Mushroom season

Whilst we are incorporating Briga into the routine, getting anything done is a challenge.  So I thought I´d just post some photos of the mushrooms Breo and I have seen on our morning walks.  This seems to be a cracking year with so much rain in November.

I don´t know much about fungi. There´s a lot I don´t know about a lot of stuff, and frankly, mushrooms aren´t high on the list.  I don´t pick them for two reasons - 1.  I would no doubt poison myself directly and 2.  There are lots and lots of more knowledgeable people around who do, so I figure I should leave the ones I see to repopulate.  They are really beautiful and interesting in their range of shapes and sizes, so here is a selection.

The Tudor Monastery Farm

The latest offering from the intrepid BBC Team of  Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold, and historian Ruth Goodman.

All seven episodes are on Youtube, including the Christmas Feast.

Part I



And Part II



ETA - Oops - the team is now in Secrets Of The Castle on BBC.

Apple Cider

I was pleased to try this organic cider when we were at the house.  In the past, most of the cider apple harvest in Galicia went straight to sidrerías in Asturias or Pais Vasco, but recently, the prices weren´t enough to cover the transportation costs.  So someone had the bright idea of reviving the cider industry in Galicia. We tried the organic, sweet ¨Natural¨, and thought it was delicious.  Light, refreshing, slightly sweet and notably apple-y.  Just the thing for a warm summer evening.

Enter Maeloc.  A subsidiery of the folks that bring us Estrella Galicia beer (Hijos de Rivera), they make both sweet and dry apple ciders, along with perry (!) blackberry and strawberry.  Maeloc is one of the businesses featured in the initiative Mercado de la Cosecha, sponsored by Hijos de Rivera, R and Gadis, dedicated to fostering sustainable rural development projects in Galicia.

ETA - I just found a blog dedicated to Galician cider (in gallego)  Sidra Gallega

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Can´t wait to try making some on my own.  We´ll need to try to revive the old, very tired and neglected apples on the property and plant some more.  The neighbors also had apples that had seen better days.

I´m intrigued by the whizbang design for a press. No sense not using a garbage disposal and a hydraulic automotive jack when they´re so widely available.

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An Ode to Autumn

I Go Among  Trees

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it.  As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

-Wendell Berry (b. 1934)

More marvelous photography by Nelleke Pieters.

Una Granja para el Futuro

This is a lovely (Devon is gorgeous) and important documentary on the future of farming from the BBC.  Now a link with Spanish subtitles!

Alma-Tadema and Victorian Painting

I went to see an exhibit of 19th century paintings at the Thyssen-Bornemisza called Alma-Tadema and Victorian Painting in the Perez-Simon collection.  This is the kind of traditional realist art that makes a modernist/conceptual/abstract expressionist aficionado´s lip curl along with a simultaneous retina-detaching eye-roll. I thought it was gorgeous.

From the website:

After being shown in Paris and Rome, the exhibition Alma-Tadema and Victorian Painting arrives at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in June 2014, offering visitors the chance to discover the aesthetic sensuality of some of the most celebrated 19^th-century English artists. In their paintings Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Sir Frederic Leighton, Albert J. Moore and Dante Gabriel Rossetti emphasised values that were strikingly different to the moralising attitudes of the day, including a return to classical antiquity, an interest in the nude, rich decorative effects and references to medieval themes inherited from the Pre-Raphaelites.
The exhibition, curated by Véronique Gerard-Powell, Paris Sorbonne University professor, includes a selection of works, among them icons of British art such as The Roses of Heliogabalus by Alma-Tadema; Greek Girls collecting Pebbles from the Sea by Leighton: The Quartet by Albert Moore; and Andromeda by Poynter, have been loaned from the private Pérez-Simón collection, one of the most important in the field of Victorian art.

The skin glows, the drapery alternatively clings and floats, the sun dazzles.  Masterful technique that sweeps you away to the long ago and far away as conceived by the  imagination of Victorians.  Anachronisms, paternalism, sexism, colonialism all there, but also stunning draftsmanship, color, and unabashed romanticism.

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The pièce de résistance is the enormous The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888 by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Dutch!) depicting a Roman (of course) banquet wherein the guests are slowly smothering under a deluge of rose petals.  Those petals are all individually rendered, accompanied by the scent of roses wafting through the salon.

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I was very much looking forward to Waterhouse´s Crystal Ball, but  have to say I wasn´t knocked over.   I was more impressed by  the luminescent nymph Crenaia.

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Virtual tour here.
Informational video here.

Blooming

 I must have them all.   The pinks are especially fabulous.



David de los Santos

After 9 months and 50,000 shots (only using 5.000 for the final video), my first flowers timelapse has finished. After a long work looking for flowers that would open fast, here is a list of the flowers that have been part of the timelapse: Lillium, hibiscus, carnations, orchids, dandelions, lilies, daisies, alstroemeria, peonies and nigella damask.

