Mandalay

I've recently been reading 17 Watts? : the Birth of British Rock Guitar by Mo Foster. Through an entertaining assemblage of anecdotes from that initial post-War generation that went from Meccano to home-made pickups and amplifiers to filling stadiums in a single decade, it tells the story of the birth of our national obsession with guitar-driven pop.

The stories are great, but I think the best bit is the series of late 1950s back garden photographs showing nascent rock gods, aged 12, proudly cradling cheap guitars which are bigger than they are. Who could have guessed what riches the world would shower on some, or how badly it would end for others?

As I mention in my profile (over on the right there, next to the crow), I was born in 1954 and so never knew life in The Land Before Rock'n'Roll. Indeed, some of my earliest memories are rocking out, as only a 4-year old can, to Lonnie Donegan and Tommy Steele on seaside caff jukeboxes, to the deep embarrassment of my "proper" boomer sister, eight years older. My Dad had to endlessly improvise guitars for me out of sticks and rolled up newspaper -- anything would do, so long as I could go "Dang-a-dang, dang, DANG!" to that rocking music. I was an appalling little show-off.

But reading the book, looking at the pictures, and remembering the music sparked off some deep musical memories that had nothing to do with guitars. If you don't get your cultural history from Central Casting you'll know that culture is always a mixed picture, with huge time lags working their way through the system*. In the 1950s my Dad's generation were in their prime, and closer to their experience of the jungles of Burma and the beaches of Normandy than we are now to "9/11" and the Milennium Bug. To them, the "skiffle thing" was a passing youth fad, just "greasy kids' stuff" in the contemporary phrase.

Dad -- only 40 in 1958 -- had been a keen amateur drummer and motocyclist, but his musical horizons were fixed by big band swing and the sophisticated vocals of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Ton Up Boys, Little Richard and Chuck Berry simply disgusted him. He was a man of strong musical tastes -- he couldn't understand the appeal of anything that lacked polish, that invoked raw or mawkish emotions, or wasn't essentially Sophisticated Movie American in impulse. For him, it was a time of Italian-copy suits and Volare, the excitement of business travel to France on BEA Viscounts and Come Fly With Me.

But most of his generation were stuck in an older, music-hall groove. It was the twilight of the great age of novelty and variety acts -- I well remember harmonica bands and penny whistle acts on Sunday Night At The London Palladium, in between jugglers and the Tiller Girls. What played on the radio until about 1965 was intended to entertain this easily-pleased but easily-bored majority.

Although "rock" has carried all before it for 50 years, to the point where other musics now struggle for an audience, it's important to realise that at the time of its greatest original triumphs it was like those first tiny mammals, scampering around the feet of the dinosaurs -- strong on potential but low on visibility. I doubt the BBC Light Service played more than twenty "Rock'n'Roll" tracks in a week, even in the Great Age of Elvis.

It was also the Age of Dan Dare who, oddly,
crash landed on campus this week

What the BBC did play a lot of was songs and tunes from musicals, and a particular brand of British light orchestral music that has vanished from the world. The composers and players of this music are now forgotten men -- Ronald Binge or Eric Coates, anyone? And yet, if you grew up in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, their catchy, wholesome tunes were ubiquitous, in the arrangements of Mantovani and other popular orchestras. Thinking of the descending riff of Shakin' All Over, I found myself remembering with deep fondness the not dissimilar tune of Binge's Elizabethan Serenade, which instantly transported me back to a sunny, windy washday in Peartree Way, Stevenage, with my Mum pegging flapping wet sheets onto the clothes line.

And the radio in those days carried survivors from an even earlier age, like the Victorian pennies that would turn up in your change before decimalisation. Ancient-seeming music: the fifty years before 1960 seem to have been considerably longer than the most recent fifty years. For some bizarre reason, I found myself singing On the Road to Mandalay while I was away on holiday. Few things take you so thoroughly by surprise as stuff you didn't know you knew. There I was, swaggering around a French farmhouse kitchen, mentally kitted out as a Kipling-era soldier, singing in a faux-baritone,

On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin' fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder,
Outta China 'crost the bay!

