Le jazz fait son cirque

Les extraits du spectacle que li'l lam a vu hier soir au Puy

Guggenmusik

Before we (Batala Massif) played for the last time at Montbrison Sunday 4th October, we had the chance to watch this group. Apparently there are guggenmusik groups all over the place where they come from, but this is the first time I'd seen any. And having looked at a few on YouTube since, this lot are better than most!

And this is what we thought of them! (And what the guy was looking at and Charlotte filming in the clip above!)

Spuds

Being short of space in our garden, a friendly neighbour lent us a couple of rows of his field. Yesterday was the day we lifted them. Highlights? 200kg of spuds for the winter, I got to drive the tractor a bit, and we had a great meal altogether afterwards. Marvellous!

Lionel & Karine bigging it up at Rotterdam

carnival main parade 484
Originally uploaded by ograndeviado

What a fantastic weekend of music and madness. More photos on facebook and soon on flickr. This ones by ograndeviado - Angus (amongst other things) to the rest of us.

Flies, flies and more flies

I never heard about the essential oil solution again. I took that as a no, and set to work on the flies in photoshop. And ran out of time. So no completed SoFoBoMo for me this year. I might still complete it on blurb or some such platform. But in the meantime, I'm getting some prints together for a summer exhibition. The subject is stone transformations. Lots of stone. Obviously. Transformed in different ways, both in its natural context, by people, and by the print medium and framing. Like my previous exhibition here, I'm exploring how we approach, perceive or understand the essential stuff of a subject. The last time my approach was to abstract the subject to varying degrees in the composition of the shots, with the aim of inciting people to look at the characteristics of the image and the subject rather than what you could label it as. This time, by taking the same subject and looking at it in many different ways, I'm hoping to understand something about whether there is anything common to all the images, something that could be considered essential to stone. Or not. Do these transformations change the essential characteristics of stone? Into what? And is that in any way important? Meaningful? And why should I care?

Conversations and cloning

I wish I could do it justice. Imagine a keen foreign photographer, yours truly, sat at his kitchen table. With a beer. And a farmer. Who also has a beer. It's a scene that has been played out often. Frequently. Weekly even. Except that this time is different. We discuss the merits or otherwise of ASM (Clermont-Ferrand's rugby team) in the recent top 14 final. It is ASM's 10th final. And their 3rd in a row. And they came 2nd again. So there's a lot to talk about. Which is good, you understand. Because all the while I'm wondering how exactly I'm going to broach the subject of flies. How exactly am I going to ask him if he minds me putting bath oil and essential oils on his cows. The reason is clear enough to me. Very persuasive even. But I'm not sure he's going to even get to wondering why. And even then. Flies kind of go with the territory as far as he's concerned. So I think of this phrase and that. Of starting in a round about way. For quite a long time. Which is also good, because it gives us both the time to start another beer. And to get some way through it.

So when I finally broach the subject, he doesn't laugh. There is a very very long pause however. Long enough that I have plenty of time to wish that he had laughed instead. But, after a few deep breaths, he asks me one or two questions. And it looks like it might be alright. So he leaves, a beer or two better off, muttering about eucalyptus and citronella, bath oil and flies, and climbs into his car and disappears over the hill.

I'm still waiting for his reply. I don't know if I could start the same conversation again.

So I have tried a bit of photoshopping. And, amateur as I am, I think it might just work.

But to be honest, I really want to plaster his cows in essential oils now. Just so I can say I did. You understand don't you?

Smellies it is then

The rubbish weather this morning hasn't made any impact on the flies, so I'm about to raid the essential oil supply for some eucalyptus ... and the kitchen for vinegar

Cows and flies

I've been searching the web for fly solutions (no pun intended!) this morning. And there are a few out there. Mainly seem to be for horses, but flies are flies I reckon. So I'm going to run these past the farmers and hope to get their go-ahead to try them out. I'm going to go for the natural recipes I've found. Citronella and eucalyptus are popular ingredients added to vinegar bath oil and water.

It's pretty fresh this morning too, so I'm going to take a ride down and see if there are fewer flies today. The light's not good though ...