Art for the weekend; Helen Forbes

HELEN KATHERINE FORBES;
AMERICAN ARTIST

Information found at

http://www.nmwa.org/clara/search_artist_detail.asp?artist_id=19769&search=alpha

Artist's Biography:
Muralist and painter Helen Forbes is best known for her paintings of California and other Western subjects. Her mountainous landscapes, painted in vibrant colors, consist of flowing contours and semi-abstracted forms that capture the grace and beauty of the Southwest.


Forbes was born in San Francisco in 1891. She studied at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco with Frank Van Sloan and Armin Hansen, at the Akademic der Bildenden Künste in Munich, with André Lhote in Paris, and with Ernst Leyden in Amsterdam.


An avid traveler, Forbes lived and worked throughout Europe and the United States, but home was always California. While she painted and etched portraits and still lifes early in her career, starting in the 1920s, her work began to focus on rugged Western themes, including Death Valley, the Sierra Nevadas, and remote regions of California. The Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Cedar Peaks, and the mining town of Guanajuato, Mexico, which she visited in 1925 and 1926, were also great sources of inspiration.

Her murals, many of which were done under the Works Progress Administration, also depicted these motifs.


Forbes was commissioned to paint murals for the post offices in Susanville, Monrovia, and Merced, California. Her mural in Monrovia depicts California grizzly bears and manzanita shrubs.


Forbes was a member of the San Francisco Art Association and was president of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists from 1928 to 1930. She died in San Francisco in 1945.

john lee hooker & carlos santana , chill out

john lee hooker & carlos santana
  chill out

music for saturday,
a little late but worth waithing for

One of these days,
Things gonna change
One of these days
Tings gonna change
You'll try not baby
Afterwhile gonna be mine, gonna be mine
One of these days
I'm old and lonely baby
Cry Cry Crying
Wont be long long
Things gonna change

Sometime, in the middle of the night
And you're so long, and so long and so long
Tings gonna change, things gonna change
Change change change
Tings gonna change,

Further on up the road baby, things gonna change
Change change change
Change change change
Change baby
You'll try not to leave
But after while Gonna be mine
My time my time baby

Things gonna change
Change change change
Change change change
Things gonna change
Yes it is
Things gonna change
Change change change
Change change change

Change change change
Change change change

Things gonna change
Things gonna change
Things gonna change
Things gonna change change change change
Things gonna change

 

There can't be mny people left who havn't read this; BUT, just to make sure no one is left out, here it is again. Please go read it, I think you'll find it very amusing and enlightening. http://astranavigo08.multiply.com/journal/item/321/An_Open_Letter_to_the_Far_Right_The_Fundies_The_Birthers_The_Moonbats_and_the_Tinfoil-Hat-Brigade

The release of the'' Lockerbie Bomber'' .Abdel Basset al-Megrahi

The release on compassionate grounds, of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Mr Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, 57 seems to have caused quite a bit of controversy. I know this will make me very unpopular with some of my friends, but I’m going to say it anyway.
My reasons for agreeing with his release has nothing to do with the uncertainty surrounding his conviction

‘’ The BBC's Daniel Sandford in Washington said "broadly" families in the UK were concerned about the conviction, whereas US relatives were convinced of his guilt.’’
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/282145,background-the-long-and-complex-tale-of-the-lockerbie-bombing.html

‘’ In a highly critical assessment of the 2001 conviction, Scotland's Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) found in 2007 that al- Megrahi could have been the subject of a miscarriage of justice, and that his conviction "may be unsafe."
‘’ The commission pointed out that the Libyan's conviction was based on "wholly circumstantial evidence," and that a number of "critical inferences drawn were not sufficiently supported by the evidence." It also said that crucial documents had been withheld from the trial.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/8198603.stm

Although I think this is another discussion entirely, I did follow the case and I did think there were questions left unanswered regarding the evidence and yes, I did think it was probably an unsafe conviction.


