This doesn't really count as a blog entry, but still!

It's hard for me to say much more about this other than "Wow! The Best!" Please feel free to add your own caption.

Paris/Mexico Remix Deluxe

In the 1860s, as civil war raged in North America, French interests led by Napolean III embarked on a curious political adventure in Mexico. At least as we learn of it from Manet's famous painting, this episode ended badly from the French point of view. That is, the European potentate Napolean appointed to rule Mexico (Austrian archduke Maximilian) was executed by firing squad.

Beneath the wings of this auspicious sign, I offer you the following foray in trans-Atlantic communication. "Come on, Old Ken," I hear you prodding, "there must be some greater motivation for pairing Parisian wallpaper (such as we see above) with the great ruins of Teotihuacan (such as appears in the photograph below)!" Well, such is the magic of the remix; the familiar is defamiliarized, the usual made strange, but the down-right-weird stays weird.



But, before we fling ourselves into the mix, the obligatory backstory: Old Ken was just in Paris and found himself staying near his old haunts in the Quartier Latin; near the Pantheon, the Jardin des Plantes (topic of a future blog, rest assured), and many other fine sites. It was there, in the quaint Hôtel des Grandes Ecoles, that I encountered the wallpaper you see photographed here. A ballooning adventure? Attacks against balloons? Lovers 'a courting? The merry shepherd? What is going on here?



As if these questions were not enough, our last posting brought the happy gift of some startling footage from the nicebirdrox.com South America correspondent, the Famous Anthropologist. So, without further ado, let us take the lead of the wallpaper itself—let us combine its playful juxtapositions with our correspondent's narrative:



"Last Monday, still reeling from my Palm Sunday trip to the Basilica of
Guadalupe, I headed out on a half hour bus ride out of Mexico City to visit the archaeological ruins of Teotihuacan. This particular city was destroyed circa 800 AD, but it remained a sacred site for centuries that followed. The Aztecs, for example, told the conquering Spaniards that they visited the ruins, and they also made revival-style copies of artifacts from the site, brought its pottery back to their capital of Tenochtitlan (where Mexico City is today).



"Anyhoo, after wandering from the southern (?) entrance of the site up the Avenue of the Dead, and ascending the Pyramid of the Sun, and checking out tourist watercolorists at work in the patio of the Palace of the Quetzal-Butterfly, I headed to one of the more maligned sculptures at the site: a massive boulder in front of the Pyramid of the Moon, rather crudely carved with the visage of a goddess. Now, said goddess has a deep hole carved in her head, and a friend of mine has argued that this statue was something like a christmast tree stand: hole being used to hold the trunk of amassive tree dragged in for certain rituals (this kind of ritual is found throughout Mesoamerica, and one can still see it performed for tourists on the hour in front of the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City).



"In any case, crudely carved as the statue is, the light has to be perfect to actually get some shadow effects for the carving to be visible. What luck, the light was perfect, so I hopped up on the possible dance platform in front of the statue to snap some shots.



"Only then did I realize that said goddess was the focus of some sort of ritual. It started with all of the 9 or so pilgrims facing the stone, hands pressing a wrapped cloth bundle to its surface (perhaps the bundles had Cuzco stones inside?). I was a bit distant to hear anything. Then they turned to face the Pyramid of the Moon, bundles in hand in various positions, supplicating something."

It is hard for someone of Old Ken's cast of mind not to do a little bit of speculating in cases like this. And it seems to me that our Parisian wallpaper and our Mexican ritual pose some similar interpretive questions. That is, where does the "story" start and end? What parts count—what bits are essential to our understanding—and what aspects are more accidental? Can all of it be meaningful? Or, more cynically, is it all meaningless? Now certainly, the enigmatic wallpaper—with its provision of just enough formal and scenic continuity to induce us to believe that there is (or should be) intelligible connections between its disparate parts—is hardly on the level of the Mexican ruins. But might we not visualize our own efforts to coax some meaningful insight from its elusive form through the odd prostrations of our pilgrims before their massy, inscrutable god?

Fernando Montes—Painter of THE BEST!

This, I will confess, is a story that was once begun, then aborted, and now begins again. If truth must out (as it usually does), Old Ken stopped with the story as I was sure I had written up the narrative that this exhibition by local Genius-Hat Fernando Montes spurred. But, alas, I was not able to find it anywhere in my various files. So, guided only by my dim recollections and this series of Señor Montes' paintings entitled The Spirit of the Andes, I offer you the following tale.



All this took place, so the poet said, in an age when leopards roamed the earth—back when I trod the shores of ye Olde Countree. I think the date was roughly March 2003; it was certainly cold and I recall there being snow upon the ground. So much for our setting; let us proceed to the characters and the action. I, Old Ken, was at the Digby family residence when I looked out the window and saw two shiny-new grey vans pulling briskly up the driveway. It was my first thought that these must be the goons of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft coming to silence the voice of the elder radical statesperson on the premises, and that I should go out to defend her against their thuggery.

