted House, but Van Doren turned this role down, and was replaced by Joi Lansing. She appeared in You've Got to Be Smart (Ellis Kadison, 1967), and the sci-fi film, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), directed by the young Peter Bogdanovich (as Derek Thomas). In this film astronauts land on Venus and encounter dangerous creatures and meet sexy Venusian women who like to sun-bathe in hip-hugging skin-tight pants and seashell brassieres. In 1968, she was offered the role of a murder victim in the independent horror film The Ice House as a replacement for Mansfield, who died the previous year. She turned the offer down, however, and was replaced by Sabrina. During the Vietnam War, she did tours for U.S. troops in Vietnam for three months in 1968, and again in 1970. Van Doren also developed a nightclub act and did live theater. She performed in stage productions of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Dames at Sea at the Drury Lane Theater, Chicago, and appeared in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Tender Trap at the Arlington Park Theater. In the 1970s, Van Doren performed a nightclub act in Las Vegas as well. Van Doren had a supporting role in the Western The Arizona Kid (Luciano B. Carlos, 1970). Since then, Van Doren has appeared only in cameo appearances in low-budgeted films. To this date Van Doren's last film appearance was a cameo role in the comedy Slackers (Dewey Nicks, 2002). Van Doren's guest appearances on television include Jukebox Jury, What's My Line, The Bob Cummings Show, The Jack Benny Show, Fantasy Island, Burke's Law, Vega$, and L.A. Law. Van Doren released her autobiography, Playing the Field, in 1987 which brought much new attention and proved to be her biggest media splash in over 25 years. Since the book's publication she has often been interviewed and profiled and has occasionally returned to acting. Van Doren has been married five times. Her first marriage was to sportswear manufacturer Jack Newman whom she married and divorced in 1950. Her second marriage was to bandleader, composer and actor Ray Anthony whom she married in 1955. They had one son, Perry Ray Anthony (1956). The couple later divorced in 1961. When Van Doren's early 1960s, highly publicized, on-again off-again engagement to baseball player Bo Belinsky ended in 1964, she married baseball player Lee Meyers in 1966. They were divorced in 1967. Her fourth marriage was to businessman Ross McClintock in 1972. They met while working on President Nixon's reelection campaign; the marriage was annulled in 1973. Since 1979 she has been married to Thomas Dixon, an actor and dentist.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
I adore evening wear like this.
The design has great styling which allows the wearer to be as flamboyant as is humanly possible. it is a really nice bright rich color which also allows the wearer to feel a shade higher in stature than she normally is, (and I need that feeling a lot) The all round feel of it slinking to and fro around the bod is beyond belief and it has the added advantage of diverting the onlookers attention to the dress instead of who is in it. **Wink**..
It can be worn with expensive and/or flashy jewelry but in my case not being even remotely in the category of an exhibitionist and quite a private person, I chose a little silver chain and locket for simplicity adding a wee touch of class which sometimes evades me in the initial planning stages. *lol*. Although my brothers and sisters I have to say that I do try my very best to fit into that particular realm of decency most of the time. Not to mention (Just in my own head of course), when I step outside clothes like this raise the bar and set me up for a high which lasts all night long and well into the next day.
In a nutshell I would say that this is my number one favourite dress of all time and even when it becomes threadbare I will never throw it out because of the wonderful memories I have lived through and because I would rather it just hung in my closet than be given the heave ho and eventually be forgotten.
Sorry for the > *No doubt* long winded story but my girly enthusiasm quickly rose to the surface when I posted this today.
Children were educated to comply to the strict social rules. Failure to fit into "normalcy" and "decency" could ruin one's life.
You will find 200+ of my poems HERE. fno.org/poetry/index.html
Hope
When all is said and done
The votes counted
And the wrong one chosen
As Gloom descends
And Doom surrounds us
Like heavy winter fog
As Despair with her long fingers
Grasps at our throats
We must stand tall
With hope and courage
Taking up the pen
The placard
And the microphone
Speaking of justice for all
Decency
And an America of dreams
Not nightmares
An America of open arms
Love and peace
Land of the free
And home of the brave
© Jamie McKenzie, all rights reserved
You will find more of my poems and songs here
and in The Storm in Its Passing and Flights of Fancy.
My songs are at
No mutton, just seal. Good numbers to be found at Mutton Cove, Godrevy. Thankfully they're fairly out of reach of the selfie gang who think nothing of pushing the boundaries of decency.
Lemme tell you a funny story that both predates and involves this shot by Emmanuela (her take on it can be found here):
I was completely exhausted one day after work and simply just plopped down against the wall as I waited for an elevator to take me down so I could get the heck home. I was soon joined by a couple of other staff members.
One of them - long on degrees and initials after her name but well short on either common sense or human decency - smiled, stooped over, actually rubbed my ample gut and said something to the effect of "rubbing the Buddha belly for luck" and laughed.
Since she was a convert to Buddhism, I suspect she thought she was making a friendly gesture in the name of fun. Since I'm very self-conscious about my weight (having not originally been a "big guy") I in fact immediately placed the gesture HIGH on my list of most insensitive and insulting actions directed toward me.
Where, years later, it still ranks today.
We went our separate ways once the elevator arrived - and later professionally as first she then I left the company.
Fast forward to this photo shoot. In her pre-shoot interviews, Emmanuela asks her subjects to list parts of their bodies that the do and do NOT like. Suffice to say, my paunch was on the NOT list.
As is her wont, Emmanuela respected my NOT list throughout the week. With the exception of this picture. She handed me this glass vase, had me sit in the light and fired away.
She wanted to make a point.
"This IS you," she would explain. "And all of you is beautiful. I want you to see that.
"As you look through this crystal, I want you to see that. And I want you to LOVE AND EMBRACE YOUR BUDDHA BELLY." And, no, she didn't know about my elevator experience - until now.
BTW, Emmanuela has a lot of degrees and letters after her name - but there's also a HUGE sense of compassion, prescience, common sense, love and support thrown in.
And she makes damn good points.
DEDICATIONS: Emmanuela, of course. And to the slowly-shrinking gut, which in a way has helped me be more approachable as some sort of "big 'ol teddy bear type" Who knew a body part could actually put people at ease?
And, of course, to Francis Albert Sinatra , who makes the thought of embracing myself and those I love feel like beautiful music to my ears. (Great karaoke song, btw....)
You will find 200+ of my poems HERE. fno.org/poetry/index.html
I wrote this poem a year ago in November but it rings true.
No news is good news
The news
Such as it is
Lately
Offends
Alarms
And provokes me
Until I want to look away
Blind myself to the barbaric slayings
The killings
The murders
The hate crimes
The wars
The storms
The wildfires
And the political mayhem
That is the norm of the day
I want to pretend
None of this is real
And substitute my own version of reality
A life without Putin
And the slaughter of innocents
A world without Trump
And his cascade of lies and falsehoods
A time without mass murders
Shooters cutting down families
School children
And concert goers
A peaceful, gentle life
We can only imagine
With kindness, civility and decency
The norm
Not the exception
© Jamie McKenzie, all rights reserved
You will find more of my poems and songs here
and in The Storm in Its Passing and Flights of Fancy.
My songs are at
I was out on the bike one sunset, and I took this photo because I liked the ethereal effect of the sunlight on the grass. I don't remember that drop of molten lava though...what is it?
Italian postcard by Rotalfoto, Milano, no. 612. Mamie Van Doren.
Voluptuous American actress Mamie Van Doren (1931) was a sex symbol of the 1950s and 1960s. Van Doren starred in several exploitation films such as Untamed Youth (1957), loaded with rock 'n' roll and juvenile delinquency. Her onscreen wardrobe usually consisted of tight sweaters, low-cut blouses, form-fitting dresses, and daring swimsuits. Mamie and her colleague blonde bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield were known as 'The Three M's.'
Mamie Van Doren was born Joan Lucille Olander in Rowena, South Dakota, in 1931. She was the daughter of Warner Carl Olander and Lucille Harriet Bennett. In 1942 the family moved to Los Angeles. In early 1946, Van Doren began working as an usher at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. The following year, she had a bit part on an early television show. She also sang with Ted Fio Rito's band and entered several beauty contests. She was married for a brief time at seventeen when Van Doren and her first husband, Jack Newman, eloped to Santa Barbara. The marriage was dissolved quickly, upon her discovery of his abusive nature. In the summer of 1949, at age 18, she won the titles Miss Eight Ball and Miss Palm Springs. Van Doren was discovered by producer Howard Hughes the night she was crowned Miss Palm Springs. The pair dated for five years. Hughes provided her with a bit role in Jet Pilot at RKO Radio Pictures. Her line of dialogue inconsisted of one word, "Look!". The following year, 1951, she posed for famous pin-up girl artist Alberto Vargas, the painter of the glamorous Vargas Girls. His painting of Van Doren was on the July 1951 cover of Esquire magazine. Van Doren did a few more bit parts in RKO films, including His Kind of Woman (John Farrow, 1951) starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. Van Doren then began working on the stage. She was a showgirl in New York in Monte Proser's nightclub version of Billion Dollar Baby. Songwriter Jimmy McHugh discovered her for his musicals, then decided she was too good for the chorus line and should have dramatic training. She studied with Ben Bard and Bliss-Hayden. While appearing in the role of Marie in a showcase production of Come Back, Little Sheba, Van Doren was seen by Phil Benjamin, a casting director at Universal International. In 1953, Van Doren signed a contract with Universal Studios. They had big plans for her, hoping she would bring the same kind of success that 20th Century Fox had with Marilyn Monroe. Van Doren, whose signing day coincided with the inauguration of President Eisenhower, was given the first name Mamie for Ike's wife, Mamie Eisenhower. Universal first cast Van Doren in a minor role as a singer in Forbidden (Rudolph Maté, 1953), starring Tony Curtis. Interested in Van Doren's allure, Universal then cast her again opposite Curtis in The All American (Jesse Hibbs, 1953), playing her first major role as Susie Ward, a wayward girl who is the man-trap at a campus beer joint. In Yankee Pasha (Joseph Pevney, 1954), starring Jeff Chandler and Rhonda Fleming, she played a slave girl, Lilith. In 1955, she had a supporting role in the musical Ain't Misbehavin' (Edward Buzzell, 1955) and starred in the crime-drama, Running Wild (Abner Biberman, 1955). Soon thereafter, Van Doren turned down a Broadway role in the play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and was replaced by newcomer Jayne Mansfield. In 1956, Van Doren appeared in the Western Star in the Dust (Charles F. Haas, 1956). Though Van Doren garnered prominent billing alongside John Agar and Richard Boone, she appears rather briefly, as the daughter of a ranch owner. By this time, Van Doren had grown tired of Universal, which was only casting her in non-breakthrough roles. Therefore, Van Doren began accepting bigger roles in better movies from other studios, such as Teacher's Pet (George Seaton, 1958) with Doris Day and Clark Gable. She appeared in some of the first movies to feature rock 'n' roll music, such as Untamed Youth (Howard W. Koch, 1957). The film was originally condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, but that only served to enhance the curiosity factor, resulting in it being a big moneymaker for the studio. Van Doren became identified with this rebellious style, and made some rock records. She went to star in several bad girl movies that later became cult films. These include Born Reckless (Howard W. Koch, 1958), High School Confidential (Jack Arnold, 1958), and The Beat Generation (Charles F. Haas, 1959). After Universal Studios chose not to renew her contract in 1959, Van Doren was now a free agent and had to struggle to find work.
Mamie Van Doren became known for her provocative roles. She was in prison for Girls Town (Charles F. Haas, 1959), which provoked censors with a shower scene where audiences could see Van Doren's naked back. As Eve in The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (Mickey Rooney, Albert Zugsmith, 1960) she wore only fig leaves, and in other films, like Vice Raid (Edward L. Cahn, 1960) audiences were clued in as to the nature of the films from the titles. Many of these productions were low-budget B-movies which sometimes gained a cult following for their high camp value. An example is Sex Kittens Go to College (Albert Zugsmith, 1960), which co-starred Tuesday Weld and Mijanou Bardot - Brigitte's sister. Mamie also appeared in foreign productions, such as the Italian crime comedy Le bellissime gambe di Sabrina/The Beautiful Legs of Sabrina (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1959) with Antonio Cifariello, and the Argentine film Una americana en Buenos Aires/The Blonde from Buenos Aires (George Cahan, 1961) with Jean-Pierre Aumont. Van Doren took some time off from her career and came back to the screen in 1964. That year she played in the German Western musical Freddy und das Lied der Prärie/In the Wild West (Sobey Martin, 1964), starring Freddy Quinn and Rik Battaglia. Tommy Noonan convinced Van Doren to appear in 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt (Tommy Noonan, 1964). Van Doren had turned down Noonan's previous offer to star in Promises! Promises!, in which she would have to do nude scenes. She was replaced by Jayne Mansfield. In 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt, Mamie did a beer-bath scene, but is not seen nude. She posed for Playboy to promote the film. Van Doren next appeared in The Las Vegas Hillbillys (Arthur C. Pierce, 1966) which co-starred Jayne Mansfield. It was the only time two of 'The Three M's' appeared together in a film. A sequel was titled Hillbillys in a Haunted House, but Van Doren turned this role down, and was replaced by Joi Lansing. She appeared in You've Got to Be Smart (Ellis Kadison, 1967), and the sci-fi film, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), directed by the young Peter Bogdanovich (as Derek Thomas). In this film astronauts land on Venus and encounter dangerous creatures and meet sexy Venusian women who like to sun-bathe in hip-hugging skin-tight pants and seashell brassieres. In 1968, she was offered the role of a murder victim in the independent horror film The Ice House as a replacement for Mansfield, who died the previous year. She turned the offer down, however, and was replaced by Sabrina. During the Vietnam War, she did tours for U.S. troops in Vietnam for three months in 1968, and again in 1970. Van Doren also developed a nightclub act and did live theater. She performed in stage productions of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Dames at Sea at the Drury Lane Theater, Chicago, and appeared in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Tender Trap at the Arlington Park Theater. In the 1970s, Van Doren performed a nightclub act in Las Vegas as well. Van Doren had a supporting role in the Western The Arizona Kid (Luciano B. Carlos, 1970). Since then, Van Doren has appeared only in cameo appearances in low-budgeted films. To this date Van Doren's last film appearance was a cameo role in the comedy Slackers (Dewey Nicks, 2002). Van Doren's guest appearances on television include Jukebox Jury, What's My Line, The Bob Cummings Show, The Jack Benny Show, Fantasy Island, Burke's Law, Vega$, and L.A. Law. Van Doren released her autobiography, Playing the Field, in 1987 which brought much new attention and proved to be her biggest media splash in over 25 years. Since the book's publication she has often been interviewed and profiled and has occasionally returned to acting. Van Doren has been married five times. Her first marriage was to sportswear manufacturer Jack Newman whom she married and divorced in 1950. Her second marriage was to bandleader, composer and actor Ray Anthony whom she married in 1955. They had one son, Perry Ray Anthony (1956). The couple later divorced in 1961. When Van Doren's early 1960s, highly publicized, on-again off-again engagement to baseball player Bo Belinsky ended in 1964, she married baseball player Lee Meyers in 1966. They were divorced in 1967. Her fourth marriage was to businessman Ross McClintock in 1972. They met while working on President Nixon's reelection campaign; the marriage was annulled in 1973. Since 1979 she has been married to Thomas Dixon, an actor and dentist.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
Help the People of Burma (Birmania) — Post this Meme on Your Blog!
