The Roses of June

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, this has been a banner year for flowering shrubs.  In fact, it is the most wondrous flowering event in our 30+ years living at the Homestead.  The rose bushes are nearly falling over with blossoms, and it has been the same with all of our many flowering shrubs.  Something really clicked this spring to set off such a display of lilacs, roses, .. and .., to our benefit.  Right now the roses are peaking, and smell heavenly.

We usually get five or six blooms at a time on our bushes.  Not this year. 

The weather continues to be more like July and August, and many teachers and students can be thankful that schools are shut until September.  It would have been a brutal finish in the classroom this year.  To date I've had four fine nights this lunar cycle for observing.  Tonight is a fifth possibility, but evening storms are predicted.  We shall see.  At this time of year I have to stay up very late to get much done, as it isn't very dark until at least 10:30 pm.  The mosquitoes are out in force now, too.  And the fireflies.  Our backyard is lit up like a Christmas display after dark these past evenings.

In movie news, my two films from last week need to be mentioned.  The fun began with the next film by Fassbinder, as I make my way through every available film, all of them restored and in pristine condition.  Fear of Fear is from 1975, and deals with the mental unraveling of a young housewife just after her 2nd baby is born.  Starring Margit Carstensen, she gives a great performance of incipient madness.  after watching the film, a sad realization is that the stigma of mental illness remains at about the same level as it was in 1975.  Definitely worth catching on Criterion.

Now showing on Criterion. 

Leaving June 30th is Shaft, from 1971, starring Richard Roundtree as the hip black private detective sent to find a mobster's kidnapped daughter.  Filmed in Harlem, the street scenes are wonderful, capturing the period perfectly.  Directed by still photographer Gordon Parks, this is a very fun movie, with the "wooka-chucka" score and award winning song by Isaac Hayes.  Shaft's relationship with a white police lieutenant is priceless.

Showing on Criterion until June 30th.

Turning briefly to landscape art (to complete your day), here is a wonderful print, tiny, by one of the great masters of the genre.  Here he chooses a little fixer-upper of a place, well situated near woods and water.  The appetite for landscape art knew no limits in the 17th C., and if unable to afford a painting, then prints such as these could be had for much less money.  It's probably something I would have added coloured myself to back in the day.

 

Little Bridge, 17th C.  Etching and drypoint in black ink on laid paper.  8" x 11". Jacob van Ruisdael, Dutch (1628 or 29-1682).  Detroit Institute of Arts.

 

 

Detail of left side.

Detail of right side. 

 

Someday I may even get to see art for real again.  Until then....

 

Mapman Mike