But as I said, agreeing with this mans release on compassionate grounds has nothing to do with my concerns over the safety of the conviction. I agree with his release because………………..it IS the compassionate thing to do. There are those who say this man deserves no compassion because he showed no compassion. Those people could be right, but personally, I don’t want to place myself in the same category as him or any one else who lacks compassion. I want to be a compassionate person, most of the time I fail miserably but that’s no reason to stop trying. I’ve also read newspaper reports and watched television reports saying many Americans don’t understand our concept of release on compassionate grounds; I’ve heard there is no equivalent in American law. If that’s true it really doesn’t surprise me but it does reinforce my previously held belief that our judicial system is very different to the American system. A judicial system that lacks compassion comes perilously close to being a revenge system. The value of a judicial system in a civilized country is that it deals with crime and criminals in such a way as to remove the threat of mob rule and vigilanite attacks. It also replaces that utterly understandable raw thirst for revenge experienced by the victims and their families with a calm impartiality and full consideration of all evidence and facts. I believe the overriding priority of the courts is to preserve the safety of the public. If someone is deemed by the court to be a danger to society it’s the responsibility of the court to protect the public from harm and from that person, for how ever long it takes for that person to stop being a danger.

 My own personal belief is that ‘punishment’ for the sake of it serves no purpose, if a person is dangerous, the public needs protecting, if the person isn’t dangerous, I don’t see the point in keeping them locked up. To imprison someone is a huge financial drain on the state and the manpower used to guard/ care for that person could be much better used elsewhere. In this case the prisoner is a frail sick man who presents no danger to any one; he just wants to go home to die. In the case of younger, fitter prisoners, to keep them locked up if they are not danger to society is not only a waste of state resources, it also prevents the individual contributing  toward society in a positive way, which means the state loses twice.

But my belief about ‘punishment’ in general isn’t particularly relevant in this case. This case is about a man who is 57, very frail and about to die. This man presents no danger to any one, he is facing a death sentence of his own, and there is no possible way this man could ever present a danger to any one. Part of the reason this man is so sick is his illness remained undiagnosed until it was terminal. Not only does it seem right to make the compassionate decision to allow him to die in his own country, it seems inhumane not to allow it. And I know there are many who would say he does not deserve compassion and he acted inhumanly toward his victims, and this could be true. But as a citizen of this country I want my country to act humanly and with compassion toward every one. Not to do so only legitimizes inhumane treatment of others in different situations.

It also gives me a certain amount of pride knowing that Scotland (yes tiny Scotland) can stand up to considerable pressure from America and say NO. I can’t help thinking that if this man were in prison in England he would be left to die there because; England traditionally does what ever America asks. I’m so glad Scotland is not afraid to stand up for what is right.

THE EPIC JOURNEY 1973; PART TWO

The Epic Journey of 1973;
 a very personal journey.
Part two

I spent a while in Istanbul, I loved it. In some ways I didn’t want to leave but at the beginning of this epic journey, we had planned to go a lot further than Istanbul so off we went again. Until this point we had been hitching lifts, young and stupid though we were, we thought maybe this was the time to start taking public transport, so we did.

We travelled by train from Istanbul to Ankara, looking out of the window we could see a river with what looked like red mountains in the background. The river was shallow and ran by the side of the train tracks, the water looked red from the debris it must have collected as it came down the sides of the red mountains. There were little turtles swimming around in the river and sunning them selves on the rocks by the water edge. Along the waters edge were telegraph poles with telephone wires and all along these wires fluttered bright green and yellow birds that looked like budgies. The noise these birds made could be heard above the noise of the train. The ‘tea boy’ on this train was a young man who swing his tea urn full of boiling tea in and out of the passengers seemingly with out a care in the world, the train was crowded and I shrank back in horror imagining all sorts of horrendous accidents with boiling water and running children. I don’t think health and safety regulations had been introduced into Turkey at that time.
 I liked Ankara; it was a modern city with parks and good places to eat. If you strayed away from the city centre there seemed to be hundreds of little garages all repairing one or two cars on the road outside their premises. They all had their tiny radios with them and the sounds of lots of different Turkish songs mingled into one big buzz of the unfamiliar. There were western banks where all the staff spoke English and you could change currency or travellers checks. Apart from odd little things, like the call to prayer, Turkish music blaring out and signs written in Turkish, it was just like any other western city. The people didn’t seem to dress or act any differently to any other people in any other city.  From Ankara we took a bus to Tehran, (Persia) via towns called Erzurum (Turkey) and Tabriz (Persia) this was a trek into the unknown, we travelled through the desert. Erzurum had ‘’The Koran School’’; which was housed in a building with twin minarets. By the time we reached Erzurum, things began to look and feel very different. This town was part of Turkey (still is) but it felt more ‘part of the east’ than the rest of Turkey had. I remember the horse and carts there; they seemed to be the equivalent of the local taxi. I remember I had run out of film by the time I reached Erzurum and didn’t manage to take any photos. These photos I came across on the web, they were marked Erzurum 1973, and I must admit it is exactly how I remember it. They came from this site
 http://www.merhabaturkey.com/1SHOWSBindex.html



