Kenroku

Kenroku-en 兼六園 has lain outside the gates of Kanazawa Castle in Ishikawa, Japan since 1676. The name means "Garden of Six Elements" referring to the six features that Sung Dynasty Chinese poets thought impossible to combine in one garden: vastness and intimacy; existing ruins and introduced structures; waters and pools and distant views. The Second Life version was created by brue Noel of AbleSeed Co., in Ishikawa, Japan.
This magnificent, peaceful and extensive build accomplishes that difficult combination with careful attention to detail and colour. From the shadow and modulated light within the buildings to the seasonal details which change as time passes - I first visited yesterday on the last day of winter, apparently, for the snow had melted away by this morning, except in cold pockets here and there, and fresh grass has sprung up everywhere, though summer foliage is not yet in - all demonstrate the patient and observant skill of its creator. Lazy koi weave in the pond, leaves blow about here and there and all is surrounded by a vast, glittering sea. Thank you, Hamlet, for guiding me there!

A vision or waking dream?

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

And Home again!

Striking a pose at Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai.



And a bitterly cold New Year's day on the Great Wall.

I was unable to rouse any friends on an afternoon visit to Second Life, but did visit Privateer Space and was given a tour of this detailed and enormous build by new friend Muttonchops Chaplin, whom you will see piloting the aethercraft. Thank you, Mr. Chaplin, for rescuing me from some dreadful missteps and meteoric descents. I was impressed by a mustachioed robot and the ruins of an underground Martian civilization.





I was travelling incognito, of course, as Carnevale is just around the corner.

Sintra Palacio da Pena

In Utopia Portugal

Versailles encore

Young, Os, Enj

But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of the Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant swords to look at, and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would surely keep anything going, for ever and ever. Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that was never to leave off.

Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

And I forced to leave before the party had barely started! Apologies to my abandoned friends, whose enjoyments, it seems, accelerated after leaving Versailles.

Shanghai

click for panorama
Endless city, commerce and industry without bound, twenty million lives squeezed into hundreds of thousands of buildings, expressways choked with automobiles, happiness and rage, fashion and aspiration jumbled with concrete and asphalt, a roaring clamor continuing around the clock, pounding energy and optimism and pride. A river plain transformed into vertical cliffs and canyons. A city created out of nothing in fifteen years. I first came here twenty years ago, when a modern building was a soviet palace. Now there is no limit to the chrome and glass and steel and money spent on raising higher, narrower, stranger buildings. Exhilarating. Exhausting.

The Far Away and Relic

Drowsing in Chakryn Forest

Windlight. At last.

Home Again

Twenty-one days: Shanghai, Macau, Shanghai, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, Hong Kong. The itinerary of a wayward droplette. I do have pictures, but ye shall have to allow me to sleep for a bit before I can sort out who was where and when. My dreams are full of steaming crabs and teeming streets and rickety taxis and endless meetings in Mandarin, Shanghainese and Cantonese.

Farewell

After several years' absence I return to China on the morrow and abandon my home in Orion for most of the month of November. As many farewells as be stars in heaven, and to you my friends as many fond wishes as the miles between us.

Versailles en filme

A tragic conclusion.

Versailles

From the journal of Dr. Rafael Fabre, self-styled Steampunk Physician, I learned that the Palace of Versailles had been rebuilt in Second Life, and hastened there to see for myself. I have lived much too long out of my own age, among Victorians, Aegyptians, Edwardians, slave-trading barbarians, et cetera. What a profound pleasure to return to a part of the world and a place in time I recognize. Indeed, one feels quite at home dans la galerie des glaces - the Hall of Mirrors, et aupres des grandes eaux in the garden without. Voila, I cannot help but ascend to my native tongue, which has been worn out by so much English in recent centuries.

While chatting with tourists Mephistopheles Janus and Lilliput Little, the Quality made an entrance. I had the great honour of meeting a Duchess (la duchesse d'Orléans?) Janine Debevec, her lady-in-waiting StarMaker Boa, and their majordomo broc Zehetbauer, in period dress, and most friendly to these trespassers on their lovely build.

I implore you to visit: as ambitious as the magnificent Assisi, though perhaps not as accurate, Versailles is nevertheless a grand and wonderful build. I am sure StarMaker Boa will also want me to add, if you are half as delighted by their work as I was, you may vote for them in the green box by the entrance.
I shall return as soon and as oft as I am able, to study their fine work with much appreciation and no little joy.

Strange Encounter

"We have stood prettily much too long," I said to Osprey after we conversed about China and teaching art for the better part of an hour, "We should stretch our legs and find an admirer." For what better way to cheer one's self than go begging for compliments?
Osprey suggested New Babbage, where I had never been, and we presently arrived at a lonely train platform, haunted by a shade in a pretty blue dress and raven tresses amply piled upon her head. We were alarmed at first, but the phantom invited us to approach and delivered a prognostication! I shuddered as if we were Banquo and Macbeth before the Weird Sisters, but she was a solitary shade who spoke so equably and gently, we were much reassured. She spoke first to Osprey (whom I shall let reveal what was said, if it please her) and then turned to me. "Look to the stars," the phantom said, and "Much is expected of you, Young Geoffrion!" and more besides before she vanished.
A strange encounter! What does it portend?

