Vines Gardens

The entrance to Vines Gardens. Photo by me, May 2018.

 
Last week I had the opportunity to take a walk through Vines Gardens in Loganville. Vines was on my list of places to visit, but I kept it on hold until spring which I thought would be the best time to visit. Now that it is becoming late spring, even though it feels like summer already, I remembered this garden and made my way there.

In searching the web may find lots of conflicting information about Vines Gardens. Some will say it is a botanical garden, some a restaurant, some an event venue, some a park, some a private residence. What Vines is, is a public park owned by Gwinnett County and it is free to visit the gardens. The house on the property is an event venue used for weddings and such. It is true that this was once a botanical garden and it was at one time a private residence too. Today the gardens are maintained by volunteers and you can wander around them at your leisure.

Photo by me, May 2018.

The property is 79 acres and features a paved trail of a half mile, a variety of garden types and a lake as a centerpiece. 

 

Photo by me, May 2018.

I entered the grounds and followed the path down a hill and turned right. The lake was in front of me and a white bridge spanned the water with nice views of the lake and gardens. You can get a sense standing on it of the size of the gardens and how peaceful they are.

Photos by me, May 2018.

Along the water's edge was a bed of yellow iris in bloom.

Photo by me, May 2018.

Photo by me, May 2018.

This is the view from the center of the bridge looking across the length of the lake. A gazebo is on the right and a deck overlooking the water is on the shore to the left.

Photo by me, May 2018.

One of the gardens on the property is the "Asian Garden." It was a pretty standard Japanese garden with maples of various sizes and other plantings. This garden is a shady place where the shadows give it a cozy presence.

Photos by me, May 2018.

Photo by me, May 2018.

Photo by me, May 2018.

The Japanese garden was perched on a small knoll and had a winding boardwalk that passed through. The garden had Japanese maples and other trees. As is common in Japanese gardens there was a water feature with a small pond, waterfall and a bridge. There was also a bench on which to sit and take in the shadows and filtered light through the trees. I imagine this garden is especially beautiful in the fall.

Georgia has an ideal climate for Japanese gardens and there are several scattered throughout the state, but most are rather small like this one. I keep hoping someone will come along and build a large Japanese garden in the state. 

 

Photo by me, May 2018.

The next garden is known as the "White Garden." The flowers and blooming bushes that are in this garden yield white blooms as you would expect. This was my favorite garden with the white blooms and the statuary.

Photos by me, May 2018.

Photos by me, May 2018.

This garden feels very delicate with all the white blooms and I missed the peak of the blooms that had come earlier in the spring, but there were still enough left to enjoy. There are white azaleas and honeysuckles and plants I am not familiar. The honeysuckles had already turned from their white color to their golden shade indicating they were ripe.

Photo by me, May 2018.

This large piece of statuary was of a nymph blowing a horn  atop a base that reminded me of a tiered wedding cake with cherubs encircling her. It adds a sense of formality to this garden before entering the rose garden that follows it.

Photos by me, May 2018.

Photo by me, May 2018.

From this perspective in the garden you can see the house that was built on this former estate across the lake. I do not believe I have every seen so many windows on a house that is not all that large. It had more windows than actual walls.

Photo by me, May 2018.

There is a small grove of trees that provide a gallery effect between the nymph statue and the rose garden like a visual pass-through.

Photos by me, May 2018.

A statue of a lion peers from the grove of trees into the rose garden. The variety of statuary was the best feature of all the gardens.

Photo by me, May 2018.

The rose garden was in bloom. Roses have such a distinct smell and any time I go through a rose garden I have to take in the fragrance.

Photos by me, May 2018.

Photos by me, May 2018.

This garden had a few different varieties of roses and I particularly liked the vivid pink one. Spanning the garden walkway were two rows of Doric columns. The rose garden had a feeling of the Mediterranean about it with the columns, the statuary and the towering trees that appear to be cedar that serve as a backdrop.

Photos by me, May 2018.

Of interest to children or young at heart adults there was a sizable model town set up with a train set. The train only runs on certain days of the month according to a sign. It was not running the day I visited.

Photos by me, May 2018.

I followed the path along the shore of the lake that is on the same side as the house and found even more color. The mountain laurel that was blooming had such vibrant colors. Rhododendron is most often just a very dull green bush or small tree, but when it blooms the colors are incredible. Along the path were also more iris and azalea in bloom.

