Cliff at Étretat, the Port d’Aval (1869) at the Norton Simon Museum

I was walking through The West Wing of the Norton Simon Museum and nearly screamed when I saw this painting of Cliff at Étretat, the Port d’Aval (1869) by Gustave Courbet.

Gold framed painting of the Cliffs of Étretat in the background with a gravel looking beach with a white and black boat in the midground and several large rocks in the foreground.

I couldn’t help but remember the Noël episode of the television series The West Wing (S2 E10) and Bernard’s flat delivery:

This is a painting of the cliffs of Étretat, cleverly entitled “The Cliffs of Étretat”.

Wall mounted museum card displayed next to a painting that reads: Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877) Cliff at Étretat, the Port d'Aval, 1869 Oil on Canvas The extension of a railway line from Paris via Le Havre brought tourism to the tiny fishing village of Étretat in the 1850's. Writers and artists soon flocked to the town, it's picturesque half-mile of beach, and its striking rock formations. Guy de Maupassant, Jacques Offenbach, Camille Corot, Eugene Boudin, and Claude Monet all spent time there, but none conjured its crumbled cliff faces and chill, frothy sea more effectively than Courbet, who spent five weeks in an Étretat cottage during the fall of 1869. His rugged method of paint application—using a palette knife as often as a brush—was ideally suited to the rough topography and lonely aspect of that place. The Norton Simon Foundation F.1969.06.2.P In the bottom corner is a blue circle with a white arrow followed by "326" ostensibly the indicator to play the accompanying audio tour portion for this artwork.
The museum wall card for the seascape oil painting

That episode described a similar painting by a minor (fictitious) painter Gustave Callioux who was apparently influenced by Courbet. The plot was likely art imitating real life as Courbet’s painting was apparently stolen by the Nazis

Perhaps the show’s reference was also a snipe at the Canadian children’s television show Caillou? One also has to wonder at the similarities of the name Cliff Calley who pops ups up in the show’s “Ways and Means” episode (S3, E3).

Listened to Episode 1 - The Legacy and Art of Charles White by This is Altadena from This is Altadena (Podomatic)

Welcome to This Is Altadena, a podcast hosted by the Altadena Libraries, celebrating people’s life experiences and stories, and the hidden histories of Altadena, California. In our inaugural episode, we look at the life and times of Altadena legend, artist Charles White. Library staffer Chloe Cavelier sat down with community members Veronica Jones, Keni Arts, and Eugene Hutchins for 3 in-depth conversations about Charles White, his art and legacy, and his ties to our thriving local art community. Then later, our own Aaron Kimbrell chats with resident Teen Librarian Isabelle Briggs about the amazing programs and services offered in the teen department here at the Altadena Library District. For more about Charles White, don't hesitate to reach out to the Altadena Library: https://www.altadenalibrary.org For more about Keni Arts, visit his website: https://keniarts.com

This podcast is simply awesome! It makes me proud to be a resident of Altadena, CA. Can’t wait to see what they continue to come up with.

Non-technical IndieWeb: Fun, Creativity, Community, and “Content”

I resemble that remark.

rakhim
–Credit: Rakhim

Um…

Er… I mean…

I resent that remark. 😉 

The point of having a website is putting something interesting on it right?

The IndieWeb wiki does tend toward the technical, but many of us are working toward remedying that. For those who haven’t found them yet, there are some pages around a variety of topics like poetry, crafts, hobbies, music, writing, journalism, education, and a variety of other businesses and use cases. How we don’t have one on art (yet) is beyond me… Hopefully these might help us begin to use our sites instead of incessantly building them, though this can be a happy hobby if you enjoy it.

If you’ve got an IndieWeb friendly site, why not use it to interact with others? Help aggregate people around other things in which you’re interested. One might interact with the micro.blog community around any of their tagmoji. (I’m personally hoping there will be one for the stationery, pen, and typewriter crowd.) One might also find some community on any of the various stubs (or by creating new stubs) on IndieWeb.xyz

For more practical advice and to borrow a proverbial page from the movie Finding Forrester, perhaps reading others’ words and borrowing or replying to them may also help you along. I find that starting and ending everything from my own website means that I’m never at a loss for content to consume or create. Just start a conversation, even if it’s just with yourself. This started out as a short reply, but grew into a longer post aggregating various ideas I’ve had banging around my head this month.

Rachel Syme recently made me think about “old school blogs”, and as interesting as her question was, I would recommend against getting stuck in that framing which can be a trap that limits your creativity. It’s your site, do what you want with it. Don’t make it a single topic. That will make it feel like work to use it.

The ever-wise Charlie Owen reminds of this and suggests a solution for others reading our content. 

Of course if building websites is your passion and you want to make a new one on a new platform every week, that’s cool too. Perhaps you could document the continuing refreshing of the process each time and that could be your content?

Of course if this isn’t enough, I’ll also recommend Matthias Ott‘s advice to Make it Personal. And for those with a more technical bent, Simon Collison has a recent and interesting take on how we might be a bit more creative with our technical skills in This Used to be Our Playground.

In any case, good luck and remember to have some fun!

Read Teageneration (or: why I don’t trust transporters) by fluffyfluffy (beesbuzz.biz)
A series of 3D-printed objects, starting by printing the iconic Utah Teapot, scanning the print, and printing the scan, iterating as the object degrades. Thi...
This poses an interesting question about copies of intellectual property. When does it become something else or someone else’s?
Read a thread by Kicks Condor (Twitter)
Read Child Ballads (Wikipedia)
The Child Ballads are 305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, anthologized by Francis James Child during the second half of the 19th century. Their lyrics and Child's studies of them were published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The tunes of most of the ballads were collected and published by Bertrand Harris Bronson in and around the 1960s.

Burl Ives’s 1949 album, The Return of the Wayfaring Stranger, for example, includes two: “Lord Randall” and “The Divil and the Farmer”. 

Annotated on August 04, 2020 at 08:59AM

In 1956 four albums (consisting of eight LPs) of 72 Child Ballads sung by Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd were released: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vols. 1–4. 

Annotated on August 04, 2020 at 09:05AM

Illustration by Arthur Rackham of Child Ballad 26, “The Twa Corbies” 

Annotated on August 04, 2020 at 09:06AM

Joan Baez sang ten Child ballads distributed among her first five albums, the liner notes of which identified them as such. 

Annotated on August 04, 2020 at 09:07AM

Watched The Celtic World, Lecture 23: Celtic Music and Dance by Jennifer Paxton from The Great Courses
Celtic instruments come to life in this lecture. Take a music lesson and learn about the carnyx, a war trumpet; the bodhrán, a hand drum; and the crwth, a lyre played with a bow. Treat your ears to samples of these and beautiful Irish singing, then watch clips of delightful Celtic dances based on classic traditions.
96% done with the series.
Bookmarked Archaeological art from Orkney - Brodgar (Brodgar)
Our archaeological art takes its inspiration from artefacts found in Orkney. Each one is a unique piece, made by archaeologist Chris Gee.
In the long summer evenings, when it hardly gets dark at all here in Orkney, you will often find Chris in his garden overlooking the archipelago, where he is chipping away at another stone. He finds delight in recreating Stone Age art using their tools and methods. And like them, he carefully selects local stone, with beautiful colours and patterns. In this way, he makes Neolithic ceremonial maces, stone axes, carved stone balls, enigmatic carved stone objects, and beautifully patterned sandstone which he sometimes colours with hematite and other natural dyes. It is awe-inspiring to think that his hands are recreating the same movements that someone right here in Orkney did more than five thousand years ago.