Fandango’s Friday Flashback • 22 May. Not having blogged that long, I’m re-posting this post from 22 December that I put up for Silent Sunday. To see the ‘rules’ click here.
If you’d like to keep on enjoying your Silent Sunday, click here.
Click here to view more of my entries in FFF.
Fandango’s Friday Flashback • 15 May. Not having blogged that long, I’m re-posting this post from 15 January that I put up for Jez’ Water, water everywhere challenge.
Cuban Dusk • Water Water Everywhere #10
This photo features a passage way to the ocean for the fishing village where I was at, somewhere in Cuba.
Posted as part of Jez Braithwaite’s WWE challenge.
Click here to view more of my entries in FFF.
Fandango’s Friday Flashback • Treasure Hunt. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of Lens Artists on #FFF is from February 24.
The #85 edition of the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge by Tina urges us to go on a ‘Treasure Hunt’ in your photo library. For details, see the link.
While the setting sun is a bit of an after-thought, here’s a more obvious and cliché one. Notice the outline of the moon right above the sun.
So, this treasure hunt of the #85 Lens-Artists Photo Challenge seriously depleted my photo library.
You can find more entries in photo challenges here.
Fandango’s Friday Flashback • Insane51 Berlin Mural. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of Monday Mural on #FFF is from February 17.
We found this mural at the foot of the Oberbaumbrücke in Berlin.
With the help of scooj (https://scooj.org/ and see his comment below) the artist is a Greek by the name Insane51. It is kind of a 3D mural, with a blue lens you get to see the woman, with a red lens her skeleton.
Sami then pointed this YouTube video out:
That also led me to his video of how he makes his art:
Discovered on December 3, 2018. Entry in Sami’s challenge February 17. For more of my entries, see for instance this.
All-in-all I find this ‘collaboration’ of an Insane51 fan for this Monday Mural post truly great!
Fandango’s Friday Flashback • Ali Bombaye!. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of Three Things Challenge #170 on #FFF is from March 10.
Ali Bomaye! • Three Things Challenge #170 is my entry into this challenge by pensitivity101.
I totally forgot the birthday of the (self-proclaimed) Greatest which was on January 16. The prompt of fight, wound and blood however immediately made me remember. Here’s a small tribute to correct this faux-pas.
He had been spoiling for the Rumble in the Jungle. Certainly the greatest fight of his career. The chance to redeem himself. After he was stripped of his World Champion title for political reasons, he was lusting for blood. It still is a miracle he emerged victorious without so much as a wound n his face. And a beating he took the first 6 or 7 rounds. While many (wrongly) accused him of rope-a-doping, there are those who point out that it was a combination of his unrivaled skills, strategy and his loud mouth. But no matter who’s right or who’s wrong, that single fight in Kinshasa, Zaire proved once and for all that he was the Greatest. Ever. Ali Bomaye!
If you’d like to see the Greatest outfighting the Strongest check out this link.
Or watch the Oscar-winning documentary When we were Kings for FREE on Hulu, by clicking here.
You do not have to read the next part, as it contains nothing of interest or any value. To please Google – according to their own Analytics nobody ever clicks on this link – click here to read my other submission into this writing challenge. And to appease this pompous almighty one even more I have to include this one more time. Three Things Challenge #170.
Fandango’s Friday Flashback • How do you remake magic? • Blogging Insights#7. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of Dr. Tanya’s Blogging Insights#7 on #FFF is from January 2, 2020.
Dr Tanya – in her great blog Salted Caramel – has been running her Blogging Insights series for nearly three months. In this quest she has unearthed a wealth of insights from bloggers, and by keeping this all in-the-public-eye so to speak it can be of tremendous value for bloggers. Not in the least for rookie-bloggers like myself. So far she has fired off 11 salvo’s, or sets if you will, of questions. Some of these are pretty easy to answer. Others require some ‘soul-searching’. Now she has given us, who like myself are pretty new to this form of ‘mental exercise’, the opportunity to catch up with the front-runners.
So here is my answer to the 7th question:
How do you write fresh content when everything that is worth saying has already been said ?
For me, coming from the advertising world where everything worthwhile saying has been said dozens of times over, the real question behind Dr Tanya’s question is a different one.
Is it really about finding fresh content, or is it more about finding a fresh way of phrasing the same old tired content?
