Recently saw the film "Loving Vincent," a hand painted/drawn ("rotoscoped"???) movie concerning the circumstances and aftermath of Van Gogh's death. Excellent experience. Highly recommended.
Which brings to mind:
<<De Pijp is one of the most vibrant areas of Amsterdam and is named after the narrow, long and straight streets that run parallel to each other. Every morning when the locals are going into the city center through these narrow streets (pipes), it looks like a smoky cloud that explodes when they go into town.
Most of the streets in De Pijp have been named after Dutch painters. To us this seems obvious. Several painters have embraced pipe smoking in the history of art and they even displayed that on their canvasses. A good example is Vincent van Gogh.
Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30th 1853 in a little town called Groot-Zundert. He was an enthusiastic pipe smoker, as many of his self-portraits show. He passed away in the morning of July 29th 1890 and stories tell that he spent his last hours in bed smoking his pipe, while his brother Theo stayed close.>>
Famous author William Manchester,on the cover of his great book Goodbye Darkness.As a side bar the book is about his revisiting famous battle fields in the Pacific which he took part in during W.W. Two.Including Sugar Loaf Hill on the island of Okinawa Terrible battle.
@ghostsofpompeii - your latest post with pictures of Leonard Nemoy and Norman Fell reminded me of the descriptions of some of the blends at Kramer's Tobacco Shop in Beverley Hills, CA. The lists of who smoked some of their house blends is pretty interesting.
@motie2, I'll have to admit, I have always been a big fan of Ms. Lewinsky, because I have always been a fan of women who kiss and tell. Then again I am currently single and could afford the press, if there ever was any press. Last time I was asked for an interview, was when there was a local UFO sighting, and some wormwood gave the press my name in an effort to give them the slip. It took 2 weeks for them to give up, get off my lawn, and go back home. During the interim, I was forced to hole up at Uptown's in Green Hills and smoke one cigar after another.
@jfreedy While I don't listen to Phil Keaggy's music (I'm more of a metal guy), I respect his immense talent, and he deserves to be more well known than he is. He played in a P.O.D. instrumental track, and it's quite good. Glad to have him in our ranks.
@motie2 Saw the preview last week at Victoria and Abdul for Drawing Vincent. It looks like a killer artistic film. (In every sense of the term artistic). Glad to hear from someone who has seen it.
I am not interested in "art" per se. SWMBO is the artist in the family (pastel painter/art historian). But, you know how it is, I went to a movie with my wife. Not a chic flic, but something I never would have gone to see. I enjoyed it thoroughly; it is a hand painted, frame by frame, work of art in and of itself. I was amazed at my own level of engagement, both with the story/narrative/script -- an investigation into Van Gogh's death -- and with the movie itself. A character, the Postman, appears in the film. I actually recognized him, from one of my infrequent walks through the NYC art museum. It's one of Van Gogh's paintings, and I recognized it in the character onscreen. What a cool affirmation that I've learned something. Go see it. Check out the website, below:
Mark Twain is an irresistible historical figure for pipe enthusiasts, not only because he was instrumental in shaping an authentic American literary voice, but because he evidently smoked more than any other human being. He bought cigars by the barrel and corncob pipes by the gross.
He liked corncobs because he would take out the stem and leave the bowl in his tobacco pouch in his pocket, where it would shake as he moved about and fill the bowl naturally, so when he next wanted a smoke, all he need do was put the stem back in and light up.
In 1891 he wrote, “I smoke a good deal. That is to say, all the time.” Others agreed. His longtime friend, William Dean Howells, commented. “I do not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly.”
Mark Twain tried to give up smoking on a couple of occasions, mainly to please his wife, Olivia. But he failed, finding that he couldn’t write without tobacco. An unidentified reporter from the New York Evening Post visited him in a hotel before his marriage, while Mark Twain was writing The Innocents Abroad, and wrote about the humorist’s process:
“And there was Mark Twain in a little back room, with a sheet-iron stove, a dirty, musty carpet of the cheapest description, a bed, and two or three common chairs. The little drum stove was full of ashes, running over on the zinc sheet; the bed seemed to be unmade for a week, the slops had not been carried out for a fortnight, the room was foul with tobacco smoke, the floor, dirty enough to begin with, was littered with newspapers, from which Twain had cut his letters. Then there were hundreds of pieces of torn manuscripts which had been written and then rejected by the author. A dozen pipes were about the apartment, on the washstand, on the mantel, on the writing table, on the chairs, everywhere that room could be found. And there was tobacco, and tobacco everywhere. One thing, there were no flies. The smoke killed them, and I am now surprised the smoke did not kill me too. Twain would not let a servant come into his room. He would strip down to his suspenders (his coat and vest, of course, being off) and walk back and forward in slippers in his little room and swear and smoke the whole day long.”
It’s tempting to imagine how much fun Mark Twain might have had in our own time, with so many artisan pipes available, and so many more variations of pipe tobacco. Perhaps he would have maintained his love for corncobs and Blackwell’s Durham, one of his favorite pipe tobaccos. But, like us, he may have frequented the Smokingpipes.com website and the multitude of smoking possibilities therein. He’d have been one of us, and we could sure use him these days.
Comments
https://www.pinterest.com/dtfordjr/famous-pipe-smokers/
https://josephcrusejohnson.blogspot.com/
Which brings to mind:
Leonard Nemoy, Groucho Marx, and Norman Feld
@ghostsofpompeii - your latest post with pictures of Leonard Nemoy and Norman Fell reminded me of the descriptions of some of the blends at Kramer's Tobacco Shop in Beverley Hills, CA. The lists of who smoked some of their house blends is pretty interesting.
https://www.kramerstobaccoshop.com/blends
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Keaggy
http://www.philkeaggy.com/
Oh, my friend, I am wracked with compassion..... it's a tough life having to do that......
Saw the preview last week at Victoria and Abdul for Drawing Vincent. It looks like a killer artistic film. (In every sense of the term artistic). Glad to hear from someone who has seen it.
http://lovingvincent.com/