Clever Contiguity in Design - Wood Block Princes

The thing that makes and the thing that's made are sweet sets. Here is one of the three blocks that made the printed fabric on the lower edge.

A morning spent in a wood block print workshop in Jaipur , under the patient tutelage of two adept craftsmen,  whose sense of detail, balance and alignment is enviable, shows me that while ( see below) less would have been more there is more than one way of getting into print.

Who Put the Bull in the Tuk Tuk?

Old Delhi, charismatic and pluralistic when it comes to getting from here to there. Foot, tuk-tuk, motorbike, and yoked beast, here  all in one aperture . This Brahmin bull, with beautiful red horns that match the tuk tuk's roof and such peaceable demeanour seems almost like the tuk-tuk's passenger.

Bells Ring, Drums Beat - All Night Vigil in Pushkar

At the centre of Pushkar's Camel Fair is religious festival, and at the temples around the  Lake bells ring and drums beat late into the night , the mood,  hypnotic and ecstatic, with the air hazy with smoke from fireworks, crowds of people milling to watch dancers and acrobats, offerings of candles and flowers floating out from the temples on the lake's edge

The Lovely Honeycombing of Light - Jaali in Rajasthan

Geometric, tessellated, stone work jaali or jail screens seem to cleverly concentrate any breeze, perhaps its the smaller apertures and the winds want to get out quickly through other doors.  Their lovely articulation of the view, and the implicit invitation to get close and spy on the outside world is not to be underestimated.

Mrs Woo-Star dream of Pickled Plums and Rhodophyta

Mrs Woo-Star, aspiring farmer of sea merchandise, sometimes likes to meditate amongst red land plants, here an oversize crop of red shiso, which she likes to imagine is a forest of red algae - though Granny Egg, who regards Mrs Woo-star as an interloper and is still pondering if she her neighbour is serious in her request for peck of plums to pickle, or is Granny has misheard and she asked for a peek at a plectrum of prickles, prickles being a commodity with some currency(see By the Prickings)  in Huntingdon County.

Sea Murchandising at Brass Acres - The Return of Mrs Woo-Star

The last time we saw Mrs Woo-Star she was plain Mrs Woo, and she had taken adverse possession of Brass Acres, the former farm and mise en scene extraordinaire of Bart Brassica ( Vale).  As a result of her addiction to reading PG Wodehouse's tales of Bertie Wooster, with which she finds some affinities to our lost Bart B, and what she sees as her new career in Rock Pool farming, she has assumed the 'Star' suffice by Indeed Poll.
Now she surveys her Rock Pool farm where she hopes to cultivates Sea Merchants, though this is due to her mishearing of the word Sea Urchin and noting the rich price they fetch in Sushi Bars.  You will no doubt spot her failure to provide any fodder for her Merchandise ( her term, not mine) in the form of Kelp.  The question is will she realise and call the National Kelp Line?

Lodhi Garden's Shisha Gumbad

Dusk lasts longer is Delhi's Lodhi Gardens, and here I will refrain from mentioning how this is due to  the air being overloaded with particulates, so everything has a romantic haze and all colours are shuffled along into the red spectrum. Lodhi is gorgeous with 15th Century treasures, gardens, people strolling, running (ouch! that air) and the elegance of birds.  And Shisha Gumbad's lovely arched doorways frame the light and trees perfectly.

Spice Street, Old Delhi

Two kinds of dates, golden sultanas, greenish raisins, almonds, walnuts, pistachios, Old Delhi's spice street, pantry, stage set, graphic feast.

What the Stylish Camel wears this Autumn

The best dressed camel is tasselled and tessellated with plenty of pom poms, bedecked with beading, tassells trembling, anklets tintinnabulating with each soft camel step. Even the camel's shadow is  sharply stylish.  The camel fair at Pushkar in Rajasthan  is obviously the place to be seen for stylish dromedary.

The Fabulous Land of Wedding Bling

While there are elegant shops of passamenterie in Florence, for extreme ebullience, for dazzle, for gorgeous excess, for silver sass, for chi-chi chutzpah, for over opulence, for ribbon riot, for graphic gobsmack, the wedding lanes in Old Delhi does it best. My favourite, hmm, either second row down, centre stack, the top wide with of black and silver... but.....

Buildings as Astronomical Instruments

What if every new building worked to test or measure a scientific principle?  Each house collected the data that fell on it from the sky?  New Delhi's18th century Jantar Matar, eminently photographic, dedicatedly scientific collection of built things to measure matters astronomical does exactly that.  Bravo to Jai Singh II who built a series of Jantar Matars.