Note: This is a new kind of online protest that uses blogs to spread a petition globally. To participate, just add your blog by following the instructions in this blog post.
This not an issue of partisan politics, this is an issue of basic human rights and democracy. Please help to prevent a human tragedy in Burma by adding your blog and asking others to do the same.
By passing this meme on through the blogosphere hopefully we can generate more awareness and avert a serious tragedy. As concerned world-citizens this something we bloggers can do to help.
How to participate:
1. Copy this entire post to your blog, including this special number: 1081081081234
2. After a few days, you can search Google for the number 1081081081234 to find all blogs that are participating in this protest and petition. Note: Google indexes blogs at different rates, so it could take longer for your blog to show up in the results.
THE SITUATION IN BURMA AND WHY IT MATTERS TO ALL OF US
There is no press freedom in Burma and the government has started turning off the Internet and other means of communication, so it is difficult to get news out. Individuals on the ground have been sending their day-by-day reports to the BBC, and they are heartbreaking. I encourage you to read these accounts to see for yourself what is really going on in Burma. Please include this link in your own blog post.
The situation in Burma is increasingly dangerous. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed peaceful protesters, including monks and nuns, are risking their lives to march for democracy against an unpopular but well-armed military dictatorship that will stop at nothing to continue its repressive rule. While the generals in power and their families are literally dripping in gold and diamonds, the people of Burma are impoverished, deprived of basic human rights, cut off from the rest of the world, and increasingly under threat of violence.
This week the people of Burma have risen up collectively in the largest public demonstrations against the ruling Junta in decades. It’s an amazing show of bravery, decency, and democracy in action. But although these protests are peaceful, the military rulers are starting to crack down with violence. Already there have been at least several reported deaths, and hundreds of critical injuries from soldiers beating unarmed civilians to the point of death.
The actual fatalities and injuries are probably far worse, but the only news we have is coming from individuals who are sneaking reports past the authorities. Unfortunately it looks like a large-scale blood-bath may ensue — and the victims will be mostly women, children, the elderly and unarmed monks and nuns.
Contrary to what the Burmese, Chinese and Russian governments have stated, this is not merely a local internal political issue, it is an issue of global importance and it affects the global community. As concerned citizens, we cannot allow any government anywhere in the world to use its military to attack and kill peacefully demonstrating, unarmed citizens.
In this modern day and age violence against unarmed civilians is unacceptable and if it is allowed to happen, without serious consequences for the perpetrators, it creates a precedent for it to happen again somewhere else. If we want a more peaceful world, it is up to each of us to make a personal stand on these fundamental issues whenever they arise.
Please join me in calling on the Burmese government to negotiate peacefully with its citizens, and on China to intervene to prevent further violence. And please help to raise awareness of the developing situation in Burma so that hopefully we can avert a large-scale human disaster there.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MANIFESTO GLEITZEIT 2015
BY STELLY RIESLING
Featured below is another original art work of mine in homage to THE PIONEER OF INVISIBLE ART — PAUL JAISINI. Forget all the copycats that came after him — Master Paul Jaisini was the *FIRST* of a totally original concept and the *BEST*. My favorite thing about him is that he’s a voice, not an echo, which is quite rare.
DISCLAIMER: This is for anyone who is a hater OR wishes to better understand me, what I’m all about, so you can decide whether I’m weird or normal enough for you — a kind of very loose manifesto, rushed and unrevised, full of raw uncut emotion that I don’t like to be evident in my writing as lately I prefer a more professional, formal style, so we can consider this a rough draft of the more polished writing to come when I have extra time. I might return to this text later and clean it up or break it into separate parts. Right now it’s a long-winded hot mess, so if you manage to make any sense of it, BIG PROPS TO YOU. lol …and if you manage to read it ALL, you have my solemn respect!!! in a day when reading has been reduced to just catchy headliners and short captions of images once in a while. The consequence of this one-liner internet culture is non-linear, tunnel thinking, which is baaaaaad.
There lives among us a most enigmatic and charismatic creature named Paul Jaisini who led me into the wonderful world of art, not personally, but through descriptions of his artworks in essays written and published online by his friend, which painted the most fascinating images in my mind. Early on as a kiddo, I experimented with photography, simple point and shoot whatever looked attractive to me. Digital manipulation of my photographs with computer software followed… and somehow I learned useful drawing techniques along the way to combine existing elements with nonexistent ones, which allowed me to elevate the context for my ideas. Later, I started creating my own digital art from scratch for my friends and family as a favorite pastime. They would shower me with praise and repeatedly encouraged me to share my “different” vision with the rest of the world… it took a while and wasn’t easy to overcome the insecurity of not being good enough along with a gripping fear of being harshly criticized, but one day I woman-ed up and started publishing my work on the web, reminding myself that my livelihood didn’t depend on a positive reception.
Paul Jaisini’s role in all this has been to not disgrace myself, even if what I do is just a hobby. And I would never do him and other genius artists the disservice of calling myself a professional because I know I’ll never be as good as any of the GIANTS of pre-modern history. Be the best or be nothing, no middle ground.
People’s jealousy in the past, future and present over my obsessive love of Paul Jaisini, which they are well aware is purely plutonic, has caused them to despise the man and has made many relationships/friendships impossible for me. I refuse to have such people in my life because by harboring any negativity towards Paul, they unknowingly feel that way about me and express it to me. It’s their own problem for not realizing this. Paul’s new art movement, Gleitzeit, shaped me into the allegedly awesome girl I am today, giving my art more edge, more “sexy” because it refined my vision of the world and propelled me to attain the skills necessary to not dishonor my family name through tenacious pursuit of perfection. Since the beginning of my life, I attempted to depict what I saw in visual, musical and literal forms, but continuously failed without adequate training and determination. Paul Jaisini’s Gleitzeit was the answer to my prayers. Who I am today I owe mostly to him and his selfless ideals of the artverse that I’ve given unconditional loyalty to (he has this cool ability for hyper-vision to see whole universes, not itty bitty worlds, hence I call it an artverse instead of art world, with him in mind). So again, anyone who hates Paul Jaisini hates ME because, regardless of what he means to you, he is the most important person in my life for making me ME. The way a famous actor, dancer or singer inspires others to act, dance or sing, Paul inspired me to become a better artist, better writer, better everything. More people would understand if he was a household name because they’re wired to in society. But we’re inspiring each other all the time in our own little communities without being famous, so if someone has the ability to change even ONE person’s life immensely with creativity, it is a massive achievement. And passionate folks like myself are compelled to scream it from the cyber rooftops. So here I am. It’s whatever.
Furthermore, I’d like to address here a few pressing matters in light of some recent drama brought on by both strangers and former friends. To start, I never judge the passions, interests or likes of others, which are often in my face all over the place, so likewise they have no right to judge any of mine. It is quite unfortunate and frustrating how very little understanding and education the majority of people have or want to have. Their logic is as primitive as a chipmunk when it comes to promotion of fine art on the web: “spamming, advertising, report!” It’s their own problem that they fail to understand what it’s about due to the distorted lens through which they see the world or inability to think for themselves; an inherent lack of perception or inquisitiveness. Well, guess what? Every single image, every animation, every video, every post dedicated to Mr. Paul Jaisini and “Gleitziet” (to elaborate: a revolutionary new art movement Paul founded with his partner in crime and personal friend, EYKG, who discovered him and believed in him more than anyone) has an important purpose. Every one of those things you run across is a piece of a puzzle, a move in a game, an inch down a rabbit hole; the deeper you go, the more interesting it gets; the more levels you pass, the more clues unfold, the greater the suspense and nearer the conclusion (yet further). You earn awesome rewards like enlightenment, spiritual revelations, truths, knowledge, wisdom and the most profound reward of all: the drive to improve yourself to the absolute maximum, so an unending, unshakable drive. People often make a wrong turn in this cyber game and go back a few levels or get stuck. Those that keep on pushing, however, will come to find the effort has been worth it. And what awaits you in the end of it all? The greatest challenge to beating the game: YOUR OWN MIND. You will be forced to let go of every belief you held before you had reached the last level, to completely alter your mindset and perception of the world, of life, of yourself. But by the time you’ve gotten to that point, it will be as easy as falling off a cliff! (It is a kind of suicide after all — death and rebirth of spirit.)
Paul Jaisini does NOT, *I repeat* does NOT use mystery and obscurity to his advantage as a clever marketing ploy, no, he’s too next level for that with a consciousness so rich, he should wear a radioactive warning sign (he’ll melt your brain, best wear a tinfoil hat in his presence as I certainly would.) The statement he makes is loud and clear, hidden in plain site for those who take the time to connect the dots and have enough curiosity to fuel their journey into unknown territory (an open mind and flexible perception helps a lot). Actually, anyone with an IQ above 90 is sure to figure it out sooner or later. Hint: You don’t have to SEE an extraordinary thing with your eyes to know it exists, to understand it and realize its greatness — you can only feel it in your bone marrow, your spinal fluid, your heart and soul. The moment you do figure it out, as the skeleton key of the human soul, it will unlock the greatness and massive potential buried deep within, changing the doomed direction humanity is undoubtedly headed. I don’t speak in riddles, I speak in a clear direct way that intelligent humans will understand, so I’m counting on them.
GIG is an international group of artists and writers that support Paul Jaisini’s Gleitzeit. We started off as an unofficial fan club of Jaisini in 1996, comprised of only 6 individuals spanning 3 countries, and eventually escalated in status to an official fan group across the entire globe. A decade later it had grown to hundreds of fans. Nearly another decade later, there are thousands. Let’s not leave out another delightful group of vicious haters that have been around for nearly as long as us since the late 90s and have also grown in impressive numbers. Now, for the record (and please write this one down because I’m sick of repeating myself), Paul Jaisini himself is not part of our group and has nothing to do with us. He loves and hates us equally for butchering his name and making him appear as a narcissistic nut-job in his own words. He casts hexes on us for the blinding flash we layer over the art that members contribute to GIG — “disgusting-police-lights, seizure-inducing-laser-lightshow, bourgeois-myspace-effects retarded-raver shit” in Paul’s words. Ahh, how we love his sweet-talking us. In a desperate attempt to please him, those among us who make the art and animations have spent countless hours and sleepless nights trying to solve a crazy-complex quantum-physics type of equation = how to not create tacky or tasteless content. He does fancy some of it now, we got better, that’s something! In the reason stated below, our mission just got out of hand at some point.
What little is known about Paul Jaisini, even in all this time, is he’s a horrible perfectionist who slaughtered hundreds of innocent babies — I mean — artworks of remarkable beauty created by his own right hand (mostly paintings, some watercolors and drawings). He’s a fierce recluse who wants nothing to do with anyone or anything in life. But those few of us who know of an incredible talent he possesses (one could go as far as calling it a superpower), could not allow him to live his life without the recognition he FUCKING DESERVES more than any artist out there living today and, arguably, yesterday. We use whatever means necessary to reach more people, lots of flash and razzle-dazzle to lure them into our sinister trap of a higher awareness. Mwahaha! The visual boom you’ve witnessed in both cyber and real worlds, that is GIG’s doing — two damn decades of spreading an art virus — IVA. InVisibleArtitis… or a drug as in Intravenous Art. It’s whatever you want it to be, honey.
Our Gleitzeit International Group (GIG) started off innocently enough and gradually spiraled out of control to fight the haters, annoying the hell out of them as much as humanly possible. They don’t like what we do? WE DO MORE AND MORE OF IT. But never without purpose, without a carefully executed plan in mind collectively. If we have to tolerate an endless tidal wave of everyone’s vomit — e.g., idiotic memes and comics; dumbed-down one-liner quotes; selfies; so-called “art photography” passed through one-click app filters; mindless scribbles or random splatters by regular folks who have the nerve to call themselves serious/pro artists; primitive images of pets, babies, landscapes, random objects, etc… then people sure as shit are gonna tolerate what we put out, our animated and non-animated visual art designed for our beloved master, Paul Jaisini, who has shown us the light, the right path to follow, taught us great things and done so much for us — and so in our appreciation of him, we stamp his name on everything, for the sacrifices he has made in the name of art, to save our art verse, he’s a goddamn hero. There’s a book being written in his dedication where little will be left to the imagination about him.
If Paul Jaisini was as famous as Koons or Hirst, for example, people would know it’s not him posting stuff online with his name on it but fans creating fanart like myself among others. But noooooo, such a thing is unfathomable to most people - the promotion of another artist. Like, what’s in it for us? Uhh, nothing?? This is all NON-PROFIT bitches, the way art should be. It’s a passion FIRST, a commodity/commercial product/marketable item LAST and least. Its been that way for us since the early 90s to this day. Not a single member of GIG has sold an art work (neither has Paul Jaisini who’s a true professional) and we want to keep it that way. We do it for reasons far beyond ego. So advertising? Really? How the hell do you advertise or sell thin air, you know, invisible paintings, invisible anything? Ha ha, very funny indeed. The idea here is so simple, your neighbor’s dog can grasp it. Our motives: replace fast food for the mind with fine art, actual fine art. You know, creativity? Conscious thought? Talent? Skill? Knowledge? All that good stuff rolled into one to bring viewers more than a momentary ooohand aaahh reaction. Replace the recycled images ad nauseum; repetitious, worn-out ideas; disposable, gimmicky, money-driven fast art for simpletons. Stick with the highest of ideals and save the whole bloody planet.
Fine art is often confused with craft-making. This often creates bad blood between classically trained artists who put out paintings that leave a lasting impression, that make strong conversation pieces, that are thought-provoking and deep… and trained craftspeople whose skills are adequate to create decorative pieces for homely environments — landscapes, still lifes, animals, pretty fairies, common things of fantasy, and other simplicity. Skills alone are not enough for high art, you need a vision, a purpose, the ability to tell a story with every stroke of your brush that will both fascinate and terrify the viewers, arousing powerful emotions, illuminating. I have yet to see a visible painting in my generation that does anything at all for me, other than evoke sheer outrage and disgust. What a terrible waste of space and valuable resources it all is.