Photo by me, May 2018.

One last glance of the lake looking across to the rose garden.

Photo by me, May 2018.

Vines Gardens exceeded my expectations in its beauty. I am so glad that I visited in the spring when so many things were blooming. I look forward to seeing it again, maybe in the fall.

May Blooms In Oakland Cemetery

The main gate at Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery. Photo by me.

After walking in Grant Park on Sunday I felt like I needed more exercise and went over to Oakland Cemetery. Oakland is not only a Victorian cemetery, but is also a city park. Spring is a good time to walk through the vast sea of graves and tombs because of all the flowers and the weather is not too hot yet by Georgia standards.

Photo by me.

Photo by me.

I stopped my walk to smell the roses. These roses remind me of my childhood home. We grew these exact same roses in their delicate light pink shade. These roses are faintly fragrant and come with nice sized thorns, I know because I cut myself many a time as a child on that rose bush. If not pruned these roses will grow into massive bushes. The one at my childhood home was humongous and covered one entire corner of our house.

Add caption

Photo by me.

These are a different variety of roses that were in bloom at the grave of Margaret Mitchell Marsh and her husband. Margaret Mitchell as she was better known was the author of a little book you might have heard of called, Gone With The Wind. She was killed in 1949 on Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta when she was run over by a drunk driver by the name of Hugh Gravitt.

The daughter of Mr. Gravitt published her own book in 2013 from her family's perspective about the accident that killed Margaret Mitchell. In her book she alleges that Margaret Mitchell was possibly murdered by her own husband John Marsh by pushing her in front of the car driven by Gravitt. She claims Gravitt was railroaded in court and it was not her father's fault that Mitchell was killed by his car. I have not read the book, but it sounds like a modern day conspiracy theory/nonsense cooked up to sell books to me. The reviews on Amazon make the book sound rather laughable.

Photo by me.

Photo by me.

Photo by me.

There were so many blooming plants and bushes that I did not take time to stop and photograph them all. I did stop to admire these beautiful irises that were in their full grandeur. That deep purple color is so rich.

Photo by me.

I stopped by to take a look at the massive sculpture of a sleeping lion cradling the Confederate flag. The sculpture is for remembering the unknown Confederate deaths during the American Civil War.

I enjoy walking in Oakland Cemetery for the peacefulness of the place and various sculptures that adorn the graves. Oakland is one of my favorite places in Atlanta.

A Saturday

It was a Saturday morning without a plan or a need for one. This past Saturday I cooked oatmeal for breakfast, had my coffee and put my feet up. It was going to be a lazy morning as I listened to Bill Evans Trio's album Sunday At The Village Vanguard. It might not have been a Sunday but I could pretend. Mellow was the mood as the morning came by, through and over me. There was no rush to do a thing as the dense humidity was building outside and the hot temperatures were brewing across the city.

I wanted to be the smooth notes of the piano and the bass and not be bothered to be bothered about a thought of anyone or anything. So the morning was just what I wanted as if I had ordered it out of an expensive catalog made of thick, slick paper.

A walking trail at Mason Mill. Photo by me in May 2018.

A beaver dam on the South Peachtree Creek. Photo by me in May 2018.

It would be late afternoon when the peak of the heat had climaxed before I decided to go beyond my door. I went for my regular walk at the South Peachtree Creek Trail near home. I did it from end to end and back again to make my goal of four miles for the walk.

I enjoyed the walk through the trees, over the creeks, to the sound of the singing birds and with the fading sun. My lazy Saturday was not so lazy after all.

Strange Days Indeed

I woke up early this morning and went out when the moon was still full in the constellation of Virgo and enjoyed the quiet of the city. Now the sun is rising as I sit down to write this with my coffee after breakfast. I have not written here this week so I thought I would take some time this morning to put down some words.

Inman Park Festival drinking, 2013. Photo by me, April 2013.

Later today I am headed to my favorite festival of the year in Atlanta and that is the Inman Park Festival. I used to do this festival with my former friend Rod, but he's moved to Arizona. We would spend the day at the festival people watching and enjoying the day with beers in our hands.

