More Walking Beasts

Strandbeest Movies Follow the link to Theo Jansen's homepage.

Venyosa Walk 2 shows how well they can move. They are fascinating and also beautiful.

Would love to afford the book and DVD.

Walking Robot

I saw a link to this ages ago, thinking about something else made me look for it again.

Created by Boston Dynamics. For military purposes.

This is fascinating but I also find it rather creepy. it has a strangely insect-like look to it and an eerie buzzing sound. weird!

Tried to embed it but it is a bit too wide.

Bank Holiday Sunday

Went to Pool Market. Got there a bit late so most of the stalls had gone. Had seen this book on a previous occasion, the stall holder wanted £2. It was on the stall yesterday he wanted 50p. Bargain.

It's a Dover Publication I love their books, they are quirky. Many are reprints of earlier works. This one gives an insight into the Victorian interior designer's mindset and has reminded me of something else that I will put into my next entry. I can only put about five pictures into a post.

Truro

Truro yesterday. Lunch in the Try Dowr , love my lasagne. Followed by a world tour of the secondhand bookshops and charity shops.

Lemon Quay has really taken off as a new hub of the town. There was a Farmer's Market there yesterday and the M.I. Bar and the Hall for Cornwall have cordoned off sections as pavement cafés, there was a children's roundabout operating too. This picture shows it just after the completion of the shopping development.


Image Source

On another occasion in June these two guys were performing light operatic songs. Their version of 'Time To Say Goodbye' was excellent.



There was a book stall in front of the Museum selling secondhand books. Bought a hardback version of Lawrence & Oppenheimer by Nuel Pharr Davis.

Yesterday

Gold dust again in the charity shops. The Clic Sargeant has more old-stock CDs.

Bought Dvorak 'From the New World'and Prokofiev, Highlights from 'Romeo and Juliet'.

Then, because I recognised Samy Bishai (from Celloman, Digitonal), this:



Lost the original image from the website, this one courtesy of Amazon

Seckou Keita

Very good so far.

In another shop, bought this, with a picture of my little friend on the cover:



Got to get a handle on that furry little brain somehow!

Frivolity

It's the Bank Holiday. A slightly more serious post regarding Edward Gorey may follow. But for now...



Not a million miles away from...



"I have a looly. I am a lady. A lady's looly."

Brilliant!

Wow, books!

This is the Big Book Sale by The Friends of San Francisco Public Library.

Had to edit this as the original image became unavailable. This one is an improvement actually. Only in America do you go bookshopping with a shopping trolley!

The 2010 one is September 22nd to 26th

Bibliophile heaven!

Books

Photo by Scott Frances
I think it's this chap. His photos are amazing.

Not a room in my house, wish it was.

One of the things I must do is catalogue all my books.

I would love to take a larger part in a site called LibraryThing. I have entered a few of my books, but I have so many it would be a marathon task to upload them all.

I have:

Three bookcases in the lounge

A huge bookcase in the back room

A bookcase in the spare room/computer room

Books beside the bed

My son has books in his old room

And several piles of books

Many things hold me back:

I haven't got a bar code reader

a lot of my books predate barcodes anyway

I wouldn't even dream of unpacking the books in my cabinet of curiosities. So they would be uncatalogued

Only the first 200 books are free, so I'd definitely have to upgrade to the premium account. Although $25 for life doesn't sound too bad

But I STILL BUY BOOKS

Second hand, charity shop books. I certainly don't agree with this chap and neither do the people who commented on the piece, Why I hate second-hand books



It's not quite that bad!

A Cabinet of Curiosities

I love these images. This has a passing resemblance to mine.



This article explains it well:

The Cabinet of Curiosities

Wunderkammern or “Wonder-Chambers”: Forerunners of Modern-Day Museums

Dec 14, 2006 Suzanne Hill

Wunderkammern fostered the Renaissance craze to assemble strange, frivolous, yet aesthetic personal collections.

In the past, new scientific discoveries, strange finds, and striking pieces of original artwork were greeted with awe and wonder. It became popular during the Renaissance to build a "cabinet of curiosities" to display a private collection of art and natural objects of which the owner was extremely proud. These groups of objects were at first housed in an actual cabinet or ornate piece of furniture, known as Wunderkammern or Wunderkabinetts. They are simultaneously pieces of furniture and the collections of items within them.