Strange. I doubt this was as enjoyable to listen to as it was to do, but I made a mental note to look the song up when I got home, and perhaps learn the lyric as a party piece. Or maybe not. But I was surprised and pleased by this felt connection to the Land Before The Land Before Rock'n'Roll.

And when I looked up the song, I was very taken with its final verse, a rock'n'roll sentiment avant la lettre if ever I saw one:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea;

On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,Where the flyin' fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay!

Another time I must write something about Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads (the source of Mandalay), one of the great underrated masterpieces of English literature. But for now, let's all raise a thirst and sing together:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"

Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

Rip it up...

* If there is a system -- Discuss, with examples.

And the Winner is...

I have mentioned in several recent posts that I've been comparing the Olympus E-P1 and the Panasonic GF1 (the Panasonic G1 having been knocked out in the first round, on grounds of too closely resembling a DSLR). They're both very good cameras, but I'm not wealthy enough to keep both and a choice had to be made.

The interesting bit about comparing cameras in use is that it's rarely the headline features that colour one's impression. In fact, in almost every case I experienced the exact opposite of the expected outcome. The Panasonic has a better LCD screen? On paper, yes, but in use the difference is negligible to non-existent, and in sunlight the Olympus is actually far easier to see. The Panasonic lacks in-body image stabilisation? True, but for me it consistently returned the sharpest images. The Olympus is a little over-stylish, a little "look at me"? Perhaps, but it seemed to become invisible as soon as I hung it on my shoulder (it has a very good strap, btw). The Olympus has no flash? Absolutely, but I have never once used the pop-up flash on the Panasonic.

In the end, my final impression was that the Olympus felt the best -- its density, size and layout suited me, and I really enjoyed using it to take pictures. It handles very like a lighter OM-1. The layout of the buttons was just right, and I loved using the combination of the exposure compensation button and the rolling thumb dial. The buttons were nicely recessed, too, so that brushing against my side didn't affect any settings. Having been driven slowly mad by the mode dial on the LX3 (which changes if you breathe on it), this plus the ultra-recessed mode dial with its stiff detents was a sheer pleasure. The thumb dial, however, was far too easily moved and annoyed me intensely e.g. by changing aperture radically between shots.

But I was sometimes let down by the images it brought home. The autofocus was slow and -- worse -- slightly off target rather too often. Backlit and high-contrast edges suffered from more colour fringing than I like, and -- despite the inbuilt image stabilisation -- there was far too much softness in the sort of hand-held moderate close-ups that are characteristic of my photography. I was losing pictures, and that's simply no good.

The Panasonic is less solid in build than the Olympus, and a little smaller and squarer. If the E-P1 is reminiscent of an OM-1, the GF1 is reminiscent of a chunkier Olympus XA. I was afraid that it would have a similarly flighty mode dial to the LX3, but it's got good solid click stops. Exposure compensation and aperture/shutter speeds are handled by a plasticky but functional control dial which is stiff and unsatisfying to use but impossible to change accidentally. However, the main buttons are not recessed, and can be pressed accidentally by rough contact. Also, in Program Mode the software has an annoying preference for the widest available aperture, resulting in (to me) mad exposures in Spanish sunshine like 2500th @ f/1.7 -- but then Aperture Priority Mode is always my preferred default.

Its photographs are consistently good, however, and that is what counts. Autofocus and exposure are almost always spot on, and there's a quality to them (a "Panasonic look") that they share with the LX3 which I find very pleasing. The consistent sharpness of the images is mystifying -- I kept wondering whether Panasonic had actually implemented image stabilisation at the last minute and forgotten to tell anyone. Maybe knowing it's not there makes one more conscious of technique? The electronic viewfinder, of course, makes a huge difference, and is the icing on the cake.

It was an easy choice deciding which camera to take on holiday, and it's an easy choice to decide which to keep. My only regret is that in selling on the Olympus I will be losing the 17mm lens, which is excellent -- better, I found, in most circumstances, than the much hyped Panasonic 20mm, which can vignette quite badly -- and the VF-1 optical viewfinder, which is a perfect match for the Panasonic 20mm lens.

