Dali House

Strange things happen all the time on northern England’s Lancashire moors, and here to keep the Pendle witches company is “The Singing Ringing Tree”, a musical sculpture in tuned, galvanised-steel pipes that twists and howls in the wind.

It brings to mind the wind organ that Dali wanted to build on a hill in Quermanco, Spain. Still waiting for that one to materialise. It might yet.

The resident curlews and merlins must wonder what to make of their moaning new neighbour, a panopticon devised by the London duo Tonlin Liu — Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu, who met in Hong Kong and set about “dismantling current mythology and inventing their own”, in Austria, Indonesia and here in Thailand, as well as in England and Hong Kong, as it says on their website.

The Singing Tree was officially unveiled at the end of 2006 atop Crown Point, south of Burnley, where I was born. The Cliviger wind turbines are whirling far to the east, and to the north is Pendle Hill with its famous nick.

See the rest.

Dali aficionado Paul Chimera, who served as publicity director for the original US Dali Museum in Beachwood, Ohio, before it moved to Florida and who’s also a member of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, has launched a website dedicated to the previously unseen works of art he’s helped bring into the public view in Buffalo, New York.

Click here to visit Dali Catalog. The link also appears in the “Call for Help” menu on the left.

In a startling revelation a couple of months ago, the widow and daughters of the late Dr Edmund Klein, a skin-cancer expert who apparently treated Dali in the 1970s for some form of a skin disorder — quite possibly cancer — unveiled 15 original, unknown Dali drawings and a sculpture that had been stored in a Buffalo bank vault.

Dali preferred to pay for professional services in his most readily available — and valuable — currency: his own art. After his manager contacted Dr Klein in 1972, the dermatologist visited Dali several times at the St Regis Hotel in New York and sometimes at the Dali homestead in Cadaques, Spain, as well.

Klein, who died in 1999, was paid with the sketches and a sculpture, all personally inscribed to him, with what Mrs Klein described as “a delightful angel theme running throughout most, because Dali told my husband he considered him his ‘guardian angel’ for the medical help and advice he gave him”.

A Buffalo-based journalist, Chimera, pictured here, handled the introduction and other text for a catalogue of the Klein collection, which is now on sale at his website for $21.99. The site features a video clip of the local news broadcast announcing the artwork’s reappearance.

As well as Dali’s angel on the cover, the works include nods to favoured themes like the DNA molecule and Don Quixote and an original sculpture with Dali’s handwritten authentification certificate.

For now, the art pieces have been returned to the vault, awaiting a decision on their final disposition.

Chimera says Dali initially contacted Klein after hearing that the skin specialist had received the Albert Lasker Award. America’s foremost medical prize. “I think Dr Klein probably treated Dali for a form of skin cancer,” he adds.

Salvador Dali’s “L’Ouroboros”

From the pedant’s encyclopaedia comes the revelation that Jesus and his apostles had more than bread and wine as appetisers at the Last Supper, followed by a main course of Christ’s body and blood.

Actually the news (olds?) came via Britain’s Daily Mail earlier this month: Leonardo da Vinci decided that the Last Supper menu ought to have included eel with orange slices.

The newspaper cited an interview in Gastronomica magazine in which art historian John Varriano claimed that a 1997 restoration of Leonardo’s iconic painting showed these delicacies — “very fashionable in the 1400s” — on the table.

And besides, Varriano said, his research on Leonardo found that he too was an eel connoisseur.

Below is an actual postcard of the actual “Last Supper” purchased in Milan, the actual city where Leo’s actual painting actually is.

It was given to me just as the Daily Mail was making its “Christ Menu Shock!” announcement by my colleague Veena Thoopkrajae, who had just returned from an actual trip to Milan and seen the actual masterpiece.

This is my “version” of a video created and posted on YouTube by entropious88 here. I don’t wish to take anything away from his terrific original, but the resolution was breaking up on playback, so I layered over some fresh effects (and added a picture of Dali with Eno at the end).

If the video doesn’t play properly here, try here.

Entropious used time-lapse photography to shoot a view across the Thames River in Komoka Provincial Park, west of London, Ontario, Canada (not far from where I grew up, actually). He’s done several others, all quite compelling, using other Eno tracks.

Here are the lyrics to this song, “This”, which comes from the 2005 album “Another Day On Earth”:

LuciaM, one of the most active members of the Google Earth Community, sent me the photo above, which she’d taken while roaming around New York City — just some buildings near the intersection of MacDougal & Houston, she believed.

Then later she noticed something else in the picture besides the buildings and the rather forlorn-looking fellow sitting on the front steps.

Yes, as if offering the poor guy some reassurance, there’s Our Salvador, peering from a billboard advertising the “Dali: Painting and Film” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. What a surreal place.