In the exhibits of these early Wunderkammern, owners might display strange, beautiful, mysterious, and precious marvels like starfish, monkey teeth, alligator skins, phosphorescent minerals, Indian canoes, Egyptian figurines, and “unicorn tails.” Rich art patrons would display their new art acquisitions in the intimate backdrop of a prized spot in an ornate carved cabinet. At Kensington castle, Sir Walter Cope is said to have displayed, “holy relics from a Spanish ship; earthen pitchers and porcelain from China; a Madonna made of feathers; a back-scratcher; a Javanese costume, Arabian coats; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros; the baubles and bells of Henry VIII's fool; and a Turkish emperor's golden seal.” The collections demonstrated manmade wonders and the diversity of God’s creations as well as a fascination with new scientific approaches to the study of natural phenomena. Each collection’s commitment to miscellany dependended on the idiosyncratic interests of the collector.

Ole Worm
For example, Ole Worm, personal physician to King Christian IV of Denmark, assembled a fascinating collection that ranged from fossils to preserved plants, bones, tortoise shells, and any manner of curiosity. Much of these objects he collected during his extensive travels. Today the Georg Laue gallery in Munich recreates the Renaissance cabinet with many rare curiosities and objects made of exotic materials like coral, ivory, rhinoceros horn, chamois horn, rare woods, silver, gold, and semiprecious stones like rock crystal and serpentine.

The objects on display in these storage or display spaces were marvels of nature. Formal boundaries between scientific disciplines didn’t yet exist so science, art, and the natural order of the universe were all interconnected to those of the seventeenth century. The move toward the modern museum began in the eighteenth century.

Peale Museum
One of the earliest museums in the world open to the public was the Peale Museum founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1784 by the painter and scientist, Charles Willson Peale. The collection consisted of both natural history objects and portraits (the majority of the paintings were done by him and his son Rembrandt Peale). Then Peale’s son established the Peale Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1814, and today this museum (still with a collection featuring paintings and natural history objects) is the oldest museum building in the Western Hemisphere. At the height of its popularity, the Museum’s Quadruped Room displayed 90 specimens of mammals. Its Long Room had more than 700 bird specimens situated in mini-dioramas, about 4000 insects in glass cases, numerous minerals, and scores of Peale's portraits. A third room showcased marine specimens. Peale's famous mammoth skeleton was among the first such mounting anywhere in the world.

The collections of the Wunderkammern have their beginnings in the curiosity spawned by the Renaissance. Later Western scholarship would sort natural finds into increasingly distinct categories, such as botany, biology, geology, archaeology, anthropology, and art. As the rigors of scientific thought developed, the chamber of curiosities or “Wonder Cabinet” began to seem primitive and went out of fashion. As it became important to specialize and separate by discipline, the Renaissance notion of the all-embracing collection was abandoned in favor of a more up-to-date view of the world. But certainly the Wunderkammern are evidence of humans’ timeless interest in collecting intriguing objects.

Link

My Cabinet of Curiosities

I've always been fascinated by the Renaissance idea of a cabinet of curiosities, in fact this blog could be looked upon as a virtual cabinet of curiosities.

This is looking like it will be a recurrent theme. I have always liked to find unlikely articles/artifacts in junk shops and flea markets. Through the years I have assembled my own.

Film

A conversation last night reminded me of what I call my 'forgotten classics'. Films that I love that are seldom seen now.

They include:

Enemy Mine

Somewhere in Time

The Changeling (with George C Scott)

Dreamscape

The Dead Zone

Silent Running

Office of the University Curator

Another example of serendipity

From The Brown University Library

It's not just me!!

Serpents' teeth, nuns' girdles and the joy of random stuff

Christopher Howse
Published: 12:01AM GMT 04 Nov 2006

Objects for a Kunstkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, belonging to Georg Lave Christopher Howse celebrates the oddball collectors who, throughout history, have accumulated hoards of peculiar, idiosyncratic and fascinating artefacts

''A hat-band made of the sting-ray", reads a typical entry in the catalogue of the cabinet of curiosities collected by the Tradescants, father and son, in the mid 17th century.

Such baroque treasure-stores have been inspiring a top-drawerful of artists in the past three decades. The results of Damien Hirst's fascination with cabinets of curiosities we all know about – his preserved creatures in jars, or, from 1993, a display case filled, not with museum exhibits, but dozens of cigarette ends (entitled Dead Ends Died Out). But as early as the 1930s Joseph Cornell was assembling objects in vitrines – glass cases of the kind used in museums. In 1984, the Tate bought a work by Joseph Beuys, a vitrine containing beeswax, a jar of pork dripping, a pile of lard and a zinc box of mutton tallow.

