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LINKS:
Foire Internationale du Dessin
Poemas del río Wang
Le Divan Fumoir Bohémien
L'échappée (MP Nougaret)
Etsukoy
Terre à terre
Planète sans Visa
Qu'est-ce que l'art (aujourd'hui) ?
Pierre Rabhi
Regard Eloigné
Ivan Terestchenko
Michel Terestchenko
Pedro de Alcantara
Chutes d'Images
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2013-05-18
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Saffron Spice Found to Reverse Macular Degeneration, Preserve Eye Health
If you’ve ever priced saffron for a fancy creation in the kitchen, you may have opted to ignore the spice. Saffron is a spice stemming from the flower Crocus Sativus, and its rarity and difficulty to be collected cause it to be rather expensive. However, the cost may be worthwhile when you consider its potential benefits – especially those pertaining to eye health preservation.
Saffron has reportedly been used for ages, not only in cooking, but also in healing. It is said to encourage cellular repair in something called neuro-protection, something that is credited in the spice’s apparent ability to reverse the blinding effects of age-related macular degeneration.
Macular degeneration is the primary cause of blindness in older individuals. While most common in those over the age of 50, the issue can also affect those who are younger. Macular degeneration occurs when the most light-sensitive part of the retina is damaged, severely limiting sight of things in the central line of vision.
(via positive-press-daily:)
(via wampuintheylangylang)
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2013-05-17
Moulin à Ombres (Shadow Mill) avatar (Second Life)
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Photo taken in one of the free builds - based on real life architecture - by William Weaver: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/112469 -
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Revealed: How US State Department ‘Twists Arms’ on Monsanto’s Behalf Selling seeds, selling out democracy: US State Department does biotech industry’s bidding - Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer The U.S. State Department does the bidding of biotech giants like Monsanto around the world by “twisting the arms of countries” and engaging in vast public campaign schemes to push the sale of genetically modified seeds, according to a new report released Tuesday by Food & Water Watch. undefined (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Nigeria) The report, Biotech Ambassadors: How the U.S. State Department Promotes the Seed Industry’s Global Agenda, which pulls from over 900 State Department diplomatic cables (obtained via WikiLeaks), reveals an environment wherein US ambassadors act as sales representatives for the global biotech industry. U.S. ambassadors and their staffs actively lobby foreign governments to adopt pro-biotechnology policies and laws, create “rigorous public relations campaigns to improve the image of biotechnology” and challenge “commonsense biotechnology safeguards and rules — including opposing genetically engineered (GE) food labeling laws.” “It really goes beyond promoting the U.S.’s biotech industry and agriculture,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “It really gets down to twisting the arms of countries and working to undermine local democratic movements that may be opposed to biotech crops, and pressuring foreign governments to also reduce the oversight of biotech crops.” As FWW reports, the State Department has gone to great lengths to see that biotech companies’ desires are met: The U.S. State Department’s multifaceted efforts to promote the biotechnology industry overseas: The State Department targeted foreign reporters, hosted and coordinated pro-biotech conferences and public events and brought foreign opinion-makers to the United States on high-profile junkets to improve the image of agricultural biotechnology overseas and overcome widespread public opposition to GE crops and foods. The State Department’s coordinated campaign to promote biotech business interests: The State Department promoted not only pro-biotechnology policies but also the products of biotech companies. The strategy cables explicitly “protect the interests” of biotech exporters, “facilitate trade in agribiotech products” and encourage the cultivation of GE crops in more countries, especially in the developing world. The State Department’s determined advocacy to press the developing world to adopt biotech crops: The diplomatic cables document a coordinated effort to lobby countries in the developing world to pass legislation and implement regulations favored by the biotech seed industry. This study examines the State Department lobbying campaigns in Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria to pass pro-biotech laws. The State Department’s efforts to force other nations to accept biotech crop and food imports: The State Department works with the U.S. Trade Representative to promote the export of biotech crops and to force nations