I dedicated six hours to watch that Netflix documentary, Wild Wild Country, that has been getting so much press lately. The film is about a cult that moved from India to a remote area of Oregon in the 1980s and built a commune. It is a wild story including attempted murders, poisoning an entire town, 90 Rolls Royces, greed, power and sex. However, it did not need to be six hours long and could have used a better framed editorial perspective instead of letting so many lies go unchallenged. It was not a very good documentary series. Of all the big stories of the 1980s I do not much remember this cult and their activities but then again this was in Oregon and no one paid much attention to Oregon then and that was a world away from where I grew up. I think people are acting as if this was a bigger story now and than it was at the time. It was probably a blip on the radar screen of new stories that would get buried in the last ten minutes of the national evening news.

The fashionable 80s cult in Oregon. Wild, Wild Country.

The part that I found most interesting were the clothes the cult members had to wear. If you were a member of this cult you had to wear the same color as everyone else. When it was India they all wore orange and when they came to the United States they changed colors to a more burgundy color. Their clothes were the coolest thing about this cult. They look so fashionable and stylish in their cult clothes and notice how skinny everyone was. The food we ate in the world was much more healthy back in those days. No one in my family was overweight and it was uncommon then to see overweight people, unfortunately diets and lifestyles have changed and now so many people are overweight. 

 
Here's one of my favorite of John Lennon songs, Nobody Told Me, from which I borrowed a lyric for the title of this post.



Strange days indeed...have a great weekend.

Rebellious Birds, Stalin Wets The Floor, Boring Isn't & Shadows

This Sunday morning outside my front door I listened to the cardinals sing and watched them feed and play or maybe they were fighting for territory, I'm not sure.

Every year about this time the cardinals come through in their pairs, they are always in pairs or couples, and they sing, feed and nest in the cedar trees. I enjoy the cardinals.

The cardinal was the favorite bird of my late grandfather on my mother's side of the family. He had bird feeders and enjoyed watching the birds. I like the cardinal too for it is red and that's a rebellious color in nature's color palette.

The cardinal is a common bird in the eastern half of the United States and what I find most interesting about them is that the male is more red and brightly colored than the female. The female cardinal is a more subdued red and has brown feathers too. I suppose the male is more red so that he might attract more potential mates but that's only a guess on my part.

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Last week I watched The Death of Stalin. The film is a comedy set around the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the power struggle that ensues.  It was mediocre. There was so much absurdity around the real death of Stalin and the characters that surrounded him that there was plenty of comedic material to work with yet this film never takes full advantage of it. The pacing is glacial at times and the film drags along in several scenes and you must wait forever to find any humor. The film is banned in Russia which isn't surprising. I wish the film was more absurd because to portray Stalin and his absurdity you need go full throttle absurd to even reflect an ounce of how crazy his reign truly was.

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Tom Boring. Photo by Eggleston.

On Saturday I read and thoroughly enjoyed this essay in Oxford American about famous photographer William Eggleston and his friend Tom Boring. The essay is a story of chaos, decadence and debauchery that only true Southerners can achieve. I love tales like this.

I am well familiar with the photography of Eggleston as he may be the most famous living American photographer at the moment and his wonderfully crazy life but I was not familiar with Tom Boring.

Tom Boring it seems was just as colorful and outlandish if not more so than Eggleston. You would expect Eggleston to have crazy friends especially in his younger days and so the essay introduced me to what might have been his closest friend. Tom was a fellow southerner living in Greenwood, Mississippi from a good background, served in the navy and became a dentist. I could never do justice to Tom's story like the linked essay does but I certainly want to know more about him now after reading it.

There's also a mystery about Tom's death in 1980. It seems Tom may have had enemies and his burned and beaten body was found in the ruins of his burned down house in Greenwood. The local police didn't seem to give a damn about the murder and now claim the records from that time were also lost in another fire. Sure...

I want to know more about Tom Boring, someone should write a book.

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And finally...

Photo by me, March 2018.

I couldn't get enough of the shadows this morning on my dining room floor. I stood and admired them for several minutes and finally took a photo. The sun on the wood floor and the shadows of my palm plants made me think of a hot summer day in Florida. The chair legs at the top of the photo make me wonder what has taken place in this room. Of course I know what takes place there because I eat there but if I weren't familiar with the room and chairs I would wonder about the people that have sat there in those spots. 

