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Picture Diary 96
2025-06-26 18:08 poliphilo
Picture Diary 96.

1. Forward to the Past



2. CAN



3. Romantic composer



4. Avians



5. Autumn



6. New Ice Age

The Future Of The Movies
2025-06-26 09:47 poliphilo
Judy is annoyed about a book that says Hollywood is finished because in a few years time movies will be entirely constructed in AI- with no need for actors or cinematographers and- what hits her hardest- screen writers.

I'm not going tp play the prophet but I'm inclined to think- as she does- that old-style movie making will continue as a craft- just as other things superceded by the machine have done- cabinet making for instance or lace making or watercolour painting.

All the same I cannot help noticing how AI image-making proceeds by leaps and bounds. I have been making AI pictures for less than two years and when I started it was cutting edge and now the things I'm producing are looking a bit old hat. This morning on YouTube I was watching some nice little clips of people walking with dinosaurs that were created using MidJourney. Very good they were too. Effects that once cost millions can now be knocked off in someone's back bedroom. 

Not With A Bang.....
2025-06-25 11:29 poliphilo
According to the media the mysterious bottle that cleared several streets in the heart of Eastbourne was found in a house previously occupied by squatters. The contractors tasked with clearing the property called the police who summoned the bomb squad who sent in a robot to blow it up.

Was there a mighty explosion?

Apparently not.

The Eastbourne Open
2025-06-24 19:56 poliphilo
 The police had discovered a bottle of "mysterious liquid" in a house in the centre of town and had sealed off and evacuated the surrounding streets. It was all very discreet and if the Daily Mail hadn't told us to look left as drove up Grove Rd we'd not have guessed anything was out of order.  Entrance to the afflicted area was sealed off with tape and a single affable copper was standing by to deter the general public from ducking under it.

Nothing to see here. Now move along please.....

We were on our way to the tennis. The Eastbourne Open has been downgraded this year but a good number of top players have shown up anyway. I sat myself down alongside Court 4 and watched this match....



Note that Rakhimova doesn't get a flag which means she's Russian.

Here she is



And here's Cocciaretto....



Rakhimova won.

I've never been to Wimbledon. A friend who has been to both says Eastbourne is quiter, more relaxed and better tempered. There's no champagne, no strawberries and cream, but the sea-food infused mac and cheese I bought off a kiosk was perfectly nice. They have a big screen so that those who haven't paid for seats on Centre Court can watch the action at one remove. No extra charge is made for the very comfortable deckchairs.....

You know, I think this is the very first time I've attended a professional sporting event of any kind.

Golden
2025-06-23 11:43 poliphilo
I remember a blind man telling us that what he saw- in his mind's eye- was not darkness- as we'd presumed- but a "wonderful golden light".

A "wonderful golden light " is what I "see" when I close my eyes in the Meeting House.

"Golden" is not quite right. There are other colours there.  You know when you look at a sunset and you can't tell where one colour ends and and the next begins and you call it golden because words fail? Well, its a bit like that- only the colours don't shade into one another but are all present at once. Also it's soft and deep, as gold, the metal, isn't.

And I don't just see, I also  hear and feel. And all these verbs are approximate. The light is bound up with the silence and has dimensions beyond the senses. It has consciousness, an internal movement as of motes in a sun beam- and is somehow involved with Peace and Love....

Back To The Meeting House
2025-06-22 10:25 poliphilo
I dreamed I was attending a church service. It was sort of Anglican, sort of Methodist, sort of Quaker. The building was very grand.  I was sitting next to an old lady who was being friendly and I was racking my brains to remember her name. A snarly man stood up and made a nasty comment and someone else started arguing with him and I thought, "This is horrible. I need to get back to my own Meeting House...."

Next to the church the nudists were lying on the grass, sunning themselves and indulging in rough horseplay. "I can't go that way..." I thought.

The route I took led up hill, through town. It was a very large town. I had been separated from my wife (who wasn't Ailz) and this bothered me....

I woke and there was a thunderstorm going on.

Sussex Charmer
2025-06-21 10:15 poliphilo
The Summer Solstice- and it's going to be another very hot day.

Yesterday we drove across the County to buy the intensely local cheese they make in Rudgwick up against the Surrey border. The cheese is called Sussex Charmer and I've been eating it at the Long Man Inn. The outlet in Rudgwick has a cafe alongside where the speciality is toasted cheese and just about everything they serve is finger food. Where are the knives and forks? we wondered. But, of course there aren't any. This fed into the dream I had last night where I was working at a school and my job was to give out cutlery to the children then collect it up at the end of the meal. It was a peach of a job (though it entailed early rising) and I got on wonderfully with the kids.

