Staff Sgt. Brian Alfano, a survival, evasion, resistance and escape instructor with the 103rd Rescue Squadron, 106th Rescue Wing, demonstrates an overt method for marking a drop zone during a bundle drop training flight at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Fla., Jan. 19, 2016. (U.S. Air National Guard photo/Staff Sgt. Christopher S. Muncy)

Shot with LV and the flip screen tilted to be as discrete as possible. Not that I think he would have cared if I'd been more overt!

It's a funny thing the not so long ago it was seen as unladylike for women to wear pant/trousers, with only certain occasions when it was seen to be OK to do so.

 

Normally some kind of sport or hiking. popping to the shops wasn't one of those occasions. And so women used to get something of a hard time if they wore slacks.

 

Fast forward to today and they now get grief if they wear dresses for everyday wear.

 

Just wondering at what point guys can wear dresses? Not that i lake the idea myself. Yes that sounds odd doesn't it. OK put it this way women wear trousers that are designed for females, different cut, styling and materials.

And so a dress for men, and by men i mean non trans Men a dress would have to be less feminine in design so maybe ditch the overtly floral patterns. maybe a little less floaty, the garment would then be a dress for MEN as opposed to something I would wear.

 

Basically I wouldn't wear a dress designed for men for i see myself as a woman. Is that wrong? And if men could or did wear men's dresses I wonder what would be said if they stared to openly female clothes.

 

Just a bit of waffle to think aboujt

See the trees from the forest and in this case, see the leaves from the tree!

 

Or risk getting hopelessly lost.

 

It’s a curious thing, why some Nikon users typically hate other brands such as Canon and especially Sony so much.

 

Nikon certainly has a much longer history than Sony so many Nikon users are typically long term dyed-in-the-wool fanatics and some of them tend to associate the Nikon brand to their self worth. These people will spread vicious untruths about other brands while obnoxiously defend any less than positive comments about their brand totem, no matter how factual it is. In fact, the Nikon mirrorless Z mount users in gear forums will even turn against Nikon DSLR F mount users, making cannibals look like saints!

 

Why such extreme cult-like behavior? Psychologically, these people are likely too deep into their brand totem and cannot accept that other brands have caught up or even surpassed their beloved brand with better features, options and performance. To deal with this internal cognitive dissonance, they can only put down the other brands just to assuage their bruised ego, especially when they lacked the means to switch brands.

 

It’s hence also clear why Nikon Z-ealot influencers don’t express any dislike/falsehoods against Panasonic or Olympus.

 

The rampant fallacies that these Nikon Z-ealots have perpetuated over the years;

 

(1) Sony E mount diameter is too small hence it’s not feasible to make fast f1.2 lenses and IBIS effectiveness is limited as the degree the sensor can shift is also limited by the smaller mount. Yet Sony released the FE 50mm f1.2 GM that is smaller, lighter (by 30%) and cheaper than the Z 50mm f1.2 S. The new Sony A7R5 has 8 stops IBIS, which is impossible and fake news if one believes the Nikon Z-ealots.

 

(2) Sony has terrible color science, Nikon Z-ealots sprouting this falsehood likely either never shoot RAW or have very rudimentary post-processing ability and

 

(3) Nikon Z lenses are superior because of the large mount. This has been well and truly trashed because the Z lenses mostly tend to be bulkier, heavier and more expensive without really being better!

 

A recent incident when the mirrorless Sigma 14-24mm f2.8 DN ($1,400) was shown to be matching the performance of Nikon’s Z 14-24mm f2.8 S ($2,500). Nikon Z-ealot influencers expressed extreme consternation and simply resorted to reject the test outright and tried to discredit the test even though none of them have ever used the Sigma. Those who shot Sony or Panasonic already knew how good the Sigma 14-24mm f2.8 DN is as it has been available in E and L mount since 2019. This shows how biased and delusional these Nikon Z-ealot influencers are, they simply chose to think that their brand totem is superior regardless of how good competitive brands are, such biases and delusion really make their overtly enthusiastic opinions of Nikon products utterly suspect.

 

Nikon mirrorless Z is rather poor value due to their diminishing market share; flic.kr/p/2kUAhdS. It’s little wonder that their Z-ealot influencers are getting increasingly desperate. This fact has been laid bare when Nikon released the rebadged Z 28-75mm f2.8 with a 50% premium based on the Tamron 1st Gen lens and it’s even 33% more expensive than the current Tamron Gen 2 version!

 

Update

======

Nikon continues to lose market share, contrary to the claims of Nikon Z-ealot fanbois obviously afflicted with severe tunnel vision sprouting misinformation about other brands at every opportunity.

 

Digital camera 2021 global market share as reported by Japanese Techno System Research;

Canon. … 45.8% (-2.1%)

Sony … 27.0% (+4.9%)

Nikon … 11.3% (-2.4%)

Fujifilm. … 5.9% (+0.3%)

Panasonic … 4.4% (±0.0%)

Source: vdata.nikkei.com/newsgraphics/share-ranking/#/year/latest...

 

The same report last year had Nikon losing -4.9% market share. www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/camera-market-share-canon...

 

Over a span of 2 years from 2020 and 2021, Nikon lost nearly 40% of their market share (from 18.6% down to 11.3%) in a declining market, no wonder the Nikon influencers are desperate! Bear in mind that Nikon still has a fair bit of DSLR in their portfolio, if we subtract this. their mirrorless market share is even smaller!

 

Such a small market share also means a much less active secondary market.

 

As expected, Nikon influencers are frantically passing around their Kool-aid, claiming silly pseudo Finance theory that market share doesn't affect revenue or profit. Problem with a small market share and especially a fast shrinking one is that the important fixed and semi-fixed costs such as R&D can't be spread out to enough units and this is likely why we see releases like the rebadged Nikon Z 28-75mm f2.8 at a +50% extra premium!

 

In Nikon's case, less is worse and as per Warren Buffett; Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked!

i received this email (below) on my website a few weeks ago:

 

We ran across your website and thought you might be interested in our upcoming Project. We are Art in Hand˙, an arts publisher looking to bring our City Project Decks of cards to the city of Washington, DC. We are seeking 54 artists who are currently living and working in the Washington, DC area to participate in our next City Project Deck.

 

The Washington, DC Project will be a deck of fully functional playing cards where each individual card in the deck (plus 2 jokers) is rendered in the typical style of the contributing artist. The project will create widespread exposure for participating artists while producing a unique, entertaining, functional and green product for the city of Washington, DC.

 

We are seeking artists of 2-dimensional art in any style or medium and from as many different neighborhoods and districts within Washington, DC area as possible.

 

Accepted artists will be assigned one card from the deck and asked to produce an original piece of work that clearly represents their designated card, that represents some aspect (be it overt or subtle) of Washington, DC and that is created in their own unique style.

 

There will be no fee for participation but accepted artists will be asked to sign a letter of commitment as well as submit a high res TIFF of the image in exchange for a one-time royalty payment in product. Artists are free to keep their original image.

