Klee, Clay, Creation!?:-)

Paul Klee is a hero of mine. This book details the hand-puppets he created for his son. I'm not overly fond of hand- puppets. In my experience they tend to be aggressive. I dated one once and she was far too tactile for my liking. But hail to Paul Klee the depictor of the electronic world before it really came into existence. Check out this book at amazon. Just click on the pic to take you there.

Disquieting

The Woman of Weird Depicted by DeChirico Even Before I Sawed Her. IN DREAMS SHALT THOU SWEAT...

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Beauty and Tell Me Its Reverse

A big hi and a thank you to all of you who sent in comments!

I'm not going to say that much today but I am going to let these two pictures speak for beauty. One is a tiny Bubble-feeder from the oceans and the other is an altocumulus lenticularis cloud of the sky.

Noruz-e-Hamatoon Mobarak

That is a happy New Year to all Iranians. I myself am British but I lived in Iran in the 1970's. I display two pictures. One is a pastry shop which will have been much visited over this festive period and the other is of goldfish-left!- which are essential to the layout of the ceremonial items for this day, the first of spring which Iranians and Afghanis celebrate.
The earth breathes again, life begins its cycle here.


However, my mind is on sadder things and that is Iraq. I have here an excerpt from John Simpson's article about intelligence (read STUPIDITY) gathered in Iraq before the invasion.


Remember 1,000,000 people have now lost their lives there.

This blog should link directly to the full article. Or just click> HERE

Here is the excerpt:

Saddam's secret


I've gathered from government sources over a period of time that British intelligence had two or three agents on the fringes of Saddam Hussein's inner circle here.
They would have sent their reports to London by radio, and must have been remarkably brave men.
But they weren't close enough to Saddam to know the best-kept secret of his rule: that at some stage in the 1990s, he got rid of most of his weapons of mass destruction.
But why should he want to keep that a secret? British officials believe it's because he was afraid his neighbour, Iran, would take advantage of his weakness, and invade.
It has emerged that MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, was up-front about its lack of first-class intelligence about Iraq.
It told Tony Blair it hadn't known much about Iraq's work on chemical and biological weapons since 1988.
But that wasn't the impression Mr Blair gave to Parliament. As we've seen, he called the intelligence "extensive, detailed and authoritative".

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The Snail Carries A "Cross"

I observe that The Snail by Matisse and The Carrying of the Cross by Bosch share a structural resemblance. Both compositions send the eye to the centre and outwards in a spiral. A snail is a being who carries a cross of sorts all its life. Snails fascinate me. If human dwellings were always on the verge of being stamped on by giants how would they have evolved?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Matisse:

In 1941 he was diagnosed with cancer and, following surgery, he started using a wheelchair. Matisse did not allow this setback to halt his work, and with the aid of assistants he set about creating cut paper collages, often on a large scale, called gouaches découpés.(The Snail, above, is an example).

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Matisse:

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

The Post-Modern City Generates Approx 5% Failure to Maintain Its Machinery

Babel? Babylon? London? New York? Moscow? Mexico City? Here? There? Everywhere?

The modern and post-modern city was begat in the competition between merchant-titans. It is a shit machine that beshits itself. To live in the city of the modern life is to compete and be forced to behave like a rat. The top "athletes" are rewarded massively with gold palaces. In the middle you humans have puppets like me to keep you entertained. Your lives are punctuated by sex and adrenaline and alcohol. So that you don't feel too angry with the winners, many of whom (but not all) are cheats, these drugs and other distractions are provided for you. At the bottom of the pile are the homeless and the poor; and farther down are those in the 3rd World who cry from hunger. The machine of Capital has become crueller. Mad Meg by Breughel the Elder, the painting below on the is a good graphic analogy of this schizophrenic people-eating machine.

The machine of Capital teeters (titters; tits?) on the verge of serious failure. The machine has over-heated. It may conk out. Loonies masquerading as sane from every colour of the political spectrum will promise you solutions and paradises. But the reality of their policies may be more akin to those of a Stalin or a Hitler. The other version of events may be a fragmented society of rapacious vigilantes or small armies. If the crops start to fail because of global warming it could be a nightmare scenario...

On public transport I hear people drunkenly joking about whether or not their jobs will be secure next year. I say elect me Squorch747. It will be as if you are flying first class on your favourite airline to your favourite destination with the person of your dreams sitting beside you... Course I jest, but in jest I warn you of serious times ahead if the machine keeps trampling on people and ruining humans. Every single human being has the potential to be of value to his/her community. The painting below is The Carrying of the Cross by Hieronymus Bosch who influenced some of Breughel works. The first painting above is also by Pieter Breughel and I think it is the Tower of Babel. I will be showing a few more of Breughels paintings soon. Stay tuned and entertained. Don't get mad. Despite my own anger on behalf of the unloved and unwanted I must promote forgiveness because that can heal the society of you humans; a society on the verge of collapsing into a I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Have you heard the one about the Capitalist, the Communist and the Cobbler? Nor have I but I'm waiting for the podcast: I predict a write-off.

The Prayer of Jabez

Jabez cried out to the God of Israel,

- "Oh, that you would bless me
- and enlarge my territory!
- Let your hand be with me,
- and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain!"

This prayer is one of the shortest in the Bible and has become a favourite in certain quarters. The painting is by Rembrandt. It is titled St James the Great.