Rudgwick has a church. I thought it a very average sort of a church. The pictures I took of it were very average too (the sort of uninspired, documentary pictures I've taken in a hundred different places: view of the tower from the south-west, check, close up of tower, check, view looking eastward down the nave, etc.....) so I wasn't particularly upset when I got home and found I'd been snapping away without a memory card.

After 30 Years
2025-06-20 10:27 poliphilo
We hadn't seen Joyce in something like 30 years. No problem. It could have been 30 minutes. We just carried on as we always have done. Friendship never ends (that's Yeats again) or as I said to her (and it's one of my favourite things to say) "Time is an illusion."

She's been visiting Eastbourne with a bunch of "wrinklies" (her word)  on a coach holiday. Yesterday she spent the morning with us at the Meeting House. Our Quakers were lovely with her. They're a friendly crowd.

She's had good weather for it. Temperatures in the mid 20s. 

The Savage God
2025-06-19 11:31 poliphilo
I've had Maxwell's Silver Hammer popping into my head for weeks now.

It's a song the other Beatles hated- mainly because McCartney took it so seriously and made them work overtime to get it right.

They thought it was a throwaway bit of Granny music, but it ain't. For one thing it's about a mass murderer, for another it treats its subject with unbecoming levity. It's nihilistic but cheerful with it- in the best tradition of Mr Punch and the English music hall.

And this morning I stumbled across a piece of info that pulled everything together:

Macca had been taking an interest in Alfred Jarry, That's why "pataphysical"- a Jarry coinage- crops up in the first verse.

Jarry, you may or may not know, wrote a play called Ubu Roi- about an obscene little fat man who murders his way to the throne of Poland. It is absurd, scatalogical and an affront to all the decencies. Yeats was at the first night in 1896, cheering it on, but then went away and was sad because he knew it meant the end of the Celtic Twilight and all that greenery-yallery stuff that was his stock in trade and he'd have to toughen up if he wanted to survive in the new artistic environment. "After us," he wrote, "The savage gods."

Ever since he erupted onto the political scene I've thought of Donald Trump as Jarryesque. He's the living image of Pere Ubu. The savage god come into his own at last, or- Yeats again- the rough beast prophesied in "The Second Coming."

So here's the whole lineage: Mr Punch, Pere Ubu, Maxwell Edison, Donald Trump....

Maxwell's Silver Hammer is a song for our times. 

Picture Diary 95
2025-06-18 18:01 poliphilo
Picture Diary 95

1. You called?



2. What are you doing here?



3. Through the Stargate



4. Friends



5. Treat it with care



6. Lotus

Unreal
2025-06-18 12:42 poliphilo
A few more days and we'll be half way through 2025. Six more months and we'll be in the second quarter of the century.....

The 20th century was a drag. At least towards the end it was. Year after year after year- and the Millenium still such a long way off!  As Ray Davies wrote at some point during that slow, slow process, "I'm a 20th century man but I don't want to die here...."

But now the 21st century is flying past.....

It's A Mystery
2025-06-17 11:07 poliphilo
"Should I know any of these people?" asked Ailz from the next room

"Which people?"

"The people in the photograph on the mantlepiece."

"There is no photograph on the mantlepiece."

"Yes there is. Come and see...."

And indeed there was. I hadn't put it there, Ailz hadn't put it there. I asked Carolina  and she said it had been there when she entered the room and she'd carefully dusted round it.

Here's the photograph. I knew the image but I hadn't known we possessed this particular print. It shows a bunch of young people in fancy dress posing with some elders who have moved beyond that kind of frivolity. The only ones I can certainly identify are my grandmother and her three sisters- Ethel, Kathleen and Joan. Violet, my granny, is in the back row just off centre holding a parasol. My guess is she and the other parasol carriers are dressed as the "three little maids from school" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. Joan, my favourite great aunt, is the kiddie in the foreground in the feathery hat holding what I think is a toy trumpet.

("For, God's sake, someone take it off her. She'll deafen us all!")




Did granny put the photo on the mantlepiece? Did Joan? Did they conspire together? What are they trying to say?

That they're still around?

Well, of course they are.

Regulars
2025-06-16 10:25 poliphilo
The Landlord, who we hadn't met before, said the only place he could seat us was out in the garden, but the waitress made protesting noises and said, "No, no, no; they're regulars"- and he changed his mind and nodded us towards a seat in the corner of the bar area which had a notice on it saying "Drinkers Only". This was all very gratifying.....

