Wheezles and Sneezles
Tweet“Christopher Robin had wheezles and sneezles,
they bundled him into his bed.
They gave him what goes with a cold in the nose,
and some more for a cold in the head.”
Blue Monday
Jan Erik Waider devotes himself to “Atmospheric landscape photography of the North; Norway, Iceland, Greenland and beyond.” He titles his collected works Northlandscapes and he captures their cold and damp, chillingly, beautifully.
TweetHolocaust Remembrance Day
On 27 January each year, the world commemorates the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated six million Jews, five million Slavs, three million ethnic Poles, 200,000 Romani, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people and 9,000 homosexuals by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and its collaborators.
“When Hitler started out, he took the Jews from their homes
Hitler started out, he took the Jews from their homes
That’s one thing Mr. Hitler you know you done wrong.We’re gonna tear Hitler down
We’re gonna tear Hitler down
We’re gonna tear Hitler down someday.
We’re gonna bring him to the ground
We’re gonna bring him to the ground
We’re gonna bring him to the ground someday.You ain’t no iron, you ain’t no solid rock
You ain’t no iron, you ain’t no solid rock
But we American people say ‘Mr. Hitler you is got to stop!'”
Huddie William Ledbetter (Leadbelly) was born on 20 January in 1888, in Louisiana. He was in and out of jail starting in his teens, for owning a gun, for killing a relative. John and Alan Lomax discovered him in prison in the early 1930s and they put some of his songs on tape. Freedom and fame followed. Born on a plantation, Leadbelly ended up touring the world and bringing blues music to a new generation.
TweetBird’s-eye Shanghai
Created by Chinese company Bigpixel Technology, this ultra-high-resolution image of Shanghai offers a 360-degree panorama that allows users to pan across and zoom into, so that even people at ground level appear identifiable. The image’s extraordinary clarity results from its 195 gigapixels (195 billion pixels, or 195,000 megapixels). Note: the latest iPhone XS camera takes photos at 12 megapixels.
Shot from 230 metres up on Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower, the image is put together from thousands of smaller photos taken by a range of cameras with 600 millimetre telephoto lenses. The project’s 8,700 photos added up to a massive 2.6 terabytes storage, by the way.
TweetAssiettes & Broderies
“Marie-Claude Marquis is an artist whose practice is rather multidisciplinary. Touching both graphic design and visual arts, she is inspired by souvenirs, nostalgia, pop culture, Québec identity and her own emotions which she expresses with a feminine touch and a colorful sensitivity.” Check out MC MARQUIS. Very stimulating.
TweetTake down the love letters
The poet and playwright Derek Walcott was born on this day in 1930 in Saint Lucia, an island country in the eastern Caribbean. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment”. How does Walcott’s verse rate? The poetry critic William Logan summed it up with faint praise: “No living poet has written verse more delicately rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems seem destined to be remembered.” This one is, we feel.
TweetLove After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved youall your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.Derek Walcott (1930 – 2017)
Google search for “P&G” on 19 January
The controversy over Gillette’s recent “toxic masculinity” ad campaign has got people talking and thinking. If Proctor & Gamble, which owns Gillette, wishes to use some of the enormous profits it makes on every razor and blade to re-educate un-woke men on how to behave, that’s its business, but not everyone has to fund the venture.
TweetMaggie Rogers: Light On
In the depths of deep midwinter, light is needed more than ever. Step forward young Maggie Rogers, who grew up along the banks of the Miles River in Easton, Maryland, and began playing harp at age seven, focusing on the music of Holst and Vivaldi. The single “Light On” was released on 10 October last year and it can be found on her major-label debut album, Heard It In a Past Life, which hit the streams last Friday. Lights on!
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