Category: Culture

Mr. Bleu

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Delighted to hear Bill Gross’ point of view regarding art collecting. He and his wife seem more impressed by stamps, which they’re renowned collectors.

I’ve never been much of an art aficionado myself, having settled for framing some All American Rockwells neatly clipped from old Saturday Evening Post covers. There was a time though when a well-publicized Rockwell came to auction and Sue and I expressed some interest. Ever since, we’ve been on the art house’s mailing lists and I must admit, it’s fun to browse through the Picassos, Rothkos, and whatever else currently frenzies modern collectors. I’m no expert though, and if I begin to pretend that I am, Sue puts me in my place because she’s the artist in the family. She likes to paint replicas of some of the famous pieces, using an overhead projector to copy the outlines and then just sort of fill in the spaces. “Why spend $20 million?” she’d say – “I can paint that one for $75”, and I must admit that one fabulous Picasso with signature “Sue”, heads the fireplace mantle in our bedroom

→ Janus Capital

A History of ETA

A brief history of the most infamous and highly distributed Swiss movement. 

The last we checked, the deadline was somewhere out in 2019 (2023 for Nivarox hairsprings – a much more difficult technology to reproduce).

And thus, ETA has become the little (watch) engine that could, that did, and now won’t for much longer.

→ Worn&Wound

B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations

The thrill is not yet gone as he helped pave the way to great artists and inspired many more to keep up the fight. 

“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.

“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”

And from the New Yorker :

That tension in his music—it was, in retrospect, I suppose, a play between a jazz ear and a blues hand, and even between the city and the country—paid off in a quality that I recognized at once that night, though I might not have known the word for it. It was the thing that marked him off from all those earnest English pasticheurs: B. B. King swung.

Credit : Danny Clinch

→ The New York Times

40 Years Since Saigon’s Fall

Rembering a brother and one of the most iconic photograph of the century :

“My brother, very good photographer,” Ut says, stepping away from where he shot his most famous photo. “I really love him. Every time he came back from assignments and showed the pictures, people die, the war. He showed his wife, he showed me. He was very angry. He said one day he was going to take a picture that would stop the war. But he never did. When he died, I heard his words in my ear. When I took the picture of Kim Phuc, I told my brother: ‘I have it for you.’”

Note : Title purposely shortened. 

→ The Guardian