Betel Leaf's emphemeral green spiral into the red

Arrestingly graphic, with a Fibonacci appeal, laid out spirals of betel leaf in Old Delhi's spice market seem to be a role model of green.  Later they will be filled with areca nut and often tobacco.
This mix, an addictive pyscho-active tooth rot, with be chewed into a red juice and spat out on the street, red tubercular-esque stains.  Bad ending.

Old Delhi's Colourised Sepia lanes

Crumbling chalky wash of colour, infusion of sepia, tangle of cables, glimpse of  faded rickshaw, faded grandeur of old Haveli balconies, it all might be a concoction of filters and collage but this Old Delhi lane was as is.  That atmosphere courtesy of the fine particulates, the chalk wash a leftover from a movie shoot, and yes, that noir mystery is real.

Pigeon Napping in Progress in Old Delhi

The somewhat coy and variegated beauty on the left, skittish, curious and confused has been caught flocking with someone else's crowd. Coming in to this high terrace in Old Delhi, her new friends colour matched with the grey sky, she is soon to be seduced by the lush  peckings, nabbed with a net by a careful man who has been cooing his best. Then, rumour has it, there will be the business of ransom and return. Fowl play?

Observational Variations on Existence

Jun T Lai's crater rich stainless steel art piece, ropes nearby pieces in a kinetic dance of distortion and a liquid redoing  like a flat kaleidoscope. She calls it Non-Existence, but I think an observant piece like this might be variant of Cogito Ergo Sum, but maybe this is an instance of Video Ergo Sum?

Go directly to White Rabbit in Chippendale to see for yourself.

Manhole Covers at 45 Degrees South

Wind blown lake-side sedges seemingly winnowing something seminally Japanese, what the double 's' might be?  A sibilance of lake and leaves, an assurance of storm storage, a winter snow stop, spring shower, summer stormwater course? Queenstown thanks for getting down to the ground with art.

Cloud Nine Berries

In April I walked the Milford Track, setting out deliberately blindsiding the prospect of getting up and over the 1km rise of McKinnon's Pass, as heights give me the heebie-geebies.  While others were extolling me to take in the view, and preferring to pass up on extra vertigo, I looked at around my feet quite keenly. These sweet pink-tinted berries, white inside were the best of offsets; low ,insignificant and delicious, grounding one might say.

When is Chair Like a Plate of Spaghetti?

An Arne Jacobsen chair elaborated with rope from a show of chairs at the National Gallery of Victoria this July - yes, I know I'm behind hand.  The loops and cascades and casings of string bring to mind a bridal excess and perhaps a comment on the tied-upness of the bridal parties. Or how much spaghetti one might spill in a lifetime of culinary fallout?

Return of the Light _ Milfording

Goethe reported last words  'More light, More Light ',  seem lucidly pertinent when taking in Milford Sounds palpable display of sun beams, with its inference that if light is physically manifest we are all made of light, or spare parts from old stars.
In any case, the Treasure in back on deck.

Poems Flourishing in Polished French - Invitation to Take a Seat

Here we have two types of chairs to sit and read in, same but different, so please get comfy and open up this link to Recours au poeme, at  http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/essais-chroniques/ping-pong-visages-de-laustralie-carole-jenkins-po%C3%A8mes-et-entretien/marilyne
and read away - in English or French.  The translations of these eight poems by Marilyne Bertoncini, poet and translator,  came out of a set of work prepared for the 32nd Internatioanl Festival de la Poesie in Trois Rivieres, Quebec held in October 2016. Merci beaucoup to Marilyne B and the Festival for their invitation and wonderful festival. Viva la Poemes!

The Soft Soap or No Words LIke Snow Words

Contemplating  Jasper's Sno-Dome Cafe's Soap Center, that neat central caesura suggests a soft peach for each who enter  laundry bags, often so dry each cap leaps.
And all  this sibilant silliness before one starts on anagrams: so much fun with words when taken to the cleaners in Canada.

Cat's Play: Slips in the Perceptual Field

Am I above cat post? No, the transcription errors in this s here, with lines of colour filched, I think,  from the garden, might be a  model for  interference in the perceptual field, and naturally makes me wonder how different is a  cat's perception of the world, and ergo Schrodinger's mind experiment, in which no cat's were harmed, but setting aside the fussiness of quantum entanglement, cautions us against taking corrupted models as reality. Schrodinger I wish you were here.

Happy New Year.