View allAll Photos Tagged Misunderstanding,
Macro Mondays: Framed
After all these years, Blossom's acting career was about to take off - he had just signed on with Pixar to play Donkey's stunt double in "Shrek - Return of the Gingerbread Man" and was the lead consideration to play the part of Eeyore in a film based on his life - a potential academy award winning script. But drat it all, the paparazzi, intent on destroying his dreams, had unearthed a mugshot from his naive youth in the 70s. A charge of grand theft from a jewelers store.
"It was a misunderstanding," Blossom's publicist remarked, "a deliberate frame. Blossom was under the impression that he was being loaned the silver harness so that he could make a good impression at his Grizzly Adam's audition."
It was later discovered that the jeweller was in cahoots with Number 7, a mule who was also auditioning for Grizzly Adams, and all charges against Blossom were later dropped.
A silly macro monday to you all!
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Te Mania house, Conway Flat, Kaikoura, New Zealand.
Built 1937.
The Wilding family farm-house Te Mania, rural Conway Flats near the river mouth, south of Kaikoura, is a notable example of early modern New Zealand architecture. Influenced by Le Corbusier, and the Bauhaus. Architect Richard D. Harman of Christchurch. Built in 1937 of reinforced concrete in-situ. Clean lines, startling for the times, but practical and lasting; depending on advance and recess in balanced proportions. The plan was considered in advance for the time too, with spatial flow. The house has come to fit well with down-to-earth farming and became centre for its famous Angus beef stud. [300 hectare farm]. See also its likeness to other early modern examples by New Zealand architects, such as Connell's 1930 High and Over at Amersham, north of London: www.flickr.com/photos/peteshep/8177531255/in/album-721576... and John Anderson's Auckland Wharetane of 1928: www.flickr.com/photos/peteshep/7776625390/in/photolist-KV...
Architecturally, despite magazine stories, no "Deco" about it -- a misunderstanding of Modern.
It relies on its size, simple lines, frank concrete, and spatial rectilinear expression. It was softened by Virginia creeper as above; then green creeper was balanced with the Virginia.
[Conway Flat is a rural locality south of the Conway River mouth, 5+km south-east of Hundalee; Parnassus, Hurunui District.]
Explore - September 5, 2008 (#489)
~ Nan Robertson
With all this talk about apples, I can't help but think of one more interesting fact:
Try to eat at least one apple a day because Pectin contained in apples limits the amount of fat that the body can absorb. It helps you get back into shape faster.
Source: 9-fat-burning-eating-tips
August 26, 2008, Caro, Michigan. These apples from here.
When the information system fails, only paper remains. If the screens are still able to do this, they will show: „Please refer to the yellow timetable“. These timetables are updated every year for almost 800 SBB train stations and stops. And everyone is different, to be noted. Days before the timetable change, they are hung up. So that no misunderstandings occur, the expiring ones are temporary hung over the new ones with adhesive strips. On day X, the old schedules can be easily removed by the first staff present and everything is new. It is planned to replace these paper timetables with digital pillars. Whether this is a good idea I dare to doubt. Switzerland, May 13, 2021.
No matter what else is going on, the misunderstandings, the confusion and
questioning that are part of life, no matter how many failures, it is worth getting
up in the morning to see this boy's sweet face and loving eyes.
Fam. Asparagaceae
Subfam. Agavoideae
Probably a 'short-day' plant, it begins to bloom usually until September / October, never in the period from May to July! This year these starts to bloom very early! An flower initiation at this Yucca I never observed if was a day length 15 hours or a night length of less than 9 hours.
Yucca x vomerensis C. Sprenger in Cat., 1901
In his "Mitteilungen über meine Yucca-Hibriden und -Formen" (Mitt. Deutsch. Dendrol. Ges. Nr. 29: 119. 1920) he wrote:.
"Yucca aloifolia x gloriosa gave me a large number of seedlings, but among themselves mostly very consistent, so that one could call them without further ado, one and all as 'vomerensis'."
Yucca x glorifolia nom. nud.
(not an valid name, and there can be misunderstandings because also used for Y. gloriosa x recurvifolia hybrids)
In the Botany of the Bermudas by H. B. Small, 1913, is listed
Similar forms are also called Yucca gloriosa 'aloifolia form'.
Brimham Rocks, once known as Brimham Crags, is a 183.9-hectare (454-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest and Geological Conservation Review (GCR) site, 8 miles (13 km) north west of Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, on Brimham Moor in the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The site, notified as SSSI in 1958, is an outcrop of Millstone Grit, with small areas of birch woodland and a large area of wet and dry heath.
The site is known for its water- and weather-eroded rocks, which were formed over 325 million years ago and have assumed fantastic shapes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, antiquarians such as Hayman Rooke wondered whether they could have been at least partly carved by druids, an idea that ran concurrently with the popularity of James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry of 1760, and a developing interest in New-Druidism. For up to two hundred years, some stones have carried fanciful names, such as Druid's Idol, Druid's Altar and Druid's Writing Desk.
Brimham Rocks has SSSI status because of the value of its geology and the upland woodland and the acidic wet and dry heath habitats that support localised and specialised plant forms, such as chickweed wintergreen, cowberry, bog asphodel and three species of heather.
Site location and SSSI designation
Brimham Rocks is a 183.9-hectare (454-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and Geological Conservation Review (GCR) site, 8 miles (13 km) south of Ripon on Brimham Moor in the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in North Yorkshire. It is 1.5 miles (2.4 km) north of Summerbridge and 3 miles (4.8 km) east of Pateley Bridge and the River Nidd. The site is managed by the National Trust along with a visitor's centre, public facilities and a car park. Under normal circumstances Brimham Rocks is open throughout the year between around 8.30 am and dusk, but as of 21 March 2020, was closed until further notice due to the coronavirus outbreak in the United Kingdom.
The site was SSSI notified in 1958, with revisions in 1984 and on 19 February 1988. The site was listed for the value of its geology and because the "heath and bog habitats represent important examples of plant communities, formerly more widespread, which have been reduced by agricultural improvement, drainage and afforestation." Associated with the more well-known rocky outcrops, are birch woodland, acidic bogs, wet and dry heath, and plant communities which thrive when sheltered between the rocks and exposed on the moor.
Geology
Brimham Rocks are formed from a medium to coarse sandstone known both as the Lower Brimham Grit and also as the Lower Plompton Grit, one of a series of such sandstones laid down in the later part of the Carboniferous period in what is now the Pennine region. In formal terms this particular grit which is between 10 and 30m thick, forms a part of the Hebden Formation, itself a sub-unit of the Millstone Grit Group. It was deposited 318-317 million years ago during the Kinderscoutian substage of the Bashkirian stage. The rock which has traditionally been referred to as Millstone Grit, originated as river-deposited sands in a delta environment and contains both feldspar and quartz pebbles. Deposition from moving water has resulted in the cross-bedding which is very evident in most of the outcrops. Brimham Rocks has been described as "a classic geomorphological site, significant for studies of past and present weathering processes and their contribution to landscape evolution."
Although discussion continues around the formation and date of tors such as these throughout Britain, much of the development into the forms displayed at Brimham is likely to have taken place over the last 100,000 years before, during and after the last ice age – the Devensian. Some disintegration of the rock strata may have occurred along weaknesses such as fault and fracture planes whilst still buried. Sub-aerial weathering has continued the process. The outcrops were exposed when glacial action, gelifluction and further weathering and water erosion removed the loose material which separated them.
During periods of harsher climate, windblown-ice as well as particles of sand and dust have more effectively eroded weaker layers to give rise to these wind-carved shapes. Such processes have created holes in some rocks, and left dust on the ground below. Erosion continues, caused by weather and tourist numbers. One possibility for the mushroom shape of some stones is that they were exposed to sandblasting at ground level when an ice cap melted 18,000 years ago, narrowing the bases of outcrops, then they were subject to all-over sandblasting when the ice had gone, causing the irregular shapes. Due to this process the Idol rock, for example, will not exist for ever.
Druidic theories
Perforated rock, once thought to be an oracular stone (now called Smartie Tube)
It was not until the early 20th century that it was understood that the rocks were created by natural forces. During the 18th and 19th centuries, some writers theorised that the rock-shaping could have been enhanced by Druidic carving. Their theories coincided with the growth of Neo-Druidism, and followed the 1760 publication of James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry. After a lecture in 1786, the opinion of the antiquary Hayman Rooke was reported in 1788 with mild scepticism by the Sheffield Register.
"The extraordinary position of these rocks is supposed to have been owing to some violent convulsion of nature, but it is evident, we are told, that art has not been wanting to render their situation yet more remarkable. Fragments of rocks obtained great regard, even veneration, from people of very remote antiquity: here they are found placed one on another, some having plainly the marks of the tool. This writer, though he does not venture to determine, conjectures that they are the work of the Druids. The Britons having had early communication with the Egyptians and Phoenicians, it is probable, he thinks, that the Latter imparted their arts and religious ceremonies to the Druids, who would politically conceal them from the people, that by means of auguries and divinations, the greater submission might be yielded to their decrees. To purposes of this kind Mr Rooke imagines these rocks to have been destined. They are various forms, some are rock-idols, others are rocking-stones, several have been perforated, in one instance, at least, quite through. To these our author assigns the name of the oracular stone, supposing that hence the crafty Druids might contrive to deliver predictions and commands which the credulous people would receive as proceeding from the rock-deity. It is well known, that many, who enjoyed far superior advantages for religious knowledge, have in later times employed such deceitful and scandalous methods to promote their ambitious and tyrannical views. (Whether it was thus in the very remote and uncultured periods to which Mr Rooke alludes, must remain in the uncertainty wherein time has involved this with many other points of historical disquisition).
In 1844, Druidic theories were strong enough for the Worcester Journal to publish a list of "British monuments, commonly called Druidical," to correct misunderstandings, including those by "antiquarian writers of celebrity." The list included the Rock Idol at Brimham Rocks. By 1849 John Richard Walbran, writing about erosion as the cause of the rocks' shapes, hesitated to support Druidical theories.
Nevertheless, in 1849, Druidic theories were still influential. John Williams (Ab Ithel), described Brimham Rocks in a poetic manner as if they were partly created by the hand of man: "Brimham Rocks, where amidst great natural acclivities, and on the verge of precipices, ancient architects of the school of the builders of the Tomb of Laius, seem to have derived an intense pleasure in vanquishing and triumphing over the difficulties which nature opposed to their exertions.
By 1890 Druidic theories were dying out, leaving some rock names to bear witness to past ideas. The Pateley Bridge & Nidderdale Herald quoted from Professor Phillips' Geology of Yorkshire. "The wasting power of the atmosphere is very consipicuous in these rocks; searching out their secret lamination; working perpendicular furrows and horizontal cavities; wearing away the bases, and thus bringing slow but sure destruction on the whole of the exposed masses. Those that remain of the rocks of Brimham are but perishing memorials of what have been destroyed.
Rock names
Great Cannon is one of the earliest rock names on this site. Many of the rock names have been used for over a hundred years. Some fanciful names may have been invented by the Rocks House caretakers in their efforts to amuse visitors. Some appear to have been inspired by antiquarians who adhered to Druidical theories about their origins. Just a few names, such as the Noonstone whose shadow indicated midday, and old local names, Great Cannon and Little Cannon (now the Smartie Tube), may come from an earlier tradition. In his 1786 lecture, Some account of the Brimham rocks in Yorkshire, Hayman Rooke mentions the Idol Rock, the Great Cannon, and the Noonstone next to which a fire was lit on Midsummer Eve.
In 1844 the Worcester Journal mentions the Rock Idol, and in 1843 the Leeds Times mentions the Rocking Stones, Lovers' Leap, Baboon's Head, Pulpit Rock, Parson's Head, Yoke of Oxen, Frog and Tortoise, Serpent's Head, Dancing Bear, Druid's Writing Desk, Druid's Aerial Altar, Druid's Coffin, Sphinx, Oyster Shell, Mushroom, Idol Rock, and Cannon Rocks. In 1849 J.R. Walbran mentions the Rocking Stones and illustrates the Anvil and Porpoise Head. In 1906 the writer Harry Speight mentions the Elephant Rock, the Porpoise Head, the Dancing Bear, the Boat Rock, the Idol and the Rocking Stones. The identity of the Porpoise Head rock has been forgotten, although it appears in a drawing by Walbran.
The mention of Druids appears in Brimham Rocks, the wonder of Nidderdale (ca.1920) by journalist Herbert W. Ogle (1871–1940) of Otley. He lists Druid's Head, Druid's Writing desk, Druid's Castle, Druid's Pulpit, Druid's Parlour, Druid's Kitchen, Druid's Coffin, Druid's telescope "and so on." The Parlour and Kitchen no longer exist. At the far end of the Eye of the Needle were once the Druid's Caves, which included a Parlour and Bedroom, but they have been exposed or obliterated by a rock fall. Other rock names mentioned in 1920 are Oyster Shell, Rocking Stones, Baboon Rock, Mushroom Rock, Wishing Rock, Yoke of Oxen, Boat Rock (also known as the Druid's Altar), Boat Rocking Stone ("first discovered to be movable in 1786"), Dancing Bear, Rhinoceros Head, Anvil Rock, Pivot Rock, Lovers' Leap, Frog and Tortoise, Cannon Rocks, Split Rock, Sphinx Rock, Rabbit Rock, Elephant's Head, Dog Rock (possibly the Watchdog) and Tiger's Head.
Kathakali (Malayalam: കഥകളി, kathakaḷi; Sanskrit: कथाकळिः, kathākaḷiḥ) is a stylized classical Indian dance-drama noted for the attractive make-up of characters, elaborate costumes, detailed gestures and well-defined body movements presented in tune with the anchor playback music and complementary percussion. It originated in the country's present day state of Kerala during the 17th century and has developed over the years with improved looks, refined gestures and added themes besides more ornate singing and precise drumming.
HISTORY
Popular belief is that kathakali is emerged from "Krishnanattam", the dance drama on the life and activities of Lord Krishna created by Sri Manavedan Raja, the Zamorin of Calicut (1585-1658 AD). Once Kottarakkara Thampuran, the Raja of Kottarakkara who was attracted by Krishnanattam requested the Zamorin for the loan of a troupe of performers. Due to the political rivalry between the two, Zamorin did not allow this. So Kottarakkara Thampuran created another art form called Ramanattam which was later transformed into Aattakatha. Krishnanaattam was written in Sanskrit, and Ramanattam was in Malayalam. By the end of 17th century, Attakatha was presented to the world with the title 'Kathakali'.
Kathakali also shares a lot of similarities with Krishnanattam, Koodiyattam (a classical Sanskrit drama existing in Kerala) and Ashtapadiyattam (an adaptation of 12th-century musical called Gitagovindam). It also incorporates several other elements from traditional and ritualistic art forms like Mudiyettu, Thiyyattu, Theyyam and Padayani besides a minor share of folk arts like Porattunatakam. All along, the martial art of Kalarippayattu has influenced the body language of Kathakali. The use of Malayalam, the local language (albeit as a mix of Sanskrit and Malayalam, called 'Manipravaalam'), has also helped the literature of Kathakali sound more transparent for the average audience.
As a part of modernising, propagating, promoting and popularizing Kathakali, the International Centre for Kathakali at New Delhi has taken up a continuing project since 1980 of producing new plays based on not only traditional and mythological stories, but also historical stories, European classics and Shakespeare's plays. Recently they produced Kathakali plays based on Shakespeare's Othello and Greek-Roman mythology of Psyche and Cupid.
Even though the lyrics/literature would qualify as another independent element called Sahithyam, it is considered as a component of Geetha or music, as it plays only a supplementary role to Nritham, Nrithyam and Natyam.
KATHAKALI PLAYS
Traditionally there are 101 classical Kathakali stories, though the commonly staged among them these days total less than one-third that number. Almost all of them were initially composed to last a whole night. Nowadays, there is increasing popularity for concise, or oftener select, versions of stories so as the performance lasts not more than three to four hours from evening. Thus, many stories find stage presentation in parts rather than totality. And the selection is based on criteria like choreographical beauty, thematic relevance/popularity or their melodramatic elements. Kathakali is a classical art form, but it can be appreciated also by novices—all contributed by the elegant looks of its character, their abstract movement and its synchronisation with the musical notes and rhythmic beats. And, in any case, the folk elements too continue to exist. For better appreciation, perhaps, it is still good to have an idea of the story being enacted.
The most popular stories enacted are Nalacharitham (a story from the Mahabharata), Duryodhana Vadham (focusing on the Mahabharata war after profiling the build-up to it), Kalyanasougandhikam, (the story of Bhima going to get flowers for his wife Panchali), Keechakavadham (another story of Bhima and Panchali, but this time during their stint in disguise), Kiratham (Arjuna and Lord Shiva's fight, from the Mahabharata), Karnashapatham (another story from the Mahabharata), Nizhalkuthu and Bhadrakalivijayam authored by Pannisseri Nanu Pillai. Also staged frequently include stories like Kuchelavrittam, Santanagopalam, Balivijayam, Dakshayagam, Rugminiswayamvaram, Kalakeyavadham, Kirmeeravadham, Bakavadham, Poothanamoksham, Subhadraharanam, Balivadham, Rugmangadacharitam, Ravanolbhavam, Narakasuravadham, Uttaraswayamvaram, Harishchandracharitam, Kacha-Devayani and Kamsavadham.
Recently, as part of attempts to further popularise the art, stories from other cultures and mythologies, such as those of Mary Magdalene from the Bible, Homer's Iliad, and William Shakespeare's King Lear and Julius Caesar besides Goethe's Faust too have been adapted into Kathakali scripts and on to its stage. Synopsis of 37 kathakali stories are available in kathakalinews.com.
MUSIC
The language of the songs used for Kathakali is Manipravalam. Though most of the songs are set in ragas based on the microtone-heavy Carnatic music, there is a distinct style of plain-note rendition, which is known as the Sopanam style. This typically Kerala style of rendition takes its roots from the temple songs which used to be sung (continues even now at several temples) at the time when Kathakali was born.
As with the acting style, Kathakali music also has singers from the northern and southern schools. The northern style has largely been groomed by Kerala Kalamandalam in the 20th century. Kalamandalam Neelakantan Nambisan, an overarching Kathakali musician of those times, was a product of the institute. His prominent disciples include Kalamandalam Unnikrishna Kurup, Kalamandalam Gangadharan, Kalamandalam P.G. Radhakrishnan, Rama Varrier, Madambi Subramanian Namboodiri, Tirur Nambissan, Kalamandalam Sankaran Embranthiri, Kalamandalam Hyderali, Kalamandalam Haridas, Subramanian, Kalanilayam Unnikrishnan and Kalamandalam Bhavadasan. The other prominent musicians of the north feature Kottakkal Vasu Nedungadi, Kottakkal Parameswaran Namboodiri, Kottakkal P.D. Narayanan Namboodiri, Kottakkal Narayanan, Kalamandalam Anantha NarayananKalamandalam Sreekumar Palanad Divakaran, Kalanilayam Rajendran, Kolathappilli Narayanan Namboodiri, Kalamandalam Narayanan Embranthiri, Kottakkal Madhu, Kalamandalam Babu Namboodiri, Kalamandalam Harish and Kalamandalam Vinod. In the south, some of whom are equally popular in the north these days, include Pathiyur Sankarankutty. Southerner musicians of the older generation include Cherthala Thankappa Panikker, Thakazhi Kuttan Pillai, Cherthala Kuttappa Kurup, Thanneermukkam Viswambharan and Mudakkal Gopinathan.
PERFORMANCE
Traditionally, a Kathakali performance is usually conducted at night and ends in early morning. Nowadays it isn't difficult to see performances as short as three hours or fewer. Kathakali is usually performed in front of the huge Kalivilakku (kali meaning dance; vilakku meaning lamp) with its thick wick sunk till the neck in coconut oil. Traditionally, this lamp used to provide sole light when the plays used to be performed inside temples, palaces or abodes houses of nobles and aristocrats. Enactment of a play by actors takes place to the accompaniment of music (geetha) and instruments (vadya). The percussion instruments used are chenda, maddalam (both of which underwent revolutionary changes in their aesthetics with the contributions of Kalamandalam Krishnankutty Poduval and Kalamandalam Appukutty Poduval) and, at times, edakka. In addition, the singers (the lead singer is called “ponnani” and his follower is called “singidi”) use chengila (gong made of bell metal, which can be struck with a wooden stick) and ilathalam (a pair of cymbals). The lead singer in some sense uses the Chengala to conduct the Vadyam and Geetha components, just as a conductor uses his wand in western classical music. A distinguishing characteristic of this art form is that the actors never speak but use hand gestures, expressions and rhythmic dancing instead of dialogue (but for a couple of rare characters).
ACTING
A Kathakali actor uses immense concentration, skill and physical stamina, gained from regimented training based on Kalaripayattu, the ancient martial art of Kerala, to prepare for his demanding role. The training can often last for 8–10 years, and is intensive. In Kathakali, the story is enacted purely by the movements of the hands (called mudras or hand gestures) and by facial expressions (rasas) and bodily movements. The expressions are derived from Natyashastra (the tome that deals with the science of expressions) and are classified into nine as in most Indian classical art forms. Dancers also undergo special practice sessions to learn control of their eye movements.
There are 24 basic mudras—the permutation and combination of which would add up a chunk of the hand gestures in vogue today. Each can again can be classified into 'Samaana-mudras'(one mudra symbolising two entities) or misra-mudras (both the hands are used to show these mudras). The mudras are a form of sign language used to tell the story.
The main facial expressions of a Kathakali artist are the 'navarasams' (Navarasas in anglicised form) (literal translation: Nine Tastes, but more loosely translated as nine feelings or expressions) which are Sringaram (amour), Hasyam (ridicule, humour), Bhayanakam (fear), Karunam (pathos), Roudram (anger, wrath), Veeram (valour), Beebhatsam (disgust), Adbhutam (wonder, amazement), Shantam (tranquility, peace). The link at the end of the page gives more details on Navarasas.
One of the most interesting aspects of Kathakali is its elaborate make-up code. Most often, the make-up can be classified into five basic sets namely Pachcha, Kathi, Kari, Thaadi, and Minukku. The differences between these sets lie in the predominant colours that are applied on the face. Pachcha (meaning green) has green as the dominant colour and is used to portray noble male characters who are said to have a mixture of "Satvik" (pious) and "Rajasik" (dark; Rajas = darkness) nature. Rajasik characters having an evil streak ("tamasic"= evil) -- all the same they are anti-heroes in the play (such as the demon king Ravana) -- and portrayed with streaks of red in a green-painted face. Excessively evil characters such as demons (totally tamasic) have a predominantly red make-up and a red beard. They are called Red Beard (Red Beard). Tamasic characters such as uncivilised hunters and woodsmen are represented with a predominantly black make-up base and a black beard and are called black beard (meaning black beard). Women and ascetics have lustrous, yellowish faces and this semi-realistic category forms the fifth class. In addition, there are modifications of the five basic sets described above such as Vella Thadi (white beard) used to depict Hanuman (the Monkey-God) and Pazhuppu, which is majorly used for Lord Shiva and Balabhadra.
NOTABLE TRAINING CENTRES & MASTERS
Kathakali artistes need assiduous grooming for almost a decade's time, and most masters are products of accomplished institutions that give a minimum training course of half-a-dozen years. The leading Kathakali schools (some of them started during the pre-Independent era India) are Kerala Kalamandalam (located in Cheruthuruthy near Shoranur), PSV Natya Sangham (located in Kottakal near Kozhikode), Sadanam Kathakali and Classical Arts Academy (or Gandhi Seva Sadan located in Perur near Ottappalam in Palakkad), Unnayi Varier Smaraka Kalanilayam (located in Irinjalakuda south of Thrissur), Margi in Thiruvananthapuram, Muthappan Kaliyogam at Parassinikkadavu in Kannur district and RLV School at Tripunithura off Kochi and Kalabharathi at Pakalkkuri near Kottarakkara in Kollam district, Sandarshan Kathakali Kendram in Ambalapuzha and Vellinazhi Nanu Nair Smaraka Kalakendra in Kuruvattor. Outside Kerala, Kathakali is being taught at the International Centre for Kathakali in New Delhi, Santiniketan at Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal, Kalakshetra in Chennai and Darpana Academy in Ahmedabad among others. PadmaSree Guru Chengannur Raman Pillai mostly known as 'Guru Chengannur'was running a traditional Gurukula Style approach to propagate Kathakali.
‘Guru Chengannur” is ever renowned as the Sovereign Guru of Kathakali. His precision in using symbols, gestures and steps were highest in the field of Kathakali. Guru Chegannur's kaththi vesham, especially the portrayal of Duryodhana enthralled the audience every time he performed. A master of the art, he found immense happiness and satisfaction in the success and recognition of his disciples.
Senior Kathakali exponents of today include Padma Bhushan Kalamandalam Ramankutty Nair, Padma Shri Kalamandalam Gopi, Madavoor Vasudevan Nair, Chemancheri Kunhiraman Nair, Kottakkal Krishnankutty Nair, Mankompu Sivasankara Pillai, Sadanam Krishnankutty, Nelliyode Vasudevan Namboodiri, Kalamandalam Vasu Pisharody, FACT Padmanabhan, Kottakkal Chandrasekharan, Margi Vijayakumar, Kottakkal Nandakumaran Nair, Vazhenkada Vijayan, Inchakkattu Ramachandran Pillai, Kalamandalam Kuttan, Mayyanad Kesavan Namboodiri, Mathur Govindan Kutty, Narippatta Narayanan Namboodiri, Chavara Parukutty, Thonnakkal Peethambaran, Sadanam Balakrishnan, Kalanilayam Gopalakrishnan, Chirakkara Madhavankutty, Sadanam K. Harikumaran, Thalavadi Aravindan, Kalanilayam Balakrishnan, Pariyanampatta Divakaran, Kottakkal Kesavan, Kalanilayam Gopi and Kudamaloor Muralikrishnan. The late titan actor-dancers of Kathakali's modern age (say, since the 1930s) include Pattikkamthodi Ravunni Menon, Chenganoor Raman Pillai, Chandu Panicker, Thakazhi Guru Kunchu Kurup, Padma Shri Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair, Padma Shri Vazhenkada Kunchu Nair, Kavalappara Narayanan Nair, Kurichi Kunhan Panikkar, Thekkinkattil Ramunni Nair, Padma Shri Keezhpadam Kumaran Nair, Kalamandalam Padmanabhan Nair, Mankulam Vishnu Namboodiri, Oyur Kochu Govinda Pillai, Vellinezhi Nanu Nair, Padma Shri Kavungal Chathunni Panikkar, Kudamaloor Karunakaran Nair, Kottakkal Sivaraman, Kannan Pattali, Pallippuram Gopalan Nair, Haripad Ramakrishna Pillai, Champakkulam Pachu Pillai, Chennithala Chellappan Pillai, Guru Mampuzha Madhava Panicker, and Vaikkom Karunakaran.
Kathakali is still hugely a male domain but, since the 1970s, females too have made entry into the art form on a recognisable scale. The central Kerala temple town of Tripunithura has, in fact, a ladies troupe (with members belonging to several part of the state) that performs Kathakali, by and large in Travancore.
KATHAKALI STYLES
Known as Sampradäyaṃ(Malayalam: സമ്പ്രദായം); these are leading Kathakali styles that differ from each other in subtleties like choreographic profile, position of hand gestures and stress on dance than drama and vice versa. Some of the major original kathakali styles included:
Vettathu Sampradayam
Kalladikkodan Sampradyam
Kaplingadu Sampradayam
Of late, these have narrowed down to the northern (Kalluvazhi) and southern (Thekkan) styles. It was largely developed by the legendary Pattikkamthodi Ravunni Menon (1881-1949) that is implemented in Kerala Kalamandalam (though it has also a department that teaches the southern style), Sadanam, RLV and Kottakkal. Margi has its training largely based on the Thekkan style, known for its stress on drama and part-realistic techniques. Kalanilayam, effectively, churns out students with a mix of both styles.
OTHER FORMS OD DANCE & OFFSHOOTS
Kerala Natanam is a kind of dance form, partly based on Kathakali techniques and aesthetics, developed and stylised by the late dancer Guru Gopinath in the mid-20th century. Kathakali also finds portrayal in Malayalam feature films like Vanaprastham, Parinayam, Marattam, and Rangam. Besides documentary films have also been shot on Kathakali artistes like Chenganoor Raman Pillai, Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair, Keezhpadam Kumaran Nair, Kalamandalam Ramankutty Nair, Kalamandalam Gopi and Kottakkal Sivaraman.
As for fictional literature, Kathakali finds mention in several Malayalam short stories like Karmen (by N.S. Madhavan) and novels like Keshabharam (by P.V. Sreevalsan). Even the Indo-Anglian work like Arundhati Roy's Booker prize-winning The God of Small Things has a chapter on Kathakali, while, of late, Anita Nair's novel, Mistress, is entirely wrapped in the ethos of Kathakali.
Similar musical theater is popular in Kasaragod and the coastal and Malenadu regions of Karnataka, viz. Yakshagana. Though Yakshagana resembles Kathakali in terms of its costume and makeup to an extent, Yakshagana is markedly different from Kathakali as it involves dialogues and method acting also the narration is in Kannada, wherein philosophical debates are also possible within framework of the character. As per records the art form of Yakshagana was already rooted and well established at the time of Sri Manavedan Raja. There is possibilities of its significant influence in formation of Kathakkali as the troupe of performers of "Krishnanattam" designed the basic costume of the art form already established in other parts of south India including Males playing the female roles (until more recently).
Kottayam thamburan's way of presenting kathakali was later known as Kalladikkoden sambradayam. Chathu Paniker,the introducer of Kallikkoden Sambrathayam, stayed in Kottayam for five years with Kottayam Thamburan's residence and practiced Kalladikkoden Sambrathayam. Then he returned to his home place. After a short period Chathu Paniker reached Pulapatta as instructed by Kuthiravattath nair. That was around the year ME 865. Many deciples from Kadathanadu, Kurumbra nadu, Vettathu nadu, Palakkadu and Perumpadappu studied kathakali(Kalladikkoden Sambrathayam ) By that time Chathu Paniker was an old man. Some years later he died from Pulapatta.
