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| [Please note the tatoo on the left forearm... :] |
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| [1847 title page] |
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| [2013 vlog] |
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| [This was actually playing when I was in London, but, alas, was sold out] |
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| [Yes - Doctor Who S3 becomes Shakespeare!] |
Peter and Alice goes a bit mad - in the best possible way; in a way that is perfectly in keeping with Wonderland and Neverland. The bookshop set is pulled up to the ceiling, and behind is a land with Tenniel and picaresque illustrations intermingled. J.M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Alice, and Peter (the fictional characters in these last two cases) all join the stage, and the dialogue whips back and forth among them all. Childhood memories mix with retrospective reservations, which interweave with the excited shouts of the childish characters, or the justifications of the authors. It should be confusing, but the excellent writing and acting mean that it is not. So many tones come together - there are moments of nostalgia, and seeing Judi Dench take on the gait and manner of a young girl is quite breathtaking to see; there are moments of recrimination; of guilt; of confusion; of regret.... [Yet] The midpath between nostalgic indulgence and Nihilistic noir has been expertly judged - and perfectly acted by a brilliant cast, led, of course, by Dench and Whishaw.
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[It's very dynamic and so looks different depending on the light.]
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| [Before and after] |
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| [A very young Academy Award Winner Adrien Brody] |
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| [Matthew McConaughey's character was the first to get helped by an Angel.] |
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| [They went to high school together in Tacoma!] |
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| [Volumes 1 & 2 are out, with Volume 3 coming by the end of the year.] |
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| [I agree whole-heartedly!] |
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| [Renaissance Man] |
A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a speaker for the dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.)
The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. "Is there anyone here," he says to them, "who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?"
They murmur and say, "We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it." The rabbi says, "Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong." He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, "Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he'll know I'm his loyal servant."
So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, "Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone."
The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.
As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head, and throws it straight down with all his might, crushing her skull.
"Nor am I without sin," he says to the people. "But if we only allow perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it."
So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.
The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.
For the English, D Day might well have stood for Dunkirk Day. The tremendous news that British soldiers were back on French soil seemed suddenly to reveal exactly how much it had rankled when they were beaten off it four years ago. As the great fleets of planes roared toward the coast all day long, people glancing up at them said, "Now they'll know how our boys felt on the beaches of Dunkirk." And as the people went soberly back to their jobs, they had a satisfied look, as though this return trip to France had in itself been worth waiting four impatient, interminable years for. There was also a slightly bemused expression on most D Day faces, because the event wasn't working out quite the way anybody had expected. Londoners seemed to imagine that there would be some immediate, miraculous change, that the heavens would open, that something like the last trumpet would sound. What they definitely hadn't expected was that the greatest day of our times would be just the same old London day, with men and women going to the office, queuing up for fish, getting haircuts, and scrambling for lunch.
D Day sneaked up on people so quietly that half the crowds flocking to business on Tuesday morning didn't know it was anything but Tuesday, and then it fooled them by going right on being Tuesday. The principal impression one got on the streets was that nobody was smiling. The un-English urge to talk to strangers which came over Londoners during the blitzes, and in other recent times of crisis, was noticeably absent. Everybody seemed to b existing wholly in a preoccupied silence of his own, a silence which had something almost frantic about it, as if the effort of punching bus tickets, or shopping for kitchen pans, or whatever the day's chore might be, was, in its quiet way, harder to bear than a bombardment. Later in the day, the people who patiently waited in the queues at each newsstand for the vans to turn up with the latest editions were still enclosed in their individual silences. In the queer hush, one could sense the strain of a city trying to project itself across the intervening English orchards and cornfields, across the strip of water, to the men already beginning to die in the French orchards and cornfields which once more had become "over there." Flag sellers for a Red Cross drive were on the streets, and many people looked thoughtfully at the little red paper symbol before pinning it to their lapels, for it was yet another reminder of the personal loss which D Day was bringing closer for thousands of them.
In Westminster Abbey, typists in summer dresses and the usual elderly visitors in country-looking clothes came in to pray beside the tomb of the last war's Unknown Soldier, or to gaze rather vacantly at the tattered colours and the marble heroes of battles which no longer seemed remote. The top-hatted old warrior who is gatekeeper at Marlborough House, where King George V was born, pinned on all his medals in honour of the day, and hawkers selling cornflowers and red and white peonies had hastily concocted little patriotic floral arrangements, but there was no rush to put out flags, no cheers, no outward emotion. In the shops, since people aren't specially interested in spending money when they are anxious, business was extremely bad. Streets which normally are crowded had the deserted look of a small provincial town on a wet Sunday afternoon. Taxi drivers, incredulously cruising about for customers, said it was their worst day in months. Even after the King's broadcast was over, Londoners stayed home. Everybody seemed to feel tat this was one night you wanted your own thoughts in your own chair. Theatre and cinema receipts slumped, despite the movie houses' attempt to attract audiences by broadcasting the King's speech and the invasion bulletins. Even the pubs didn't draw the usual cronies. At midnight, London was utterly quiet, the Civil Defence people were standing by for a half-expected alert which didn't come, and D Day has passed into history.
It is in the country distracts just back of the sealed south coast that one gets a real and urgent sense of what is happening only a few minutes' flying time away. Pheasants whirr their alarm at the distant rumble of guns, just as they did when Dunkirk's guns were booming. On Tuesday evening, villagers hoeing weeds in the wheat fields watched the gliders passing in an almost unending string toward Normandy. And always there are the planes. When the big American bombers sail overhead, moving with a sinister drowsiness in their perfect formations, people who have not bothered to glance up at the familiar drone for months rush out of their houses to stare. Everything is different, now that the second front has opened, and every truck on the road, every piece of gear on the railways, every jeep and half-track which is heading toward the front has become a thing of passionate concern. The dry weather, which country folk a week ago were hoping would end, has now become a matter for worry the other way round. Farmers who wanted grey skies for their hay's sake now want blue ones for the sake of their sons, fighting in the skies and on the earth across the Channel. Finally, there are the trainloads of wounded, which are already beginning to pass through summer England, festooned with its dog roses and honeysuckle. The red symbol which Londoners were pinning to their lapels on Tuesday now shines on the side of trains going past crossings where the waiting women, shopping baskets on their arms, don't know whether to wave or cheer or cry. Sometimes they do all three.
Obvious State is a multi-disciplinary creative studio co-run by Nichole and Evan Robertson. Our projects reflect our shared love of Paris, language and literature.
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| [Someday this will hang in my kitchen.] |
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| [Love this one for This Side of Paradise] |
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| [She also has done some Illustrations, each capitalizing on multiple images.] |
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| [Paris in Mint!] |
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| [Assorted "Paris in Color"] |
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| [They, understandably, didn't want us taking pictures of the artwork... but they were right above my head in this shot] |
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| [These now await frames and more wall space... but I can't wait to display them] |
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| [Paris inspired fashion. Also, apparently my striped green shirt likes Obvious State too ;) ] |
