Ni Dieu Ni Maitre

Northern Thailand is in an air quality tailspin. When I was briefly there in Chaing Mai at the end of last year, the weather was delightful and the air fresh. Currently it is, frankly, poisonous, running an AQI of 205 today. I am looking at far northern India as an option, but also at very southern Thailand, even though the rainy season is approaching there. Unfortunately, looking at three different AQI results today, the numbers are, as usua,l widely divergent for Phuket where such things are measured in this region. Plume Labs : 114, AQI: 78,Copernicus: 44. The official Thai site in pretty undecipherable as it is written in Thai script, but the general area is in the 70’s. Which is acceptable.

Great album!+

Of course, Phuket is a place I’d rather avoid, as it is a main center of Thailand’s sleazy ‘sex for male tourists’ industry… and it is on an industrial scale. Other, smaller and cleaner spots do abound along the southern coast, though. The Indian north-eastern states still look attractive with many areas featuring clean air and several winning awards for their great air quality.

The problem with both Thailand and North India is rain, May being the beginning of rainy season in both areas. It’s not a monsoon, with endless heavy rains daily, but still 50% rainy days. Northern India does not have the high steamy heat of Southern Thailand though.

Letter to a friend…

I mentioned a while back that I was studying art (at a leisurely pace) and now I wonder if this pursuit would interest you. It began back when I subscribed to the Washington Post (masthead motto: Democracy Dies in Darkness) where their art writer, Sebastian Smee was presenting single works of art with his reactions and observations to each work… a process spread out over several years. These articles were pretty informative and I was reading through them chronologically until Jeff Bezos (owner of Amazon) bought the paper and began his several years of dismantling the paper and firing most of the staff, including Smee. I was an early subscription canceller and thus lost access to these columns on art. The masthead, so proudly displayed for many decades now serves as the epitath for a once respected news source.

In any event, I have turned to WikiArt as a new source of material. This site features multiple thousands of artworks and is somehow linked with the indispensible, for me, wikipedia, although the art site is for profit while still free to peruse. Here, once you learn to navigate the site, you can see the works of thousands of artists or explore various movements and styles (Impressionism, Blue Rider, Baroque and so on). I recently looked at several hundred works by Rembrandt, the famous artist whose work has always failed to impress me… and it still doesn’t. Camille Corot, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise. These days of leisure, I’m on WikiArt for an hour or so almost every day. Sometimes randomly and otherwise looking at the works of a single artist, Rodin or Berthe Morisot or one of my favorites Wassily Kandinski.

My hopes, in addition to broadening my appreciation, are that I may begin to see the world differently and that my photographic ‘skills’ will improve a bit, balance, lighting, composition, color, not photographing my thumb and so on. But the exercise itself is a welcome pleasure.