Connections. Twiggy and Pope’s Grotto… W…

Connections. Twiggy and Pope’s Grotto…

Was in the coffee-palace today thinking ’bout my Barney logs and Lissitzky the Russian who worked for Stalin, and how Barney called him a “Hack.” So I pick up a copy of ‘Soviet Union for 1962′ from the library at ‘Coffee to the People’ filched from the SF Unified School District, History dept. ex libris the James Denman Junior High.

And bless my soul, there on a page with a Kruschev picture, someone had written a pencilled bubble, with the words ‘Barney B’ inside. For real.

Spooky.

Alessandra the daughter – who knows how to do a contortion or two – says it’s Barney talking from the other side. I’m quite certain that’s what Barney would say too. An example of Serendipity if ever there was.

And this is a Serendip type event because it was hecka weird when I saw “Barney B” in a bubble coming out of Kruschev’s shiny pate. So this is a good example to illustrate Alexander Pope’s invention of the word, Serendipity, the happy habit of fancival discovery, which was named for (or after) the Three Princes (or were they Princesses?) of Serendip, in what is now Sri Lanka, and used to be called Ceylon, and featured as a mythical place in antiquity, then made fabulous in a 17th Century novel. Recently it was Tiger-territory. Pope’s example to illustrate the word with a story about a camel was not a very apt definition. Mine is better.

Daught Aless’ current pin-up is the 60’s London model Twiggy, the thin, but healthy model, who lived in a house close by Pope’s Grotto in Twickenham, a grotto under the road made of shells and dubious antiquities cobbled together in a faux mithras alcove.

Twig-tech is the contemporary expression of the wicker or wattle arts, also hedgerow weaving. I studied advanced Twig-tech with Faye Schoolcraft the sculptor in the ’80’s. Current expression of the latest advances in Twiggery are to be found in the architcture of the raised beds in my garden.