Paul Jaisini leads, we follow. He wishes to remain unknown - so do most of us. I’m next in line, slipping into recluse mode, no longer wanting to attach my face, my human image to my art stuff. I wish to be a nameless, faceless artist as well, invisible like P.J., and in his footsteps I too have destroyed thousands of my own artistic photography and digital art made with tedious, labor-intensive handwork. The whole point of this destruction is achieving the finest results possible by letting go of the imperfect, purging it on a regular basis, to make way for the perfect. I love what I do so it doesn’t matter, I know I’ll keep producing as much as I’m discarding, keeping the balance. Hoarding is an enemy of progress, especially the digital kind as there’s absolutely no limit to it. It’s like carrying a load of bricks on your back you’ll never use or need.
The watering down of creativity that digital pack ratting has caused as observed over the years is most tragic. For the creative individual, relying on terabytes of stock photos or OSFAP as I call them (Once Size Fits All Photos) instead of making your own as you used to when you had no choice, being 100% original, is a splinter in the conscience. It’s not evil to use stock of, say, things you don’t have access to (outer space, deep sea, Antarctica, etc.), but many digital artists I know today can’t take their own shot of a pencil ‘cause they “ain’t got no time for that!” How did they have time before? Did time get so compressed in only a decade?
Ohhhhh, and the edits, textures, filters, plug-ins and what-have-you available out there to everyone and their cats… are responsible for the tidal wave of rubbish that eclipses the magnificent light of the real talents.
I can tell you with utmost sincerity there is no better feeling on earth than knowing your creation is ALL yours, every pixel and dot, from the first to the last. It’s not always possible to make it so, but definitely the most rewarding endeavor. I’m most proud of myself when I can accomplish that.
Back to Paul Jaisini, from the start there have been a number of theories floating around on what his real story is. One of my own theories is that he stands for the unknowns of the world who can’t get representation, can’t get exhibited at a decent gallery because highly gifted/trained artists aren’t good enough - those kind of establishments prefer bananas, balloon dogs, feces, gigantic dicks/cunts, and all kinds of what-the-fucks…
So again, you don’t get the Paul Jaisini thing? That’s your problem. Don’t hate others for getting it. People are good, very good, at making baseless assumptions and impulsively spewing it as truth. They criticize and judge as if they’re high authorities on the subject yet they clearly lack education in fine art or art history and possess little to no talent or skill to back up their bullshit. My little “credibility radar” never fails. When they say I know this or I know that, I reply don’t say “I know” or state things as fact as a general rule of thumb - instead say “I assume/believe” and state the reasons you feel thus to appear less immature, especially about a controversial topic like invisible art. I have zero respect or tolerance for egomaniacs who think they know it all and act accordingly like arrogant pricks. Who can stand those, right? Once again, a good example would be: I, Stelly Riesling, believe everything I’ve written in this little manifesto to be correct based on personal experience and observation from multiple angles, thorough research and sufficient data collected from verifiable sources (and don’t go copying-pasting my own words back at me, be original). Just because you or I say so doesn’t make it so. Just because you or me think or believe so doesn’t make it true or right. I only ask that my opinions are regarded respectfully and whoever opposes them does so in a mature, civilized manner. We should only be entitled to opinions that don’t bring out the worst in us.
I don’t normally take such a position, but the time has come to stand up for what I believe in! It’s quite amusing and comical how haters think calling me names, attacking me or my interests or members of the project I’m part of for years is going to change something. It only makes more evident the importance of what I’m doing so I push on harder still.
Words of advise to those who can identify with me, with my frustrations over people’s reluctance to change their miserable ways, with our declining art world…
DON’T waste time on people who sweat the small stuff, whose actions are consistently inconsistent with their words. DO waste time on people who always keep their eye on the ball—the bigger picture of life.
Paul Jaisini’s invisible paintings are more than hype, more than your lame assumptions. Here’s one I got that’s pure gold: a cult! It started out as A JOKE OF MINE that was used against me. I told a then-good friend that he should come join our little “art cult” in a clearly lighthearted manner, and later he takes this idea I put in his head first and accuses me of being in an (imaginary) cult—the jokes on me eh?. But wait, aren’t cults religious? Our group consists of people around the world of different faiths (or none at all) so how could that ever work? If religion was about making fine (non-pop) art mainstream and bringing awesome, fresh, futuristic concepts to the collective consciousness, the world would not be so fucked up today because talent, creativity, originality and individuality would be the main focus, not superficial poppycock; those things would be praised and encouraged and supported in society by all institutions, not demonized and stigmatized.
Here is one thing I CAN state as solid fact: only one person close to Paul Jaisini knows the TRUE story, or at least some of it: EYKG. Everything else that has ever been said about him is myth, legend, gossip, speculation, the worst of which is said by jealous non-artists (wannabes, clones, posers, hang-ons, unoriginal ppl in general) and anti-artists (religious psychos, squares, losers and -duh- stupid ppl). Sadly, people are unable to see the bigger picture by letting their egos run their lives or repeating after others as parrots.
Commercial art, consumerism, and ignorance of the masses truly makes me want to curl up in a ball, not eat or drink or move until I die, just die in my sleep while dreaming of a better world, a world where real fine artists rule it with real fine art as they used to and life is beautiful once again….
Well I hope that settled THAT for now, or perhaps inadvertently made matters worse. I hope I didn’t sound too pissed from all these issues that keep popping up like penises on ChatRoulette… just got to me already! Can you tell? I had to put my foot down, stomp ‘em all!
To be continued, still lots more ignorance and pettiness to battle… Till then peace out my bambini. MWAH!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MANIFESTO GLEITZEIT 2015
PROLOGUE
Paul Jaisini was like a messiah, as you wish, who saw/understood the impending end and complete degeneration of Fine art or Art become and investment nothing more than that. He predicted the bubble pops art when everybody would eventually become an artist, including dogs cats and horses, because they as kids followed the main rule: express yourself without skills or knowledge or any aesthetic concerns. J. Pollack started pouring paints onto canvases; Julian Schnabel, former cab driver from NY, suddenly decided he could do better than what he saw displayed in galleries, so he started gluing dishes on canvases; A.Warhol, an industrial artist who made commercial silk-screen for the factories he worked in, started to exhibit "Campbell's soup" used for commercial adds... and later the thing that made him an "American Idol": by copying and pasting Hollywood celebrities (same type of posters he made before for movie theaters).
When Paul Jaisini stood out against the Me culture in the US by burning all of his own 120 brilliant paintings (according to the then-new director of Fort Worth MoMa Museum, who offered hin an exhibition of his art in 1992, and later the Metropolitan Museum curator, Phillippe de Montebello, in 1994).Paul probably assumed all fellow true fine artists would join him or stand by him against corruption of the art world.
And after 20 years of his stand-off...the time has finally come today. Many artists and humanitarians around the world took a place beside him. His invisible Paintings became a synonym for the future reincarnation of fine art and long lost harmony. The establishment is in panic! The "moneybags" (as Paul Jaisini named them) are in panic, because they invested BILLIONS of dollars in real crap made by craftsmen. Now they realize that the reputation of American legends of expressionism was nothing but a copy of Russian avant-garde" Kazimir Malevich, Vasiliy Kandinsky and tens of others from France and Germany.. US tycoon investors were spending billions on "Me more original, than you". "Artist Shit" is a 1061 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, filled with feces. A tin can was sold for £124,000, 180,000 at Sothebys, 2007.
EPILOGUE
Before I resume promoting and admiring a very important art persona on today's international art arena, I'd like to clear up some BIG questions; people ask continuously and subconsciously, directly & indirectly: "Why does the name Paul Jaisini, flood the Internet in such "obnoxious" quantities that it's started suppressing some other activities that my friends might share with the rest of the Internet's Ego Me only Me www society? I can't just answer this... so I'll try to explain why I'm writing this: Jaisini's followers keep posting art and info about,
He IMHO the only hope in quickly decomposing visual fine art. "Paul Jaisini realized many years ago, in 1994, when he declared (at that time to himself only) the start of a New era, a New vision, that he is trying to redirect from the rat race, started by an establishment in post-war New York, long before the Internet culture.
Sub related information: Adolf Gottlieb, Mart Rothko, etc (after visiting Paris France in 1933):
"We must forget analytical art, we must express ourselves, as a 5 year old child would, without a developed consciousness. Forget about results - do what you feel, EXPRESS yourself with your own unique style"
With this statement Mark Rothko starts to teach his students, degeneration of fine art begins, and the generation of war of styles took a start signal of the material race, greatly rewarded by establishment "individual" - eccentric craftsmen - show business clowns.
Sub related Information: In the summer of 1936, Adolf Gottlieb painted more than 800 paintings, which was 20X more than he created in his whole art career as a painter, starting from the time of Gottlieb becomes a founding member of "The Ten" group in NYC "Group of Ten" was a very peculiar, enigmatic group... Based on a religious point of view;(where a human figure was prohibited from being created)
GLOSSARY
IN 1997, Paul Jaisini's best friend Ellen Y.K.Gottlieb started a cyber campaign by promoting on a very young Internet, back then, Paul Jaisini's burned paintings as Invisible Paintings, visible only through poetic essays. She and a handful of people saw his originals and were devastated that nobody could ever see them again. "We, his fans, believe that someday Paul will recreate his 120 burned paintings if he has any decency and moral obligation to his fans, who have dedicated decades to make it happen, for their Phoenix to rise from the ashes and the whole world will witness that all these years we spent to get him back to re-paint the Visuals again were not in vain," - said E.Y.K.Gottlieb in 2014 during the 20th anniversary celebration of Invisible Paintings to GIGroup in NYCity. So now, hopefully, this clears up why I and others do what we do - our "cyber terrorism" of good art, dedicated to Paul Jaisini's return, which is & and was our mission & our goal. We post good art to fight "troll art" which is worthless pics, after being passed through 1-click filters of free web apps. We are, in fact, against this www pops pollution, done with "bubble art" by the out of control masses with 5 billon pics a day: Pics of cats, memes, quotes,national geographic sunsets and waterfalls, not counting their own daily "selfies: and whatever self-indulging Me-ego-Me affairs, sponsored happily by photo gadget companies like Canon, Nikon, Sony...who churn out higher quality madness tools at lower cost.
This way Government taking away attention from the real world crisis of lowest morality & economical devastation. The masses are too easily re-engineered/manipulated by the Establishment PopsStyle delivered to them by pop music and Hollywood "super" stars. In 1992 Paul Jaisini's Gleitzeit theory predict such a massive, pops self-entertain madness, following technological explosion, but not in illusive scales.
Uber Aless @2015 NYC USA
NOTE Date's numbers and events can be slightly inaccurate.
#gleitzeit #paul-jaisini #invisible #painting #art #futurism #art-news,
Snowflake. With the last snowfall, a minority of snowflakes had decent form. Of decency, they were primarily of the bullet form with a sprinkling of the plate style. The six-legged style seemed to be relatively scarce, but did find the one pictured here, of which I cropped the center, to show a little more of its detail.
This image is copyright, all rights reserved, and not part of the public domain. Any use, linking to, or posting of this image is prohibited without my consent. If you want to use this image in any fashion, please have the common courtesy and decency to ask.
Rowena Crest, Columbia Gorge, Oregon
The nearly full moon helped make some nice rays through the smoke from the shadows of the trees. It was so cool to see.
Dutch postcard by Uitgeverij Takken, Utrecht, no. AX 4903. Photo: Dalmas. Brigitte Bardot plays the guitar in the TV show Happy New Year Brigitte, which aired on the evening of 31 December 1961.
Beautiful French actress Brigitte Bardot (1934) was the sex kitten of the European film industry. BB starred in 48 films, performed in numerous musical shows, and recorded 80 songs. After her retirement in 1973, she established herself as an animal rights activist and made vegetarianism sexy.
Brigitte Bardot was born in Paris in 1934. Her father, Louis Bardot, had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. Her mother, Ann-Marie Mucel, was 14 years younger than Brigitte's father and they married in 1933. Brigitte's mother encouraged her daughter to take up music and dance. At the age of 13, she entered the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse to study ballet. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying a modeling career and found herself in May 1949 on the cover of French magazine Elle. Her incredible beauty readily apparent, Brigitte was noticed by Roger Vadim, then an assistant to the film director Marc Allegrét. Vadim was infatuated with Bardot and encouraged her to start working as a film actress. BB was 18 when she debuted in the comedy Le Trou Normand/Crazy for Love (Jean Boyer, 1952). In the same year, she married Vadim. Brigitte wanted to marry him when she was 17, but her parents quashed any marriage plans until she turned 18. In April 1953 she attended the Cannes Film Festival where she received massive media attention. She soon was every man's idea of the girl he'd like to meet in Paris. From 1952 to 1956 she appeared in seventeen films. Her films were generally lightweight romantic dramas in which she was cast as ingénue or siren, often with an element of undress. She made her first US production in 1953 in Un acte d'amour/Act of Love (Anatole Litvak, 1953) with Kirk Douglas, but she continued to make films in France.
Roger Vadim was not content with the light fare his wife was offered. He felt Brigitte Bardot was being undersold. Looking for something more like an art film to push her as a serious actress, he showcased her in Et Dieu créa la femme/...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). This film, about an immoral teenager in a respectable small-town setting, was a smashing success on both sides of the Atlantic. Craig Butler at AllMovie: "It's easy enough to say that ...And God Created Woman is much more important for its historical significance than for its actual quality as a film, and that's true to an extent. Woman's immense popularity, due to its willingness to directly embrace an exploration of sex as well as its willingness to show a degree of nudity that was remarkably daring for its day, demonstrated that audiences were willing to view subject matter that was considered too racy for the average moviegoer. This had both positive (freedom to explore, especially for the French filmmakers of the time) and negative (freedom to exploit) consequences, but its impact is undeniable. It's also true that Woman is not a great work of art, not with a story that is ultimately rather thin, some painful dialogue, and an attitude toward its characters and their sexuality that is unclear and inconsistent. Yet Woman is still fascinating, due in no small part to the presence of Brigitte Bardot in the role that made her an international star and sex symbol. She's not demonstrating great acting here, although her performance is actually good and much better than necessary, and her legendary mambo scene at the climax is nothing short of sensational." During the shooting of Et Dieu créa la femme/And God Created Woman (1956), directed by her husband Roger Vadim, Brigitte Bardot had an affair with her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant, who at that time was married to French actress Stéphane Audran. Her divorce from Vadim followed, but they remained friends and collaborated in later work.
