I practice a policy of gastronomic laissez-faire and say “Live and let live, but if you hunger for a critter, try to get one that has been raised and killed humanely”.  If possible get it from the source and don’t waste any part of it.  Thank it’s soul for giving itself so that I may eat, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.

I was once very irritated by a smug, holier-than-thou vegetarian who said, “I don’t eat anything that has a face” and I know of certain carnivores (who shall remain nameless) who won’t eat an animal which has a name, eg Bossy the Cow or Chicken Little.  Well, even my vegetables have names and faces.  Enter Sam and Petunia, our Jack-o’-Lanterns.  They both have both names and faces and are both going to be eaten.

Sam & Petunia

Sourced from Michael Howard’s deli, just across the street from us; all of their meat and vegetables can be traced to the farm it came from.

Sam and Petunia had a happy, free range life in their pumpkin patch  .  .  .  .  .

and fulfilled their duty as Jack-o’-Lanterns, sitting at the top of our stairs and welcoming our dinner party guests.

I started with the offal and made toasted pumpkin seeds for hors d’oeuvre at our Samhain Feast on Saturday.

Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

• Pumpkin seeds
• Olive oil
• Sea salt
• Soy sauce and chili powder, or freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to about 350° F/180°C.   Toss the seeds with olive oil and salt.  Sprinkle with either soy sauce and chili powder or toss with Parmesan cheese.  Spread on a cookie sheet and roast for about a half hour, tossing about every 1o minutes.

Tonight I made pureed pumpkin which I’ll freeze and use for soup. pumpkin cheesecake and our Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.  Sorry Linus!

Wow, this is an awesome song and music video I encountered for the first time a week ago.

Crazy is is the first single from Gnarls Barkley, a musical collaboration between Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo, and is taken from their 2006 debut album St. Elsewhere.  It’s a great song.  Going along with the psychiatric theme of the song, Gnarls Barkley’s music video for “Crazy” is done in the style of the Rorschach inkblot test. Animated, mirrored inkblots morph into another, while taking on ambiguous shapes.  The inkblot illustrations were done by art director and motion graphic designer  Bryan Louie.

Crazy

I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place.
Even your emotions had an echo
In so much space

And when you’re out there
Without care,
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough
I just knew too much

Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly

And I hope that you are having the time of your life
But think twice, that’s my only advice

Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are,
Ha ha ha bless your soul
You really think you’re in control

Well, I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
Just like me

My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on a limb
And all I remember is thinking, I want to be like them
Ever since I was little, ever since I was little it looked like fun
And it’s no coincidence I’ve come
And I can die when I’m done

Maybe I’m crazy
Maybe you’re crazy
Maybe we’re crazy
Probably

On our recent visit to London, Steve and I saw quite a bit of artwork.  Sculpture at the Royal Academy, Turner and the Masters at the Tate Britain, the shortlisted nominees for this year’s Turner prize and an installation by Miroslaw Balka at the Tate Modern.

The Anish Kapoor sculpture in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of the Arts was terrific to photograph.  An arrangement of 76 shiny spheres bubbles up to the level of the surrounding Palladian buildings.

Anish Kapoor – ‘Tall Tree and the Eye’

My favourite piece of art was in a show we stumbled across in Spitalfields.  The Future Can Wait featured the work of over 30 artists in a derelict, industrial space on the top floor and roof top of Brick Lane’s Old Truman Brewery.

Not only was the setting fabulous, but I fell in love with a sculpture called Family Portrait by Marilene Oliver.

Family Portrait

The piece was made from a series of sculptures of the artist’s family made from MRI scans. The scans where printed onto acrylic and stacked in correct order give the illusion of a ghostly figure, which appears and disappears depending on your view point.

This is Oliver’s artist’s statement from her website:

“The virtual world created by the computer is one that provides no place for the physical body. As communications technology and the use of the Internet is becoming an integral part of our lives, the absence of the physical in the virtual space is destined to provoke changes in the physical body and in our relationship to it in the real world. My work centres around this relationship, seeking to explore and create ways of intimately representing the physical body.

My relationship with the body is nostalgic and romantic, based on an anxiety that the body is becoming redundant. New technologies, especially communications and medical imaging alienate us from the bodies that we have. They promote a decentralisation of the self – they allow us to project ourselves into different spaces and offer us new views of our bodies that belittle being contained in a physical body.”

Annie Kevans – Oils

Angela Bartram – Performance Writing

Self Portrait

Chocolate covered cat

Rooftop detail – as tweaked in Photoshop

View to the west

Since we live in a top floor flat, our closest neighbours are the jackdaws who nest in the chimneys and congregate on the rooftopos.  This summer the roofs and skies over Moretonhampstead have been filled with hundreds of these birds.   They are the smallest species of Corvus the genus of crows and ravens.  Jackdaws are very sociable and are usually found in pairs or larger groups.  They have so much character as they strut and hop along the rooftops, stopping to peer down their chimney pots.

A clattering of jackdaws

Here’s a recording of their song

Males and females pair together within flocks.  Jackdaws mate for life, and like most birds who follow this custom become engaged early in life, long before sexual maturity. First the young males of a new brood struggle among themselves to decide their individual status, and then pairing with females begins. The jackdaw female promptly upon pairing assumes the same social position of her male.

Mr and Mrs Jackdaw enjoy the misty dawn

Here is a video I made with waves of jackdaws flowing across the summer ocean skies -

This weekend, Steve and I went up to Birmingham.  Our first stop was a garden party for Muchuu (aka George and Milky) a cute-as-a-button band who write and sing about dreams, things seen on adventures, imagination and escapism; appreciating the real things, the little things that make you smile!  But if you listen to Milky’s lyrics, there are shadowy thickets just beyond the sunny forest glades.

