WHAT DREAMS MAY COME

Commenting on yesterday's post recounting my dream about the Queen, Suzanne wondered what dreams are "trying to tell us", which put me in mind of another dream involving royalty that is dreamt in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Found There.

During Alice's encounter with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the twins point out the Red King lying fast asleep...

...He had a tall red night-cap on, with a tassel, and he was lying crumpled up into a sort of untidy heap, and snoring loud-- "fit to snore his head off!" as Tweedledum remarked.

"I'm afraid he'll catch cold with lying on the damp grass," said Alice, who was a very thoughtful little girl.

"He's dreaming now," said Tweedledee: "and what do you think he's dreaming about?"

Alice said, "Nobody can guess that."

"Why, about you!" Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. "And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?"

"Where I am now, of course," said Alice.

"Not you!" Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. "You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!"

"If that there King was to wake," added Tweedledum, "you'd go out-- bang!--just like a candle!"

"I shouldn't!" Alice exclaimed indignantly. "Besides, if I'm only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?"

"Ditto," said Tweedledum.

"Ditto, ditto," cried Tweedledee.

He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying "Hush! You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise."

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream..."

Every time I read this surreal description of the Red King's Dream I think how astonishing it is to find such a disturbing philosophical conundrum within the pages of a children's book.

I remember being decidedly bothered by this passage when I was young, but the closer I get to going out -- bang! -- like a candle, the more alarming it seems...


[Images: Sir John Tenniel]

THE QUEEN & I

Last night I had dinner with the Queen. Strictly speaking it was a pre-show supper, but it was lavish enough to have been a full-blown, top-notch, pukka dinner…

We were going on to attend a gala performance of something and since I don’t know what it was, I’d best come clean and say that this was in a DREAM!

There was a big screen in the corner of the room relaying images of the crowds gathering and the stars arriving. We were a select group: the Queen and I and two men who, at the time, I seemed to know very well, but who, I now realise, were total strangers!

The others were clearly involved with organising the event in some way and kept excusing themselves and dashing in and out, leaving HM and myself to keep each other company.

The Queen was dolled up in a sparkly evening gown and was wearing a tiara, but the most striking feature was her hair, which was swept up into a great wave of green and white stripes.

I admired the effect and the Queen said she was glad that I liked it as she felt it was an improvement on her usual hair-do. Then she turned slightly in order to show me that the hair at the back of head was raven black. “The trouble is,” she confided, “It’s started growing out, so I’m going to have to get it redone soon.”

We chatted on (some elements of the dream are crystal sharp, others hazy) and, apropos of nothing, the Queen asked if I had seen a list of the people she was going to have to meet. When I said that I hadn’t, she sighed in a slightly world-weary way and said with a smile: “Oh well, I expect they’ll show me one eventually…”

A butler was serving the food and, at one point when he had left the room, the Queen leaned forward and asked, sotto voce, if I had any money with which she might use for a tip. Unfortunately, I hadn’t so she handed me her purse and told me to have a look inside. “It’s no good my looking,” she said, “I haven’t got my specs.”

I rootled through the purse (which seemed to contain very little except a lipstick and large quantity of different-sized Band-aids) and eventually found a ten-pound note carefully folded to display the portrait of herself - though, oddly, without green and white hair.

I expressed some surprise, saying that I’d always heard that the Queen never carried any money.

“Oh, yes!” she replied, “I make it a rule to have a note of the realm handy at all times in case of emergences. In fact, I always say, I never go anywhere without ‘Ten ME’s’!”

WHAT UTTERLY RIDICULOUS, IDIOTIC NONSENSE!!

If it had really been the Queen, she would have said: “In fact, I always say, I never go anywhere without ‘Ten ONE’s’!”

But that’s dreams for you…


[Image: Royal menu from Royal Insight Magazine; Ocean of Dreams by Josephine Wall]

MORE LIKES & DISLIKES

Another regular reader of this blog, Anne, belatedly asked me -- or, rather, asked Buttons -- for a letter to play the Likes & Dislikes game.

Buttons gave Anne the letter 'B' to play with and it turns out that, among other things, she likes 'Books', 'Bagels' and 'Bubble wrap' but isn't too keen on 'Bills', 'Bugs' and 'Brandy'!

Check out her full list at Queen Anne's Revenge.

