dolores666's photos with the keyword: Tributes

A very merry Solstice to you all, in spite of the possibilities of having a really jolly one being rather slim. Stay stubborn. Stay sane. Dance for as long as you have legs to dance with. Acknowledgment of Senior Moment. 22/09/21 This goes well beyond a mere “senior moment” and accelerates very hard from plain embarrassment to utter bewilderment. The worse is that I remained unaware of this fuck up for the whole of three days. Exhaustively checking my temporal sub-routines -which have bee somewhat maladjusted, lately- and doggedly backtracking the course of circs that led to it. (I suspect the clocks going back next week has played a not insignificant role in this gaffe) Nearly there although I won’t bore you with the results. All that remains is to say, like the Mi-Go would, is ‘Mozt zinzere apologiez, folkz. Ignore the zilly capzion and have a zpoinditiouz weekend”. Do. And be lenient with gross absent-mindedness.

Centenaries. 100 years ago today she and her poor comrade Karl Liebknecht were captured, tortured for hours on end and finally murdered and disposed of by the Freikorps’ bastard hell-hounds. She was shot and thrown into the Landwehr Canal; he was driven to the middle of some godforsaken where or other and shot in the back. The ineffable Wikipedia has this to say: Although the circumstances were disputed by the perpetrators at the time, the Freikorps commander, Captain Waldemar Pabst, later claimed, "I had them executed” Nice one, Waldemar. Today nobody remembers Captain Pabst. Rosa and Karl, on the other hand, live in our memories and in our hearts. I raise my glass (and my fist) to you both.

Alien Altarpiece. I (from the Enigmatic Alien Cults series.) In Memoriam. Antonio Fraguas de Pablo “Forges”. 17 January 1942 – 22 February 2018 Last week another loved one, one of those I've never met but who had been with me from way, way back, climbed the cypress' path, to put it with The Poet (Salvador Espriu). Antonio Fraguas de Pablo “Forges" left the world of matter and passed on into legend and cartoon heaven. He left us, his devoted life-long buffs, desolate, bereft and deprived. He left a vast and wondrous legacy, however. His gently biting humour, his irreverence, his love of life and of his beloved country and its languages will live and linger for as long as there's ink and paper or pixels and screens. Back then, even long before Spain transitioned from the Middle Ages to Modernity, Forges was there for us with his Blasillos and his Marianos and his Conchas, his funcionarios and chupatintas, his corrupt politicians and his shipwrecked chaps, and his multifarious army of characters, both human and animal, all of them invariably sporting spectacles (yes, even his sardines wore glasses). In them dark days, the natives of "clean and noble, cultured, rich, free, clever and happy"* countries had existentialist philosophers and Noam Chomsky. We had Forges. On hindsight, and given that I never cared one fig for Sartre or his girlfriend, thatChomsky appears to have gone gaga, and that I've come to regard most Anglo-Saxons as a bunch of barbarians, I'm so very grateful I was born where and when I was. So, being a devout atheist yet feeling the need to formalize an expression of my grief, I betook myself to the shrine of the Great Un-Cognizable Celestial Auntie to pray for don Antonio's subatomic particles. May they fare well and far, and fill the universe with their irrepressible joy, their kind-hearted sarcasm and their love. The pilgrimage was great fun and very educational, although most of the really juicy questions went unanswered, as I suspected they would. Like: is Auntie pregnant? If yes, who is the father of the fierce-looking maybe-baby that may or may not squat in her cryptic womb? Why are the two custodian FattyBumbums there? Have they taken to moonlighting as "security" to dodgy demiurges? And, most puzzling of all, why the scroll at Madamina's feet bears a fragment of a poem by Joan Salvat-Papasseit? Never mind. It's the thought that counts. And the willingness to ask the questions, especially the awkward ones. Here's a few links to the dearly departed stuff, mostly for the benefit of Spanish-speakers: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Fraguas_de_Pablo es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forges elpais.com/cultura/2018/02/22/actualidad/1519268111_985350.html www.forges.com/#bienvenido *Again, Salvador Espriu. Assaig de cántic en el temple

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue; never mind the sixpence in my shoe –for one thing, they don’t make them anymore. This is for Ursula K. Le Guin, who died peacefully in her bed a few days ago, aged 88, after a long life of dreaming and dreaming damned well. Ah, yes, the girl could dream like nobody’s business. So here is my tribute wot contains all the four ingredients for an alchemical marriage that happened a while back, when I was young and foolish and good Sci-Fi-starved. Borges said once that nobody likes owing anything to their contemporaries. This is, if it is at all, rubbish. We all owe lots of things to lots of people so it’s a waste of time liking the fact or not. Personally I rather owe to of my age group (or near-age group) that to some centuries old geezer whose ideas were dodgy to begin with but yet linger, and linger, and liiiiiiinger (oy vey!), instead of laying quietly in the intellectual elephant’s graveyard where they belong. In fact, for this modest loving homage, I’ve borrowed from myself, look, you! Bye bye, Ursy. Fare thee well, give my regards to the sub-atomic particles and see you soon(ish).

Here, this’s got everything he would have liked: Sun, Moon, wee stars, olive trees, cerros and, more to the point, gloworms, gusanitos luminosos or luciernagas, for short. The only thing missing is a river but you can imagine it meandering its way to the sea, now wild now peaceful, just behind the hills. Here’s to you, me old dead china!