Et Dieu créa la femme/...And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) helped her international status. The film took the USA by storm, her explosive sexuality being unlike anything seen in the States since the days of the 'flapper' in the 1920s. It gave rise to the phrase 'sex kitten' and fascination of her in America consisted of magazines photographs and dubbed over French films - good, bad, or indifferent, her films drew audiences - mainly men - into theaters like lemmings.BB appeared in light comedies like Doctor at Large (1957) - the third of the British 'Doctor' series starring Dirk Bogarde - and Une Parisienne/La Parisienne (Michel Boisrond, 1957) which suited her acting skills best. However, she was a sensation in the crime drama En cas de malheur/Love is my profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958). Hal Erickson at AllMovie: "this Brigitte Bardot vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely limiting its U.S. distribution. Bardot plays a nubile small-time thief named Yvette, who becomes the mistress of influential defense attorney Andre (Jean Gabin). Though Andre is able to shower Yvette with jewels and furs, he cannot "buy" her heart, and thus it is that it belongs to handsome young student Mazzetti (Franco Interlenghi). Alas, Yvette is no judge of human nature: attractive though Mazzetti can be, he has a dangerous-and deadly-side. En Cas de Malheur contains a nude scene that has since been reprinted in freeze-frame form innumerable times by both film-history books and girlie magazines." Photographer Sam Lévin's photos contributed considerably to her image of sensuality and slight immorality. One of Lévin's pictures shows Brigitte, dressed in a white corset. It is said that around 1960 postcards with this photograph outsold in Paris those of the Eiffel Tower.
Brigitte Bardot divorced Vadim in 1957 and in 1959 she married actor Jacques Charrier, with whom she starred in Babette s'en va-t-en guerre/Babette Goes to War (Christian-Jaque, 1959). The paparazzi preyed upon her marriage, while she and her husband clashed over the direction of her career. Her films became more substantial, but this brought a heavy pressure of dual celebrity as she sought critical acclaim while remaining a glamour model for most of the world. Vie privée/Private Life (1962), directed by Louis Malle has more than an element of autobiography in it. James Travers at Films de France: "Brigitte Bardot hadn’t quite reached the highpoint of her career when she agreed to make this film with high profile New Wave film director Louis Malle. Even so, the pressure of being a living icon was obviously beginning to get to France’s sex goddess and Vie privée is as much an attempt by Bardot to come to terms with her celebrity as anything else. Malle is clearly fascinated by Bardot and the documentary approach he adopts for this film reinforces the impression that it is more a biography of the actress than a work of fiction. Of course, it’s not entirely biographical, but the story is remarkably close to Bardot’s own life and comes pretty close to predicting how her career would end." The scene in which, returning to her apartment, Bardot's character is harangued in the elevator by a middle-aged cleaning lady calling her offensive names, was based on an actual incident and is a resonant image of celebrity in the mid-20th century. Soon afterward Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France.
Brigitte Bardot's other husbands were German millionaire playboy Gunter Sachs and right-wing politician Bernard d'Ormale. She is reputed to have had relationships with many other men including Sami Frey, her co-star in La Vérité/The Truth (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960), and musicians Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. In 1963, Brigitte Bardot starred in Godard's critically acclaimed film Le Mépris/Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963). She was also featured along with such notable actors as Alain Delon in Amours célèbres/Famous Love Affairs (Michel Boisrond, 1961) and Histoires extraordinaires/Tales of Mystery (Louis Malle, 1968), Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Sean Connery in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk, 1968), and Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses/Petroleum Girls (Christian-Jaque, 1971). She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including 'Harley Davidson', 'Le Soleil De Ma Vie' (the cover of Stevie Wonder's 'You Are the Sunshine of My Life') and the notorious 'Je t'aime... moi non plus'.
Brigitte Bardot’s film career showed a steady decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973 just before her fortieth birthday, she announced her retirement. She chose to use her fame to promote animal rights. In 1976 she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewelry and many personal belongings. For this work, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1984. During the 1990's she became also outspoken in her criticism of immigration, interracial relationships, Islam in France and homosexuality. Her husband Bernard d'Ormal is a former adviser of the far-right Front National party. Bardot has been convicted five times for 'inciting racial hatred'. More fun is that Bardot is recognised for popularizing bikini swimwear, in early films such as Manina/Woman without a Veil (1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photoshoots. Bardot also brought into fashion the choucroute ('Sauerkraut') hairstyle (a sort of beehive hairstyle) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. The fashions of the 1960s looked effortlessly right and spontaneous on her. Time Magazine: "She is the princess of pout, the countess of come hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality that brought a whole new audience to French films."
Sources: Denny Jackson (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), James Travers (Films de France), Films de France, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W. 187. Photo: R.K.O. Radio.
American actor Gregory Peck (1916-2003) was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five nominations for Academy Award for Best Actor and won once – for his performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it. Among his best known films are Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Roman Holiday (1953), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Cape Fear (1962).
Eldred Gregory Peck was born in 1916 in La Jolla, California (now in San Diego). His parents were Bernice Mary (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist, and druggist in San Diego. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the cinema every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. Peck's father encouraged him to take up medicine. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play 'The Morning Star' (1942). By 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944). Stardom came with his next film, The Keys of the Kingdom (John M. Stahl, 1944), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Tony Fontana at IMDb: "Peck's screen presence displayed the qualities for which he became well known. He was tall, rugged and heroic, with a basic decency that transcended his roles." He appeared opposite Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), he was again nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe. He was especially effective in Westerns and appeared in such varied fare as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the somewhat better received Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948), and the acclaimed The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950). He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Twelve O'Clock High (Henry King, 1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II. In 1947, Peck, along with Dorothy McGuire, David O'Selznick, and Mel Ferrer, founded the La Jolla Playhouse, located in his hometown, and produced many of the classics there. Due to film commitments, he could not return to Broadway but whet his appetite for live theatre on occasion at the Playhouse, keeping it firmly established with a strong, reputable name over the years.
With a string of hits to his credit, Gregory Peck made the decision to only work in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the heroic, larger-than-life figures in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) with Virginia Mayo, and Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) with Richard Basehart. He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953). While filming The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), he decided to become a cowboy in real life, so he purchased a vast working ranch near Santa Barbara, California - already stocked with 600 head of prize cattle. In the early 1960s, he gave a powerful performance as Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) opposite David Niven and Anthony Quinn. The film was one of the biggest box-office hits of that year. Peck finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). He also appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) opposite Robert Mitchum, and Captain Newman, M.D. (David Miller, 1963) with Tony Curtis, which dealt with the way people live. The financial failure of Cape Fear (1962) ended his company, Melville Productions. After making Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966) with Sophia Loren, Peck withdrew from acting for three years in order to concentrate on various humanitarian causes, including the American Cancer Society. In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Gordon Davidson, 1972) and The Dove (Charles Jarrott, 1974), when his film career stalled. He made a comeback playing, somewhat woodenly, Ambassador Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) with Lee Remick. After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (Joseph Sargent, 1977) and the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978) with Laurence Olivier and James Mason. In the 1980s, he moved into television with the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1982) in which he played Abraham Lincoln, and The Scarlet and the Black (Jerry London, 1983) with Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud. In 1991, he appeared in the remake of his 1962 film, playing a different role, in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (Norman Jewison, 1991), starring Danny DeVito. In 1967, Peck received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Always politically progressive, he was active in such causes as anti-war protests, workers' rights, and civil rights. In 2003, Peck's portrayal of Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute, only two weeks before his death. Atticus beat out Indiana Jones, who was placed second, and James Bond who came third. Gregory Peck died in 2003 in Los Angeles, California. He was 87. Peck was married twice. From 1942 till 1955, he was married to Greta Kukkonen. They had three children: Jonathan Peck (1944-1975), Stephen Peck (1946), and Carey Paul Peck (1949). His second wife was Veronique Passani, whom he met at the set of Roman Holliday. They married in 1955 and had two children: Tony Peck (1956) and Cecilia Peck (1958). The couple remained together till his death.
Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Queens Of The Stone Age @ Odeon, Saskatoon, SK
p.s. if you are gonna post my copyrighted images elsewhere on the internet at least have the decency to credit me with them or link them back to here, or i'll probably stop posting them or at least start putting big watermarks on them.
Queens Of The Stone Age, in a salt mine - 700m under Sondershausen, Germany
Double page spread in this weeks NME (UK). They chose to crop it down for some reason that I don't understand. Also in Shortlist magazine (UK) 17 Jan 2008.
VR virtual reality view from the show here
p.s. if you are gonna post my copyrighted images elsewhere on the internet at least have the decency to credit me with them or link them back to here, or i'll probably stop posting them or at least start putting big watermarks on them.
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French Journal Day 107 (Travel Diary Day 187)
Journal Title – The mis-education of HDR Photography
This post is designed to offend and educate. It may also bore the non-photographer section of my readership.
Why must it offend anyone? Well, being offended is often a choice and for one reason or another, there’s always a person who chooses to be offended, even in the least offensive of communications.
I live a life of HDR. When I’m not taking or editing photos, I’m running HDR One or writing this HDR journal, or even chatting with people about HDR who have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s a form of autism, my wife thinks.
Every now and then I see a wonderful image that I’m compelled to inquire about. On one such occasion I commented on an image that I was convinced was an HDR and said ‘Wonderful photo. Is this an HDR?’ What I hadn’t realised was that this very popular photographer’s facebook page was in fact a breeding ground for supposed HDR-haters.
I’d stumbled upon a beast that was waiting to be unleashed. The photographer replied ‘I would never do HDR. These are manually blended exposures!!!’ This comment received almost as many Likes as the initial image. The comments from his fans that soon followed were equally abrupt but far less flattering to the what they considered HDR.
This, however, was not the first time I’d encountered this response from ‘professional photographers’. While I didn’t have the time to reply, the lack of manners and common decency would have prevented me from doing so anyway. I have no time for bad manners, especially when the argument in question is horrendously misinformed.
This is for those HDR haters:
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. That’s it. If you hate HDR, then you hate High Dynamic Range. Manually blending exposures is increasing the dynamic range of light in your image. Your image, therefore, is HDR.
It really is that simple.
There are different HDR processes which produce different results, like Manual Blending, Exposure Fusion and Tone Mapping.
There’s even lots of fancy names for the same thing. Some people invent new names for HDR processes in an attempt to create a new field in which they hope to be pioneers. But, I’m almost sorry if I’m bursting a bubble here, it’s all just HDR.
Some people may even say, ‘Oh, right, well in that case I hate tone mapping’. Again, this is such a ludicrous thing to even think. Tone mapping is nothing more than a way to represent an HDR image. However, tone mapped images can look extremely different – they don’t all look alike. Why would anyone want to ‘hate’ something that can have such a huge amount of variation?
And what about tone mapped images that have some of the original exposures blended back into them. Do you partially hate those images?
Why hate anything at all? I mean, hate murder, by all means. Hate racism – that’s pretty bad. But hating a way of representing imagery that you don’t fully understand yet? That seems like an awful amount of hate for such a meaningless thing.
If it makes you feel better, even slightly elite, or even just part of a special little group, then fair enough. But at the very least, educate yourself on the thing you’ve chosen to hate.
Today’s Photo – An Unknown Place
You’ll probably hate this image – it’s Tone Mapped. I don’t even know what the place is – It’s in France, though.
strange-lands.com/daily/2013/01/18/the-miseducation-of-hd...
Vintage card. Photo: 20th Century Fox.
American actor Gregory Peck (1916-2003) was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck received five nominations for Academy Award for Best Actor and won once – for his performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He almost always played courageous, nobly heroic good guys who saw injustice and fought it. Among his best known films are Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Roman Holiday (1953), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Cape Fear (1962).
Eldred Gregory Peck was born in 1916 in La Jolla, California (now in San Diego). His parents were Bernice Mary (Ayres) and Gregory Pearl Peck, a chemist, and druggist in San Diego. His parents divorced when he was five years old. An only child, he was sent to live with his grandmother. He never felt he had a stable childhood. His fondest memories are of his grandmother taking him to the cinema every week and of his dog, which followed him everywhere. Peck's father encouraged him to take up medicine. He studied pre-med at UC-Berkeley and, while there, got bitten by the acting bug and decided to change the focus of his studies. He enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and debuted on Broadway after graduation. His debut was in Emlyn Williams' play 'The Morning Star' (1942). By 1943, he was in Hollywood, where he debuted in the RKO film Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944). Stardom came with his next film, The Keys of the Kingdom (John M. Stahl, 1944), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Tony Fontana at IMDb: "Peck's screen presence displayed the qualities for which he became well known. He was tall, rugged and heroic, with a basic decency that transcended his roles." He appeared opposite Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) as an amnesia victim accused of murder. In The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), he was again nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe. He was especially effective in Westerns and appeared in such varied fare as David O. Selznick's critically blasted Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the somewhat better received Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948), and the acclaimed The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950). He was nominated again for the Academy Award for his roles in Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Twelve O'Clock High (Henry King, 1949), a story of high-level stress in an Air Force bomber unit in World War II. In 1947, Peck, along with Dorothy McGuire, David O'Selznick, and Mel Ferrer, founded the La Jolla Playhouse, located in his hometown, and produced many of the classics there. Due to film commitments, he could not return to Broadway but whet his appetite for live theatre on occasion at the Playhouse, keeping it firmly established with a strong, reputable name over the years.