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Crisis In The Global Economy?

CRISIS? Some commentators are saying that the financial markets (that is the stockmarkets etc) will not register the crisis as in previous times of economic upheaval. They will not provide an adequate warning sign. Computers and globalisation have allowed new forms of making money. Some brilliant economists have found mathematical ways of passing debts along the global finance chain using sophisticated equations.

PANDORA'S BOX. But a Pandora's box has been opened. It's consequences have not yet been felt. It is like a set of billiard balls going in one direction. This is the action. The reaction has not yet happened. The billiard balls have not returned.

funky ronald macdonald does the king tut

UNCERTAINTY. No one is sure of the direction and nature of the return of these billiard-balls ie these debts. Some analysts are panicky, because, as the famous saying of Woody Allen goes: It is easier to get into something than to get out of it. It was great to create these money making equations but it's not so great to work out all their results, how to get out of their consequences. The result of some of these equations may be chaos.

ingenious ways of throwing away rubbish

my "masters" shadow

the 12th station of the cross (in st osmand's, hammersmith)

it is lent

Peace to the global family.

Mirrors in the Halls of the Universe

We are beings who are looked at in the spectacle of the world. Jaques Lacan.

In dreams of arcades...I dream about not dreaming...I dream about my dreams...Our dreams want to turn us into a dream...

Many are the halls of mirrors in the Universe. The hall of halls, the mirror of mirrors is our mind.

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case of the woman of weird in Paris and London

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Along the Champs Elysee on a cold damp February morning a puppet in his mid-thirties finds himself turning into an arcade that is clean and quiet and unpopulated.


Soon after he has walked along with eerie sounds grating his nerves, he sees in one of the many open but unstaffed shops this strange figure of femininity. She transmits a thought: You will dream of me for a month.


Back in London the puppet does indeed do so. Each night he sweats and becomes entangled sorely in his own strings. Then he goes through an arcade in Piccadilly and sees her again. This time she transmits no thoughts. But a Hitchcockian stranger stands behind the puppet and says:"Keep writing about replication...or die!"


The young and tiny puppet is too frightened to turn around to see the evil character only whose reflection he has seen in the mirror behind the cryptic figurine. Scared, the puppet speeds away and finds himself on the Westbound platform of Victoria station being chased by police-puppets. They catch him. They tell him:"The Hitchcockian says,'Dye your shirt the colour of the figurine woman's coat to gain the limelight.'"

The puppet replies:"I have no fear of the Hitchcockian. It is the Cobbler of Barnes Bridge who is terrifying me." The police-puppets laugh and vanish into the crowd.

IN THE DARK OF EERIE NIGHT IN DREAMS THOU SHALT SWEAT

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starring Catherine Deneuve and Squorch747

a still from Loop Hell Breakout

The Bunuel season is over. Surrealism sleeps. But I have a starring role beside Catherine Deneuve. In the scene from which this still is taken, she has died and found herself actually trapped inside the film Belle du Jour. She can not move out of it, or speak, other than the words of dialogue from the film. But her thoughts are: How the hell can I get out of here?

A mysterious Hitchcockian is watching her on screen in a cinema. He does not know that she can see him. He pours poison into the popcorn of a young blonde woman in the seat next to him as she passionately kisses her boyfriend.

On screen, I enter the scene and speak as a tongued-Shakespeare: Squourchspeare.

"O woman of still-lake soft smooth time-has-no-effect skin,

Where is this mystery you are encastled in?"

Salvador Dali angrily tears down to the floor a red curtain he has been hiding behind. Pelting me with eyeballs he rushes at me with a barber's razor. Catherine screams, pulls off her wig and accosts Dali. They wrestle on the floor and Bunuel appears as the Archangel Michael dancing to the Jackson 5's Can You Feel It and turns Dali into a giant fried egg that sizzles on the carpet.

I am saved and grateful and this incident has so upset the blonde in the cinema audience that rather than snack on the poisoned popcorn she leaves the auditorium. She too has been saved.

den hte

Mayhem...

Maya with Doll.Pablo Picasso

Mayhem in London and Paris

At 14:13 pm today in Victoria tube station I spotted a vagabond haring away from the police. Then over the tannoy, Message for the police: the person you're chasing is on the Westbound platform.

Could this have been the thief who stole Picasso's Maya with Doll in Paris yesterday? Yes and No.

If we study the painting we notice Picasso wants to draw out the similarity between the doll and Maya, his daughter who was at the time about three years old. The similarly nostrilled noses join as though they are two connecting pieces of a jigsaw. The eyes also are raised and lowered, left to right, right to left as they would be in a mirror though they are not as alike as the noses. Moreover, their bodies are two halves as one. That they are separate is shown only by the different colour of cloth they wear. (It was painted in 1938 and at some point I will explore the relation between Picasso's art and craft and his possible use of opium. And please do feel free to send your knowledge or views about Picasso and opium.)

So, returning to Yes and No above, the VAGABOND could have been the thief in that the world is full of similarities and coincidences. And as for the poor grand-daughter of Picasso who had owned the painting until its theft, her mind is full of massive questions. Where is it? Who took it? When we lose something, even more so when it is stolen, the whole world becomes VAST, a vast place full of hiding holes and suspect people-our friends, our enemies, the vagabond chased in Victoria Underground at 14:13 pm on the 1st of March 2007.

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