NOTED KATHAKALI VILLAGES & BELTS
There are certain pockets in Kerala that have given birth to many Kathakali artistes over the years. If they can be called Kathakali villages (or some of them, these days, towns), here are some of them: Vellinezhi, Kuruvattoor, Karalmanna, Cherpulassery, Kothachira, peringode, sreekrishnapuram Kongad and Ottapalam in Palakkad district, Vazhenkada in Malappuram district, Thichur or Tichoor, Guruvayur, Thiruvilwamala and Irinjalakuda in Thrissur district, Tripunithura, Edappally, Thekkan Chittoor in Ernakulam district and Kuttanad, Harippad belt in Alappuzha district besides places in and around Thiruvanathapuram in south Travancore and Payyannur in north Malabar.
AWARDS FOR KATHAKALI ARTISTS
Sangeet Natak Akademi Awardees - Kathakali (1956–2005)
Nambeesan Smaraka Awards—For artistic performances related kathakali{1992-2008}
KATHAKALI ATTAMS (ELAKI ATTAMS)
Attams or more specifically "elaki attams" are sequences of acting within a story acted out with the help of mudras without support from vocal music. The actor has the freedom to change the script to suit his own individual preferences. The actor will be supported ably by Chenda, Maddalam, and Elathalam (compulsory), Chengila (not very compulsory).
The following are only some examples. 'Kailasa Udharanam' and 'Tapas Attam' are very important attams and these are described at the end. Two of the many references are Kathakali Prakaram, pages 95 to 142 by Pannisheri Nanu Pillai and Kathakaliyile Manodharmangal by Chavara Appukuttan Pillai.
VANA VARNANA: BHIMA IN KALYANA SAUGANDHIKA
Modern man looks at the forest, indeed the birthplace of primates, with a certain wonder and a certain respect. Kathakali characters are no exception.
When Pandavas were living in the forest, one day, a flower, not seen before, wafted by the wind, comes and falls at the feet of Panchali. Exhilarated by its beauty and smell, Panchali asks Bhima to bring her more such flowers. To her pleasure Bhima is ready to go at once. But Panchali asks him what he shall do for food and drink on the way. Bhima thinks and says "Food and Drink! Oh, this side glance (look) of yours. This look of longing. This look of anticipation. The very thought fills me up. I don't need any food and drink at all. Let me go." He takes his mace and off he goes. Ulsaham (enthusiasm) is his Sdhayi Bhavam (permanent feature).
"Let me go at once in search of this flower," says Bhima. "The scented wind is blowing from the southern side. Let me go that way." After walking some distance he sees a huge mountain called Gandhamadana and three ways. He decides to take the middle one which goes over the mountain. After going further "The forest is getting thicker. Big trees, big branches in all directions. The forest looks like a huge dark vessel into which even light can not penetrate. This is my (Bhima's) way. Nothing can hinder me." So saying he pulls down many trees. Sometimes he shatters the trees with his mace. Suddenly he sees an elephant. "Oh! Elephant." He describes it. Its trunk. Sharp ears.
The itching sensation in the body. It takes some mud and throws on the body. Oh good. Then it sucks water and throws on the body. Somewhat better. Slowly it starts dosing even though alert at times. A very huge python is approaching steadily. Suddenly it catches hold of the elephant's hind leg. The elephant wakes up and tries to disengage the python. The python pulls to one side. The elephant kicks and drags to the other side. This goes on for some time. Bhima looks to the other side where a hungry lion is looking for food. It comes running and strikes the elephants head and eats part of the brain and goes off. The python completes the rest. "Oh my god, how ruthless!" says Bhima and proceeds on his way.
UDYANA VARNANA: NALA IN NALACHARITHAM SECOND DAY
Descriptions of gardens are found in most dance forms of India and abroad. These are also common in Kathakali.
Newly married Nala and Damayanthi are walking in the garden. When Nala was lovingly looking at Damayanthi a flower falls on her. Nala is overjoyed and thinks that this is a kindness nature has shown on his wife. Nala says "On seeing the arrival of their queen, the trees and climbers are showing happiness by dropping flowers on you." He tells her, "See that tree. When I used to be alone the tree used to hug the climber and seemingly laugh at my condition." Then he looks at the tree and says, "Dear Tree, look at me now. See how fortunate I am with my beautiful wife."
Both wander about. A bumblebee flies towards Damayanthi. Immediately Nala protects her face with a kerchief. He looks at the bee and then at Damayanthi. He says, "On seeing your face the bee thought it was a flower and came to drink the nectar." Nala and Damayanthi listen to the sounds coming out of the garden. Damayanti says, "It appears that the whole garden is thrilled. The flowers are blooming and smiling. Cuckoos are singing and the bees are dancing. Gentle winds are blowing and rubbing against our bodies. How beautiful the whole garden looks." Then Nala says that the sun is going down and it is time for them to go back and takes her away.
SHABDA VARNANA: HANUMAN IN KALYANA SAUGANDHIKAM
While Bhima goes in search of the flower, here Hanuman is sitting doing Tapas with mind concentrated on Sri Rama.
When he hears the terrible noises made by Bhima in the forest he feels disturbed in doing his Tapas. He thinks "What is the reason for this?" Then the sounds become bigger. "What is this?" He thinks, "The sounds are getting bigger. Such a terrible noise. Is the sea coming up thinking that the time is ripe for the great deluge (Pralaya). Birds are flying helter-skelter. Trees look shocked. Even Kali Yuga is not here. Then what is it? Are mountains quarreling with each other? No, That can't be it. Indra had cut off the wings of mountains so that they don't quarrel. Is the sea changing its position? No it can't be. The sea has promised it will not change its position again. It can't break the promise." Hanuman starts looking for clues. "I see elephants and lions running in fear of somebody. Oh a huge man is coming this way. Oh, a hero is coming. He is pulling out trees and throwing it here and there. Okay. Let him come near, We will see."
THANDEDATTAM: RAVANA IN BALI VADHAM
After his theranottam Ravana is seen sitting on a stool. He says to himself "I am enjoying a lot of happiness. What is the reason for this?" Thinks. "Yes I know it. I did Tapas to Brahma and received all necessary boons. Afterwards I won all ten directions. I also defeated my elder brother Vaishravana. Then I lifted Kailas mountain when Siva and Parvathi were having a misunderstanding. Parvathi got frightened and embraced Siva in fear. Siva was so happy he gave a divine sword called Chandrahasa. Now the whole world is afraid of me. That is why I am enjoying so much happiness." He goes and sits on the stool. He looks far away. "Who is coming from a distance. he is coming fast. Oh, it is Akamba. Okay. Let me find out what news he has for me."
ASHRAMA VARNANA: ARJUNA IN KIRATHAM
Arjuna wants to do Tapas to Lord Siva and he is looking a suitable place in the Himalayan slopes. He comes to place where there is an ashram. Arjuna looks closely at the place. "Oh. What a beautiful place this is. A small river in which a very pure water is flowing. Some hermits are taking baths in the river. Some hermits are standing in the water and doing Tapsas. Some are facing the Sun. Some are standing in between five fires." Arjuna salutes the hermits from far. He says to himself "Look at this young one of a deer. It is looking for its mother. It seems to be hungry and thirsty. Nearby a female tiger is feeding its young ones. The little deer goes towards the tigress and pushes the young tiger cubs aside and starts drinking milk from the tigress. The tigress looks lovingly at the young deer and even licks its body as if it were its own child. How beautiful. How fulfilling."
Again he looks "Here on this side a mongoose and a serpent forgetting their enmity are hugging each other. This place is really strange and made divine by saints and hermits. Let me start my Tapas somewhere nearby."
A sloka called "Shikhini Shalabha" can be selected instead of the above if time permits.
AN ATTAM BASED ON A SLOKA
Sansrit slokas are sometimes shown in mudras and it has a pleasing and exhilarating effect. Different actors use slokas as per his own taste and liking. However, the slokas are taught to students during their training period. An example is given below.
Kusumo Kusumolpatti Shrooyathena Chathushyathe
Bale thava Mukhambuje Pashya Neelolpaladwayam
Meaning a flower blooming inside another flower is not known to history. But, my dear, in your lotus like face are seen two blue Neelolpala flowers (eyes).
A CONVERSATION BASED ON A SLOKA
Sanskrit slokas can also be used to express an intent. One such example is a sloka used by Arjuna addressed to Mathali the charioteer in Kalakeya Vadham. Sloka:
Pitha: Kushalee Mama hritha Bhujaam
Naatha Sachee Vallabha:
Maatha: kim nu Pralomacha Kushalinee
Soonurjayanthasthayo
Preethim va Kushchate Thadikshnavidhow
Cheta Samutkanuthe
Sutha: tvam Radhamashu Chodaya vayam
Dharmadivam Mathala
Meaning: The husband of Indrani and the lord of gods my father - Is he in good health? His son Jayantha - Is he strictly following the commands of his father? Oh, I am impatient to see all of them.
SWARGA VARNANA: ARJUNA IN KELAKEYA VADHAM
Arjuna goes to heaven on the invitation of his father, Indra. After taking permission from Indrani he goes out to see all the places in Swarga. First he sees a building, his father's palace. It is so huge with four entrances. It is made of materials superior to gold and jewels of the world. Then he goes ahead and sees Iravatha. Here he describes it as a huge elephant with four horns. He is afraid to touch it. Then he thinks that animals in Swarga can't be cruel like in the world and so thinking he goes and touches and salutes Iravatha. He describes the churning of the white sea by gods and demons with many details and how Iravatha also came out of the white sea due to this churning.
He walks on and sees his father's (Indra's) horse. It is described as being white and its mane is sizzling like the waves of the white sea from which it came. He touches and salutes the horse also. Then he goes to see the river of the sky (or milky way). He sees many birds by this river and how the birds fly and play is shown.
Then he sees the heavenly ladies. Some are collecting flowers, and one of them comes late and asks for some flowers for making garland. The others refuse. She goes to the Kalpa Vriksha and says "please give me some flowers." Immediately a shower of flowers occurs which she collects in her clothes and goes to make garlands chiding the others. "See... I also got flowers." After this he sees the music and dance of the heavenly ladies. First it starts with the adjustments of instruments Thamburu, Mridangam, Veena. Then the actual music starts along with the striking of cymbals. Then two or three types of dances are shown. Then comes juggling of balls. It is described by a sloka thus:
Ekopi Thraya Iva Bhathi Kandukoyam
Kanthayaa: Karathala Raktharaktha:
Abhrastho Nayanamareechi Neelaneelo
Popular belief is that kathakali is emerged from "Krishnanattam", the dance drama on the life and activities of Lord Krishna created by Sri Manavedan Raja, the Zamorin of Calicut (1585-1658 AD). Once Kottarakkara Thampuran, the Raja of Kottarakkara who was attracted by Krishnanattam requested the Zamorin for the loan of a troupe of performers. Due to the political rivalry between the two, Zamorin did not allow this. So Kottarakkara Thampuran created another art form called Ramanattam which was later transformed into Aattakatha. Krishnanaattam was written in Sanskrit, and Ramanattam was in Malayalam. By the end of 17th century, Attakatha was presented to the world with the title 'Kathakali'. Kathakali also shares a lot of similarities with Krishnanattam, Koodiyattam (a classical Sanskrit drama existing in Kerala) and Ashtapadiyattam (an adaptation of 12th-century musical called Gitagovindam). It also incorporates several other elements from traditional and ritualistic art forms like Mudiyettu, Thiyyattu, Theyyam and Padayani besides a minor share of folk arts like Porattunatakam. All along, the martial art of Kalarippayattu has influenced the body language of Kathakali. The use of Malayalam, the local language (albeit as a mix of Sanskrit and Malayalam, called ), has also helped the literature of Kathakali sound more transparent for the average audience. As a part of modernising, propagating, promoting and popularizing Kathakali, the International Centre for Kathakali at New Delhi has taken up a continuing project since 1980 of producing new plays based on not only traditional and mythological stories, but also historical stories, European classics and Shakespeare's plays. Recently they produced Kathakali plays based on Shakespeare's Othello and Greek-Roman mythology of Psyche and Cupid.
Even though the lyrics/literature would qualify as another independent element called Sahithyam, it is considered as a component of Geetha or music, as it plays only a supplementary role to
Bhumau Talcharana Naghamshu Gaurgaura:
Meaning One ball looks like three balls. When it is in the hands of the juggler, it takes the redness of the hands, when it goes up it takes the blueness of the eyes, when it strikes the ground it becomes white from the whiteness of the leg nails. Once a juggled ball falls down. Then she, the juggler, somehow manages to proceed and remarks "See.. how I can do it".
At one time a garment slips from a lady's body and she adjusts the cloth showing shameful shyness (Lajja). Then the ladies go in for a Kummi dance. As Arjuna was enjoying this dance, suddenly somebody calls him. Arjuna feels scared. "Oh God, where am I?" he says and beats a hasty retreat.
TAPAS ATTAM: RAVANA IN RAVANA ULBHAVAM
[Background: Mali, Sumali and Malyavan were three brothers ruling Sri Lanka. During a war between them and Indra, Indra requested help from Lord Vishnu and as a consequence Lord Vishnu killed Mali. Sumali and Malyavan escaped to Patala. Kaikasi was the daughter of Sumali. She wandered in the forest. She belong three boys through a great sage called Vishravassu. (Vishravassu had an earlier son called Vaishravana who became the richest among all people.) The eldest boy of Kaikasi was Ravana followed by Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana.]
SCENE 1
When Ravana was a young boy (Kutti Ravana vesham), one day he was sleeping on his mothers lap in a place called madhuvanam. At that time Kaikasi sees Vaishravana flying overhead in his vimana (mythical aeroplane). She thinks “Oh, that is Vaishravana, technically a brother of my son who is sleeping on my lap. He is rich and strong. My son is so poor and weak. While thinking thus a drop of tear from her eyes drops on Ravana’s face. Ravana suddenly wakes up and sees his mother crying. When he knew the reason he could not bear it. He says he is going to do tapas to Brahma to get boons so that he will be strong and rich.
SCENE 2
(The tapas itself is shown as a part of autobiographical narration of adult ravana)
Ravana (adult Ravana, not kutti Ravana) is sitting on a stool. He thinks “Why am I so happy? How did I become so rich and strong? Oh yes. It is because of the tapas I did. What made me do the tapas? When I was a young boy, one day I was sleeping on my mother’s lap in a place called Madhuvanam. A drop of tear from her eyes falls on my face. I asked her why she was crying. She said she saw Vaishravana flying overhead in his vimana (plane). She told me Vaishravan was a brother of mine now flying in a plane. He is rich and strong. I am so poor and weak. When I heard this comparison between me and my brother, I could not bear it. I am going to do tapas to Brahma to get boons so that I will be strong and rich.
I made five different types of fires (while doing tapas gods are approached through Agni the god of fire). Then I started my tapas. I asked my brothers to stand guard and also keep the fires burning. Then I fully concentrated on tapas. Time passed but Brahma did not appear. I looked. Why is Brahma not appearing? I doubled my concentration. Time passed. Brahma is not appearing. Still not appearing? I cut one of my heads and put it in the fire. Waited, Brahma did not come. One more head rolls. Still no Brahma comes. Heads roll and roll. No Brahma. Only one head is left. First I thought of stopping my tapas. But no! Never! That will be an insult to me and my family. It is better to die than stop. Also when I die Brahma will be judged as being partial. With great determination I swung the sword at my last neck, when, lo and behold, suddenly Brahma appeared and caught my hand. I looked at him with still un-subsided, but gradually subsiding anger. Brahma asked me what boons I wanted. I asked for a boon that I should win all the worlds and have all the wealth and fame and that I should not be killed except by man. I also asked him to give boons for my brothers.
In the next scene Ravana asks Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana what boons they got. Unfortunately Kumbhakarna’s tongue got twisted while asking for boon and he got ‘sleep’ instead of becoming the ‘king of gods’. Ravana laughed it off. As for Vibhishana, he being a bhaktha of Vishnu, asked for Vishnu’s blessings and got it. Ravana laughs it off and also decides to conquer all the worlds and starts preparing his grand army for the big conquest of the worlds.
[This method of presentation with a peculiar sequence has a tremendous dramatic affect. The main actor redoes a small part of what happened to kutti Ravana vesham, and this gives a view of the high contrast between the boy and the man Ravana. Similarly the presence of Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana in the subsequent scene offers a good smile on the face of the viewer at the end of the play.]
KAILASA UDDHARANAM: RAVANA IN BALI VIJAYAM
[Background and Previous scene: After receiving the boons, and widening his kingdom in all directions, Ravana lives in Sri Lanka with great pomp and splendor. One day he sees Saint Narada approaching his palace singing songs in praise of him ‘Jaya jaya Ravana, Lanka Pathe’. Happily he receives Narada and seats him next to him. After telling Narada about the victory of his son Indrajith on Indra, Ravana tells Narada “Now there is nobody on earth or other worlds who can fight with me”. To this Narada replies “ Very true indeed, but there is one huge monkey called Bali who says he can defeat you. He even said that you are just like a blade of grass to him. Well let him say what he wants. You are unbeatable.” Then Narada says ‘let us go there and see him’. Both decide to go. But Ravana takes his famous sword called “Chandrahasam”. Then Narada asks the history of this sword. Ravana’s Attam Starts.]
Ravana says “I received this sword from Lord Siva. It happened thus. Once when I was conquering new places and expanding my empire I happened to be going across the Kailasa mountain. The plane got stuck on the mountain unable to move forward. I got down from the plane and looked at the mountain. (Looks from one end to the other first horizontally and then vertically.) So huge it was. Then I decided to lift it with my bare hand and keep it aside and move forward. I started sticking my hands under it one by one. Then I tried to lift it. It doesn’t move. I put more force and more force. It moved just a bit. I pushed harder and harder, slowly it started moving then again and again and it moved easily. Then I lifted it up with my hands and started juggling it (exaggeration evident).
“At that particular time Lord Siva was quarreling with his wife Parvathi. Why did they fight? The story is as follows. Parvathi had gone for enjoying swimming and bathing in some beautiful pond. At that time Siva opened his jata (disheveled long hair) and called Ganga for some entertainment after asking Ganapathi and Subramania to go for some errands. Somehow becoming suspicious, right at that time, Parvathi came back in a hurry with wet clothes and saw Siva with Ganga. Siva was wondering what to do and it was at that time that Ravana started lifting the Kailasa. When Kailasa started shaking Parvathi got scared and ran to Siva and hugged him. So the quarrel ended and Siva was happy. “As a reward Siva called me and gave me this famous Chandrahasa sword.”
Then Narada and Ravana leave to meet Bali. Ravana wanted to take the sword along with him, but Narada suggested that the sword is not required for teaching a lesson to Bali who is after all an unarmed monkey.
The Bass Rock & May Island as seen from the grounds of Tantallon Castle. The Bass Rock is one of the largest gannetries in Europe and the white specks on the Rock are the individual birds. There are boat trips (landings are sometimes possible) from North Berwick. The Bass has variously been a prison, fortification and currently a nature reserve
The May Island lies at the mouth of The Firth of Forth & is also a large nature reserve & trips (including landings) are available from Anstruther in Fife. During the First World War an unfortunate misunderstanding during night naval maneuvers in poor visibility resulted in the loss of several vessels due to rammings/ collisions originally attributed to enemy action and called "The Battle of May Island".
To my pro-China followers:
I’d like to address some of the complaints that you’ve made about me. I’m not going to argue politics, but I’d like to clear up some misunderstandings you seem to have.
1. Regarding the complaint about ruining the purity of origami with political statements, I’ve been doing this for years. You have never complained about my political origami in the past, so don’t pretend that you dislike me being political with my art. The problem is not about my art. The problem is with your ultra-nationalism.
2. I am not, and never have been, a citizen of China. Your claim that I should have patriotism towards China is ridiculous.
3. If you’re going to say bad words about me in Chinese, at least get my name right.
4. Well I can speak some Cantonese, I cannot read or write any Chinese. You know this already. So when you choose to write to me in Chinese, don’t complain if I have to resort to using Google translate in order to understand your comments. I don’t have to try to translate your comments. The fact that I do means that I am being courteous to you. If you really want me to understand what you want to say, then write in English.
5. I almost never check comments here on Flickr.
Kathakali (Malayalam: കഥകളി, kathakaḷi; Sanskrit: कथाकळिः, kathākaḷiḥ) is a stylized classical Indian dance-drama noted for the attractive make-up of characters, elaborate costumes, detailed gestures and well-defined body movements presented in tune with the anchor playback music and complementary percussion. It originated in the country's present day state of Kerala during the 17th century and has developed over the years with improved looks, refined gestures and added themes besides more ornate singing and precise drumming.
HISTORY
Popular belief is that kathakali is emerged from "Krishnanattam", the dance drama on the life and activities of Lord Krishna created by Sri Manavedan Raja, the Zamorin of Calicut (1585-1658 AD). Once Kottarakkara Thampuran, the Raja of Kottarakkara who was attracted by Krishnanattam requested the Zamorin for the loan of a troupe of performers. Due to the political rivalry between the two, Zamorin did not allow this. So Kottarakkara Thampuran created another art form called Ramanattam which was later transformed into Aattakatha. Krishnanaattam was written in Sanskrit, and Ramanattam was in Malayalam. By the end of 17th century, Attakatha was presented to the world with the title 'Kathakali'.
Kathakali also shares a lot of similarities with Krishnanattam, Koodiyattam (a classical Sanskrit drama existing in Kerala) and Ashtapadiyattam (an adaptation of 12th-century musical called Gitagovindam). It also incorporates several other elements from traditional and ritualistic art forms like Mudiyettu, Thiyyattu, Theyyam and Padayani besides a minor share of folk arts like Porattunatakam. All along, the martial art of Kalarippayattu has influenced the body language of Kathakali. The use of Malayalam, the local language (albeit as a mix of Sanskrit and Malayalam, called 'Manipravaalam'), has also helped the literature of Kathakali sound more transparent for the average audience.
As a part of modernising, propagating, promoting and popularizing Kathakali, the International Centre for Kathakali at New Delhi has taken up a continuing project since 1980 of producing new plays based on not only traditional and mythological stories, but also historical stories, European classics and Shakespeare's plays. Recently they produced Kathakali plays based on Shakespeare's Othello and Greek-Roman mythology of Psyche and Cupid.
Even though the lyrics/literature would qualify as another independent element called Sahithyam, it is considered as a component of Geetha or music, as it plays only a supplementary role to Nritham, Nrithyam and Natyam.
KATHAKALI PLAYS
Traditionally there are 101 classical Kathakali stories, though the commonly staged among them these days total less than one-third that number. Almost all of them were initially composed to last a whole night. Nowadays, there is increasing popularity for concise, or oftener select, versions of stories so as the performance lasts not more than three to four hours from evening. Thus, many stories find stage presentation in parts rather than totality. And the selection is based on criteria like choreographical beauty, thematic relevance/popularity or their melodramatic elements. Kathakali is a classical art form, but it can be appreciated also by novices—all contributed by the elegant looks of its character, their abstract movement and its synchronisation with the musical notes and rhythmic beats. And, in any case, the folk elements too continue to exist. For better appreciation, perhaps, it is still good to have an idea of the story being enacted.
The most popular stories enacted are Nalacharitham (a story from the Mahabharata), Duryodhana Vadham (focusing on the Mahabharata war after profiling the build-up to it), Kalyanasougandhikam, (the story of Bhima going to get flowers for his wife Panchali), Keechakavadham (another story of Bhima and Panchali, but this time during their stint in disguise), Kiratham (Arjuna and Lord Shiva's fight, from the Mahabharata), Karnashapatham (another story from the Mahabharata), Nizhalkuthu and Bhadrakalivijayam authored by Pannisseri Nanu Pillai. Also staged frequently include stories like Kuchelavrittam, Santanagopalam, Balivijayam, Dakshayagam, Rugminiswayamvaram, Kalakeyavadham, Kirmeeravadham, Bakavadham, Poothanamoksham, Subhadraharanam, Balivadham, Rugmangadacharitam, Ravanolbhavam, Narakasuravadham, Uttaraswayamvaram, Harishchandracharitam, Kacha-Devayani and Kamsavadham.
Recently, as part of attempts to further popularise the art, stories from other cultures and mythologies, such as those of Mary Magdalene from the Bible, Homer's Iliad, and William Shakespeare's King Lear and Julius Caesar besides Goethe's Faust too have been adapted into Kathakali scripts and on to its stage. Synopsis of 37 kathakali stories are available in kathakalinews.com.
MUSIC
The language of the songs used for Kathakali is Manipravalam. Though most of the songs are set in ragas based on the microtone-heavy Carnatic music, there is a distinct style of plain-note rendition, which is known as the Sopanam style. This typically Kerala style of rendition takes its roots from the temple songs which used to be sung (continues even now at several temples) at the time when Kathakali was born.
As with the acting style, Kathakali music also has singers from the northern and southern schools. The northern style has largely been groomed by Kerala Kalamandalam in the 20th century. Kalamandalam Neelakantan Nambisan, an overarching Kathakali musician of those times, was a product of the institute. His prominent disciples include Kalamandalam Unnikrishna Kurup, Kalamandalam Gangadharan, Kalamandalam P.G. Radhakrishnan, Rama Varrier, Madambi Subramanian Namboodiri, Tirur Nambissan, Kalamandalam Sankaran Embranthiri, Kalamandalam Hyderali, Kalamandalam Haridas, Subramanian, Kalanilayam Unnikrishnan and Kalamandalam Bhavadasan. The other prominent musicians of the north feature Kottakkal Vasu Nedungadi, Kottakkal Parameswaran Namboodiri, Kottakkal P.D. Narayanan Namboodiri, Kottakkal Narayanan, Kalamandalam Anantha NarayananKalamandalam Sreekumar Palanad Divakaran, Kalanilayam Rajendran, Kolathappilli Narayanan Namboodiri, Kalamandalam Narayanan Embranthiri, Kottakkal Madhu, Kalamandalam Babu Namboodiri, Kalamandalam Harish and Kalamandalam Vinod. In the south, some of whom are equally popular in the north these days, include Pathiyur Sankarankutty. Southerner musicians of the older generation include Cherthala Thankappa Panikker, Thakazhi Kuttan Pillai, Cherthala Kuttappa Kurup, Thanneermukkam Viswambharan and Mudakkal Gopinathan.
PERFORMANCE
Traditionally, a Kathakali performance is usually conducted at night and ends in early morning. Nowadays it isn't difficult to see performances as short as three hours or fewer. Kathakali is usually performed in front of the huge Kalivilakku (kali meaning dance; vilakku meaning lamp) with its thick wick sunk till the neck in coconut oil. Traditionally, this lamp used to provide sole light when the plays used to be performed inside temples, palaces or abodes houses of nobles and aristocrats. Enactment of a play by actors takes place to the accompaniment of music (geetha) and instruments (vadya). The percussion instruments used are chenda, maddalam (both of which underwent revolutionary changes in their aesthetics with the contributions of Kalamandalam Krishnankutty Poduval and Kalamandalam Appukutty Poduval) and, at times, edakka. In addition, the singers (the lead singer is called “ponnani” and his follower is called “singidi”) use chengila (gong made of bell metal, which can be struck with a wooden stick) and ilathalam (a pair of cymbals). The lead singer in some sense uses the Chengala to conduct the Vadyam and Geetha components, just as a conductor uses his wand in western classical music. A distinguishing characteristic of this art form is that the actors never speak but use hand gestures, expressions and rhythmic dancing instead of dialogue (but for a couple of rare characters).
ACTING
A Kathakali actor uses immense concentration, skill and physical stamina, gained from regimented training based on Kalaripayattu, the ancient martial art of Kerala, to prepare for his demanding role. The training can often last for 8–10 years, and is intensive. In Kathakali, the story is enacted purely by the movements of the hands (called mudras or hand gestures) and by facial expressions (rasas) and bodily movements. The expressions are derived from Natyashastra (the tome that deals with the science of expressions) and are classified into nine as in most Indian classical art forms. Dancers also undergo special practice sessions to learn control of their eye movements.
There are 24 basic mudras—the permutation and combination of which would add up a chunk of the hand gestures in vogue today. Each can again can be classified into 'Samaana-mudras'(one mudra symbolising two entities) or misra-mudras (both the hands are used to show these mudras). The mudras are a form of sign language used to tell the story.
The main facial expressions of a Kathakali artist are the 'navarasams' (Navarasas in anglicised form) (literal translation: Nine Tastes, but more loosely translated as nine feelings or expressions) which are Sringaram (amour), Hasyam (ridicule, humour), Bhayanakam (fear), Karunam (pathos), Roudram (anger, wrath), Veeram (valour), Beebhatsam (disgust), Adbhutam (wonder, amazement), Shantam (tranquility, peace). The link at the end of the page gives more details on Navarasas.
One of the most interesting aspects of Kathakali is its elaborate make-up code. Most often, the make-up can be classified into five basic sets namely Pachcha, Kathi, Kari, Thaadi, and Minukku. The differences between these sets lie in the predominant colours that are applied on the face. Pachcha (meaning green) has green as the dominant colour and is used to portray noble male characters who are said to have a mixture of "Satvik" (pious) and "Rajasik" (dark; Rajas = darkness) nature. Rajasik characters having an evil streak ("tamasic"= evil) -- all the same they are anti-heroes in the play (such as the demon king Ravana) -- and portrayed with streaks of red in a green-painted face. Excessively evil characters such as demons (totally tamasic) have a predominantly red make-up and a red beard. They are called Red Beard (Red Beard). Tamasic characters such as uncivilised hunters and woodsmen are represented with a predominantly black make-up base and a black beard and are called black beard (meaning black beard). Women and ascetics have lustrous, yellowish faces and this semi-realistic category forms the fifth class. In addition, there are modifications of the five basic sets described above such as Vella Thadi (white beard) used to depict Hanuman (the Monkey-God) and Pazhuppu, which is majorly used for Lord Shiva and Balabhadra.