Something more arresting came from Rosamond Purcell in the 1990s. She produced photographic artworks simply by picking up on such extraordinary exhibits as the teeth from the collection of Tsar Peter the Great arranged in an old display case. The title she chose, Teeth Drawn by Peter the Great, reflected a chilling aspect of his cruel reputation, but it was the image that startled. In 2003 she assembled in her Massachusetts studio two rooms of objects based on the Wunderkammer, or roomful of curiosities, made famous by Olaus Worm, the 17th-century Danish collector.

A successful English artist who at first seems to share much with the 17th-century collectors is Polly Morgan. Her work, made in her east London studio, features stuffed animals. "Kate Moss bought a blue tit lying asleep on a prayer book beneath a glass chandelier," she says. "People who buy from me are used to buying art, not taxidermy. My work might be a modern take on the cabinet of curiosities, but the juxtapositions are quite different."

The name "cabinet of curiosities" suggests a piece of furniture. John Bargrave, a 17th-century collector of everything from medieval seals to the chains of slaves he freed, did house his meticulously annotated hoard in two large, beautifully tailored cabinets, which he left to Canterbury Cathedral, where they can still be seen.

But a piece of furniture was too small for all the bright-plumaged birds, ancient carved gemstones, tropic shells, Roman coins, unicorns' horns and mummified crocodiles of the aristocratic collector. The cabinet became a room of wonders. I suspect these represent in part a secularised version of vast medieval collections of relics, as at St Ursula's, Cologne.

Anyway, from cabinets of curiosities grew more ordered museums. Yet perhaps there is something in human nature that prefers oddness, serendipity, the impact of juxtapositions to regimented display.

The polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-80) said Noah's Ark was the first museum, and "The Ark" was the name given to the house in bosky South Lambeth where the piratically bearded and ear-ringed gardener John Tradescant and his son John built up an astonishing collection in the 1630s. This "Collection of Rarities" came to boast a grander name, Musaeum Tradescantianum, and formed the heart of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The Tradescants' collection was the largest in Europe. Its flavour comes through in their catalogue:

An Arabian vest.
Nunnes penitential Girdles of Haire.
A pair of Scotch gloves wrapt up like a ball.
A Bracelet made of the thighes of Indian flyes.
Edward the Confessors knit gloves.
Divers night-caps made of grasse.
A Sempitan or Trunck wherewith they execute men to death with poysoned Arrowes.
A Hat-band of glasse spun into fine threads.
A Turks travelling bucket.
A little Box with the 12 Apostles in it.
Cloath spun of the downe of yellow feathers.
Variety of Chains, made of the teeth of Serpents.
A Cherry-stone holding 10 dozens of Tortois-shell combs.
A book of all the Stories in the glasse-windowes of Sancta Sophia lim'd in vellum by a Jew.
Flea chains of silver and gold with 300 links a piece and yet but an inch long.
A glasse-horne for anointing kings.
A piece of the Stone of Sarrigo-Castle where Helen of Greece was born.
Blood that rained in the Isle of Wight, attested by Sir Jo: Oglander.
A Turkish tooth-brush.
Poisoned Daggers – 2 waved, 2 plain.
An Umbrella.

In the view of James Putnam of the British Museum, it is the "apparent lack of rational classification, with its bizarre sense of accumulation and juxtaposition" that makes cabinets of curiosities so appealing. This haphazardness led to their dismantling in an age when museums became more "scientific". Only at rare bristling temples of chaos such as the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford can there still be found a coracle hanging on the back of a totem-pole, display cases full of trepanned skulls, and drawers full of charms or teething-coral or things made with hair. This is not a museum of art; it is one huge, complicated work of art.

Alistair McAlpine, one of the greatest omnivorous collectors (who once possessed 900 truncheons), is credited with having revived the notion of cabinets of curiosities as the antithesis of minimalism. This week he is enthusing about marionettes from Mali. In 1981 there was an exhibition at the Bond Street Old Master dealers Colnaghi called Objects for a Wunderkammer, after which Lord McAlpine fuelled interest through his shop in Cork Street in London – and again in 1996 at the auction when he sold it. The skeletons flew like butterflies.

"A cabinet of curiosities is a microcosm," he tells me. "The Tradescants would have something like a Chinese sandal, an ordinary sandal. So now you'd have a Nike trainer. Or, if you were very competitive, a piece of Concorde, or a bit of the moon. There used to be a small piece of the moon in the waiting room at Downing Street. Perhaps someone's nicked it."

To Lord McAlpine, the influence of the cabinet of curiosities today is clear. "Hans Sloane, whose collection formed the nucleus of the British Museum, used to have a newt with two tails in a jar on his desk. Well, that's Damien Hirst."

