Wurl Imagemaker

08/28/2026

No words, a void now.

08/17/2026

Fifth Avenue, Saint Patricks Cathedral, Sax and Company. .

07/27/2026

Sweet.

06/07/2026

Great photo, so evocative.

Almost Nobody Knows That Joan Baez and Janis Joplin Watched Jimi Hendrix Together at Woodstock

Joan Bayz wrote about it in her memoir. The book was published in 1989, 20 years after Woodstock. She called it and A Voice to sing with. In the Woodstock chapter, she described the early morning hours of August 18th, 1969. The festival was nearly over. Jimmy Hris was on stage for the closing set. She and Janice Joplain were watching from Joe Cocker's van.

Two women, the same van, the same muddy field, the same music coming through the windows. Almost nobody knows this. To understand what that van contained, you have to understand how different these two women were. Joan Bayz in 1969 was 28 years old. She had been the most important female voice in the folk music movement since she was 19.

She had performed at the Newport Folk Festival every year since 1959. She had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. She had gone to jail for her anti-war activism. She had introduced Bob Dylan to the world by standing beside him on stage in 1963 and saying, "This is someone you should hear." She was in 1969 what the music establishment and the political establishment and the cultural establishment considered the ideal of what a female musician should be.

serious, political, vocally disciplined. Her soprano was precise and pure, each note placed exactly where she intended it. She had never put a feather boa on in her life. She did not see the point of southern comfort. Janice Joplain in 1969 was 26 years old. She had been famous for exactly 2 years since Monterey in 1967.

Before that, she had been the girl Port Arthur laughed out of town. The girl San Francisco failed to catch the first time. The girl who tried to become ordinary and could not. She was in 1969 what the music establishment considered a problem. She was too loud, too raw, too obviously in pain. She drank on stage. She was not managing her image.

She was giving everything she had every night and not saving enough for the next night. And everyone who knew anything could see where it was going. She was also the most important female rock singer in America. And the folk queen and the blues queen ended up in the same van at Woodstock watching Jimmyi Hendris together.

06/06/2026

Perfect!

In the desolate remnants of a forsaken abbey in England, these haunting sculptures remain still, shrouded in an aura of mystery and age-old enigmas. The cloaked figures, devoid of features, appear as sentinels of history, overseeing the timeworn stones that have borne silent witness to countless tales. This strikingly beautiful installation enriches the already charged atmosphere, prompting curiosity about the narratives and folklore that echo within this hallowed ground.

06/06/2026

A sweet moment for today.

https://www.threads.com//post/DZMwg7-gEwO?xmt=AQG0Iethwke3lMLJsCO2Dv1X10DLZwbiTsCqTTnTqivVv35pEPQKaXA4ni-Efs-fbqK3nbfn&slof=1

06/04/2026

I certainly agree with that sentiment.

“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep."
E. Joseph Cossman

Félix Vallotton - Sleeping Woman, 1898.

06/01/2026

Helen , backstory

Her real name was Ilyena Lydia Mironoff. She was nine years old when her father — a Russian aristocrat whose family had escaped the Bolshevik Revolution — quietly changed the family surname to something less conspicuous in working-class England. She became Helen Mirren. What happened next, nobody planned. 🌟

At thirteen, she watched a production of Hamlet at a local theater. Her family owned no television, never went to the cinema. But inside that theater, something shifted permanently. She walked out knowing — not hoping, knowing — that she had to be part of it.

Her parents had different ideas. They had rebuilt their lives from almost nothing and wanted security for their children. Her sister became a teacher. Helen was enrolled in teacher training college to do the same.

She left.

At eighteen, she auditioned for the National Youth Theatre. Accepted. No formal drama training. No degree. No connections. Eventually she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company on raw ability alone — playing Cleopatra, playing Lady Macbeth, standing on the same stages as the greatest actors of her generation and matching every one of them.

The industry didn't care.

For two decades, critics who praised her wrote about it as though talent in someone who looked the way she looked was a pleasant surprise. The roles available to women in the 1970s and 1980s were built around youth and appearance — not depth, not range. She fell into serious depression in her mid-twenties, genuinely uncertain she had made the right choice.

A palm reader in a rundown neighborhood told her that her greatest success wouldn't arrive until her late forties.

She held onto that. She kept working.

In 1991, *Prime Suspect* arrived on British television.

Helen Mirren played Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison — a brilliant, flawed, driven woman fighting to solve murders while simultaneously fighting every institution that resented her presence in it. The performance was raw, precise, and completely without vanity. BAFTA Awards. Emmy Awards. Critical recognition so overwhelming it could no longer be minimized.

She was in her mid-forties.

The palm reader had been right.

Fifteen years later, she was cast as Queen Elizabeth II in *The Queen* — examining the days the Royal Family fell silent after Princess Diana's death. Mirren didn't imitate the Queen. She found the human being beneath the institution. The grief beneath the composure. The woman beneath the symbol.

She won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

She was sixty years old.

She has not stopped since. Catherine the Great. Alma Hitchcock. A Tony Award on Broadway. A Dame Commander of the British Empire. Six decades of a career that has kept growing long after most careers quietly end.

Ilyena Mironoff. Daughter of a man who changed his name so his children could fit in — who raised a daughter who spent her entire life refusing to.

She never waited for permission.

She just kept going. 🌟

05/31/2026