Kitai

Like a mouse in the pantry, I kept on a shelf in a dark corner at the back of my uncle's bookshop a collection of treasures. These were baubles, bits of glass, pinecone people with acorn heads, etchings and plates come loose from their bindings, and books liberated from the tables where they were to be sacrificed to commerce. I imagined no one knew of my mousehole, hidden as it was where two giant cabinets met at an angle, and reachable only by a dusty person of diminutive size, but I now think it was a luxury granted me by the compassion of a man toward an orphan with an appetite for knowledge. The largest (and most valuable, had I been sensible of such things) was a book of marvels by "the most miraculous mystagogue of nature": China monumentis, qua sacris quà profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata, by Athanasius Kircher. This musty folio edition, published sixty years earlier, and based on the tales of jesuit missionaries and envoys, embellished and elaborated in Kircher's fertile imagination, introduced me to the wonders of the Great Wall, to the pine-apple, to Confucius Trismegistus(!), to the use of pictographs as a method of writing, to tea and silk, geomancy and flying turtles. I travelled across those tall Thibetan peaks many times in my imagination, and studied those complex characters until my eyes crossed in hope of deciphering their meaning.
It was therefore no accident that when in 1743 I was in dire need to flee as far as I could from my infernal husband I arranged passage on the Swedish East Indiaman “Götheborg" to Canton, and there stole ashore. For two years I journeyed in a country more wonderful than Kircher ever imagined. I have since returned to China many times, and long since learned to speak the language of the Mandarins, and read their classics, and contemplate the lessons and histories of their many scholars.
On All Saint's Day I return to China, once again by way of Canton, whence I travel northward to Shanghai and Beijing, for a fortnight and a week. I remain silent on the nature of my business only because it must gestate to term before being brought into public light, but I shall report on my progress where chance and opportunity allow. You will discover I am not fond of the moral condition into which business in China has descended (and which recalls to me the France of patronage and privilege of the Ancien Régime), nor the profligate waste and arrogance of the newly wealthy, no less than the importunity and knavery of the poor, but I remember it is a beleaguered population much confused and misguided by inconstant policy and ill used in the past. Great change is borne only with great suffering, and the material improvements that have been wrought at so enormous a scale and for the benefit of so many is no less wonderful than the Imperial glory long since vanished.

ArtExpo

ArtExpo is an annual congregation of international artists, rather more commercial than one expects to find in Basel or Miami, but with tremendous appeal to most of us who do not belong to the cognoscenti (smelly cogs, I call 'em). I have attended every year since 1997 when it was still held in Los Angeles, then later in San Francisco, and then in New York after the West Coast Expos were abandoned. This year they have returned to the West Coast to the centre of high surrealism that is the mythical city of Las Vegas. It was a smaller show than New York, but large with over 600 exhibitors, and very a satisfying assembly of multiple styles and personalities. The regulars were there: vibrant Hessam, young Ascensio, charming Jia Lu, heavenly Terbush, plus some remarkable work by new talent (new to ArtExpo I should say): Nikolai Blokhin's dramatic paintings and Jack Storms’ dichroic and optical crystal sculptures.

ArtExpo Las Vegas

ArtExpo is an annual congregation of international artists, rather more commercial than one expects to find in Basel or Miami, but with tremendous appeal to most of us who do not belong to the cognoscenti (smelly cogs, I call 'em). I have attended every year since 1997 when it was still held in Los Angeles, then later in San Francisco, and then in New York after the West Coast Expos were abandoned. This year they have returned to the West Coast to the centre of high surrealism that is the mythical city of Las Vegas: I am just returned from there. It was a smaller show than New York, but large with over 600 exhibitors, and very a satisfying assembly of multiple styles and personalities. The regulars were there: vibrant Hessam, young Ascensio, charming Jia Lu, heavenly Terbush, plus some remarkable work by new talent (new to ArtExpo I should say): Nikolai Blokhin's dramatic paintings and Jack Storms’ dichroic and optical crystal sculptures. No, it's not all to my taste, and sometimes it is simply awful, but I am fascinated by the melding of so much heart and optimism with sometimes cynical commerce and silly self-promotion.

Assisi

I toured the Basilica of St Francis Assisi yesterday. This magnificent build is one of the reasons I came to Second Life: to see art and architecture in its spatial context, to swim in light and dimensionality, to escape the flat prison of the printed page. The care taken here is a testament to the devotion of its artists and their respect for the work of Cimabue and Giotto, displayed so magnificently upon its walls. Repeated textures have been sparingly employed with ingenuity so as not to spoil the richness of the walls and ceilings, each one a unique painting. Golan Holder, Quozar Winx (whom I met at the basilica), Testsuo Allen, Brando Dovgal, Sarg Bjornson, Giulio Perhaps, and Agnes Noel have done a great thing, and I look forward to their future collaborative creations.
Alas, you have noticed I was so struck with wonder I failed to remove my hat. How uncouth and impious.