 

Interested artists should submit an email to info@artinhandcards.com, include a short bio and a link to a website where their work can be easily viewed or 2-3 sample image files representative of their work. Please include the title: Washington, DC Project Artist in the subject line of your email.

 

If you are accepted to the project, we will contact you asap and send you an information package that should answer all your questions.

 

For more information or to view other City Projects, please visit our website, www.artinhandcards.com.

 

Thanks for considering being part of this very fun and unique project.

 

i replied and was accepted. i was given the QUEEN OF CLUBS as my card;

 

EXPLANATION OF THIS CARD:

 

my card is allegorical. it addresses the situation of female political figures (the queen) in the male dominated washington political arena (the clubs). the heads in the corners represents the extremes of the right and left, the physical challenges to women as well as the unreasoned demands and attacks from special interests of all kinds. birds are omens. on an allegorical level, the bird can be seen as either the

embodiment of the disturbing and shattering forces that threaten all female political figures or as a winged messenger of hope. the queen herself lacks any indication of her femaleness (no body, no clothes) – there is too much emphasis on the appearance of female politicians and not enough on their views and accomplishments. and the dancing children-- politics in washington is a game which you need to learn regardless of gender- to be “a player.”

 

i will, as a surprise (shhhh!), give david a deck or two of cards when it is printed (i think in march). since david is a card player i think he will enjoy this little gift of playing poker with his friends using art cards, of which is mother will be one. don't tell him!

  

EXHIBITED AT:

 

Touchstone Gallery

901 New York Ave NW

Washington DC 20001

29 june-29 july 2011

  

jenniferbeinhacker.com

art outside the edge

 

We had this belief about photography, but that's about to disappear because of the computer. I actually welcome this development; I'd like to think that more overt recognition and discussion of the manipulation which has always been inherent in photographic representation is healthy.

 

~Esther Parada - Writing in 1993 about her work with digital photographs.

 

P.S. Non-HDR-processed / Non-GND-filtered ● Black Card Technique 黑卡作品

I spend so much of my professional life managing the thinly controlled chaos of weddings that it makes me want to take whatever chances I can get to exercise total control. Of course the problem is that I LOVE the chaos; I find studio portraiture relatively uninteresting. So I figured I could split the difference, bending existing locations to create pre-conceived scenery, even if it means my assistant and I throwing towels over half of the light fixtures in a hotel hallway.

 

These days, it's easier and easier to take great shots of people, especially with a subject like Claudia, so I'm increasingly interested in photos that bring up the question "Why is this beautiful person in fabulous clothes here?" And whether the question is overtly answered or not, I want that answer to be something more than "because a photo was being taken." I have some personal projects in mind that will explore this in-depth, but we'll see when that happens -- 2011 has again blessed me with lots of amazing clients.

 

The lighting in this one, like in yesterday's photo, is using a very low-powered Litepanel Micropro as a main (here with a warm gel) and the light from a TV as the kicker/background light. It's motivational light, making sense with the scene, and gone are the days when you had to fake TV light with bright blue-gelled hot-lights -- now I can just use ISO 3200 and f/1.4.

----

Ryan Brenizer Photography Blog. Photography tips, wedding photos, events and portraits from New York City and beyond

"Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais (French pronunciation: ​[sɛ̃ ʒɛʁvɛ sɛ̃ pʁɔtɛ]) is a Roman Catholic parish church located in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, on Place Saint-Gervais in the Marais district, east of City Hall (Hôtel de Ville). The current church was built between 1494 and 1657, on the site of two earlier churches; the facade, completed last, was the first example of the French baroque style in Paris. The organists of the church included Louis Couperin and his nephew François Couperin, two of the most celebrated composers and musicians of the Baroque period; the organ they used can still be seen today. The church contains remarkable examples of medieval carved choir stalls, stained glass from the 16th century, 17th century sculpture, and modern stained glass by Sylvie Gaudin and Claude Courageux. Saint-Gervais was a parish church until 1975, when it became the headquarters of the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem.

 

The 4th arrondissement of Paris (IVe arrondissement) is one of the twenty arrondissements of the capital city of France. In spoken French, this arrondissement is referred to as quatrième. Along with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd arrondissements, it is in the first sector of Paris, which maintains a single local government rather than four separate ones.

 

The arrondissement, also known as Hôtel-de-Ville, is situated on the right bank of the River Seine. It contains the Renaissance-era Paris City Hall, rebuilt between 1874 and 1882. It also contains the Renaissance square of Place des Vosges, the overtly modern Pompidou Centre, and the lively southern part of the medieval district of Le Marais, which today is known for being the gay district of Paris. (The quieter northern part of Le Marais is within the 3rd arrondissement). The eastern part of the Île de la Cité (including Notre-Dame de Paris) and all of the Île Saint-Louis are also included within the 4th arrondissement.

 

The 4th arrondissement is known for its little streets, cafés, and shops but is often regarded by Parisians as expensive and congested. It has old buildings and a mix of many cultures.

 

Paris (French pronunciation: ​[paʁi]) is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,150,271 residents as of 2020, in an area of 105 square kilometres (41 square miles). Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, science and arts. The City of Paris is the centre and seat of government of the Île-de-France, or Paris Region, which has an estimated official 2020 population of 12,278,210, or about 18 percent of the population of France. The Paris Region had a GDP of €709 billion ($808 billion) in 2017. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Worldwide Cost of Living Survey in 2018, Paris was the second most expensive city in the world, after Singapore, and ahead of Zürich, Hong Kong, Oslo and Geneva. Another source ranked Paris as most expensive, on a par with Singapore and Hong Kong, in 2018.

 

The city is a major railway, highway and air-transport hub served by two international airports: Paris–Charles de Gaulle (the second busiest airport in Europe) and Paris–Orly. Opened in 1900, the city's subway system, the Paris Métro, serves 5.23 million passengers daily; it is the second busiest metro system in Europe after the Moscow Metro. Gare du Nord is the 24th busiest railway station in the world, but the first located outside Japan, with 262 million passengers in 2015 Paris is especially known for its museums and architectural landmarks: the Louvre was the most visited art museum in the world in 2019, with 9.6 million visitors. The Musée d'Orsay, Musée Marmottan Monet, and Musée de l'Orangerie are noted for their collections of French Impressionist art, the Pompidou Centre Musée National d'Art Moderne has the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe, and the Musée Rodin and Musée Picasso exhibit the works of two noted Parisians. The historical district along the Seine in the city centre is classified as a UNESCO Heritage Site, and popular landmarks in the city centre included the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, on the Île de la Cité, now closed for renovation after the 15 April 2019 fire. Other popular tourist sites include the Gothic royal chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, also on the Île de la Cité; the Eiffel Tower, constructed for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889; the Grand Palais and Petit Palais, built for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900; the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Élysées, and the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur on the hill of Montmartre.