A Brief History of Humanity in Pictures

Here is a little miscellany of images from the excellent Musée de l'Aquitaine in Bordeaux. Cast in order of appearance.

The Venus of Laussel
(Palaeolithic karaoke night?)

Roman memorial stones
(nice to see the locals kept their beards)

The angel restrains Abraham
(or is s/he checking the sharpness of his blade?)

Saint Somebody or Other gets it on...

From Montaigne's tomb

The shadow of slavery...

It's nice to visit a museum where photography is allowed (no flash or tripods, obviously). These were all hand held at ISO 800.

Unlike this miserably run-down chateau we visited in the Dordogne (mainly for the coolness, it's true) which contained barely anything of interest, but which forbade photography throughout. But try and stop me...

Another Venus,
Chateau Wotsit

Dismantling My Career

Pavement in Cambo-Les-Bains

In case you haven't seen it, there's a really interesting interview with Alec Soth here:

Dismantling my career : an interview with Alec Soth


If you don't know who Alec Soth is, and why this is such an interesting interview, you have some catching up to do...

Notes from a Holiday

The Heat

As the captain lowered the belly of our aircraft to skim the thick layer of cloud which obscured our view of England's south coast the frame of the thing shuddered with turbulence, but it felt like a shiver of cold. When we had boarded at Bergerac 90 minutes ago, the temperature was in the low 30s Celsius; at Southampton, we were told, it would be 16 degrees. Welcome home!

The heat was a major feature of our recent holiday in the Pyrenees and in the Dordogne. Avoiding it (long drives in our air-conditioned hire car to spend lingering visits in cool museums and chateaux), studying it (figuring out when "Le Méteo" would be broadcast, and trying to pick useful nuggets out of the weatherwoman's gabble), and enduring it, mainly.

Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux


Looking at France, from Spain

The Flies

In the Dordogne, particularly, we were under daily assault by insects and allied trades. Large wasps of several species were working the old masonry of the house, finding their way in through the shutters and cruising the internal airspace like French teenagers on mobylettes. At night, enormous spiders and sensationally ugly leaf-shaped centipedes came out of the cracks in the stonework. At any hour of the night, the cry "Dad!!" would get me out of bed to despatch yet another of these monsters menacing my children from the wall. I ended up sleeping on a hair trigger, which led to interesting dreams but little relaxation.

Oh, and mosquitoes... My eyesight and concentration are not at their best at 4:30 am, so pursuing these little blood-sucking bastards round a high-ceilinged farmhouse was a nightly challenge. Give me a spider the size of a saucer any day.


The Birds

Southwest France and the Pyrenees is a good spot for birds. One morning, we stepped outside to see a "kettle" of 50 or 60 table-sized Griffon vultures stacked up over our garden. Large raptors of many species are commonplace, but as we only had a "travel weight" bird book and had omitted to pack any binoculars identification was speculative; you began to understand why Victorian naturalists reached for a shotgun as a way of eliminating uncertainty. "Yup, that's a Short-toed Eagle alright! Shall we leave it for the vultures or have it stuffed?"

My favourites were the Honey Buzzards, rather shifty raptors with a clear admiration for crows, who hang around on the ground in ploughed fields, hopping from clump to clump looking for tasty invertebrates. A previous visitor had seen a Hoopoe in the garden (one of the more memorable Latin names, Upupa epops), but we didn't. At night various unfamiliar owls screeched and whooped in the trees.

A tradition of our family holidays is the Owl Incident (see The Wol of Minerva), and this time it occurred on a Pyrenean backroad returning from a trip to San Sebastian in Spain. We had a French left-hand drive hire car, and I have never driven such a vehicle before. I found it to be a major exercise in overcoming reflexes and muscle memory: in tight spots, I would find myself grasping the window winder rather than the gear stick. Also, a diesel Peugeot 207 "estate" is not, shall we say, my car of choice, but it is what Mr. Hertz chose to loan me. Luckily, French and Spanish roads are virtually empty most of the time. (It occurs to me that the treble shock of driving on the left in a right-hand drive car and nose-to-tail at 80 mph in a traffic density greater than a car park may account for the comparative paucity of foreign visitors to our own fair country).