 

Insta-Glamour

  Wonderful it was looking at these photos in The Cut from someone I had never had of before. Antonio Lopez was glamorous and knew glamorous people and that shows in his photographs. Looking at the photos which were made with an inexpensive Instamatic camera they look current because of today's trendy use of filtered photos made to look old through applications such as Instagram or Lightroom. Lopez's photos though are authentic and are shot on 110 and 126 film like the first film I ever used in the early 1980s. However, my photos are nothing even remotely as interesting or glamorous as his since he was a glamorous person that knew glamorous people in a glamorous time in New York and Paris with disco and outrageous fashion dominating that cultural period.

Lopez wasn't a photographer by trade but instead he was a fashion illustrator. He did work for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Interview, Elle and the New York Times. He was however friends and neighbors with the legendary photographer Bill Cunningham. Lopez was actually friends with lots of famous people from the 70s and 80s jet set from Jessica Lange, Grace Coddington, Pat Cleveland, Jerry Hall, Karl Lagerfeld, Grace Jones to Tina Chow among others. Being surrounded by that much intense star power in that decadent time will provide plenty of glamour to photograph.

You can view more of his photos at the Danziger Gallery website and in person too when a show opens next month displaying his photography.

Though I am aware of and familiar with all the names surrounding Antonio Lopez, I wasn't familiar with him until today. He died at the age of 44 in 1987 from complications from AIDS. He was another victim of that time when AIDS was new and ravaging the creative world unabated.

A documentary covering a time in Lopez's life in the late 60s and 70s has been made and I will have to go see it. The film is called Antonio Lopez: Sex, Fashion and Disco.



Here's a review of the film in The Guardian.

Living In The Absurd

It has been apparent since January of 2017 when the orange nut job became president that our government was not to be trusted in anything they say or do. We are watching our freedom and institutions die every day before our eyes and nothing is being done about it. The Democrats are a feckless bunch and the Republicans as have been for decades are only out for the money and covering their own asses at the expense of us the people.

Just before the Soviet Union collapsed under Gorbachev the people there no longer believed in their government; they knew it was all absurd lies and so they didn't trust their leaders. After the collapse under Yeltsin all of the industries were gobbled up by oligarchs and power was consolidated into the hands of only a few. This may be what becomes of the United States. What was once unthinkable is now possible and that is that this country is over as we know it.

I'm a fan of the films that BBC documentarian Adam Curtis has been doing for years in trying to make sense of and offer a better understanding of the world we live in today. In one such film, Pandora's Box, he spends an hour discussing what I had written about above in regard to the Soviet Union before the fall. The film like many of his other BBC films is widely available on various video streaming sites such as YouTube.

The Deepest Sea Remains A Mystery

The opportunity presented itself a couple of weeks ago for me to dive back into the world and life of Nick Drake so I put down the book I had already started and picked up another Drake biography. I had recently read the biography of Drake by Patrick Humphries and when I came across a copy of Darker Than The Deepest Sea (published 2006) by Trevor Dann I couldn't resist it.

Nick Drake's world is a confusing and depressing place filled with beautiful music but reading two biographies on his life in a short span may have been too much for me. Still, reading Darker Than The Deepest Sea was a pleasure and it went quickly as I finished it in just two days. There's only so much information to mine about someone that lived so short a life and in a time when we didn't keep digital records of everything we do so if you've read Humphries' biography on Drake you aren't going to learn much new in this book.

Between the two biographies of Drake I found the one of Humphries to be more comprehensive and interested in dissecting every song by Drake versus the book by Dann which is more casual in its writing style but perhaps more updated having been published later with more accurate details about mostly minor things.

I did get a better sense of who young Nick was as Dann spends more time writing about Drake's public school days. For instance, I learned that Nick was a disinterested student that was barely accepted into college at Cambridge having to take his exams twice and waiting another school term. Without some pleading on his behalf from staff at his public school Drake would have never gotten a spot at Cambridge.

This book advances the idea that Drake was schizophrenic and that his drug abuse exacerbated his mental problems. Plenty of reference is made to the copious amounts of marijuana that he smoked for several years and again the idea that he was a user of heroin. The idea of him using heroin though has never been confirmed by any witness in anything that I have read about Drake. It is certainly possible that he used heroin given who he was hanging out with and that heroin seemed to fit his personality. This speculation is much different than in the Humphries biography which has Nick's friends strongly denying that he was ever known to have taken heroin.

But then Nick was a mystery to even his friends so whether he was a heroin user or not or whether he was gay or not (yes, this book too speculates on his sexuality) they simply cannot do anything more than speculate themselves like the rest us decades after his death.