On we travelled, another bus, another journey. I had never seen a desert before; I found the experience of the desert quite spiritual in a strange way. I began thinking about how different religions all seem to have stories about the desert and I began to understand why this should be. If you haven’t done it yourself, it’s a very difficult experience to explain. I found myself sitting on a bus, a pretty uncomfortable bus, for a couple of days, with only a few stops at places with  basic toilet facilities and dubious looking drinking water, and all in temperatures I had never experienced before. The air was hot and still, there was no wind, not even a breeze, they skys were without cloud, the desert looked endless. There was a road, more like a dirt track, as we headed east there were mountains to the left and a vast expanse of desert scrubland to the right. This scrubland was acrid and barren with tiny bits of yellowed grasses scattered around. If the air moved at all they bounced around the desert in dusty yellow balls. If you looked very hard you could see little villages with mud huts sheltered at the base of the mountain range to your left. Then our bus broke down, I never did find out why. Every one was asked to get off the bus and a group of men tried to fix it. These photos were taken in the middle of the dessert when the bus broke down. If you look carefully you can see the mud hut village at the base of the mountain.

 

Eventually the men managed to get the bus going again and we continued on our journey. We left Turkey, entered Persia and passed through Tabriz. Again I didn’t manage to take photos in Tabriz, I think the very hot climate coupled with photographic technology of 1973 didn’t make it easy to get goods shots.  Tabriz is the dominant city of Northwest Persia and is the second largest city in Persia. Tabriz has been a centre of the Persian carpet trade for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years and it is these carpets that I remember, there were rug shops every where, the most amazing rugs I had ever seen. These are pictures (not taken by me) of one of the traditional Persian rugs of that area.
 http://www.oriental-rugs.com/persian-tabriz-rug.html



And then we arrived in Tehran, what a joy it was to get off that bus and find ourselves a cheap hotel for the night. The city of Tehran was lovely; it was clean and there was the most wonderful park in the centre of the city, it was like a little oasis of green after spending days in the desert. The people all seemed friendly; most people seemed to speak English and they all had a favourite restaurant or a favourite shop to recommend. It felt like a city of culture, of art, of education, there were so many things to see and so much to learn. I wish I taken more photos, I wish I remembered more of the sightseeing. I have learnt a valuable lesson from my time there. Take nothing for granted; because never in a million years would I ever have believed this wonderful city would become what it is today. If I had known how very privileged and lucky I was to experience that city at that time every moment of my time there would be indelibly imprinted on my mind. Hind sight is a wonderful thing, at the time it was just another leg in the journey. It was here that I met up with and spent time with a young German couple; this is a picture of me and the girl in the main street of Tehran and a picture of the couple sitting on the wall of Tehran Park in the centre of the city.


It breaks my heart to remember that city as it was in the 1970’s, pre revolution Persia/Iran is unimaginable for most people today. This is a web site that shows more of life in Persia/Iran in the 1970’s, it’s very interesting, it shows a modern vibrant city full of young people dressed in typical 1970’s fashion, including mini-skirts, wandering around just like young people in any modern city.

http://www.pagef30.com/2009/04/iran-in-1970s-before-islamic-revolution.html

Next stop after Iran was Afghanistan, more uncomfortable buses, more deserts, more stiflingly hot air and more scorched, cloudless skys. Before we left Persia we passed through Mashhad. This city is now known as a pilgrimage site for Shiites; they go there to pay homage to ‘Imam Reza’, an Islamic holy man believed to have been assassinated in AD 817. In the 1970s, when I was there, Mashhad was an important center for commerce, religion and tourism, known particularly as the gateway to Afghanistan. The political situation over the whole of that area has destroyed almost all trade and travel and left the town primarily a religious town. This picture is one I found on the net, it is a school photo with the teacher taken in Mashhad in 1973.