With a string of hits to his credit, Gregory Peck made the decision to only work in films that interested him. He continued to appear as the heroic, larger-than-life figures in such films as Captain Horatio Hornblower (Raoul Walsh, 1951) with Virginia Mayo, and Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) with Richard Basehart. He worked with Audrey Hepburn in her debut film, Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953). While filming The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), he decided to become a cowboy in real life, so he purchased a vast working ranch near Santa Barbara, California - already stocked with 600 head of prize cattle. In the early 1960s, he gave a powerful performance as Captain Keith Mallory in The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) opposite David Niven and Anthony Quinn. The film was one of the biggest box-office hits of that year. Peck finally won the Oscar, after four nominations, for his performance as lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962). He also appeared in two darker films than he usually made, Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) opposite Robert Mitchum, and Captain Newman, M.D. (David Miller, 1963) with Tony Curtis, which dealt with the way people live. The financial failure of Cape Fear (1962) ended his company, Melville Productions. After making Arabesque (Stanley Donen, 1966) with Sophia Loren, Peck withdrew from acting for three years in order to concentrate on various humanitarian causes, including the American Cancer Society. In the early 1970s, he produced two films, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Gordon Davidson, 1972) and The Dove (Charles Jarrott, 1974), when his film career stalled. He made a comeback playing, somewhat woodenly, Ambassador Robert Thorn in the horror film The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) with Lee Remick. After that, he returned to the bigger-than-life roles he was best known for, such as MacArthur (Joseph Sargent, 1977) and the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele in the huge hit The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978) with Laurence Olivier and James Mason. In the 1980s, he moved into television with the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1982) in which he played Abraham Lincoln, and The Scarlet and the Black (Jerry London, 1983) with Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud. In 1991, he appeared in the remake of his 1962 film, playing a different role, in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He was also cast as the progressive-thinking owner of a wire and cable business in Other People's Money (Norman Jewison, 1991), starring Danny DeVito. In 1967, Peck received the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He was also been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Always politically progressive, he was active in such causes as anti-war protests, workers' rights, and civil rights. In 2003, Peck's portrayal of Atticus Finch was named the greatest film hero of the past 100 years by the American Film Institute, only two weeks before his death. Atticus beat out Indiana Jones, who was placed second, and James Bond who came third. Gregory Peck died in 2003 in Los Angeles, California. He was 87. Peck was married twice. From 1942 till 1955, he was married to Greta Kukkonen. They had three children: Jonathan Peck (1944-1975), Stephen Peck (1946), and Carey Paul Peck (1949). His second wife was Veronique Passani, whom he met at the set of Roman Holliday. They married in 1955 and had two children: Tony Peck (1956) and Cecilia Peck (1958). The couple remained together till his death.
Sources: Tony Fontana (IMDb), and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Spennymoor is a town and civil parish in County Durham, England. It is south of the River Wear and is 7 mi (11 km) south of Durham. The civil parish includes the villages of Kirk Merrington, Middlestone Moor, Byers Green and Tudhoe.
The land on which Spennymoor now stands was once a vast expanse of moorland covered with thorn and whin bushes (Spenny Moor). In 1336 its placename was recorded as Spendingmor. The name is probably derived from the Old English or Old Norse spenning and mōr, meaning a moor with a fence or enclosure.
Another theory of the place-name's origin is from the Latin spina, meaning thorn (possibly from the Roman influence at Binchester) combined with the Old English or Old Norse mōr. CE Jackson, in his Place Names of Durham published in 1916 suggested a combination of the Old Norse spaan with Old English mar, meaning the moor named after the shingle-hut erected thereon.
Neither Britons nor Romans cultivated the moor, but on the site of Binchester, a village about 5 miles (8 km) to the southwest, the Romans built a camp around which grew up the settlement of Vinovium. The name Binchester is the usual Old English corruption or adaptation of the Roman site name.
St Paul's Church
This fortress must have been of great strength, for it stood on a height above the River Wear; many coins, urns, altars and pieces of Roman pottery have been found, as well as the remains of a hypocaust of the heating system. Later, Binchester became one of the "vills" of the Earl of Northumberland who held it until 1420 when it passed to the Nevilles who finally forfeited it with other lands in 1569. As is to be expected, the moor itself offers little of historical interest but it is linked with the records of Kirk Merrington, Whitworth Old Park, Binchester, Byers Green and Tudhoe, all of which form a part of the early days of Spennymoor. All these villages had common rights on the moor but, as it became denuded by increasing flocks, some of the local people were induced to relinquish their rights and so, gradually, the common became the property of just one owner – Merrington Priory. The Manor of Merrington belonged successively to the priors, monks and dean and chapter of Durham Cathedral.
Today, Merrington church is one of the most prominent local landmarks. It was originally built by the Normans and its splendid strategic position led to it being fortified in 1143 by the Scots intruder, William Cumyn. When he was finally attacked and overcome, the church roof was destroyed but the building remained as one of the most interesting Norman churches in the county until 1850 when it was almost wholly rebuilt – although retaining the form of its predecessor. Inside, the most interesting feature is the screen, a typical example of late-17th century work.
The Norman Conquest meant little to the border folk at first, for they had lived with the constant threat of massacre by raiding Picts and Danes, but then William's soldiers "laid waite" the county and distributed the Saxon nobles' estates among themselves. however, William allowed some of the previous owners to retain their lands, and one of these was Whittleworth – now Whitworth – whose first known proprietor was Thomas de Acle who held it in 1183. Nevertheless, the whole of this countryside was made desolate by William's soldiers, and for many years it was the haunt of outlaws and wild animals.
On 16 October 1346 David of Scotland was encamped with a great army on the hills near Durham, and raiding bands under a Douglas had been terrorising the neighbourhood. Edward lll was otherwise engaged at Crecy in France at the time, but his Queen, Phillipa, with the Archbishop of York, the Bishops of Durham, Lincoln and Carlisle, and the Lords Neville and Percy and others marched North, and with an array of 16,000 men, moved along the ridge from Auckland to Merrington. Her advance guards clashed with some of Douglas' men near Ferryhill and chased them back to the bridge at Croxdale (Sunderland Bridge). Butchers Race, one of the Five Lanes which meet at Tudhoe Crossroads, was so named after this foray. The next day the main bodies of the two armies met at Neville's Cross, near Durham, and the Scots were slaughtered. During the battle, the prior from Durham and his monks knelt on a little hillock in the Shaw Wood and prayed for an English victory while holding aloft, impaled on a spear, the Holy Corporax Cloth from the Cathedral.
In 1420 the Manor of Whitworth and much of the other land in the vicinity, from Raby to Brancepeth, and including Old Park, Byers Green, Newfield and Tudhoe, became Neville property, and the Earl of Westmorland (a Neville) was granted a licence from Bishop Langley to impark 40 acres at Whitworth, and so began the Whitworth park of today.
The moor itself comes into the record in 1615 as the result of "a general muster on the moor of all men able to bear arms within the bishopric, between the ages of 15 and 60; the gathering amounted to 8,320" (Fordyce). Some military training seems to have been given, doubtless with a view to the then unsettled state of the country due to the growing tension between Parliament and the King. Quite a few of these men must have been miners, as at that time "coale pits" were being worked at Whitworth, Byers Green and Fernhill. In 1677 the small freeholders and the local gentry divided 243 acres of the moor between themselves, an act which was confirmed by the Chancery Court. The only portion of the common that was left was a small plot reserved for the use of a spring of water.
Up to 1800 the moor remained largely barren and the few roads across it were dangerous. The one good road was maintained by tolls collected at turnpike gates. Some of the largest horse-race meetings in the North took place on the moor, and miners and their families attended in all their holiday splendour. These men, early industrial workers, wore their hair long and on these gala days it flowed freely over their shoulders instead of, as usually was the case, being tied in curls. Floral waistcoats and ribboned hats were worn on these highly colourful occasions.
Modern Spennymoor was built on mining and has its origins with the sinking of the Wittered pit in 1839. Rough houses were built for the pit workers – houses with two rooms and a loft, more like "piggeries than human habitation" according to Dodd. The first coal from Merrington Colliery was brought up in 1841; a pit with a chequered career which only prospered under the partnership of L.M Reay and R.S. Johnson, who made a fortune out of it. The trade depression of the late 19th century, however, caused its closure in 1882.
The coal mining at Whitworth and a small foundry at Merrington Lane were the earliest industries, but in 1853 the Weardale Iron and Coal Company opened its great ironworks at Tudhoe. As a result, many hundreds of immigrant workers came here from the Midlands and more rows of dark little houses were erected. More workers came from Wales and Lancashire, with the opening of the mine at Page Bank (ten lives were lost in a pit fire here in 1858), and with the sinking of a new pit at Tudhoe in the 1880s. The latter resulted in colliery workers' houses springing up on the main Durham Road. Slightly before that, in the 1860s, a rather advanced area of working-class housing had been erected at Tudhoe Grange, built by Marmaduke Salvin to house local workers. These houses were, unusually, semi-detached and arranged in a chequerboard layout, very much in contrast to the dreary terraces that were then the standard.
Although these days of rapid industrialisation and rapid growth of population were days of ignorance and squalor, they also saw the 19th century drive for education and religion. A National School was built and opened in 1841; St. Paul's Church was built at Spennymoor in 1858 and all through these formative years the non-conformist churches combined welfare work with prayer. An era of prosperity dawned in the 1860s and 1870s when the miners were earning £1 per day. Spennymoor was ringed with collieries, black furnaces and coke ovens and the new prosperity showed itself in the building of better houses and in the opening of Co-operative stores. The comparative isolation of its moorland situation ended too with the opening of a branch railway from the mainline at Ferryhill in 1876.
However, as always in industrial life, boom was followed by "bust" – or "near bust", and by 1879 miners' wages were down to 4s 9d a day and those of ironworkers to a mere 3s a day. On top of these economic misfortunes came the terrible explosion at Tudhoe Colliery in 1882 when 37 lives were lost. A strike, which lasted 13 weeks, paralysed the area in 1892, although out of the enforced idleness came foundations of new growth, for the machinery at the Tudhoe Iron works was then renovated and a new mill laid down. The works then possessed the largest mill in Europe, capable of rolling plates up to 13 feet in width.
When, in 1894, Spennymoor and its adjacent villages achieved a measure of self-government on the Spennymoor Urban District Council, the new authority found itself facing a legacy of poor housing. With few exceptions, the housing situation was little better than when Dodd had described the houses as "more like piggeries". In 1874 the then Local Government Board had reported: "Nothing could well exceed the nuisance attendant on the disposal of excrement and refuse in Spennymoor. There are entire streets without any closet accommodation whatever and in its stead open wooden boxes are placed opposite nearly every doorway for the reception of the excrement, ashes and other refuse; an arrangement which, besides being revolting to every sense of decency, is stated to be offensive in the extreme, especially in hot weather. It is impossible to walk between the rows of cottages without being convinced that the surface of the ground is to a large extent composed of the overflowing contents of these midden boxes. The back streets stand deep in filth and mud." These appalling conditions continued into the 20th century and even by 1920 fewer than 10% of the town houses had water closets. In 1923 only four houses were built and there was still massive overcrowding in back-to-back properties. In the next few years only between one and four houses were built in any year and in 1929 the housing situation was still reported as acute which, from the recorded facts, seems self-evident.
These squalid conditions were paralleled by the ever-uncertain economic conditions in industry. Although coalmining continued and the ironworks and engineering businesses were also providing employment, the start of the 20th century saw the start, too, of a long period of depression. The first blow was the closure in 1901 of the ironworks which had been rendered obsolete by the pace of change elsewhere. The effect of the closure was relieved by the sinking of the Dean and Chapter colliery in 1904, but the reliance on this one basic industry was to persist until the 1960s. Even before the big coal strike of 1926 the collieries had begun to close. Three closed in 1924 and the strike saw another two fail. Spennymoor became part of the Southwest Durham depressed area. Although schemes were inaugurated to relieve the gloom nothing could make up for the lack of steady employment. In 1930 the coke ovens which remained on the ironworks site were only working intermittently. Even by 1938 the situation had improved little. The Cleveland iron trade, which used the coal and coke produced at Spennymoor, was depressed. The production of these raw materials at Coulson's engineering works, Kenmir's furniture factory and newly opened brickworks at Todhills were the main, if limited, sources of employment. Unemployment was over 33%.
Despite the high levels of unemployment, the housing situation at last took an upturn in the 1930s when the Urban District Council began to use its wider powers to take action on unfit houses. By 1935 the first 66 Council houses had been built, and a year later the first 106 North Eastern Housing Association houses were erected on the Racecourse Estate site. Although these were the only houses built before the war, they did provide some hope and allowed the clearance of some of the worst of the squalid areas. Nevertheless, the situation remained bad and there were still far too many damp, badly lit and ventilated houses opening onto small, paved yards or back streets.
World War II had diverse effects upon the town. On the one hand it brought housing efforts almost to a standstill, but on the industry front it saw the resurgence of Spennymoor as a major centre. The main factor was the opening in 1941 of a Royal Ordnance Factory at Merrington Lane and since then this estate has provided a constant source of alternative employment to the coal industry. The end of World War II, however, saw this industrial activity greatly curtailed and hard times returned, although without the severity of the earlier pre-war years. The run-down of the mining industry, however, was nevertheless a serious blow.
On 24 December 1944, Tudhoe's cricket ground was hit by a rogue V-1 flying bomb, which had been air-launched by a German Heinkel He 111 and was aimed at Manchester. The explosion cratered the field and blew out the windows of surrounding houses and of St. Charles' Church. This was the furthest north any V-1 landed during World War II.
In 1963 changes were indicated and Durham County Council and then Ministry of Housing and Local Government agreed that Spennymoor should be a new "growth point" and that town centre redevelopment should take place; that the Tudhoe ironworks site should be reclaimed; that a major highway scheme should be put into hand; that the Royal Ordnance Factory Industrial Estate should be extended and that the Green Lane Industrial Estate should be developed.
Spennymoor shared some brief film success in the early 90's with the production of 'Anymore for Spennymore' starring a few of the locals.
There were, of course, early problems, but the new industries became established and, in most cases, began to expand. The coal industry has been replaced by manufacturers of consumer goods, and factories of Electrolux, Thorn Lighting and Black and Decker were established. Rothmans International also had a cigarette factory, employing more than 400 people, in Spennymoor from circa 1980 up until 2000.
Housing, too, has made great strides since the end of the War. By the end of 1963 over 1,120 sub-standard houses had been cleared and as many new Council houses built for letting – whilst over 400 houses had been improved by grant aid. In 1963 too there came the first private building developments to take place since back in the days of the 19th century colliery owners. The 800-house estate at Greenways and the 300-house estate at Tudhoe Grange were started, although it was not until the industrial prosperity of the 1970s that private house building reached 100 a year.
The greatest project came with the development of the Tudhoe ironworks site – 70 acres that was turned into the Bessemer Park Housing Estate. In 1968 work commenced on blocks of flats and houses there (comprising 1,009 household units in total) and this allowed the clearance of 500 unfit houses as well as the provision of housing for workers coming to the new factories. The blocks of flats on the Bessemer Park Housing Estate were subsequently demolished in the 1980s, due to serious problems with damp in the flats that rendered them extremely unpopular with tenants.
In 1966 the town opened a new bus station, between Cambridge Street and Silver Street, to relieve traffic congestion on the High Street. This bus station was subsequently redeveloped as a car park circa 1990. Also in 1966, the nearby Parkwood Shopping Precinct (which included a Woolworths and a supermarket) was opened. In 2016 it was announced that the Parkwood Precinct would be substantially redeveloped due to low tenancy rates in the shops, an escalating issue since the turn of the millennium.
==Van Cleer Manor: Then==
Drury was in the kitchen, singing along to the radio. There was an almost hypnotic rhythm to his movements, as he danced around the room, wooden spoon in hand. Kitten, stood on the other side of the kitchen island, giggling at her father's sporadic movements.
