Sunday, July 01, 2018

I'm chasing shadows in the gallows

the above audio is from The Grateful Dead in 1969. Rolling Stone say it's one of their best ever gigs.
 Dream Bowl, Vallejo, California
February 22nd, 1969
 That's good enough for me ! I've been in a Dead State of Mind this past hot week . Track two is especially beautiful.
 I have been looking into my plans for travel to London for this: event in London in a couple of weeks time (the same weekend Trump comes to town!).
 Its at the youth hostel I worked in 1971-1972 in the City of London.Opposite St Paul's .Read about my mispelt  youth here:
 (I have been in touch with  Clive, in the hope of a meetup that weekend?)

Monday, June 25, 2018

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Alice Longstaff

"the lost negatives" were only found,developed & printed this year.
Here is a bookies-runner in Hebden Bridge Park (inside   the  shelter under the canal bridge).1950's

Today we also went to this: exhibition of the photos of Claude Cahun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Cahun  
 I read this in the literature & laughed out loud...!


Is this why Megan Markel is always smiling?

young fathers on Joolz Holland recently.

I'm chasing shadows in the gallows 
Collecting what was stolen from me ......
Me and Cath have seen them live twice.
Love them to bits.
great punk values.
we last saw them in March this year. here: are my images of the night.
This month they were banned from a festival in Germany for their opposition to Israel’s oppression of Palestine.
read about this here

Friday, June 22, 2018

the devil's harvest

This week's sepia saturday is themed around "farms"& "agriculture" "harvest"
My dad's family come from the eastern Polish city of Białystok . It is a big (rather primitive) agricultural region.
The first image (a still from a 1990 home movie) is of a conversation i was having with  an old  family neighbour ( he was a tad drunk himself here!)
He is , telling me a rather gruesome story about how another  village local ,in the winter of 1943  got so drunk one night that he tried to stagger home in the dark but ,tripped alone and fell into a well.
After a mass search, he was found drowned  the next next morning
. The Devil's Harvest perhaps....?
This second image I took (also in 1990) on the family farm.......
My Cousin Marak & Uncle Czesek.
Finally , a home movie I took in 1965. It begins & ends with a few brief shots of my Dad & Mum.Inbetween, my Uncle collecting the honey.


image: me in The Blue Teapot in Mytholmroyd on Wednesday. audio: live Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, UK; May 14, 2018.Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan.
 "Pangaea" (the title of this song) refers to  is  hypothetical supercontinent that included all current land masses, believed to have been in existence before the continents broke apart........
Finally.I was sad to hear that Danny Kirwan died on June 8.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Kirwan 
I saw him play live several times.He saw difficult times (eg he ended up homeless & sleeping rough on the streets of London.)
Not a good look.
 Here he is in his pomp playing with Fleetwood Mac in Seattle,March 10.1972.
( In the context of this post,forgive the pun. "Oh well" )

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

with Phil & Ken in Halifax

https://zimnoch.smugmug.com/Halifax18th-June-2018/

 In February 1985, British birder David Hunt led a tour around India.
One of the stops was Jim Corbett National Park, in Uttar Pradesh, which has a large tiger population. The park provides an armed guard to each group of visitors, and they’re required to stay on the trails. As his party explored the park, though, Hunt heard an unknown call and walked a short distance off the track. Minutes later there was a scream. When his friends rushed to help, they discovered his mauled body in a clearing nearby.
His friend Bill Oddie wrote:
"When David’s body was recovered, so was his camera. Later on, the slides were developed … The first one is a nice close-up of a Spotted Owlet sitting on a branch … Then he must have heard a noise behind him, or maybe just sensed that he was not alone. Keeping crouched, he turned and saw a tiger pacing to and fro at the edge of the clearing.
 The next slide is of the tiger. It is some way away, walking to the right. On the next picture it is walking to the left. In the next one, it is facing the camera. In the next, it has begun to move forward, still looking straight at the lens. 
The next is closer. Then closer. And closer still. The final picture is of a frame-filling shot of the tiger’s head, eyes blazing and teeth exposed in a snarl.
 “If David had kept shooting on his motor-drive, the whole thing must have happened in barely ten seconds,” Oddie added. “Crouched behind a camera, looking through the viewfinder and especially when using a telephoto lens, you don’t realise how close your subject has got. Neither, at the time, do you care. All you are focusing on is the picture. Press cameramen in war situations call it ‘camera blindness.’ It has proved fatal before.”
 (From Oddie’s Follow That Bird!, quoted in Stephen Moss’ A Bird in the Bush, 2004.)