 

Paris received 38 million visitors in 2019, measured by hotel stays, with the largest numbers of foreign visitors coming from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and China. It was ranked as the second most visited travel destination in the world in 2019, after Bangkok and just ahead of London. The football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris. The 80,000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros. The city hosted the Olympic Games in 1900, 1924 and will host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The 1938 and 1998 FIFA World Cups, the 2007 Rugby World Cup, as well as the 1960, 1984 and 2016 UEFA European Championships were also held in the city. Every July, the Tour de France bicycle race finishes on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris." - info from Wikipedia.

 

Summer 2019 I did a solo cycling tour across Europe through 12 countries over the course of 3 months. I began my adventure in Edinburgh, Scotland and finished in Florence, Italy cycling 8,816 km. During my trip I took 47,000 photos.

 

Now on Instagram.

 

Become a patron to my photography on Patreon or donate.

acrylic on canvas, 2012, 70 x 100 cm

 

Today Stasi agents use chemical (binary) weapons and energetical weapons(micro-waves) etc

 

e.g. nonconformity and freethinking now considered mental illness

anticonformismo e libero pensiero ormai considerati malattie mentali

  

The Stasi perfected the technique of psychological harassment of perceived enemies known as Zersetzung – a term borrowed from chemistry which literally means "corrosion" or "undermining".

 

By the 1970s, the Stasi had decided that methods of overt persecution which had been employed up to that time, such as arrest and torture, were too crude and obvious. It was realised that psychological harassment was far less likely to be recognised for what it was, so its victims, and their supporters, were less likely to be provoked into active resistance, given that they would often not be aware of the source of their problems, or even its exact nature. Zersetzung was designed to side-track and "switch off" perceived enemies so that they would lose the will to continue any "inappropriate" activities.

 

Tactics employed under Zersetzung generally involved the disruption of the victim’s private or family life. This often included psychological attacks such as breaking into homes and messing with the contents – moving furniture, altering the timing of an alarm, removing pictures from walls or replacing one variety of tea with another. Other practices included property damage, sabotage of cars, purposely incorrect medical treatment, smear campaigns including sending falsified compromising photos or documents to the victim's family, denunciation, provocation, psychological warfare, psychological subversion, wiretapping, bugging, mysterious phone calls or unnecessary deliveries, even including sending a vibrator to a target's wife. Usually victims had no idea the Stasi were responsible. Many thought they were losing their minds, and mental breakdowns and suicide could result.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

 

The progression of recent history clearly shows a dedicated effort to lead the world into unknowingly accepting communitarian solutions.

Communitarianism is the theory that individual rights must be balanced against the rights of the "community." Its many proponents insist that individual rights and liberties pose a real threat to the health and safety of the "community at large." The founders of the Communitarian Network began "shoring up the moral, social and political environment" in the early 1990s. Today the communitarian theory is the basis for hundreds of new global rules and regulations eliminating individual rights.

  

Wie viel „DDR“ steckt in der heutigen Bundesrepublik?

ef-magazin.de/2021/02/27/18244-wie-viel-ddr-steckt-in-der...

 

Das hätte man im Grunde genommen auch auf einer Kaderschule im Osten lernen können, wie man eine stille Revolution durchzieht.

Viele haben es immer noch nicht gemerkt. Ich glaube, die meisten haben gemerkt, dass hier grundlegende Veränderungen durchgeführt worden sind. Aber es waren Veränderungen, die nicht gestern angefangen haben, sondern die haben einen Vorlauf von sicherlich dreißig Jahren oder zumindest 20 Jahren (Hans-Georg Maaßen)

www.epochtimes.de/politik/deutschland/hans-georg-maassen-...

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jan Theuninck is a Belgian artist

www.boekgrrls.nl/BgDiversen/Onderwerpen/gedichten_over_sc...

www.forumeerstewereldoorlog.be/wiki/index.php/Yperite-Jan...

www.graphiste-webdesigner.fr/blog/2013/04/la-peinture-bel...

www.eutrio.be/expo-west-meets-east

www.e-architect.co.uk/architects/le-corbusier

 

zineshow.blogspot.com/2013/02/jan-theuninck-belgium.html

alexwitter-vrijheid.blogspot.com/2019/02/jan-theuninck.html

  

We defeated the Soviets, meanwhile a Stasi culture engulfs Europe... (Jan Theuninck, August 14, 2009)

 

Wir haben die Sowjets besiegt, inzwischen ein Stasi-Kultur verschlingt Europa ... (Zitat von Jan Theuninck, 14 August 2009)

 

Abbiamo sconfitto i sovietici, nel frattempo l'Europa è inondata da una cultura Stasi(Jan Theuninck, 14 Agosto 2009)

 

Nous avons vaincu les soviétiques, entre-temps une culture stasi envahit l'Europe (citation de Jan Theuninck, 14 août 2009)

  

Es ist schlimmer als eine kommunistische Diktatur in dem Sinne, dass die Menschen hinter dem eisernen Vorhang davon wussten

 

C'est pire qu'une dictature communiste dans le sens où les gens derrière le rideau de fer le savaient

 

È peggio di una dittatura comunista, nel senso che le persone dietro la cortina di ferro lo sapevano

 

Overt.

 

Catalpa Collection - Red Edition

 

Exclusive for Sense. Event opens on the 18th August.

 

------------

Find us on the MP: marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/221181

Find us in SL: maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Escher/111/146/2343

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY : Shot overtly. Final day of conductor operation on Birmingham Outer Circle Route. Scanned from 35mm Ilford FP4 negative.

And He Man.

 

This is going to be a theme in my photography for a bit. Eventually, these action figures will take their own, less overt space within my photos.

 

Right now, though, the action figure concept is up front and demanding.

 

I mean, it is He Man.

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Lettice is sitting at her Hepplewhite desk next to the fire in her drawing room. On her desk sit two brightly coloured interior designs she has created for her new client, American film actress Wanetta Ward, using her watercolours and pencils. Whilst she works away, her old childhood chum, Gerald, also a member of the aristocracy who has tried to gain some independence from his family by designing gowns from a shop in Grosvenor Street, is sitting in one of her Art Deco tub arm chairs contentedly sewing beads onto his and Lettice’s friend, Margot de Virre’s, wedding dress bodice. Both have cups of tea from the pot Lettice’s maid, Edith, keeps replenishing.

 

“You sound displeased, Lettuce Leaf,” Gerald responds to a disgruntled huff from Lettice, drawing out his thread as he speaks. “What’s the matter?”

 

“Calling me that name doesn’t help, Gerald,” she mutters crossly. “I keep telling you, we aren’t children anymore. I hated it then, so imagine how much I detest it now?”

 

“Oh! We are techy tonight!” Gerald remarks without looking up as he pushes his needle back into the centre of a crystal bead. He pauses and looks up. “I’m sorry.” He pouts dramatically. “Friends again?”