But, as happens so often in these cases, the actuality was much stranger than my paranoid fantasty. For, rather than any sinister "men in black," the group that piled out of the vans comprised a truly motley crew. The long flowing skirts of the ladies were matched, in due course, by the long flowing beards of male attendants. No, this was not an Amish convention (at least so I was informed by the slightly wild-eyed leader who approached the house). Instead, he informed me, he had brought a Peruvian shaman (a specialist in magical or sacred sites/objects called a "huaca-cayamoc" in Quechua, an ancient Andean language - - just in case you want to get technical). Anyway, said huaca-camayoc was going to stand roughly near my grandmother's wood pile and harness the energies flowing between the monadnock to the north (Mt. Ascutney) and the mountains to the west (Okemo and perhaps Pico). Apparently, this convergence of lay-lines makes for some powerful energy flows.



Well, be that as it might have been, I had a busy day ahead of me, so I drove into town. But, apparently, my noble automobile, Sir Percival Price, was sympathetically resonated by all the energy flows back at the homestead, because he promptly died in the Springfield Plaza parking lot. As I had a number of tedious errands to run, this left me in the unenviable position of needing to go retrieve another car. And what with my mother's place of employment being but a hop, skip and a jump over the beautiful Black River, hers was the obvious choice.

Not a long geographical distance was this; but the psychological trauma involved was more formidable. As my luck would have it on that cloudy March day, my mother was not in her normal place of work but on cafeteria duty. This meant that it became necessary for Old Ken to re-enter the junior highschool cafeteria—a place I had despised when I was in junior highschool—and, at a well advanced age, stoop to the indignity of asking my mother for the keys to her car.




Alas, such things perhaps build character, or I might have repeated to myself sardonically. But all such was nothing a little coffee (and Danish!?) couldn't heal, I reassured myself as I made my way through greater Springfield, toward the Morningstar Cafe. Yes, I thought, I will sit, relax for a moment, and then do a little work. And my plan seemed to be going well as I parked and made my way into said restaurant.

But lo!—what was this? Why was I being accosted; being jostled; being brought before a strange-looking man with a bushy tuft of black hair sprouting from the tip of his nose? Had you not guessed already, this attractive personage was, of course, none other than our huaca-camayoc who had guided his flock into town for a refreshing "cuppa" as they recovered from their recent exposure to the massive energy field that is my grandmother's wood pile.

Rapidly making my excuses, I was able to extricate myself from his surprisingly chatty conversational clutches and make my way to a free table with the much-needed coffee and pastry. Slightly disoriented by this sequence of events as I had been, I took heart in the company of two tables of perfectly normal looking middle-aged women who, so I thought, would provide a pleasant buffer from the freakshow at the center of the cafe. Unfortunately, I could not have been more wrong! For, as I took a sip of my beverage, one of these "normal" seated ladies turned away from her conversation partner and toward a woman seated by herself at the window. Their conversation went something like this:

"Oh, you're there all by yourself. Wouldn't you like to join us?"
"No. Sometimes, all I need is a window and a tree."

Perhaps this is an odd thing to say. But, the absolutely insane exchange which followed—and which drove me directly out the door—requires some further backstory. Now, as you will probably recall, the city of Cuzco was the religious, cultural and administative center of the Inca empire. High in the Andes of what is now Peru, Cuzco remains home to some brilliant specimens of Inca stone masonry, which (as seems to be depicted in Señor Montes' work above) used no mortar but fit the stones together with incredible precision.

But, back to our conversation; once it had been shared that our freakish loner only needed a window and a tree, our inquisitor—completely inexplicably to my mind—nodded and gave her full assent to this statement. As if encouraged, loner lady dropped the following conversational bomb; a statement that made me vacate the premises at the time and upon the crest of whose wave I will leave you now:

"Oh," she said, excitedly, grasping the largest stone on her oversized necklace. "When you said that just now, it made my Cuzco stone wiggle!"

Manowar-Joke Spectacular!

Now, please be forewarned that the punchline of this fabulous joke is not "Manowar." In fact, the images of the amazing Manowar back-patch, which Old Ken happened to spy while walking along the South Bank this fine spring afternoon, have absolutely nothing to do with the joke I want to lay on you. But no matter. For, our joke goes like this:

Q: How can you tell America is getting worried about bird flu?



A: President Bush just started bombing the Canary Islands!

Whee!

The Best Movie Poster Ever?

As it was a beautiful spring weekend here in south east London - - the first pink and lavender flowers blossoming on the trees - - I reckoned it was time for a good, old-fashioned ramble. And, in my ongoing quest to bring you news of the best signage England has to offer, I give you this delight.



Should you find yourself south of the Hayward Gallery on London's south bank any time soon, you will be able to witness in person that which you see photographed above. Now, Old Ken has never actually heard of this animated "Ice Age" film, let alone the sequel advertised here.



But, with the tagline "Kiss Your Nuts Goodbye," I can only imagine that it is aiming at the highest of all possible high-brows. Move over Fellini; here comes a hot chunk of steaming art-house magic!