that do not want these imports to accept U.S. biotech foods and crops. “It’s not surprising that Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow want to maintain and expand their control of the $15 billion global biotech seed market, but it’s appalling that the State Department is complicit in supporting their goals despite public and government opposition in several countries,” said Ronnie Cummins, executive director of Organic Consumers Association. “American taxpayer’s money should not be spent advancing the goals of a few giant biotech companies.” “The biotech agriculture model using costly seeds and agrichemicals forces farmers onto a debt treadmill that is neither economically nor environmentally viable,” said Ben Burkett, President of the National Family Farm Coalition. “An overwhelming number of farmers in the developing world reject biotech crops as a path to sustainable agricultural development or food sovereignty.” “Thanks, Monsanto. And thanks, State Department. Not only are you selling seeds, you’re selling out democracy,” Hauter concludes. _______________________
(Source: heres-to-your-health)
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The Monsanto Meditation - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5JxvcQ6wsw
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One of my favorite pastimes as a child in Iran was to make kites from old newspapers and fly them nightly from our roof at dusk. The thrill was palpable and rendered dusk as the magic hour forever. And this was my face, every, single, time. True story.
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Le Monde selon Tippi 1997 (by sonenvironnement)
Tippi from Namibia
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Tippi Degré, the girl who spent her childhood in the African jungle
Tippi Degré could be a normal girl, but for the fact of having lived 13 years of her life in the African jungle, living with all kinds of animals, from the most peaceful to the largest predators. A kind of Mowgli in females. Since her birth in 1990 until she was 13-years-old Tippi lived in the African jungle, but after Tippi moved with her parents to Paris and the result was expected: the girl couldn’t relate because she had “little in common” with other children. She was educated at home and today, at age 23, studying cinema at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. [read more]
What a lucky child(Source: earth-song, via dianeling)
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Calder by Matter. Publicity photograph for Pierre Matisse of Calder in his storefront studio, New York, 1936. View on Vertical Constellation with Yellow Bone. Calder with the mobile commission for the Hotel Avila Ballroom in Caracas, Venezuela, 1941. All photos by his close friend Herbert Matter. © 2013 Calder Foundation, New York
(via alainrichert)
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A miniature painting of Emperor Babur on the cover of ‘Babur Nama’ journal of Emperor Babur.
(via alainrichert)
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The Rite of Spring 1913: Why did it provoke a riot?
The Rite of Spring caused an outrage on its premiere in Paris a century ago. But was it the music or the dance? Ivan Hewett investigates.
It was 100 years ago that the most famous scandal in the history of the arts took place, at a swanky new theatre in Paris. Anyone who was anyone was there. The cosmopolitan German aristocrat Count Harry Kessler said that “it was the most dazzling house I’ve ever seen in Paris”. Jean Cocteau wrote that “the smart audience in tails and tulle, diamonds and ospreys, was interspersed with the suits and bandeaux of the aesthetic crowd. The latter would applaud novelty simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes… Innumerable shades of snobbery, super-snobbery and inverted snobbery were represented.”
What drew them on the night of May 29 1913 was the whiff of something potentially outrageous: a brand-new ballet from the Ballets Russes, which had entranced and shocked Paris ever since their first appearance there in 1909. What gave the event an extra frisson was that this Rite of Spring was the product of the most savage of all these so-called “Northern savages”.
Igor Stravinsky, the composer, had scored a massive hit the previous year with Petrushka, which added an exciting element of modernist collage to colourful Russian folklore. Vaslav Nijinsky, the choreographer, had caused a minor scandal a few months previously, with his blatantly erotic portrayal of the lovesick faun in Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune.
Stravinsky was hoping the new ballet would be an even bigger hit than Petrushka. “From all indications I can see that this piece is bound to ‘emerge’ in a way that rarely happens,” he wrote gleefully to Nicholas Roerich, who was the guiding spirit behind the ballet’s vision of pagan Russia. It’s a fair bet that Diaghilev, the great entrepreneur behind the Ballets Russes, was hoping for something more than an emergence. He wanted a scandal.