 

Lettice looks over at him disgruntledly, but at the sight of her friend’s rather comical expression of remorse, she sighs, smiles and then laughs tiredly. “Yes Gerald.”

 

“So,” he looks over at the desktop littered with Lettice’s paints and jugs of murky water with brushes sticking out of them. “What’s wrong then?”

 

“It’s these designs!” She flicks her hands irritably at the offending pieces of paper and gives them a contemptuous look. “I’m not happy with them. Miss Ward says yellow is her favourite colour, yet I can’t quite manage yellow walls with blue furnishings.” She holds up a design of a music room with grand piano in yellow with blue accents.

 

“Oh,” Gerald’s eyes open widely as he nods. “Yes, I do begin to see what you mean. Well, it’s dramatic, I’ll say that.”

 

“It’s vulgar, is what it is.” She picks up her paint brush again, although is dumbfounded as to what to do to improve the image, other than to screw it up and start again, as she stares at the yellow wash spread across the page like a huge bruise.

 

“Well, she is an actress, darling.” Gerald remarks, going back to his sewing. “And part of the American mi…”

 

“Oh, don’t you start on the mediocre middle-classes again!” she interrupts, wagging her brush at him threateningly. “I scolded Margot when we were shopping at Selfridges last week. She sounded just like you.”

 

“Oh, bully for Margot!” Gerald smiles contentedly, taking up another bead, casting in onto his thread and plunging it into the fabric of the bodice. “I really must congratulate her next time I see her.”

 

“You’re a bad influence on her, with your overt snobbery.”

 

“It is true,” Gerald sighs. “But I can’t help it. It’s just part of my charm.” He bats his eyelashes across at his friend and smiles. “Anyway, you are the one who called Miss Ward gauche, so shouldn’t her home reflect a little of that gaudy, showy moving picture actress personality of hers?”

 

“Not if I’m designing it, Gerald. I have a reputation of exceptionally good taste to uphold.” She looks at her second design of a dining room, also with yellow walls. “Miss Ward be damned! Anyway Gerald, you of all people shouldn’t complain about the middle classes.”

 

Gerald sighs and drops the beaded bodice into his lap, whilst still keeping a firm hold of his needle. “That too is true, my darling. If it were not for Mrs. Hatchett and her coterie, well...”

 

“See,” Lettice smiles. “Did I not say that she would be the making of your couture house?”

 

“Hardly!” he retorts, giving her a shocked look.

 

“What? Aren’t she and her friends putting in countless orders for day dresses, tea gowns and evening frocks?”

 

“Oh they are!” he remarks. “But,” He exhales disappointedly. “Up-and-coming middle-class mediocrity Mrs Hatchett and her friends’ outfits are hardly going to make the pages of the Tattler or Vogue, are they? And even their money can’t make Grosvenor Street pay for itself. A day dress suitable for a Surrey village fête is hardly going to cost what a stunning piece of couture,” He holds up the exquisitely embroidered fabric. “For the London Season will. Why else do you suppose I’m sitting here embroidering Margot’s bodice in your Mayfair drawing room and not at home in Soho?”

 

“I assume because you enjoy my company.” Lettice teases with a smile.

 

“Oh I do darling,” Gerald says in earnest. “But I also love the fact that here I don’t have to pay the electricity bill.” He glances up at the glittering chandelier above them casting prisms across the white painted ceiling with its Art Deco cornicing.

 

“Nor the grocer’s bill,” Lettice smirks with a friendly chuckle, indicating to the plates on the black japanned coffee table containing the remnants of one of Edith’s chocolate cakes.

 

“Nor the wine merchant’s bill. The largesse of one’s friends is always welcome.”

 

Lettice looks back sadly at her friend. “Have you asked your father about an increase to your allowance, or perhaps an advance?” she asks hopefully.

 

“It isn’t as easy as that. I’m not you, Lettice.”

 

“I’ll have you know Gerald, that I get constant lectures from Pater about designing for my own class if I must insist on designing anything, and Mater just wants me to throw it all away and marry some dull member of the peerage, live in the country and have a dozen children.”

 

“A dozen?”

 

“Well at least three, like Lally.”

 

“Your sister is expecting again?”

 

“Yes, due in February, and Mummy is always comparing me to my propagating older sister, lording it over me that ‘Lally is married’, unlike me, and ‘Lally has children’, unlike me! She’s convinced my life is unfulfilled. I’m a girl, and I’m the youngest child and…”

 

“And you have your father wrapped around your little finger.” Gerald counters with a knowing look.

 

“Well,” Lettice blushes. “I can’t deny that I do seem to have some influence over the Pater.”

 

“Whereas I am just the second son: the spare.”

 

“Well thankfully you aren’t the heir, Gerald.” Lettice gives him a knowing look. “Otherwise, you would have to fulfil your duty to carry on the family line with some poor little debutante who must never know that her husband…”

 

“Is sexually inverted.” Gerald finishes Lettice’s sentence discreetly, stabbing the fabric with his needle. “Yes, I know that doesn’t help my cause in father’s eyes, any more than my wish to sew frocks for ladies.”

 

“At least you don’t wear them, revel in that fact and have photographic proof, unlike dear Cecil* does.”

 

“Nonetheless, being the second son, a fashion designer and a deviant,” Gerald blushes, looking towards the dining room, making sure that Lettice’s maid, Edith, isn’t listening at the green baize door. “I’m a disappointment, through and through. And my obvious shortfalls do not endear me to Father.”

 

“You asked him then?” Lettice asks with defeat. When Gerald nods in assent she adds, “Not even an advance?”

 

“Not a bean.”

 

“That’s so unfair.”

 

“My father isn’t your father, Lettice.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Well, we might be neighbours, but your father owns most of the neighbourhood. Your father is the Viscount of Wrexham with a fine estate, which Leslie has helped to modernise, thank goodness.” He raises his eyes to the ceiling. “Whilst my father is just Sir Bruton, a baron – an obstinate and old fashioned one, and an impecunious one at that – with a leaky roofed manor house on a plot of land that is getting smaller as he slowly sells it off. The golden pre-war days are gone, yet Father won’t face up to facts.”

 

“Poor Gerald,” Lettice says, standing up and putting a comforting hand on her friend’s shoulder. Looking down at the beautifully beaded bodice in Gerald’s lap she continues, “Well, let’s hope that Margot’s wedding dress heralds better times for you as well as her and Dickie. At least this gown will appear in the Tattler, if nowhere else, and that means good business for you. That’s a beautiful pattern you are embroidering.”

 

“Thank you darling.” Gerald smiles as he looks down at his own work. Suddenly he sits up in his seat. “That’s it!”

 

“What’s it, Gerald?” Lettice looks up from her paintings in concern.

 

“Patterns!” He looks at her excitedly. “Did you not say Miss Ward was also interested in bold patterns?”

 

“Yes Gerald. What of it?”

 

“And did I not see you when I was here last week, flicking through some wallpaper samples?” He clambers up from his seat, carefully putting the beaded bodice aside.

