If you haven’t seen this video from The Sultan’s Elephant, check it out. It’s a performance by Royal Deluxe, a French performance troop that travels around blowing people’s minds with their complex giant puppets.
I think this was filmed when the troop performed in London in 2006. Wikipedia has fun descriptions of their performances.
Sanna Annukka is a Finnish-British illustrator whose work combines the curviness and nature imagery of art nouveau with the precise repetition and clean edges of computer art.
Some of her images seem to be modeled on Hilda Flodin’s ornaments for the Pohjola building in Helsinki. She has also cited the Kalevala as an important influence on her work.
Looking at her web site, I was particularly impressed with her album cover designs, some of the best-looking record packaging I’ve ever seen.
There are more wonderful examples of her illustrations on her web site.
It’s interesting to read the local papers when you’re traveling. When we were driving up the west coast a few days ago, the front page story in the local papers was the salmon disaster. The number of salmon off the coast of northern California, Oregon, and southern Washington, is so low this year that the governors of these states have applied for disaster relief for coastal fishing communities. The plummeting populations have been linked to overuse of coastal river water for irrigation as well as deterioration of ocean habitat.
This year’s failure stems from the sudden collapse of California’s Sacramento River Chinook salmon run. That’s being blamed in part on a gauntlet of irrigation pumps that young fish have to swim past in the Sacramento Delta plus starvation conditions once they reach the ocean.
I’ve often heard tips on how to improve the sustainability of your seafood eating habits, but because of the salmon disaster, I was in a particularly receptive mood when KUOW’s Weekday show focused on seafood and the Puget Sound habitat. With the price of salmon expected to go above 30 dollars a pound, and the prospect of a complete collapse of salmon populations, I think I’ve finally got it through my thick head: lay off the salmon.
Taras Grescoe, the author of Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, was the guest on the program, and he recommends trying some jellyfish. Unlike large fish species, the jellyfish population has increased to problematic levels with the disappearance of cod and other fish that feed on them. So I looked around a bit, and found a great recipe on The Melting Wok. I’ve never had jelly fish before, but this looks delicious. I’ll try it some time soon and let you know how it tastes.
Here’s audio from the interview:
Here are the last photos of our wonderful western U.S. road trip adventure (sigh).
Click the image for more pictures of California and Oregon
As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!
-1911
This poem, written by James Oppenheim to celebrate the movement for women’s rights and published in American Magazine in 1911, is closely associated with the Lawrence textile mill strike of 1912. During the strike, which was in protest of a reduction in pay, the women mill workers carried signs that quoted the poem, reading “We want bread, and roses, too”. The photo above was taken during the strike.
Bread and Roses was set to music by Mimi Fariña in the 1970s, and has become an anthem for labor rights, and especially the rights of working women, in the United States and elsewhere.
Here is a recording of the song by Judy Collins.
The great Eddy Arnold, by some accounts the most successful country musician of all time, has died. Here is my favorite of his many lovely songs, Cattle Call, first recorded in 1945.
This video is from a 1996 television performance, when Arnold was 78 years old. Courtesy of CutterCovina, an excellent channel with a wonderfully eclectic mix of music videos.
I recommend you watch long enough to see their recommendations for cat hobbies and cat discipline.
Video courtesy of klusmanp
My Thanksgiving post about Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms has proven very popular. Here is The Golden Rule, another of his political paintings.
Sign the petition at condimustgo.com
In honor of Cinco de Mayo, some Mexican dance music from Café Tacuba. Enjoy.
Via Larko, I found this page, which lets you list places you’ve visited and produces maps of them. Since I just got back from a big road trip where I visited a couple of U.S. states I’d never been to before, now’s a good time to try it.
And here are the countries in Europe I’ve visited.
As Larko points out, it can be a bit misleading. I once spent the weekend in St. Petersburg — it was actually Leningrad at the time — so the whole country of Russia is filled in on this map.
Still a lot of the world to see.
You can try it yourself here.
While I was away, Morna at Bittersweet sent me a link to this video. She thought I might like it for the Chawed Rosin. Indeed I do.
The Ross sisters sing, dance, and contort their way through a catchy tune called Potato Salad in the 1944 film Broadway Rhythm.
More of a short film than a commercial. I’m not even sure if they’re selling bags or cell phones, but it’s a psychedelic trip.
The story of Samuel Taylor Coleridge being unable to complete “Kubla Khan” because he was interrupted while writing endures because it is something anyone can relate to — the brilliant thought that dies.
The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas’s Pilgrimage: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.” The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
The poem is here.
The Extraterrestrial Highway stretches 100 miles through southern Nevada, from Alamo to Warm Springs.
Click image for more photos
Zion National Park, on the green banks of the Virgin River.
Click image for more pictures of Zion
