I am not dead

Here are some apple blossoms to celebrate.

Experiments in macro photography

Oh, and if I should wind up missing for an extended time, I probably came home afyer 10pm and got murdered for it by my landlady.

It’s my apartment, I pay for it, but…she controls the door.  If her keys are in the lock on the inside, I can’t get my key in the lock to open it.  She knows this.  She still leaves her keys in the lock, so I have to knock on the door, and she has to come stomping out to the hall to let me in.   She opens the door to the stairway that leads up to my apartment, giving me the evil eye as she does so.  I’d show you a picture of her scowling visage, but it’s illegal to take people’s pictures without permission here.  Imagine the mask of Satan.

Sundays with Clyfford Still: Carrying the fire (7)

Welcome to Sundays With Clyfford Still.  I’m your host, M.K. Hajdin.

This is number 7  in the series.  You can read the other posts here.

PH1033-1976, by Clyfford Still

Today’s painting is PH1033, dating from 1976.    Bolts of jagged orange blaze their way through a cold white background like lava burning through an ice sheet.  A dab of brown on the left, which seems to float in arctic calm despite the orange bursting like a solar flare next to it, balances the monumental violence on the right.

“You can turn the lights out. The paintings will carry their own fire. ”  — Clyfford Still

Clyff's painting tools (credit: Cyrus McCrimmon

Here we have Clyffie’s palette and painting knives.  He painted with knives rather than brushes.  And he didn’t clean them any better than I do mine.   The last painting he ever painted was mostly yellow, it looks like.  (Want to see more palettes of famous artists?  Click here.)

Questions or comments?  You are warmly invited to leave a comment below, or tweet to me with the hashtag #clyffordlove.

Scotland in the Gloaming: amazing photography site

Where has this website been all my life?

Amazing twilight photography of Scotland, surely one of the most beautiful countries on earth.

Gloaming, for those unfamiliar with the word, means twilight.  John Burnside uses it way too much in his novel A Summer of Drowning,  through which I have only plowed 1/4 of the way because it is so annoyingly slow and vague.  Gloaming is a great word, but it shouldn’t be abused.

Anyway, go visit Scotland in the Gloaming.

Seamill Ripples by Alastair Jackson

Man, superman, and misogyny

A tweet on my timeline this morning:

“Beating @joliclown at Words With Friends makes me feel  like a man.  Beating her by 107 points makes me feel like SUPERMAN”.

If I point out every instance of misogyny on the internet I’ll be here typing away for at least the next thousand years, but this reminded me of something from my past and I just couldn’t let it go.

Further tweets revealed the culprit to be her own son, which excuses it not at all.  Note that he said beating his mother at something didn’t make him feel like an adult, which is gender neutral at least on the surface.  He said it made him feel like a MAN.  And the idea there is that one gets to earn adult male status by defeating women.

Holy misogyny, Superman.

We should all be doing non-competitive stuff like flower gazing

Sit a spell,  dear readers,  and I’ll tell you a story from my past:

Primroses

Today I’ve been invited to Brezice again to visit Ozara.  They’ll be picking up trash along the road,  and I will support them in this unglamorous but environmentally friendly task.

In the meantime, I leave you with one of my recent experiments in close-up floral photography.   This one turned out fairly well in spite of my rotten little camera.

I loved primroses even before I knew what they were called.  They aren’t native to the western U.S., so when I came to Europe I had never seen them before.  The way they suddenly appear in the grass and turn it into what looks like a green and yellow Persian carpet is magical.

Primroses a-bloom in the woods

Spring flowers

No time to post, but here are some spring flowers I saw yesterday.

Spring flowers pushing up through old leaves

Flying into the aurora

Now this is a job I wouldn’t mind having.

The kind of effects I struggle to capture in paint on canvas are conjured up by magnetized particles with the greatest of ease.

We look at space and feel small.  And it’s good for us.

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Via @openculture and @youtube

Karma: my thoughts exactly

Okay, I’m too busy to write anything interesting, but had a few moments to kill over on Pinterest and found this:

Source: dictoot.com via M.K. on Pinterest

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I’m going to put this on a T-shirt and send it to my new hero, Eric Joyce.

On second thought, it’s a bit girly looking for a dude, better to wear it myself.

(The only thing I don’t understand is why he apologized.  Is that a usual thing in the UK?  I don’t understand why anyone would be sorry at all for headbutting Tories.  Sorry that he only got two of them,  while the rest continued their devil’s work of disemboweling the NHS and slashing benefits for disabled people, maybe, but I don’t pretend to understand British politics.   We Americans don’t apologize for anything, so I wouldn’t know jack about being sorry.  Can some local person clarify the situation?)

The first day of spring

In Slovene, it’s “pomladansko enakonočje“.  So now you know.

I wandered lonely as a cloud...

Evocative Railway Station Photo of the Day

Here is the Brezice railway station in the twilight.

Brezice railway station