In my mind, isn’t this what we’re all struggling with from time to time? Or, taken this question and re-framing it slightly:
Coca-Cola has started claiming Santa Claus (yes, I know, there are some pundits even claiming it invented Santa Claus), and they have more or less kept the same message, or content if you will, alive and kicking to this day.
The famous Coca-Cola Santa Claus is the brainchild of really three greats of the old advertising industry: Fred Mizen, Archie Lee and the Michigan native Haddon Sundblom.
Fresh consistency seems to be the key concept here. All very well for the one who first leveraged the magical story I can hear the critical reader think. All’s very well once you’ve ‘fathered’ the initial magic. Your only challenge then is to keep it the magic fresh. This is by no means a small feat however. Remember the (in my mind) equally great Polar Bears campaign? Which they let die because they couldn’t keep the magic fresh?
Sheer folly? This territory has been taken? There is simply no way in remaking the magic that Coke has so powerfully managed to keep consistent yet fresh?
W R O N G !
Try this one on for size:
“Actually buddy, I think you made it even better’ is the wonderful last line in this TVC that sums it all up.
So here’s the stone old trick to answering this question with the same sentiment: ‘How do you remake magic?’ Do N O T go for fresh consistency. Forget about the last part. Find a different spin on the subject. Your spin.
Fandango’s Friday Flashback • Celebrities Cars. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of ‘Cee’s Fun Photo Challenge’ on #FFF is from September, 2019.
Re-reading it I was suddenly remembered that this was meant to be work-in-progress, so a first update is now high on my to-do list. Here’s the original post:
Celebrities cars. Cee’s Fun Photo Challenge. This challenge caught my attention immediately. The chance to show some of my collection of photos of 1960s & 1970s celebrities cars. Let me start by saying that I can only dream of having taken these photos. I started collecting them of a global Facebook group called ‘Theo’s classic cars friends’ some time ago, as they just leaped of my Mac (I can recommend this group to every classic car lover) and it just grew.
Every photo of celebrities cars has a story. Wherever possible I included as much of the stories I could find. Obviously, this will be work in progress, so do check in from time to time…
If the ’70s were the decade for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, few people practiced it as religiously as Keith Moon, the drummer for The Who. Widely credited with perfecting rock star cliches like trashing hotel rooms, driving luxury cars into swimming pools, and destroying his drums on stage every night, Moon partied harder than just about anybody. He ended up paying dearly for it too — he died at age 32 in 1977. Here’s Moon in 1972 with daughter Mandy and an array of his cars. There are three Rolls-Royces, a Mercedes-Benz 350SLC, Bucket-T Ford hot rod, a 1930s Chrysler, a hovercraft, and a Ferrari Dino. He famously gave the keys to the Ferrari to a group of teenagers at his local pub and forgot about it — until he found the car wrecked in a ditch while stumbling home drunk.
Ernest Hemingway spent much of his life in Cuba: starting in 1939, for more than 15 years, albeit with several interruptions. On the island, he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, with which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize the following year. Also in Cuba, Hemingway started For Whom the Bell Tolls and made famous cocktails like the Mojito and the Daiquiri. The American writer also left one of his cars on the island, a 1955 Chrysler New Yorker De Luxe Convertible: the restoration of the car became the subject of a documentary. It is a car that, thanks to its illustrious owner, has great historical value, but at the time of its discovery, which occurred recently, its conditions were not good. In fact, it had stood still and abandoned for over half a century. But there was no money for the restoration and finding original parts was very difficult. At this point, David Soul came on the scene, known for playing Ken Hutch in the TV series Starsky & Hutch. The actor is a big fan of Hemingway and, thanks to the British passport in his possession, he had traveled to Cuba many times, becoming a friend of the director of the museum dedicated to the writer. Who asked him for help. Thanks to the magazine Practical Classics, Soul came in touch with Andy Bernbaum, supplier of original Chrysler parts, also a big Hemingway fan. Then, with the help of some sponsors, the restoration became really possible.
In the early ’70s, Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones were at the top of their powers. On top of jet-setting and selling out arenas around the world, they were recording seminal albums like Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. Somewhere between all of that, Mick was able to vacation in the south of France. Here he is behind the wheel of a Morgan, a wood-framed, British-built sports car. Aside from an interruption during World War II, the Morgan has been in constant production since 1936. Amazingly, the modern Morgan isn’t all that different from Mick’s car here.
