Clangers!

A bit of Tuesday morning frivolity...



Clangers

The Clangers Election Broadcast

Cult TV

Brilliant. Thanks BBC!

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello

Love this video, amazing visuals.

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello - 2005 from debora censi on Vimeo.

Curiouser and Curiouser

The Cabinet of curiosity I blogged about here does not actually exist. It is a wonderful Trompe l'Oeil artwork, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it is not a painting but is constructed from slivers of inlaid stone.

This explanation is from here

Amazingly, this is not a painting! It’s a picture made of a mosaic of tiny slivers of inlaid stone. It was done about four hundred years ago by Flemish artist Domenico Remps, and usually it lives in a small institution in Florence called the Opificio delle Pietre Dure.

The subject is a so-called cabinet of curiosities. These were little display collections of natural and artistic curiosities, placed in specially made cabinets by wealthy collectors between four and three hundred years ago. They went out of fashion as collections of such things became too large and specialised for a small cabinet, but they are the ancestors of today’s museums.

Trompe L’oeil is french for Trick the Eye. The idea of pictures in this style is to be so realistic that, ideally, viewers might be deceived into not realising that they were looking at a picture rather than the real thing.

Victorian Surrealism

Amazing, fascinating, weird and rather creepy images by Jeffrey Harp.

Degenerates


Chorus


Dagon


The Flickr set is here

Jeffrey Harp's website is not fully functional at the time of writing.

Blogs as Wunderkammern

Wow!! This is exactly how I think about mine!

The difference is that mine isn't very public, I have one invited reader and I gave my son the link. There may be others who have stumbled here...Welcome to the flotsam and jetsam of my mind.

More Books

A trawl through the charity shops in my home town yielded two cracking books.

Berlin: The Downfall 1945 by Anthony Beevor


Image source

And Dry Store Room No 1: The Secret History of the Natural History Museum


Amazon Image

The Beevor book covers the events inside and outside the bunker. I watched the German film Downfall a while ago. Bruno Ganz was excellent as Hitler.

In my opinion there are three films to see regarding the Second World War
Downfall
Schindler's List
Conspiracy with Kenneth Branagh

I haven't seen Cabaret for a while, but I think that should receive an honourable mention.

Schlindler's list is a very difficult film to watch, heartbreakingly so at times. That and Downfall convincingly portray a society where every social and cultural norm have broken down.

The Fortey book looks fascinating. The Natural History Museum is not just a cabinet of curiosities but a whole building. Now we are beginning to make scientific sense of everything and that adds another layer of interest.

Both £1.50 each. Bargain.

Bulb mania

I love the Eden project in Cornwall and being local I can take advantage of the all-year free entry ticket.

These are some shots of the Bulb Mania displays taken in May 2006.






I'm not the most expert of photographers but I always manage to take good ones at the Eden project.