Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Anything man-made

Since I’m closing in on the photo upload limit, I thought to go through my media gallery in order to select a few photos of some of my favourite man-made things from my earlier posts (i.e. from when I barely had an unrelated follower). It makes me happy to look at them again – and this is basically why I do what I do.

If you wish to know more about these photographs, you will have to look back (hihi).

I can see a few patterns: shooting things up on the trees (why?), food (well…), puurty colours, intricate shapes.

Man-made and mad-woman-shot-and-picked.

Who is it that loves Jeger in that song? Metka?

New carnation design: cranberry chocolate from Slovenia

Orbetello street lamp design.

Photo: MM

For Cee’s new Anything Man-made challenge:

Pane di papà, ikebana di mamma, never again Youth, Il giardino dei tarocchi for the inner child. Photo: MM

Poem from the board

There once was a board on my wall:

It included many things, memories, places, each item deserving a special entry. Look, there is Trpanj and a little English town in the middle of nowhere, and postcards from A. and R. and one of a huge rock made of shells in Karpathos, which we first bought and then located the rock in nature and it was nowhere as huge as it appears, and the Kiss, and the little pin calling for 40 days without alcohol, which N. gave me for my 40th birthday and I didn’t see the zero and said: “Oh, four days, I can do that!”, and Jeanette, and Slavoj’s hand, and Mickey, and my tarok cards, and a very old cartoon from Mladina magazine saying “Sad ću ja turbo da uključim” (I’ll switch to turbo now), and poems: e.e., Kosovel, a short one on tango, and this one by Austrian poet, here in the original:

Ernst Jandl 

zweierlei handzeichen

ich bekreuzige mich

vor jeder kirche

ich bezwetschkige mich

vor jedem obstgarten

 

wie ich ersteres

tue weiss jeder katholik

wie ich letzteres tue

ich allein

I just found this poem translated into English by Peter Lach – Newinsky in his Word and image lab:

Two Kinds of Hand Signals

 

Before every church

I cross myself.

Before every orchard

I plum myself.

 

How I do the first:

every catholic knows.

How I do the second:

I alone.

But sometimes it happens that a poem really comes to life in a completely obscure little language, such as ours (close-up from the board, the postcard with the poem used to be distributed freely in a Ljubljana bookshop).

A samurai enters a tea parlour.

A woman asks him to whom he sold his sword.

Samurai looks at her sternly and replies morosely: “I didn’t sell it. Anyway, it was not a sword but rather a bowl of rice, I hardly got anything for it.”

The woman adds: “Why is it then that you have two swords in your belt?”

—Mladina magazine 1988, translated by Manja Maksimovič

Poet Janez Janša

(Yes, this is a poem by the original Janez Janša. I have Moralna mačka on here, so I had to put him up too, for balance… This one was written in June 1988 in JNA military prison and published in Mladina a year later… yep, from my scrapbook… stuff you find there – it’s deadly. First, translation by Manja Maksimovič on the spot, then the original.)

Glimpse

By Janez Janša

When my soul is food for moths

open the closet door

and send them flying

When my thoughts come looking for

a way to return

from the afterlife

embrace them

When they reconcile the injustices

that are left behind me

smile at them

When they aspire to draw the shadow

bigger than the tree

point to the sun

When everything is gone

and nothing remains

know

that we aspired to live as well.

Tivoli, Ljubljana. Photo: MM

Utrinek

Janez Janša

Ko bodo dušo žrli molji

odpri vrata omare

in jih poženi v beg.

Ko bodo moje misli iskale

pot nazaj

iz onstranstva

jih sprejmi.

Ko bodo poravnavali krivice

ki ostajajo za mano

se jim nasmehni.

Ko bodo hoteli narisati

senco večjo od drevesa

pokaži sonce.

Ko bodo odšlo vse

in bo ostal nič

vedi

da smo tudi mi hoteli živeti.

In the year 2000, there will be ten states in Europe: Eastern Europe, Western Europe and eight Yugoslavias.

—Mladina magazine, 1987, translated by Manja Maksimovič