People that were friends with Nick have felt like they never knew him well with his enigmatic comings and goings. So certainly none of the rest of us are ever going to figure the man out decades after his death no matter how hard we try. The dark and deep sea that was the life of Nick Drake is still a mystery. I say enjoy the music he left behind for that is what matters most and that was what made me discover him in the beginning.

This book is a good companion piece to the more in-depth biography written by Humphries. If you are a Drake fan of course the book is worth your time and if you for some reason have to choose between reading the Humphries biography or this one I would go with the one by Humphries.

Facebook Does Evil

So many smart and timely articles have been published recently about the terrible and dangerous ways Facebook is acting that I thought I would share three that I happened across today without even seeking them out.

The first article is from BuzzFeed News about how Facebook partners with the anti-democratic government in Cambodia in silencing dissent.
Excerpt:

When Facebook first came to Cambodia, many hoped it would help to usher in a new period of free speech, amplifying voices that countered the narrative of the government-friendly traditional press. Instead, the opposite has happened. Prime Minister Hun Sen is now using the platform to promote his message while jailing his critics, and his staff is doing its best to exploit Facebook’s own rules to shut down criticism — all through a direct relationship with the company’s staff.
Facebook has also dramatically reduced the reach of independent media in Cambodia after it decided last year to silo off their content as part of a controversial experiment. The company said this month it would make similar changes to News Feeds for users worldwide.

The second article is from Gizmodo and is about how Facebook spies on you and can track you by the dust on your cell phone camera lens. Really? Yes, really.
Excerpt:

It might assume two people knew each other if the images they uploaded looked like they were titled in the same series of photos—IMG_4605739.jpg and IMG_4605742, for example—or if lens scratches or dust were detectable in the same spots on the photos, revealing the photos were taken by the same camera.

The third article is from Vanity Fair and it touches on the potential downward spiral that is ahead for Facebook. I certainly hope Facebook faces a downward spiral and I do believe it is in trouble with users in Europe and in the United States but it may be overly optimistic in predicting a dramatic drop off in users like Myspace experienced. Facebook has long sought to increase its user base in Asia and that is where their growth, if they see any, will come from. I hope people in Asia are wise enough to avoid the Facebook trap.
Excerpt:

When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.

I have none of those applications on my phone and when I did I never allowed them to access my contacts because it was none of their damn business. I haven't had the Facebook app on my phone in years.

I'm still torn on having a Facebook account at all at this point, I don't ever use it but still it exists and that bothers me. I have deleted it before and then joined again six months later with a new account. This time if I delete my account it will be permanent with no going back.

Updated to add 1/15/2018:
Today in Davos at the World Economic Forum, George Soros made a speech on the dangers of Facebook on the human mind and the threats to society. Here's an excerpt from an article about his speech in the Guardian:

“This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”

In addition to skewing democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”.

“The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind’. There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences.”

Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places such as the Philippines.

Graffiti Woods

The South Peachtree Creek Trail and some of the large houses that overlook it. Photo by me, January 2018.

The streets still showed the battle signs of winter snow being that they were covered in salt and sand but on Sunday it was so warm you would have thought it was spring. The sudden warmth and deep blue sky lured the world or at least Atlanta out of its winter hibernation. I had planned to go for a long walk and apparently all of the city had the same idea which was to put on shorts and get outside, it was that warm. On Sunday the high reached 68 F (20C) and we had not seen weather this warm in a very long time.

I had entertained the idea of heading north to the mountains but I knew the trails would be busy with people out with the same idea during this warm break. There was also the federal government shutdown so I knew some hiking areas would be closed because they are federally managed and during government shutdowns those areas get closed.

I decided to go walk in my regular walking spot at the South Peachtree Creek Trail which is nearest where I live and it is a pleasant place. Every household in my part of the city had the same idea and I have never seen this trail so busy as I did on Sunday. I know how crowded the Atlanta Beltline becomes on weekends so I rarely walk there and on Sunday the South Peachtree Creek Trail was just as crowded.

One of the less crowded moments. Photo by me, January 2018.

I managed to get in two miles on Sunday which was not as long as I had hoped but the time was slipping by quickly and I had other things to do.

I detoured off the trail to the graffiti covered ruins of the old Decatur Waterworks which I had not been down to see since 2011. I took some photos of the place as I wandered around looking at the pretty colors. I noticed some of the old walls had come down since I had last been down there seven years ago.

