Edgy portraits with striped shirts

Let's focus on the art, not the gossip! Work from Sandro Kopp

Good olive oil and crusty bread

Bread, as my grandfather used to say, is the stuff of life. Add olive oil, and it's a very wonderful thing. My ultimate comfort food. Friends of ours have an olive oil museum on the Western coast of Turkey which is on our agenda for a visit next summer (there are a number of olive-focused museums here)....and Turkey is known for amazing bread, or ekmek (see photo for exemplars of Turkish ekmek)...

Pink ribbon mania

At least we can talk about breast cancer these days - even if the pink ribbon mania is a bit over the top - I'll take it, anyday!

Tea eggs

Sometimes I think I like the idea of tea eggs more than the actual tea eggness. There is something alluring about the process of making a tea egg - all of that bathing of eggs in soy, tea, etc. Perhaps I am really just tortured by what is, in retrospect, a terrible falsehood I told once, to get out of a second date with a boorish sort, which involved invoking illness related to the consumption of a thousand year-old egg (a different thing altogether, I know). In any case, check out the wonderful blog "the scent of green bananas" for more on tea eggs - I have copied the picture from that blog here...

Persepolis

My muse of the moment of the latest moment is the film PERSEPOLIS.

“As long as you are alive you can protest and shout, yet laughter is the most subversive weapon of all.”

Marjane Satrapi

Here is the "party line" on the film from The New York Times: Persepolis” is a simple story told by simple means. Like Marjane Satrapi's book, on which it is based, the film, directed by Ms. Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, consists essentially of a series of monochrome drawings, their bold black lines washed with nuances of gray. The pictures are arranged into the chronicle of a young girl’s coming of age in difficult times, a tale that unfolds with such grace, intelligence and charm that you almost take the wondrous aspects of its execution for granted."

Never a true fan of comix, M. convinced me that I would love this film, and he was right. It pulled on my heartstrings in so many memory ways, capturing the joy and rapture of young girlhood, the ravages of depression, being a punk rock kid, the love of grandmother and granddaughter. Amazing that black and white, and carefully chosen moments of color, can evoke so much.

Black and white are unsung tools, I am thinking. As M. is peeling a grapefruit within an inch of it's life, I recall the tumbling jasmine flowers throughout the film - especially a young girl asking her grandmother why jasmine fell out of her bra at the end of the night...you'll have to see the movie to get what that's about - be ready to really laugh - and cry too.

Flowering tea

...a lovely new thing entered my reality this evening thanks to new friends M and J - flowering tea - see whether you can figure it out...from strange bird's nest ball in pearly green shades to blooming underwater masterpiece this will surely capture your attention for hours on end...