By the way, it's been pointed out to me that on my personal list, David only managed to scrap onto my inventory of 'Likes' at number 10 and that it was a pretty mean of me to put my best chum and lover at the bottom of the list - even if he was preceded by 'bottoms' (in the form of 'derrières') and was even complimented on his own rear!

Well, I certainly didn't intend to give David the bum's rush, I just hadn't thought of the 1-10 numbering being a ranking order!

So, to put the matter straight (as it were) David is most defintely Number One and everything else (including derrières, his and others) are in any order there on down!!

Here he is giving Jack Sparrow a run for his dubloons!


[Images: Letter 'B' by Creations Unlimited; Long John Weeks by Brian Sibley!]

STOLEN PROPERTY

Monday evening in a nice little Italian restaurant in London where we eat every week with members of The Magic Circle, I had my much loved, world-travelled Tumi bag stolen…

How did it happen? I hung it on the back of my chair.. Yes, I know! An act of rank stupidity that I’ve cautioned so many others about…

But what is most disturbing is that it had to have been taken by someone who was dining at one of the nearby tables.

Lots of late night calls to police, credit card companies etc were a tiring addition to the distress of losing the bag and its contents.

Then, Tuesday morning comes a phone call from a chirpy young lady at Holloway Bus Garage in north London. “Have you lost anything?” she asked, presumably thinking that I had carelessly left my possessions on a bus.

“Well, I had a bag stolen last night,” I told her to which, in a rather more sober voice, she told me that she had it safe and sound in Lost Property…

A two-hour round trip to Holloway Road reunited me with my Tumi and, miraculously, some of the contents...

The thief’s choice of what to steal and what to dump is bizarre but interesting…

LOST

* Folding umbrella (It was raining)

* Oyster card (Stopped, so of no use)

* A rather nice, new pink silk tie (Stylish selection on the thief’s part!)

* Small bottle of Hermés Concentré D’Orange Verte eau de toilette (Excellent choice!)

* Nokia mobile phone (Old but still serviceable but, with the sim card stopped, no use to them or me)

* Canon ixus 5 mp digital camera (* Sigh * Sob!)

* Packet of Halter sugar free Apple bonbons (Well, they were sugar-free)

* Packet of Germoloid Tissues (Hurrah! At least the thief’s got piles!)

FOUND

* Tumi bag (Worn, but still desirable)

* Ventolin inhalers (So the thief doesn't have asthma as well as piles; pity!)

* Oyster card folder (Thoughtful!)

* Leather credit-card wallet (A 50th birthday gift, so I’m glad to have that back)

* Entire contents of wallet: Membership cards to The Magic Circle, Equity and NUJ; PRESS card; NHS Pre-paid prescription card; Clapham Picture House and Dulwich Picture Gallery membership cards; Boots, W H Smith and Co-operative cards and a Steroid-users card.

* Silver, hallmarked pill box (Huh??)

* 3 credit cards (Doh!)

What was a Very Lucky Escape was that Buttons wasn’t along for the ride as he quite often is (see below); although he says that if he had been in the bag, then he would have Made a Loud Noise Enabling the Thief to be Apprehended!

A SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE

"Distance has the same effect
on the mind as on the eye."

- Samuel Johnson

The photographer responsible for this wonderful picture is unknown to me (if you know, tell me and I'll give credit where credit is due), but if you like it, then you need to explore one of the great sites on the www.


The World Wide Panorama, is filled with the most amazing vistas of beautiful, bizarre, romantic, ordinary, extraordinary and unlikely places that can be viewed from every conceivable angle!

You can visit and re-visit and always find somewhere new on the globe to wonder at --- and there's no need for a passport or vaccinations, and no worries about reduced baggage allowances or increased APD!

So, off you go and BON VOYAGE!!

FLIGHT OF FANCY

Every now and again YouTube justifies its normally dull and boring existence by bringing us a genuine gem.

One such rarity is Kiwi, a delicious little animated film by Dony Permedi, which runs for just 3 minutes 9 seconds but re-plays in the memory indefinitely...

Dony's Master's Thesis Animation, Kiwi was completed while he was at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. It brilliantly succeeds in achieving what Walt Disney used to refer to as "The Plausible Impossible" and, what's more, shows an imagination as inspired and unique as the heroic and determined vision of its central charcter.

Come! Let's fly...



I for one look forward to seeing more of Dony's work in the future; meanwhile, you can download Kiwi from Dony's Animation; and read more about the animator and the creation of Kiwi in an interview on Happy Junk.