Burning Life

I spent my only half hour this month paying tier and looking for friends. Alas, I shall have to write another paean to loneliness. Travel and obligations separate me from all those I love and respect, but my fate as an adventurer demands it.
I paid a brief visit to Burning Life, looking for Osprey's growing stones, on the groundless fear she might have sprouted tendrils, but found neither them nor their uprooted author. As you shall see I was watered by Emmanuel Lane's Green Man and entered a foal's vision of her future (doubtless the fire-spewing steed was the dream, the tiny angelic unicorns the nightmare!). The sliced face was a work of genius, a fascinating effect which I should like to adopt in my own builds. Pavig Lok's stylized landscape and Green Man mask was very appealing.



Above and beyond all these, and many other examples of creative minds hard at work, the one work of art I most enjoyed was Andrek Lowell's midnight forest. This artist has created an emotional space with an immediate impact, instilling a calm reverence and suggesting haunting spirituality that we rarely see in our World. This he or she (one must never assume) created with an admirable effortlessness and understated simplicity of idea and execution. The picture I show here does not do it justice. It was a lovely space where one could reconnect with the ancient arbor and its beleaguered giant inhabitants, long-suffering friends of man.

Berlin

The German's love for classical antiquity and for music is evident in Berlin, with its Pergamon and Alte Museums, three major opera houses and seven symphony orchestras. Angels grace every part of the city, outnumbered only by bears escaped from its coat of arms and parading in the streets. I was thrilled to see Karl Friedrich Schinkel's proud buildings, charmed to find the Kaisersaal and Cafe Josty still operating (though very much transformed), and impressed to find Berliners as serious and industrious as they ever have been.


Alas I was unable to obtain tickets for Phaedra or Medea playing at the Berliner Oper, but heard two chamber music concerts, a mediocre one at the Orangerie of Schloss Charlottenburg with musicians in historic costume (well, a half-hearted attempt at such), the other one excellent at the Kammermusiksaal.

Imagine my delight to find hanging in the Gemäldegalerie a painting I know so well, by Antoine Watteau, painted around the year in which I was born and featuring so many who would become my very dearest friends in the Comédie Italienne, including Dominique Biancolelli (far right), dear Marie-Thérèse's father. They were all masters of improvisation, and caused me to think with fondness of our merry troupe now rehearsing in Phobos, who share the same love of nonsense and playfulness, and whom I hope to see again before long.

The last photo is of the Kaisersaal, now absorbed into the Sony Centre. Don't you think Torley Linden would like it?

London

Gone are the songs and cries of street sellers, the unruly and violent theatre audiences, the plagues and the hangings, but the stones of London still guard the bones of Kings and Poets in Westminster, and Sir Christopher Wren's magnificent dome still o'erlooks the city entire from Tower Hill to Tottenham Court, nay further still, for I had a clear view as far as Notting Hill.

In the first of my two short days I paid visit to the shops on Brompton Road, Peter Pan in Kensington Garden, the Queen's Palace, Westminster Cathedral, the Parliament, the Horse Guards, the National Gallery, Canada House in the Square, St. Martin's in the Field (Gibb's building shrouded by scaffolds and sheets whilst suffering a restauration), Covent Garden (and Benjamin Pollock's, now owned by actor Peter Baldwin, where I purchased several tuppence sheets for my collection), quiet Temple, the Embankment and thence to St. Paul's and its 530 steps to the Golden Gallery and its views. It was on slightly wobbly legs I did then discover a rebuilt Tate Museum, now become a monstrosity housing monstrous art, and a rebuilt Globe Theatre, where I secured a gentleman's box to enjoy a delightful Merchant of Venice. Having a better view of the groundlings than I did of the stage, I remarked how enraptured the audience was of Kirsty Besterman's intelligent Portia, and of the remarkable Craig Gazey, who stole the show as the ribald servant Launcelot.

I spent a more restful second day sketching in the V&A and British Museums (which change appearance every time I visit) and browsing in Bloomsbury bookshops.

London was preceded by a quick trip to visit friends in Oxford, where I reacquainted myself with the Radcliffe Camera and the Ashmolean Museum, and saw a tiny, perfect exhibition of armillary spheres and other navigational and scientific instruments exquisitely fashioned of brass at the Museum of the History of Science (or Old Ashmolean).

The (so very tall) Duke of Marlborough was at home during the horse trials at Blenheim, and I enjoyed a wonderful morning watching dressage, cross country and Chris King's spectacular jumping on The Secret Weapon.
Thence to Prussia....