Anyway, the Owl Incident. Somewhere on a sequence of tight and narrow hairpin bends that, in the darkness, put one in the state of mind appropriate to a challenging but repetitive video game, I dipped the headlights in courtesy to an oncoming driver, only to find that when I undipped them they went out: I was driving in complete obscurity on a mountain road with a failed electrical system.

The only way I could get the lights to work was to pull the lever onto "full beam flash" and hold it there with one hand, thumb hooked around the steering wheel, and steer and change gear with the other. I am a good man in a crisis, and I felt like Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III as I eventually glided us safely into a layby. No need to cheer, folks, just doing my job. I felt rather less heroic when I discovered that there had not been a catastrophic failure of the Peugeot's electrics, but that I had simply turned off the headlights when I dipped them. Doh!

As I turned the lights back on, they lit up a Barn Owl standing on a road sign, turning its head from side to side as it checked us out. We checked it out in return for some while, before getting into gear and heading for home. Of such incidents are family memories made.

My beautiful children...
I hope they remember who chased away the spiders when I get old.

The Basques

The Basques are an all round curious bunch of people. Occupying the French and Spanish western borderlands since possibly the last Ice Age, they speak a non Indo-European language with no known relatives. Or, at least, some of them do. A few, anyway, allegedly. It's a damnably difficult language to learn: I know, because I bought Le Basque pour les nuls ("Basque for Idiots") to entertain me in the evenings. I quote from Wikipedia:

A Basque noun is inflected in 17 different ways for case, multiplied by 4 ways for its definiteness and number. These first 68 forms are further modified based on other parts of the sentence, which in turn are inflected for the noun again. It has been estimated that, with two levels of recursion, a Basque noun may have 458,683 inflected forms.

Forget about it! People say that when a language dies, so does a whole universe. Well, if Star Trek is to be believed some universes are terrible places with monsters (like 458,683 inflected forms of a noun -- can this really be true?) and it's not surprising nobody wants to go there any more. Few languages look quite so much like they have been made up by a committee of Vogon poets, either. My book Le Basque pour les nuls gives some splendid examples:

Txoria ibilten da elurrean ("the bird walks in the snow")
Maitek artoa txoriari eman dio ("Maité has given the maize to the bird")
Non da Donibane Lohizuneko hondartza handia? ("Where is the main beach at Saint-Jean-de-Luz?")

Despite the fact that, according to the evidence of my ears, virtually no-one speaks Basque in public in either the "French" or "Spanish" parts of the Basque homeland ("Euskal Herria"), the limited degree of autonomy won by the separatists in Spain mean that many road signs there are in Basque. It really does help to know that San Sebastian is called "Donostia" in Basque, for example. A hot foreign man driving a hired Peugeot 207 could easily get lost and very cross indeed.

Long-standing readers may recall my post "The Italian Job", in which I discuss the way awkward bedfellows are brought together by nationalism. The Basque Country is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

In "France", Basque-ness seems pretty much entirely cultural. A uniformity of custom and practice is found that is almost disturbing. Everything -- but everything -- is coloured green, white and red, the Basque colours. All farmhouses conform to the "traditional" regional design to the extent of all facing in the same "traditional" direction, like churches. Every village has a pelota fronton, like a shabby drive-in cinema. Above all, there's that ubiquitous bloody Basque typeface. Does any other cultural group have its own typeface? It would drive me mad (or French) to have to live with that depth of branding.



In "Spain", by contrast, Basque-ness is deeply political. Although joyous and inventive Spanish typography is everywhere, and the houses and farms look like houses and farms anywhere in southern Europe, the terrorist separatist campaign of ETA rumbles on, and in the back streets of San Sebastian you will find pro-ETA sentiment without looking too hard.

For example, this wall of posters appealing for amnesty for ETA convicts is next to a bar called, ominously, The Belfast Irish Pub. I didn't hang around.



The Cameras

I've never seen so many digital cameras around as I've seen this holiday. Not just point and shoots, but mighty top-end Nikon and Canon DSLRs with battery packs and heavyweight zooms, toted by family guys for holiday snaps. The chiropracters must be rubbing their hands.