 

“You did Gerald.” Lettice looks at him questioningly.

 

“The combination of blue and yellow is jarring when yellow is the main colour.” He gesticulates around him dramatically. “What if you swap it around? I’m sure there was a strong Prussian blue wallpaper amongst the samples: one that had a bold pattern highlighted in gold.”

 

“You’re right Gerald!” Lettice agrees excitedly. “It was a fan pattern! Of course! I’ve been looking at this the wrong way around! Paper the walls rather than paint them! What a dullard I am!” She grabs up her brush and dunks it into the jug of murky water.

 

“No! No! Don’t change your pictures!” Gerald gasps, anxiously hurrying around to Lettice’s desk and staying her elegant hand. “Use them. Show Miss Ward how jarring yellow is, and then pull out the paper. Show her how luxurious it is, and you’ll easily be able to convince her that it’s the right choice.”

 

“It is a bold pattern…”

 

“Yet an elegant one.”

 

“And it’s certainly glamorous.”

 

“And fans are very oriental, darling.” Gerald bats his eyelashes coquettishly as he pretends to hide behind an imaginary fan.”

 

“Oh Gerald!” Lettice giggles. “What would I do without you?”

 

“You’d never be able to decorate Miss Ward’s flat, that’s certain!” he smiles at his friend’s glittering eyes and gentle grin as she contemplates the possibilities he has helped instil in her mind.

 

*Cecil Beaton was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as an Oscar winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre. Although he had relationships with women including actress Greta Garbo, he was a well-known homosexual.

 

For anyone who follows my photostream, you will know that I collect and photograph 1:12 size miniatures, so although it may not necessarily look like it, but this cluttered desk is actually covered in 1:12 size artisan miniatures and the desk itself is too. All are from my collection of miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

Lettice’s Hepplewhite drop-drawer bureau and chair are beautifully and artfully made by J.B.M. miniatures. Both the bureau and chair are made of black japanned wood which have been hand painted with chinoiserie designs, even down the arms of the chair and inside the bureau. The chair set has a rattan seat, which has also been hand woven.

 

On the top of the Hepplewhite bureau stand three real miniature photos in frames including an Edwardian silver frame, a Victorian brass frame and an Art Deco blue Bakelite and glass frame. The latter comes from Doreen Jenkins’ Small Wonders Miniatures in England, whilst the other two come from Melody Jane Dolls’ House, also in England. The photos themselves are all real photos, produced to high standards in 1:12 size on photographic paper by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire.

 

The watercolour paint set, brushes, and Limoges style jugs (two of a set of three) also come from Melody Jane Dolls’ House. So too do the pencils, which are one millimetre wide and two centimetres long.

 

Also on the desk, are some 1:12 artisan miniature ink bottles, a roller, a blotter, a letter opener and letter rack, all made by the Little Green Workshop in England who specialise in high end, high quality miniatures. The ink bottles are made from tiny faceted crystal beads and have sterling silver bottoms and lids. The ink blotter, sitting behind the paint box and next to the jug’s handle is sterling silver too and has a blotter made of real black felt, cut meticulously to size to fit snugly inside the frame. The letter opener and roller are also sterling silver. The letter rack which contains some 1:12 size correspondence, is brass. Like the other pieces, it is also made by the Little Green Workshop.

 

Lettice’s two interior design paintings are 1920s designs. They are sourced from reference material particular to Art Deco interior design in Britain in the 1920s.

 

The fireplace appearing just to the right of the photograph is a 1:12 miniature resin Art Deco fireplace on which stands an Art Deco metal clock hand painted with wonderful detail by British miniature artisan Victoria Fasken.

 

The geometric Art Deco wallpaper is beautiful hand impressed paper given to me by a friend, which inspired the whole “Cavendish Mews – Lettice Chetwynd” series.

Modoll Copy

  

Some sad news today - because the big fashion names behind the MODOLL project have such a huge following on social media, artists getting their work stolen and plagiarised so overtly are having a hard time "finding a voice"

 

Searching the #modoll hashtag on instagram will show you the huge follower power this "project" has, with hundreds of fans innocent of what has actually happened sharing and commenting. Whenever one of us Popovy Sisters fans writes a comment asking for information on the similarities - our comments get deleted.

 

I created this square-format image, that speaks loudly for itself, for anyone on instagram wishing to share - remember to tag MODOLL so that people innocent of what has happened can find out and decide for themselves

 

Orvet géant des Balkans - European Glass Lizard

www.matthieu-berroneau.fr

 

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With apologies to Jesse and the family! Taken in my garden amongst the Pig Faces.

 

The genus Argiope includes rather large spiders that often have a strikingly coloured abdomen. These spiders are distributed throughout the world. Most countries in tropical or temperate climates host one or more species that are similar in appearance. The etymology of Argiope is from a Latin word argentum meaning silver. The carapace of Argiope species is typically covered in silvery hairs, and when crawling in the sun, they reflect it in a way that gives them a metallic, white appearance.

 

In Australia, Argiope keyserlingi and Argiope aetherea are known as St Andrew's cross spiders, for their habit of resting in the web with paired legs outstretched in the shape of an X and mirroring the large white web decoration (the cross of St. Andrew (having the same form). This white zigzag in the centre of its web is called the stabilimentum or web decoration.

 

In North America, Argiope aurantia is commonly known as the black and yellow garden spider, zipper spider, corn spider, or writing spider, because of the similarity of the web stabilimenta to writing.

 

The average orb web is practically invisible, and it is easy to blunder into one and end up covered with a sticky web. The visible pattern of banded silk made by Argiope is pure white, and some species make an "X" form, or a zigzag type of web (often with a hollow centre). The spider then aligns one pair of its legs with each of the four lines in the hollow "X", making a complete "X" of white lines with a very eye-catching spider forming its centre.

 

The zigzag patterns, called stabilimenta, reflect UV light. They have been shown to play a role in attracting prey to the web, and possibly in preventing its destruction by large animals. The centres of their large webs are often just under 1 metre above the ground, so they are too low for anything much larger than a rabbit to walk under. The overtness of the spider and its web thus has been speculated to prevent larger creatures from accidentally destroying the web and possibly crushing the spider underfoot.

 

Other studies suggest that the stabilimenta may actually lead predators to the spider; species such as A. keyserlingi place their web predominantly in closed, complex habitats such as among sedges.

 

As Argiope sit in the centre of their web during the day, they have developed several responses to predators, such as dropping off the web, retreating to the periphery of the web, or even rapidly pumping the web in bursts of up to 30 seconds, similar to the motion done by the unrelated Pholcus phalangioides.

 

The male spider is much smaller than the female, and unassumingly marked. When it is time to mate, the male spins a companion web alongside the female's. After mating, the female lays her eggs, placing her egg sac into the web. The sac contains between 400 and 1400 eggs.

 

These eggs hatch in autumn, but the spiderlings overwinter in the sac and emerge during the spring. The egg sac is composed of multiple layers of silk and protects its contents from damage; however, many species of insects have been observed to parasitise the egg sacs.

