Welcome to my Blog!
I hope to share here my irrepressible thoughts on news, music, books, arts, history, cultural events and such like.
In general these will be items, events and issues which I feel have no place on my website (which focusses on aviation history and my travel photography).

The item immediately below this would be the latest posting.

"Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself. - Charles Baudelaire
Esse est percipi (To be is to be perceived)" ¬Bishop George Berkeley

"Not even I understand everything I am" ¬Aurelius Augustinus of Hippo

"I'm only myself in front of my typewriter" ¬Joan Didion (I'd replace 'typewriter' by 'desktop PC'..)
"I always think that the quickest way to understand someone is to look at what's on their bookshelfes." ¬Matt Haig

In 2013 I started a series of photo albums on Blurb.com, named '36Exp' (a subject adressed in 36 exposures, a reference to the exposures on most common rolls of 35 mm film: 12, 24 & 36.) back in the day.
The books can be ordered directly from the Blurb.com or Amazon.
www.blurb.com/user/ruudleeuw

CURRENT BLOG

Now widely acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest photographers, Saul Leiter (b.1923–d.2013) remained relatively unsung until he was rediscovered by curators and critics in his early 80s, and his work has been drastically re-evaluated over the last two decades.
Leiter’s images evoked the flow and rhythm of life on the mid-century streets of New York in luminous colour at a time when his contemporaries were shooting in black and white.
His complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh and moved to New York City in 1946. He pioneered a painterly approach to colour photography starting in the late 1940s and produced covers for fashion magazines such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, before largely withdrawing from public attention in the 1980s.
The publication in 2006 of his first monograph, 'Early Color', inspired an avid ‘rediscovery’ of Leiter’s work by contemporary audiences.

His studio in New York’s East Village, where he lived from 1952 until his death in 2013, is now the home of the Saul Leiter Foundation.
The Foundation has begun a full-scale survey and organization of his more than 80.000(!) works, with the aim of compiling the ‘complete’ archive.
This volume, The Unseen, contains works discovered through this process, specifically colour slides, never before published or seen by the public.
Meticulously curated by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation and supported by texts that explain how Leiter built the slide archive and how it is now being explored, catalogued and restored, this new monograph can be recommended as a must-have for photography fans worldwide.

www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/the-unseen-saul-leiter/
en.wikipedia.org:_Saul_Leiter

'Skorpio' (Bennie Griessel #9 by Deon Meyer)
A day after they get reinstated as captains, Benny Griessel gets the Idas Valley case. A private eye, crushed under a BMW in his garage. Looks a lot like suicide. Vaughn Cupido knew the deceased. He's saying, it's murder, and he want in on the investigation.
Benny would love to have his help, because the case is going nowhere. But Vaughn is stuck with minor arson - a shepherd's hut burnt down high in the Bottelary Hills. Surely, it's a frustrating waste of his considerable talents?
Until a caravan explodes on a nearby farm. And the identity of the body drives the media into a feeding frenzy of majestic proportions. Just a week before the statesmen of the BRICS alliance comes to town.
When rocket parts surface with the name Skorpio on them, the trail leads to Moscow and Africa.
That's when the flames in both cases start burning like crazy. And the clock is ticking…

Another fine Deon Meyer thriller with a surplus of plots twisting and turning!

www.bruna.nl/boeken/benny-griessel-9-skorpio (NL)
https://deonmeyer.com/

First visit to this Mega event! @Kalkar – Looking for bargains, rummaging through junk, and shopping for new goods at a low price: you can do all that at Wunderland Kalkar's.
This amusement park has a mega edition with around 450 stalls. besides the amusement park. Came, away with a few nice finds! ☺

Between 1957 and 1991, West Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands pursued an ambitious plan for a fast breeder nuclear reactor.
In the wake of large anti-nuclear protests at Wyhl and Brokdorf, protest demonstrations against the SNR-300 reactor escalated in the mid-1970s.
Construction of the Kalkar reactor was completed in the middle of 1985. In March 1991, the German federal government said that the SNR-300 would not be put into operation...
The nuclear reactor plant has since been turned into Kern-Wasser Wunderland, an amusement park with a rollercoaster and several other rides and restaurants. The huge fleamarket is next to it.

My 2026 Streetphotography (colour)
My 2026 Streetphotography (black & white)
More photos on Flickr.com

'A Tourist in Africa' is a travel book by the English writer Evelyn Waugh. It appeared in 1960, many years after his travel writings of the 1930s.
The book is in the form of a diary, describing a tour of East Africa from January to April 1959.
Events and sights are described with perception and clarity, and the history associated with a particular place is often discussed.
The edition I read was published in 1985, by Methuen.

After a channel crossing, Waugh travels by train from Paris to Genoa. There he meets a friend he has portrayed in fiction as Mrs. Stitch, and they go sightseeing, particularly looking at the marble tombs in the Campo Santo (cemetery).
He continues by sea from Genoa in the Rhodesia Castle. It pauses at Port Said and Aden, and the ship spends 5 days in Mombasa; he has visited these places before.

He visits various places in Tanganyika, travels over bad roads, visits friends (often in influential positions). He also visits the The Rhodesias, flying to Salisbury (present-day Harare) in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) in two stages, staying overnight at Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia).
In Salisbury he stays with friends who live there. He visits Umtali, and Great Zimbabwe, the ruins of an ancient city.
The names are of different times, throwing me of the scent sometimes, confusing.

He visits Serima Mission, a church in the diocese of Gwelo, where he meets Fr John Groeber, its architect.
He flies to Bulawayo, and describes Lobengula's part in the local history. He visits Matobo National Park, where there is the grave of Cecil Rhodes; he discusses Rhodes.
He returns to England from Cape Town, sailing in the ship Pendennis Castle.

An entertaining travelogue, Waugh's diary offers a 'time capsule'.

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (b.28Oct1903 – d.10Apr1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer.
His most famous works include the early satires 'Decline and Fall' (1928) and 'A Handful of Dust' (1934), the novel 'Brideshead Revisited' (1945), and the WW2 trilogy 'Sword of Honour' (1952–1961)

en.wikipedia.org:_A_Tourist_in_Africa
en.wikipedia.org:_Evelyn_Waugh

Martin Parr puts the world to rights in this comprehensive catalogue of 5 decades of his photographs, published to accompany a major exhibition at Jeu de Paume in Paris.
For over 50 years Martin Parr has photographed the absurdities of the contemporary world, from the frenzy of over-consumption and the ravages of mass tourism to humanity’s increasing reliance on technology and our complex relationship with the animal kingdom.

By turns critical, satirical, surprising, and funny, Global Warning is published in association with Jeu de Paume to accompany a new major exhibition of Parr’s photography at the arts centre in Paris in January – May 2026.

Richly illustrated with more than 175 of his photographs, from his early black-and-white work in the raucous holiday parks and sleepy supermarkets of rural England to his more recent colour photography of bustling tourist attractions and must-see destinations from across the globe.
Global Warning offers a reinterpretation of Martin Parr’s work and position in a time of widespread global disorder.

Featuring a tone-setting introduction by Quentin Bajac, director of Jeu de Paume, 4 further essays by Jean-François Staszak, Roberta Sassatelli, Violette Pouillard, and Adam Greenfield, experts in the fields of geography, sociology, wildlife conservation and urban design, put the selection of works into context and explore the important topics that seem immediately relevant to our everyday lives.
I really enjoyed these essays!

www.phaidon.com/ - - - /global-warning
en.wikipedia.org:_Martin_Parr