And he got one, though what actually happened that night is something of a mystery. The dancer Dame Marie Rambert remembered that “a shout went up in the gallery: ‘Un docteur!’. Somebody else shouted louder, ‘Un dentiste!’” Kessler said that people started to whisper and joke almost immediately. The conductor of the premiere, Pierre Monteux, was told by one of his double-bass players that “many a gentleman’s shiny top hat or soft fedora was ignominiously pulled down by an opponent over his eyes and ears, and canes were brandished like menacing implements of combat all over the theatre.”
These are just a few of dozens of eyewitness reports. As the musicologist Richard Taruskin points out, the Rite is the most over-documented premiere in history, and yet so many things are obscure. Was it the choreography that annoyed people, or the music? Were the police really called? Was it true that missiles were thrown, and challenges to a duel offered? Were the creators booed at the end, or cheered?
There were certainly plenty of good reasons for outrage, starting with the high, almost strangled bassoon melody that begins the work, soon draped with fluttering, twittering woodwind sounds.
It’s often said that the pulsating rhythms of the Rite of Spring are what caused the outrage, but pulsating rhythms at least have an appeal at a visceral level (an appeal certainly felt at the Rite’s premiere, where according to one eye witness one excited onlooker beat out the rhythms on the bald pate of the man in front). It’s more likely that the audience was appalled and disbelieving at the level of dissonance, which seemed to many like sheer perversity. “The music always goes to the note next to the one you expect,” wrote one exasperated critic.
At a deeper level, the music negates the very thing that for most people gives it meaning: the expression of human feelings. As Stravinsky put it, “there are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring”. This is what separates it so decisively from Stravinsky’s hit of 1911, Petrushka. There we’re immersed in a human world, which exudes the very specific cultural ambience of Russia. It’s true that the main characters are puppets, rather than rounded human beings. But they have characters, even if they’re somewhat rudimentary, and at the end there’s even a suggestion that Petrushka might have a soul.
There’s no sign that any of the creatures in the Rite of Spring has a soul, and there’s certainly no sense of a recognisable human culture. The dancers are like automata, whose only role is to enact the ritual laid down by immemorial custom. An iron necessity rules everything: there has to be a game of Rival Tribes, there has to be Dance of the Young Girls, and an elder has to bless the earth. And finally, a young girl has to be chosen and then abandoned to her fate, which is to dance herself to death.
Which brings us to the other great innovator of that long-ago premiere, Vaslav Nijinsky. This strange young man, with his oddly shaped body and strange naive air (“One became aware of strange absences in his personality,” said Stravinsky) created something as epoch-making in dance as Stravinsky’s score was in music. Whereas classical dance aspired upwards, in defiance of gravity, Nijinsky’s dancers seemed pulled down to the earth. Their strange, jerky movements and awkward poses defied every canon of gracefulness.
Given all this, it’s no surprise there was a scandal. And yet, among the shouting and hissing, there were one or two sensitive observers who realised they were witnessing something deeply original, rather than merely shocking. The French writer Jacques Rivière observed that “there is something profoundly blind about this dance. There is an enormous question being carried about by all these creatures moving before our eyes. It is in no way distinct from themselves. They carry it about with them without understanding it, like an animal that turns in its cage and never tires of butting its head against the bars.”
To be reminded of that brute animal unconsciousness at the zoo is one thing; to have it enacted by a troupe of highly trained dancers and musicians, in a theatre full of Parisian sophisticates, is quite another. Perhaps the riot was a sign of disquiet, a feeling that the world had lost its moorings, and that barbarism was about to be let loose in the streets. Given that the First World War would soon break out, that feeling wasn’t so wide of the mark.
