India, she is my love song.

 All photos (c) jamesxvi

 In late February I visited India for the first time, a three-day business trip to Bangalore, and during my one day of site seeing explored the ancient Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple in the town of Srirangapatna in the Indian state Karnataka. My driver waited down the street as I walked to the temple entrance, where after removing my shoes and leaving them with hundreds of other pair arranged in no particular order along the stone foundation, I was allowed to join the stream of Hindu worshipers entering the courtyard just beyond the tower seen below. 

 

 Courtyard view.

The building beyond the courtyard was a labyrinth of hallways, the air filled with sandal wood incense. Rooms  off these halls contained statues of Hindu Gods, each doorway manned by a robed swami. I was careful not photograph any of the worshipers, so these photos belie the fact that there were a lot of people around me, they simply were crowding the doorways and worship areas in the center of the building, leaving these stone pillared outer halls virtually empty. 

On the road, we stopped  for some fresh coconut milk.

 

On returning to Bangalore, the grueling traffic made the hotel seem especially welcoming after a long day. I was delighted with my stay at the Leela Palace, where I had breakfast on the the dining terrace (below) every morning.

With yoga instructor Sanjiv, 7 am, Feb 17, 2011.

 The hotel offers a 6 am yoga class in a lovely pavilion just off the pool (below). Each day I was there the yoga class had two to four pupils, and I had the pool to myself afterward for a few laps before breakfast.

Then hi-ho, hi-ho... off to work.

The moon over Bangalore, through the car window, as we drove to the airport for a 2:30 am connecting flight to Paris Charles DeGaul airport.

God bless the executive chefs at Air France... foie gras at 30,000 feet.

My hiatus from posts here is, well, complicated. I am working on the house and hope to return soon with an update and new photos of work in progress. Thanks for stopping by.

- James

Twilight Pond

Photo: jamesxvi

Axel Vervoordt Interview for German TV

I can't understand anything the interviewer asks, and while Mr. Vervoordt answers in English, the German translation audio dubbed over his voice makes it difficult to make out what he is saying most of the time. If I can translate the transcript, I will post a follow up with some quotes. You can watch the interview here.

The Selby Contest at CB2

This picture of the renovations underway was first seen here last November for Brooke Gianetti's Brickmaker coffee table giveaway. While comments were plentiful and complimentary, my entry didn't make it to the top, but now I have found another contest to try, and I'm pretty excited about it. I am a big fan of the eccentric and inspiring photos taken by Todd Selby (below) for his blog, The Selby. Home furnishings company CB2, an off-shoot from Crate and Barrel, is sponsoring The Selby Contest, with a grand prize that includes a $10,000 CB2 gift card and a photo session of the winning home by Mr. Selby. They require three pics, and you can see mine, and vote for Garvinweasel, here. You can cast your vote in under 15 seconds, so I hope you won't mind that I ask for your support, by way of vote, and if you'd like to repost or link back, even better and very much appreciated. And by the way, if by some chance I should win, I will donate the card to a charity... it's the right thing to do. Wish me luck, and thanks for your support!

Copyright 2010, Todd Selby

Vervoordt r.e. Kanaal

I found an interesting site about a project by Belgium's Vervoordt family. I heard about this when I was living in Brussels in 2008, that Axel Vervoordt's son Dick was planning a development around the Kanaal complex, where the Axel Vervoordt company has their workshops and showrooms. This extensive site contains an explanation of the master plan and its inspiration, descriptions and floorplans of the properties that will be for sale, biographies of the architects and designers behind the project, information about the Vervoordt Foundation, dedicated to supporting the arts and preserving the Vervoordt collection, and probably much more. It is in Dutch, but I viewed the site in Google's Chrome browser, which did a pretty good job of translating to English.

I have been on hiatus for a while now, focusing on renovations at Garvinweasel, with lots of projects underway simultaneously... never really a good idea in my experience, but sometimes things just work out that way. I hope to post some new photos soon of the original floors stripped of a century and a half of coverings, including at least two coats of paint and two layers of carpet. This is one tough project, slow going, and I have a backup plan for new plank flooring should I just give up at some point, so wish me luck.

Dominique Browning on Our Aging Oil Infrastructure

Image: here

While we still don't know the full extent of impact from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Dominique Browning, former Editor-in-Chief of the much missed publication House & Garden, spells out the additional disasters waiting to happen in the Mississippi delta/Gulf of Mexico region in her blog hosted by the Environmental Defense Fund. She also provides a link to send a letter to the White House and Congress. Go, read, write.

We'll Always Have Paris

Malcolm McLaren died of cancer at the age of 64 on April 8, 2010, in Switzerland.

As producer of the seminal punk rock band the Sex Pistols, he created a phenomenon that, at the age of twenty, captivated me. Their debut album "Never Mind the Bollocks..." was in heavy rotation on my turntable and on the second night of the band's only U.S. tour, I stood on a front-row center chair, eyeball-to-pretty-vacant-eyeball with an angry John Lyndon aka Johnny Rotten. The band's infamous bass player, Sid Viscious, had a suspicious looking bandage around his left elbow, later revealed as an injury from trying to shoot up some street-bought heroin using a washed-out ink pen center as a makeshift needle.