I remember vividly entering Herat, the border town of Afghanistan. It wasn’t a very big town, and it was obviously smaller, more rural, less wealthy and altogether different to the wonderful cities and towns  of Persia we had so recently left. The thing I remember with such clarity about Herat is the many small lorries and carts, all hand painted in bright designs and colours and the way every vehicle seemed to have people stuffed inside, sitting on the roof and hanging off the edges. Along the main street there were people selling water melons, huge big ripe water melons and for some reason they also sold orange Fanta fizzy drinks. I’ve no idea why they sold Fanta as opposed to any other fizzy drink, but they did. The water melons were the sweetest imaginable, they were so very big and as soon as you cut into them the pale red juices would start to dribble out, in no time at all and no matter how clean you tried to stay, they red juice of the watermelon dripped up your arms. They also had shoe shops, but not like any shoe shop I had ever seen before. This sort of shoe shop was an open fronted building with a man sitting on red hand woven rugs at the back of his ‘shop’; he would have his tea urn and his hubbly pipe. He would sit hand stitching sandals made out of camel leather. If you wanted a pair of sandals from  this man, he would draw around your foot to make a template and from that he would hand stitch you a pair of camel leather sandals, usually in a couple of hours. There were two not so nice memorable things we took from Herat, one was the flies, there were flies every where and they seemed to stay every where until I left Afghanistan. And there was the poverty. Not I hasten to add povery as you would see in some under developed countries now, but poverty like I had never seen before. There were children, mostly young boys, who pushed carts full of peoples luggage or sometimes they would be seen pushing cart loads full of melons. These young boys, about 8 years old, lived on the streets; their carts were their homes and their means of making a living. At night when all was quiet they would sleep under their carts or sometimes curled up on top of their carts. They were always ready for the next customer, it was a hand to mouth existence but somehow they seemed to manage. None of them were very big children, but neither were they the emaciated pot bellied kids we see on all the famine appeals. Herat seemed to have a few bakers  where visitors and tourists bought the very sweet and aromatically flavoured local pastry for these children. There were also tea shops every where, every one drank tea all of the time, hot, sweet, strong, black tea served into your small china cup from a long handled metal jug. Herat was a small town, its main purpose was as a border crossing in or out of Afghanistan. We spent a week or so there and then decided to move on toward Kabul.

 Photos from Wikipedia of local Musicians in Herat, 1973.


This has taken me much longer to write out than I expected and consequently, I haven't managed to get as far as I planned, a bit like the real journey I suppose, nothing goes exactly to plan. Tomorrow the next installment will see us travel through Afghanistan.

The Epic Journey of 1973;, part one

The Epic Journey of 1973;
 a very personal journey.
Part one
from Portsmouth to Instanbul

First I need to apologise for the very poor quality of these photos, they have been collecting dust since 1973 and in 1973, much as I already loved my camera, I wasn’t particularly good at photography. I’ve scanned them but at the moment I don’t even have photoshop, so like I said, my apologies for the state of the photos.

The story starts early in the year, about January time, I was already living in Portsmouth, by the sea, a couple of hundred miles from my parents. One cold day in January, I took myself away on the train to visit my parents. I had a very old fur coat, something I wouldn’t be seen dead in now but at the time I loved it, I lived in it. It was one of my favourite possessions, I found it lying in a second hand shop, picked it up, put it on and hence forth, was rarely seen without it! It took me a bus, then a train, then the underground train through London, then another train and then another bus before I reached my parents house. That left a lot of time for thinking and I found myself thinking about the pleasures of a travelling. I always planned to travel and by the time I returned home to my little flat in Portsmouth, my epic journey was virtually mapped out in my head. In 1973 things seemed so much easier and a lot less complicated than they are now, I asked a couple of friends if they wanted to travel, I took a couple of jobs waitressing to earn extra cash, I lived of beans on toast and soup for a few months and scraped enough money together to………well to just go.

