Old World Swine

Old Steel

There is something about these vintage motorcycles that goes beyond mere nostalgia - the sentimental wish to return to something like one's childhood.

The lines of these old machines just seem to me more human, somehow. In the beginning, cars and motorcycle design looked to the past for inspiration. Then came a period of purely pragmatic development (form follows function), and then a period which looked to an imaginary future.

What shapes the design of such things, now?

These pictures are from a vintage motorcycle rally in Bella Vista, Arkansas last Saturday, June 26th, 2010.

You Know Things Are Bad...

You know things are bad when Canada's Economy is the envy of the world!

(*Heh-heh...*)

Tokyo in Tulsa?

Not much time to expand on this, but Saturday I went to an anime festival, Tokyo in Tulsa, as both chauffeur and chaperone to my daughter and some others.

Quite an experience. These kids (and a surprising number of adults, too) wear costumes of different characters from Japanese anime, from comics, video games, movies and just about anything else. These outfits are everything Halloween costumes should be but aren't anymore. Fun, for one thing. Yes, a lot of the young girls are dressing in a way too risque for their own good, but in general there is a lot more flesh exposed at your average picnic at the lake.

I do admire the creativity and ingenuity of a lot of the costumes, many of which are made by hand. Okay, some of them are kind of sad, and some of the participants need to, shall we say, re-think the whole concept. For instance, being a pudgy forty-something would serve to limit (in my mind) what sort of costume I might get away with. Try as I might, I don't see myself convincingly pulling off the role of a Jedi knight or Cosmic Warrior (or any other kind of warrior). Just give it some thought, is all I'm sayin'.

More on this fascinating event as time permits. I have to say, I found most of the kids polite and sweet, and very supportive and encouraging toward one another, even the scary looking ones.

I Never Forget a Face...

Okay, here's a brilliant idea. Somone at Google should get on this right away;

As I was reminded in my last post, it can be really hard to find an image online if you don't already know the name or source of the image. I mean, if you had a picture of the Mona Lisa, but didn't know it by title or that it was painted by Leonardo, how would you go about finding it, or finding more information about it?

There ought to be some search software that would allow you to search the web for a particular image, not by title or subject, but by matching the visual information of the image, using something like the facial recognition software now used in security applications.

So, you just need a digital image - from a camera, or the web, or a scanned image - which you could then feed into the search, and the software would generate a list of the closest visual matches to that image found on the web. You might even be able to use this to identify places or landmarks you had photographed but forgotten.

Of course, this might have its nefarious uses, as well.

But there you go, the next big thing in web searches. You folks at Google, just direct deposit my royalty checks.

You're welcome.

UPDATE: Well, it appears that this concept is already in the works (check the links in the combox), which is not that surprising, but... NUTS! There goes my royalty checks, not to mention everlasting fame....

Art Mystery Solved!

 
Armand Guillaumin - Portrait of the Artist

Reader Shmikey gets the prize... a genuine postcard! Just e-mail me your preferred snail mail address, Shmikey. I, too, knew it must be nineteenth century impressionism, but couldn't find the image. Kudos! You are truly a formidable internet sleuth.

The painter of the portrait in question in this post is (in Smikey's own words);

 Armand Guillaumin, born: Paris - 1841 / died: Orly, 1927

He was critically praised and admired through his career, and was a major presence in the Impressionist movement, with close ties to Gaugin, Pissarro, Cezanne and Monet. He was never quite as famous, but is recognized as "one of the few artists that critics agree epitomise true classic impressionism"

How Bantam Books ended up confusing this with Friedrich's Traveler Looking Over the Sea of Fog is an even greater mystery, though I find the portrait fits the character of Dr. Frankenstein (not his creature)very well. He appears haggard and haunted.

Find out more about Guillarmin HERE.

Art Mystery for the Day

 
This portrait was used on the cover of the Bantam Books edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that I have been reading. It's identified on the title page as Caspar David Friedrich's Traveler Looking Over the Sea of Fog, which is wrong. It's not Traveler... and it's not Friedrich.

Any guesses? First correct answer wins a genuine postcard.

By the way, Friedrich is one of my favorite landscape painters. Here is Traveler Looking Over the Sea of Fog...