A quiet place.
I have over the years tried to teach myself to read music, play the guitar and the piano. I can never remember what the written musical notes mean, I hate hitting wrong keys or plucking the wrong string, I hate my incompetency. Neither my brain nor my fingers want to do it and I refuse to try again. Yet, blessed beyond my dreams, I have sons who can play pieces like Beethoven’s Sonata Quasi una Fantasia, which I more easily remember as Moonlight Sonata.
Here’s Luke at his piano yesterday:
A bit of research on Google revealed that this ad for Abbots Lager was painted near Tobruk, Libya, in January 1941 by the 6th Division of the Australian Army. (‘Journey to Tobruk: John Murray – Bushman, Soldier, Survivor’ by Louise Austin).
My father wrote under the photo: ‘Australian beer is best’.
This clock tower is in Beirut. The caption my father wrote under the photo gave the town of Tripoli as the tower’s home, but a search for it on Google images showed me where it really is. It was built in 1934 and survived the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and 80s. Four new clock faces with Roman numerals have replaced the faces you see here. The tower is no longer encircled by concrete, but flower beds.
The Australian troops trained in Palestine on their way to Egypt and Libya. In the war album there are a number of photographs from Lebanon, indicating they must have had rec leave in Beirut.
I received a few gifts on the weekend. One of them was this candle holder from one of my sons. The candle is also new. I took several shots of it burning: lights on, lights off, flash on, flash off, a compact digital camera, a larger DSLR. This photo is with the latter, lights on, flash off. I couldn’t hold the small camera steady enough and ended up with blurry candles. The DSLR shutter was quicker so the image isn’t bad.
The candle was about twice this height when I began shooting it…
In the old sketchbooks there are four drawings of reclining women on the phone. They all resemble women from Vargas’s calendars. This one is influenced by Orientalism and is the best of the four.
This drawing is from one of my father’s sketch books. You’ll see that the woman in his heart thought bubble is not my mother (see entry for 7th February). Perhaps she’s the woman who was posing in the art class. Perhaps she’s the generic woman that every soldier thinks about in the desert, standing next to a cactus, holding a very big gun.
So many of the photos we took on the weekend are studies in blue. This one shows that blue does not always mean down. When you’re beside blue water, under a blue sky, in front of a blue lamp post, and it’s your birthday, blue means up.
Today’s theme is a curious one for me. We don’t use the word closet in Australia except to speak of someone with secret habits. We store our clothes in a wardrobe. Since I’m at the beach for the weekend and I have no access to mine, I thought of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and that magical piece of furniture that one can step through to find a land of dreams and terrors. If I could step through my clothes and the back of my wardrobe, I would come out into this land:
I was walking here this afternoon. It was about 5 pm and the sun had finally shone for the first time today. The water clarity and temperature, the warmth of the sun after yet another cool summer day (global cooling), the absence of people, the eternal rolling of the waves; all of it is perfect. These beaches on the south coast of New South Wales make me VERY happy.
At my front door a visitor sees inside and outside at once.