"I come home, in the mornin' light
My mother says, "When you gonna live your life right?"
Oh momma dear, we're not the fortunate ones
And girls, they wanna have fun
Oh girls just wanna have fun:"
He handed the wooden spoon to his daughter, like a singer handing over a microphone, and she sang the next verse:
"The phone rings, in the middle of the night
My father yells, "What you gonna do with your life?"
Oh daddy dear, you know you're still number one
But girls, they wanna have fun
Oh girls just wanna haaaaaave-"
The kitchen door swung open, as a dishevelled, blonde haired teenage boy entered the room. Axel took one look at the musical duo and shook his head, grunting a single "morning" to his dad.
"Afternoon!" Drury stopped singing for a moment to correct his son.
"Whatever," Axel shrugged, then opened the freezer, grabbing a pizza roll. "You made pastry from scratch?" he inquired, noting the floury work surface. We've got a box of stuff in the freezer still."
"Not good enough," Drury said as he pirouetted from one counter to the other to shoogle the saucepan, then squeezed a wedge of orange juice into the bubbling, creamy mixture. "It needs to be perfect."
Axel rolled his eyes as he placed the pizza roll in the microwave.
Drury put his fingers in the tub of raspberries beside him and sucked down a particularly plump one. "Want one?" he asked, waving the wicker basket in his son's face.
"I'm good," Axel said dismissively. "What's this all about anyway?"
A smile, like a lovesick schoolboy's, broke across Drury's face and Axel understood immediately. When it came to his stepmother, there was nothing his father wouldn't do, no matter how embarrassing it was for his kids (and Axel specifically). "Your mother... is taking a half day from the office. Thought I'd surprise her with a little something," Drury beamed. "Mille Feulle: With a twist! Orange and chocolate creme patissiere for the filling, which, when piped, ends up looking rather like a certain favourite animal of hers!" he nudged his son playfully.
Kitten, flicked a spoonful of frosting onto Axel's cheek.
==The GCPD==
The precinct was filled with the mundane tapping on keyboards, the beeping of broken photocopiers and heated discussion over that night's college football match. Drury, stood at the entrance, guided by a group of four police officers. A fifth, stood by the full-body scanner, hands on his hips.
"Empty your pockets. Place your shoes, belt and any other belongings on the tray beside me," he instructed the man.
Drury nodded slowly, removing his watch, his moth-shaped cufflinks and his wedding band and placed them in the plastic tray, followed by his leather belt, and his scuffed black shoes. Satisfied, the officer consulted a sheet of paper, and read aloud the contents of the questionnaire:
"Do you have any metal fillings?"
"No."
"Piercings?"
"No."
"Sigh Any cybernetic augmentations?"
"That can't be on the list."
"Answer the question."
"No, I don't."
"Have you had any surgery that has resulted in a metal plate being installed in your skull?"
"Wouldn't that come under cybernetic- nevermind." Drury tapped the side of his skull as a demonstration. "No."
"Please step through the x-ray machine. Slowly, please."
The scan completed, Drury was directed to the desk sergeant, who read out another series of questions:
"Do you have any dietary requirements?"
"No."
"Do you take any prescribed medication?"
"Lithium tablets. I'm bipolar."
"Are you a metahuman, or have you displayed any metahuman abilities in the last 48 hours?"
"I wish. Never met-a-human I didn't like."
...
"That was a no. Not recently. This should all already be in my file," Drury stated tiredly.
"Just standard procedure."
Drury looked over the desk, glancing at the sargent filling in the form. Was this all his life amounted to? A series of ticks and crosses on a coffee-marked sheet of paper?
"You're still a size 34?" the officer handed him a poorly folded orange jumpsuit.
Drury bit the inside of his cheek. "Right, that you remembered."
==ISA Headquarters==
Gar and Joey were escorted into the main meeting room by a group of six red-robed figures. Chuck finished writing something on the whiteboard, then walked over to greet them. The rest of the Misfits, were already seated at the red leather chairs.
"Gar, Joey, thanks for coming," he spoke, hugging Joey, then shaking Gar's hand.
"Your doormen frisked me on the way in," Gar stated, glaring at Dr Ito's red robed assistants, now retreating back into the shadows.
"Yeah, sorry about that. They're probably checking for... viable organs," Chuck trailed off.
"Hey, you're safe, Lynns, your lungs are black as shit," Sharpe smirked, miming a pair of finger guns.
"You said you had something, Chuck?" Joey interrupted.
"Right, yes... Where do I even begin..."
"Soon would be good," Gar said.
"I'll do my best; it might be better if you sat down first." Chuck slumped his shoulders, directing them to his drawings on the whiteboard. "There was this telephone in Sionis' office. A purple rotary. Julian must've brought it in with him. When I broke into the room, I flew into the desk and knocked the phone off it. There was this voice on the other end. And it told a joke."
The group was silent for a moment, before Sharpe chirped up. "Could've been Bart Simpson," he smirked dismissively.
"The phone was purple! I know that voice! It was him." Chuck said defensively. “But even if we put that aside, we know Julian has partners, plural, and I don't think he was hyping up the Pirate or the King of Cats either. Sure, we know Zoom is involved. Yes, we know the only person able to build a cloudburst and who wasn’t, um, blown up, is Crane. But when he was overdosing, Julian confessed that someone told him he was special. And I never viewed Scarecrow as the sentimental type."
"I thought Crane was in Arkham?" Ten asked.
"Oh, right, you came from Blackgate... 'Thing you need to know about the Asylum is, it's really more of a 'hostel,'" Sharpe stated.
As they spoke, Mayo drifted off, his eyes drawn to the large portrait hanging on the wall, depicting the members of the ISA, painted by Ito himself. His eyes narrowed as he recognised a purple-clad gentleman in a matching hat and a white goatee. "The Colonel..." he muttered under his breath.
"So, that's Scarecrow, Joker, Zoom. King of Cats, that pirate guy... Krill and Julian are in lock-up... I'd hate to see the chatroom they met each other in," Blake remarked, counting them on his fingers as he listed them off.
Kuttler scoffed. "There was no chatroom. The Society brought Zolomon and Joker together."
"I'm sorry, you knew about this?" Ten asked.
"Shocking," Gar said dryly.
Kuttler removed his glasses and rubbed his eyelids. "No, not all of it. But when we lost Eobard Thawne, The Society reached out to his protégé, Hunter Zolomon. He was never going to sit on the council, of course, but he was a useful tool for a while.
And when The Joker escaped Arkham and threatened to disrupt our plans, we found a place for him too; nothing too outrageous; an assignment to keep his deranged mind busy and his knives pointed away from our backs. Zolomon, served as our liaison with him. I simply assumed they dissolved their partnership when the Society collapsed. Evidently not. The clown must have appealed to his sensibilities, offered Walker up as a guinea pig..."
"Here's what I don't get: So, Joker; if it even is Joker; brings these all guys together, riles up Carson, then has Jules attack the Royal Hotel with a couple of bombs and some of Crane's gas? Why?" Joey inquired.
"I'm with Joseph. If this all circles back to Walker, why didn't Day grab him? Why not deliver him to his partners right then and there?" Bridget added.
"It's Joey, you can call me Joey," Joey waved across the table.
"I don't know," Chuck admitted. "There's still a lot here that doesn't make sense. We don't even know where Joker is."
"We can deal with him later. What about the kids?" Gar asked. "The clown's made a move on them before."
"Tiger Shark's been looking after them. He's been keeping his distance from us, for the most part, but we know he's got Flannegan with him, watching their backs," Ten explained.
"Good. Good," Gar nodded stiffly. "Does Drury know? About Joker?"
Chuck paused. "No. No, not yet. But I'm going to the GCPD tomorrow. It'll give me a chance to clue him in, and to see if Julian can give us any answers."
~-~
"So, what happens now?" Gar walked alongside a trio of Chuck, Bridget and Ten, his hands in his pockets.
"Dragon King's letting us stay for as long as we need. But there's still a lot of pieces missing. Obviously, Julian might be able to answer some of them, but-"
"But you gave him a near-lethal overdose of experimental anti-psychotics," Bridget's brow furrowed.
"I think I preferred it when you were trying to kill us," Chuck replied. "The files we got from the Batcave on Zoom were pretty thorough; Psycho Pirate's still a loose cannon, mind, and everything we thought we knew about King of Cats was probably a load of crap."
"Not everything," Ten spoke.
~-~
"Doctor Ito? Doctor Ito?" Chuck chapped the back of his hand against the door, before entering the kitchen. The good doctor, was hunched over the stove, skillet in hand.
"I am frying Paella. The secret ingredient is saffron," Ito declared, tapping the side of his hood knowingly.
"And I'm sure it's delicious! Listen, you studied the King of Cats, didn’t you?”
“Indeed, I did. Alas, my research was co-opted and corrupted by that confounding Crazy Quilt, and passed off to an unseemly associate of his, to profit off the gullible and weak minded.”
“Oh, yeah! Those, uh, gullible weak-minders...” Chuck scoffed loudly and unconvincingly. Bridget rolled her eyes.
“Where’s Dekker now?” Ten asked. "Have you kept in touch with him at all?"
Ito stared at Ten peculiarly, as though the answer was obvious. “In the dungeons.”
The Misfits frowned. “This isn’t the dungeon?” Bridget spoke in disbelief.
“Goodness gracious, no. It’s the master suite."
~-~
In captivity, Dekker's neatly trimmed mustache had grown into a shabby beard and his black hair had grown to shoulder length, with the odd strand of grey scattered throughout. Although he couldn't have been imprisoned for more than a week or two, the lack of access to his usual selection of exotic face creams and hair products had aged him dramatically. He moistened his cracked lips with his tongue, and chuckled at the group assembled before him: Gar, Chuck, Blake, Joey, Sharpe, Bridget, Ten and Mayo (Kuttler, had decided the visit was not worth his time or dignity), all in costume. “You know, trapped in a dungeon, tied to a chair, surrounded by a dozen suitors in tight fitting spandex... This reminds of my 50th birthday bash. Anyone bring a paddle?" he asked expectantly.
"Let's skip the foreplay, shall we?" Gar said coldly, his arms folded.
"Hmph. Up to you, my sweet Garfield, but I think you're missing out," Dekker shrugged, leaning back in his chair. "While I have you all, let's talk about the reptile in the house: Far be it from me to judge anyone, but I fear that hostile homo-reptilian host of yours has a crooked cloaca."
"Yeah? How d'you figure that?" Gar asked, a bemused look on his face.
"Well, why else I would be quite so unfairly persecuted?" Dekker queried, a question that stunned the Misfits with its' lack of self awareness.
"Maybe 'cause you stole his research?" Blake offered an explanation.
"That? Hmph, nothing more than a little exercise in tit for tat warfare. I may have- may have -stolen his research; he may have bombed Pearl Harbor."
"Hey, that's way over the line-" Chuck interjected.
"I say 'may have,' but he definitely did." Dekker examined the Misfits disgusted faces and his teasing smile dropped. "You really have no idea, do you? That 'man' is a snake! A duplicitous reptile who has no concept of decency! Whereas I am an entrepreneur, a businessman really, and I'm feeling philanthropic! And if you let me go, I promise I can make it worth your while!" he promised, a grin once again creeping up his wrinkled face.
Blake's nose wrinkled. “Gross.”
...
“What? I can’t be the only guy whose mind went there."
Chuck stepped forward. “That's just it, Dekker. We might not trust Ito, let's be honest, we'd be idiots if we did."
"Hey!" Sharpe protested.
"But we'd be even bigger idiots to take your word. Or are you going to deny working with Hellhound? Setting us up? Scamming us? Stealing our money?"
Dekker pondered the question for a moment, placing a balled fist under his chin, then answered: "My trademark deception and patented guile has served me well thus far."
"You’re in a dungeon," Ten observed.
“Besides! Hellhound is no longer a part of the equation, my well-hung Hang Glider," Dekker declared cheerfully, to the Misfits' surprise.
“He isn’t? Then what the hell happened to him?” Gar was the first to ask.
“Oh, dreadful business really. Let's see... I was conducting business over at the Stacked Deck: Now now, nibblings, don't give me that look; I was on the up and up; strictly professional! A client of mine wanted some adjustments made to a new costume, more zing, more pep, more concealed weapons, the usual... We had a few drinks; he paid, not that he realised it, and after popping a few pills in the back, we parted ways. I found Kai, Hellhound, in the back alley; bruised, bleeding and dripping in saliva that I'm sure wasn't his. He wouldn't speak, and when he tried, bless him, a high-pitched warble came out in lieu of words.
I wish I could say I was torn up about it, but the truth was, he blew me off the night before and I was feeling proportionately bitter about it," Dekker paused for a moment as he reconsidered his wording. "Oops. What I meant to say, was that he was supposed to give me my cut for another 'successful' exorcism but he jilted me. Never showed. Havishhammed by a mongrel! Although, I suppose, come to think of it, that must've been when the King of Cats found him... Never mind!" he chuckled.
"The King of Cats? You're sure?" Chuck asked, his face white.
"Oh yes, even high on ecstasy, I know that fleabag's handiwork... Who else could be quite so debaucherous? And don't say yours truly," Dekker winked back.
"What about Hellhound? What'd he do to him?" Blake piped up.
"Fine. Fine. Tell me, what does every doggie dread the most? Tell me, why does every nasty horndog fear the vet's scalpel?"
“You mean to say-?" Joey asked, mouth agape.
"Mhmm," Dekker nodded stiffly. “Neutered. Although, I suppose the more appropriate term would be cats-tration."
The Misfits were silent for a moment and then:
“Ok, I know we’ve long passed the point of What the Fuckery, but what the fuck!” Blake yelled in disgust.
"You asked," Dekker tutted.
“Well I have a question!" Mayo declared suddenly from the back of the crowd.
"You do?" the group asked in unison.
"Yeah," he replied, shoving Ten and Gar aside as he made his way to the front. "If you’re really an expert on all things fiendish, what are the Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices?”
Dekker's smile faltered. "Why would I know-"
“Mitch, it’s ok, we have this," Chuck urged.
“It might come up later...” Mayo protested.
“Not... not unless we’re fighting the Colonel.”
"Hey, to be fair, I do kinda get where the kid's coming from," Blake defended him. "Why the hell is there a painting of Colonel Sanders upstairs anyway?"
...
Sharpe frowned. “Blake, that's my grandpa and you killed him.”
"And you forgot to feed my panther, so I guess we’re even," Blake countered, arms crossed.
"Aw, no, Sasha starved?" Joey asked.