(via myimaginarybrooklyn:)
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Anouar Brahem, John Surman & Dave Holland - Badhra
─═ڿڰۣڿ☻ڿڰۣڿ═─
(via aesrayalazan)
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Musings by Samsaran: Why we Conflict with Others
Rarely do two selves conflict. Self wants harmony and moves away from disharmony and conflict, after all, conflict is painful. Why then do we clash with parents, teachers, co-workers and others?
Ego pure and simple.
Ego is that part of us that “desires” things. One of the things ego most desires…
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The Thinker of Cernavoda and Sitting Woman
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Description via: migration-diffusion.info HERE
“In 1956 in Cernavoda, Romania, near to he banks of the Danube, a strange neolithic statuette was discovered, dated to 4.000 – 3.500 BC. He represents a man in cogitant position, a motive for which she was baptized the Thinker. Since he belonged to the neolithic culture of Hamangia, he was named „Thinker of Hamangia“. In respect to this value, the UNESCO soon approved his being part of the Cultural Patrimony of Mankind.
Thirty years later, in 1986 the Romanian researcher Vasile Droj presents at a symposion of the Academia R.S.R. in Bucharest an interesting discovery concerning the famous statuette. The Thinker of Hamangia unveils an extraordinary ‘synthetic’ geometry, codificated in his body through which comes out one after the other an ininterrupted cascade of impressing relations, as:
- his height in centimetres hides the only two whole numbers whose ratio gives the Greek pi with a precision of a millionth
- his height is exactly ten times less than the human one
- evident and indiscutable proofs for the presence of the decimal metric measure system
- the superior part of the Thinker geometrizated holds in itself the pyramidal archetype in a way that, superposed to the Pyramid of Cheops, it fits perfectly
- not only; but in a certain way two Thinkers (copy) combined reproduce always the pyramidal archetype by different parts of their bodies
- the Cheops Pyramid herself, in a scale of 1 : 10.000, has absolutely the measure of the Thinker
- the superior part of the statuette copies the equilateral triangle hidden in the head shape of the Sphinx in Giza
- the Thinker is conceived to be made as serial or in copies and therefor was found together with his wife (an other statuette, feminine, of the same dimensions)
- the copies of the Thinker join to each other like the reef stabilopoda of the sea, forming impressive couplings
- the simple combinations of the Thinkers reproduce the universal archetypes of the Phoenician and Greek – Latin letters
- between the Thinker and the Geto – Dacian Sanctuary of Sarmizegetusa Regia there is a close relation, in a discendent scale. The same statuette constitutes the module of collusion between the Sanctuary and the Pyramid of Cheops.
The Thinker of Hamangia, besides of the combinatorical module of pyramidal rapports, is also a key of access to the most profound mysteries of the Cheops Pyramid, as to be seen in the following article. And this is again a mystery, the Pyramid of Cheops was constructed about 2.500 BC., but the Thinker of Hamangia about 4.000 BC. The Thinker is much older than the Pyramid, for 1.000 – 1.500 years. Further, between Egypt and Romania there are thousands of kilometres as distance.
The little Danubian – Pontican statuette gives rise to a disconcerting query; the pyramidal archetype (standard Cheops) was present at the banks of the Danube 1.500 years before the Egyptian attempt, if at all the Pyramid of Cheops was erected at this epoch. Always more indications point to this zone as the native place of an archaic culture generating universal values (cf. the articles of the Author about: Hyperboreans, Atlantis in the Black Sea, the Flood, the Foundation of Rome, the Codex of Ancestral Linguistics, the Romanian Migration, etc.).
By the side of the Disc of Nebra, the Thinker of Hamangia is an other artematical product, like the first (1986) together with further thirties dispersed over five continents proving that the Artematical Science (Art Antique Mathematizated), discovered and founded by the author, is in working order.” via: migration-diffusion.info (Image I:timetv.ro, Image II: sciencemag.org)(via snowonredearth)
