Dali House

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Back in the days when the middle-aged JMW Turner had no one actually willing to say his paintings were good, or even okay, a young fella called John Ruskin stood out in the middle of the crowd and used words like “brilliant” to describe Turner’s work. They became friends, Ruskin became a respected art critic and Turner became, eventually, brilliant in everyone’s eyes. See the rest.

In a letter about this 1931 painting to the French surrealist poet Paul Eluard, Dalí defined the clouds and the rainbow as being the spectre and the brick shape as being the phantom. The clouds take on forms as the viewer stares at them, reflecting the basis of Dalí’s Paranoia Critical method. See the rest.

Ah, simpler times. There’s a European newspaper (not the Danish one with the very worried cartoonists) that’s forging ahead with the paperless newspaper, which updates itself throughout the day via the Net, and much talk about sheets of sheer plastic on which the news magically updates through some trick of the molecular light.

Elsewhere progress isn’t in such a rush, media corporations content to merely downsize their broadsheets to chewable tabloid proportions for easier consumption by ever-mobile readers, and I think my own paper, Thailand’s The Nation, is ogling that possibility from a cautious distance.

In 1821 the British papers would have had stories about Greeks finding something more comfortable to rest their feet on than Ottomans and Spain losing not just Mexico and most of Central America to independence but Florida to those insatiable Americans. Oh, and that poor fellow Keats died and, somewhat less mournfully for the English, so did Napoleon. See the rest.

There’s a fella noodling around on Google Earth who has a website called Planetary Art Saved from Google Earth, where he stashes all the striking images he’s found of our planet forming itself (sometimes with human assistance) into astonishing eye candy. See the rest.

I have found, every time I’ve tried to peer more deeply into the entrancing art of Maurits Cornelis Escher, that the most amazing thing is you end up standing in a pool of mathematics, and if, like me, you lack adequate grounding in maths, you’re in for a shock. But there it is, plain for all to see, and no wonder the number tumblers love him. See the rest.