Photo by me, January 2018.

Photo by me, January 2018.

Photo by me, January 2018.

Photo by me, January 2018.

Photo by me, January 2018.

Photo by me, January 2018.

Photo by me, January 2018.

Photo by me, January 2018.

Photo by me, January 2018.

Photo by me, January 2018.

Photo by me, January 2018.

I am glad to see that they are still allowing people paint on the ruins. Having an area like this with the old ruins and colorful walls is a cool place to explore and not feel like the entire world has been sanitized.

An Unknown Compelling Force

In 1956 a group of nine Russian hikers, mostly college students at Ural Poly-technical Institute, died under mysterious circumstances while camping in winter on the side of Holatchahl Mountain. Their deaths have been commonly referred to the Dyatlov Pass Incident which is derived from the name of the leader of the group Igor Dyatlov.

I had heard about the Dyatlov incident before and even had watched a documentary on it and a movie that was partly based on the story. Most of what you read on the internet about Dyatlov is conspiracy theory and borders on the absurd. When there is an absence of information about an interesting story that void will often be filled with wild conspiracy theories and the Dyatlov story is no different. People have floated theories that aliens killed the hikers, the government was behind it, local tribesman or escaped convicts murdered them or that one of the group members went into a jealous lover's rage and did it. I had always felt that science one way or another would come to solve this mystery and that seems to be so.

The book I chose to read about this was Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story Of The Dyatlov Pass Incident (2013) by author Donnie Eichar. Ok, don't let that awful title that reads like a crappy made for television movie on Lifetime dissuade you from this book because it is fairly thorough and interesting. Eichar isn't the greatest writer and the book shakily begins talking too much about himself but it improves as it goes along. So if you can get beyond the narcissism there is a good story here.

The book does a well at explaining how and by whom the investigation was conducted and it also does well at putting the time in which this incident took place into context with the government of Nikita Khrushchev.

This book provides a look into the backgrounds of the hikers and explains at how well prepared they were to take on the challenge of winter hiking in the Ural mountains.  I learned from reading this that I had a few things in common with the leader of the group Igor Dyatlov, we both loved photography, hiking and radio communications. It was nice to learn about the hiking club at the university and the levels of hiking classification it offered to members. I do wish it had gone more into the Mansi people but that might have been too much of a diversion for the book so there is something for me to learn about on my own I suppose.

If you want to cut through the internet conspiracy theories and read a well researched account of what happened at Dyatlov Pass then this is a good book for just that. You will find more information compiled in this book and photos of the group than you can from reading websites about the Dyatlov Pass Incident.

The book does come to its own conclusion as to what happened to the hikers that night on the mountain. The theory he postulates is one that involves meteorology. With help from NOAA scientists in the United States and a friend of the author in Russia they suggest that infrasound and a Karman vortex street as a result of the landscape and weather that night is what compelled the hikers to abandon the safety of their tent and die as a result. The treeless dome shaped mountain with wind blowing over and downsloping over it created twin vortices which resulted in infrasound. That infrasound had negative consequences on the hikers in their tent with a low humming sound that caused confusion, panic, possible physical pain and forced them out of the tent into the cold night. Some died from hypothermia and some died from a combination of falling into a ravine injuring themselves with broken bones and hypothermia.

The theory presented is a believable scenario and one I find as a most credible theory that is based on science to explain the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident. I would trust proven scientific theory or a conspiracy theory every time.

Either Weird Or Lonely

T he last weekend of 2017 is here and it's cold, it has been cold for days now and it slaps me in the face every morning stepping out to start the day. I have found time for what will probably be my last blog post of this year and so I'm sitting here with my coffee ready to write.

Last weekend, which was Christmas weekend, I finished reading a biography of one of my favorite singer/songwriters and that is Nick Drake. I fell in love with Nick's music about fifteen years ago and I can't even remember how I first heard his voice now which is a shame.

Nick again was one of those troubled souls that suffered from depression or a more significant mental disorder perhaps schizophrenia and ultimately he overdosed in a likely suicide in 1974 at the age of twenty-six. He died having only completely finishing three albums of music and never experiencing fortune or fame. His music wouldn't be well-received and become even remotely popular until well after his death. I still wouldn't consider him that famous or well known except for those with cultivated musical tastes that stray from the mainstream of music. However once you discover Nick's soothing voice, fantastic acoustic guitar playing and poignant lyrics that draw from nature and conjure up images of the English countryside you realize you have found someone special.

Going into reading Nick Drake : The Biography by Patrick Humphries (1998) I knew to expect a sad tale and Nick's life was just that especially in the last four years of his life in London and then back at his parent's house in Tanworth-in-Arden. I did learn from reading the book that Nick was a mostly well adjusted child at boarding school and he even played sports and this is when he became more interested in performing music. He would go to college in Cambridge and this is where he became more interested in drugs, especially marijuana, and somewhere at this point in his life he began to slowly pull away into his own world. He would leave Cambridge with a year left to complete his degree to go record his first album and live in London.

In London with a recording contract with Island Records he put out three albums and had recorded four tracks for another album before he died. Nick developed a fear of performing live on stage and touring to support his music so none of his albums were promoted and sold well in his lifetime. Nick was a paradox in that he wanted recognition but he didn't want or couldn't do the touring that would have helped him achieve his dreams.

Nick's mental problems grew in London and he became so detached over time that he wouldn't wash, would sit and stare at walls, would hardly speak and was living in a world that was wholly contained within his head. Yet, despite all that he was a perfectionist on the guitar had a smooth velvety voice and could write fascinating songs.

The book went through Nick's life with a fine tooth comb despite not having the assistance of his existing family members to flush out some of the details. There are many repetitious passages in the book which were obvious moments of filler but I did appreciate all the insight provided into the recording sessions and interviews with most of the people that worked with or were friends with Nick. Overall, I thought the book was a great read.

If you've never heard the magic of Nick Drake you should give him a try.

One last note about Nick and his personal life which included no known lovers male or female, I suspect that he was deep in the closet. I think Nick was gay in deep denial and that was part of his mental problems. If you look at photos of him he was very fashionable, aloof, incredibly handsome and he was known to be incredibly sensitive. Somewhere out there whether in his trips to France or Morocco some guy has a Nick Drake sexual story to share. Even one of the few women that was close to Nick in London and admitted to fumbling around with him thinks that he was gay. I'm not alone in thinking Nick was gay as many have speculated such and it is even discussed a few times in his biography. Whether he was gay or not I still love his music and wish he had had a much longer and better life than he did.

Reading In The Shadows

Normally I would hesitate to read a biography about a rock musician or band because you often find that the people that make music you enjoy are flawed people at best or terrible assholes. Then I decided to read Touching From A Distance (1995) by Deborah Curtis about Ian Curtis the late lead singer of Joy Division and my expectations were confirmed that he was a deeply unstable person and he was a terrible asshole too. Just once I would like to read about a musician that was a normal person.

One might argue or suggest that being famous transforms a person into a bad person and damages them in ways that make them unlikable but in the case of Ian Curtis he was an anti-social prick even as a teenager.

The book is written by his wife (who was in the process of divorcing him at the time of his suicide) and she writes that Ian always seemed to have had a death wish to die young. He succeeded in dying young at the age of twenty-three and thus like other rock stars that died young he's been hoisted onto a pedestal like Cobain or Hendrix or Joplin for the simple fact they died young and made some good music. Over time their legend overshadows what music they made in their short lives.

I try not to make heroes out of musicians or worship them because no matter how great their music might be, the people behind its creation will always let you down. It is better to live in the unaware bliss of just enjoying the music for the sake of loving music than learning too deeply about who made it. Disappointment will taint the music you enjoy if you dig too deeply into its creator.

The book relates one story after another of Ian behaving poorly and though his wife repeatedly talks of how overwhelmingly generous he was she only tells one story to support that claim of when he gave a homeless man some food. Otherwise most of the stories are about how selfish a person he was that only seemed to be concerned about himself. He seemed to love and miss the dog named Candy more than he did his own daughter or his wife. He was a man that relied heavily on his wife to do everything in the household and he barely even contributed any money to it though he was becoming a famous rock star. He was off running around with his mistress and holing up in various places with her instead of ever spending time with his family. He was pretty damn shameless in how he acted and when your husband tells you that he no longer loves you standing in the middle of the damn street I think I would be filing for divorce straight away instead of doing his laundry so he can go back out on tour with his mistress.