NOTABLE TRAINING CENTRES & MASTERS
Kathakali artistes need assiduous grooming for almost a decade's time, and most masters are products of accomplished institutions that give a minimum training course of half-a-dozen years. The leading Kathakali schools (some of them started during the pre-Independent era India) are Kerala Kalamandalam (located in Cheruthuruthy near Shoranur), PSV Natya Sangham (located in Kottakal near Kozhikode), Sadanam Kathakali and Classical Arts Academy (or Gandhi Seva Sadan located in Perur near Ottappalam in Palakkad), Unnayi Varier Smaraka Kalanilayam (located in Irinjalakuda south of Thrissur), Margi in Thiruvananthapuram, Muthappan Kaliyogam at Parassinikkadavu in Kannur district and RLV School at Tripunithura off Kochi and Kalabharathi at Pakalkkuri near Kottarakkara in Kollam district, Sandarshan Kathakali Kendram in Ambalapuzha and Vellinazhi Nanu Nair Smaraka Kalakendra in Kuruvattor. Outside Kerala, Kathakali is being taught at the International Centre for Kathakali in New Delhi, Santiniketan at Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal, Kalakshetra in Chennai and Darpana Academy in Ahmedabad among others. PadmaSree Guru Chengannur Raman Pillai mostly known as 'Guru Chengannur'was running a traditional Gurukula Style approach to propagate Kathakali.
‘Guru Chengannur” is ever renowned as the Sovereign Guru of Kathakali. His precision in using symbols, gestures and steps were highest in the field of Kathakali. Guru Chegannur's kaththi vesham, especially the portrayal of Duryodhana enthralled the audience every time he performed. A master of the art, he found immense happiness and satisfaction in the success and recognition of his disciples.
Senior Kathakali exponents of today include Padma Bhushan Kalamandalam Ramankutty Nair, Padma Shri Kalamandalam Gopi, Madavoor Vasudevan Nair, Chemancheri Kunhiraman Nair, Kottakkal Krishnankutty Nair, Mankompu Sivasankara Pillai, Sadanam Krishnankutty, Nelliyode Vasudevan Namboodiri, Kalamandalam Vasu Pisharody, FACT Padmanabhan, Kottakkal Chandrasekharan, Margi Vijayakumar, Kottakkal Nandakumaran Nair, Vazhenkada Vijayan, Inchakkattu Ramachandran Pillai, Kalamandalam Kuttan, Mayyanad Kesavan Namboodiri, Mathur Govindan Kutty, Narippatta Narayanan Namboodiri, Chavara Parukutty, Thonnakkal Peethambaran, Sadanam Balakrishnan, Kalanilayam Gopalakrishnan, Chirakkara Madhavankutty, Sadanam K. Harikumaran, Thalavadi Aravindan, Kalanilayam Balakrishnan, Pariyanampatta Divakaran, Kottakkal Kesavan, Kalanilayam Gopi and Kudamaloor Muralikrishnan. The late titan actor-dancers of Kathakali's modern age (say, since the 1930s) include Pattikkamthodi Ravunni Menon, Chenganoor Raman Pillai, Chandu Panicker, Thakazhi Guru Kunchu Kurup, Padma Shri Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair, Padma Shri Vazhenkada Kunchu Nair, Kavalappara Narayanan Nair, Kurichi Kunhan Panikkar, Thekkinkattil Ramunni Nair, Padma Shri Keezhpadam Kumaran Nair, Kalamandalam Padmanabhan Nair, Mankulam Vishnu Namboodiri, Oyur Kochu Govinda Pillai, Vellinezhi Nanu Nair, Padma Shri Kavungal Chathunni Panikkar, Kudamaloor Karunakaran Nair, Kottakkal Sivaraman, Kannan Pattali, Pallippuram Gopalan Nair, Haripad Ramakrishna Pillai, Champakkulam Pachu Pillai, Chennithala Chellappan Pillai, Guru Mampuzha Madhava Panicker, and Vaikkom Karunakaran.
Kathakali is still hugely a male domain but, since the 1970s, females too have made entry into the art form on a recognisable scale. The central Kerala temple town of Tripunithura has, in fact, a ladies troupe (with members belonging to several part of the state) that performs Kathakali, by and large in Travancore.
KATHAKALI STYLES
Known as Sampradäyaṃ(Malayalam: സമ്പ്രദായം); these are leading Kathakali styles that differ from each other in subtleties like choreographic profile, position of hand gestures and stress on dance than drama and vice versa. Some of the major original kathakali styles included:
Vettathu Sampradayam
Kalladikkodan Sampradyam
Kaplingadu Sampradayam
Of late, these have narrowed down to the northern (Kalluvazhi) and southern (Thekkan) styles. It was largely developed by the legendary Pattikkamthodi Ravunni Menon (1881-1949) that is implemented in Kerala Kalamandalam (though it has also a department that teaches the southern style), Sadanam, RLV and Kottakkal. Margi has its training largely based on the Thekkan style, known for its stress on drama and part-realistic techniques. Kalanilayam, effectively, churns out students with a mix of both styles.
OTHER FORMS OD DANCE & OFFSHOOTS
Kerala Natanam is a kind of dance form, partly based on Kathakali techniques and aesthetics, developed and stylised by the late dancer Guru Gopinath in the mid-20th century. Kathakali also finds portrayal in Malayalam feature films like Vanaprastham, Parinayam, Marattam, and Rangam. Besides documentary films have also been shot on Kathakali artistes like Chenganoor Raman Pillai, Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair, Keezhpadam Kumaran Nair, Kalamandalam Ramankutty Nair, Kalamandalam Gopi and Kottakkal Sivaraman.
As for fictional literature, Kathakali finds mention in several Malayalam short stories like Karmen (by N.S. Madhavan) and novels like Keshabharam (by P.V. Sreevalsan). Even the Indo-Anglian work like Arundhati Roy's Booker prize-winning The God of Small Things has a chapter on Kathakali, while, of late, Anita Nair's novel, Mistress, is entirely wrapped in the ethos of Kathakali.
Similar musical theater is popular in Kasaragod and the coastal and Malenadu regions of Karnataka, viz. Yakshagana. Though Yakshagana resembles Kathakali in terms of its costume and makeup to an extent, Yakshagana is markedly different from Kathakali as it involves dialogues and method acting also the narration is in Kannada, wherein philosophical debates are also possible within framework of the character. As per records the art form of Yakshagana was already rooted and well established at the time of Sri Manavedan Raja. There is possibilities of its significant influence in formation of Kathakkali as the troupe of performers of "Krishnanattam" designed the basic costume of the art form already established in other parts of south India including Males playing the female roles (until more recently).
Kottayam thamburan's way of presenting kathakali was later known as Kalladikkoden sambradayam. Chathu Paniker,the introducer of Kallikkoden Sambrathayam, stayed in Kottayam for five years with Kottayam Thamburan's residence and practiced Kalladikkoden Sambrathayam. Then he returned to his home place. After a short period Chathu Paniker reached Pulapatta as instructed by Kuthiravattath nair. That was around the year ME 865. Many deciples from Kadathanadu, Kurumbra nadu, Vettathu nadu, Palakkadu and Perumpadappu studied kathakali(Kalladikkoden Sambrathayam ) By that time Chathu Paniker was an old man. Some years later he died from Pulapatta.
NOTED KATHAKALI VILLAGES & BELTS
There are certain pockets in Kerala that have given birth to many Kathakali artistes over the years. If they can be called Kathakali villages (or some of them, these days, towns), here are some of them: Vellinezhi, Kuruvattoor, Karalmanna, Cherpulassery, Kothachira, peringode, sreekrishnapuram Kongad and Ottapalam in Palakkad district, Vazhenkada in Malappuram district, Thichur or Tichoor, Guruvayur, Thiruvilwamala and Irinjalakuda in Thrissur district, Tripunithura, Edappally, Thekkan Chittoor in Ernakulam district and Kuttanad, Harippad belt in Alappuzha district besides places in and around Thiruvanathapuram in south Travancore and Payyannur in north Malabar.
AWARDS FOR KATHAKALI ARTISTS
Sangeet Natak Akademi Awardees - Kathakali (1956–2005)
Nambeesan Smaraka Awards—For artistic performances related kathakali{1992-2008}
KATHAKALI ATTAMS (ELAKI ATTAMS)
Attams or more specifically "elaki attams" are sequences of acting within a story acted out with the help of mudras without support from vocal music. The actor has the freedom to change the script to suit his own individual preferences. The actor will be supported ably by Chenda, Maddalam, and Elathalam (compulsory), Chengila (not very compulsory).
The following are only some examples. 'Kailasa Udharanam' and 'Tapas Attam' are very important attams and these are described at the end. Two of the many references are Kathakali Prakaram, pages 95 to 142 by Pannisheri Nanu Pillai and Kathakaliyile Manodharmangal by Chavara Appukuttan Pillai.
VANA VARNANA: BHIMA IN KALYANA SAUGANDHIKA
Modern man looks at the forest, indeed the birthplace of primates, with a certain wonder and a certain respect. Kathakali characters are no exception.
When Pandavas were living in the forest, one day, a flower, not seen before, wafted by the wind, comes and falls at the feet of Panchali. Exhilarated by its beauty and smell, Panchali asks Bhima to bring her more such flowers. To her pleasure Bhima is ready to go at once. But Panchali asks him what he shall do for food and drink on the way. Bhima thinks and says "Food and Drink! Oh, this side glance (look) of yours. This look of longing. This look of anticipation. The very thought fills me up. I don't need any food and drink at all. Let me go." He takes his mace and off he goes. Ulsaham (enthusiasm) is his Sdhayi Bhavam (permanent feature).
"Let me go at once in search of this flower," says Bhima. "The scented wind is blowing from the southern side. Let me go that way." After walking some distance he sees a huge mountain called Gandhamadana and three ways. He decides to take the middle one which goes over the mountain. After going further "The forest is getting thicker. Big trees, big branches in all directions. The forest looks like a huge dark vessel into which even light can not penetrate. This is my (Bhima's) way. Nothing can hinder me." So saying he pulls down many trees. Sometimes he shatters the trees with his mace. Suddenly he sees an elephant. "Oh! Elephant." He describes it. Its trunk. Sharp ears.
The itching sensation in the body. It takes some mud and throws on the body. Oh good. Then it sucks water and throws on the body. Somewhat better. Slowly it starts dosing even though alert at times. A very huge python is approaching steadily. Suddenly it catches hold of the elephant's hind leg. The elephant wakes up and tries to disengage the python. The python pulls to one side. The elephant kicks and drags to the other side. This goes on for some time. Bhima looks to the other side where a hungry lion is looking for food. It comes running and strikes the elephants head and eats part of the brain and goes off. The python completes the rest. "Oh my god, how ruthless!" says Bhima and proceeds on his way.
UDYANA VARNANA: NALA IN NALACHARITHAM SECOND DAY
Descriptions of gardens are found in most dance forms of India and abroad. These are also common in Kathakali.
Newly married Nala and Damayanthi are walking in the garden. When Nala was lovingly looking at Damayanthi a flower falls on her. Nala is overjoyed and thinks that this is a kindness nature has shown on his wife. Nala says "On seeing the arrival of their queen, the trees and climbers are showing happiness by dropping flowers on you." He tells her, "See that tree. When I used to be alone the tree used to hug the climber and seemingly laugh at my condition." Then he looks at the tree and says, "Dear Tree, look at me now. See how fortunate I am with my beautiful wife."
Both wander about. A bumblebee flies towards Damayanthi. Immediately Nala protects her face with a kerchief. He looks at the bee and then at Damayanthi. He says, "On seeing your face the bee thought it was a flower and came to drink the nectar." Nala and Damayanthi listen to the sounds coming out of the garden. Damayanti says, "It appears that the whole garden is thrilled. The flowers are blooming and smiling. Cuckoos are singing and the bees are dancing. Gentle winds are blowing and rubbing against our bodies. How beautiful the whole garden looks." Then Nala says that the sun is going down and it is time for them to go back and takes her away.
SHABDA VARNANA: HANUMAN IN KALYANA SAUGANDHIKAM
While Bhima goes in search of the flower, here Hanuman is sitting doing Tapas with mind concentrated on Sri Rama.
When he hears the terrible noises made by Bhima in the forest he feels disturbed in doing his Tapas. He thinks "What is the reason for this?" Then the sounds become bigger. "What is this?" He thinks, "The sounds are getting bigger. Such a terrible noise. Is the sea coming up thinking that the time is ripe for the great deluge (Pralaya). Birds are flying helter-skelter. Trees look shocked. Even Kali Yuga is not here. Then what is it? Are mountains quarreling with each other? No, That can't be it. Indra had cut off the wings of mountains so that they don't quarrel. Is the sea changing its position? No it can't be. The sea has promised it will not change its position again. It can't break the promise." Hanuman starts looking for clues. "I see elephants and lions running in fear of somebody. Oh a huge man is coming this way. Oh, a hero is coming. He is pulling out trees and throwing it here and there. Okay. Let him come near, We will see."
THANDEDATTAM: RAVANA IN BALI VADHAM
After his theranottam Ravana is seen sitting on a stool. He says to himself "I am enjoying a lot of happiness. What is the reason for this?" Thinks. "Yes I know it. I did Tapas to Brahma and received all necessary boons. Afterwards I won all ten directions. I also defeated my elder brother Vaishravana. Then I lifted Kailas mountain when Siva and Parvathi were having a misunderstanding. Parvathi got frightened and embraced Siva in fear. Siva was so happy he gave a divine sword called Chandrahasa. Now the whole world is afraid of me. That is why I am enjoying so much happiness." He goes and sits on the stool. He looks far away. "Who is coming from a distance. he is coming fast. Oh, it is Akamba. Okay. Let me find out what news he has for me."
ASHRAMA VARNANA: ARJUNA IN KIRATHAM
Arjuna wants to do Tapas to Lord Siva and he is looking a suitable place in the Himalayan slopes. He comes to place where there is an ashram. Arjuna looks closely at the place. "Oh. What a beautiful place this is. A small river in which a very pure water is flowing. Some hermits are taking baths in the river. Some hermits are standing in the water and doing Tapsas. Some are facing the Sun. Some are standing in between five fires." Arjuna salutes the hermits from far. He says to himself "Look at this young one of a deer. It is looking for its mother. It seems to be hungry and thirsty. Nearby a female tiger is feeding its young ones. The little deer goes towards the tigress and pushes the young tiger cubs aside and starts drinking milk from the tigress. The tigress looks lovingly at the young deer and even licks its body as if it were its own child. How beautiful. How fulfilling."
Again he looks "Here on this side a mongoose and a serpent forgetting their enmity are hugging each other. This place is really strange and made divine by saints and hermits. Let me start my Tapas somewhere nearby."
A sloka called "Shikhini Shalabha" can be selected instead of the above if time permits.
AN ATTAM BASED ON A SLOKA
Sansrit slokas are sometimes shown in mudras and it has a pleasing and exhilarating effect. Different actors use slokas as per his own taste and liking. However, the slokas are taught to students during their training period. An example is given below.
Kusumo Kusumolpatti Shrooyathena Chathushyathe
Bale thava Mukhambuje Pashya Neelolpaladwayam
Meaning a flower blooming inside another flower is not known to history. But, my dear, in your lotus like face are seen two blue Neelolpala flowers (eyes).
A CONVERSATION BASED ON A SLOKA
Sanskrit slokas can also be used to express an intent. One such example is a sloka used by Arjuna addressed to Mathali the charioteer in Kalakeya Vadham. Sloka:
Pitha: Kushalee Mama hritha Bhujaam
Naatha Sachee Vallabha:
Maatha: kim nu Pralomacha Kushalinee
Soonurjayanthasthayo
Preethim va Kushchate Thadikshnavidhow
Cheta Samutkanuthe
Sutha: tvam Radhamashu Chodaya vayam
Dharmadivam Mathala
Meaning: The husband of Indrani and the lord of gods my father - Is he in good health? His son Jayantha - Is he strictly following the commands of his father? Oh, I am impatient to see all of them.
SWARGA VARNANA: ARJUNA IN KELAKEYA VADHAM
Arjuna goes to heaven on the invitation of his father, Indra. After taking permission from Indrani he goes out to see all the places in Swarga. First he sees a building, his father's palace. It is so huge with four entrances. It is made of materials superior to gold and jewels of the world. Then he goes ahead and sees Iravatha. Here he describes it as a huge elephant with four horns. He is afraid to touch it. Then he thinks that animals in Swarga can't be cruel like in the world and so thinking he goes and touches and salutes Iravatha. He describes the churning of the white sea by gods and demons with many details and how Iravatha also came out of the white sea due to this churning.
He walks on and sees his father's (Indra's) horse. It is described as being white and its mane is sizzling like the waves of the white sea from which it came. He touches and salutes the horse also. Then he goes to see the river of the sky (or milky way). He sees many birds by this river and how the birds fly and play is shown.
Then he sees the heavenly ladies. Some are collecting flowers, and one of them comes late and asks for some flowers for making garland. The others refuse. She goes to the Kalpa Vriksha and says "please give me some flowers." Immediately a shower of flowers occurs which she collects in her clothes and goes to make garlands chiding the others. "See... I also got flowers." After this he sees the music and dance of the heavenly ladies. First it starts with the adjustments of instruments Thamburu, Mridangam, Veena. Then the actual music starts along with the striking of cymbals. Then two or three types of dances are shown. Then comes juggling of balls. It is described by a sloka thus:
Ekopi Thraya Iva Bhathi Kandukoyam
Kanthayaa: Karathala Raktharaktha:
Abhrastho Nayanamareechi Neelaneelo
Popular belief is that kathakali is emerged from "Krishnanattam", the dance drama on the life and activities of Lord Krishna created by Sri Manavedan Raja, the Zamorin of Calicut (1585-1658 AD). Once Kottarakkara Thampuran, the Raja of Kottarakkara who was attracted by Krishnanattam requested the Zamorin for the loan of a troupe of performers. Due to the political rivalry between the two, Zamorin did not allow this. So Kottarakkara Thampuran created another art form called Ramanattam which was later transformed into Aattakatha. Krishnanaattam was written in Sanskrit, and Ramanattam was in Malayalam. By the end of 17th century, Attakatha was presented to the world with the title 'Kathakali'. Kathakali also shares a lot of similarities with Krishnanattam, Koodiyattam (a classical Sanskrit drama existing in Kerala) and Ashtapadiyattam (an adaptation of 12th-century musical called Gitagovindam). It also incorporates several other elements from traditional and ritualistic art forms like Mudiyettu, Thiyyattu, Theyyam and Padayani besides a minor share of folk arts like Porattunatakam. All along, the martial art of Kalarippayattu has influenced the body language of Kathakali. The use of Malayalam, the local language (albeit as a mix of Sanskrit and Malayalam, called ), has also helped the literature of Kathakali sound more transparent for the average audience. As a part of modernising, propagating, promoting and popularizing Kathakali, the International Centre for Kathakali at New Delhi has taken up a continuing project since 1980 of producing new plays based on not only traditional and mythological stories, but also historical stories, European classics and Shakespeare's plays. Recently they produced Kathakali plays based on Shakespeare's Othello and Greek-Roman mythology of Psyche and Cupid.
Even though the lyrics/literature would qualify as another independent element called Sahithyam, it is considered as a component of Geetha or music, as it plays only a supplementary role to
Bhumau Talcharana Naghamshu Gaurgaura:
Meaning One ball looks like three balls. When it is in the hands of the juggler, it takes the redness of the hands, when it goes up it takes the blueness of the eyes, when it strikes the ground it becomes white from the whiteness of the leg nails. Once a juggled ball falls down. Then she, the juggler, somehow manages to proceed and remarks "See.. how I can do it".
At one time a garment slips from a lady's body and she adjusts the cloth showing shameful shyness (Lajja). Then the ladies go in for a Kummi dance. As Arjuna was enjoying this dance, suddenly somebody calls him. Arjuna feels scared. "Oh God, where am I?" he says and beats a hasty retreat.
TAPAS ATTAM: RAVANA IN RAVANA ULBHAVAM
[Background: Mali, Sumali and Malyavan were three brothers ruling Sri Lanka. During a war between them and Indra, Indra requested help from Lord Vishnu and as a consequence Lord Vishnu killed Mali. Sumali and Malyavan escaped to Patala. Kaikasi was the daughter of Sumali. She wandered in the forest. She belong three boys through a great sage called Vishravassu. (Vishravassu had an earlier son called Vaishravana who became the richest among all people.) The eldest boy of Kaikasi was Ravana followed by Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana.]
SCENE 1
When Ravana was a young boy (Kutti Ravana vesham), one day he was sleeping on his mothers lap in a place called madhuvanam. At that time Kaikasi sees Vaishravana flying overhead in his vimana (mythical aeroplane). She thinks “Oh, that is Vaishravana, technically a brother of my son who is sleeping on my lap. He is rich and strong. My son is so poor and weak. While thinking thus a drop of tear from her eyes drops on Ravana’s face. Ravana suddenly wakes up and sees his mother crying. When he knew the reason he could not bear it. He says he is going to do tapas to Brahma to get boons so that he will be strong and rich.
SCENE 2
(The tapas itself is shown as a part of autobiographical narration of adult ravana)
Ravana (adult Ravana, not kutti Ravana) is sitting on a stool. He thinks “Why am I so happy? How did I become so rich and strong? Oh yes. It is because of the tapas I did. What made me do the tapas? When I was a young boy, one day I was sleeping on my mother’s lap in a place called Madhuvanam. A drop of tear from her eyes falls on my face. I asked her why she was crying. She said she saw Vaishravana flying overhead in his vimana (plane). She told me Vaishravan was a brother of mine now flying in a plane. He is rich and strong. I am so poor and weak. When I heard this comparison between me and my brother, I could not bear it. I am going to do tapas to Brahma to get boons so that I will be strong and rich.
I made five different types of fires (while doing tapas gods are approached through Agni the god of fire). Then I started my tapas. I asked my brothers to stand guard and also keep the fires burning. Then I fully concentrated on tapas. Time passed but Brahma did not appear. I looked. Why is Brahma not appearing? I doubled my concentration. Time passed. Brahma is not appearing. Still not appearing? I cut one of my heads and put it in the fire. Waited, Brahma did not come. One more head rolls. Still no Brahma comes. Heads roll and roll. No Brahma. Only one head is left. First I thought of stopping my tapas. But no! Never! That will be an insult to me and my family. It is better to die than stop. Also when I die Brahma will be judged as being partial. With great determination I swung the sword at my last neck, when, lo and behold, suddenly Brahma appeared and caught my hand. I looked at him with still un-subsided, but gradually subsiding anger. Brahma asked me what boons I wanted. I asked for a boon that I should win all the worlds and have all the wealth and fame and that I should not be killed except by man. I also asked him to give boons for my brothers.
In the next scene Ravana asks Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana what boons they got. Unfortunately Kumbhakarna’s tongue got twisted while asking for boon and he got ‘sleep’ instead of becoming the ‘king of gods’. Ravana laughed it off. As for Vibhishana, he being a bhaktha of Vishnu, asked for Vishnu’s blessings and got it. Ravana laughs it off and also decides to conquer all the worlds and starts preparing his grand army for the big conquest of the worlds.
[This method of presentation with a peculiar sequence has a tremendous dramatic affect. The main actor redoes a small part of what happened to kutti Ravana vesham, and this gives a view of the high contrast between the boy and the man Ravana. Similarly the presence of Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana in the subsequent scene offers a good smile on the face of the viewer at the end of the play.]
KAILASA UDDHARANAM: RAVANA IN BALI VIJAYAM
[Background and Previous scene: After receiving the boons, and widening his kingdom in all directions, Ravana lives in Sri Lanka with great pomp and splendor. One day he sees Saint Narada approaching his palace singing songs in praise of him ‘Jaya jaya Ravana, Lanka Pathe’. Happily he receives Narada and seats him next to him. After telling Narada about the victory of his son Indrajith on Indra, Ravana tells Narada “Now there is nobody on earth or other worlds who can fight with me”. To this Narada replies “ Very true indeed, but there is one huge monkey called Bali who says he can defeat you. He even said that you are just like a blade of grass to him. Well let him say what he wants. You are unbeatable.” Then Narada says ‘let us go there and see him’. Both decide to go. But Ravana takes his famous sword called “Chandrahasam”. Then Narada asks the history of this sword. Ravana’s Attam Starts.]
Ravana says “I received this sword from Lord Siva. It happened thus. Once when I was conquering new places and expanding my empire I happened to be going across the Kailasa mountain. The plane got stuck on the mountain unable to move forward. I got down from the plane and looked at the mountain. (Looks from one end to the other first horizontally and then vertically.) So huge it was. Then I decided to lift it with my bare hand and keep it aside and move forward. I started sticking my hands under it one by one. Then I tried to lift it. It doesn’t move. I put more force and more force. It moved just a bit. I pushed harder and harder, slowly it started moving then again and again and it moved easily. Then I lifted it up with my hands and started juggling it (exaggeration evident).
“At that particular time Lord Siva was quarreling with his wife Parvathi. Why did they fight? The story is as follows. Parvathi had gone for enjoying swimming and bathing in some beautiful pond. At that time Siva opened his jata (disheveled long hair) and called Ganga for some entertainment after asking Ganapathi and Subramania to go for some errands. Somehow becoming suspicious, right at that time, Parvathi came back in a hurry with wet clothes and saw Siva with Ganga. Siva was wondering what to do and it was at that time that Ravana started lifting the Kailasa. When Kailasa started shaking Parvathi got scared and ran to Siva and hugged him. So the quarrel ended and Siva was happy. “As a reward Siva called me and gave me this famous Chandrahasa sword.”
Then Narada and Ravana leave to meet Bali. Ravana wanted to take the sword along with him, but Narada suggested that the sword is not required for teaching a lesson to Bali who is after all an unarmed monkey.
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I tagged by Hayley and Mark. So here we go:
1.I love writing letters and making postcards. Sometimes I really want a pen friend so badly.
2.I don't know why but I'm the jealous person you could ever met.
3.My best friend jealous on me. Because I talked much with the boy that she likes and wrote a few things to his wall on Facebook. And I learned that she deleted me on Facebook. I'm seriously angry right now.
4.I can read Twilight Series over million times, I can watch and read Harry Potter Series over million times, I can listen "Love Will Come Through(by Travis)" over million times and I'll never get bored :)
5.Yeah I know I need take a nice self portrait and upload it but I don't think that my dad will allow that. But I can use Karen's idea :)
6.If I started school in normal time I wiould be graduated from elementary school this friday :/ Kinda sucks.
7.I have the coolest aunt ever :D She is middle of her 40's but she has a Canon and Olympus( I'm not sure ) and she takes awesome photos.
9.Film shots are like the memories that you can never forget.
10.Mark tagged me to do something.
I hate misunderstandings and I love sunless but warm and windy days. (You need to feel it)
11. I don't know why but I just want to talk, talk and talk right now :D
And it's not this red hair, or my puffy face,or my nose that always looks too big when I take a selfie without a tripod !
Lee and Craig are going back to work,Monday !
Since April of 2009,there has been very little work
in construction in our state. They will be working on the Tennesee-Kentucky line.
The job crosses the line of both states. Yesterday I wrote Virginia,but that was a misunderstanding.
To all of you who sent up prayers for our family,I cannot thank you enough !
Most of all I thank my Lord,who heard and answered those prayers !
In my distress I called to the Lord;
I cried to my God for help.
From His temple He heard my voice;
my cry came before Him,into His ears. Psalm 18:6...The Holy Bible
Kent State May 4 Shooting Site, Kent State University, Kent, Portage County, Ohio
THE MAY 4 SHOOTINGS AT KENT STATE UNIVERSITY: THE SEARCH FOR HISTORICAL ACCURACY
BY JERRY M. LEWIS and THOMAS R. HENSLEY
On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine Kent State students. The impact of the shootings was dramatic. The event triggered a nationwide student strike that forced hundreds of colleges and universities to close. H. R. Haldeman, a top aide to President Richard Nixon, suggests the shootings had a direct impact on national politics. In The Ends of Power, Haldeman (1978) states that the shootings at Kent State began the slide into Watergate, eventually destroying the Nixon administration. Beyond the direct effects of the May 4, the shootings have certainly come to symbolize the deep political and social divisions that so sharply divided the country during the Vietnam War era.
In the nearly three decades since May 4, l970, a voluminous literature has developed analyzing the events of May 4 and their aftermath. Some books were published quickly, providing a fresh but frequently superficial or inaccurate analysis of the shootings (e.g., Eszterhas and Roberts, 1970; Warren, 1970; Casale and Paskoff, 1971; Michener, 1971; Stone, 1971; Taylor et al., 1971; and Tompkins and Anderson, 1971). Numerous additional books have been published in subsequent years (e.g., Davies, 1973; Hare, 1973; Hensley and Lewis, 1978; Kelner and Munves, 1980; Hensley, 1981; Payne, 1981; Bills, 1988; and Gordon, 1997). These books have the advantage of a broader historical perspective than the earlier books, but no single book can be considered the definitive account of the events and aftermath of May 4, l970, at Kent State University.(1)
Despite the substantial literature which exists on the Kent State shootings, misinformation and misunderstanding continue to surround the events of May 4. For example, a prominent college-level United States history book by Mary Beth Norton et al. (1994), which is also used in high school advanced placement courses.(2) contains a picture of the shootings of May 4 accompanied by the following summary of events: "In May 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen confronted student antiwar protestors with a tear gas barrage. Soon afterward, with no provocation, soldiers opened fire into a group of fleeing students. Four young people were killed, shot in the back, including two women who had been walking to class." (Norton et al., 1994, p. 732) Unfortunately, this short description contains four factual errors: (1) some degree of provocation did exist; (2) the students were not fleeing when the Guard initially opened fire; (3) only one of the four students who died, William Schroeder, was shot in the back; and (4) one female student, Sandy Schreuer, had been walking to class, but the other female, Allison Krause, had been part of the demonstration.
This article is an attempt to deal with the historical inaccuracies that surround the May 4 shootings at Kent State University by providing high school social studies teachers with a resource to which they can turn if they wish to teach about the subject or to involve students in research on the issue. Our approach is to raise and provide answers to twelve of the most frequently asked questions about May 4 at Kent State. We will also offer a list of the most important questions involving the shootings which have not yet been answered satisfactorily. Finally, we will conclude with a brief annotated bibliography for those wishing to explore the subject further.
WHY WAS THE OHIO NATIONAL GUARD CALLED TO KENT?
The decision to bring the Ohio National Guard onto the Kent State University campus was directly related to decisions regarding American involvement in the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States in 1968 based in part on his promise to bring an end to the war in Vietnam. During the first year of Nixon's presidency, America's involvement in the war appeared to be winding down. In late April of 1970, however, the United States invaded Cambodia and widened the Vietnam War. This decision was announced on national television and radio on April 30, l970, by President Nixon, who stated that the invasion of Cambodia was designed to attack the headquarters of the Viet Cong, which had been using Cambodian territory as a sanctuary.
