A little nostalgic story

Posted on April 7, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

Books were an extraordinarily important part of my childhood and I tend to wax nostalgic when I run across a story online about one that I actually owned and read. This week, I happened on a piece about a book and a centennial anniversary of a little piece of New York City history.

In 1921, a little red lighthouse was taken out of storage, re-assembled, and put to work at Jeffrey’s Hook along the Hudson River in northern Manhattan. After operating for only ten years, the George Washington Bridge was built on top of the lighthouse, dwarfing the 40 foot structure and making it obsolete.

Hildegarde Swift wrote and Lynd Ward illustrated a book in which the George Washington Bridge asks the lighthouse for help and by doing so, shows the small structure that it wasn’t obsolete and even small things have their place. Thanks to the public’s love for this book the lighthouse was saved, given to the NYC Parks Department, and added to the National Registry of Historic Places.

So, happy anniversary to the Little Red Lighthouse and thanks to Hildegarde Swift and Lynd Ward for the many happy childhood reads.

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Mad For Alice

Posted on April 6, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

I’ve been mad for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books since I borrowed my first copy from my local library as a young child. Any museum or library show on the beloved classics is sure to get my attention. So, I sat up and took notice of  Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser at the V&A, London: Until December 31, 2021 We can all take a tumble down the rabbit hole, courtesy of the V&A’s latest exhibition in London. The exhibition celebrates all things Alice in Wonderland. Discover the origins and iterations of Lewis Carroll’s beloved books, before being taken on an immersive journey through the various adaptations and reinventions they’ve spawned over the past century and a half. Expect to see designs by Vivienne Westwood, original book illustrations, paintings by Salvador Dalí and fashion photo shoots, as well as eye-popping ballet costumes, psychedelic posters and much, much more. Hopefully, the V&A will be putting more from the show online in coming days.

 

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like a shadow or a friend

Posted on April 5, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

KINDNESS
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

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Collective Nouns

Posted on April 4, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

 

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The Best of France

Posted on April 3, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

Like many North Americans, I had a romantic notion of France before I actually visited. Growing up with a Francophile Mother who spoke fluent French, read French literature, and played Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour records daily, I was conditioned to love France long before I ever went there. Of course, I was disabused of those rosy notions within the first ten minutes of my arrival at the Gare du Nord Paris. Still, I continue to return to France and have learned to accept the real culture warts and all. So I was tickled by  ‘Keep the Best of France”  the latest campaign from Le Chocolat des Français to promote its new limited edition bars and pay tribute to French life, and the French people, with all of their foibles.

To seduce lovers of France, Le Chocolat des Français has teamed up with TBWA\Paris to create a limited-edition packaging of chocolate bars and a advertising campaign that will highlight the brand’s values of authenticity and deliciousness.

By playing with the paradox of positive and negative clichés about France, the campaign humorously invites lovers of the country to keep the best of France: Le Chocolat des Français and the positive clichés.

 

 

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True Grit

Posted on April 2, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

By now, regular visitors to TBTP are well aware of my fascination with all forms of printing and printmaking. So it will be no surprise that I was impressed by this brilliant, short demonstration of stone lithography. In the video below, co-produced by Daysix Film, Alistair Clark of Edinburgh Printmakers demonstrates the stone lithography printmaking technique, from graining the stone, drawing the image with greasy ink, processing the stone, inking the stone, and printing on paper with multiple colors. A separate stone is required for each color.

Located in a former brewery complex in the Fountainbridge district of Edinburgh, Scotland, Edinburgh Printmakers is home to one of the largest printmaking studios in Europe.

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It was the best of times…

Posted on April 1, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

I was quite amused by Eli Grober’s piece in the New Yorker, where he rewrote the opening sentences of iconic novels to make them reflect the insanity of our pandemic times. Here are a few choice examples :

“A Tale of Two Cities,” by Charles Dickens

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But, mostly, it was the worst of times. In fact, not once had it felt like the best of times.”

“To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee

“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. And since we were remote-learning, he had to sign his own cast.”

“Moby-Dick,” by Herman Melville

“Call me Ishmael327. I am a Twitter bot, trolling your election.”

“Gravity’s Rainbow,” by Thomas Pynchon

“A screaming comes across the sky. It is me. I am screaming. It feels good to scream.”

You can read all of them: “Opening Lines Rewritten for a Pandemic” (The New Yorker)

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Age is just a state of mind (or not)

Posted on March 31, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

Inspired by his own series of giant paste-up portraits, the French street artist known as  JR started a scheme back in 2011 encouraging people around the world to participate in his Inside Out project by doing their own pastings. They were encouraged to send in a portrait, shot in black and white, which was then printed in large format and sent back to them for free. These self-portraits have been pasted on buildings in large-scale outdoor artworks for ten years in 130 countries around the world. After 400,000 posters, the project is still going strong.

The Inside Out project has now morphed into JR’s new book, How Old Am I? The book charts people ages one through to 100 in numerical order, from one-year-old Gwen to 100-year-old Beatrice. Each age is represented by a person from a different country, and is intended to capture the process of growing older as well as the differences and similarities of people’s life experiences around the world.

Each section features a black and white photograph of the individual, a small map illustrating where they were born and where they live, and a short bio divulging their hopes and dreams, experiences and memories.

While the book incorporates photographs and vibrant design, the core of the book is the stories, which JR hopes will spark discussion between the children reading the book and their families. “My work is always an excuse to start a conversation, whatever it is and however we actually [do] that,” the artist explains. “Whenever we have those portraits pasted in the street or whenever I’m organizing a pasting, it’s actually an excuse for a conversation. That’s really the meaning of my work – it’s to create discussion.”

How Old Am I ? can be pre-ordered from the publisher here.

 

Posted in Africa, Art, Asia, Books, Europe, Middle East, Photography, South America, USA, Writing | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Paris For Free

Posted on March 30, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

Every time that I visit Paris, I go to the Louvre. In fact, on some trips I have gone twice in a week. It doesn’t look as though I’ll be popping in to France’s most iconic museum for quite a while. However, like everyone else around the world, I can now view the Louve’s artworks online, and not just the ones currently on display: through the new portal collections.louvre.fr, we can all now have digital access to every single one of the museum’s artworks online.

According to the museum’s press release, “For the first time ever, the entire Louvre collection is available online, whether works are on display in the museum, on long-term loan in other French institutions, or in storage.” This includes not just the “more than 480,000 works of art that are part of the national collections,” but the “so-called ‘MNR’ works (Musées Nationaux Récupération, or National Museums Recovery), recovered after WWII,” and “works on long-term loan from other French or foreign institutions such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Petit Palais, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, the British Museum and the archaeological museum of Heraklion.”

Check it out, but beware you may go down the art rabbit hole.

 

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Time Travel Is Possible

Posted on March 29, 2021 by Brian D. Butler

Although I hide it well, I have been a little obsessed with London for decades. I don’t know why, maybe it was my love for British Invasion music from the 60s or a childhood crush on Marianne Faithfull . Who knows, but it all culminated in a travel guidebook that I wrote way back in the early 80s called London for Free. Sadly, the book is long out of print, however my fascination with all things London continues. So, it will come as no surprise that I love the animated video below. Ollie Bye has created the animated time lapse of the growth of London from a small Roman town in 47 ACE to the largest city in the world (during the Victorian era) to the massive, sprawling city it is today. Trust me, it’s neat.

Posted in Art, Europe, Film, History, Maps, Tourism | Tagged , , | 1 Comment