Layers of meaning

This comes from a rusting metal door a few streets from where I live. I've no idea how it got there, though it has a Banksy sort of artiness about it. Zorro and X-Men seem to have been added at a later date and may have had no original connection with the central image (although, of course, they do now). The street, really no more than an alley, leads to the house of a local artist, notoriously shy and intolerant of praise. I'm sure there's no connection between the two, or there wasn't before this post. I wonder where the baby comes from and why he's ringed in blue like this; if there's any sense to it.

Flyer found in toilet

Another great find by Jane. A flyer spotted in the Ladies' Powder Room (honestly) of Beatties department store, Wolverhampton, now, alas, part of the House of Fraser. Those of you who know Beatties will understand how sad this is. I remember sitting in the ballroom as mannequins wandered among the tables with the price of their dresses on small embossed cards in their hands, background music provided by a small man at a piano. I remember Battenburg and angel cake and leaves in the tea. Sad, sad, sad. And this flyer is emblematic of Beatties' decline. The oddest thing about it is that it clearly knows what it's saying and thinks its message somehow appropriate and, even, appealing.

Having said all that, because of course, like everyone else, I can have it both ways, there's a shamelessness about it that I find rather compelling. A sort of slapping on the muck while Wolverhampton burns.

Multitasking ad infinitum

As though he didn't have enough on his hands...

(Spotted by Jane on Ridley Road. Nice one, Jane.)

Machine translation. Don't you just love it...

If you've nothing better to do and speak the language of another country reasonably well, click on its flag in the my widget panel down there to the right and enjoy what happens to all these posts.

And then wonder what would happen if an official document -- a peace treaty, say, a writ -- were subjected to the same treatment, and cover your face with horror.

Peckish?

This comes from the label of a small jar of a local speciality. The hairs have been removed.

Fortuitous errors

In the following line from, I think, Letters from Iceland, 'And the ports have names for the sea', Auden originally wrote 'poets', but preferred the printer's error and left it as it was.

Similarly, in the previous post, I intended to say 'home-made wine', but actually typed 'hole-made wine'. This captures the flavour, foetid, unsunned, acidic, of the stuff so perfectly I'm going to take a leaf from Auden's book.

ROSENQUIST: THE F-111

A man has a contract from the company making the bomber
A beam at the airport
A man in an airplane approaching a beam at the airport
A bug hitting a light bulb
A light sky blue area

The painting is a cube or a box with one empty wall space
The pattern in an elevator lobby
A wallpaper roller with hard artificial flowers
Aluminium flowers on an aluminium panel

A jet plane painted on aluminium panels
An idea of fragments of vision
A person buying a recording of the time

A vacant aluminium panel

A fancy cornice or something seemingly more human
A pulsing muscular notion to the speed on the avenue
A glimmer
A flash of static movement

An aluminium panel

A fragment of a machine the collector is already mixed up with
A couple of aluminium panels

Foodstuff

A shaft that goes in the middle of the cake from the core or mould used to bake it
A big hole in the middle of the cake
A giant birthday cake lying on a truck for a parade

The spaghetti just on the right, with the fork, has been painted orange with artists’ oil colour
The little girl is the female form in the picture
The grass in Day-Glo green colours is the change of nature in relation to the new look of the landscape

A vacant aluminium panel

An umbrella superimposed over an atom bomb blast
Someone raising his umbrella or raising his window in the morning, looking out the window and seeing a bright red and yellow atomic bomb blast, something like cherry blossom

An aperture for a view

The rod holding up the umbrella goes right down the middle of the explosion
The umbrella is realistic
The blue in the umbrella is its own colour
It’s a beach umbrella that was left up in the winter
The breath of an atomic bomb

A huge arabesque
A fold of aluminium material
A blanket
A painter’s drop cloth
Drops and residues of paint
An orange field, the image of spaghetti
A person who offers up a gift

A man in an airplane approaching a beam at the airport
A beam at the airport
A small relief to a heavy atmosphere
An artist offering up something as a small gift
An extravagance

A man has a contract from the company making the bomber

When your cavity needs a little filling

The dentist's chair is often a locus for sexual fantasies but I've never seen the notion expressed quite as blatantly as it is in this sign, spotted in Kingsland High Road and snapped by Jane.

And if you think the title to this post is gratuitous vulgarity (as of course it is), let me hastily refer you to its onlie begetter, Bette Midler, who wrote and performed the song it comes from: Long John Blues.

Thank you, Jane!