Protests occurred the next day, Friday, May 1, across United States college campuses where anti-war sentiment ran high. At Kent State University, an anti-war rally was held at noon on the Commons, a large, grassy area in the middle of campus which had traditionally been the site for various types of rallies and demonstrations. Fiery speeches against the war and the Nixon administration were given, a copy of the Constitution was buried to symbolize the murder of the Constitution because Congress had never declared war, and another rally was called for noon on Monday, May 4.
Friday evening in downtown Kent began peacefully with the usual socializing in the bars, but events quickly escalated into a violent confrontation between protestors and local police. The exact causes of the disturbance are still the subject of debate, but bonfires were built in the streets of downtown Kent, cars were stopped, police cars were hit with bottles, and some store windows were broken. The entire Kent police force was called to duty as well as officers from the county and surrounding communities. Kent Mayor Leroy Satrom declared a state of emergency, called Governor James Rhodes' office to seek assistance, and ordered all of the bars closed. The decision to close the bars early increased the size of the angry crowd. Police eventually succeeded in using tear gas to disperse the crowd from downtown, forcing them to move several blocks back to the campus.
The next day, Saturday, May 2, Mayor Satrom met with other city officials and a representative of the Ohio National Guard who had been dispatched to Kent. Mayor Satrom then made the decision to ask Governor Rhodes to send the Ohio National Guard to Kent. The mayor feared further disturbances in Kent based upon the events of the previous evening, but more disturbing to the mayor were threats that had been made to downtown businesses and city officials as well as rumors that radical revolutionaries were in Kent to destroy the city and the university. Satrom was fearful that local forces would be inadequate to meet the potential disturbances, and thus about 5 p.m. he called the Governor's office to make an official request for assistance from the Ohio National Guard.
WHAT HAPPENED ON THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY CAMPUS ON SATURDAY MAY 2 AND SUNDAY MAY 3 AFTER THE GUARDS ARRIVED ON CAMPUS?
Members of the Ohio National Guard were already on duty in Northeast Ohio, and thus they were able to be mobilized quickly to move to Kent. As the Guard arrived in Kent at about 10 p.m., they encountered a tumultuous scene. The wooden ROTC building adjacent to the Commons was ablaze and would eventually burn to the ground that evening, with well over 1,000 demonstrators surrounding the building. Controversy continues to exist regarding who was responsible for setting fire to the ROTC building, but radical protestors were assumed to be responsible because of their actions in interfering with the efforts of firemen to extinguish the fire as well as cheering the burning of the building. Confrontations between Guardsmen and demonstrators continued into the night, with tear gas filling the campus and numerous arrests being made.
Sunday, May 3 was a day filled with contrasts. Nearly 1,000 Ohio National Guardsmen occupied the campus, making it appear like a military war zone. The day was warm and sunny, however, and students frequently talked amicably with Guardsmen. Ohio Governor James Rhodes flew to Kent on Sunday morning, and his mood was anything but calm. At a press conference, he issued a provocative statement calling campus protestors the worst type of people in America and stating that every force of law would be used to deal with them. Rhodes also indicated that he would seek a court order declaring a state of emergency. This was never done, but the widespread assumption among both Guard and University officials was that a state of martial law was being declared in which control of the campus resided with the Guard rather than University leaders and all rallies were banned. Further confrontations between protesters and guardsmen occurred Sunday evening, and once again rocks, tear gas, and arrests characterized a tense campus.
WHAT TYPE OF RALLY WAS HELD AT NOON ON MAY 4?
At the conclusion of the anti-war rally on Friday, May 1, student protest leaders had called for another rally to be held on the Commons at noon on Monday, May 4. Although University officials had attempted on the morning of May 4 to inform the campus that the rally was prohibited, a crowd began to gather beginning as early as 11 a.m. By noon, the entire Commons area contained approximately 3,000 people. Although estimates are inexact, probably about 500 core demonstrators were gathered around the Victory Bell at one end of the Commons, another 1,000 people were "cheerleaders" supporting the active demonstrators, and an additional 1,500 people were spectators standing around the perimeter of the Commons. Across the Commons at the burned-out ROTC building stood about 100 Ohio National Guardsmen carrying lethal M-1 military rifles.
Substantial consensus exists that the active participants in the rally were primarily protesting the presence of the Guard on campus, although a strong anti-war sentiment was also present. Little evidence exists as to who were the leaders of the rally and what activities were planned, but initially the rally was peaceful.
WHO MADE THE DECISION TO BAN THE RALLY OF MAY 4?
Conflicting evidence exists regarding who was responsible for the decision to ban the noon rally of May 4. At the 1975 federal civil trial, General Robert Canterbury, the highest official of the Guard, testified that widespread consensus existed that the rally should be prohibited because of the tensions that existed and the possibility that violence would again occur. Canterbury further testified that Kent State President Robert White had explicitly told Canterbury that any demonstration would be highly dangerous. In contrast, White testified that he could recall no conversation with Canterbury regarding banning the rally.
The decision to ban the rally can most accurately be traced to Governor Rhodes' statements on Sunday, May 3 when he stated that he would be seeking a state of emergency declaration from the courts. Although he never did this, all officials -- Guard, University, Kent -- assumed that the Guard was now in charge of the campus and that all rallies were illegal. Thus, University leaders printed and distributed on Monday morning 12,000 leaflets indicating that all rallies, including the May 4 rally scheduled for noon, were prohibited as long as the Guard was in control of the campus.
WHAT EVENTS LED DIRECTLY TO THE SHOOTINGS?
Shortly before noon, General Canterbury made the decision to order the demonstrators to disperse. A Kent State police officer standing by the Guard made an announcement using a bullhorn. When this had no effect, the officer was placed in a jeep along with several Guardsmen and driven across the Commons to tell the protestors that the rally was banned and that they must disperse. This was met with angry shouting and rocks, and the jeep retreated. Canterbury then ordered his men to load and lock their weapons, tear gas canisters were fired into the crowd around the Victory Bell, and the Guard began to march across the Commons to disperse the rally. The protestors moved up a steep hill, known as Blanket Hill, and then down the other side of the hill onto the Prentice Hall parking lot as well as an adjoining practice football field. Most of the Guardsmen followed the students directly and soon found themselves somewhat trapped on the practice football field because it was surrounded by a fence. Yelling and rock throwing reached a peak as the Guard remained on the field for about 10 minutes. Several Guardsmen could be seen huddling together, and some Guardsmen knelt and pointed their guns, but no weapons were shot at this time. The Guard then began retracing their steps from the practice football field back up Blanket Hill. As they arrived at the top of the hill, 28 of the more than 70 Guardsmen turned suddenly and fired their rifles and pistols. Many guardsmen fired into the air or the ground. However, a small portion fired directly into the crowd. Altogether between 61 and 67 shots were fired in a 13-second period.
HOW MANY DEATHS AND INJURIES OCCURRED?
Four Kent State students died as a result of the firing by the Guard. The closest student was Jeffrey Miller, who was shot in the mouth while standing in an access road leading into the Prentice Hall parking lot, a distance of approximately 270 feet from the Guard. Allison Krause was in the Prentice Hall parking lot; she was 330 feet from the Guardsmen and was shot in the left side of her body. William Schroeder was 390 feet from the Guard in the Prentice Hall parking lot when he was shot in the left side of his back. Sandra Scheuer was also about 390 feet from the Guard in the Prentice Hall parking lot when a bullet pierced the left front side of her neck.
Nine Kent State students were wounded in the 13-second fusillade. Most of the students were in the Prentice Hall parking lot, but a few were on the Blanket Hill area. Joseph Lewis was the student closest to the Guard at a distance of about 60 feet; he was standing still with Four men sit staring at a candle-lit stage, on which there are portraits of the four Kent State students who died as a result of the firing by the Guard.his middle finger extended when bullets struck him in the right abdomen and left lower leg. Thomas Grace was also approximately 60 feet from the Guardsmen and was wounded in the left ankle. John Cleary was over 100 feet from the Guardsmen when he was hit in the upper left chest. Alan Canfora was 225 feet from the Guard and was struck in the right wrist. Dean Kahler was the most seriously wounded of the nine students. He was struck in the small of his back from approximately 300 feet and was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Douglas Wrentmore was wounded in the right knee from a distance of 330 feet. James Russell was struck in the right thigh and right forehead at a distance of 375 feet. Robert Stamps was almost 500 feet from the line of fire when he was wounded in the right buttock. Donald Mackenzie was the student the farthest from the Guardsmen at a distance of almost 750 feet when he was hit in the neck.
WHY DID THE GUARDSMEN FIRE?
The most important question associated with the events of May 4 is why did members of the Guard fire into a crowd of unarmed students? Two quite different answers have been advanced to this question: (1) the Guardsmen fired in self-defense, and the shootings were therefore justified and (2) the Guardsmen were not in immediate danger, and therefore the shootings were unjustified.
The answer offered by the Guardsmen is that they fired because they were in fear of their lives. Guardsmen testified before numerous investigating commissions as well as in federal court that they felt the demonstrators were advancing on them in such a way as to pose a serious and immediate threat to the safety of the Guardsmen, and they therefore had to fire in self-defense. Some authors (e.g., Michener, 1971 and Grant and Hill, 1974) agree with this assessment. Much more importantly, federal criminal and civil trials have accepted the position of the Guardsmen. In a 1974 federal criminal trial, District Judge Frank Battisti dismissed the case against eight Guardsmen indicted by a federal grand jury, ruling at mid-trial that the government's case against the Guardsmen was so weak that the defense did not have to present its case. In the much longer and more complex federal civil trial of 1975, a jury voted 9-3 that none of the Guardsmen were legally responsible for the shootings. This decision was appealed, however, and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a new trial had to be held because of the improper handling of a threat to a jury member.
The legal aftermath of the May 4 shootings ended in January of 1979 with an out-of-court settlement involving a statement signed by 28 defendants(3) as well as a monetary settlement, and the Guardsmen and their supporters view this as a final vindication of their position. The financial settlement provided $675,000 to the wounded students and the parents of the students who had been killed. This money was paid by the State of Ohio rather than by any Guardsmen, and the amount equaled what the State estimated it would cost to go to trial again. Perhaps most importantly, the statement signed by members of the Ohio National Guard was viewed by them to be a declaration of regret, not an apology or an admission of wrongdoing:
In retrospect, the tragedy of May 4, 1970 should not have occurred. The students may have believed that they were right in continuing their mass protest in response to the Cambodian invasion, even though this protest followed the posting and reading by the university of an order to ban rallies and an order to disperse. These orders have since been determined by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to have been lawful.
Some of the Guardsmen on Blanket Hill, fearful and anxious from prior events, may have believed in their own minds that their lives were in danger. Hindsight suggests that another method would have resolved the confrontation. Better ways must be found to deal with such a confrontation.
We devoutly wish that a means had been found to avoid the May 4th events culminating in the Guard shootings and the irreversible deaths and injuries. We deeply regret those events and are profoundly saddened by the deaths of four students and the wounding of nine others which resulted. We hope that the agreement to end the litigation will help to assuage the tragic memories regarding that sad day.
A starkly different interpretation to that of the Guards' has been offered in numerous other studies of the shootings, with all of these analyses sharing the common viewpoint that primary responsibility for the shootings lies with the Guardsmen. Some authors (e.g., Stone, 1971; Davies, 1973; and Kelner and Munves, 1980) argue that the Guardsmen's lives were not in danger. Instead, these authors argue that the evidence shows that certain members of the Guard conspired on the practice football field to fire when they reached the top of Blanket Hill. Other authors (e.g., Best, 1981 and Payne, 1981) do not find sufficient evidence to accept the conspiracy theory, but they also do not find the Guard self-defense theory to be plausible. Experts who find the Guard primarily responsible find themselves in agreement with the conclusion of the Scranton Commission (Report , 1970, p. 87): "The indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."
WHAT HAPPENED IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE SHOOTINGS?
While debate still remains about the extent to which the Guardsmen's lives were in danger at the moment they opened fire, little doubt can exist that their lives were indeed at stake in the immediate aftermath of the shootings. The 13-second shooting that resulted in four deaths and nine wounded could have been followed by an even more tragic and bloody confrontation. The nervous and fearful Guardsmen retreated back to the Commons, facing a large and hostile crowd which realized that the Guard had live ammunition and had used it to kill and wound a large number of people. In their intense anger, many demonstrators were willing to risk their own lives to attack the Guardsmen, and there can be little doubt that the Guard would have opened fire again, this time killing a much larger number of students.
A man and young boy stare up at a May 4th Memorial.Further tragedy was prevented by the actions of a number of Kent State University faculty marshals, who had organized hastily when trouble began several days earlier. Led by Professor Glenn Frank, the faculty members pleaded with National Guard leaders to allow them to talk with the demonstrators, and then they begged the students not to risk their lives by confronting the Guardsmen. After about 20 minutes of emotional pleading, the marshals convinced the students to leave the Commons.
Back at the site of the shootings, ambulances had arrived and emergency medical attention had been given to the students who had not died immediately. The ambulances formed a screaming procession as they rushed the victims of the shootings to the local hospital.
The University was ordered closed immediately, first by President Robert White and then indefinitely by Portage County Prosecutor Ronald Kane under an injunction from Common Pleas Judge Albert Caris. Classes did not resume until the Summer of 1970, and faculty members engaged in a wide variety of activities through the mail and off-campus meetings that enabled Kent State students to finish the semester.
WHAT IS THE STORY BEHIND THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING PHOTO OF THE YOUNG WOMAN CRYING OUT IN HORROR OVER THE DYING BODY OF ONE OF THE STUDENTS?
A photograph of Mary Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway, screaming over the body of Jeffery Miller appeared on the front pages of newspapers and magazines throughout the country, and the photographer, John Filo, was to win a Pulitzer Prize for the picture. The photo has taken on a life and importance of its own. This analysis looks at the photo, the photographer, and the impact of the photo.
The Mary Vecchio picture shows her on one knee screaming over Jeffrey Miller's body. Mary told one of us that she was calling for help because she felt she could do nothing (Personal Interview, 4/4/94). Miller is lying on the tarmac of the Prentice Hall parking lot. One student is standing near the Miller body closer than Vecchio. Four students are seen in the immediate background.
John Filo, a Kent State photography major in 1970, continues to works as a professional newspaper photographer and editor. He was near the Prentice Hall parking lot when the Guard fired. He saw bullets hitting the ground, but he did not take cover because he thought the bullets were blanks. Of course, blanks cannot hit the ground.
WHAT WAS THE LONG-TERM FACULTY RESPONSE TO THE SHOOTINGS?
Three hours after the shootings Kent State closed and was not to open for six weeks as a viable university. When it resumed classes in the Summer of 1970, its faculty was charged with three new responsibilities, their residues remaining today.
A student holds a candle at night to remember the victims of the May 4th shootings.First, we as a University faculty had to bring aid and comfort to our own. This began earlier on with faculty trying to finish the academic quarter with a reasonable amount of academic integrity. It had ended about at mid-term examinations. However, the faculty voted before the week was out to help students complete the quarter in any way possible. Students were advised to study independently until they were contacted by individual professors. Most of the professors organized their completion of courses around papers, but many gave lectures in churches and in homes in the community of Kent and surrounding communities. For example, Norman Duffy, an award-winning teacher, gave off-campus chemistry lectures and tutorial sessions in Kent and Cleveland. His graduate students made films of laboratory sessions and mailed them to students.
Beyond helping thousands of students finish their courses, there were 1,900 students as well who needed help with gradation. Talking to students about courses allowed the faculty to do some counseling about the shootings, which helped the faculty as much in healing as it did students.
Second, the University faculty was called upon to conduct research about May 4 communicating the results of this research through teaching and traditional writing about the tragedy. Many responded and created a solid body of scholarship as well as an extremely useful archive contributing to a wide range of activities in Summer of 1970 including press interviews and the Scranton Commission.
Third, many saw as one of the faculty's challenges to develop alternative forms of protest and conflict resolution to help prevent tragedies such as the May 4 shootings and the killings at Jackson State 10 days after Kent State.
WHAT ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MAY 4 SHOOTINGS?
Although we have attempted in this article to answer many of the most important and frequently asked questions about the May 4 shootings, our responses have sometimes been tentative because many important questions remain unanswered. It thus seems important to ask what are the most significant questions which yet remain unanswered about the May 4 events. These questions could serve as the basis for research projects by students who are interested in studying the shootings in greater detail.
(1) Who was responsible for the violence in downtown Kent and on the Kent State campus in the three days prior to May 4? As an important part of this question, were "outside agitators" primarily responsible? Who was responsible for setting fire to the ROTC building?
(2) Should the Guard have been called to Kent and Kent State University? Could local law enforcement personnel have handled any situations? Were the Guard properly trained for this type of assignment?
(3) Did the Kent State University administration respond appropriately in their reactions to the demonstrations and with Ohio political officials and Guard officials?
(4) Would the shootings have been avoided if the rally had not been banned? Did the banning of the rally violate First Amendment rights?
(5) Did the Guardsmen conspire to shoot students when they huddled on the practice football field? If not, why did they fire? Were they justified in firing?
(6) Who was ultimately responsible for the events of May 4, l970?
WHY SHOULD WE STILL BE CONCERNED ABOUT MAY 4, 1970 AT KENT STATE?
In Robert McNamara's (1995) book, "In Retrospect:The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" is a way to begin is an illustration of the this process. In it he says that United States policy towards Vietnam was "... terribly wrong and we owe it to future generations to explain why."
The May 4 shootings at Kent State need to be remembered for several reasons. First, the shootings have come to symbolize a great American tragedy which occurred at the height of the Vietnam War era, a period in which the nation found itself deeply divided both politically and culturally. The poignant picture of Mary Vecchio kneeling in agony over Jeffrey Miller's body, for example, will remain forever Students gather in a circle, holding hands around a May 4th memorial to remember the victims of the Guard shootings.as a reminder of the day when the Vietnam War came home to America. If the Kent State shootings will continue to be such a powerful symbol, then it is certainly important that Americans have a realistic view of the facts associated with this event. Second, May 4 at Kent State and the Vietnam War era remain controversial even today, and the need for healing continues to exist. Healing will not occur if events are either forgotten or distorted, and hence it is important to continue to search for the truth behind the events of May 4 at Kent State. Third, and most importantly, May 4 at Kent State should be remembered in order that we can learn from the mistakes of the past. The Guardsmen in their signed statement at the end of the civil trials recognized that better ways have to be found to deal with these types of confrontations. This has probably already occurred in numerous situations where law enforcement officials have issued a caution to their troops to be careful because "we don't want another Kent State." Insofar as this has happened, lessons have been learned, and the deaths of four young Kent State students have not been in vain.
I hate cats !
I mean everything that acts like cats when life is all good and happy ... whether its a person, a feeling or a misunderstanding that ruins life !
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Te Mania house, Conway Flat, Kaikoura, New Zealand.
Built 1937.
The Wilding family farm-house Te Mania, rural Conway Flats near the river mouth, south of Kaikoura, is a notable example of early modern New Zealand architecture. Influenced by Le Corbusier, and the Bauhaus. Architect Richard D. Harman of Christchurch. Built in 1937 of reinforced concrete in-situ. Clean lines, startling for the times, but practical and lasting; depending on advance and recess in balanced proportions. The plan was considered in advance for the time too, with spatial flow. The house has come to fit well with down-to-earth farming and became centre for its famous Angus beef stud. [300 hectare farm]. See also its likeness to other early modern examples by New Zealand architects, such as Connell's 1930 High and Over at Amersham, north of London: www.flickr.com/photos/peteshep/8177531255/in/album-721576... and John Anderson's Auckland Wharatane of 1928: www.flickr.com/photos/peteshep/7776625390/in/photolist-KV...
Architecturally, despite magazine stories, no "Deco" about it -- a misunderstanding of Modern.
It relies on its size, simple lines, frank concrete, and spatial rectilinear expression. It was softened by Virginia creeper as above; then green creeper was balanced with the Virginia.
[Conway Flat is a rural locality south of the Conway River mouth, 5+km south-east of Hundalee; Parnassus, Hurunui District.]
Kathakali (Malayalam: കഥകളി, kathakaḷi; Sanskrit: कथाकळिः, kathākaḷiḥ) is a stylized classical Indian dance-drama noted for the attractive make-up of characters, elaborate costumes, detailed gestures and well-defined body movements presented in tune with the anchor playback music and complementary percussion. It originated in the country's present day state of Kerala during the 17th century and has developed over the years with improved looks, refined gestures and added themes besides more ornate singing and precise drumming.
HISTORY
Popular belief is that kathakali is emerged from "Krishnanattam", the dance drama on the life and activities of Lord Krishna created by Sri Manavedan Raja, the Zamorin of Calicut (1585-1658 AD). Once Kottarakkara Thampuran, the Raja of Kottarakkara who was attracted by Krishnanattam requested the Zamorin for the loan of a troupe of performers. Due to the political rivalry between the two, Zamorin did not allow this. So Kottarakkara Thampuran created another art form called Ramanattam which was later transformed into Aattakatha. Krishnanaattam was written in Sanskrit, and Ramanattam was in Malayalam. By the end of 17th century, Attakatha was presented to the world with the title 'Kathakali'.
Kathakali also shares a lot of similarities with Krishnanattam, Koodiyattam (a classical Sanskrit drama existing in Kerala) and Ashtapadiyattam (an adaptation of 12th-century musical called Gitagovindam). It also incorporates several other elements from traditional and ritualistic art forms like Mudiyettu, Thiyyattu, Theyyam and Padayani besides a minor share of folk arts like Porattunatakam. All along, the martial art of Kalarippayattu has influenced the body language of Kathakali. The use of Malayalam, the local language (albeit as a mix of Sanskrit and Malayalam, called 'Manipravaalam'), has also helped the literature of Kathakali sound more transparent for the average audience.
As a part of modernising, propagating, promoting and popularizing Kathakali, the International Centre for Kathakali at New Delhi has taken up a continuing project since 1980 of producing new plays based on not only traditional and mythological stories, but also historical stories, European classics and Shakespeare's plays. Recently they produced Kathakali plays based on Shakespeare's Othello and Greek-Roman mythology of Psyche and Cupid.
Even though the lyrics/literature would qualify as another independent element called Sahithyam, it is considered as a component of Geetha or music, as it plays only a supplementary role to Nritham, Nrithyam and Natyam.
KATHAKALI PLAYS
Traditionally there are 101 classical Kathakali stories, though the commonly staged among them these days total less than one-third that number. Almost all of them were initially composed to last a whole night. Nowadays, there is increasing popularity for concise, or oftener select, versions of stories so as the performance lasts not more than three to four hours from evening. Thus, many stories find stage presentation in parts rather than totality. And the selection is based on criteria like choreographical beauty, thematic relevance/popularity or their melodramatic elements. Kathakali is a classical art form, but it can be appreciated also by novices—all contributed by the elegant looks of its character, their abstract movement and its synchronisation with the musical notes and rhythmic beats. And, in any case, the folk elements too continue to exist. For better appreciation, perhaps, it is still good to have an idea of the story being enacted.
The most popular stories enacted are Nalacharitham (a story from the Mahabharata), Duryodhana Vadham (focusing on the Mahabharata war after profiling the build-up to it), Kalyanasougandhikam, (the story of Bhima going to get flowers for his wife Panchali), Keechakavadham (another story of Bhima and Panchali, but this time during their stint in disguise), Kiratham (Arjuna and Lord Shiva's fight, from the Mahabharata), Karnashapatham (another story from the Mahabharata), Nizhalkuthu and Bhadrakalivijayam authored by Pannisseri Nanu Pillai. Also staged frequently include stories like Kuchelavrittam, Santanagopalam, Balivijayam, Dakshayagam, Rugminiswayamvaram, Kalakeyavadham, Kirmeeravadham, Bakavadham, Poothanamoksham, Subhadraharanam, Balivadham, Rugmangadacharitam, Ravanolbhavam, Narakasuravadham, Uttaraswayamvaram, Harishchandracharitam, Kacha-Devayani and Kamsavadham.
Recently, as part of attempts to further popularise the art, stories from other cultures and mythologies, such as those of Mary Magdalene from the Bible, Homer's Iliad, and William Shakespeare's King Lear and Julius Caesar besides Goethe's Faust too have been adapted into Kathakali scripts and on to its stage. Synopsis of 37 kathakali stories are available in kathakalinews.com.
MUSIC
The language of the songs used for Kathakali is Manipravalam. Though most of the songs are set in ragas based on the microtone-heavy Carnatic music, there is a distinct style of plain-note rendition, which is known as the Sopanam style. This typically Kerala style of rendition takes its roots from the temple songs which used to be sung (continues even now at several temples) at the time when Kathakali was born.
As with the acting style, Kathakali music also has singers from the northern and southern schools. The northern style has largely been groomed by Kerala Kalamandalam in the 20th century. Kalamandalam Neelakantan Nambisan, an overarching Kathakali musician of those times, was a product of the institute. His prominent disciples include Kalamandalam Unnikrishna Kurup, Kalamandalam Gangadharan, Kalamandalam P.G. Radhakrishnan, Rama Varrier, Madambi Subramanian Namboodiri, Tirur Nambissan, Kalamandalam Sankaran Embranthiri, Kalamandalam Hyderali, Kalamandalam Haridas, Subramanian, Kalanilayam Unnikrishnan and Kalamandalam Bhavadasan. The other prominent musicians of the north feature Kottakkal Vasu Nedungadi, Kottakkal Parameswaran Namboodiri, Kottakkal P.D. Narayanan Namboodiri, Kottakkal Narayanan, Kalamandalam Anantha NarayananKalamandalam Sreekumar Palanad Divakaran, Kalanilayam Rajendran, Kolathappilli Narayanan Namboodiri, Kalamandalam Narayanan Embranthiri, Kottakkal Madhu, Kalamandalam Babu Namboodiri, Kalamandalam Harish and Kalamandalam Vinod. In the south, some of whom are equally popular in the north these days, include Pathiyur Sankarankutty. Southerner musicians of the older generation include Cherthala Thankappa Panikker, Thakazhi Kuttan Pillai, Cherthala Kuttappa Kurup, Thanneermukkam Viswambharan and Mudakkal Gopinathan.
PERFORMANCE
Traditionally, a Kathakali performance is usually conducted at night and ends in early morning. Nowadays it isn't difficult to see performances as short as three hours or fewer. Kathakali is usually performed in front of the huge Kalivilakku (kali meaning dance; vilakku meaning lamp) with its thick wick sunk till the neck in coconut oil. Traditionally, this lamp used to provide sole light when the plays used to be performed inside temples, palaces or abodes houses of nobles and aristocrats. Enactment of a play by actors takes place to the accompaniment of music (geetha) and instruments (vadya). The percussion instruments used are chenda, maddalam (both of which underwent revolutionary changes in their aesthetics with the contributions of Kalamandalam Krishnankutty Poduval and Kalamandalam Appukutty Poduval) and, at times, edakka. In addition, the singers (the lead singer is called “ponnani” and his follower is called “singidi”) use chengila (gong made of bell metal, which can be struck with a wooden stick) and ilathalam (a pair of cymbals). The lead singer in some sense uses the Chengala to conduct the Vadyam and Geetha components, just as a conductor uses his wand in western classical music. A distinguishing characteristic of this art form is that the actors never speak but use hand gestures, expressions and rhythmic dancing instead of dialogue (but for a couple of rare characters).
ACTING
A Kathakali actor uses immense concentration, skill and physical stamina, gained from regimented training based on Kalaripayattu, the ancient martial art of Kerala, to prepare for his demanding role. The training can often last for 8–10 years, and is intensive. In Kathakali, the story is enacted purely by the movements of the hands (called mudras or hand gestures) and by facial expressions (rasas) and bodily movements. The expressions are derived from Natyashastra (the tome that deals with the science of expressions) and are classified into nine as in most Indian classical art forms. Dancers also undergo special practice sessions to learn control of their eye movements.
There are 24 basic mudras—the permutation and combination of which would add up a chunk of the hand gestures in vogue today. Each can again can be classified into 'Samaana-mudras'(one mudra symbolising two entities) or misra-mudras (both the hands are used to show these mudras). The mudras are a form of sign language used to tell the story.
The main facial expressions of a Kathakali artist are the 'navarasams' (Navarasas in anglicised form) (literal translation: Nine Tastes, but more loosely translated as nine feelings or expressions) which are Sringaram (amour), Hasyam (ridicule, humour), Bhayanakam (fear), Karunam (pathos), Roudram (anger, wrath), Veeram (valour), Beebhatsam (disgust), Adbhutam (wonder, amazement), Shantam (tranquility, peace). The link at the end of the page gives more details on Navarasas.
One of the most interesting aspects of Kathakali is its elaborate make-up code. Most often, the make-up can be classified into five basic sets namely Pachcha, Kathi, Kari, Thaadi, and Minukku. The differences between these sets lie in the predominant colours that are applied on the face. Pachcha (meaning green) has green as the dominant colour and is used to portray noble male characters who are said to have a mixture of "Satvik" (pious) and "Rajasik" (dark; Rajas = darkness) nature. Rajasik characters having an evil streak ("tamasic"= evil) -- all the same they are anti-heroes in the play (such as the demon king Ravana) -- and portrayed with streaks of red in a green-painted face. Excessively evil characters such as demons (totally tamasic) have a predominantly red make-up and a red beard. They are called Red Beard (Red Beard). Tamasic characters such as uncivilised hunters and woodsmen are represented with a predominantly black make-up base and a black beard and are called black beard (meaning black beard). Women and ascetics have lustrous, yellowish faces and this semi-realistic category forms the fifth class. In addition, there are modifications of the five basic sets described above such as Vella Thadi (white beard) used to depict Hanuman (the Monkey-God) and Pazhuppu, which is majorly used for Lord Shiva and Balabhadra.
