It’s no secret that the Chinese are superstitious and look at things differently. The Cantonese and their play on words is truly inexhaustible and likely unappreciated by non-Chinese speakers. They find it totally ridiculous. Take numbers for instance. Number 4 is unlucky and you might wonder why. In Cantonese, the word four translates into say, [...]
Writing associations… I don’t mean groups, but how we hear a story or a name and link them. I was watching on TV “Turn of the screw,” and the first thing that came to mind was Henry James, the author. This got me thinking how many times we do it. There are obvious cases where [...]
Back in the early 80’s, in my farmwife days, I was a newspaper columnist in Morris, Minnesota, author of “Melly’s Memorabilia” for the “Morris Tribune”, receiving $25 per weekly column published. Morris, population 5,000, three hours west of the Twin Cities, was the largest town within an hour’s drive. The “Morris Tribune” was the type [...]
An often asked question, over the years in Country Music People. Why don’t we in the UK get the major US stars on tour any more? The answer is two-fold, both equally important. First, the cost of the tour over here would far out weigh the CDs sold, so no matter what you gained in [...]
The traditional coffeehouse is never to be confused with the recent proliferation of corporate-owned and operated cookie-cutter chain coffee shop/cafes brought to us by Starbucks and others. If you think a Starbucks is a “coffeehouse,” try dressing down, taking your guitar and smokes with you into one, sit down and light up and start to [...]
I am a simple gardener–I spade, sow, seed, water, then I plant and wait. Loving variety, I am also an eclectic gardener, never like Secret Garden’s Frances Hodgson Bennett’s garden where three hundred coral-pink roses bloomed. Three hundred roses on my fifty by seventy-five foot plot would require me to move my house, although I [...]
The definition of a cult film is as slippery as any eel. Around its boundaries are pure camp movies, hopelessly dated films, movies so bad they’re good, and the like. Authorities seem never to agree on one unambiguous definition for a cult classic. There will, apparently, always be fuzzy edges and movies argued for and [...]
Artist Paul Cezanne spoke to the question when he said: “A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. Emotion is the starting point, the beginning and the end. Craftsmanship and technique are in the middle.” You may remember reading that the first time I saw a photograph of Jean Moulin, [...]
Is there a typical male art buyer? No more and no less than there is a typical male clothing buyer or car buyer. That still means they buy like men and not like women. Do more men buy animal scenes and sports-related art? Certainly. Still, most men truisms never equate to every man realities. So, [...]
As a buyer, I know that buying art is the most exciting event. As a buyer, I know that I enjoy every piece of part I have purchased every single day of my life as I give it admiring glances as I pass by. Every once in a while for no particular reason, a painting [...]