Traipsing
2025-06-15 09:20 poliphilo
"Now I remember why we used to like coming to Tonbridge," said Ailz as we traipsed from charity shop to charity shop.  Tonbridge High Street has so many of them. She bought a dress for herself and one for Wendy- who had treated us to lunch- and I bought a straw hat (made in China, of course.)

"Traipse" is a word I like to use. It has weariness built into it. Traipsing is so much more tiring than a good brisk walk over the same distance would be.

Yesterday was hot and still. I felt I needed that hat to keep the sun off. Oh, how my feet hurt and my legs ached!

Nature Boy
2025-06-14 09:38 poliphilo
They promised us a thunderstorm. It would blanket the south-east, they said. Lots of banging and flashing. In the event we got some flashing but hardly any noise. This morning's weather is hot, damp and oppressive.

Yesterday's weather, building up to the storm, was sunny and still. I pursued my resolution to ground myself by going round without shoes and socks. It's nice to feel the grass underfoot. Towards evening as it grew cooler I got the lawn mower out. For that I put some shoes on.

You gotta be careful round lawn mowers. Last year, first time I cut the grass, I wasn't paying attention and tripped over ithe mower and almost certainly broke a rib or two. I didn't tell anyone because I hate to make a fuss, but there was pain for several weeks- and I had to steel myself every time I turned over in bed.

Back to the grounding. There was a period of my life when I was Nature Boy and all but dispensed with shoes. Memory tells me I once walked the mile or so into town barefooted in the snow but surely Memory is lying......

Rights
2025-06-13 10:55 poliphilo
"Does Israel have the right to exist?" asked the interviewer.

And the interviewee- who was Palestinian- replied "Israel exists".....

Meaning the present state of Israel is a political fact that it would be foolish to deny but the rights of the matter are something else entirely.....

You could have the same exchange about any piece of real estate on earth. The geo-political map is always in flux. Nations blink into existence, blink out again. Empires come and go, their boundaries in a state of perpetual change. Look at a political map from a hundred years ago and it'll be hopelessly out of date.

Forget Israel- that's so contentious- and let's look at the status of a territory that's a little less so- though who knows?- California.  it has existed inside it's present boundaries since the 1500s. Before that it was a patchwork of tribal territories. According to Dick Allgire- who was giving us his take on the present unrest in L.A.- it is stiil- on paper- which isn't worth a great deal- the property of the King of Spain. When Spain lost its grip on its American colonies, California passed to Mexico, but only briefly- and then to the United States. Each one of these transitions was marked by violence. Does the United States have a "right" to hold onto it? Only for as long as it can. The protesters in L.A. who are waving Mexican flags have a point....

Every name on the world map is a notion, an idea, a dream.

In 1579 the English pirate Francis Drake landed somewhere north of the present City of San Francisco. He got on well with the local tribespeople and claimed the area for the English crown, naming it New Albion. This colony of his persisted for about as long as he remained in the vicinity- and if King Charles wants to reaffirm his right to the land he would have first have to ascertain exactly where it is because people no longer remember....

God Only Knows...
2025-06-12 09:57 poliphilo
Brian Wilson died.

And my brain is looping the single phrase "God only knows...."

Grounding
2025-06-11 10:16 poliphilo
The garden was beginning to look shaggy, so I got out the long-handled shears and the short-handled shears and trimmed it a bit. It was late afternoon and the sun was on the slide and the light it was giving was mellow. I sat on the grass, snipping away and a sense of well-being stole over me that lasted for the rest of the evening.

I believe this is called "grounding". I should do it more often.....

The Old Normal And The New
2025-06-10 11:45 poliphilo
Most weeks we get a food delivery from one of the big supermarkets. This week Ailz went with Waitrose- which is a novelty- and for the first time since Covid we had a delivery man who didn't just hand over at the doorstep but carried his boxes through to the kitchen. I told him how impressed I was and he seemed surprised- as though he'd never known any different.

I thought, "Finally things have returned to normal" but, of course they haven't. Since Covid the world has changed- but this was an odd little flash of how things used to be.

Talking about how the world has changed- but changing register- I notice that journalists are using the term "Civil War" to describe what is going on in L.A.- where anti-ICE activists are now facing off against the Marines.....

Spacey Jim
2025-06-09 11:27 poliphilo
I'm not going to go mad with bands of the 80s that never existed but should have, but couldn't resist visualising this one.

The very wonderful....

Spacey Jim and the Pleiadians