NOTABLE TRAINING CENTRES & MASTERS
Kathakali artistes need assiduous grooming for almost a decade's time, and most masters are products of accomplished institutions that give a minimum training course of half-a-dozen years. The leading Kathakali schools (some of them started during the pre-Independent era India) are Kerala Kalamandalam (located in Cheruthuruthy near Shoranur), PSV Natya Sangham (located in Kottakal near Kozhikode), Sadanam Kathakali and Classical Arts Academy (or Gandhi Seva Sadan located in Perur near Ottappalam in Palakkad), Unnayi Varier Smaraka Kalanilayam (located in Irinjalakuda south of Thrissur), Margi in Thiruvananthapuram, Muthappan Kaliyogam at Parassinikkadavu in Kannur district and RLV School at Tripunithura off Kochi and Kalabharathi at Pakalkkuri near Kottarakkara in Kollam district, Sandarshan Kathakali Kendram in Ambalapuzha and Vellinazhi Nanu Nair Smaraka Kalakendra in Kuruvattor. Outside Kerala, Kathakali is being taught at the International Centre for Kathakali in New Delhi, Santiniketan at Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal, Kalakshetra in Chennai and Darpana Academy in Ahmedabad among others. PadmaSree Guru Chengannur Raman Pillai mostly known as 'Guru Chengannur'was running a traditional Gurukula Style approach to propagate Kathakali.
‘Guru Chengannur” is ever renowned as the Sovereign Guru of Kathakali. His precision in using symbols, gestures and steps were highest in the field of Kathakali. Guru Chegannur's kaththi vesham, especially the portrayal of Duryodhana enthralled the audience every time he performed. A master of the art, he found immense happiness and satisfaction in the success and recognition of his disciples.
Senior Kathakali exponents of today include Padma Bhushan Kalamandalam Ramankutty Nair, Padma Shri Kalamandalam Gopi, Madavoor Vasudevan Nair, Chemancheri Kunhiraman Nair, Kottakkal Krishnankutty Nair, Mankompu Sivasankara Pillai, Sadanam Krishnankutty, Nelliyode Vasudevan Namboodiri, Kalamandalam Vasu Pisharody, FACT Padmanabhan, Kottakkal Chandrasekharan, Margi Vijayakumar, Kottakkal Nandakumaran Nair, Vazhenkada Vijayan, Inchakkattu Ramachandran Pillai, Kalamandalam Kuttan, Mayyanad Kesavan Namboodiri, Mathur Govindan Kutty, Narippatta Narayanan Namboodiri, Chavara Parukutty, Thonnakkal Peethambaran, Sadanam Balakrishnan, Kalanilayam Gopalakrishnan, Chirakkara Madhavankutty, Sadanam K. Harikumaran, Thalavadi Aravindan, Kalanilayam Balakrishnan, Pariyanampatta Divakaran, Kottakkal Kesavan, Kalanilayam Gopi and Kudamaloor Muralikrishnan. The late titan actor-dancers of Kathakali's modern age (say, since the 1930s) include Pattikkamthodi Ravunni Menon, Chenganoor Raman Pillai, Chandu Panicker, Thakazhi Guru Kunchu Kurup, Padma Shri Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair, Padma Shri Vazhenkada Kunchu Nair, Kavalappara Narayanan Nair, Kurichi Kunhan Panikkar, Thekkinkattil Ramunni Nair, Padma Shri Keezhpadam Kumaran Nair, Kalamandalam Padmanabhan Nair, Mankulam Vishnu Namboodiri, Oyur Kochu Govinda Pillai, Vellinezhi Nanu Nair, Padma Shri Kavungal Chathunni Panikkar, Kudamaloor Karunakaran Nair, Kottakkal Sivaraman, Kannan Pattali, Pallippuram Gopalan Nair, Haripad Ramakrishna Pillai, Champakkulam Pachu Pillai, Chennithala Chellappan Pillai, Guru Mampuzha Madhava Panicker, and Vaikkom Karunakaran.
Kathakali is still hugely a male domain but, since the 1970s, females too have made entry into the art form on a recognisable scale. The central Kerala temple town of Tripunithura has, in fact, a ladies troupe (with members belonging to several part of the state) that performs Kathakali, by and large in Travancore.
KATHAKALI STYLES
Known as Sampradäyaṃ(Malayalam: സമ്പ്രദായം); these are leading Kathakali styles that differ from each other in subtleties like choreographic profile, position of hand gestures and stress on dance than drama and vice versa. Some of the major original kathakali styles included:
Vettathu Sampradayam
Kalladikkodan Sampradyam
Kaplingadu Sampradayam
Of late, these have narrowed down to the northern (Kalluvazhi) and southern (Thekkan) styles. It was largely developed by the legendary Pattikkamthodi Ravunni Menon (1881-1949) that is implemented in Kerala Kalamandalam (though it has also a department that teaches the southern style), Sadanam, RLV and Kottakkal. Margi has its training largely based on the Thekkan style, known for its stress on drama and part-realistic techniques. Kalanilayam, effectively, churns out students with a mix of both styles.
OTHER FORMS OD DANCE & OFFSHOOTS
Kerala Natanam is a kind of dance form, partly based on Kathakali techniques and aesthetics, developed and stylised by the late dancer Guru Gopinath in the mid-20th century. Kathakali also finds portrayal in Malayalam feature films like Vanaprastham, Parinayam, Marattam, and Rangam. Besides documentary films have also been shot on Kathakali artistes like Chenganoor Raman Pillai, Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair, Keezhpadam Kumaran Nair, Kalamandalam Ramankutty Nair, Kalamandalam Gopi and Kottakkal Sivaraman.
As for fictional literature, Kathakali finds mention in several Malayalam short stories like Karmen (by N.S. Madhavan) and novels like Keshabharam (by P.V. Sreevalsan). Even the Indo-Anglian work like Arundhati Roy's Booker prize-winning The God of Small Things has a chapter on Kathakali, while, of late, Anita Nair's novel, Mistress, is entirely wrapped in the ethos of Kathakali.
Similar musical theater is popular in Kasaragod and the coastal and Malenadu regions of Karnataka, viz. Yakshagana. Though Yakshagana resembles Kathakali in terms of its costume and makeup to an extent, Yakshagana is markedly different from Kathakali as it involves dialogues and method acting also the narration is in Kannada, wherein philosophical debates are also possible within framework of the character. As per records the art form of Yakshagana was already rooted and well established at the time of Sri Manavedan Raja. There is possibilities of its significant influence in formation of Kathakkali as the troupe of performers of "Krishnanattam" designed the basic costume of the art form already established in other parts of south India including Males playing the female roles (until more recently).
Kottayam thamburan's way of presenting kathakali was later known as Kalladikkoden sambradayam. Chathu Paniker,the introducer of Kallikkoden Sambrathayam, stayed in Kottayam for five years with Kottayam Thamburan's residence and practiced Kalladikkoden Sambrathayam. Then he returned to his home place. After a short period Chathu Paniker reached Pulapatta as instructed by Kuthiravattath nair. That was around the year ME 865. Many deciples from Kadathanadu, Kurumbra nadu, Vettathu nadu, Palakkadu and Perumpadappu studied kathakali(Kalladikkoden Sambrathayam ) By that time Chathu Paniker was an old man. Some years later he died from Pulapatta.
NOTED KATHAKALI VILLAGES & BELTS
There are certain pockets in Kerala that have given birth to many Kathakali artistes over the years. If they can be called Kathakali villages (or some of them, these days, towns), here are some of them: Vellinezhi, Kuruvattoor, Karalmanna, Cherpulassery, Kothachira, peringode, sreekrishnapuram Kongad and Ottapalam in Palakkad district, Vazhenkada in Malappuram district, Thichur or Tichoor, Guruvayur, Thiruvilwamala and Irinjalakuda in Thrissur district, Tripunithura, Edappally, Thekkan Chittoor in Ernakulam district and Kuttanad, Harippad belt in Alappuzha district besides places in and around Thiruvanathapuram in south Travancore and Payyannur in north Malabar.
AWARDS FOR KATHAKALI ARTISTS
Sangeet Natak Akademi Awardees - Kathakali (1956–2005)
Nambeesan Smaraka Awards—For artistic performances related kathakali{1992-2008}
KATHAKALI ATTAMS (ELAKI ATTAMS)
Attams or more specifically "elaki attams" are sequences of acting within a story acted out with the help of mudras without support from vocal music. The actor has the freedom to change the script to suit his own individual preferences. The actor will be supported ably by Chenda, Maddalam, and Elathalam (compulsory), Chengila (not very compulsory).
The following are only some examples. 'Kailasa Udharanam' and 'Tapas Attam' are very important attams and these are described at the end. Two of the many references are Kathakali Prakaram, pages 95 to 142 by Pannisheri Nanu Pillai and Kathakaliyile Manodharmangal by Chavara Appukuttan Pillai.
VANA VARNANA: BHIMA IN KALYANA SAUGANDHIKA
Modern man looks at the forest, indeed the birthplace of primates, with a certain wonder and a certain respect. Kathakali characters are no exception.
When Pandavas were living in the forest, one day, a flower, not seen before, wafted by the wind, comes and falls at the feet of Panchali. Exhilarated by its beauty and smell, Panchali asks Bhima to bring her more such flowers. To her pleasure Bhima is ready to go at once. But Panchali asks him what he shall do for food and drink on the way. Bhima thinks and says "Food and Drink! Oh, this side glance (look) of yours. This look of longing. This look of anticipation. The very thought fills me up. I don't need any food and drink at all. Let me go." He takes his mace and off he goes. Ulsaham (enthusiasm) is his Sdhayi Bhavam (permanent feature).
"Let me go at once in search of this flower," says Bhima. "The scented wind is blowing from the southern side. Let me go that way." After walking some distance he sees a huge mountain called Gandhamadana and three ways. He decides to take the middle one which goes over the mountain. After going further "The forest is getting thicker. Big trees, big branches in all directions. The forest looks like a huge dark vessel into which even light can not penetrate. This is my (Bhima's) way. Nothing can hinder me." So saying he pulls down many trees. Sometimes he shatters the trees with his mace. Suddenly he sees an elephant. "Oh! Elephant." He describes it. Its trunk. Sharp ears.
The itching sensation in the body. It takes some mud and throws on the body. Oh good. Then it sucks water and throws on the body. Somewhat better. Slowly it starts dosing even though alert at times. A very huge python is approaching steadily. Suddenly it catches hold of the elephant's hind leg. The elephant wakes up and tries to disengage the python. The python pulls to one side. The elephant kicks and drags to the other side. This goes on for some time. Bhima looks to the other side where a hungry lion is looking for food. It comes running and strikes the elephants head and eats part of the brain and goes off. The python completes the rest. "Oh my god, how ruthless!" says Bhima and proceeds on his way.
UDYANA VARNANA: NALA IN NALACHARITHAM SECOND DAY
Descriptions of gardens are found in most dance forms of India and abroad. These are also common in Kathakali.
Newly married Nala and Damayanthi are walking in the garden. When Nala was lovingly looking at Damayanthi a flower falls on her. Nala is overjoyed and thinks that this is a kindness nature has shown on his wife. Nala says "On seeing the arrival of their queen, the trees and climbers are showing happiness by dropping flowers on you." He tells her, "See that tree. When I used to be alone the tree used to hug the climber and seemingly laugh at my condition." Then he looks at the tree and says, "Dear Tree, look at me now. See how fortunate I am with my beautiful wife."
Both wander about. A bumblebee flies towards Damayanthi. Immediately Nala protects her face with a kerchief. He looks at the bee and then at Damayanthi. He says, "On seeing your face the bee thought it was a flower and came to drink the nectar." Nala and Damayanthi listen to the sounds coming out of the garden. Damayanti says, "It appears that the whole garden is thrilled. The flowers are blooming and smiling. Cuckoos are singing and the bees are dancing. Gentle winds are blowing and rubbing against our bodies. How beautiful the whole garden looks." Then Nala says that the sun is going down and it is time for them to go back and takes her away.
SHABDA VARNANA: HANUMAN IN KALYANA SAUGANDHIKAM
While Bhima goes in search of the flower, here Hanuman is sitting doing Tapas with mind concentrated on Sri Rama.
When he hears the terrible noises made by Bhima in the forest he feels disturbed in doing his Tapas. He thinks "What is the reason for this?" Then the sounds become bigger. "What is this?" He thinks, "The sounds are getting bigger. Such a terrible noise. Is the sea coming up thinking that the time is ripe for the great deluge (Pralaya). Birds are flying helter-skelter. Trees look shocked. Even Kali Yuga is not here. Then what is it? Are mountains quarreling with each other? No, That can't be it. Indra had cut off the wings of mountains so that they don't quarrel. Is the sea changing its position? No it can't be. The sea has promised it will not change its position again. It can't break the promise." Hanuman starts looking for clues. "I see elephants and lions running in fear of somebody. Oh a huge man is coming this way. Oh, a hero is coming. He is pulling out trees and throwing it here and there. Okay. Let him come near, We will see."
THANDEDATTAM: RAVANA IN BALI VADHAM
After his theranottam Ravana is seen sitting on a stool. He says to himself "I am enjoying a lot of happiness. What is the reason for this?" Thinks. "Yes I know it. I did Tapas to Brahma and received all necessary boons. Afterwards I won all ten directions. I also defeated my elder brother Vaishravana. Then I lifted Kailas mountain when Siva and Parvathi were having a misunderstanding. Parvathi got frightened and embraced Siva in fear. Siva was so happy he gave a divine sword called Chandrahasa. Now the whole world is afraid of me. That is why I am enjoying so much happiness." He goes and sits on the stool. He looks far away. "Who is coming from a distance. he is coming fast. Oh, it is Akamba. Okay. Let me find out what news he has for me."
ASHRAMA VARNANA: ARJUNA IN KIRATHAM
Arjuna wants to do Tapas to Lord Siva and he is looking a suitable place in the Himalayan slopes. He comes to place where there is an ashram. Arjuna looks closely at the place. "Oh. What a beautiful place this is. A small river in which a very pure water is flowing. Some hermits are taking baths in the river. Some hermits are standing in the water and doing Tapsas. Some are facing the Sun. Some are standing in between five fires." Arjuna salutes the hermits from far. He says to himself "Look at this young one of a deer. It is looking for its mother. It seems to be hungry and thirsty. Nearby a female tiger is feeding its young ones. The little deer goes towards the tigress and pushes the young tiger cubs aside and starts drinking milk from the tigress. The tigress looks lovingly at the young deer and even licks its body as if it were its own child. How beautiful. How fulfilling."
Again he looks "Here on this side a mongoose and a serpent forgetting their enmity are hugging each other. This place is really strange and made divine by saints and hermits. Let me start my Tapas somewhere nearby."
A sloka called "Shikhini Shalabha" can be selected instead of the above if time permits.
AN ATTAM BASED ON A SLOKA
Sansrit slokas are sometimes shown in mudras and it has a pleasing and exhilarating effect. Different actors use slokas as per his own taste and liking. However, the slokas are taught to students during their training period. An example is given below.
Kusumo Kusumolpatti Shrooyathena Chathushyathe
Bale thava Mukhambuje Pashya Neelolpaladwayam
Meaning a flower blooming inside another flower is not known to history. But, my dear, in your lotus like face are seen two blue Neelolpala flowers (eyes).
A CONVERSATION BASED ON A SLOKA
Sanskrit slokas can also be used to express an intent. One such example is a sloka used by Arjuna addressed to Mathali the charioteer in Kalakeya Vadham. Sloka:
Pitha: Kushalee Mama hritha Bhujaam
Naatha Sachee Vallabha:
Maatha: kim nu Pralomacha Kushalinee
Soonurjayanthasthayo
Preethim va Kushchate Thadikshnavidhow
Cheta Samutkanuthe
Sutha: tvam Radhamashu Chodaya vayam
Dharmadivam Mathala
Meaning: The husband of Indrani and the lord of gods my father - Is he in good health? His son Jayantha - Is he strictly following the commands of his father? Oh, I am impatient to see all of them.
SWARGA VARNANA: ARJUNA IN KELAKEYA VADHAM
Arjuna goes to heaven on the invitation of his father, Indra. After taking permission from Indrani he goes out to see all the places in Swarga. First he sees a building, his father's palace. It is so huge with four entrances. It is made of materials superior to gold and jewels of the world. Then he goes ahead and sees Iravatha. Here he describes it as a huge elephant with four horns. He is afraid to touch it. Then he thinks that animals in Swarga can't be cruel like in the world and so thinking he goes and touches and salutes Iravatha. He describes the churning of the white sea by gods and demons with many details and how Iravatha also came out of the white sea due to this churning.
He walks on and sees his father's (Indra's) horse. It is described as being white and its mane is sizzling like the waves of the white sea from which it came. He touches and salutes the horse also. Then he goes to see the river of the sky (or milky way). He sees many birds by this river and how the birds fly and play is shown.
Then he sees the heavenly ladies. Some are collecting flowers, and one of them comes late and asks for some flowers for making garland. The others refuse. She goes to the Kalpa Vriksha and says "please give me some flowers." Immediately a shower of flowers occurs which she collects in her clothes and goes to make garlands chiding the others. "See... I also got flowers." After this he sees the music and dance of the heavenly ladies. First it starts with the adjustments of instruments Thamburu, Mridangam, Veena. Then the actual music starts along with the striking of cymbals. Then two or three types of dances are shown. Then comes juggling of balls. It is described by a sloka thus:
Ekopi Thraya Iva Bhathi Kandukoyam
Kanthayaa: Karathala Raktharaktha:
Abhrastho Nayanamareechi Neelaneelo
Popular belief is that kathakali is emerged from "Krishnanattam", the dance drama on the life and activities of Lord Krishna created by Sri Manavedan Raja, the Zamorin of Calicut (1585-1658 AD). Once Kottarakkara Thampuran, the Raja of Kottarakkara who was attracted by Krishnanattam requested the Zamorin for the loan of a troupe of performers. Due to the political rivalry between the two, Zamorin did not allow this. So Kottarakkara Thampuran created another art form called Ramanattam which was later transformed into Aattakatha. Krishnanaattam was written in Sanskrit, and Ramanattam was in Malayalam. By the end of 17th century, Attakatha was presented to the world with the title 'Kathakali'. Kathakali also shares a lot of similarities with Krishnanattam, Koodiyattam (a classical Sanskrit drama existing in Kerala) and Ashtapadiyattam (an adaptation of 12th-century musical called Gitagovindam). It also incorporates several other elements from traditional and ritualistic art forms like Mudiyettu, Thiyyattu, Theyyam and Padayani besides a minor share of folk arts like Porattunatakam. All along, the martial art of Kalarippayattu has influenced the body language of Kathakali. The use of Malayalam, the local language (albeit as a mix of Sanskrit and Malayalam, called ), has also helped the literature of Kathakali sound more transparent for the average audience. As a part of modernising, propagating, promoting and popularizing Kathakali, the International Centre for Kathakali at New Delhi has taken up a continuing project since 1980 of producing new plays based on not only traditional and mythological stories, but also historical stories, European classics and Shakespeare's plays. Recently they produced Kathakali plays based on Shakespeare's Othello and Greek-Roman mythology of Psyche and Cupid.
Even though the lyrics/literature would qualify as another independent element called Sahithyam, it is considered as a component of Geetha or music, as it plays only a supplementary role to
Bhumau Talcharana Naghamshu Gaurgaura:
Meaning One ball looks like three balls. When it is in the hands of the juggler, it takes the redness of the hands, when it goes up it takes the blueness of the eyes, when it strikes the ground it becomes white from the whiteness of the leg nails. Once a juggled ball falls down. Then she, the juggler, somehow manages to proceed and remarks "See.. how I can do it".
At one time a garment slips from a lady's body and she adjusts the cloth showing shameful shyness (Lajja). Then the ladies go in for a Kummi dance. As Arjuna was enjoying this dance, suddenly somebody calls him. Arjuna feels scared. "Oh God, where am I?" he says and beats a hasty retreat.
TAPAS ATTAM: RAVANA IN RAVANA ULBHAVAM
[Background: Mali, Sumali and Malyavan were three brothers ruling Sri Lanka. During a war between them and Indra, Indra requested help from Lord Vishnu and as a consequence Lord Vishnu killed Mali. Sumali and Malyavan escaped to Patala. Kaikasi was the daughter of Sumali. She wandered in the forest. She belong three boys through a great sage called Vishravassu. (Vishravassu had an earlier son called Vaishravana who became the richest among all people.) The eldest boy of Kaikasi was Ravana followed by Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana.]
SCENE 1
When Ravana was a young boy (Kutti Ravana vesham), one day he was sleeping on his mothers lap in a place called madhuvanam. At that time Kaikasi sees Vaishravana flying overhead in his vimana (mythical aeroplane). She thinks “Oh, that is Vaishravana, technically a brother of my son who is sleeping on my lap. He is rich and strong. My son is so poor and weak. While thinking thus a drop of tear from her eyes drops on Ravana’s face. Ravana suddenly wakes up and sees his mother crying. When he knew the reason he could not bear it. He says he is going to do tapas to Brahma to get boons so that he will be strong and rich.
SCENE 2
(The tapas itself is shown as a part of autobiographical narration of adult ravana)
Ravana (adult Ravana, not kutti Ravana) is sitting on a stool. He thinks “Why am I so happy? How did I become so rich and strong? Oh yes. It is because of the tapas I did. What made me do the tapas? When I was a young boy, one day I was sleeping on my mother’s lap in a place called Madhuvanam. A drop of tear from her eyes falls on my face. I asked her why she was crying. She said she saw Vaishravana flying overhead in his vimana (plane). She told me Vaishravan was a brother of mine now flying in a plane. He is rich and strong. I am so poor and weak. When I heard this comparison between me and my brother, I could not bear it. I am going to do tapas to Brahma to get boons so that I will be strong and rich.
I made five different types of fires (while doing tapas gods are approached through Agni the god of fire). Then I started my tapas. I asked my brothers to stand guard and also keep the fires burning. Then I fully concentrated on tapas. Time passed but Brahma did not appear. I looked. Why is Brahma not appearing? I doubled my concentration. Time passed. Brahma is not appearing. Still not appearing? I cut one of my heads and put it in the fire. Waited, Brahma did not come. One more head rolls. Still no Brahma comes. Heads roll and roll. No Brahma. Only one head is left. First I thought of stopping my tapas. But no! Never! That will be an insult to me and my family. It is better to die than stop. Also when I die Brahma will be judged as being partial. With great determination I swung the sword at my last neck, when, lo and behold, suddenly Brahma appeared and caught my hand. I looked at him with still un-subsided, but gradually subsiding anger. Brahma asked me what boons I wanted. I asked for a boon that I should win all the worlds and have all the wealth and fame and that I should not be killed except by man. I also asked him to give boons for my brothers.
In the next scene Ravana asks Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana what boons they got. Unfortunately Kumbhakarna’s tongue got twisted while asking for boon and he got ‘sleep’ instead of becoming the ‘king of gods’. Ravana laughed it off. As for Vibhishana, he being a bhaktha of Vishnu, asked for Vishnu’s blessings and got it. Ravana laughs it off and also decides to conquer all the worlds and starts preparing his grand army for the big conquest of the worlds.
[This method of presentation with a peculiar sequence has a tremendous dramatic affect. The main actor redoes a small part of what happened to kutti Ravana vesham, and this gives a view of the high contrast between the boy and the man Ravana. Similarly the presence of Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana in the subsequent scene offers a good smile on the face of the viewer at the end of the play.]
KAILASA UDDHARANAM: RAVANA IN BALI VIJAYAM
[Background and Previous scene: After receiving the boons, and widening his kingdom in all directions, Ravana lives in Sri Lanka with great pomp and splendor. One day he sees Saint Narada approaching his palace singing songs in praise of him ‘Jaya jaya Ravana, Lanka Pathe’. Happily he receives Narada and seats him next to him. After telling Narada about the victory of his son Indrajith on Indra, Ravana tells Narada “Now there is nobody on earth or other worlds who can fight with me”. To this Narada replies “ Very true indeed, but there is one huge monkey called Bali who says he can defeat you. He even said that you are just like a blade of grass to him. Well let him say what he wants. You are unbeatable.” Then Narada says ‘let us go there and see him’. Both decide to go. But Ravana takes his famous sword called “Chandrahasam”. Then Narada asks the history of this sword. Ravana’s Attam Starts.]
Ravana says “I received this sword from Lord Siva. It happened thus. Once when I was conquering new places and expanding my empire I happened to be going across the Kailasa mountain. The plane got stuck on the mountain unable to move forward. I got down from the plane and looked at the mountain. (Looks from one end to the other first horizontally and then vertically.) So huge it was. Then I decided to lift it with my bare hand and keep it aside and move forward. I started sticking my hands under it one by one. Then I tried to lift it. It doesn’t move. I put more force and more force. It moved just a bit. I pushed harder and harder, slowly it started moving then again and again and it moved easily. Then I lifted it up with my hands and started juggling it (exaggeration evident).
“At that particular time Lord Siva was quarreling with his wife Parvathi. Why did they fight? The story is as follows. Parvathi had gone for enjoying swimming and bathing in some beautiful pond. At that time Siva opened his jata (disheveled long hair) and called Ganga for some entertainment after asking Ganapathi and Subramania to go for some errands. Somehow becoming suspicious, right at that time, Parvathi came back in a hurry with wet clothes and saw Siva with Ganga. Siva was wondering what to do and it was at that time that Ravana started lifting the Kailasa. When Kailasa started shaking Parvathi got scared and ran to Siva and hugged him. So the quarrel ended and Siva was happy. “As a reward Siva called me and gave me this famous Chandrahasa sword.”
Then Narada and Ravana leave to meet Bali. Ravana wanted to take the sword along with him, but Narada suggested that the sword is not required for teaching a lesson to Bali who is after all an unarmed monkey.
WIKIPEDIA
It’s a snow day here in North Carolina. It started as a thunderstorm last night and switched to snow this morning… the weather doesn’t seem to care it’s the second day of spring. It’s a sorry day for spring but it’s a great day to go over some past images. This is from last March at Charleston, South Carolina… we had a cold snap last March that sent us diving into the deep freeze for days that affected all the early spring bloomers. Azaleas festivals throughout the south went bust. It’s not unheard of, though it’s rare. It’s already warming up here and we’re expecting one last rain later today… I’m going to spread some weed and feed around the lawn while it’s still wet today. Then I’m grilling steaks… it is spring after all. That said, a Facebook friend just posted this: "Missing Person! Police are searching for Mother Nature. She is bi-polar and believed to be off her medication." No doubt! Here’s the dialog I wrote in last year’s post, the same egret at a more showy angle:
There are three types of white egrets here in the states. This one is a great egret. “Well, that’s just wonderful, Mike. But how do you know?” I’m glad you asked. Great egrets are distinguished from snowy and cattle egrets by a few peculiarities evident here, such as the black legs, the yellow bill, and the green patch around his eye, the last one particular only to male great egrets. You may see that and think that he’s camouflaged in the same value as the spring green of the bald cypress he’s resting on. Those showy feathers (yet another distinction of the great egret) that were fluttering in the wind made his camouflage null and void… well, that and the contrastive white tux he was dressed in. That green patch around his eye is prevalent only during mating season… which has made me wonder about my own situation. I have hazel eyes, which means they sometimes appear to be green and other times appear to be brown… likely, however, since I’m often described as being “full of beans”, the “green” condition may indicate I’m just a quart low… darn!
You can tell from those long legs that great egrets are wading birds much like the great blue heron. Its diet consists mostly of small fish… as does the heron, it can be seen in water up to the length of its legs moving ever so slightly until it uses its extensive neck and bill to spear into the water. I’ve never seen one miss its target… and then swallow the hapless fish whole. You may notice that this egret has some discoloration of its feathers… turns out that great egrets, though being wading birds and lacking the webbed feet that geese do, swim using their wings. This fella is drying himself after a short swim in one of the swampy ponds of Magnolia Plantation... among alligators. The gators took note, so he went from breast-stroke to airborne mode quickly… the transition from swimming to flight looked a bit awkward, yet here he is none the worse for it. I remember a story that Louie “Satchmo” Armstrong once told of his childhood that may explain the “discoloration”: “When I was a little boy living in Louisiana, my mother said, ‘Boy, run down to the pond an’ fetch me a pail of water right away. So, I went runnin’ down to this pond to get water, but the minute I went to dip the pail into the water I saw an alligator rise up out of that water. I jumped up and ran home. I no sooner got to the porch when my mother asked, ‘Where’s that water that I told you to get?’ I told her there’s an alligator in that water! She said, “Boy, don't you know that 'that alligator is as afraid of you as you are of him? And I said, ‘Well if that alligator is as afraid of me as I am of him, that water ain’t fit to drink.’” Seems plausible to me.
Many folks have a misunderstanding of Canada geese, thinking they’re Canadian geese… they lack citizenship granting them “Canadian” status, however. On the other hand, great egrets are also known as American egrets. They were nearly hunted to extinction in the mid-20th Century for their plumage to grace women’s hats and accessories. It is for that reason, and possibly because they are such elegant creatures, that they were chosen for the symbol of the Audubon Society… which is reason enough for citizenship.
The sun makes ice melt; kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate. —Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965)
To avoid misunderstanding: I have in my family many chemists, that gave me xanax for photo :-D
Ho in famiglia diversi famacisti che si sono prestati.
A scanso di imbarazzanti equivoci.
Copyright © 2013 by Ian J MacDonald. Permission required for any use. All rights reserved
Pen and ink on paper
Archeology and ancient sources suggest that the ancient Celts revered certain natural places. These were perhaps regarded as places that connected the living world to that of gods, the underworld, the dead, or were places with healing properties such as hot springs.
I have been fascinated by this subject for years and have devoured many books about the archeology and culture of these people. However I am also always left with a feeling that the artifacts and studies are sterile and out of context. This isn't to imply that there is anything missing in modern archeology, in fact the goal is to reconstruct and understand the past as fully as possible. Barry Cunliffe, in his books about the ancient Celts suggests that the they didn't make art for art's sake. In "The Ancient Celts" he shows a pair of forged fire dogs with bull's heads on them and profoundly relates that this imagery was not merely artistic but had meaning to them that was as obvious as modern religious symbols would mean to us - the crucifix for example. I can imagine archeologists thousands of years in the future unearthing a richly adorned crucifix, without an image of Christ on it and concluding that it is an artistic pair of crossed sticks - but having no idea of the extensive body of meaning implied by that crucifix. This is what I mean when I say the artifacts seem sterile and out of context.
In these pictures I am attempting to mentally recreate their world and see it as much as is possible in the eyes of the ancient people. This is naturally impossible since as time marches on our knowledge and control of the world has grown far beyond what they could have ever imagined. Like a genie, new knowledge cannot be un-discovered, as many people wish could happen.