 

Like almost all other spiders, Argiope are harmless to humans. As is the case with most garden spiders, they eat insects, and they are capable of consuming prey up to twice their size. A. savigny was even reported to occasionally feed on the small bat Rhynchonycteris naso.

 

They can potentially bite if grabbed, but other than for defense, they do not attack large animals. Their venom is not regarded as a serious medical problem for humans; it often contains a wide variety of polyamine toxins with potential as therapeutic medicinal agents. Notable among these is the argiotoxin ArgTX-636 (A. lobata).

 

A bite by the black and yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia) is comparable to a bee sting, with redness and swelling. For a healthy adult, a bite is not considered an issue.

 

Though they are not aggressive spiders, the very young, elderly, those with compromised immune systems, or those with known venom allergies should exercise caution, just as one would around a beehive.

Xigmo in Goa where the overt theme is Indian religious motifs. The show is not so grand cmpared to the Carnival which precedes it a by a few weeks.

 

Goa gets ready for the Carnival and Xigmo.

  

_DSC1402 nef

The overt archaeological elements of this site emerged as the Romans started to leave the Iberian peninsula, and there is a chance that, with this hilltop's views over to the distant Ulaca site, this vivid mineral 'sculpture park' of wind, sun and time, was a clandestine refuge and vantage point for those involved with the defence of the Ulaca Castro from Roman attack. Did some women, children and elders hide under the Navasangil cracks following the principle of the toue? (www.flickr.com/photos/ajmitchell-prehistory/30690580365/i...). Did Ulaca 2 arise at the first opportunity - in memory of a past people, cultural mosaic and valley? Was Navasangil really simply Ulaca 2? More sacred stones and views over a people a valley and a landscape?

 

As the early periods of the dark ages progressed, a new invasion of Visigoths would arrive into Spain, adding their name to a period of history, even if their infiltration away from urban spaces is a question of degree that is open to debate.

 

AJM 16.09.21

Did anyone ever read the Pendragon series? The seventh book "The Quillan Games" was an interesting one. I pictured the world of that book like this photo, overtly colourful to the point where it almost makes reality seem greyed out. If you have some time you should check out the books. Really cool.

  

Monty Don writes on that subject:

“There is something in the form and detail of tulips that manages to be beautiful while being outrageously sexy.

You cannot hide this in a cloak of horticulture or blind botany.

From the first, men have lusted after tulips, ruined themselves for possession of them exactly as they have lusted after women.

All the great courtesans were tulips. Cleopatra and Marilyn Monroe were tulips. The full curve of hip and buttock with tuck of waist is drawn in satin petals.

The admiration is sexual more than aesthetic, and there is more than a touch of sexual ambiguity. The folded leaves around the swollen bud are vulval, yet at the same time they are overtly and precisely phallic, knowing no sexual boundaries.

Tulips are our temple paintings, a celebration of beauty and sex decorously growing in the safety of the garden.”

 

Sometimes, just sometimes, a flower will reveal all!

 

Have a glorious day and thanx, M, (*_*)

 

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The Bogdan Khmelnytsky Monument (Ukrainian: Пам'ятник Богданові Хмельницькому) is a monument in Kyiv, built in 1888, dedicated to the Hetman of Zaporizhian Host Bohdan Khmelnytsky built in 1888. It is located almost at the centre of Sophia Square, which was originally the city’s main square, and remains and important fulcrum of Kyiv City Centre. It sits on the axis that unites the belltowers of St Sophia’s Cathedral and St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery at the other end of Volodymyrs’kyi Passage.

 

This is where residents of Kiev met Khmelnytsky leading his Cossacks regiments through the Golden Gate into city on 23 December 1648 after his victory over Polish Army at the battle of Pyliavtsi. It was designed by Mikhail Mikeshin although it is both less elaborate than Mikeshin’s original plans, and is shorn of their overtly anti-Polish and anti-Semitic aspects. The statue was cast in 1879 in St Petersburg but not displayed in Kyiv until 1888.

 

This description incorporates text from the English Wikipedia.

Oooops! Caught by the camera being overtly feminine on the bed. A break for a pink maid and well deserved !

Tuyet the Oathbreaker

 

The woman who would spawn an empire…

 

My entry to the DuckBricks Fanon Contest.

 

My take on Tuyet has remained pretty constant over the years. I’ve always believed that Tuyet (and the other Toa Mangai by extension) should correspond with the design language of Lhikan despite coming from different backgrounds in-story. If Tuyet were to have been released in set form then she would not have been excessively custom so I have balanced this consideration with my entry. I also believe that she should not appear overtly evil with spiky or gratuitous black armor. Tuyet was, after all, a trusted Toa Mangai and legendary defender of Metru Nui. That said, there are also a few stylized modifications to the default build to give her more visual impact.

 

The Barbed Broadsword (let’s not take a vague line of description too literally) is a design I’ve been using for almost a decade now. It couples the Brutaka blade with Tahu Mistika’s Rotating Shield Blades as a hilt. By attaching two pins, I’ve also been able to emulate the dual-weapon functionality seen in the Toa Nuva and Toa Metru sets, allowing the sword to also work as a surfboard. This is an alternate option for anyone wanting additional play features from this model. It also allows for some really dynamic poses.

 

I first designed a version of Tuyet back in 2008, at which point I used the mask that came with the Vezok canister as a Kanohi. Over the years, she hasn’t changed much beyond this.

 

The 3D printed mask is KhingK’s Mask of Intangibility (www.thingiverse.com/thing:3396873). While there have been other mask models released since, KhingK’s captures the genuine feel of a new Kanohi mold.

 

This particular mask was printed by @dj_makes_stuff. For the same of full transparency, my painting method for Metru blue is to mix Winsor & Newton’s Prussian Blue with any brand of white acrylic. Give it a try, it’s a really close match!

 

Instructions: brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=584308

 

As you can see, I had Daisy take today off from work. And though regrettably non-consecutive, I believe this is Daisy's fifth straight vacation day spent in a dress and heels. Hmmm...I'd say a definite trend is beginning to develop, wouldn't you? And best of all, not a whiff of coercion on my part was involved. (Well, nothing overt at any rate...I do have a sneaky streak, you know.)

Progress continues on all fronts! 😘💖💖

I'll post more pictures tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought I'd start today by appeasing the people who keep telling me I don't post enough rear views. 💋

View Large On Black Explored! Thank you!

 

Active Assignment Weekly for the Week of December 13-21: Traces

 

Inspired by an emulation assignment in another group, this week’s assignment is based on Nadav Kander's“Signs That We Exist” series. Kander explains the subjects of this series as “…the marks we make and objects we leave behind act as evidence of our existence.”

 

The goal is to take a photo of a scene that shows evidence of our existence, passing, or visitation in a passive and minimalistic manner. The photo should emphasize the clues of our presence or activity in the world. A photo of a building certainly is a sign that we exist, but this is too overt. The more subtle approach is what I’m looking for.