Ian had mental problems, he had epilepsy too but often it seems like he used those conditions to manipulate the people around him and I wouldn't doubt if he sometimes faked fits to get out of situations. That possibility of faking fits was raised in the book too. Much of his mental problems could have been attributed to self-induced guilt, lying, affairs and maybe even hiding his own sexuality. The man brought many of the problems he had in life upon himself and responsibility was something he seemed to be allergic to.

After reading this book I cannot say that I learned anything good about Ian Curtis. I found it interesting that he would often visit gay bars in his teen years even with his wife, would go to gay parties and he and his wife would joke about him being gay. Ian was also a huge fan of David Bowie and Lou Reed in their glam rock days and would model his dress like them during his teenage years which was a very gender bending look. I have long harbored suspicions about Ian's sexuality so these interesting pieces of information of his time spent in the gay community raised those suspicions further. Even his mistress (this isn't from the book but a separate interview) Annik Honore' in an interview just before her death claimed that the relationship she had with Ian was strictly platonic and never once did they have sex - was she telling the truth?

Despite all of the negative details this book contains I still enjoyed reading it and read the entire book in one day. It isn't heavy reading and you can tell that Deborah Curtis isn't a professional writer but I give her credit for putting out this book if it helped her exorcise any burdens she may have carried since Ian's death in 1980.

I don't see Ian Curtis as some tragic hero/rock god/troubled soul after reading this book but as a young man that helped make some great music but ultimately had more problems than he was willing to face. I love the dark, post-punk music of Joy Division and for that I am thankful that it exists but I wish I knew less about Ian than I do now.

My favorite Joy Division songs are: Shadowplay, Disorder, Atrocity Exhibition and The Eternal.

Early December Reading & Music

In the past week I have finished off two books, Almost Transparent Blue and The Cement Garden. Though I enjoyed both books to varying degrees I can't say that either were books that I immensely loved.

I know when reading Japanese books or watching Japanese movies to expect unusual characters and situations when viewed from an American perspective and that is what I appreciate about them. I like life, people and ways of seeing that are different than mine and my world. Differences attract my attention.

 Almost Transparent Blue by Ryu Murakami published in 1976 certainly hit the mark in being another strange experience in Japanese culture. Right from the beginning the main character Ryu is shooting up heroin with his friends in the mid 1970s, using all sorts of drugs and partying like there is no other purpose in life. There are orgies involving American military personnel and Ryu is involved in all manner of sexual pleasure from both sexes (he seemed more like a closeted gay man than bisexual) and more drugs. The plot never strays from his friends and their drug use as it goes from one scene to the next there are more drugs. The story never goes anywhere and neither do the characters no matter the trouble they may get into is isn't very interesting and there's nothing much redeeming happening either.

I enjoyed the book nonetheless but I wish something, anything would have happened that made the book more worth my time.

I began reading The Cement Garden published in 1978 by Ian McEwan knowing what happens in the story because I had already seen the 1993 movie at least a couple of times. I liked the movie and thought the story and acting were compelling.

The story is about four kids (two girls and two boys) who become orphaned when both parents die. Rather than tell authorities when their last remaining parent dies they decide to hide the body in the cellar and continue living alone caring for themselves. They live in a large house in London in a neighborhood that is being leveled for new development and so their house becomes an isolated world surrounded by rubble and nearby apartment towers.

They manage on with their daily lives over a summer through complex relationships with their siblings and an older boyfriend of the oldest girl. The book is about isolation, grief, gender fluidity, gender roles, sex, trust and finally incest. Most of these issues are handled delicately and not in a very graphic manner.

If you've ever seen the movie then don't go into the book expecting to find any aspect of the story to be different. The movie was very faithful to the plot of the book. I did find that since the movie was so faithful to the book that there is very little insight to be gained about the characters having see the movie. Still, if you have never seen the movie then the book is worth reading and I also suggest the movie too.

Above is a photo of the cast from the movie version of The Cement Garden. If you notice on the far left that is singer/actor Charlotte Gainsbourg, she plays the role of the eldest female in the movie. Charlotte is of course also known as the daughter of the French legend Serge Gainsbourg.

I have enjoyed the music of Charlotte for years and just recently she released a new album which is excellent. The new album is called Rest. Here is one of the songs that I particularly enjoy from the new album called Ring-A-Ring O' Roses.



The guy in the video is absolutely adorable too and it is Charlotte's son.