Photographed on the Unter den Linden, 1920s Berlin.
Heading to Gatsby’s Place 1 comment
Pensive On a Cool Spring Night Leave a comment
Contact Sheet 53 — Magissa Denver Leave a comment
Contact Sheet is an irregular column of selected photographs and portraits from Residents of Second Life and other virtual worlds. All rights to featured images are reserved to the artists under appropriate copyright laws. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog, Flickr or Koinup page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here), if you have an account on the appropriate service.
Suggestions are appreciated; please send descriptions and links to me by in-world IM, notecard, E-mail to harper.ganesvoort@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.
NOTICE: Some of the photos/links may contain nudity. Viewer discretion advised.
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“…Armansky’s star researcher was a pale, anorexic young woman who had hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows. She had a wasp tattoo about an inch long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm and another around her left ankle. On those occasions when she had been wearing a tank top, Armansky also saw that she had a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade. She was a natural redhead, but she dyed her hair raven black. She looks as though she had just emerged from a week-long orgy with a gang of hard rockers…..”
- Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Lisabet Salander has nothing on this model, in Magissa Denver’s lovely photo Puhi~ The koi fish. The unknown model sports a full-body tattoo of a leaping koi on her back; very lovely, elegantly posed. The Asian theme here is enhanced by the woman’s Japanese hairstyle and the buildings she faces as she shows off her adornment to us. You could study this for an hour and not get tired of it….
Copyright 2013 by Magissa Denver; all rights reserved.
For Mother Maybelle Leave a comment
Oh he taught me to love him and call me his flower
That was blooming to cheer him through life’s dreary hour
How i long to see him and regret the dark hour
He’s gone and neglected his pale wildwood flower
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Today (May 10) is the birthday of Maybelle Addington Carter, who rose to fame in the 1920s along with her cousin and brother-in-law, Sara and A. P. Carter, as the Carter Family. Following the breakup of that act in the Forties, Maybelle continued touring with her daughters, Anita, Helen and June as “Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters,” and then took back the name of The Carter Family in the Sixties. June married Johnny Cash and went on to her own solo and family fame, and Maybelle performed in their acts and on Johnny’s television show.
Mother Maybelle was a quite accomplished instrumentalist as well as vocalist. Her guitar technique was peculiar from the norm — she often played the melody line on the bass strings instead of the tenor side of the guitar, using the tenor strings for rhythm strumming. Her technique became known as the “Carter scratch,” and brought the guitar forward from a background instrument position to be the lead instrument. And, of course, Maybelle’s performances on the autoharp revolutionized that instrument as well. Instead of sitting with the zither on her lap and doing a simple strum, Maybelle would cradle it in her arms, resting the body on her shoulder; she strummed and played an abbreviated melody line with her right hand while chording the instrument with her left on the buttons. In the performances I’ve seen on YouTube, this kind of precluded her singing; but it produced some fascinating music, and paved the way for autoharp players of the folk era and later.
If you’re interested, look Maybelle up on YouTube, as I did; there are a number of tapes and recordings preserved there (including one I’m embedding below with one of her best-known songs). You can also travel to Nashville, to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. She and the original Carter Family were inducted into the Hall in 1970.
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I was standing by my window,
On one cold and cloudy day
When I saw that hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, Lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky
I said to that undertaker
Undertaker please drive slow
For this lady you are carrying
Lord, I hate to see here go
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, Lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky
Contact Sheet 52 — Larcoco Mathy Leave a comment
Contact Sheet is an irregular column of selected photographs and portraits from Residents of Second Life and other virtual worlds. All rights to featured images are reserved to the artists under appropriate copyright laws. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog, Flickr or Koinup page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here), if you have an account on the appropriate service.
Suggestions are appreciated; please send descriptions and links to me by in-world IM, notecard, E-mail to harper.ganesvoort@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.
NOTICE: Some of the photos/links may contain nudity. Viewer discretion advised.
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I don’t publish nearly as many of this column as I could, and there are many reasons; but one is that, as I say above, the photos I talk about here are selected. There needs to be something about the shot that moves me in some way to write it up here, some feeling or emotion or simply a quality that catches my attention hard enough to log in to WordPress and do the work.
This photo fits that bill, though I wasn’t the discoverer. Cajsa Lilliehook twigged me onto it, with the latest trend in the “publishing empire” she runs centered on her blog, It’s Only Fashion. Both Cajsa and Gidge Uriza publish their own periodic columns of a fast five links to items that catch their attention, and this photo, by Larcoco Mathy, was in today’s piece by Cajsa. You truly get the sense of someone setting out on a journey to learn more about herself, to accomplish something for the benefit of herself or the world around her.
Contact Sheet 51 — Debbi Lombardo Leave a comment
Contact Sheet is an irregular column of selected photographs and portraits from Residents of Second Life and other virtual worlds. All rights to featured images are reserved to the artists under appropriate copyright laws. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog, Flickr or Koinup page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here), if you have an account on the appropriate service.
Suggestions are appreciated; please send descriptions and links to me by in-world IM, notecard, E-mail to harper.ganesvoort@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.
NOTICE: Some of the photos/links may contain nudity. Viewer discretion advised.
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If you have a Facebook account, head there and take a look at this photo. I’m not totally sure that this was done in Second Life or by a Resident, but it’s just too fantastic with its colors and its sense of motion. The artist is named Debbi Lombardo; and I hope you’ll click Like on this one when you get there. A thumbnail:
Copyright 2013 by Debbi Lombard; all rights reserved
Saluting King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands 2 comments
In salute to the inauguration of the new King and Queen of the Netherlands, her home country, Sascha Frangilli has created a new gown named Queen Máxima, in the orange of the Royal House. It will be right in the front of the New Items section of Sascha’s Designs, and at a very special price.
Proficiat aan Koning Willem-Alexander der Nederlanden, en Koningin Máxima! (Or, for my English readers, “Congratulations to King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and Queen Máxima!”) By the time you read this article, the former Prince of Orange-Nassau will have been inaugurated as the first King of the Netherlands since his great-great grandfather, William III, abdicated the throne in favor of the Princess Wilhelmina.
I am most definitely an American; a loyal daughter of Michigan, no matter which state I live in; and recent research on ancestry.com suggests that there is more German than Dutch in my background, family tradition and beliefs to the contrary. But I’m too old a filly to change my “tertiary allegiance,” if you take my meaning — I’ve rooted for Holland when they weren’t up against USA in anything over the years, especially at the Winter Olympics. So my best wishes both to the incoming king and his family, and to the outgoing Queen Beatrix as she returns to being a princess, in the tradition of her mother and grandmother.
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One of the prettiest national anthems on the planet is Het Wilhelmus, which I first heard in the Seventies over a hissy shortwave radio that I had oh so carefully tuned to the proper frequency for Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (the Dutch version of the BBC World Service, but now sadly off the air), and then prayed that atmospheric conditions would hold. It helped a lot that Radio Nederland maintained a transmission relay station in Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles, aimed at North America, which meant a good signal if I could get past the BBC. I’d recognize two pieces of music on that station: the “interval tone” of a set of carillon bells, played beginning at 5 minutes before the night’s programming began to help listeners tune in; and, on Sunday nights, Het Wilhelmus, in an instrumental version, which closed off the weekly Happy Station program.
The full song, it should be noted, is fifteen stanzas long! Usually, only the first and sixth verses are sung at most — more typically just the first, just like in the United States. (How many of us know anything of “The Star-Spangled Banner” beyond the first verse (grin)?)