 

There are a couple of folks from AAW who are also part of the group that attempted to emulate Mr. Kander. Welcome back to his idea.

 

Restrictions: No black and white.

 

Dare: Square format

 

WIT

I wanted to really go as minimal as possible, but make the impact very clear. I took several shots of planes with vapor trails amid trees, with clouds, sun, but liked this best. A slight increase in contrast, and crop to square format for the "dare"...

A replica of the judge's courthouse and saloon and an overt opportunity for tourist dollars. Roy Bean actually operated in the tiny town of Langtry, Texas in Val Verde County on the Rio Grande. His self-proclaimed title of being the "only law west of the Pecos (River) likely led to people coming to Pecos, Texas in search of his stomping ground. This surely led to the building of this replica.

 

visitpecos.com/visit-pecos/destination/judge-roy-bean-cou...

After the Dancing House, we continued in the footsteps of Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves to Wenceslas Square. The warmth from the sun, hunger and fatigue started to wear us down and rather than risk getting fleeced at some of the overtly touristy merchants that lined the square, we opted to head back to our room and take a nap.

A typical ancestral hall contains no proper rooms. Largely unadorned and unfurnished, it is, as its name implies, a freestanding building. Its overt function is to be a home for the family's ancestral tablets.

 

Ping Shan, Hong Kong (Wednesday 11 March 2015)

 

My photostream displayed in black background with FlickeFlu

Oliver and I did a series of pics with our Jedi and Sith characters battling. He had some cool poses and backdrops and we just went to town!

 

When I designed the Sith character, I based her costume on the idea that the Sith and the Jedi are opposites more than one being "evil" and the other "good". The Jedi are reserved, logical, and suppress their emotions whereas the Sith celebrate powerful emotions and feelings like lust and hatred. Making the costume overtly sexual is all about reveling in the power and beauty of her sexuality and flies in the face of the stoic Jedi and their approach to the Force.

A variation on yesterday's image. Taken a few minutes earlier, hence the slightly cooler feel. I prefer this as the previous shot feel somewhat contrived, as I had to place the horizon in the centre of the image to stop the Trig from overtly distoring given the wide angle lens (no one likes leaning over trig points surely :)) This has a bit more of an natural feel for me.

The woman arches her torso in willful surrender to her partner, who bends at his ease to kiss her. Rodin　tempered the work’s overt eroticism by giving it a variety of classicizing titles. First called Zephyr and Earth and later exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1897 as Cupid and Psyche, the composition’s true subject is sensuality and impassioned lovemaking. This marble version, commissioned in 1906 by the railroad investor and banker Isaac D. Fletcher, displays the soft, veiled quality of carving associated with Rodin’s late marbles

The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village. It has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Widely regarded as Van Gogh's magnum opus, The Starry Night is one of the most recognizable paintings in Western art.

In the aftermath of the 23 December 1888 breakdown that resulted in the self-mutilation of his left ear, Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum on 8 May 1889. Housed in a former monastery, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole catered to the wealthy and was less than half full when Van Gogh arrived, allowing him to occupy not only a second-story bedroom but also a ground-floor room for use as a painting studio.

During the year Van Gogh stayed at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the prolific output of paintings he had begun in Arles continued. During this period, he produced some of the best-known works of his career, including the Irises from May 1889, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the blue self-portrait from September, 1889, in the Musée d'Orsay. The Starry Night was painted mid-June by around 18 June, the date he wrote to his brother Theo to say he had a new study of a starry sky.

Although The Starry Night was painted during the day in Van Gogh's ground-floor studio, it would be inaccurate to state that the picture was painted from memory. The view has been identified as the one from his bedroom window, facing east, a view which Van Gogh painted variations of no fewer than twenty-one times,[citation needed] including The Starry Night. "Through the iron-barred window," he wrote to his brother, Theo, around 23 May 1889, "I can see an enclosed square of wheat ... above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory."

Van Gogh depicted the view at different times of the day and under various weather conditions, such as the sunrise, moonrise, sunshine-filled days, overcast days, windy days, and one day with rain. While the hospital staff did not allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, he was able there to make sketches in ink or charcoal on paper; eventually, he would base newer variations on previous versions. The pictorial element uniting all of these paintings is the diagonal line coming in from the right depicting the low rolling hills of the Alpilles mountains. In fifteen of the twenty-one versions, cypress trees are visible beyond the far wall enclosing the wheat field. Van Gogh exaggerated their size in six of these paintings, most notably in Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night, bringing the trees closer to the picture plane.

One of the first paintings of the view was Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Rémy, now in Copenhagen. Van Gogh made a number of sketches for the painting, of which. The Enclosed Wheatfield After a Storm is typical. It is unclear whether the painting was made in his studio or outside. In his 9 June letter describing it, he mentions he had been working outside for a few days. Van Gogh described the second of the two landscapes he mentions he was working on, in a letter to his sister Wil on 16 June 1889. This is Green Wheat Field with Cypress, now in Prague, and the first painting at the asylum he definitely painted en plein air. Wheatfield, Saint-Rémy de Provence, now in New York, is a study for it. Two days later, Vincent wrote to Theo stating that he had painted "a starry sky".

The Starry Night is the only nocturne in the series of views from his bedroom window. In early June, Vincent wrote to Theo, "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big". Researchers have determined that Venus (sometimes referred to as the "morning star") was indeed visible at dawn in Provence in the spring of 1889, and was at that time nearly as bright as possible. So the brightest "star" in the painting, just to the viewer's right of the cypress tree, is actually Venus.

The Moon is stylized, as astronomical records indicate that it actually was waning gibbous at the time Van Gogh painted the picture, and even if the phase of the Moon had been its waning crescent at the time, Van Gogh's Moon would not have been astronomically correct. (For other interpretations of the Moon, see below.) The one pictorial element that was definitely not visible from Van Gogh's cell is the village, which is based on a sketch made from a hillside above the village of Saint-Rémy. Pickvance thought F1541v was done later, and the steeple more Dutch than Provençal, a conflation of several Van Gogh had painted and drawn in his Nuenen period, and thus the first of his "reminisces of the North" he was to paint and draw early the following year. Hulsker thought a landscape on the reverse was also a study for the painting.

Despite the large number of letters Van Gogh wrote, he said very little about The Starry Night. After reporting that he had painted a starry sky in June, Van Gogh next mentioned the painting in a letter to Theo on or about 20 September 1889, when he included it in a list of paintings he was sending to his brother in Paris, referring to it as a "night study." Of this list of paintings, he wrote, "All in all the only things I consider a little good in it are the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills and the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and the rest says nothing to me"; "the rest" would include The Starry Night. When he decided to hold back three paintings from this batch in order to save money on postage, The Starry Night was one of the paintings he did not send. Finally, in a letter to painter Émile Bernard from late November 1889, Van Gogh referred to the painting as a "failure."