Close call

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The Glasgow School of Art suffered a terrible fire Friday.  Fortunately, there were no injuries and everyone was evacuated safely.  The latest statement indicates that the damage wasn´t as bad as had been feared.

Assistant Chief Officer Dave Boyle, director of service delivery on the west, said: "Crews have been working absolutely flat out throughout this very challenging incident and it is clear their effort and skill has saved this treasured building and many of the items it housed.

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The Mackintosh building is a Scottish cultural icon.  Charles Rennie Mackintosh (7 June 1868 – 10 December 1928) was a Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist. He was a designer in the post impressionist movement and also the main member of the Glasgow School art movement.  Relatively few of his architectural designs were built, making this structure even more important.

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As an Arts and Crafts fan, it´s a relief that the damage wasn´t as bad as it first appeared, and that no one was injured.  Congratulations to the firefighters on their great work.  Let´s hope there´s support for reconstructing as benefits such a treasure.

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Chateau de Gudanes

Wow, these people really have ambition.  An Australian couple are renovating a French Chateau in the Pyrennees.

Blog Chateau de Gudanes here.

Facebook here.

The Holy Grail?

There´s a book coming out that proposes the ¨Cáliz de Doña Urraca¨ housed in the San Isidoro Museum in Leon is actually the Holy Grail (so anxiously pursued by Arthurian knights and Indiana Jones)! Torres y Ortega del Río presented their work Los Reyes del Grial, detailing the investigation yesterday.

In theory, the grail was housed in the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem until 1054 but traveled as a gift from a powerful Vizir of the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt to the Emir Denia in Spain, who in turn gave it to Ferdinand I of Leon, as described in documents discovered in Egypt. Ferdinand´s daughter, Urraca had the chalice decorated with her own jewelry to signify its importance.

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The chalice is in fact two cups, joined by gold work and gems in the middle. The upper half is the supposed grail, made of a Qumran ceramic typical of Palestine at the time of Christ. Also, researchers have claimed that when Saladin gave permission to move the Holy Grail, he demanded a shard, and one of the scrolls found in Egypt suggests that the chalice of Christ is missing one, as does the Cáliz de Urraca.

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How interesting! And they didn´t even need the holy hand grenade.

New to Me

 After months of scanning the internet, I finally found a vintage, portable, electric sewing machine with both a straight and zig zag stitch.

She´s a 1960´s Alfa model 103 and came with the original instruction book and a whole bunch of accessories and gizmos.

I figure she´s been put away somewhere for a while, so I should probably disassemble the relevant parts and make sure she´s clean and oiled, but when I tried her out before taking her home the stitching was solid and quiet.

She will do a whole bunch of embroidery stitches, which seem more applicable to baby clothes than anything to me, BUT you can also drop the feed dogs, the little teethed plates that push the fabric under the pressure foot, so there is an option for free-form sewing used in machine embroidery and quilting that´s all the rage.

V has already started rearranging the second bedroom so I can have a space to work.  So woot for me!!

The Vermeer Controversy

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I found this article fascinating - mostly because I think Tim Jenison is awesome, and because Vermeer is one of my favorites.

There has been a controversy swirling for years about whether or not Vermeer used an aparatus called a ¨camera obscura¨ as an aid in his paintings, a theory proposed by artist David Hockney and an architecture professor named Philip Steadman.

So Tim Jenison became interested in the theory and set about proving if it could be done - and his process is now the subject of a documentary by Penn Jillette, of the magical duo Penn and Teller.

Jenison´s devotion to the issue is remarkable.  He spent 5 years in the R&D phase, travelling to Amsterdam and London to study the paintings, reading translations of latin texts on optics and art, figuring out a way of putting together the lens and mirror contraption, building an exact replica of the room that was the subject of his painting - The Music Lesson, making the lenses himself as well as grinding the pigments for the paints.  An inspiration.

Tim’s Vermeer - releasing in February.

They´re Back

The team that brought you The Victorian/Edwardian Farm and Tales from the Green Valley on the BBC (which I loved) are doing another called The Tudor Monastery Farm.

Historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold turn the clock back over 500 years to run a farm at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum in West Sussex exactly as it would have been in 1500, during the reign of the first Tudor King, Henry VII.

At Amazon.co.uk:  The Victorian Farm, The Edwardian Farm and Tales of the Green Valley .

Edwardian Farm Episode 1



Tales of the Green Valley Episode 1

Performance Art

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I´m keeping an eye out for a vintage sewing machine with all metal parts, basic functions, etc.  In my search  I keep running across these marvels of engineering of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - elegant, sleek, functional, robust, resiliant, precision instruments still performing more than 120 years later, made by the millions all over the world.

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Beautifully decorated, wrapped in fine casework, they were expensive investments, lately mostly appreciated by collectors. Now, with the crisis, I think prices seem to be coming down. 

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There are a few brands I´ve never heard of:  Jones, Libelle, National, Kayser, Gritzner, Vibra, Naumann.

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They´re even being given makeovers.

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How long does the latest iteration of a cell phone last these days?

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An interesting blog about restoring an old singer here.