The world in pre-Roman and pre-Christian eras was a small, uncertain and a violent place. Diseases, disasters, invading bands and armies came seemingly out of nowhere and struck ferociously. Knowledge has provided us an unparallelled amount of certainty in our lives, but until recently a spate of bad weather could mean mass starvation - something that still occurs in places in the modern world. I religions probably arise formed from our insatiable desire to connect events with reason. Coupled with the ability to have abstract thought this powerful adaptation has made humans one of the most powerful forces on earth.
Religions provided some explanation and feeling of control over the world. Some authors have noted connections between ancient Indo-European religions originating in India and Iran, that are often nowadays associated with Yoga and meditation. I often see the Gundestrup cauldron held up as an example as their is a horned deity, similar to depictions of Cunernos,sitting in the lotus position, possibly meditating and holding a torc and snake - a symbol also associated with Eastern religions. It seems plausible to me that many tenets of European religions could have originated from ancient Indo-European society, but I hesitate to take this comparison too far as meditation and quiet introspection are features of many religions including Christianity. Christianity similarly contains elements of many ancient Pagan religions but it is only murky shadows of them. Besides we really have no firsthand description of even the most basic tenets of their religions, only reconstructions based on archeology and some ancient writings which contain considerable amounts of bias and misunderstanding. I believe the local conditions and experiences shaped their religions which would account for the huge variety of deities that have been uncovered through archeology.
As a reflection of the world around them, Celtic deities appear to be fearsome beings with fickle personalities. We'll never know for sure, but forgiveness and fairness do not seem to be their main attributes. A personal relationship with the deities also does not appear to be likely either. These were deities that affected the world and meted out harsh retribution for...tbc
Care must be used when using the word "natural" as it comes loaded with modern implications. Natural means things that occurred naturally such springs, bogs water bodies, mountains, caves etc... In modern parlance "natural" means closer to the land, organic, environmentally aware and so on. This modern meaning of natural cannot be applied to the ancient Celts as the whole world was "natural" and everyone was more connected to the land and weather and the cycles of nature as a means of survival. There was no other alternative to that world. Imposing the modern meaning on them reduces them to the stereotypical "noble savage" or barbarians just as the ancient Roman writers often did intentionally (e.g. Caesar ) or not (e.g. Pliny and Tacitus).
In these pictures I have tried to get into the head of the ancient Celts and depict their holy places without relying on the cliches, stereotypes, and misinformation - e.g. Stonehenges and scrolling knot work, white-robed druids praying to the sun etc... I imagine that sacred places evolved for reasons, perhaps long lost to the ancient Celts. I also envision that sacred places were subtle and perhaps not noticeable until you were on top of them. A foreigner might never recognize them.
I don't believe we can ever see the world as ancient people did, or anyone in the past for that matter. Knowledge is like a genie - once it is out it cannot be put back and the world cannot be experienced as it was before, no matter how hard one tries. Ancient writers have described "fearsome" wooden idols standing in dark groves. Ancient writers also seemed to highlight the most lurid aspects of these ancient religions, although all societies practiced animal and human sacrifice. The Romans describe the Celts ...and all barbarians....as spooky and superstitious but Romans were no less spooky or superstitious. They were the conquerors wrote the history, and found their Celtic superstitions to be strange and creepy and theirs moral and right.
Hessane is a member of the Dark Brotherhood since the day she became a vampire - and that is certainly a very long time.
She was Listener right until she left everything behind thanks to some misunderstandings and some unnecessary deaths.
She is now back to carry on but with Astrid in the way, she cannot work as she intended to do.
Right now her greatest fear is to lose Cicero - she always looked after the little jester and now his life was in danger. She has to find him before the lapdog of the Sanctuary's Mistress do so...
so i got tagged some time ago so here are 10 facts:
- i've just got up.
- i'm tired even it's nearly midday.
- i chew gum.
- i'm stroking my pet cat :)
- i still wear my pyjamas.
- i'd like to have ice cream now.
- i think my friend is angry at me.
- i'm planning to do a photo tour today if the weather is good.
- i'm posting on my blog right now.
- i'll go shopping today.
it's a very old picture but i quite like it.
© eva.photography all my photos may not be blogged or used in any way without my written permission!
KV Dream Fashion Agency
KV WINTER FASHION MONTH
Ava Jhamin For
WHIMSICAL IMAGINARIUM
" Faraways Land"
K.V. Dream Fashion Agency is organizing the "KV Winter Fashion Month".
The event will take place from the 1st to the 30th of October.
In the frame of this big event we have 3 different events linked to each other:
1) KV Winter Fashion Month – Gacha
2) KV Winter Fashion Month – Shopping Way
3) KV Winter Fashion Month - Haute Couture
Each designer can decide to join only one event or all 3.
The event will be advertised on:
- Inovare Magazine;
- Versus Magazine;
- ModelSL Magazine;
- Kingdoom Style Magazine
- 63 blogs
- KV FaceBook and Flickr Pages
- KV Website
ABOUT SPONSORS:
We will link a Photo Contest to the event, prizes and rewards will be on KV Dream Fashion Agency.
1) KV Winter Fashion Month – Gacha (maximum 32 designers)
We require each designer to create exclusive WINTER THEMED MESH ITEMS (we highly discourage the usage of system clothes in this section of the event).
A Gacha Event will only be successful if the items will be high quality, something customers will want to collect.
So we ask to all designers to create great and unique items.
Due to the nature of the Gacha, items have to be transf/no copy, so the customers can trade doubles. The customers will be allowed to use the KV Dream Fashion Agency Group (in world) to trade their doubles.
Each designer will have 2 Gacha machines and they will cost 500$L each.
The vendors required to have AT LEAST 6 items in the machine - the number and ratio of rares is at the designer's discretion.
All prims must fit within the assigned vendor space. One machine per vendor.
We ask the designers to sell the items at a low price, so the customers will be tempted to collect them all.
We kindly ask to the designers, who never joined a Gacha event, to search information about how it works.
We will explain you how to use the script.
KV Dream Fashion Agency will accept the first 32 applications, so first come first serve.
2) KV Winter Fashion Month – Shopping Way (maximum 22 designers)
Is a glamorous, WINTER THEMED street sale.
Each designer will get a stand located in the avenues of the KV sim in which you can rez 3 vendors:
- 2 exclusive items (both clothing and accessories are welcome)
- 1 non-exclusive item as long as it's winter themed.
All items will be sold at a discounted promotional price so we would ask you not to exceed the prices listed below:
1) Accessories:
- skin: 200$L
- poses: 30$L each
- make-up: 50$L
- jewelry/accessories/poses: 70$L
- "ORIGINAL MESH" shoes: 150$L
- " NON ORIGINAL MESH" shoes: 70$L
2) CLOTHES
- "ORIGINAL MESH" lingerie: 130$L
- "ORIGINAL MESH" casual dress: 150$L
- "ORIGINAL MESH" formal dress: 190 L
- "NON ORIGINAL MESH" lingerie: 50$L
- "NON ORIGINAL MESH" casual dress: 70$L
- "NON ORIGINAL MESH" formal dress: 130$L
** The ITEMS are considered "ORIGINAL MESH" if you created the model yourself on a 3D software (Blender, Maya, etc).
The ITEMS aren't "ORIGINAL MESH", if you bought full perms item from another creator.
We ask you to provide DEMOS for a better shopping experience.
We won't ask you a joining fee but we require that the vendors will have a 20% split with KV*.
KV Key:
KVDreamFashion Resident : 79d128e5-597e-4fa6-b678-99a2048c11ca
* We strongly suggest you to use your own split script, so that you have full control over it.
We will organize a fashion show to promote your items and advertise the event and your brand with it.
We will select the items that better fit the winter theme for the show..
The Fashion Show will be the 6th of October at 1.00pm SLT.
KV Dream Fashion Agency will accept the first 22 designers, who send the application form.
3) KV Summer Fashion Month - Haute Couture
(maximum 15 designers)
We require each designer to create 1 exclusive WINTER THEMED MESH ITEMS (we highly discourage the usage of system clothes in this section of the event).
The item will be hosted into a special shop in KV Sim.
We ask you to keep the prices of this exclusive creation between 100 and 500 L$ (you can sell it at full price at the end of the event) and to provide DEMO for a better shopping experience.
We won't ask you a joining fee but we require that the vendors will have a 30% split with KV*.
KV Key:
KVDreamFashion Resident : 79d128e5-597e-4fa6-b678-99a2048c11ca
* We strongly suggest you to use your own split script, so that you have full control over it.
We will organize a fashion show to promote your items and advertise the event and your brand with it.
The Fashion Show will be the 8th of October at 1.00pm SLT.
KV Dream Fashion Agency will accept the first 15 designers who will return the application note, correctly filled in.
If you wish to join all the sections, please fill all the applications.
The designers can, of course, sell their exclusive items with full prices in their mainstores/Marketplace at the end of the event (after the 30th of October).
We would ask you to provide your bloggers with the SLURL to the KV sim to add to their posts, along with dates and infos about the event.
KV SLURLS is the following:
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Brimstone%20Island/39/211/35
KV will provide a list of bloggers too from its selected group to help you spread the voice and enhance your sales and our traffic.
KV Dream Fashion Agency invites all the designers to pay attention to the deadlines to avoid confusion and misunderstandings.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Best regard
The owners of K.V. Dream Fashion Agency, sim
Katiuscia Vollmar
JuanSebastian Menges
Ets Zessinthal
Ora Ohara
_ . ; _ ' - . _
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{ . ' - ` . _ ; - ' ;
` ' - - . _ . - '
.-\ \, -"-. ♥ ℓღνє,
`- \( '-. \ ♥ AVA
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Passing by this gentleman this evening, I wanted to get a frame of him in action. An environmental candid if you will. No intent on taking his art as my own; as you can see, he had strong thoughts on the topic.
Apologies for the misunderstanding.
Here is a transcribed PODCAST of Ben Edlund talking about the Script (1st Draft) and the Pitch Fact
Sheets (In reference to my posts 2 years ago on November 12, 2017, The Tick Character Desciptions from The Original Animated Series 1 of 2) that I believe were integral with the transition from Comic Book to Television Animated Series based on the following: (...but you decide)
SYS Podcast Episode 274: Writer/Creator of The Tick, Ben Edlund, Talks About How He Was Able
To Turn The Comic Book Into An Amazon Series by ASHLEY SCOTT MEYERS
Ashley: Welcome to Episode #274 of the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. Today I'm interviewing Ben Edlund the creator and current showrunner for the Amazon series The Tick. He has an incredible story to tell. He started out in high school, originally creating this Tick character as a comic book for a
local comic shop and slowly he had success with it. And he's actually had two other TV series based on
this same character. We talk through this entire journey, how he came up with the idea, got it to
market, eventually got it to Amazon, all through this long journey that's taken over 20 years.
So now let's get into the main segment. Today I am interviewing writer Ben Edlund. Here is the
interview.
Ashley: Welcome Ben to the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the
show with me today.
Ben: I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Ashley: To start out maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up
and how did you get interested in the entertainment business?
Ben: Yeah. I grew up in Massachusetts in a small town, Pembroke, Greater Boston, really and... I'm
old so that was in the 70's. That was like a time where I got really trained on very early to the idea of
film making. Star Wars was highly impactful and I became one of those kids that got a Super 8
camera off a blanket at a yard sale and started to make movies and that was the pattern. Then from
that point I was also just always drawing. My dad was an artist so I developed storytelling... visual
storytelling both in comic books and movies. That was my thing and so I had a lot of time in by the
time I had a few opportunities to grab for.
Ashley: Yeah. Let's talk about The Tick. Season two is gonna be dropped on Amazon Prime on April
5th. Maybe to start out you can just give us a quick pitch or a logline for the show. What is this show
all about?
Ben: It's a universe full of superheroes. The Tick and Arthur are a pair of heroes trying to make it.
Arthur is a former accountant with sort of a fearful nature he's trying to overcome and the Tick is an
enigmatic superhuman blue vaguely bug-related superhero, cannot remember his past and tends to be
a gifted bumbler in the tradition of inspector Clouseau. That's a long logline.
Ashley: Yeah. I think that sums it up well. I think this is just a fascinating story in terms of how you
were able to get this ultimately on Amazon. You originally wrote a comic book so we'll dig into that,
you got it on Fox at one point and then again in 2001. So maybe we can just talk through some of these
steps where we're just taking us way back to the very origin of The Tick. Where did that idea come
from?
Ben: it was just a real simple combination of things that were in my life. I grew up on a cranberry bog
with a lot of dogs so ticks were a big part of our existence. We had them, the dogs had them, everybody
had them. That was the thing. And when I was in my teens I started to play roleplaying games and
started to play... one of the games was a marvel roleplaying game, Marvel Super Heroes and that was
like a meta-analysis of superheroes that was just kinda there, and as I played it I started to get a kind
of view on superheroes that sort of felt like... I mean, I really enjoyed them but I also saw them in this
gorgeously ridiculous way that made me wanna create my own. I started fooling around with this
character called the Tick that was at fist just a doodle and something very primitive and simple but I
ended up... I lived a few towns over from a comic book company that was trying to become a
publishing company. So I happened to find my way to them and showed them samples of my work, I
started to illustrate for them and then eventually the Tick is a character they saw and got excited
about. That's how the publishing started.
Ashley: Okay. And then what does that mean, like an independent comic book and this must've been
what, in the eighties? How does that ultimately transfer into getting a television show? Did they
promote it well, did it kinda just catch fire? What was that trajectory of going from local comic book
to show on Fox?
Ben: Yeah. It was the eighties, it was like 88' when we put it out. That was at the tail end of what was
called the black and white explosion which was a market fascination with black and white independent
comic books. So we thought we would just cash in on the very end of that but it turned out that the
comic book itself had a kind of winning chemistry and people started to really enjoy it which was great
for me so I kept doing it. This was also an acclimate. We were only not... I mean, I grew up within an
hour's drive of Eastman and Laird who created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so there was a local
folkloric rise to greatness [laughs] that took place right next door and it kind of inspired us to be
looking around and see if we could do something similar. And through various... I mean, it took a
couple of years but through a long kinda slug we were able to finally land at Fox Kids network. Yeah.
Ashley: And maybe you can even give us some of those details. I mean, you're starting to get a little bit
of traction with the comic book, people are enjoying it. Did you actively make an effort and said,
"Listen, we can turn this into an animated series," and you went out actively looking for people or was
it the opposite where the comic book was catching on and then you started having television people
coming to you giving you offers?
Ben: It was like that. The offers were not immense but they were... they started to come in once we
kinda proved that we'd be around so we were still... it was really issue five and six somewhere in there
that we started to get attention. And then... I think there was an independent feature producer that
wanted to buy up an option and wanted to work out a treatment for a feature that seemed unlikely to
me because at that point especially we only had very little on... that was before Batman, the Michael
Keaton Batman, so it was a time of great skepticism in terms of live of action. But other larger
producers came looking at that and then the way I kind of saw it moving I think even then what
seemed like the most likely course was something that followed the route that the Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles was following.
And that became a long process. I signed up with a toy licensing agent called Kiscom and
that was... I think certainly in the short term it worked so it was a good move. It was a high percentage
toy licensing, and I'm not sure if I was necessarily well represented, but it was an high percentage to
kind of get in the game and actually move this from the point of just me up in Massachusetts to
somebody who had contact and lounge for real meetings to start to take place. At that point I was
living in New York City and going to school at School of Visual Arts so every once in a while I'd get
on my bike and ride up to Midtown and I'd take my bike seat in with me because people would take
your bike seat.
So I'd walk in the meetings with my bike seat and I'd sit down and go, "Well, let's make a
TV show." And I was very young at that point. I was 22. Somehow over the course of a couple of years
we managed to make contacts sufficient to get us in front of Fox Kids network. That was like maybe a
year and a half of meeting with different people though we went up a road with Bandai, major
Japanese toy manufacturer that had basically, if I'm not mistaken, was the company that initially did
the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle run. But at any rate it was one of those large companies that was
used to packaging cartoons with toy lines and doing all of that. In that respect it turns out I think I was
extremely lucky that everybody looked at The Tick and said, "That's too weird and funky. We're not
gonna do it," because it has prospered so much better being... even though it did get a cartoon, it didn't
get a cartoon that was based on a toy line which allowed it to be more itself.
It didn't have the pressure of a large company on top of the network trying to control what
it was so it was really allowed to grow sort of unmolested and become... it's not an overwhelming one
but it's a cultural landmark to some degree for some people. It wouldn't have done that if it was toy
line. It would have been a nostalgic remembrance of childhood but I prefer what happened [laughs].
Ashley: Yeah. So during this year and a half as you're sort of ramping up did you write some spec
episodes of The Tick, sort of a pilot episode and a couple episodes? Did you start to prepare yourself
for this potential to have a TV show or did you just still basically have the comic book and what you
were doing there?
Ben: I had various pitch documents that I had worked out. By the time we went to Fox Kids Network it
was a thick pitch book with... I had done illustrations for all the characters and character descriptions
and I kind of, if I'm not mistaken, an over-view of the pilot. There wasn't a pilot script. It was more
like an overview of the show at that point. It evolved from something that was less about the show and
more about the potential of the toy line and then overarching kind of story value of the piece that was
this angle at which one approached the toy world at that point.
This was a mutation of that , that was like pitch book kind of consistent with what I was
seeing in the cartoon world but it was not... I didn't have a script. And so when I first got engaged with
the Fox Kids Network situation that was actually a consultancy. I was at that point fairly sure that I
was gonna sign away, that I was signing away The Tick sort of, because there was no guarantee I was
gonna personally be involved the making of the show. It just... like that was sort of... it certainly wasn't
the case for Eastman and Laird, they were not involved. They handed it off and it became this very
Saturday morning thing that was wildly popular and I assumed that's what was gonna take place.
Instead I was given a kind of a consultancy in my contract which was very much at their
option in terms of they could certainly put a clone of silence around me if they needed to. Instead I just
ended up...I was in the same city as one of the two key writers that they had brought onto the project,
Richard Liebmann-Smith, the other one (Eric Lewald) was out in Los Angeles and they were going to
kinda pull together the pilot script and write the season, and I was sort of just writing emails,
commenting on the material that was coming out and the flow in commentary and my connection with
Richard Liebmann-Smith I just sort of ended up sitting in the seat where I started to co-write with
Richard. And then the guy (Eric Lewald) in Los Angeles became kinda out of -istic and we just started
going, and the script was just... It was unusual, I was really young, I had no experience before that
point but I was the actual only scholar and expert on The Tick that they had and it turned out to be
kind of a sensitive... it always has been a sensitive kind of tone so I was just lucky I got in there. Since
then it's just been immensely fortunate.
Ashley: Yeah. I'm curious too. You were talking about this toy company that you signed a deal with
and then that seemed to lead to some of these meetings at Fox. Did the toy company, did they have the
actual contacts over at Fox that they could just pick up the phone and set up those meetings or was it
more just having that toy company signed on was prestigious enough then you were able to go out and
set up those meetings? What did the toy... I guess I'm not fully clear how signing with this toy company
seemed to ultimately equal getting that Fox show.
Ben: They functioned as my agent at that point. They were people who had a lot of connections. They
had made all kinds of calls to networks because they were always trying to push forward various deals
with other toy lines and really sort of auxiliary kind of entertainment material needed. So they were in
that world to a degree. They were one degree removed because their emphasis was on toys but they
were able to function completely as agents for me in that regard. I didn't make meetings, I didn't call
people out of the blue or anything like it, that would never have happened. I wouldn't have known who
to call. Instead I was just... anytime we needed material I generated the materials, anytime... I was the
content and they were the provider at that point. By the time we started getting into production or pre
-production as agents do, they faded away because the bond had been made and it was time to get to
work.
Ashley: Yeah. Let's talk about the 2001 version. How did that come about? How were you able to just
keep this train going and get that set up?
Ben: That started with... I was envisioning it in the following way: Barry Sonnenfeld, a successful
director, was on a private jet that almost crashed and it went past the edge of the runway and kinda
skidded out. He was okay but he was a very nervous flyer and so had a near death experience and
when he came out of it he was like, "We need to do The Tick as a live action show [laughs]."
And so for some reason he decided that was the thing that needed to happen. He had
encountered this guy Patrick Warburton and felt like this guy was the walking embodiment of the
Tick. I think his children had been seeing The Tick cartoon and that's how his awareness of the began
but then Flody Suarez also kind of was working with them and Barry Josephson and they were both
pushing hard to make The Tick one of the choices that the company went for. And so they called me
up and we started to work on something. First I said no. It was my habit of saying no, "No. That's
crazy. I can't make a live action Tick, it's crazy." But then I met Patrick Warburton, they flew me out
to LA to talk to him and he seemed great and he was and we became this kind of amazing human
avatar that was eye opening and it opened my brain to the wider potential of the character.
At that point we agreed that we had this guy, he was great and he was already kind of
popular because of Seinfeld. Everyone loved him [laughs] and still does. But that became a pretty good
package because we went out with Barry Josephson, Barry Sonnenfeld, Patrick Warburton and myself
doing the pilot and it sold. And so... yeah. Got to work.
Ashley: Perfect. And then takes us through that same trajectory. How did you then ultimately end up a
third time on Amazon?
Ben: That show went for about nine episodes. It was not fully embraced by the network that bought it
and that was just a misunderstanding of what they asked for and what they got. Essentially they asked
for Barry Sonnenfeld Property X and then when it came out and it had superheroes in it they were like,
"Superheroes! What are they [laughs]?" So it came and went but it inspired a... I think everyone
associated with it has had the same experience which is people loved it and talked about it and brought
it up all the time with Patrick, all the time with the Barry's.
Everybody really just feeling like this thing was... it had a cult fascination associated with it,
so Barry Josephson got sick of it. He was always on other projects and somebody would come up from
the crew and say, "Are you ever gonna do something with The Tick?" and so finally he went to Sony,
he was doing other things, he sniffed it out and there was interest there too for taking the rights which
they still possessed in trying to make a new television expression of The Tick in live action which was
for me... so Barry came to me, I first said, "No," but it ate at me and I started to think about it and
realized yeah it's a challenge we didn't quite complete in the first live action iterations, something we
didn't... there were calculations I made at that time in the engineering of that show which fated it to be
short-run show not that it was given a chance but just in terms of its DNA. I realized there were all
kinds of things that I wanted to do to grapple again with what is really I think one of the... it's maybe
one of the hardest forums which would be a long forum superhero comedy because that is so... it
couldn't be more likely or less important. Like long forum superhero dramas, at least you're going
with stakes and you're trying to make it... but something as absurd as The Tick that one wants to see
for seasons and seasons that was a challenge I didn't understand how to meet and I was...yeah, fatally
intrigued [laughs].
Ashley: And so you keep saying that they would come to you and you would say, "No." Why do you say
no? Are you just sick of working on this thing since you were 14, you want other projects or the initial
deal just doesn't look that good? What is going through your mind when you're saying no at first?
Ben: I mean, in each case it's... and this is one of the biggest issues going when it comes to getting
scripts up and running, is fear. In each case I had completed something that was okay, it was good,
people liked it. I had come off the cartoon, the cartoon was quite celebrated actually and so later in the
90's when someone came to me and said, "Oh, you wanna open that box again and see if you can fuck
it up [laughs]," pardon my French. See if you can like just... like no, it's good [laughs].
But then the question starts to eat at me and then I think, "Well, alright." It's not so much
that I don't wanna deal with The Tick again necessarily, although after I'm done with this one I'll put
it down for a while, but it's more that my relationship with The Tick has been such that... it's actually
been pretty positive and I've been wanting to protect that legacy basically. It wasn't until I met Patrick
and all of those sort of things that I realized, "Okay, I wanna try this in live action in 2001 or 2000."
And then it wasn't really until Barry came and Josephson came out to me and I had thought about it
and then I started to see how it could be done, a turnaround of how it could be approached with which
it could be approached. And then realizing okay, if I'm starting to think of this and wanna address the
things I felt weren't addressed in the previous live action and maybe kinda make it a different thing
worth doing then I felt empowered to define my terms very rigorously. It was very specific. There
would not be a broadcast, I would not pitch it to broadcasts, I would not pitch it for 22 episodes per
season, I would not pitch it for anything but a pedigree outlet that had enough money to support a very
peculiar idea with real backing. So it had to be 13 episodes or less. I mean, I had a lot of requirements.
Ashley: Yeah. And so how involved are you with the production now? Are you still the showrunner,
are you hiring the writers, are you overseeing the scripts, are you writing some of the scripts?
Ben: Yes [laughs]. Yeah. I mean, I'm the sole showrunner in the second season then I have been doing
a lot. So if it's... I will take all the blame and a small portion of the credit because a lot of people did a
tremendous number of things. For example we did a lot of writing in Season 2 because of various
factors that just kinda fell into place. We had to do rewriting kind of all the time as we were moving
through the season and that became this partnership between myself and Susan Hurwitz Arneson, one
of our editors from the first season, she's co-executive producer now. And that was a big part of how
we pulled this thing off but in essence I have a dirty finger in everything.
Ashley: Let's talk about that process just for a little bit. I get a lot of questions from writers about how
they can get on this show or that show. Just as an example how did you find the writers for The Tick?
Were they people that you had worked with before, were they agent submissions and you read a bunch
of scripts? Were they friends suggesting their writer friends? Maybe you can just talk through how you
built the staff to write this show.
Ben: Yeah. I think we approached it in a fairly straightforward way which was Barry Josephson has a
production company that is up and running and so one of his lieutenants at that time was Eric Facade
(Resard) and he kinda launched into this massive reading campaign to start to get the raw bulk of
submissions that we wanted to look at and focus on. And that was a group of submissions that came
from all over. Like my agent came from other people's... people that we were associated with came
from Amazon, came from Sony. There were writers I looked at from friends of mine and from contacts
that I knew, that's something you need to be careful with, I mean, there's a whole chapter in whatever
one wants to pursue that is about working with friends [laughs]. But for me in this case we were
really... we had sort of a pretty reasonable budget and room to kind of shape out about seven to nine
spots and just kinda went at it. I read a lot, I met a lot of people, it was a combination of the meetings
which there's chemistry and intangible stuff that takes place during meetings and then reading the spec
stuff that was submitted. A lot of times I was reading... personally I was reading pilots that they made
because I wanted to see what kind of decisions they made when they were on their own and were Gods
of their own worlds. But... it's a weird kind of weather system that dictates what is involved in terms of
submissions and I'm not in touch with that exactly.
Ashley: Yeah. So obviously the writing is very important, you're reading these spec scripts. But what
other things are important to you when you're hiring a writer to come in and be in your writer's room?
Some of the other things besides writing?
Ben: Let's see... I mean, there's that sort of certain factors that are basically about personality and
almost like psychic signature. As a showrunner I'm sitting down with a person and I am projecting
that person into the room I'm making, and I've maybe made some choices already and so I have say
three seats filled and I'm looking into that sort of future projection of the room that I'm taking that
person and putting them there. If I've got kind of a quiet room in my head right now and I'm talking to
someone who's actually very vocal and almost has trouble not talking over me, they could be okay
depending. I would never talk over a person in a meeting that I'm trying to impress [laughs]. But I
might be looking for and listening for some volume from a person. I'm listening for a more volcanic
creative nature because I wanna picture a room and I want generators and I want processors and
ideally generator processors, but like you're looking for a variety of functions and you're trying to
create a sort of an ongoing cocktail party with a job. And so that's an element and that's something
where it's really just the advice would be be yourself and try to be as the least nervous self-aware, you
know, unnecessarily self-aware version of yourself you can be because its... it's also for you. You want
to be a comfortable fit in a space and if you're trying to contort your presentation of self over much,
unless you're a good, solid, psychopath it's gonna show. So why don't you just be yourself. So that's
that thing. The other things one looks for are like a track record... that's not always the case. I was
always looking at people who had never worked yet. I wanted to try and give people the potential door
in. Anyone who had a track record I would then make calls and talk to people who'd worked with them
and try to get the lowdown on how they operated in the room and how their drafts were, and just in
general what kind of team member they were.
Ashley: Yeah. Sound advice. So maybe you can just tell us when the... I guess The Tick are coming out
April 5th?
Ben: April 5th...
Ashley: On Amazon.
Ben: Ten episodes will come out at once, so the full season.
Ashley: Perfect, and I highly recommend people to check that out. And what's the best way for people
to keep up with what you're doing? A blog, Twitter, anything you're comfortable sharing I'll round up
for the show notes.
Ben: Yes. Check in with my Twitter. I'm trying to get better at it, so we can work on it together
everybody. It is @ben_edlund, all lower cases.
Ashley: Perfect, got it. So perfect, I will round that up for the show notes so people can click over to
that. Well Ben congratulations on getting this show, it's up and running. God luck with it and I look
forward to seeing what you do next.
Ben: Thanks man. Thank you for your time and attention. I appreciate it.
Ashley: Thank you. Will talk to you later.
Ben: Okay, bye.
Ashley: Bye.
And here is a bit more information describing the events that took place that brought The Tick from
Inception to hopefully...The Big Screen. (Bibliography: From The Book Age of TV Heroes which can
be purchased from Amazon)
Wherever there is evil and its evildoers...
Wherever there's injustice and jaywalking...
Wherever there are thugs, crooks, and politicians...
Wherever there's a blue plate special...
Rest assured, good citizens - The Tick will be there!
In the summer of 1986, The Tick first appeared in the pages of New England Comics
Newsletter, the in-house publication of the Boston comic book store chain of the same name. By 1988,
Tick spread his brand of justice in his very own series; his moth-outfitted sidekick, Arthur, made his
debut in issue four of the book. In the first story, the Big Blue Arachnid is described as the followi ng:
"He is superhumanly strong and nigh invulnerable, with the intelligence level of top soil."
Born in 1968, Massachusetts native Ben Edlund was only seventeen when he made his deal
with George Suarez, owner of New England Comics (NEC), to publish The Tick as a series. Although
not heavily into comic books while growing up, he did enjoy Richie Rich and other kid comics until the
involving nature of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run lured him into appreciating the potential of the
comics medium. The son of the accomplished artist and commercial art designer Richard Edlund, Ben
was someone who always had the support of his parents in all his artistic endeavors, and they nurtured
his desire to create. Edlund said, "I think my father's example was one thing, and I got a lot of the
osmosis, a lot of training from my dad. He just would show up when I was drawing something and
offer approval."