BY THE LETTER

In the spirit of the Victorian parlour game, "I love my love with an A" (and all the succeeding letters of the alphabet), quite a few bloggers are currently making lists of their likes and dislikes using a letter given them at random by a fellow blogger...

Following my own list of ten Likings and Loathings beginning with the letter 'D', I was requested to pass out a few letters to friends; so I did and here's what came back...

I gave QENNY the letter 'R' and (on the plus side) he came up with such 'R's as 'Ribaldry', 'Razamatazz, 'Rainbows' and 'Roger' --- as in 'Jolly Roger' and pirates generally! You can read the full list on his blog posting The Letter R; although my friend Buttons was more than a little upset to find 'Rabbits' topping the list of dislikes - as well as very scary references to 'eating' and 'r*bb*t st*w'!!

Anyway... moving swiftly along, it gives me pleasure to publish the responses of two regular, blog-less, readers...

SCROOGE was given the letter 'H' and decided - in a fit of abstemiousness - to limit himself to five likes and four dislikes. Here they are...


SCROOGE's Likes...

Happy - I have to be happy; so much so that I do a poorly paid job to be happy at work. I'm scared of not being...

Homestead - a company that deal with people who can't do websites and help them to create one very easily! I have three but if there were more time, I'd do 103.

Heart - this rules my life. If I had any logic in my head I'd be more successful, but I insist on following this organ to the bitter end.

Hazel - the missus and the love of my life, without whom nothing would be possible. She puts up with all the stupidity I throw at her and somehow carries on.
Hope - that round the corner, something even better will come along. Talk about being greedy!

SCROOGE's Dislikes...

Hotmail - why does it take so long to load up and why do they allow people to offer me investment opportunities in Nigeria and fake Rolex watches so easily?

Hate - because I inevitably come out of it worse than the object of my detestation.

Harry Potter - which I've never quite grasped but which now seems to be hyped out of all proportion.

Hype - that thing you add to something that isn't very good to make people want it.





GILL went for the full ten likes and dislikes with her given letter, 'P' and here they are...

GILL's Likes...

Philip but I am not going to expand on this!

Primroses: Harbingers of spring, I love the delicate colour and the lift they give my spirits, especially when seen on railway cuttings in an otherwise dreary journey.

Poetry: From teenage romanticism [Rupert Brooke whose photograph lived under my pillow] to more recent appreciation of the wit of Wendy Cope.

People: I insist on finding the majority of people good and kind, and they are!

Peanut Buter: But only the crunchy kind!

Purple: Since I am heading rapidly for a disgraceful old age I am going to start wearing more purple.
Paper: Blank and beautiful and inviting great thoughts.

Pens: Any kind but especially fountain pens to go with paper above.

Paperbacks: Which let me read entertaining rubbish and suffer no guilt when I pass them on or throw them out [I couldn't do that to a hardback].

Presents! At Christmas and birthdays I am about 4 years old. I love getting presents, I love unwrapping them, the content is less important than the parcel!


GILL's Dislikes...

Pollyanna: The "glad game" always made me feel distinctly sick.

Pettiness: Of all kinds. It is small minded and small spirited and often represents some ghastly need for power or to win.

Parking: I do not have a car, but I have to cope with endless discussions between car owners about how they should be allowed to park absolutely anywhere with no regard to the pedestrian, how demonic traffic wardens are [aren't they just doing their jobs?], and in particular drivers who think it is OK to park across pavements even though this means wheelchairs and pushchairs have to use the road to get round them.

Parties: Love small gatherings where I can talk to people [and hear what they are saying] hate big noisy parties I always want to go home [and sometimes do].

Party politics: The system that takes well meaning dedicated people and turns them into mendacious self seeking monsters.

Prisons: Since I have to visit these in a profesional capacity I know they are dirty, soul destroying, violent, dangerous places The punishment is supposed to be loss of liberty, not loss of dignity and destruction of the soul. Am happy to discuss this with anyone who believes the tabloid "Holiday camp" mythology.

Picallilli: Why does anyone want to eat raw cauliflower dyed bright yellow and tasting of the worst kind of vinegar?

Paperwork: Of the beauracratic kind, symptomatic of a world of number - crunching and targets and used to exercise control.

"Phlying": Sorry, I know this is a cheat! But I don't understand how all that metal stays in the air. Can cope if I sit in an aisle seat with a good book and pretend I am on a train.

Piffle!: "Wallpaper" conversation, illogical argument, droning...... [yes, I confess, I do it too!].

[Images: Scribblaphy; Upper & Lower Case Magazine; Art Design and Sign; British Library]

A SHOW OF FEELINGS

Blogs fulfil many functions: you can use it (interestingly or boringly) as a daily "Dear Diary..." or as a Commonplace Book; as a forum or debating chamber; as an entertainment and diversion for an audience considerably wider than the lone readership of the author; or, under the cloak of anonymity, as an electronic confessional...

What is common to many blogs is 'feelings': on one level they focus on the things about which bloggers feel passionate; on another, they provide a page of cyberspace on which to write about love, loneliness, happiness, sadness and anger.

My friend John van der Put (who's blog Being John van der Put is often concerned with feelings) told me about www.wefeelfine.org one the most exhilerating and existential websites dedicated to capturing the feelings of bloggers throughout the world...

The 'mission' of Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar's We Feel Fine is, as you will see, both simple and complex:

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion...


The color of each particle corresponds to the tone of the feeling inside – happy positive feelings are bright yellow, sad negative feelings are dark blue, angry feelings are bright red, calm feelings are pale green, and so on.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

If you've never visited WFF, this may be the beginning of an addiction...

However, a word of warning - go there at your liesure because this is no quick-fit web-site; it requires time: time to discover the different ways in which you can explore the feelings (there are six formal "movements" titled Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds) and time to immerse yourself in these various expressions of emotion, just as you might spend time in wandering from picture to picture in an art gallery or in browsing through the pages of a volume of poetry...

MY SECRET LIFE

Sometimes people ask me what I do when I'm not writing a daily blog...

I have always been a little shy about revealing such information...

But since it is now public knowledge - thanks to
of The New Haven Register:

Assistant State’s Attorney Brian Sibley Sr. said, "The jury spoke. Some you win, some you lose. Obviously, I’m disappointed. A lot of work goes into it. Apparently there wasn’t enough to satisfy six people to convict beyond a reasonable doubt."

Yes! I see no reason to hide the truth any longer: I am known (by those who know) as 'The Ironside of Kennington' - except, of course, when I lose the ruddy case!

'THE BLUE BOY' (NOT) BY GAINSBOROUGH!

An exhibition of portraits by Robert Wilson's went on show at the ACE Gallery in Los Angeles on Friday last, including this portrait of Brad Pitt, looking rather damp and a trifle blue.


There is also - as you will find below - a 'moving picture' version (though movement is suitably minimalist) resulting from a collaboration between photographer Wilson ("one of the world's masters of drama and light") and VOOM HD Networks ("the pioneer in HD television"), the result of which is "a groundbreaking video series of high-definition portraits for the 21st century..."

Hmmmm...

OK, OK... I'll stop making partisan use of inverted commas and let them pitch you the pitch without further interruption!

Over the past two years, Robert Wilson, one of the most exciting and influential innovators in theater, art and design, has been working with VOOM HD Networks as an Artist-in-Residence to create the VOOM PORTRAITS. These stunning works of art, so far numbering over thirty, have captured superstars and royalty, ordinary people and extraordinary animals, in a series of high-definition video portraits.


Each VOOM PORTRAIT is a set piece developed by Wilson in collaboration with his subjects, and draws inspiration from movies, art, history and more. For example, Winona Ryder is the character “Winnie” from the play “Happy Days” by Samuel Beckett (above); the portrait of HRH Princess Caroline of Hanover is inspired by her mother, Grace Kelly’s, role in “Rear Window,” as well as by the 19th century portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent; Willem Dafoe is a monstrous creature from a horror movie.

Varying in length between 2 and 15 minutes, the VOOM PORTRAITS seem at first glance to be traditional still portraits. But then, the sitters perform a simple act—a small movement, a blink, a tap of the foot—and the experience of watching them changes entirely. The clarity of HD technology heightens these subtle effects, and an accompanying soundtrack adds an additional element of drama.

So, now you know... Here's Brad...



Ah, well, as the Devil comments in Rudyard Kipling's poem, 'The Conundrum of the Workshops':

"It's pretty, but is it ART?"

[Read more about Robert Wilson's Voom Portraits ; read the full text of Kipling's poem]