Here’s a music video of ‘Getaway Train’ made by Milky -

The party was held in the new space out back of the Spotted Dog pub, a great little venue for gigs and gatherings. We always love going to the Spotted Dog, as it’s where we met last September.

We went to the Festival of Quilts on Friday.  I handed in my last two Little Gems (one of which I finished hand stitching on the drive up!).

Suncast Shadows III was made from the photo printed onto silk chiffon and handstitched onto an A4-sized piece of some boss synthetic packing material that I keep coming across.  It feels kind of like sueded, thick cling film (Saran Wrap) and it’s wonderfully opaque.  I strategically laminated the haiku onto the boss synthetic stuff with acrylic gel medium

and then stiched the chiffon over it with rows of running stitch in monofilament nylon thread.

Suncast Shadows III

For Suncast Shadows IV, I printed the photo onto acetate, used the boss synthetic stuff for the middle layer and another piece of plain acetate for the backing.  I had laminated the typewritten haiku onto the middle layer.  I zig-zagged the edges and  ‘hand-tied’ the quilt together using grey acrylic thread and beads set in a grid pattern.

Suncast Shadows IV

We wandered around for the afternoon, looking at all of the amazing quilts and meeting people.  For me, some of the most fresh and inspiring works were new students’ work in the Graduate Showcase and European Art Quilt Foundation:  Quilts from the Low Countries.  I had a long and very informative  chat with Claire Benn from Committed to Cloth about photo emulsion and thermofax screens.  I’ve decided to have a couple of thermofax screens made from my photos to see how they can be used.  I added a couple of items to my batterie de l’artiste.  A very fine tipped soldering iron and a needle threader.  Monofilament nylon thread ain’t aka ‘invisible thread’ for nuthin’!

First thing on Saturday morning, before we drove back home, we went to the Rag Market and I got a BIG bag full of nylon organza in riverine blues, greys and greens and Chagallesque emeralds, vermillions, cobalt and amethyst, all for about a tenner.

I’ll use these to continue my exploration of transparency.  I still have Marc Chagall’s stained glass windows in Tudely glowing within.

Another great thing I saw at the NEC was a rain washed aluminum chair seat.

Here in the UK, we’ve had a heatwave over the past four days with temperatures soaring into the 80’s.  One of my favourite summertime tipples is a shandy – half lager and half lemonade.  Lemonade as in store bought sparkling lemonade, not American style, which I will get to in a moment.

buddha

Shandy

• Lager
• Lemonade

Mix half and half.

buddha

And what better way to celebrate Coronation Day, 2nd June than with a feast of traditional British fayre? – a fish supper and a shandy.

God Save the Queen! and pass the vinegar

Here’s some archival footage of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 including a cast of 30,000 school children waving hankies & Union Jacks and one, notably, dressed as a telly.  The occasion has all of the expected pomp and ceremony, is narrated in the ‘Queen’s English’ and once Elizabeth walked up the aisle in Westminster Abbey, she wasn’t in Kansas any longer.

buddha

buddha

Now for American-style lemonade, infused with Yankee optimism.

American-style lemonade

• Four lemons
• 1/3 cup sugar
• One quart ice cold tap water

Juice the lemons.  Boil about 1/2 cup of the water and mix with the sugar until the sugar dissolves.  Pour the sugar syrup and lemon juice into a quartish-size glass pitcher, fill with water, stir and enjoy!

‘When life hands you lemons, make lemonade’

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What is real and what is a dream?

Sometimes a thing, a pattern, a mood or an idea captures me and I am drawn into another experience.  I might go off momentarily into a reverie, or a new world may take shape inside of me which demands expression, never quieting until I have made a new creation.

Whilst walking across Place Flagey, late at night, in search of an ATM I noticed traffic lights, passersby and boys kicking a football around filtered through opaque glass.  Dreamy  .  .  .  .  .  .

buddha

Sometimes, the essence of a place resonates deep within my soul.  Such a place is Watersmeet, a river crossing in the Teign Valley.  I love to pause on the footbridge spanning the river.  Looking upstream, two waterways come together.  Looking downstream, they have joined and flow together to the sea.

Watersmeet

I love the confluence, the point where the two waterways converge.  The ripples and patterns on the surface of each are distinct and sometimes one or the other is silty or clear.  Each watercourse brings its own unique personality.  When they join each other, a new river is formed.

Steve and I captured this conflux with images and words, and put them together to make River Song.

buddha

buddha

RIVER SONG

Listen, hear our language
Spelt in ripples on rocks,
Chalked in the swirl of current
And the eddies in our stream.

Look, see our soul shine,
Fleet in dappling shades
That bind the sun and clouds
With waterlight in motion.

Touch, feel our breath,
Where waters meet at last,
Released from yearning
In the deepest depths our joining.

Rejoice, for we are river,
Fed by raindrop,
Suckled by cloud,
Maker of ocean,
Carver of life.

Perambulate, v. ‘to travel over or through, especially on foot, or ‘to walk with no particular goal, to stroll, to roam . . . ‘

Perambulation, n. ‘a leisurely walk, usually in some public place’

Latin perambulatus, from per – through + ambulare – to walk

buddha

“Long ago we humans used a form of communication
and sensing that did not involve the brain in any way;
rather it came from a sacred space within our Heart.”

My latest video is composed of transient reflections of the Custard Factory in Digbeth.  The music was given to me from Steve, my travelling companion on a journey into a newfoundland.  He heard it being played on the streets of Birmingham and followed his heart to the Hedge Monkeys.  The musicians are Daniel Waples and Danny Cudd aka the Hang Playing Hedge Monkeys.

You can learn more about hangs and how to acquire one at Hangbauhaus, Bern, Switzerland.