take a moment and listen...

...I dig it, dig it , dig it...

this

and Pascal Obispo...this track from the first album I bought of his...; here you go

and one of my favourite contemporary Chanson singers Patricia Kaas

...but as a final standard setter; Marie Carmen singing the same song...

and she does it so sexily...

while we're listening to all this French music I might as well slip in one of my favourite bits of opera. It's, uncharacteristically, not in Italian, or German!....but in French. This is the famous male duet from Bizet's "the Pearl Fishers"

It expresses the devotion of 2 friends, a younger man and his older mentor, to one another. In the song we learn that they are both in love with the same woman but to preserve their friendship they both pledge to abandon the lady. Needless to say, the younger man cannot resist the urging of his heart and the story evolves toward it's inevitable end. Here, however, ideals and emotion are pure.

The actual story of this particular recording, the gold standard in terms of this song, is very interesting too.

I suppose I ought to get back up to date now, so here's something that makes me feel very proud to be English, the way this man was seen purely for what he expressed....not what he looked like. Absolutely brilliant; here's the link.

Enjoy, and Namaste.

Lots more words ...and some more pictures too.

I've just posted an essay, which provides a bit of an overview of Traditional Japanese metalwork, over on the Iron Brush forum. Here's the link.

...and in case you missed it, I also posted a gallery of most of the tsuba I've made over the last 20 or more years. Here's the link to that collection.

Namaste, Ford