Van Gogh argued with Bernard and especially Paul Gauguin as to whether one should paint from nature, as Van Gogh preferred, or paint what Gauguin called "abstractions": paintings conceived in the imagination, or de tête. In the letter to Bernard, Van Gogh recounted his experiences when Gauguin lived with him for nine weeks in the autumn and winter[clarification needed] of 1888: "When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or twice allowed myself to be led astray into abstraction, as you know. . . . But that was delusion, dear friend, and one soon comes up against a brick wall. . . And yet, once again I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big—another failure—and I have had my fill of that." Van Gogh here is referring to the expressionistic swirls which dominate the upper center portion of The Starry Night.

Theo referred to these pictorial elements in a letter to Vincent dated 22 October 1889: "I clearly sense what preoccupies you in the new canvases like the village in the moonlight [The Starry Night] or the mountains, but I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things." Vincent responded in early November, "Despite what you say in your previous letter, that the search for style often harms other qualities, the fact is that I feel myself greatly driven to seek style, if you like, but I mean by that a more manly and more deliberate drawing. If that will make me more like Bernard or Gauguin, I can't do anything about it. But am inclined to believe that in the long run you'd get used to it." And later in the same letter, he wrote, "I know very well that the studies drawn with long, sinuous lines from the last consignment weren't what they ought to become, however I dare urge you to believe that in landscapes one will continue to mass things by means of a drawing style that seeks to express the entanglement of the masses."

But although Van Gogh periodically defended the practices of Gauguin and Bernard, each time he inevitably repudiated them and continued with his preferred method of painting from nature. Like the impressionists he had met in Paris, especially Claude Monet, Van Gogh also favored working in series. He had painted his series of sunflowers in Arles, and he painted the series of cypresses and wheat fields at Saint-Rémy. The Starry Night belongs to this latter series, as well as to a small series of nocturnes he initiated in Arles.

Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône, 1888, oil on canvas

The nocturne series was limited by the difficulties posed by painting such scenes from nature, i.e., at night. The first painting in the series was Café Terrace at Night, painted in Arles in early September 1888, followed by Starry Night (Over the Rhône) later that same month. Van Gogh's written statements concerning these paintings provide further insight into his intentions for painting night studies in general and The Starry Night in particular.

Soon after his arrival in Arles in February 1888, Van Gogh wrote to Theo, "I need a starry night with cypresses or—perhaps above a field of ripe wheat; there are some really beautiful nights here." That same week, he wrote to Bernard, "A starry sky is something I should like to try to do, just as in the daytime I am going to try to paint a green meadow spangled with dandelions." He compared the stars to dots on a map and mused that, as one takes a train to travel on Earth, "we take death to reach a star." Although at this point in his life Van Gogh was disillusioned by religion, he appears not to have lost his belief in an afterlife. He voiced this ambivalence in a letter to Theo after having painted Starry Night Over the Rhône, confessing to a "tremendous need for, shall I say the word—for religion—so I go outside at night to paint the stars."

He wrote about existing in another dimension after death and associated this dimension with the night sky. "It would be so simple and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so, if life had yet another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one lands when one dies. "Hope is in the stars," he wrote, but he was quick to point out that "earth is a planet too, and consequently a star, or celestial orb." And he stated flatly that The Starry Night was "not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas."

Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro highlights the expressionistic aspects of The Starry Night, saying it was created under the "pressure of feeling" and that it is a "visionary [painting] inspired by a religious mood." Schapiro theorizes that the "hidden content" of the work makes reference to the New Testament Book of Revelation, revealing an "apocalyptic theme of the woman in pain of birth, girded with the sun and moon and crowned with stars, whose newborn child is threatened by the dragon." (Schapiro, in the same volume, also professes to see an image of a mother and child in the clouds in Landscape with Olive Trees, painted at the same time and often regarded as a pendant to The Starry Night.)

Art historian Sven Loevgren expands on Schapiro's approach, again calling The Starry Night a "visionary painting" which "was conceived in a state of great agitation." He writes of the "hallucinatory character of the painting and its violently expressive form," although he takes pains to note that the painting was not executed during one of Van Gogh's incapacitating breakdowns. Loevgren compares Van Gogh's "religiously inclined longing for the beyond" to the poetry of Walt Whitman. He calls The Starry Night "an infinitely expressive picture which symbolizes the final absorption of the artist by the cosmos" and which "gives a never-to-be-forgotten sensation of standing on the threshold of eternity." Loevgren praises Schapiro's "eloquent interpretation" of the painting as an apocalyptic vision and advances his own symbolist theory with reference to the eleven stars in one of Joseph's dreams in the Old Testament Book of Genesis. Loevgren asserts that the pictorial elements of The Starry Night "are visualized in purely symbolic terms" and notes that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries."

The drawing Cypresses in Starry Night, a reed pen copy executed by Van Gogh after the painting in 1889. Originally held at Kunsthalle Bremen, today part of the disputed Baldin Collection.

Art historian Lauren Soth also finds a symbolist subtext in The Starry Night, saying that the painting is a "traditional religious subject in disguise" and a "sublimated image of [Van Gogh's] deepest religious feelings." Citing Van Gogh's avowed admiration for the paintings of Eugène Delacroix, and especially the earlier painter's use of Prussian blue and citron yellow in paintings of Christ, Soth theorizes that Van Gogh used these colors to represent Christ in The Starry Night. He criticizes Schapiro's and Loevgren's biblical interpretations, dependent as they are on a reading of the crescent moon as incorporating elements of the Sun. He says it is merely a crescent moon, which, he writes, also had symbolic meaning for Van Gogh, representing "consolation."

It is in light of such symbolist interpretations of The Starry Night that art historian Albert Boime presents his study of the painting. As noted above, Boime has proven that the painting depicts not only the topographical elements of Van Gogh's view from his asylum window but also the celestial elements, identifying not only Venus but also the constellation Aries. He suggests that Van Gogh originally intended to paint a gibbous Moon but "reverted to a more traditional image" of the crescent moon, and theorizes that the bright aureole around the resulting crescent is a remnant of the original gibbous version. He recounts Van Gogh's interest in the writings of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne as possible inspiration for his belief in an afterlife on stars or planets. And he provides a detailed discussion of the well-publicized advances in astronomy that took place during Van Gogh's lifetime.

Boime asserts that while Van Gogh never mentioned astronomer Camille Flammarion in his letters, he believes that Van Gogh must have been aware of Flammarion's popular illustrated publications, which included drawings of spiral nebulae (as galaxies were then called) as seen and photographed through telescopes. Boime interprets the swirling figure in the central portion of the sky in The Starry Night to represent either a spiral galaxy or a comet, photographs of which had also been published in popular media. He asserts that the only non-realistic elements of the painting are the village and the swirls in the sky. These swirls represent Van Gogh's understanding of the cosmos as a living, dynamic place.

Harvard astronomer Charles A. