BRIAN SIBLEY : his blog
my world and welcome to it
Monday 22 April 2024
EARTH DAY AND POGO
Friday 5 April 2024
Tuesday 2 April 2024
"A SKULL FULL OF MUSH!"
A splendid piece of cover-art featuring the work of the illustrator and distinguished fine artist Daniel Bennett Schwartz (b. 1929), made for TV Guide, the US television listings-magazine.
This issue (May 5-11, 1979) features an impressive double-portrait by Schwartz of James Stephens and John Houseman, stars of The Paper Chase, a law-school drama series that was a spin-off from the 1973 movie of the same name and which quickly became one of my favourite American TV shows of the late '70s and early '80s.
Always a fan of 'flamboyant' acting, I adored Houseman's towering reprise of his role in the original film: the domineering, curmudgeonly, sharp-tongued law tutor, Prof. Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. "You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of MUSH; you leave thinking like a lawyer."
Also, to be perfectly frank, I had more than a bit of crush on Kingsfield's student, James T. Hart, played by the blonde and bespectacled James Stephens–––
And there, I think, I had better stop lest I get tempted into making inappropriate jokes about legal briefs...
Monday 1 April 2024
EASTER IN MOOMINLAND
Along with one of my Easter Eggs yesterday came this delightful little button badge featuring Moominpappa, ever-reliable paterfamilias of Tove Jansson's Moomins and their extended family. [Many thanks S&R!].
This provides me with an opportunity to display a quartet of original Easter illustrations by Tove. Made in 1950, these illustrations were created using a mixed technique of ink, watercolor, and gouache and were later featured on postcards and sold at the department store Stockmann in Helsinki, Finland, during the spring of 1956.
Sunday 31 March 2024
Friday 29 March 2024
GOOD FRIDAY
Saturday 23 March 2024
EASTER TIMES PAST
Easter 1951 - C. F. Tunnicliffe (1901-1979)
Easter 1952 - S. R. Badmin (1906-1989)
Wednesday 20 March 2024
TIME FOR CHANGE!
Everything MUST be CHANGED!
And NOW ––– or SOONER!
Everyone knows: Dettol is yellowy-brown in colour and smells like a hospital.
FACT!
It is absolutely NOT this colour... and it does NOT smell of 'Lavender & Orange Oil'.
As American novelist Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945) observed:
"All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward."
Monday 18 March 2024
"THAT'S THE WAY TO DO IT!"
There are days when I totally despair of the rank bonkerness with which our media is now infested!
A display currently on show at
the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) 'mentions' (as a historical fact,
please note) that the popular seaside entertainment, the Punch & Judy Show,
has – over the years – opted to substitute the play's original 'Devil' puppet
with one modelled on the features of hated public figures including Adolf
Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and Osama bin Laden.
So?
Well, that story has now been
re-presented as the V&A promulgating the monstrous proposition that
Thatcher was as evil as Hitler and bin Laden and, as a result, that the museum
ought to have its funding taken away and that those responsible for
exhibition-label-writing should be flogged, naked, through the streets of
London!
What utter whiffle and piffle!
You can't possibly learn from history if you hide or deny it!
Anyway, here's Mrs Thatcher (or, rather, her 'Spitting Image' alter ego) as I accounted her at the Tate Gallery at their 2010 exhibition, 'Rude Britannia'.
Sunday 10 March 2024
MOTHERING SUNDAY 2024
Even when they're no longer with us, our Mothers are ever-present in our memories...
[Photo: David Weeks]