I settled on the Panasonic GF1 with the 20mm plus the collapsible Olympus 14-42mm. Bright sun, tourist traps and unfamiliar landscapes are not my territory, photographically, so I didn't expect to use them much. However, the scruffy street furniture and graffiti of Pamplona, Bayonne and San Sebastian proved so compelling that I filled several cards (about 500 images, an awful lot by my standards).

Pamplona fountain I

Pamplona fountain II

Pamplona fountain III

Paradoxically, when I started processing the files, I also rediscovered a taste for the monochrome image, which may or may not be a passing fad.

Pamplona doorway

Wall in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port

Bayonne doorway

Pale Fire VI

Pale Fire V

Pale Fire IV

Pale Fire III

Pale Fire II

Pale Fire I

Junk Jungle

A little mild excitement today, when I turned an unfamiliar corner behind the engineering buildings, and found a tangled dump of discarded, rusting metal and what looks like dismantled student engineering projects. So much picturesque junk, so little time!






No time at all at the moment, as I'm off on holiday for the next couple of weeks, but I've scheduled a selection of recent pictures (all taken with the Panasonic GF1 / 20mm / viewfinder combination) to appear every few days. For no particular reason, I've called this little exhibition "Pale Fire", and there will be six installments.

Dude, Where's My Boot Button?

A certain level of apparent "psychic" ability runs in my family -- in an old-fashioned phrase, my mother was sometimes referred to by friends and relatives as "a bit of a gypsy". This didn't mean she had a yearning for the itinerant life, or a flair for wild dancing with a tambourine, but that she seemed to know things she had no means or business to know. I have inherited something of this gift of insight, and have a particular talent for finding lost things.

A classic instance occurred this week. When I arrived at work on Thursday morning, I parked the car and went through my usual routine: check the windows are closed, get out, shut the door, lock the car, walk round the back, test the boot is shut and locked, walk away from the car. But when I reached for the release button on the rear hatch (we have a Renault Scenic -- great car) it wasn't there.

The hole where it had been was there, but the button which operates the catch wasn't in the hole. Some bastard had clearly tried to force the boot during the night, and failed, but damaged the release button and probably thrown it away.



When I got to my office I rang home. Could someone look around the front drive for an oblong-ish green plastic button? There was no sign of it. Could it have just, you know, fallen off? This seemed unlikely to me, but I trudged back over to the car park to look around. As a habitual early arriver, I tend to park in roughly the same place every day, so I crawled around looking around and under cars. No luck. Though you'd be surprised how much car-related debris accumulates in a typical car park.

At that point my "psychic" logic circuits kicked in. Alright. OK. Let's say it did fall off. What would make it fall off? Maybe going over a bump. Had I driven over any noticeable bumps? Why, yes -- yesterday evening before going home I had driven slightly too fast down a road that passes through the campus on the way to get a birthday card for my daughter, and taken several of the "traffic calming" bumps in over-dramatic style. Worth a look? Why not?

So I went over to the other side of the campus and walked along the kerb, looking for an oblong-ish green button. About half way down I spotted an oddly-shaped black plastic object lying in the kerb, a little like the innards of a plastic toy. Psychic bells went off. It was not the oblong-ish green button I was looking for, but something about its shape echoed the recessed holes which I had been prodding with a key in an attempt to open the boot. I looked closer. Small shards of green plastic were lying around. I knew I had found it.



Now, I'm not a great believer in psychic powers. But I am a great believer in a power possessed in a high degree by certain varieties of the human mind which enables us to assemble cues and clues and probabilities into mental projections which are such good simulacra of real-life scenarios that they have a weird habit of matching reality. Not everyone can do this. It's a facility like hitting a golf ball with uncannily consistent accuracy, or doing complex maths in your head. No big deal, but if you have lost your keys, I'm the man to find them. No pendulums or dowsing rods required.