A few years later I tried my own hand at being a sort of post-punk-rock impresario, opening the Antenna, a musical venue that went on to become the second longest running alternative performance space in America, according to The Official Punk Rock Book of Lists, after New York's now defunct CBGB's. Antenna served as proving grounds for bands like R.E.M., and a road to nowhere for others, including Brides of Funkenstein.

The Antenna stage was also a regular gig for another recently fallen musical genius, singer of the 60's pop hit "The Letter", Alex Chilton, who died March 17, 2010 in New Orleans.

Alex was often on guitar for a band called Panther Burns, who's leader Tav Falco, now lives in Europe, where he maintains a cult following.

My own tenure at the Antenna lasted only six months. The band Romeo Void, with their hit song "I Might Like You Better If We Slept Together", was to headline one Friday night in June 1981. I took the band, led by singer Deborah Iyall, to lunch that day at T.G.I.Fridays, and when I showed up the the club to open a few hours later, found that my partner had changed the locks. I think the band, who was also locked out, was more upset than I was, and the event allowed me to pursue a career that didn't interfere with my ability to get out of bed in the morning.

I spent the next few years getting in touch with my inner-geek, and by the time I was working on Wall Street, Mr. McLaren had morphed into a solo-artist, creating albums that brilliantly combined a wide array of influences, juxtaposing opera and hip-hop, cowgirls and down-beats. Some of my favorites from this period include "Buffalo Gals" from the album Duck Rock, and "Carmen" from the classic Fans.

But it was in 1994, while I was living in Paris, that he released a collection of songs that I still reside in my iTunes playlists, a double-album that includes collaborations with Francoise Hardy and Catherine Deneuve, the album "Paris". The influences found here mirrored my own, expressed in the lyrics "miles and miles of Miles Davis", and it quickly became the soundtrack to my own life in the City of Light, which by now had come a long way from the days I was first under Mr. McLaren's influence. But then, so had his. It's a sometimes beautiful, sometimes haunting album, with a mix of world music influences and Maclaren's wicked sense of humour, and I predict it will remain on the Garvinweasel playlist as long as I'm around. The recent departures of Mssrs. McLaren and Chilton serve as a reminder that we are, alas, only here for a short while. Long live Paris.

Malcom McLaren
1946-2010
 R.I.P.

French Lifestyle Blog - Two Maisons

Some of you know that I lived in France for a while in the nineties, and I sometimes dream about being an american in Paris again. Here's a link to a great lifestyle and design blog, Two Masions, by a lucky expat who lives in the south of France. She also has some great items for sale in the online shop.

He Ain't Heavy

He may not be my brother, but I consider him a kindred spirit. My neighbor, and the former mayor of the country village where Garvinweasel sits on the map, is an artist of sorts. His eye for landscape contour, and his ability to sculpt the earth, captivated me today as I watched him work his magic.

The act of moving logs weighing several tons, some felled by the ice storm in January 2010, others felled by my chainsaw as part of a master plan that includes reforestation of much of the property, seemed effortless. I used to spend months shredding a tree stump by hand with my maul ax. He dug this one up in about ten minutes, then carefully filled the resulting crevice and sculpted the slope from which it was pulled the way a woman sculpts her cheek bones with a sable makeup brush.

Dudley, almost one year old, keeps a close eye on the work in progress from his perch on top of the dogloo,  an igloo style dog house made mostly with hay bales. You can see other hay bale uses here. If you'd like to think about adopting Dudley, or another of the Garvinweasel rescue pack, please see my Blogger profile for my email address.

You can see here that there is still much tree clean-up underway from the ice storm. My tree crew estimated the resulting work to weigh in at close to one hundred tons. I'm doing much of it myself, and after a long day wielding a chainsaw, or loading my truck with crown wood debris, I generally take a long, hot soak in the tub, which is why I was delighted to find this great post on making bath salts on one of my favorite blogs, linen and lavender.

I should be wearing a hard hat in this picture, under a fallen pecan tree, which stood over sixty feet tall with an equal crown spread. I'm thinking these limbs might be a start for my own Wabi hut. I plan to dig a small pond  in the field seen over my shoulder here, surround it with pine seedlings, and such a structure overlooking the pond may be somewhere on my time horizon.

I spent ten hours working outside today. I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine, put on my Yoga One cd (thanks again LeAnn), and get in the tub.

Zen and the Art of Axel Vervoordt

Here is a link to a great article about Axel Vervoordt, from the online edition of Art + Auction magazine.

The article mentions a Wabi hut on the grounds at 's-Gravenwezel, 'made of earth and fallen tree limbs'. I am fascinated by this, especially considering the vast store of tree limbs still awaiting removal here, the result of a recent ice storm. If any of you have seen it, please let me know more about it.

Happy reading and good weekend.

p.s. I found a picture of the Wabi pavillion; it's in the slideshow that accompanies the article.

Photo by Laziz Hamani