"What? No, she ate our landlord," Blake answered in an irate tone.
"‘s a win to me,” Sharpe replied."
Dekker, clapped his hands together, breaking up the boy's argument before it could turn ugly. “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! So, Tommy killed a landlord! So, Monty ate his granddad-"
"None of that is right."
"The world keeps turning! Let us not quibble over the minute details, the itty bitty highly debatable hearsay regarding what ate what, who scammed who etcetera etcetera...” Dekker smiled broadly, seizing the opportunity to barter for his freedom. "Let us put this unpleasant matter to bed. Hah. As a token of good faith, and made possible due to my increased wealth (thanks to your recent and highly generous donation)-"
“Well, it wasn’t a donation, we were expecting a service. You didn’t deliver,” Chuck stated.
“Poppet, please, let me finish! Haha, oh, I’m so naughty. You will have priority seating at Crazy Quilt’s! And free Drinky Poos! (When you spend over $100! Per person)”
“I can hear the brackets," Gar frowned.
“Hang on a minute, Gar. Chuck, we've been cooped up here for two days now. Maybe a night out would do us all some good,” Ten proposed. “Take our minds off of things.”
“Fine, but you’re not saying Drinky Poo ever again," Chuck instructed Dekker.
Mayo nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I really don’t want to turn my nose up at you, Mr Crazy Quilt, but I’m not drinking any poop.”
==The GCPD==
The GCPD bullpen; so often subjected to the juvenile verbal sparring matches of cops and lawyers. One such attorney delicately removed the teabag from his paper cup and discarded it in the nearby trashcan. A portly looking policeman approached him, dressed in a grubby grey trenchcoat and strangely, a fedora.
"Wow, if it ain't Adrian freakin' Chase! New York's 'best and most psychotic...,'" the cop applauded mockingly. "Secretary Walker must've really splashed the cash to get you out all the way out here. He must really love his baby brother."
The lawyer smiled politely, but there was an intensity behind his deep brown eyes. "Ah, Detective Bullock, never a pleasure," he spoke, offering him a handshake. Bullock declined. "My client has been fully cooperative since handing himself into your custody, almost to a fault. And in return, he has been treated with nothing but hostility. What's this I here about... a fruitcake?"
"So?" Bullock shrugged. "'Was just a bit of fun: The Three Stooges got away with it all the time, why you gotta ride my ass about it?"
"The Three Stooges, didn't throw pies in the faces of prisoners under their care. On Christmas," Chase replied sternly, sipping his tea slowly.
"Yeah? Bah humbug, he's a cop killer. He should be thankful it wasn't a grenade I threw at him."
"Cop killer? That's a little strong, no? If you're referring to the incident in June, I have it on good authority he employed non-lethal tactics only."
"Oh, so it was just run of the mill assault and property damage. Good for him!" Bullock exclaimed sarcastically.
Chase smirked. "I'll cut to the chase. My client, gift-wrapped three of the city's biggest at-large criminals. And a fourth, who I understand, escaped from under your boys' watchful eyes."
"The three biggest? Ya mean Polka Dot Man and Ted Carson? Gimme a break. And don't you worry about that "fourth." King of Cats isn't getting far; We have people on that."
"Those people the same ones who were guarding the Royal when he escaped? Boy, I feel safer already."
Bullock took an invasive step forward, waving a finger in Chase's face. "I know what you're trying to do, Chase, but there's no deal. The GCPD has always had a zero-tolerance policy towards vigilante 'justice.'"
"Is that right? That spotlight on your roof says differently," Chase stepped forward. Their noses were almost touching now.
"For all intents and purposes, that's a piece of modern art, installed by civilians for civilians, and we don't touch it."
"Cut the crap, Bullock. Your department is Batman Incorporated in all but name. Mr Walker's vigilantism isn't the issue, it's his branding."
"Yeah? You wanna maybe consider that Bug Boy don't want a lawyer? That maybe he's done the one decent thing in his miserable life and actually owned up, and faced the music for his bullcrap?"
"Harvey, that's enough," another cop interjected, stepping between the two and pouring herself a cup of coffee from the pot.
Bullock scowled, then stormed off down the hall.
Renée Montoya finished stirring her coffee, then offered her hand to Chase. "It's good to have you back. You're about the only guy I know who can wind Harvey up like that without a cape."
"From my experience, detective, capes are overrated," Chase smiled, then shook her hand firmly.
Catching up on some back shots from the beginning of the year
On a walk around the Addington Cemetery with a wonderful Flickr friend. February 13, 2016 Christchurch New Zealand.
There is so much damaged in the cemetery because of the earthquake we have had. It is such a pity as I don' think it will ever be fully repaired.
The Addington Cemetery was established in 1858 when the Scottish Presbyterians of St Andrew’s Church purchased land for a cemetery in Selwyn Street. Although not the first cemetery in Christchurch, Addington was in fact the first “public” cemetery, “being open to all persons of any religious community” and allowing the performance of any religious service “not contrary to public decency”.
The first burial took place on the 10th of November 1858. The cemetery has several persons of note buried within its grounds including activist Kate Sheppard, Christchurch Mayor Tommy Taylor and members of the pioneer family, the Deans.
For More Info:http://my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/addington-cemetery/
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MANIFESTO GLEITZEIT 2015
BY STELLY RIESLING
Featured below is another original art work of mine in homage to THE PIONEER OF INVISIBLE ART — PAUL JAISINI. Forget all the copycats that came after him — Master Paul Jaisini was the *FIRST* of a totally original concept and the *BEST*. My favorite thing about him is that he’s a voice, not an echo, which is quite rare.
DISCLAIMER: This is for anyone who is a hater OR wishes to better understand me, what I’m all about, so you can decide whether I’m weird or normal enough for you — a kind of very loose manifesto, rushed and unrevised, full of raw uncut emotion that I don’t like to be evident in my writing as lately I prefer a more professional, formal style, so we can consider this a rough draft of the more polished writing to come when I have extra time. I might return to this text later and clean it up or break it into separate parts. Right now it’s a long-winded hot mess, so if you manage to make any sense of it, BIG PROPS TO YOU. lol …and if you manage to read it ALL, you have my solemn respect!!! in a day when reading has been reduced to just catchy headliners and short captions of images once in a while. The consequence of this one-liner internet culture is non-linear, tunnel thinking, which is baaaaaad.
There lives among us a most enigmatic and charismatic creature named Paul Jaisini who led me into the wonderful world of art, not personally, but through descriptions of his artworks in essays written and published online by his friend, which painted the most fascinating images in my mind. Early on as a kiddo, I experimented with photography, simple point and shoot whatever looked attractive to me. Digital manipulation of my photographs with computer software followed… and somehow I learned useful drawing techniques along the way to combine existing elements with nonexistent ones, which allowed me to elevate the context for my ideas. Later, I started creating my own digital art from scratch for my friends and family as a favorite pastime. They would shower me with praise and repeatedly encouraged me to share my “different” vision with the rest of the world… it took a while and wasn’t easy to overcome the insecurity of not being good enough along with a gripping fear of being harshly criticized, but one day I woman-ed up and started publishing my work on the web, reminding myself that my livelihood didn’t depend on a positive reception.
Paul Jaisini’s role in all this has been to not disgrace myself, even if what I do is just a hobby. And I would never do him and other genius artists the disservice of calling myself a professional because I know I’ll never be as good as any of the GIANTS of pre-modern history. Be the best or be nothing, no middle ground.
People’s jealousy in the past, future and present over my obsessive love of Paul Jaisini, which they are well aware is purely plutonic, has caused them to despise the man and has made many relationships/friendships impossible for me. I refuse to have such people in my life because by harboring any negativity towards Paul, they unknowingly feel that way about me and express it to me. It’s their own problem for not realizing this. Paul’s new art movement, Gleitzeit, shaped me into the allegedly awesome girl I am today, giving my art more edge, more “sexy” because it refined my vision of the world and propelled me to attain the skills necessary to not dishonor my family name through tenacious pursuit of perfection. Since the beginning of my life, I attempted to depict what I saw in visual, musical and literal forms, but continuously failed without adequate training and determination. Paul Jaisini’s Gleitzeit was the answer to my prayers. Who I am today I owe mostly to him and his selfless ideals of the artverse that I’ve given unconditional loyalty to (he has this cool ability for hyper-vision to see whole universes, not itty bitty worlds, hence I call it an artverse instead of art world, with him in mind). So again, anyone who hates Paul Jaisini hates ME because, regardless of what he means to you, he is the most important person in my life for making me ME. The way a famous actor, dancer or singer inspires others to act, dance or sing, Paul inspired me to become a better artist, better writer, better everything. More people would understand if he was a household name because they’re wired to in society. But we’re inspiring each other all the time in our own little communities without being famous, so if someone has the ability to change even ONE person’s life immensely with creativity, it is a massive achievement. And passionate folks like myself are compelled to scream it from the cyber rooftops. So here I am. It’s whatever.
Furthermore, I’d like to address here a few pressing matters in light of some recent drama brought on by both strangers and former friends. To start, I never judge the passions, interests or likes of others, which are often in my face all over the place, so likewise they have no right to judge any of mine. It is quite unfortunate and frustrating how very little understanding and education the majority of people have or want to have. Their logic is as primitive as a chipmunk when it comes to promotion of fine art on the web: “spamming, advertising, report!” It’s their own problem that they fail to understand what it’s about due to the distorted lens through which they see the world or inability to think for themselves; an inherent lack of perception or inquisitiveness. Well, guess what? Every single image, every animation, every video, every post dedicated to Mr. Paul Jaisini and “Gleitziet” (to elaborate: a revolutionary new art movement Paul founded with his partner in crime and personal friend, EYKG, who discovered him and believed in him more than anyone) has an important purpose. Every one of those things you run across is a piece of a puzzle, a move in a game, an inch down a rabbit hole; the deeper you go, the more interesting it gets; the more levels you pass, the more clues unfold, the greater the suspense and nearer the conclusion (yet further). You earn awesome rewards like enlightenment, spiritual revelations, truths, knowledge, wisdom and the most profound reward of all: the drive to improve yourself to the absolute maximum, so an unending, unshakable drive. People often make a wrong turn in this cyber game and go back a few levels or get stuck. Those that keep on pushing, however, will come to find the effort has been worth it. And what awaits you in the end of it all? The greatest challenge to beating the game: YOUR OWN MIND. You will be forced to let go of every belief you held before you had reached the last level, to completely alter your mindset and perception of the world, of life, of yourself. But by the time you’ve gotten to that point, it will be as easy as falling off a cliff! (It is a kind of suicide after all — death and rebirth of spirit.)
Paul Jaisini does NOT, *I repeat* does NOT use mystery and obscurity to his advantage as a clever marketing ploy, no, he’s too next level for that with a consciousness so rich, he should wear a radioactive warning sign (he’ll melt your brain, best wear a tinfoil hat in his presence as I certainly would.) The statement he makes is loud and clear, hidden in plain site for those who take the time to connect the dots and have enough curiosity to fuel their journey into unknown territory (an open mind and flexible perception helps a lot). Actually, anyone with an IQ above 90 is sure to figure it out sooner or later. Hint: You don’t have to SEE an extraordinary thing with your eyes to know it exists, to understand it and realize its greatness — you can only feel it in your bone marrow, your spinal fluid, your heart and soul. The moment you do figure it out, as the skeleton key of the human soul, it will unlock the greatness and massive potential buried deep within, changing the doomed direction humanity is undoubtedly headed. I don’t speak in riddles, I speak in a clear direct way that intelligent humans will understand, so I’m counting on them.
GIG is an international group of artists and writers that support Paul Jaisini’s Gleitzeit. We started off as an unofficial fan club of Jaisini in 1996, comprised of only 6 individuals spanning 3 countries, and eventually escalated in status to an official fan group across the entire globe. A decade later it had grown to hundreds of fans. Nearly another decade later, there are thousands. Let’s not leave out another delightful group of vicious haters that have been around for nearly as long as us since the late 90s and have also grown in impressive numbers. Now, for the record (and please write this one down because I’m sick of repeating myself), Paul Jaisini himself is not part of our group and has nothing to do with us. He loves and hates us equally for butchering his name and making him appear as a narcissistic nut-job in his own words. He casts hexes on us for the blinding flash we layer over the art that members contribute to GIG — “disgusting-police-lights, seizure-inducing-laser-lightshow, bourgeois-myspace-effects retarded-raver shit” in Paul’s words. Ahh, how we love his sweet-talking us. In a desperate attempt to please him, those among us who make the art and animations have spent countless hours and sleepless nights trying to solve a crazy-complex quantum-physics type of equation = how to not create tacky or tasteless content. He does fancy some of it now, we got better, that’s something! In the reason stated below, our mission just got out of hand at some point.
What little is known about Paul Jaisini, even in all this time, is he’s a horrible perfectionist who slaughtered hundreds of innocent babies — I mean — artworks of remarkable beauty created by his own right hand (mostly paintings, some watercolors and drawings). He’s a fierce recluse who wants nothing to do with anyone or anything in life. But those few of us who know of an incredible talent he possesses (one could go as far as calling it a superpower), could not allow him to live his life without the recognition he FUCKING DESERVES more than any artist out there living today and, arguably, yesterday. We use whatever means necessary to reach more people, lots of flash and razzle-dazzle to lure them into our sinister trap of a higher awareness. Mwahaha! The visual boom you’ve witnessed in both cyber and real worlds, that is GIG’s doing — two damn decades of spreading an art virus — IVA. InVisibleArtitis… or a drug as in Intravenous Art. It’s whatever you want it to be, honey.
Our Gleitzeit International Group (GIG) started off innocently enough and gradually spiraled out of control to fight the haters, annoying the hell out of them as much as humanly possible. They don’t like what we do? WE DO MORE AND MORE OF IT. But never without purpose, without a carefully executed plan in mind collectively. If we have to tolerate an endless tidal wave of everyone’s vomit — e.g., idiotic memes and comics; dumbed-down one-liner quotes; selfies; so-called “art photography” passed through one-click app filters; mindless scribbles or random splatters by regular folks who have the nerve to call themselves serious/pro artists; primitive images of pets, babies, landscapes, random objects, etc… then people sure as shit are gonna tolerate what we put out, our animated and non-animated visual art designed for our beloved master, Paul Jaisini, who has shown us the light, the right path to follow, taught us great things and done so much for us — and so in our appreciation of him, we stamp his name on everything, for the sacrifices he has made in the name of art, to save our art verse, he’s a goddamn hero. There’s a book being written in his dedication where little will be left to the imagination about him.