West Berlin, Cold War Era, 1976. David Bowie lived in a flat close to the Wall, together with Iggy Pop, Brian Eno and Lou Reed. Of that period he remembers being constantly high on drugs. One night he found himself in a hotel garage, his foot jammed on the gas of a black 1967 Mercedes Benz 600 Landaulet, racing around in circles at lunatic speed. Then he decided to let the steering go and end his life crashing at full speed into a garage “wall”. But just as he did so, the Mercedes ran out of petrol and spluttered to a standstill. “Oh God,” he said to himself, “this is the story of my life!” Yet he was wrong. Because instead of running on empty, Bowie wrote a harrowing confessional song called “Always Crashing In The Same Car”. Instead of dying at his peak, he would pick up the shattered pieces of his mind and distill them into the three most cathartic, influential, and magical albums of his career: “Low”, “Heroes” and “Lodger”. And instead of becoming just another ’70s Rock casualty, Bowie would fuse British Punk with Kraut Electronica, black magic with white noise, amphetamine psychosis with spiritual healing. As a by-product of this process, starting from a potential car crash, he would accidentally invent in West Berlin the future of Rock and Roll.
According to an article published in 2016 by the Italian newspaper Republica it is the 1966 Ferrari 275 GTS chassis #7359 that belonged to Raquel Welch. She received such a car as a present from the director Leslie H. Martinson (movie Fathom). She drove the Ferrari until 1975, when she sold it to a new buyer.
Fandango’s Friday Flashback • hello. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of ‘Wordless Wednesday’ on #FFF is from November 20, 2019. In hindsight, this post was one of my worst in terms of likes (just 2!) you soulless Window addicts… Didn’t anyone remember that since January 24th, 36 years ago, 1984 didn’t turn out to be… like 1984?
Wordless Wednesday • It’s been 35 years since the first hello.
Fandango’s Friday Flashback • dVerse Poets Pub. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of ‘OpenLinkNight#256’ on #FFF is from December 13, 2019, that I posted on the dVerse Poets Pub.
Of all the wild absurdities
With which the heart can cram
Its sad asylum, none’s more daft
Than this mad need, this damn-
Idiot ache to be with you
When I already am.
Kiowara no Fukayabu (early 9th century)
This poem was translated from Japanese
by Graeme Wilson
Posted by TiongHan as part of the dVerse OpenLinkNight#256.
Fandango’s Friday Flashback • February 14. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of ‘Andy Warhol’s lines’ on #FFF is from October 14, that I wrote for Becky B.‘s Lines and Squares challenge.
Andy Warhol’s lines
Here’s my entry to Becky’s Lines & Squares Challenge, Oct. 14, which is sparked by Victoria C. Slotto’s post Warhol-Pop Art in Words. A wonderful explanation and tribute to one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He’s up there with Edward Hopper and Tamara de Lempicka. Of these three, he’s truly the one who democratized art. Mostly just by idolizing ‘household brands’.
The Whitney Museum of Modern Arts wrote the following on this piece:
Green Coca-Cola Bottles was created the year that Andy Warhol developed his pioneering silkscreen technique, which allowed him to produce his paintings through a mechanical process that paralleled his use of mass culture subjects. Here, the image of a single Coca-Cola bottle is repeated in regular rows, seven high by sixteen across, above the company’s logo. The repetitive imagery and standardized format evokes the look of mechanical reproduction, but the black outlines were probably stamped by hand from a single carved woodblock onto green areas printed in a grid pattern. This engenders subtle differences in the work’s pattern; each of the bottles differs in both the evenness of the green underpainting and in the clarity of its stamped profile. The bottles are also often slightly askew, disturbing the overall regularity of the grid and making them appear simultaneously handmade and individualized, streamlined and mass-produced. In his deadpan and ironic way, Warhol at once criticized and glorified the consumerist idols and surface values of America’s media-saturated postwar culture. “A Coke is a Coke,” he explained, “and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”
If you’d like to see more of my entries to Becky’s Lines & Squares challenges, just click here, here, here or here.
I hope you like this tribute on Fandango’s Flashback Friday.