The man who has bought a lot of curiosities for Damien Hirst is Danny Moynihan, son of the painter Rodrigo. "Those preserved specimens have been incorporated into his work," he tells me. "But he will have a few rooms devoted to these things – skulls, foetuses, body parts – at Toddington." Toddington is the astonishing Gothic pile Hirst has bought, built by an ironmaster's heir, to his own design, in the reign of George IV.

Moynihan, an energetic exhibition curator, can't help buying for himself too. "I'm not trying to simulate 17th-century cabinets, but I do like the eclectic. I buy things in jars, but also African objects and Chinese scholar stones." Those are the interestingly shaped stones regarded as metaphors for landscapes and focuses of meditation.

In his opinion the collectors building up their own cabinets remain few – "odd-ball people like me". But Lord McAlpine sees it as something anyone can do. "You don't have to spend thousands. Art is where you find it. You can pick up an interesting nut from the ground or a piece of branch in a park. You can collect anything. Prisoners collect pubic hairs."

The Edinburgh dealer Emma Hawkins is spoken of by collectors with admiration; her website includes a remarkable wax model of a Hottentot woman. In London a dealer with prosperous customers is Finch & Co. Their aim is "to create the greatest of 21st-century cabinets of curiosities". They offer a 16th-century mummified cat found in a wattle-and-daub wall; the iron floor of a Victorian paper factory cast in a hexagonal maze pattern; a preserved flying-fish; and a 19th-century table made from an elephant's ear.

The possibility of actually living in a cabinet of curiosities was demonstrated by the quirky architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837). From any room in his London house, now a museum, the eye is led through thickets of ancient architectural fragments, culminating in a three-storey fantasia, with an open sarcophagus in the basement and rising tiers of urns, busts, casts and mirrors.

The dealer Christopher Hodsoll turned his own house in Notting Hill into a cabinet of curiosities. He mixed small stuffed animals, old tortoiseshells, large pieces of patinaed minerals, nautical instruments, South Sea shells and walrus tusks with some gargantuan 19th-century furniture. It is no sterile show-space. "He would include broken furniture, and things that were worn," says Lord McAlpine. "He was the first to do the crashed look."

Crashed or not, cabinets of curiosities possess the lasting appeal of depending more on discrimination than money. Collecting can be a fierce lust, and to those of us not converted to a minimalist décor, the notion of a cabinet of curiosities lends a more kindly eye to the jumble amid which we prefer to live.

Curious desirables
The mummified crocodile was the must-have object of a truly princely cabinet of curiosities. Coming from Egypt in their papyrus bandages, they suggested not only the secrets of the pharaohs, but, to baroque neo-Platonists, also the esoteric teachings of the mythic Hermes Trismegistus.

The pleasantly named 17th-century Dane, Olaus Worm, even managed to accommodate a polar bear in the rafters of his Wunderkammer. But the collectors he visited in Naples were just as jealous of the Greenland kayak suspended from his ceiling as he was of their crocodiles. And either would have been bowled over by a Mexican idol.

Ethnological items from around the globe, such as spears or fabulously decorated tunics, capes and waistcoats, made the cabinet a microcosm of mankind’s variousness.

The ancient world was represented by coins, scarabs, fragments of statuary, oil-lamps, incised gemstone seals, urns and votive objects.

From the natural world, anomalous objects were particularly sought. These might lie on the boundaries between animal, mineral and vegetable, as with fossils, corals and fly-trapping amber. Or they could be composite creatures such as mermen or basilisks, or else freaks of nature – animals or even human foetuses, dried or preserved in jars.

Telegraph

My musical journey

I grew up with the Beatles (being of a certain age) and very little else, not having much money to buy albums.

My interest in music waned with the arrival of Punk and my son.

Then things happened to kick-start it:

Firstly a getting computer and broadband.

Then there was a free CD given away with the Observer newspaper. A sampler of tracks by Moby. Hadn't heard of him. But it was brilliant and I recognised Porcelain from the radio.

Then the series of free CDs given away in the Saturday Guardian. They introduced me to Hybrid and on the Hybridised site there was a link to Digitonal.



Hybrid June 2010 by Hybridsoundsystem

This is a DJ mix but it gives an idea of the music.



Seraphim (Angel Mix) by digitonal

From there to the Big Chill website and forum and from there...

Links:

Moby

Hybrid

Digitonal

Big Chill

LOL cat. Singular

Much as I like Lolcats and Icanhascheezeburger they won't be appearing here.