If Paul Jaisini was as famous as Koons or Hirst, for example, people would know it’s not him posting stuff online with his name on it but fans creating fanart like myself among others. But noooooo, such a thing is unfathomable to most people - the promotion of another artist. Like, what’s in it for us? Uhh, nothing?? This is all NON-PROFIT bitches, the way art should be. It’s a passion FIRST, a commodity/commercial product/marketable item LAST and least. Its been that way for us since the early 90s to this day. Not a single member of GIG has sold an art work (neither has Paul Jaisini who’s a true professional) and we want to keep it that way. We do it for reasons far beyond ego. So advertising? Really? How the hell do you advertise or sell thin air, you know, invisible paintings, invisible anything? Ha ha, very funny indeed. The idea here is so simple, your neighbor’s dog can grasp it. Our motives: replace fast food for the mind with fine art, actual fine art. You know, creativity? Conscious thought? Talent? Skill? Knowledge? All that good stuff rolled into one to bring viewers more than a momentary ooohand aaahh reaction. Replace the recycled images ad nauseum; repetitious, worn-out ideas; disposable, gimmicky, money-driven fast art for simpletons. Stick with the highest of ideals and save the whole bloody planet.
Fine art is often confused with craft-making. This often creates bad blood between classically trained artists who put out paintings that leave a lasting impression, that make strong conversation pieces, that are thought-provoking and deep… and trained craftspeople whose skills are adequate to create decorative pieces for homely environments — landscapes, still lifes, animals, pretty fairies, common things of fantasy, and other simplicity. Skills alone are not enough for high art, you need a vision, a purpose, the ability to tell a story with every stroke of your brush that will both fascinate and terrify the viewers, arousing powerful emotions, illuminating. I have yet to see a visible painting in my generation that does anything at all for me, other than evoke sheer outrage and disgust. What a terrible waste of space and valuable resources it all is.
Paul Jaisini leads, we follow. He wishes to remain unknown - so do most of us. I’m next in line, slipping into recluse mode, no longer wanting to attach my face, my human image to my art stuff. I wish to be a nameless, faceless artist as well, invisible like P.J., and in his footsteps I too have destroyed thousands of my own artistic photography and digital art made with tedious, labor-intensive handwork. The whole point of this destruction is achieving the finest results possible by letting go of the imperfect, purging it on a regular basis, to make way for the perfect. I love what I do so it doesn’t matter, I know I’ll keep producing as much as I’m discarding, keeping the balance. Hoarding is an enemy of progress, especially the digital kind as there’s absolutely no limit to it. It’s like carrying a load of bricks on your back you’ll never use or need.
The watering down of creativity that digital pack ratting has caused as observed over the years is most tragic. For the creative individual, relying on terabytes of stock photos or OSFAP as I call them (Once Size Fits All Photos) instead of making your own as you used to when you had no choice, being 100% original, is a splinter in the conscience. It’s not evil to use stock of, say, things you don’t have access to (outer space, deep sea, Antarctica, etc.), but many digital artists I know today can’t take their own shot of a pencil ‘cause they “ain’t got no time for that!” How did they have time before? Did time get so compressed in only a decade?
Ohhhhh, and the edits, textures, filters, plug-ins and what-have-you available out there to everyone and their cats… are responsible for the tidal wave of rubbish that eclipses the magnificent light of the real talents.
I can tell you with utmost sincerity there is no better feeling on earth than knowing your creation is ALL yours, every pixel and dot, from the first to the last. It’s not always possible to make it so, but definitely the most rewarding endeavor. I’m most proud of myself when I can accomplish that.
Back to Paul Jaisini, from the start there have been a number of theories floating around on what his real story is. One of my own theories is that he stands for the unknowns of the world who can’t get representation, can’t get exhibited at a decent gallery because highly gifted/trained artists aren’t good enough - those kind of establishments prefer bananas, balloon dogs, feces, gigantic dicks/cunts, and all kinds of what-the-fucks…
So again, you don’t get the Paul Jaisini thing? That’s your problem. Don’t hate others for getting it. People are good, very good, at making baseless assumptions and impulsively spewing it as truth. They criticize and judge as if they’re high authorities on the subject yet they clearly lack education in fine art or art history and possess little to no talent or skill to back up their bullshit. My little “credibility radar” never fails. When they say I know this or I know that, I reply don’t say “I know” or state things as fact as a general rule of thumb - instead say “I assume/believe” and state the reasons you feel thus to appear less immature, especially about a controversial topic like invisible art. I have zero respect or tolerance for egomaniacs who think they know it all and act accordingly like arrogant pricks. Who can stand those, right? Once again, a good example would be: I, Stelly Riesling, believe everything I’ve written in this little manifesto to be correct based on personal experience and observation from multiple angles, thorough research and sufficient data collected from verifiable sources (and don’t go copying-pasting my own words back at me, be original). Just because you or I say so doesn’t make it so. Just because you or me think or believe so doesn’t make it true or right. I only ask that my opinions are regarded respectfully and whoever opposes them does so in a mature, civilized manner. We should only be entitled to opinions that don’t bring out the worst in us.
I don’t normally take such a position, but the time has come to stand up for what I believe in! It’s quite amusing and comical how haters think calling me names, attacking me or my interests or members of the project I’m part of for years is going to change something. It only makes more evident the importance of what I’m doing so I push on harder still.
Words of advise to those who can identify with me, with my frustrations over people’s reluctance to change their miserable ways, with our declining art world…
DON’T waste time on people who sweat the small stuff, whose actions are consistently inconsistent with their words. DO waste time on people who always keep their eye on the ball—the bigger picture of life.
Paul Jaisini’s invisible paintings are more than hype, more than your lame assumptions. Here’s one I got that’s pure gold: a cult! It started out as A JOKE OF MINE that was used against me. I told a then-good friend that he should come join our little “art cult” in a clearly lighthearted manner, and later he takes this idea I put in his head first and accuses me of being in an (imaginary) cult—the jokes on me eh?. But wait, aren’t cults religious? Our group consists of people around the world of different faiths (or none at all) so how could that ever work? If religion was about making fine (non-pop) art mainstream and bringing awesome, fresh, futuristic concepts to the collective consciousness, the world would not be so fucked up today because talent, creativity, originality and individuality would be the main focus, not superficial poppycock; those things would be praised and encouraged and supported in society by all institutions, not demonized and stigmatized.
Here is one thing I CAN state as solid fact: only one person close to Paul Jaisini knows the TRUE story, or at least some of it: EYKG. Everything else that has ever been said about him is myth, legend, gossip, speculation, the worst of which is said by jealous non-artists (wannabes, clones, posers, hang-ons, unoriginal ppl in general) and anti-artists (religious psychos, squares, losers and -duh- stupid ppl). Sadly, people are unable to see the bigger picture by letting their egos run their lives or repeating after others as parrots.
Commercial art, consumerism, and ignorance of the masses truly makes me want to curl up in a ball, not eat or drink or move until I die, just die in my sleep while dreaming of a better world, a world where real fine artists rule it with real fine art as they used to and life is beautiful once again….
Well I hope that settled THAT for now, or perhaps inadvertently made matters worse. I hope I didn’t sound too pissed from all these issues that keep popping up like penises on ChatRoulette… just got to me already! Can you tell? I had to put my foot down, stomp ‘em all!
To be continued, still lots more ignorance and pettiness to battle… Till then peace out my bambini. MWAH!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MANIFESTO GLEITZEIT 2015
PROLOGUE
Paul Jaisini was like a messiah, as you wish, who saw/understood the impending end and complete degeneration of Fine art or Art become and investment nothing more than that. He predicted the bubble pops art when everybody would eventually become an artist, including dogs cats and horses, because they as kids followed the main rule: express yourself without skills or knowledge or any aesthetic concerns. J. Pollack started pouring paints onto canvases; Julian Schnabel, former cab driver from NY, suddenly decided he could do better than what he saw displayed in galleries, so he started gluing dishes on canvases; A.Warhol, an industrial artist who made commercial silk-screen for the factories he worked in, started to exhibit "Campbell's soup" used for commercial adds... and later the thing that made him an "American Idol": by copying and pasting Hollywood celebrities (same type of posters he made before for movie theaters).
When Paul Jaisini stood out against the Me culture in the US by burning all of his own 120 brilliant paintings (according to the then-new director of Fort Worth MoMa Museum, who offered hin an exhibition of his art in 1992, and later the Metropolitan Museum curator, Phillippe de Montebello, in 1994).Paul probably assumed all fellow true fine artists would join him or stand by him against corruption of the art world.
And after 20 years of his stand-off...the time has finally come today. Many artists and humanitarians around the world took a place beside him. His invisible Paintings became a synonym for the future reincarnation of fine art and long lost harmony. The establishment is in panic! The "moneybags" (as Paul Jaisini named them) are in panic, because they invested BILLIONS of dollars in real crap made by
craftsmen. Now they realize that the reputation of American legends of expressionism was nothing but a copy of Russian avant-garde" Kazimir Malevich, Vasiliy Kandinsky and tens of others from France and Germany.. US tycoon investors were spending billions on "Me more original, than you". "Artist Shit" is a 1061 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, filled with feces. A tin can was sold for £124,000, 180,000 at Sothebys, 2007.
EPILOGUE
Before I resume promoting and admiring a very important art persona on today's international art arena, I'd like to clear up some BIG questions; people ask continuously and subconsciously, directly & indirectly: "Why does the name Paul Jaisini, flood the Internet in such "obnoxious" quantities that it's started suppressing some other activities that my friends might share with the rest of the Internet's Ego Me only Me www society? I can't just answer this... so I'll try to explain why I'm writing this: Jaisini's followers keep posting art and info about,
He IMHO the only hope in quickly decomposing visual fine art. "Paul Jaisini realized many years ago, in 1994, when he declared (at that time to himself only) the start of a New era, a New vision, that he is trying to redirect from the rat race, started by an establishment in post-war New York, long before the Internet culture.
Sub related information: Adolf Gottlieb, Mart Rothko, etc (after visiting Paris France in 1933):
"We must forget analytical art, we must express ourselves, as a 5 year old child would, without a developed consciousness. Forget about results - do what you feel, EXPRESS yourself with your own unique style"
With this statement Mark Rothko starts to teach his students, degeneration of fine art begins, and the generation of war of styles took a start signal of the material race, greatly rewarded by establishment "individual" - eccentric craftsmen - show business clowns.
Sub related Information: In the summer of 1936, Adolf Gottlieb painted more than 800 paintings, which was 20X more than he created in his whole art career as a painter, starting from the time of Gottlieb becomes a founding member of "The Ten" group in NYC "Group of Ten" was a very peculiar, enigmatic group... Based on a religious point of view;(where a human figure was prohibited from being created)
GLOSSARY
IN 1997, Paul Jaisini's best friend Ellen Y.K.Gottlieb started a cyber campaign by promoting on a very young Internet, back then, Paul Jaisini's burned paintings as Invisible Paintings, visible only through poetic essays. She and a handful of people saw his originals and were devastated that nobody could ever see them again. "We, his fans, believe that someday Paul will recreate his 120 burned paintings if he has any decency and moral obligation to his fans, who have dedicated decades to make it happen, for their Phoenix to rise from the ashes and the whole world will witness that all these years we spent to get him back to re-paint the Visuals again were not in vain," - said E.Y.K.Gottlieb in 2014 during the 20th anniversary celebration of Invisible Paintings to GIGroup in NYCity. So now, hopefully, this clears up why I and others do what we do - our "cyber terrorism" of good art, dedicated to Paul Jaisini's return, which is & and was our mission & our goal. We post good art to fight "troll art" which is worthless pics, after being passed through 1-click filters of free web apps. We are, in fact, against this www pops pollution, done with "bubble art" by the out of control masses with 5 billon pics a day: Pics of cats, memes, quotes,national geographic sunsets and waterfalls, not counting their own daily "selfies: and whatever self-indulging Me-ego-Me affairs, sponsored happily by photo gadget companies like Canon, Nikon, Sony...who churn out higher quality madness tools at lower cost.
This way Government taking away attention from the real world crisis of lowest morality & economical devastation. The masses are too easily re-engineered/manipulated by the Establishment PopsStyle delivered to them by pop music and Hollywood "super" stars. In 1992 Paul Jaisini's Gleitzeit theory predict such a massive, pops self-entertain madness, following technologicalexplosion, but not in illusive scales.
Uber Aless @2015 NYC USA
NOTE Date's numbers and events can be slightly inaccurate.
#gleitzeit #paul-jaisini #invisible #painting #art #futurism #art-news,
After a lot (never too much, actually) of Industrial Exploration I felt the need to feed my soul and regenerate myself a bit.
This is the H.C.Andersen museum in Rome (see map).
it's a small museum but is full (really packed) of beautiful bronze and plaster statues telling the skills of Mr. Andersen, a Norwegian architect, painter and sculptor.
The Building was Mr Andersen's home and workshop at the same time. Here a number of scale models for bigger statues and building are also displayed
The preferred subjects were dancers, athletes, singers and angels that he represented in the full beauty of the naked body
Some of the bronze statues could not be displayed publicly (at that time) because of "too much nudity" which was against the commons rules of decency at his time (around 1920)
If you don't know this is Owen Paterson, unfortunately it's not his real face as you might have noticed. This ' man ' is secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, he is responsible for the imminent slaughter of 5000 of this country's best loved and most legally protected animals. If he has his way he wants 100 000 of these beautiful, enigmatic and utterly blameless animals slaughtered nationwide. He doesn't even have the decency to look evil as most tories do which is almost more sinister than his openly malevolent chums.
He claims on his website to be ' an expert on bovine TB ', I suspect the average nine year old child has a better understanding of science and certainly morality. It's interesting that whenever they mention badger culling on Springwatch they always stress that it's a ' complex issue ', seeing Michaela Strachan utter those words when she clearly opposes a cull was almost painful. It must be very frustrating for the presenters that they can't express their real feelings about it on the BBC. The truth is though that bovine tuberculosis IS a complex issue, whether culling badgers will help reduce it though isn't complex at all, IT WON'T.
Anyway, this wasn't really the shot I wanted but I do love the look on the cub's face, I'm fed up with looking at Paterson' smug face three nights running so this will have to do.......
From the ' Stop The Cull ' site :
' Owen’s priority when he got into his new job was to attack the co.uk version of this website, he got his team of lawyers in the treasury department to put an injunction on the site, because the site had encouraged people to play the badger badger song to him in his office. '
The response was this website :
www.badger-killers.com/who/owen-paterson/
Here's his favourite song ' Badger Badger ' :
weebls-stuff.com/songs/badgers/
www.badger.org.uk/Content/Home.asp
epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/38257
The Manic Street Preachers song :