The Tick creator humbly added. "As far as other motivating factors, I think the big thing
was, I was relatively shy, and drawing was kind of a chance to escape into somewhere where you had
complete control. I was curious about the connections between shyness and obsessive. meticulous
excellence. That's a large part of I think what kept me going. I kept getting positive results from
drawing, and it sort of filled out an area that would otherwise have probably been filled out by sports and popularity. [laughs]"
As he began to get sucked into the comic book culture, he started to become a somewhat
regular customer at a New England Comics store for his regular dose of books. Ben informed, "The
idea of a comic book store was unknown to me until friends of mine got a license to drive, and then we
drove over to Boston. And I was coming to admiration because I didn't realize there were that many
comic books. Like, you'd see in the back pages of, say, Epic, ads for other comic books and stuff, and it
seemed like there was something going on out there, but the idea of hundreds of thousands of books,
different ones, independent titles, not just the ones you find with the covers torn off at a drugstore -
that was pretty big. I was doing a strip for the high school paper when I could get around to it, and
that was more what I thought of in terms of comic book stuff. And then going and seeing what was out
there was...it had a pretty strong affect on what I thought was possible. That, plus we also started to
play a role-playing game called Marvel Superheroes, which wasn't a badly-designed game, but it also
kind of took the veil off of superheroes, in a sense. You'd have to take all of their abilities and all of
their strengths and weaknesses and kind of itemize them, and it began a process of breaking down
superheroes and seeing what was mythic and clever about them, and also what was kind of naive, even
sometimes dumb about them, which really started to get me into the direction of superhero parody,
which is of course where The Tick began."
Begun as a spec strip, Tick's true origin was as a joke during a role-playing game session
amongst Ben's friends. Intrigued by the character that he jokingly made up, he began to think and
draw him out as "an unstoppable, uncrushable, and somehow deeply disconnected goofball that fell
from the sky." Not long after, the artist was beginning to feel confident in his work and drew some
superhero samples with the hope of procuring some paying work. He showed them to art director Bob
Polio and comic store owner/publisher George Suarez of NEC, who were impressed enough to call him
back for a potential comic book they were developing. With college starting and the script to the comic
arriving super-late, Ben realistically pondered on the opportunity when Suarez asked him to create a
book based on his Tick strip instead. Excited with this offer, he worked on the first issue and
developed the character more during his freshman (and part of his sophomore) year at Massachusetts
College of Art, where he wanted to study film.
Thinking back, Edlund disclosed, "I would say that there were a lot of times when I had the
book take precedence, and there were times when when school suffered... Ultimately The Tick took
precedence, and eventually I quit school to pursue it with the cartoons. So I never really got out of
college. I never graduated from an institute of higher learning. I attended them for a period of time
and that's about it." The arrival of Tick #1 was a tremendous success for the proud teenage creator
when it finally was released in 1988. "When we put it out," said Edlund, We were sort of thinking,
"Well, we'll put out a few issues of this: It was, like. right at the end of the black-and-white explosion,
so maybe we'll get some people to notice it and I'll have something to keep in my portfolio that's been printed. But it managed to just catch a little bit of the flagging interest and energy that that big bubble had supported. So it was doing pretty well. By the time. they tell me, in 1990 or something like that, I think the print runs were at about 30,000 or something, so it was a very successful independent book and that's when it sort of attracted the attention of a number of people in Hollywood and also in New York. They were sort of looking at the independent comics with an eye toward what would be the most titles that could be exploited in the way that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had been exploited."
Suddenly Edlund had various companies and enterprises at his doorstep and on the phone
that wanting to develop The Tick into all sorts of products and things. Eventually, he made a deal with
a company called Kiscom (a New Jersey toy designer and packager) that saw a lot of merchandising
potential in Tick. Kiscom pitched the character to most of the big toy companies. They nearly made a
deal with Bandai that envisioned making a toy line that hopefully would spring into a television show
for young children. Later, Sunbow Entertainment came through with an offer for an animation show
for the sympathetic Fox Kids Fox's Saturday morning programming). Edlund wanted to concentrate
more on the writing side and took the opportunity to do so in developing Tick's animated show, with
writer Richard Libmann-Smith. By protecting his creation, he was able to help steer the production to
embrace the original ideas and comedic situations that were a bit progressive for Saturday morning
television. They were sophisticated enough for an audience of adults and savvy kids.
Edlund stated, "You're doing a loosely composed storyboard when you do a comic book.
It's about as close to cinema as you can get in a form that doesn't take place over time but still uses
space. Comic books use space instead of time, and you're really splitting things up into shots and
dynamic kind of takes. So I'd been doing comic books sort of working in sort of like a film laboratory,
and I was just waiting for when I could step into the thing Itd been wanting to do for the majority of
my life. I still like drawing, I still like... I meant I've done, very infrequently, like the comic book stuff,
but my focus and a lot of my intensity was dedicating to working on the other side of the book's
premise in a live-action role."
Despite a growing fan base and critical reviews, the animated show's ratings were not
strong for the intended audience; the potential "Ninja Turtle-like" revenue for Tick's toyline fell apart
after the first season. "It had a very sunshiney debut," said Edlund, "a daytime hit, and throughout all
that whole period that we were on the air, the three years that we were, it had this growing baffled and
very affectionate audience of adults, from a wide range of walks of life. That was really cool. What
ultimately took place was, advertisers and Fox as a corporation started to notice that we were a
Saturday morning TV show that had about a 52% adult audience, and what that meant was that all
the things that they were trying to sell to kids they were being sold to people who weren't going to buy
them."
The process of building the show only gave him more confidence in his storytelling and
screenwriting talents. For Ben, working in televis;on was a goal that he had wanted toaccomplish since
he was a child. The Tick's creator also stated "For discipline, for the sense that you can sort of step
onto the cultural stage and get something to stick there. These things, these forms of encouragement and even refinement of skill, they're really, really important. In the same breath, though. they all happened very, very early for me, and was kind of head-spinning. like, when I got out of the pressure cooker of doing that for two years, I skidded around for a while, because I think I still had to absorb and assimiLate
all the newness anrl all that stuff. I mean, I was 24 when I had a show, 25 when [ had a toy line. It was
starting to blow my mind a little bit that there were people in China, what have you, Taiwan, I'm not
sure now, that were assembling the absurd little plastic parts of my daydream for mass consumption.
That was a lot to kind of absorb, so I went through moments, of great arrogance and moments of
complete emptiness. Put that in your little book! [laughs]" (We heart you Ben!)
With the animated series over, Edlund worked behind-the-scenes on various features and
took some personal time. Not too long after, major film director Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black, The
Addams Family) was extremely interested into bringing a live-action Tick television show to the air.
Going in, Edlund was a little hesitant that television might want to change the design of the Tick character because "you'd have to think in terms of CGI or something in order to really present the deformities of the Tick's cranium, the lantern-ness of his jaw" When Edlund ffnally met Sonnenfeld, he was
reassured that his vision for a live-action Tick could work with the director's strong sense of crisp visuals and style.
Another important attraction was that Ben was going to be brought into live-action television and was
an integral member of this production. Sonnenfeld felt it was important to have the character's creator
be a part of developing the show since Tick originated from him. For this reason, Ben was asked to
write the pilot episode.
For Edlund, the hardest (haracter to visualiz! three-dimensionally was Tick. During
production it became apparent that the mask needed to be altered to allow the actor to emote
and show expressions. When it came to casting. the perfect actor to fill The Tick's blue suit needed to
be someone that possessed strength, charisma, an authoritative voice and that subtle sense of humor-
this was the part that Patrick Warburton was born to play! The prolific popular actor from Seinfeld
and his current show Rules of Engagement, is atso an instantly recognizable voice from his work on
Venture Bros. and other popular cartoons. About his casting as the insect defender. Warburton
recalled, unfortunately for me, Barry Sonnenfeld was producing the show, and although we hadn't
worked together at that point, that is was his inspiration. So we sat down and had a nice meeting or two and he'd already decided that I was to play The Tick. (Pending a near plane crash, I wonder if that was at Camarillo Airforce Airport? Ben had to meet Patrick and Barry had to make The Tick TV) Which is great, 'cause I love The Tick, and whenever you have to go in and read for something that you absolutely love, personally with me, I'll jeopardize it, you know? Something gets in the way."
After the four-million-dollar pilot was filmed, there was long time gap between that and the
filming of subsequent installments. Edlund commented, "That was an issue that came a problem,
because by the time they saw the pilot, they just really didn't know what they had bought. They really
didn't understand superheroes enough to see that there was sensible humor in superheroes. Almost
from the beginning, there would be an endless struggle between the show's five producers and the FOX
Network bosses over what exactly the show was about. Also, making the show was extremely costly Ice
a lot of the show's budget was eaten up before shooting could even start. The behind-the-scenes drama
made it difficult locate a comfortable budget for filming a half-hour, rubber-costume adventure
extravaganza.
While the writers of the show were focused on making e show as bold and absurd as the
cartoons, the network Inted something closest to Seinfeid with capes." All roughout filming of the
series, Edlund and his crew were reminded that budget limited action scenes, over-the-top gizmos, or
fancy melees. Edlund commented, "There were spider cars and rooftop battles and really a lot of sh*t
that just could not be done. But our eyes were too big for our fiscal stomachs, and we could see a lot of
suffering, I think, in the course of that show, because we just didn't have the optimum design for it.
That's just about what you can actually get on camera. The whether issues were that its sensibility
hadn't really been defined and it was being pulled in several directions at once. So whatever works on
that show kind of works despite those somewhat daunting conditions." It seems that money is the
factor, and that's paramount to a network," expressed Warburton. "I mean, even when WE had done
the episodes. The critics loved the shows and it was anticipated when those ini the upper suits at FOX
were Looking at the figures saying tms is a pretty exorbitantly expensive!' show, because it was a half-hour show that was shot single-camera, so that show cost as much as an hour show to make.
That year with Joe Millionaire, that came out aIId they were making a fortune on reality
shows which cost nothing to produce. So they did everything they could to kill The Tick, and that was
sad because all of us that were part of it really wanted to do it. But it just was not to be." After the
pilot was shot, Larry Charles (one of the instrumental writers of Seinfeld and the director of Borat)
was brought into the fold to bring his comedy touch and television experience to the series. Because of
his participation. the network also started to market the show as being "from one of the creators of
Seinfeld." As soon as he arrived, the-writer/director observed that the show's production ~d hit
some potholes. Charles said, "They had done the pilot and, you know, I knew The Tick from the
cartoon and from the comic books, and I was a big fan of it and they did the pilot. Barry Sonnenfeld
directed the pilot and it was a very expensive pilot and they said it cost like four million dollars to do
the pilot, which is a lot of money for a half-hour pilot, and they said great, now make a series. And of course they had no idea how to make a series With the very little money that would in any way resemble the four-million dollar pilot directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. So of course, they managed to find me and
made that my problem. I came in, I talked to Ben [Edlund) I talked to Barry Josephson who was one of the
producers at the ti~, and we all had similar sensibilities about it and I got involved."
The show was slated to air on Thursday night, against Survivor and Friends, with a then-faltering
Family Guy as a lead-in. With that competition it never had a chance, nor was it heavily promoted on
the network. After the second episode. the show aired allover the map. It became apparent that the
network was struggling to find a time slot that worked for the series. All of these things made it hard
for viewership to build since the audience probably had a tough time discovering it.
Although Sonnenfeld had a vision for the show in establishing its look, other obligations
(like filming his Big Trouble in Little China) at the height of his career kept him preoccupied. He
could not confront network executives on a day-to-day basis. His involvement and name got the show rolling, but with circumstances changing, the network began to display less faith in the series. Further complicating matters, each subsequent episode also had a budget orbiting around one million dollars. Warburton mentions, "I don't know if Barry could have done more. God love him, he did everything he could, but when you're butting heads against the network... You know, too, The Tick was also, it was a product of Sony, Columbia and FOX, and in the midst of that, one of those studios, actually the TV department was going away. I believe it was Columbia. It got very complicated and nobody knew who really even owned it at that point. Above and beyond all of that, it was very, very expensive. We were dead in the water. We had the potential to make a fun show. We do have nine fun episodes, but really, we were just figuring out how to make this show work. A show as complex as The Tick, it's going to take some time to really get in tune and figure out what you can do, what you can get away with, how you can push the boundaries, where you can take your jabs and all that fun stuff. We were just figuring it all out and that was it. Despite it all, the results of the nine episodes filmed was utter magic. Rather than counting
on big budget effects and enormous sets, the series writers found humor in the absurdity I of just being
a superhero in the real world. Everyday trivialities were a bit more amplified when you had someone
dressed in an, extravagant costume. All of a sudden the most mundane scenarios could literally
become moments of pure hilarity (and all accomplished without a laugh track). To a degree, lessening
the big screen aesthetics that Sonnenfeld put into the pilot allowed the characters and comedy to really
stand out. Edlund, Charles, Chris McCulloch (creator of The Venture Bras.) and Other writers were
able to write very ambitious and intelligent work throughout The Ticks short run. For Fox, the entire
combination of circumstances was just too unusual for them to completely figure out how to sell.
Warburton said, "My focus as an actor playing The Tick was just to focus on exactly what it was that I had to do. So a lot of the stuff that was going on peripherally, I didn't even notice. Until the end, then I realized what was happening in the midst of all of it. My job was just to do my job and have fun doing it. Which I did. Yeah, certainly [Tick] lives in his own world. There is that Don Quixote reference in one of the episodes of The Tick when he has that shaving cream moustache and whatnot. So certainly The Tick did have some super-abilities, but at the same time he was one who definitely had delusions of grandeur. At the same time, he's also the most earnest fellow you would ever meet, and a true do-gooder. But he's huge and fun and absurd-it's all about perspective. He had a wonderful perspective on life, and friendship and partnership."
Every superhero has to have friends and allies that he can count on in the inevitable pinch
(or in-between cycles at the launderette). Tick's friends for the most part 'N.ere almost as aloof and
lovable as big blue yonder himself. The cast was nicely held united by the seamless chemistry between
the very witty performances of Nestor Carbonell (as the aspiring mack daddy named Batmanuel), Liz
Vassey (in the guise of Captain Liberty, maybe the only sane hero), and David Burke (as Arthur, the
Tick's truest friend/sidekick and the wind beneath his wing). If the show had continued, Edlund felt
that Arthur's role would have been more developed as the only real adult among the principals. The
Tick creator said, "He probably would had relationships. He was the one who was mostly out of his
costume, where, at the very least, he was sort of the Arthur of the comic books. He almost never really
had his mask on. He had his costume on occasionally. He would have ended up being a real person. He was developing a kind of family life. The episodes I really wanted to see were, like, The Tick goes to the family cookout at Arthur's house, where it's sort of like bringing your same-sex partner to your con-servative family and try and keep everything in check. That's kind of where this show wanted to be, I think, is just like social issues, really, with occasionally something absurd and just puncture that more or less just mundane sphere. We were just like one foot too deeply in the cartoon and another foot being I think bitten off at the stump by money and corporate indifference."
"I just always thought that David (Burke) was perfect as Arthur," said Patrick Warburton about his co-star. "He did a fantastic job. Just recently I watched some of the shows again, I hadn't seen them in a long time, and I was reminded how perfect an actor David was. I really thought that he nailed that He had such a likeable quality and there's something very real about his performance, and unquestioned and 100 percent committed to Arthur, that you really believe him as. Arthur. I felt that as an actor he brought more to that role than could have potentially been the case. An actor could have stepped into that role and you very much would have gotten a sense that there I was a guy playing Arthur. And with David, you just totally believed him as Arthur-you really believed it."
Playing Tick was no easy task for the active performer, who had to wear these insane $250,000 suits. They became only increasingly warmer and more uncomfortable under the set lights. There were subtle alterations made to the form-fitting suit after the pilot, as the seamless blue outfit was notoriously difficult for mobility and consumed buckets of time to wear. Yet for the good-natured Warburton, it remains one his favorite roles. He chimed, "I [ooked at it as an honor to play The Tick. I mean, The Tick is such a wonderful character. Did I enjoy wearing that rubber suit? I had to wear that rubber suit ten, twelve hours a day and you'd get kind of claustrophobic and miserable in that thing. I would have worn that suit for years if I'd had the opportunity. If that's the cross I've got to bear, then so be it. I loved being The Tick, I wanted to do that show and I had so much fun, it was so clever and just so well conceived."
The actor also said, "I didn't see The Tick as being one-dimensional because there were
times that his anger might get to him or his frustration got to him or he was depressed, he was
exuberant about something, and elated. He really kind of had the emotions of a child. Emotionally he
could change just like that and almost go from tremendous joy to tears because he was
labile like a child.
"What I loved about the [Tick] character." said Larry Charles, "was the ambiguity of it. You really did not know if The Tick was a madman or if he really was from somewhere else, or whether that was a costume or that was him. There were so many interestingly unanswered questions about him that I thought that it was kind of a meditation on consciousness in a way, like, "What is real?', and I love that idea. I thought that it was a great post-modern deconstruction of a superhero. Which of course turned out to be its downfall when it finally came out, because it came out just after September 11th and I don't think the country was really ready for the deconstruction of a superhero at that time. they were sort of more craving a real superhero, you know?"
When the pilot aired on November 8, 2001, the weight of the tragic events of September 11
was a heavy burden. Network television had a hard time hitting viewers With the right tone in their
programming. The show just got lost in the shuffle. If Tick failed, it wasn't because of Lack of hard
work-cast and crew gave it their all by working 14-hour days, six days a week. They never had a
chance to keep it steady. Today, those in need of a good laugh can count on The Tick: The Entire
Series! DVD to deliver a unique brand of the funny.
Sometimes after the series ended, there were rumors and rumblings about the potential for a Tick full-length motion picture. The Tick film is something that Ben Edlund thinks about from time to time. Patrick Warburton stated, "Yeah. I know that Barry would like to make a Tick movie. He's talked about it, you know. So maybe they'll make a Tick movie one of these days, and maybe, maybe I'll be the lucky guy to play The Tick. Maybe I won't. Things change, perceptions change and maybe I'm not the right guy, but I had fun doing the TV show and I know we just scratched the surface with that. It'd be great to do a Tick movie and have a real budget, 'cause he's the greatest superhero of all time. If they do that, I hope I get a shot at it, but if I don't, I understand. I know how this business works."
Looking back, Larry Charles mentioned, "The show could have definitely Lasted for a long time, yes, I mean, it had... Of course, there was so much ambiguity in the characters and so much conflict both within the characters and amongst the characters, that I felt it stilI had tremendous potential to go on for a long time. Because all the characters had sort of... all multi-dimensional characters, you know, they were cartoon characters. Sort of underground cartoon characters and they all had tremendous inner conflict and turmoil and angst and philosophical issues, and so I thought, yeah, this is a show we can explore a lot of interesting themes and the characters could continue to expand."
Danger Ted, with his completely unerring misunderstanding of both scale and perspective, playing with his Auntie Elizabeth's and Uncle Andrew's Christmas decorations. Dee was at home preparing for the seasonal onslaught. DT & Dee wish all their readers a Merry Christmas.
Photo © George Crawford.
www.listengo.com/n.php?c=7236087&s=Strawberry+Fields+... beatles
Tema: Strawberry Fields Forever
Intérprete: The Beatles
No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low.
That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right.
That is I think it's not too bad.
Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.
Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.
Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.
Always know sometimes think it's me, but you know I know and it's a dream.
I think I know of thee, ah yes, but it's all wrong.
That is I think I disagree.
Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.
Strawberry Fields forever.
Strawberry Fields forever.
"Paris, May 15, 1908: After several incidents with robbers and uninvited visitors, several jewellers and hotels have decided to use guardian robots for their and their guests' safety. Please cooperate with the guardians in order to avoid misunderstandings."
A series of AI-generated pictures of guardian robots, in different art styles.
To be continued.
Pictures made with Midjourney.
I'm always happy to accept invites to groups as long as I can see their content. Should I see "this group is not available to you", my pictures won't be made available to that group. Thanks for your understanding.
Some days I wake up in the middle of night … I feel as if someone is calling me … to go somewhere .. but the voices fade away. Dreams of vocal misunderstandings and poetic verses that make no sense at all.. I take a sleeping pill to forget and sleep .. but alas the voices grow stronger in a pitch dark abyss in my mind. Who is out there ; what do they want .. I know that I am here ; but where are they? I stand in front of a vintage lantern my father gave me years ago…. And I say … I will light the way.. if you can help me understand those words that you say….
Kodak Film ; Rebel Cannon . 35MM ; BULB SETTING - Old Fashion Light Painting :)
BL Add MS 62925
Date c 1260
Title Psalter, Use of Sarum ('The Rutland Psalter')
Content Contents: ff. 1r-6v: Calendar, use of Sarum, with the feasts for each month in red, blue and gold, with small roundels of the labours of the month and the zodiac symbols.ff. 7r-v: Volvelle compass, 15th century insertion.ff. 8v-143r: Psalter, Use of Sarum.ff. 143r-155v: Canticles and Athanasian Creed.ff. 155v-159v: Litany and prayers to various saints.ff. 160r-168r: Office of the Dead.ff. 169r-190v: Added prayers and devotions.Decoration:The decoration in this volume is the work of four major artists and their assistants (see Morgan, ‘The Artists of the Rutland Psalter’, 1987). 7 full-page or partial-page miniatures in gold and colours (ff. 8v, 29r, 43r, 55r, 83v, 97v, 112v), 8 historiated initials (ff. 29v, 43v, 55v, 56r, 68v, 84r, 98r, 99v), and 1 major decorated initial (f. 113r). 24 calendar roundels of the signs of the zodiac and labours of the month (ff. 1r-6v). Diagram, volvelle compass (f. 7r). Minor initials, inhabited and decorated, and extensive bas-de-page figural scenes with men, grotesques, demons, animals, birds, dragons, and foliage; some scenes taken from bestiaries and the Marvels of the East. Partial borders, some with hybrids and grotesques, and line-fillers, some fully painted. Some decoration is unfinished (e.g. f. 28v, at the end of Psalm 25), and f. 68r, which is blank, was probably intended to contain a miniature preceding Psalm 68.Miniatures and major initials:f. 7r: Volvelle compass, 15th century insertion.f. 8v: full-page historiated initial ‘B’(eatus) of King David harping, and the Judgement of Solomon, amidst men in combat astride lions and dragons, with roundels containing scenes from Creation and men in combat, at the beginning of Psalm 1, with a curtain above.f. 29r: full-page miniature of the Anointing and Crowning of King David, with Christ above flanked by the Sun (marked as a Host) and Moon, before Psalm 26; pasted in on a separate piece of parchment. f. 29v: historiated initial ‘D’(ominus) of Christ healing the blind man, at the beginning of Psalm 26.f. 43r: full-page miniature of Balaam, riding an ass, meeting the Angel wielding a sword, before Psalm 38, with a curtain above. f. 43v: historiated initial ‘D’(ixi) of King David pointing to his mouth, with a youth pointing upwards, at the beginning of Psalm 38.f. 55r: full-page miniature of Saul threatening King David, before Psalm 51, with a curtain above.f. 55v: historiated initial ‘Q’(uid) of Saul and Ahimelech as a king about to behead a priest kneeling before an altar (a misunderstanding of Doeg killing Ahimelech), at the beginning of Psalm 51.f. 56r: historiated initial ‘D’(ixit) of King David and the Fool, with God above, at the beginning of Psalm 51.f. 68v: historiated initial ‘S’(alvum) of Christ holding a host, above Jonah being thrown from a boat to the whale below, at the beginning of Psalm 68. f. 83v: three-quarter page miniature of Jacob’s dream of the ladder, before Psalm 80, with a curtain above.f. 84r: historiated initial ‘E’(xultate) of Jacob wrestling with the angel, at the beginning of Psalm 80.f. 97v: half-page miniature of King David playing the organ, accompanied by youths with bellows and hurdy gurdy, before Psalm 97.f. 98r: historiated initial ‘C’(antate) of King David harping, accompanied by musicians, at the beginning of Psalm 97.f. 99v: historiated initial ‘D’(omine) of a king and queen kneeling before an altar, with Christ above with a sword in his mouth, at the beginning of Psalm 101. f. 112v: full-page miniature of Christ in Majesty, surrounded by the four symbols of the Evangelists, before Psalm 109, with a curtain above.f. 113r: illuminated initial ‘D’(ixit), at the beginning of Psalm 109.
Languages Latin
Physical Description
Materials: Parchment codex.
Dimensions: 285 x 205 mm (text space: 185 x 135 mm).
Foliation: ff. 190 (+ 3 foliated parchment flyleaves at the beginning and 2 fragmentary parchment flyleaves at the end; f. i is a paste-down on the inside front cover and f. v is a paste-down on the inside back cover; f. 191 is a fragmentary foliated leaf).
Collation: i6 (f. 7 is a 15th century insertion); ii-xxiii8; xxiv8-2 (lacking leaves 7 & 8).
Script: Gothic (textualis quadrata).
Binding: Pre-1600 (between 1515 and 1530) blind-stamped binding with an armorial panel, gold-tooled spine, and two clasps (some of the original metalwork has been replaced and is boxed with the manuscript).
Ownership Origin: England (London?).The family of Edmund de Lacy, second Earl of Lincoln (b. c. 1230, d. 1258): his obit added to the calendar for 24 May (f. 3r). Richard de Talbot, second Baron Talbot, of Irchingfield and Goodrich (b. c. 1306, d. 1356): his obit, 'Obitus dni Ric Talebot dni de Iirchenfeld et castri godr anno dni mccclvi', now erased, added to the calendar for 22 October (f. 5v). 'Umfrehay' with motto 'verray et secrete', inscribed between 1400 and 1499 (f. v and f. 168r, under erasure). William Vaux (b. c. 1410, d. 1460), Sheriff of Northamptonshire (1436) and MP for Northamptonshire (1442): his obit in added to the calendar for 10 November (f. 6r). Henry Gairstang (d. 1464): his obit added to the calendar for 12 September (f. 5r).John Hawghe, Justice of the Common Pleas (d. 1488/9): his obit added to the calendar for 14 March (f. 2r).John Clifton, Prior of Reading Abbey between 1486 and 1490: ex libris donation inscription, under erasure: ‘Iste liber est dono dompni Johannis Clifton prioris venerabilis monasterii de Radyng quem fieri alienaverit vel de eo fraudem fecerit anathema sit’ (f. iv verso). The Clunaic Abbey of Reading, Reading, Berkshire: given to the Abbey by John Clifton, 1490.Ethelbert Burdet, canon of Lincoln, 1565: his inscription, dated 2 October 1587 (f. ii recto). Bossewell (?): 17th century inscription (f. v). Waren (?): 17th century inscription (f. v).John Henry Manners, fifth Duke of Rutland (b. 1778, d. 1857): manuscript catalogue of Belvoir Castle Library 1825, pressmark 'C. 6. 5' (f. i). Purchased by the British Library from the trustees of the ninth Duke of Rutland's estate, through Christies, with the assistance of the National Art Collections Fund, the Friends of the National Libraries, the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the G. B. Shaw Fund, in December 1983.
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Claire Donovan, The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (London, British Library, 1991), p. 203. no. 24.
Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992), pl. 6.
Janet Backhouse, The Illuminated Page: Ten Centuries of Manuscript Painting in the British Library (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), no. 64.
Alan Coates, English Medieval Books: The Reading Abbey Collections from Foundation to Dispersal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 161 no. 94.
John Higgitt, The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 81, 154.
Lucy Freeman Sandler, ‘The Images of Words in English Gothic Psalters’, in Studies in the Illustration of the Psalter, ed. by Brendan Cassidy and Rosemary Muir Wright (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 2000), pp. 67-86 (p. 76, 77).
Alixe Bovey, Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts (London: British Library, 2002) p. 51, fig. 43.
Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), fig. 17, 55, 59.
Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pl. 211.
F. O. Büttner, ‘Der illuminierte Psalter im Westen’, in The Illuminated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of its Images, ed. by F. O. Büttner, (Belgium: Brepols, 2004), pp. 1-106 (pp. 17, 20).
Alison Stones, 'The Full-Page Miniatures of the Psalter-Hours New York, PML, ms M.729: Progamme and Patron', in The Illuminated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of its Images, ed. by F. O. Büttner, (Belgium: Brepols, 2004), pp. 281-307 (p. 297, no. 19).
The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West, ed. by Paul Binski and Stella Panayotova (London: Harvey Miller, 2005), p. 112.
Nigel Morgan, 'The Trinity Apocalypse: Style, Dating and Place of Production', in The Trinity Apocalypse (Trinity College Cambridge, MS R.16.2) (London: British Library, 2005), pp. 23-43 (pp. 26, 28, 30, figs 22-23).
Treasures of the British Library, ed. by Nicolas Barker and others (London: British Library, 2005), p. 261.
Laura Kendrick, ‘Making Sense of Marginalized Images in Manuscripts and Religious Architecture’, in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. by Conrad Rudolph (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 286-88, fig. 13-2.
Asa Simon Mittman, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (New York: Routledge, 2006), fig. 5.5.
Deirdre Jackson, Marvellous to Behold: Miracles in Medieval Manuscripts (London: British Library, 2007), pl. 26.
Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle, Bible Manuscripts (London: British Library, 2007), p. 109, fig. 96.
Margaret Scott, Medieval Dress & Fashion (London: British Library, 2007), pl. 36.
Lucy Freeman Sandler, Studies in Manuscript Illumination, 1200-1400 (London: Pindar Press, 2008).
Nicholas Vincent, 'The Great Lost Library of England's Medieval Kings' in~1000 Years of Royal Books and Manuscripts~, ed. by Kathleen Doyle and Scot McKendrick (London: The British Library, 2013), pp. 73-112 (pp. 98, 111).
www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=add_ms_62925
www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-rutland-psalter
blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/05/marginali-yeah-t...
I can hardly think of what to say. Today, all day, I have had in my heart such sadness about the tragedy at Virginia Tech. I have had in my heart the families and friends of those who were killed and of the killer. I cannot make sense of it. Who ever can?
Every time something like this happens -- everytime we make war in any way, on each other, every time we destroy the people and places we love, out of hatred, anger, mental illness, isolation, misunderstanding, confusion or loneliness, we rip out a piece of the world; we create a gaping hole where once there was life and love and beauty. Every time someone lashes out with the kind of numbing rage that young man must have felt, there is cast a wide net of deep grief and loss.
The pain affects every single being on this planet, though the loss is felt more acutely by the familes whose loved ones are dead.... it changes the fabric of our society. It affects our ability to move through our lives with faith and trust.
How will we respond?