Except for one honorary appearance in Lolcat style. Because she is my cat, or more realistically I am her human!

Bargains

A local charity shop has, what looks like, bankrupt bookshop stock. they are selling things really cheaply.

I bought the book that accompanied Rachael Whiteread's New York Watertower installation, Looking Up for £1. A real bargain.



Also bought a book called The Customised Body By Ted Polhemus & Housk Randall



Review

Art: Bathsheba Sculpture

Not much time to blog today, so it's honourable mention time.

Love this artist's work: Bathsheba Grossman Mathematical sculptures

The Metatron


The Gyroid


The 24 Cell


They are made using a metal 3-D printing process. Would love to own one.

They are available Here

I had to redo this, the original Bathsheba.com site seems to have gone and they are now being retailed through the quirao.com site.

Penzance Ash Wednesday Storm 1962

Looking at Penzance-related items on the net turned up this from The Acorn Archive.

Pictures of Penzance seafront after the Ash Wednesday Storm 1962.

I lived there then and remember seeing all that devastation.

And for no other reason than I love it. The Egyptian House.

Penzance 16th August 2010

Dinner in Wetherspoons, Lasagne, always good.

Then a trawl of the charity shops and S/H bookshops.

The Oxfam shop had a rather nice tassel for 99p. I use these on the keys of my bookcases, bureau etc. as a detail and they are practical too.



There it is on the key to my Cabinet of Curiosities. More on that later.

The S/H bookshop had this rather good Hogarth print, not the actual original, but a later version dated 1809. It is The Times Plate 2.



This was originally published on one sheet with The Times Plate 1.

Plate 1 combines a pictorial defence of the then prime minister, the Earl of Bute, with a sustained attack on his predecessor William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Whereas Pitt was associated with an aggressive stance towards Britain’s French and Spanish opponents in the Seven Years’ War, Bute came to power determined to end this victorious but expensive conflict...

Plate 2 ostensibly offers a contrasting vision of the war’s peaceful aftermath, dominated by a statue of the King and by the details of replenishment. At the same time, the print also seems to call into question George III’s dependence on a coterie of Scottish courtiers and ministers. For, under the elevated but passive eye of his royal master, Bute is shown operating a pump that supplies water to a series of potted-plants inscribed with the names of fictional Scottish placemen.

From Tate Britain

Also bought a book on Bruce Chatwin. With Chatwin Portrait of a Writer by Susan Clapp. I read The Songlines a while ago, then went on to read a number of his travel books.

Serendipity

While I was searching for items on Celloman, I came across this wonderful image. On this site

Loved the comment 'Sometimes blog fodder just falls from the sky'

Originally uploaded by Partizan92

Music: Celloman

One of the bands I love is Celloman. The band consists of Ivan Hussey and various supporting musicians, including Samy Bishai who also plays for Digitonal. The music is Middle Eastern/African in flavour, not the sort of thing you would normally associate the cello with but it works beautifully.

Two photos I took of a Celloman gig I went to in 2008. It was held at the Acorn Theatre in Penzance. The Acorn was a chapel in a previous life and is a great space for an informal relaxed sort of gig. It is down a little side street in the centre of Penzance.

Then across the road there is the most beautiful regency style building. Looking like an immaculate dolls house.

Celloman website

He's touring again soon, hope he comes down to Cornwall.

My photo plus effects

This is one of my own efforts. the island at St Ives given a bit of effects treatment. Came out rather well.

OK. Why blog?

I have found I have a minor creative side that needs expression.

I've had a tough few years and need to find the old, more positive me.

This is where I will celebrate the things I enjoy, both created by me and the things of interest I love from the internet and other places. There will be no moaning or whinging here, it will be a sanctuary from the hardships of the world.

It will be like a scrapbook, but thanks to the miracle of modern technology, it will be a multimedia scrapbook.

This is purely for my own pleasure. There may be some people I invite here...Hello guy(s). But basically this is for and about me.

That's all the navel gazing I will do for now.

Art: Bendtsen

One of Tom Bendtsen's Arguments. A house made of books.

Stumbled onto this looking for something else. Gotta love the Internet for turning up these unexpected treasures.

Website

Did it!

Nova (audio by Helios) from flight404 on Vimeo.

Yay! It worked!

This person's video work is amazing.

The page

Quite like the page design even though it's a supplied one. It's like my bookshelves at home.

Whoopee! I have a blog!

It could be useful I suppose to keep track of all those assorted (see blog title) pieces of information that flicker past these tired eyes.

Whether I'll keep it going is another matter. Short attention span...what short attention spa...