I got lucky by being in a great Brabant landscape, in the first place, and a heavy rain in the second. Because I only have a point and shoot Cybershot thingy, the way to make a long exposure is to push the film-speed (there is no film, I know, but we can recreate the conditions) down to ASA400. The point of that was to catch something of the rain, but it also had the secondary effect of blurring everything slightly, since the grass was blowing in the wind, and since I was holding a camera no heavier than a slice of toast and honey in my unhandy German bands.
But being in the right place was half the battle. That's what all art is about, after all. That's what you're seeing when the trees in the distance seem to fade away. That's called aerial perspective, and it was an effect artists like Leonardo were at pains to reproduce in works like the Mona Lisa. But in real life, it's all a question of where you're standing. Painters use it to try to fake an effect which our eyes see by themselves.
Click on the image to biggify, and feel free to d/l to zoom right in and get that Impressionist feel, where every plant and nettle looks like a brush-stroke.
And since it's all about photography and painting, I'm dedicating it to nn, snapper of my tattoo ordeal, who has a painting jury later today. G'luck, kid.
I suppose it shouldn't, but it surprises me that with the sheer number of songs that are written every year and come to our notice, so few contain a word or a string of words that cause one to pull up short and think, That's exactly the right way to put it or, I never saw it that way before. Oh, I know that's not what people are always looking for, or even ever -- how else to explain prog-rock? But it's what causes a song to get its hooks into my memory.
Having said that, if I were to make a playlist of songs I think worthwhile, they would all be selected on that criterion: that the words say something to me in a new way. And there would be thousands of them. There are an awful lot if you're listening for them, even though as I started out by saying, it's not much more than a drop in the ocean.
I'm busy compiling a post, which will be quite lengthy because filled with quotes, which illustrates this idea within the despised genre of country music, but that's for later. A good example of one that's just plain powerful is Love is Everything by Jane Siberry, a Canadian singer-songwriter who now apparently wants to be known as Issa. She's an intriguing character I'd never heard of, until she was chosen to provide two tracks for the kd lang covers album Hymns of the 49th Parallel, dedicated to Canadian artists. Only Leonard Cohen was as highly-rated, and one of his was Hallelujah, which everyone thinks is a Jeff Buckley number. But I digress.
The lyrics are below. The lines that caught my attention:
Love is everything they said it would be Love made sweet and sad the same But love forgot to make me too blind to see You're chickening out aren't you?
The first line is probably the only occurence of that sentiment in popular music, where a singer looks back on a love and finds it good. The second line provides a reason why. But be careful, that line is a twin-edged blade. If sad is the same as sweet, then sweet is also sad. Doesn't that turn out to be the case? It does in hindsight, because any feeling looked back upon, even a sweet one, is now beyond us, lost and gone. The melancholy among us have learned to regard all emotions that way, not solely with hindsight. While the rousing slogan "This too shall pass" is never true for pain, it is always true for pleasure.
In the third line Issa, as she does in the first, takes a cliche and turns it into something else. Love is blind, we say, but love is not blind when it is ending. Any fool can see when, and pinpoint when, the point of no return is reached, even though we never admit it until it's much too late, and until we've lost not only the love we received, but also the love we gave, and all dignity and honour in the interim. There's at least half of the output of all popular musicians and songwriters that's an attempt to deny the obvious, the whole Come Back Baby school of lyrics. Melancholists reject that whole school of thought; acceptance is a large part of melancholy, and what distinguishes it from mere sadness. And this song rejects it, too: Love forgot to make me too blind to see.
There's more of that strain of naked truthfulness at the end of the song, when the lover is asked to look back and make a reckoning of how he/she loved. It's brutally truthful:
And find it in your heart to kneel down and say I gave my love didn't I? And I gave it big...sometimes And I gave it in my own sweet time I'm just leaving
Lyrics later, but first a performance by Jane Siberry herself, which is new to me. I can see why kd lang would be attracted to the song, which benefits, I'm sorry to say, from not being given the big torch production treatment kd brings to everything.
Here's the whole song:
Love is Everything Jane Siberry Maybe it was to learn how to love Maybe it was to learn how to leave Maybe it was for the games we played Maybe it was to learn how to choose Maybe it was to learn how to lose Maybe it was for the love we made
Love is everything they said it would be Love made sweet and sad the same But love forgot to make me too blind to see You're chickening out aren't you? You're bangin' on the beach like an old tin drum I cant wait 'til you make The whole kingdom come So I'm leaving
Maybe it was to learn how to fight Maybe it was for the lesson in pride Maybe it was the cowboys' ways Maybe it was to learn not to lie Maybe it was to learn how to cry Maybe it was for the love we made
Love is everything they said it would be Love did not hold back the reins But love forgot to make me too blind to see You're chickening out aren't you? You're bangin' on the beach like an old tin drum I cant wait 'til you make The whole kingdom come So I'm leaving
First he turns to you Then he turns to her So you try to hurt him back But it breaks your body down So you try to love bigger Bigger still But it...it's too late
So take a lesson from the strangeness you feel And know you'll never be the same And find it in your heart to kneel down and say I gave my love didn't I? And I gave it big...sometimes And I gave it in my own sweet time I'm just leaving
could ever come to be considered a genuine work by Johannes Vermeer:
is the subject of an outstanding article by Errol Morris in the New York Times blogs, though it's about as far from the usual blog post as Middlemarch is from a Twitter update. Morris bases his story on two books which have appeared in the last year on the case of Han Van Meegeren, who produced the top painting and sold it to Goering as a Vermeer, but not before receiving the authentication of the art establishment of the time.
It's in seven parts, the last of which has just appeared.