My very best friend came to see me in Portsmouth before I left and we arranged to travel some of the way together. Her name was (is) Sarah but I always called her Sally, I can’t remember the last time I saw her, probably 30 years ago. This is a photograph of Sally and I sitting on the wall outside my flat in Portsmouth, she is the one in the foreground, on the left. It was taken on Saturday 10/03/73, If this lady happens to be your friend, your sister, your wife, your mother or even your granny, please point this out to her because I have no idea where she is now.
We sailed from Portsmouth on the ferry on 25/05/73 and arrived at la Havre the following day. We met some French students and spent the first night away from home in rooms, on the top floor of the Halls of Residence of a French University. We watched a magnificent thunderstorm. I can’t even remember which university it was.

We travelled South through France and stopped for a couple of days at a very dilapidated French farm house, it was a wonderful place, no facilities and surrounded by unadulterated nature at its best. It was somewhere near to Lyon I think. This is me with one of my travelling companions

Our journey took us through Orleans, Toulouse and Grenoble and then on to Switzerland. I remember sitting and watching the huge fountain on Lake Genève, I had never seen any thing like it, I must have sat for an hour or so mesmerised by it and then later I remember walking along the rivers edge and watching eagles swoop down into the water from the trees far above. This is a photo of me sitting on the grass in Genève.

From Genève we headed south toward Italy, we decided to travel through the Mont Blanc Tunnel, no one warned me it would be so cold, I think I arrived in sandals and almost got frost bite in my toes. First opportunity I had I changed into coat and winter wear. This is a picture of me at the entrance of the tunnel; I think it’s the Italian side.


I last saw Sally in France, at the farmhouse and I had arranged to meet her in Florence so I was quite anxious to get there. We travelled down through Turin, Genoa and then on to Florence.

This is a picture of me meeting Sally in Florence, and the other two are pictures of me in Florence. We arranged to meet on the Ponte Vecchio after which we wandered around drinking in the sights and smells and pleasures of Florence.


I spent a while soaking up the sights of Florence before heading off toward Brindisi where we boarded another ferry to Corfu.
 And there we were in Greece. We didn’t do the normal tourist thing, instead of heading south to Rome or Athens, we headed north. That was a fascinating journey, if I hadn’t been so young and stupid I would have been terrified. We travelled in a lorry driven by a kind but reckless local man. He drove his lorry along tiny winding roads that spiralled around mountains, teetered around corners, struggled with the climb and swung out perilously close to the edge; close to the edge of a road which dropped away into a great endless abyss. There were shrines all along that mountain road and every so often you could peer down the mountain and see cars that didn’t quite make the last corner. These photos are from that journey. They don’t even come close to showing what a perilous journey it was.


Once we reached the north of Greece the road and the terrain settled down. We passed Thessalonica and got a lift from a very kind family who were travelling in a camper van. The couple had decided to sell up and take the kids around Europe, so they sold their house, bought a camper van, packed the bare essentials, packed the kids and set off. We spent a week on a Greek Island with them, Thasos I believe, but there was no tourism there at the time, just miles of golden sand, crystal clear water permanently heated to the temperature of a warm bath and shoals of little fishes that darted every where as you waded in. By eleven in the morning it was too hot and you needed to nap under a tree or get burnt in the sun. There were no facilities on that expanse of beach, these people just parked up and camped. What a great week that was.



When we left them we headed east toward Istanbul, Gateway to the East. Crossing that bridge for the first time was one of the most memorable moments of my live. It truly was like a giant crossroads between one world and another. That bridge is where East meets West, it has nothing to do with political boundaries, Turkey started a while before we reached the bridge and the subtle changes began before we had left Greece, but the real change, the boundary between east and west, happen on that bridge. I loved Istanbul, it was exotic and exciting. I’ve never been back there but one day I will.