"leaving the stage door": Victoria Theatre, Halifax.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/a-bird-in-the-bush-by-stephen-moss-754874.html

Saturday, June 09, 2018

Thursday, June 07, 2018

at the movie pictures

"Avid photographers celebrate the viewfinder as a means of helping us see the world anew. 
But psychology research has shown that under some conditions taking a photo of something actually makes it harder to remember.
 One possible reason is that we give less attention to an experience when we know that it will be safely stored in a photograph. 
But in a new paper in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, Julia Soares and Benjamin Storm from the University of California show that the photo-taker’s memory will suffer whether they expect to keep the photo or not..........." The British Psychological Society

Thursday, May 31, 2018

i blame the hippy at southport station who came up to me & said he knew where I could buy some "cheap grass".......



" Despite all this, I have sympathy for the obsessive photographers........ it’s easy to feel that a memory isn’t evidence enough that something happened. It’s too dreamlike......."
Me & Chris on the road through  Sheranozy (photo taken by Cathy)

The French are so full of shit.
The two most famous things about France are "The  Guillotine" and The   Champs-Elysees,
. right?
Turns out, they were both stolen from the English. 
The Guillotine was invented in
Halifax Yorkshire.
The  Boulevards of Paris  were the brain child of  Louis Napoleon who was exiled  in Southport in 1838. 
He lived near   Lord Street , and when he returned to France he remodeled the city to look like that bit of Lancashire!
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/apr/25/guardianleaders





Two further twists for me.
  • I was born on Lord Street in Halifax.
  •  Once, when visting my Dad's birthplace in Eastern Poland my family proudly showed me the village's one & only Historical Landmark.
 "Look" they said excitedly.I looked where they pointed, but saw nothing but a barren ,empty dirt track. "that" they said "is where "Napoleon's Army marched through on the way to Russia..."
Sometime, you cant see history?

Friday, May 25, 2018

"You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go for a long time? " Hilary Mantel.


 A few days after the Manchester Bomb 12 months ago a young Muslim lad called Baktash Noon walked into Manchester City centre..........
He then blindfolded himself.
He stood perfectly still. Arms outstretched and proceeded to offer hugs to the other grieving people of Manchester.
With a felt pen, he had written  on a bit of cardboard:
 "I'm a Muslim + I trust you.do you trust me enough for a hug?"
He then  stood alone,  blindfolded, for over an hour.
He was met with hundreds of ,all positive , returns of affection.
A wonderful display of mutual trust.
An example to us all.(I wouldnt ,as a wimp, have had the balls to do that!)
 St Anne's Church in Manchester is currently holding a display of paintings recording this event .
Me & Cath  went to look at this on Wednesday afternoon & to lay some flowers in memory of the 22 people ( the majority ,children)who were murdered.
https://www.manchester.anglican.org  Cathy turned 60 this week. As well as this visit to Manchester on Wednesday, on Monday we went to Liverpool to see the newly opened John & Yoko Exhibition.http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/mol/exhibitions/double-fantasy/
 Here are a few photos of this week.
You can see all these individual images here at https://zimnoch.smugmug.com/
You may view in hi-res: download & share to your hearts content!(You may do this freely, in any manner desired, even without naming the source)




Balloon

If you love the Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout, Go-Betweens, Michael Head and all that good stuff, then you should give this a listen..........  ...