****************
BOX DATE: None
APPROXIMATE RELEASE DATE: 2012
MANUFACTURER: Harbor Trade
DOLLS IN PACK: "Rapunzel;" "Belle;" "Snow White;" "Cinderella;" "Ariel;" "Sleeping Beauty"
BODY TYPE: no date; Twist 'n Turn waist; straight arms; bend & snap legs
HEAD MOLD: no date; pierced ears
IMPORTANT NOTES: Harbor Trade released many variations of this Fairy Tale Princess pack. There were dolls with different colored hair and facial screenings packaged as random princesses.
PERSONAL FUN FACT: This doll was actually a gift from a very kind flea market vendor. "Ken Suitcase lot Guy" as we dubbed him, has sold my sister and I many dolls over the past few years (probably since around 2012 or 2013). We regularly purchase dolls that he has out for sale, and we always love how he is willing to sell them for great deals. One weekend in the late summer of 2016, he saw Colleen and me walk by, and showed us this particular doll. From the distance, I could tell that she was a clone, presumably a fairy tale/princess type one. Being that I don't usually collect clone dolls, my sister and I politely declined this doll. Both of us felt bad moment later, because he exclaimed, "She is a gift!" What can I say, sellers usually don't give dolls away (he was very generous, and we felt very bad about the misunderstanding). Anyways, we obviously thanked him graciously. He told us that this poor girl was all by herself, and he figured since we always buy from him, he'd let us have her, since he knew we'd give her a good home (how sweet!). So we took her home and adopted her into our diverse doll family. Even though I used to consider most clone dolls inferior as a child, mostly because the cheap plastic made me feel sick, as an adult, I've learned that all dolls have something to offer, if I am willing to give them the chance, and I treat them with respect. So we cleaned this lady up, along with my second 1988 Super Star Barbie who I acquired that day. I fixed up her dress, made her a handmade necklace and a headband, and styled her hair. Colleen and I jokingly started calling her "Snow Ella" because she looks like Snow White wearing Cindy's dress. The name sort of stuck, so that is her official name now. I really love this doll, and I will always think of the seller's generosity when I look at her (I just hope he isn't still offended by the misunderstanding we had). She is a very nice quality doll, and has a highly detailed facial screening, despite the clone label.
Some of the people from the 2011 White Eagle Pow-Wow at Antique Acres near Waukee, Iowa. The gathering is named for Ralph Moisa aka White Eagle, a young Native American who lost his life in 1995 while heroically rescuing a Red Tail Hawk.
In 2000, Ralph's parents organized the first Multicultural Pow Wow in memory of their son and his dream to break down the walls of misunderstanding and to mend the "Sacred Hoop".
More of my photos from the 2011 White Eagle Pow-Wow:
www.flickr.com/photos/don3rdse/sets/72157627417722289/
Des Moines Flickr Friend photos from the 2011 event:
www.flickr.com/groups/1014797@N22/pool/
Photos from the 2010 White Eagle Pow-Wow:
Several years ago while on a trip to Shanghai, China for business, I had the opportunity to do some sight-seeing and wanted to visit a real Buddhist temple. Most temples in the city had long ago been converted to tourism, selling loads of merchandise manufactured for those who wanted to take home a piece of China without really knowing they were being duped. The brightly painted lit up sites were beautiful yes, but not authentic. So after learning of a place an hours drive from my hotel, I set out with my camera to take in a piece of Chinese history.
The Longhua Temple is the largest and oldest temple in Shanghai, built in 242 AD. Out front sits a genuine pagoda. Beyond the gated walls was a beautiful courtyard with a huge bronze bell. Unfortunately, I had arrived too late in the day for the bell ringing ceremony. There were several seperate buildings which I'm sure had special meaning as it was arranged very formally. Inside each one was a beautiful scene. I tried to photograph each one, being careful not to disturb anyone. There were a few people from the community there in the midst of their worship and I felt a bit strange and intrusive hovering with my camera. I'm a Christian so I felt no compusion to join them, but I can respect that I wouldn't want someone curiously snapping photos of me in my church!
In one of the buildings was a huge gold statue surrounded by flowers. It was gorgeous, as were the contents of each one of the buildings. But on the center of this statue was something I was shocked to see. It was a Nazi Swastika! It took me a few seconds before I realized that surely this has a different meaning here...and I said nothing to anyone about it for fear I would reveal my ignorance.
When I returned to my hotel I did some research and found out that the swastika symbol is common in other cultures and that it does indeed have a peaceful meaning. It's only since Hitler used it has it held a stigma to those in the west. In most eastern cultures, and many other religions, it's used as a symbol for luck, well being, balance and harmony.
This is the photo I took of it that day. It's an older camera so the qulity isn't great, but you can clearly make out the symbol.
Please visit this place if you're ever there. It's got great historical significance and well worth the commute. And I hope that you found this as interesting as I did and learned something as well.
Copyright © 2013 by Ian J MacDonald. Permission required for any use. All rights reserved
Pen and ink on paper
Archeology and ancient sources suggest that the ancient Celts revered certain natural places. These were perhaps regarded as places that connected the living world to that of gods, the underworld, the dead, or were places with healing properties such as hot springs.
I have been fascinated by this subject for years and have devoured many books about the archeology and culture of these people. However I am also always left with a feeling that the artifacts and studies are sterile and out of context. This isn't to imply that there is anything missing in modern archeology, in fact the goal is to reconstruct and understand the past as fully as possible. Barry Cunliffe, in his books about the ancient Celts suggests that the they didn't make art for art's sake. In "The Ancient Celts" he shows a pair of forged fire dogs with bull's heads on them and profoundly relates that this imagery was not merely artistic but had meaning to them that was as obvious as modern religious symbols would mean to us - the crucifix for example. I can imagine archeologists thousands of years in the future unearthing a richly adorned crucifix, without an image of Christ on it and concluding that it is an artistic pair of crossed sticks - but having no idea of the extensive body of meaning implied by that crucifix. This is what I mean when I say the artifacts seem sterile and out of context.
In these pictures I am attempting to mentally recreate their world and see it as much as is possible in the eyes of the ancient people. This is naturally impossible since as time marches on our knowledge and control of the world has grown far beyond what they could have ever imagined. Like a genie, new knowledge cannot be un-discovered, as many people wish could happen.
The world in pre-Roman and pre-Christian eras was a small, uncertain and a violent place. Diseases, disasters, invading bands and armies came seemingly out of nowhere and struck ferociously. Knowledge has provided us an unparallelled amount of certainty in our lives, but until recently a spate of bad weather could mean mass starvation - something that still occurs in places in the modern world. I religions probably arise formed from our insatiable desire to connect events with reason. Coupled with the ability to have abstract thought this powerful adaptation has made humans one of the most powerful forces on earth.
Religions provided some explanation and feeling of control over the world. Some authors have noted connections between ancient Indo-European religions originating in India and Iran, that are often nowadays associated with Yoga and meditation. I often see the Gundestrup cauldron held up as an example as their is a horned deity, similar to depictions of Cunernos,sitting in the lotus position, possibly meditating and holding a torc and snake - a symbol also associated with Eastern religions. It seems plausible to me that many tenets of European religions could have originated from ancient Indo-European society, but I hesitate to take this comparison too far as meditation and quiet introspection are features of many religions including Christianity. Christianity similarly contains elements of many ancient Pagan religions but it is only murky shadows of them. Besides we really have no firsthand description of even the most basic tenets of their religions, only reconstructions based on archeology and some ancient writings which contain considerable amounts of bias and misunderstanding. I believe the local conditions and experiences shaped their religions which would account for the huge variety of deities that have been uncovered through archeology.
As a reflection of the world around them, Celtic deities appear to be fearsome beings with fickle personalities. We'll never know for sure, but forgiveness and fairness do not seem to be their main attributes. A personal relationship with the deities also does not appear to be likely either. These were deities that affected the world and meted out harsh retribution for...tbc
Care must be used when using the word "natural" as it comes loaded with modern implications. Natural means things that occurred naturally such springs, bogs water bodies, mountains, caves etc... In modern parlance "natural" means closer to the land, organic, environmentally aware and so on. This modern meaning of natural cannot be applied to the ancient Celts as the whole world was "natural" and everyone was more connected to the land and weather and the cycles of nature as a means of survival. There was no other alternative to that world. Imposing the modern meaning on them reduces them to the stereotypical "noble savage" or barbarians just as the ancient Roman writers often did intentionally (e.g. Caesar ) or not (e.g. Pliny and Tacitus).
In these pictures I have tried to get into the head of the ancient Celts and depict their holy places without relying on the cliches, stereotypes, and misinformation - e.g. Stonehenges and scrolling knot work, white-robed druids praying to the sun etc... I imagine that sacred places evolved for reasons, perhaps long lost to the ancient Celts. I also envision that sacred places were subtle and perhaps not noticeable until you were on top of them. A foreigner might never recognize them.
I don't believe we can ever see the world as ancient people did, or anyone in the past for that matter. Knowledge is like a genie - once it is out it cannot be put back and the world cannot be experienced as it was before, no matter how hard one tries. Ancient writers have described "fearsome" wooden idols standing in dark groves. Ancient writers also seemed to highlight the most lurid aspects of these ancient religions, although all societies practiced animal and human sacrifice. The Romans describe the Celts ...and all barbarians....as spooky and superstitious but Romans were no less spooky or superstitious. They were the conquerors wrote the history, and found their Celtic superstitions to be strange and creepy and theirs moral and right.
Well. Healing good. Will probably go ride Biscuits this weekend.
But........ I've been getting a lot.... Yes ... A lot of this talk about somehow I am naughty and mischievous and scheming flirty and .......
I think people just have the wrong idea of me.
Well I'm a quiet, shy humble, mouse of a person..... Sometimes scared of my on shadow fiddley dee.
And I cry myself to rest every night thinking that I might have maybe been misunderstood or something.
The world is an oyster. My problem is, no pearls in mine...
Nope..... Just misunderstanding.
At least that's my version
BELGIO RESTAURO ARCHITETTURA: Agnello mistico di van Eyck, la restauratrice: “sono sorti equivoci sul restauro per colpa dei tweet stupidi”. Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020), THE NYT (27/01/2020) & THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
1). Museo delle Belle Arti di Gand - Agnello mistico di van Eyck, la restauratrice: “sono sorti equivoci sul restauro per colpa dei tweet stupidi.” Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020).
Usa parole piuttosto pesanti la storica dell’arte Hélène Dubois, a capo del progetto di restauro del Polittico dell’Agnello mistico di Hubert (? - Gent, 1426) e Jan van Eyck (Maaseik, 1390 circa - Bruges, 1441), dipinto nel 1432 e conservato nella Cattedrale di San Bavone a Gent (Belgio), al momento in restauro (tornerà visibile al pubblico nella primavera 2020). Dubois se la prende con tanti di coloro che hanno commentato sui social gli esiti dell’intervento: oggetto del dibattito è stato il muso dell’agnello, che a seguito della rimozione delle ridipinture cinquecentesche è stato riportato al suo stato attuale. Il punto della questione sta nel fatto che l’anonimo pittore che coprì l’originale nel Cinquecento diede un aspetto molto più naturale all’agnello, coprendo quello realizzato da Jan van Eyck, che aveva un’apparenza più umana, o secondo altri simile a quella di un cartone animato. E sulla rete si sono diffusi meme in cui l’agnello veniva paragonato a Derek Zoolander, il celebre personaggio di Ben Stiller, un modello famoso perché solito posare facendo la duckface, assumendo dunque una posa che ricorda vagamente il muso del vero agnello di van Eyck.
Ma, al di là delle battute di spirito, in tanti si sono allarmati, perché abituati a un agnello che era sì più realistico, ma non era quello dipinto da van Eyck, ed era, come detto, frutto di interventi successivi (a questi aspetti avevamo dedicato un articolo in cui spiegavamo perché van Eyck aveva dipinto l’agnello in quel modo e provavamo anche a darci una risposta riguardo al perché, nel Cinquecento, si decise di donargli un muso più naturalistico. Di conseguenza, l’allarme ha prodotto giudizi negativi sul restauro, soprattutto da parte degli utenti dei social network, contro i quali adesso Dubois se la prende.
In un articolo pubblicato oggi sul New York Times, Dubois, parlando con la giornalista Nina Siegal, commenta la vicenda affermando che “sono stati diffusi molti equivoci per colpa di tweet assolutamente stupidi e fuori contesto”. Quello che vediamo, ha spiegato la studiosa, “è l’originale agnello di van Eyck, che fu ridipinto da qualcun altro in modo da farlo sembrare più simile a un animale, più anatomicamente corretto”. E l’ovino scoperto con il restauro “è quello dipinto secondo le intenzioni di van Eyck. Non è niente di strano: semplicemente, non è quello che le persone erano abituate a vedere e dunque non è quello che si aspettavano”.
Il lavoro eseguito per riportare l’agnello alla luce è durato due settimane. E il risultato finale, per gli studiosi, non è stato per niente sorprendente. “Van Eyck non è stato il primo pittore a dipingere un agnello in quel modo”, sostiene Dubois. “Abbiamo moltissimi esempi dall’alto Medioevo e dalla tarda antichità, inclusi anche mosaici romani, dove gli agnelli sono rappresentati con questi grandi occhi inseriti frontalmente, che guardano l’osservatore affinché sia chiaro che quello che stiamo vedendo è l’agnello di Dio”. Ovviamente, continua Dubois, “l’agnello è molto più intenso di come me l’aspettavo, e mi ha davvero impressionata. Ma è perché prima eri abituato a questo agnello contenuto e passivo e adesso devi confrontarlo con questa fortissima visione del simbolo religioso di Cristo sacrificato sull’altare. Qui, Cristo è consapevole del suo sacrificio”.
Dubois ha poi aggiunto che non fu soltanto l’agnello a essere ridipinto nel Cinquecento: gli interventi riguardarono anche “i panneggi, la porzione sommitale del paesaggio, il cielo, e la veduta della città. Inoltre, sul retro degli scomparti laterali, fu ridipinto quasi il 70% della superficie”. Le ridipinture del retro, peraltro, si contraddistinguono per il fatto che si trattò di un lavoro, afferma ancora la studiosa, “condotto in maniera estremamente attenta, fatto in modo tale che tutti i contorni delle figure sono stati rispettati e la maggior parte dei colori riprodotta con pigmenti di altissima qualità”.
Nell’immagine: a sinistra il muso dell’agnello con le ridipinture del 1550, a destra quello dipinto dai van Eyck, scoperto a seguito del restauro.
Fonte / source:
-- Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020).
www.finestresullarte.info/flash-news/5729n_agnello-mistic...
2). Up Close, There’s More to the Ghent Altarpiece Than the Lamb - After causing a stir on social media, the unveiling of a restored panel kicks off a year celebrating the late-medieval master Jan van Eyck. THE NYT (27/01/2020).
GHENT, Belgium — Hélène Dubois was frustrated.
It was Friday morning, just hours before she was set to reveal the $2.4 million, multiyear restoration she had led on panels of one of the world’s great artistic treasures: “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” also known as the Ghent Altarpiece.
But the lamb’s “new” face had already been seen by thousands, online. In the previous 48 hours, a side-by-side of the panel before and after restoration had gone viral on Twitter, with Smithsonian Magazine calling the new lamb “alarmingly humanoid” and users comparing it to the pouting fashionista Derek Zoolander.
“A lot of misunderstandings have been propagated by absolutely stupid tweets taken completely out of context,” Ms. Dubois said as she opened the secure chamber at St. Bavo’s Cathedral that held the altarpiece.
Inside, displayed in a huge glass vitrine, was the nearly 600-year-old masterpiece by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, its details defined and its colors vibrant and joyful, as they must have been when it was painted. The massive work, created from 20 paintings on the front and back of 12 panels, is an astounding work of art. The lamb’s face, at the center of the largest panel on the front, is no bigger than a walnut.
“You see how small it is?” Ms. Dubois said. The changes to the lamb's face were indeed quite substantial, she added.
“This is the original sheep of van Eyck, which was painted over by someone else to make it look like a passive animal, and more anatomically correct,” she said. “But this is what van Eyck’s intention was. It’s nothing bizarre; it’s just not what people are used to looking at and perhaps do not expect.”
The unveiling of the lamb panel was the first event in what is being called here “The Year of Van Eyck,” and the return of the newly restored central panel to the cathedral is accompanied by a landmark exhibition at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts called “Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution,” which opens Feb. 1 and runs through April 30. The show features 13 original van Eyck paintings — more than half of the 22 extant known works — shown alongside 100 artworks by contemporaries from the late Middle Ages.
The restored exterior panels, including ones portraying Adam and Eve, will be separated into pairs and presented in the museum, next to similar or contrasting works by other artists of the period, like Fra Angelico and Masaccio. Most of the altarpiece’s front, including the “Mystic Lamb” panel and the unrestored top panels, will remain in the cathedral. (One of the original lower panels, known as the “Righteous Judges” panel, was stolen and continues to be missing; it is represented by a copy.)
“The last time two panels of the altarpiece, Adam and Eve, were shown in a museum was in 1902,” Frederica van Dam, a co-curator of the exhibition, said. “When they depart back to the cathedral, you’ll have this distance again. To have an exhibition where you can see them so close is so extraordinary, to be able to see all the wonderful details.”
It’s the details that may stir the most discussion, as shown already by the recent social media excitement. The restoration of the altarpiece, which began with a study of the painting by a consortium of international experts in 2012, has revealed that a substantial amount of it was reworked in the 16th century, about 120 years after it was originally painted.
“Basically, we have been looking at a masterpiece by someone else,” Ms. van Dam said in an interview at the museum.
The Ghent altarpiece was commissioned for a private chapel in St. Bavo’s Cathedral around 1420. Although there is still debate among scholars as to its precise origins, the current consensus is that it was conceived and designed by Hubert van Eyck, who died in 1426, and completed by his younger brother, Jan van Eyck, by 1432. Both painters worked in a studio with students, and so support probably came from other painters, too.
Ms. Dubois, the restorer, said that at some point in the 1500s another painter, or perhaps a group of painters, decided that it needed a reworking. They may have wanted to change the painting for theological reasons — this was, after all, the middle of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church was rewriting its doctrines at the Council of Trent — or because painting styles had changed.
The whole painting was redone, she said, “not only the lamb but all the draperies, the top part of the landscape, the sky and the city view, and on the reverse of the wings, about 70 percent was overpainted.”
She added: “What is peculiar about this one is that it was extremely carefully done so that all the contours of the figures were respected and most of the colors were reproduced with very high-quality pigments. It was not a botched job.”
But luckily, restorers discovered that there was also a very thick layer of varnish between the original painting and the newer version, which made it relatively easy for them to remove that layer to get back to van Eyck’s work, Ms. Dubois said. The original head of the lamb, for example, was “in very good condition,” she said. “We only had to do a tiny restoration of tiny paint losses.”
Nevertheless, Ms. Dubois said that she and her team had spent about two weeks removing the overpaint from the lamb alone, using a painstakingly meticulous process to remove the pigment.
“He is not the first one who painted the lamb in that way,” Ms. Dubois said. “We have many, many examples from the early Middle Ages and late antiquity, including Roman mosaics, which show the lamb with these very large frontal eyes, gazing at us to make it very identifiable as the Lamb of God.”
Because she could see the original image of the lamb emerging over a span of time, rather than in the instant way people look at side-by-side comparisons on Twitter, she said, she didn’t find it shocking to realize that the eyes were facing forward, and the lamb was far more alert than in the overpainted version.
“Of course, it’s more intense than I expected,” Ms. Dubois said. “It actually moved me. You’re just used to this demure, passive lamb and then you’re confronted with this very strong vision of the religious symbol of Christ being sacrificed on the altar. Here, Christ is aware of his sacrifice.”
Fonte / foto / source:
-- THE NYT (27/01/2020).
www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/arts/design/mystic-lamb-ghent-...
3). A godlike, pounding power': Van Eyck and the Ghent Altarpiece Restored – review. THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
Ghent, Belgium - The stupendous restoration of the altarpiece, and the magnificent exhibition nearby, confirm Van Eyck as a painting colossus. Get yourself to Ghent!
According to the Italian art critic Giorgio Vasari, writing hundreds of miles away and more than a century later, the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck “delighted in alchemy”. As he mixed up compounds by candlelight in a workshop by a canal in Bruges, he hit on the secret of oil painting. There’s no proof of any of this – but as you look at his uncannily perfect paintings in the epochal new survey of his genius at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts, it’s easy to believe he dabbled in magic.
The proof twinkles between the thumb and index finger of Jan de Leeuw, in Van Eyck’s 1436 portrait of this fellow craftsman. De Leeuw was a leading Bruges goldsmith and, as he fixes a sharp, clear gaze straight at you, he holds a ring he has made. It’s as much rivalry as homage. The jeweller’s art is intricate, but painting is something else. The ring glints in dazzles of yellow, catching a beam of light. The goldsmith made a reflective object, but Van Eyck has made the light itself.
Making gold from base metal was the alchemist’s dream. Here – in this show at Ghent Museum of Fine Arts, which accompanies the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece at nearby St Bavo’s Cathedral – Van Eyck makes it from pigments, a trick he performs in ever more spectacular ways like a magician impressing the Duke of Burgundy, for whom he worked as court artist, or doing tricks in the market squares of Bruges and Ghent.
It’s not just gold he can magic into being. In his Annunciation, lent by Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art, the angel Gabriel is bedecked in pearls, rubies and sapphires that are hypnotically solid. The words Gabriel speaks are written in gold in the air. Behind Mary, bottle-glass windows shimmer with light. It’s impossible to resist bending forward to look deeper into the painting’s space. But wait a moment. This is a flat piece of wood with paint on it – not a real room. One thing isn’t really further away than another, it’s all just an illusion.
Van Eyck is a magician all right, and he’s no easier to fathom today than when medieval folk gathered to gawp at his latest impossible creation. One of his favourite feats is to depict stone sculpture, stiller and colder than stone itself – as in his Annunciation Diptych, lent by the Thyssen Museum in Madrid. It works because Van Eyck simulates light hitting the surface of pure white marble and convincingly makes the statues seem three-dimensional, even catching reflections of their far sides in a polished background – and yet, these statues also appear alive. The dove of the holy spirit flies above Mary – but it, too, is stone. Van Eyck is truly showing off his sorcery.
This might all seem like random brilliance, with no guiding beliefs about art and its purpose – except that he left a manifesto for his vision. Van Eyck is thought to have trained as a miniaturist, painting tiny, precise pictures in handwritten manuscripts. You can see, in his portrait of the courtier Baudouin de Lannoy, with his mossy silver stubble over a creased hunk of a face, how he transferred that close eye to portraiture. He was sent on a mission with De Lannoy to portray Isabella of Portugal, so Philip of Burgundy could see his prospective bride – which suggests the court valued him as a kind of photographer before photography. But Van Eyck had grander ideas. You can’t read them in a book. Instead you have to go to St Bavo’s Cathedral to see the Ghent altarpiece.
This mesmerising exhibition celebrates a crucial step in the restoration of the altarpiece, which Van Eyck completed in 1432, six years after his initial collaborator, his brother Hubert, died. Since 2012, the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts has been restoring it, carefully and scientifically, stage by stage. Now the most famous section, the Adoration of the Lamb, has gone back on view after being returned to its original colours and details.
Later re-paintings and mustard-coloured varnish are gone. The acid-blue intensity of the sky and emerald green of the landscape have been set free. Everything is so clear and sharp, now we see it as Van Eyck painted it. The fabulous buildings of his imagined Jerusalem display their geometries, while African and Middle Eastern trees reveal prickles and spikes. Holy processions and angelic hosts gather to revere the Lamb, their faces as wrinkled and characterful as any of his portraits. It’s a painting that pounds with life.
And this is just one part. Meanwhile, other panels have been moved to the exhibition – and these are the true reason to get yourself to Ghent. It can be frustrating to see a “destination” artwork. You book your timed ticket to get a jostled experience of a remote icon. But the Museum of Fine Arts has opened up Ghent’s treasure for a proper look. Adam and Eve, two near life-sized nudes from the altarpiece, are in the show to ogle up close. And they’re stunning. Both have wiry tangles of pubic hair overflowing their fig leaves. These thin, dark filaments float over butter-gold flesh with 3D reality.
It might be a confession. The truth of the human body matters just as much to him as a mystic lamb. The real meaning of the Ghent altarpiece, for its creator, is not religious. It’s about art. Michelangelo would be accused, much later, of glorifying his own art in the Sistine Chapel, instead of God. What Van Eyck does, too, is to declare the freedom of art – and the godlike power of painting. He shows on a stupendous scale that painting can remake worlds. In one panel, a window is open on to a blue, bird-filled sky above a medieval street, where people are chatting as they did 600 years ago. Jan van Eyck has preserved this moment by an act of wizardry.
Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, from 1 February until 30 April.
Fonte / source:
-- THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/29/van-eyck-ghe...
Brimham Moor in North Yorkshire, England the rocks began taking their shape roughly 320 million years ago, when water, grit, and sand washed down from Scotland and Norway to form the land of Yorkshire.
Brimham Rocks is a stunning spectacle on the Moors in North Yorkshire. But what makes these rock formations special? The natural spectacle was created by a river 100million years BEFORE the first dinosaurs walked the earth.
When was the rock idol at Brimham Rocks created?
In 1844, Druidic theories were strong enough for the Worcester Journal to publish a list of "British monuments, commonly called Druidical," to correct misunderstandings, including those by "antiquarian writers of celebrity." The list included the Rock Idol at Brimham Rocks.
According to the Assessor's records, Gordon bought this house in 1986, a few years after I moved in next door. Landlord abandoned my house, I paid a lien for nursing-care off (the woman who built my house went into a County nursing home) & obtained ownership in 1991.
We were good neighbors, no need for a high fence. I considered Gordon a brother, he was a year younger than I. He developed a genetic, degenerative disease, which progressively got worse.
He would grunt & groan really loud. I asked, "why don't U take pain meds"? He said he disliked feeling dizzy from the meds. At night he got relief from playing his piano, drinking one beer and eating a marijuana-laced brownie.
He kept telling me, "I wish I could die." I told him I read an article in the "New York Times" where U can buy pentobarbital at veterinary pharmacies in Mexico (60-miles from home), it's recommended for suicide.
Two months ago, I took a short vacation. Gordon would watch my house & feed the cats whenever I was away. He told me he was going to live with his sister in June & would give the house to his friend, Christian. I told him, "Why go, I'll take U to the store and do things 4 U!"
When I got back from vacation, Gordon called. His tone of voice seemed kinda strange. He welcomed me back from my trip. It felt like his last goodbye. A week or two later, he swallowed a bunch of pain meds. It woulda killed him except, he took a bunch of blood-pressure meds with it. He also didn't tie a plastic bag around his head, like it says in the suicide manuals. Gordon called 911. Cops found suicide notes. They threw him in the nut-house after he recovered.
Christian went to visit him. I figured Gordon would come back home but he didn't, I never really got to talk to him again.
I told Christian to tell Gordon that two of my best friends (they're twins that I think Gordon knows) have been professional, in-home health care providers for the State of Arizona and Catholic Community services. One of 'em was a State Representative, they've been doing this work for more than 20-years, eat healthy, vegetarian foods, love cats and live only three blocks away. I'm sure Gordon's premium insurance company would pay for it.
One of Gordon's sisters, who is a fanatic "Christian" wanted Gordon to sell the house and stay with her. That's what Gordon did. He used a bitchy, nasty, pushy friend of his to sell it. I told her to let me know how much Ur selling it for. She said she would after she got it appraised.
Yesterday, this "CAT" front-end loader showed up and started dozing Gordon's front yard. I asked the workers, "When is the house going to be for sale"? They said, "It already sold." I was shocked 'cause I was interested in buying it. I said, WTF, "who bought it, are they friends of Gordon's"? "No, friends of Jan," the pushy, nasty friend of Gordon's.
Sure enough, records show the house sold for $80k on 18 June. I was pissed. Called Jan and said, "how come U didn't tell me the house was for sale, I would-have paid more?" She said the sister was in a hurry to sell, plus a lot of other stuff, including a bizarre, lie or misunderstanding about me. I'm thinking of filing an ethics complaint with the State Board of Real Estate.
I feel betrayed & hurt by Gordon. Hope he doesn't feel the same when his sister pushes him into a hospice to die.
Gordon had a bad attitude toward God. I figured one of these days maybe he would experience God. I asked Christian if he thought Gordon's personality changed after his suicide attempt. Christian didn't see anything but it's hard to tell. Gordon was also on anti-depression meds (Cymbalta) after the attempted suicide. Many ppl who have had Near Death Experiences, who have "seen God," have had dramatic personality change, where U no longer fear death but feel peace.
Gordon was a lot like me. We lived like hermits. He had one loving relationship he talked about that lasted a few years. Neither of us got married or had any kids.
Last thing I said to Gordon (one-minute phone-conversation) after his foiled suicide (besides, "Good-Bye") was, "I'll miss U!" Last thing he said to me (besides, "good-bye") was, "Well I gotta go, I'm busy with business." Kinda ironic 'cause I say that to a friend who calls me several times every day.
EDIT: Told my best-friend, Jennifer about this, she said if I owned the house she would-have rented it from me. Gordon knew Jennifer. Woulda been really nice to have Jen next door paying off my loan. Coulda-probably made a deal with Christian too so he could-have continued to use the guesthouse as a music studio.
After my last conversation with Jan, I sent her this email: "It seems unethical that U didn't get a bid from me to buy the house when I told U I was interested." She then left a crazy message on my answering-machine.
Talked to Christian the other day on the phone and thought, "Jan must be a lunatic!" Sure enough, read this court case [link removed] posted on the website of the AZ Court of Appeals, Division Two:
"The record and evidence established that [Jan] suffers from a delusional disorder that causes her to believe she is the victim of an organized conspiracy whose participants include her former husband, her former employer, the Tucson Police Department (TPD), and certain TPD employees. "After three psychological examinations and a hearing pursuant to Rule 11, Ariz. R. Crim. P., the trial court found [Jan] mentally ill but competent to stand trial."
EDIT (27 June): The company that managing the property is a reputable company that I don't think I will have a problem with. :)
EDIT (14 July): Removed last names, tags & link.
EDIT (18 June 2013): House sold for $80k shortly after pic was taken, some work was done on the house but not near enough work to justify the $175k Jan (through her real estate company) is asking for it now.
EDIT (25 November 2015): House is for sale again, asking $165k
Map-link shows the neighborhood, within one mile.