You may raise logical objections ("What about all the times you don't find the keys?"), but the point, of course, is that I did find the boot button, and usually do find the keys. Most people would have given up at an early stage, or considered the complexities too overwhelming -- it could have been flung down the street by a late night vandal, it could have fallen off anywhere along the 3 mile journey home or into work. Why even bother to look? But, as so often in the past, I projected myself into an imagined reality, and returned clutching the prize.

Even if it had been run over several times in the meantime...

The View Finder

From the misty mountains of China...




To the far off humps and bumps of the West where the blu-tack roams free ...




From a David Hockney stage-set...



To my favourite phone-box...




The campus is full of miniature adventures, to which a Panasonic GF1 with an electronic viewfinder is ideally suited.

Although I had found a used GF1 at a good price, I had not bothered to find an electronic viewfinder on the grounds that most people seemed to regard it as a bit of failure in terms of size and resolution -- rather like looking at a neighbour's TV through a telescope, was the general view. However, I began to feel that if one was available it couldn't be that bad, and could be very useful. In my comparison of the GF1 and the Olympus E-P1, one counter-intuitive thing I had discovered, for example, was that the lower-resolution LCD screen of the Olympus is much more visible in sunlight than that of the Panasonic, despite its higher resolution and alleged viewability. Couple that with the E-P1's built-in image stabilisation, and it was becoming clear which would be, for me, the longer-term purchase. Unless the Panasonic viewfinder was better than most people were saying.

Well, "most people" are wrong, in my view. Having found one at a good price, I am smitten with the way the viewfinder transforms the usability and enjoyability of this camera. What do I care about the quality of the image seen through it? I'm taking photographs, not admiring the view. Have you ever tried to use a medium-format "Waist level" viewfinder outdoors? Never mind a TV through a telescope, that is like trying to watch football through a home-made periscope. You just get used to it, laterally-reversed image and all.

What really counts is that I can hold the camera like a camera, stabilizing it against my face with a technique I perfected long ago, and -- even better -- can see exactly what I'm framing while reading off the exposure data. If necessary, I can turn it up through 90 degrees, or press the little button and revert to LCD viewing. I'm seeing an immediate improvement in the sharpness and compositional tightness of my pictures taken with the GF1. It more than compensates for the lack of in-body image stabilisation.

I'd rather it was built in to the camera body of course, and maybe future models will go down that road. But I have to say there is something appealing about taking out and assembling my kit -- camera, lens, viewfinder, lens hood -- like a fisherman assembling his rod, reel, float and weights, then baiting the hook in high anticipation on the riverbank.

The People's Choice

Like the idiot I am, I went and entered Boundary Elements for Photography Book Now at the last minute, having vowed not to enter any more silly beauty contest competitions I have no hope of winning. Ah, well. Next time I'm really not going to enter.

Assuming you don't have a horse in the race, you can do your bit by voting in the "people's choice" element of the competition by clicking on the orange and white shuttlecock below, if you would be so kind. Or you could, of course, encourage me not to do this again by not voting. Or you could vote for someone else!

There's an awful lot of rubbish in there this year, but also some real nuggets if you're prepared to sift through 2192 entries... I gave up after about the first 500 or so. As it happens, Boundary Elements is currently listed on the very first page, and therefore attracting some comments, which is pleasant. The pack will be reshuffled soon, though.



"Vote early, vote often" is not an option -- you have to register, and only get one vote. Use it wisely.

Another roadside attraction

Added 4/8/2010: My main contender for a winner so far? Check this out:

The Last Road North, by Ben Huff

He doesn't need your votes.

Moon over Babaluma

I went over to Romsey Abbey this afternoon, to give a close external inspection to the venerable Norman stonework, in which I hoped to discover many stories. There were plenty, but I'd mostly heard/seen them before.

The most interesting discovery was that someone -- presumably in relative antiquity, when the fabric of cathedrals and the like was treated with rather less cringing respect than now -- had engraved crude little pictures of houses and churches all round the facade, the sort a child would draw with a curl of smoke coming out of the chimney. Curious.


In the end, I found the most interesting things in the car park as I was leaving. Some very squashed dots in the parking bays made an interesting series of moons and landscapes with moons.

Soon over Babaluma

The Moon of the Twin Hamsters

The Moon of the Were-Rabbit