From Russia, With Luck
No kidding, this is a mint condition Olympia Progress, Russian. Unfortunately I don’t type Russian, nor do I speak it, or understand it. But I will sell it to the Russians for a tidy sum, since they are now wisely going back to typing classified documents. That is about the only good thing that can be said about Russia these days. Who would have thought that Russia is part of the typewriter insurgency!
Photograph of Chief Russian Insurgent, purportedly typing a secret report. Picture taken with one of those “film” cameras and developed in coffee….
Hey Vlad, want to buy my typewriter? For you, hmmm, $1000, cash only please.
What can this mean? A secret message? Cryptic!
Heavily redacted secret message, obviously in code as well. Proof positive that they are using typewriters for their secret business!
Filed under Photography, Poetry, Technology, Thrift shop finds, Typewriters, Uncategorized
Two Views
VIEWED FROM THE EAST IN SWANS PUB
VIEWED FROM THE WEST ON A FIRE ESCAPE
The Bridge rises
Literally
The huge counterweight
Hangs overhead
But not for long
This bridge is doomed
Little brother to the Golden Gate
Writ by the same engineers
Written off now
Other engineers think
Too expensive to fix
The mighty drill rig
Penetrates the bedrock
Laying the footings
A new bridge will stand on
Filed under Painting, Poetry, Uncategorized
High Flyer
I saw a kite the other day
It seemed to be flying by itself
But on closer inspection
Hidden in the tall grass
A man held the string
Superlatives
GIANT ARBUTUS TREE
HUGE TANKER SHIP
TINY LAMB
Scenes from where I used to work – a farm by the ocean. Emily Carr (the Canadian artist) spent time here, painting. I imagine she must have seen the big tree, which has to be centuries old. The trunk is 8 feet thick at least.
Filed under Painting
My Valiant Brother
No. 2 in a series of watercolour sketches.
Despite their being cheap and plentiful, these original Brother typewriters are still good value. I bought this ‘Valiant’ recently, simply for the name plate. They seem to have made endless versions of the same basic machine for reasons that escape me. I guess they were using scientific marketing to sell the same thing under different guise. Wasn’t it enough that it was cheap and well made?
Filed under Painting, Thrift shop finds, Typewriters
The Circle of Life
When I was at architecture school, (long long ago, and far away) we went on yearly jaunts called ‘sketching school’. Although they never actually taught us anything, we all went off to some town where we spent 10 days walking around and sketching in watercolours. It was always watercolours, which are of course the hardest bloody media of all to master, but this was part of the cunning plan to make us insane. Despite the necessity to produce a number of sketches on which we would be marked, we all managed to spend a lot of time just hanging out and having a good time. Since we are planning a trip back to Ontario for a week in June, where my wife will be busy visiting her family, I decided to resurrect the idea of sketching school. I will be wandering the town sketching while she sits around yakking. So I got myself a sketchbook and found, deep inside a box of art supplies, an old paint box that I had given my mother. It’s a tiny thing, the Windsor Newton pocket sketchbox, with 12 colours, which she probably never opened. With this and a new fangled water-brush, I have begun to practice for sketching school again. The brush is a Japanese invention, and has water in the handle. Thus one can do a watercolour sketch at any time or location without the need for a cup of water. Here is my first test sketch.
nathanguitars 