Tommorow, part two,
from Istanbul to Kandahar

I don't usually do this but;
 due to the personl nature of this blog,
consider all of it covered by copywright,
THIS IS MINE

TIM MARSHALL; THE TRUTH ABOUT THAT WEDDING

I am very upset that here on multiply there still seems to be some people who believe the mass wedding that took place in Gazza last week was a mass child bride wedding. This is simply not true, this is the report from Tim Marshall of Sky News. He is the reporter who was actually at the wedding and brought the video and report back to us in the West. As you can see he is no lover of Hamas but neither does he want to be party to untrue Propaganda. These are his words, he was there, we were not, this is what he says on the subject. Some blog sites have already taken down these untrue reports because to be associated with (as he calls it ) ignorance and propaganda does the reputation of blog sites no good at all. This is his blog, visit here and you can ask him questions about the wedding.

http://blogs.news.sky.com/foreignmatters/Post:dcc9d723-8046-4857-b618-5c1135ba6417

Islamophobia. Ignorance Or Propaganda?

Tim Marshall
August 04, 2009 8:26 AM

So, I've gatecrashed a Hamas wedding party in Gaza, as you do.

The party is for 450 grooms, the brides are elsewhere, some among the 5,000 or so guests. It's the way things are done here, Personally I'm for the mixing of the sexes, but I'm not about to argue, I'm outnumbered.
Up on the stage there's music and dancing. Everyone's having a good time, even me, although the Hamas robocops are making me a little nervous. Sure Hamas have cold blooded killers among them, sure they support the murder of children in Israel,sure they are cracking down on women's rights, but many of their supporters are just ordinary people. And they need a break.
The men and women are sitting, Most ignore the speeches, some even ignore the prayers. Then the fireworks
explode, the cheering begins, and in march the Hamas scouts, bashing drums, looking every inch the future Hamas fighters many will be. Then the grooms, aged about 18 to about 28. They are holding hands with their young nieces and cousins, little girls aged from about 3 to 8, made up to the nines, wearing white wedding dresses.
Up they all go to the stage, the cheering and music grows ever louder. The girls were having the time of their lives, but, getting a little bored after a while, came down off the stage to dance with each other and play games.
Our report on this put it into context saying that it took place just a mile from the Israeli border and was a message from Hamas about its strength confidence and future fighters. Oh and that the brides were elsewhere. Pretty straightforward.
It never struck me for a moment that the little girls might later be described in the bloggersphere as the brides! How naive I am.
Dozens, and I mean dozens, of websites took the video of the event and wrote lurid stories about Hamas mass paedophilia with headlines about '450 child brides', and endless copy about how disgusting this was, how it showed how depraved Islam is, et al, ad infinitum. Site after site jumped on the story, linking from one totally wrong load of rubbish to the next . I'll give credit to Tundra Tabloids who at least took down the video, but most sites just ploughed on regardless.
I spent a few hours visiting websites and leaving comments where I could. To little avail. Instead I received a steady stream of vitriol. The best response was on a site run by a Debbie Schlussel . The guy who posted it said he wasn't interested in the detail. The detail being the fact that the girls weren't the brides.
It showed how much some people want to believe nonsense like this, as it re-inforces their prejudices, always a comfortably fun thing to do. But Hamas, and the jihadists do enough terrible things without having to make things up about them. Most of the stuff I read was outright, unthinking, gleeful, Islamophobia from people who clearly knew nothing about Arab popular culture. It's as is they really beleive that because there are examples of child brides, it means all weddings are with child brides.
Some sites went so far as to complain that the mainstream media were complicit in paedophilia because they had reported the mass wedding but failed to mention that little girls were about to be raped that night. And so it went on, and on.
Perhaps I was making up the fact that the brides were elsewhere. It's possible. But who would you believe, the reporter who went to the event, or a desperately poor version of citizen journalist, sitting at home, making things up, not checking anything, and either unknowingly or deliberately, writing hysterical anti Islamic nonsense.

I've just been told, from what I guess is a pretty reliable source ''What people post on their sites is not something that Multiply interferes with''. So I guess if they don't mind the lies, there's not a lot I can do about it.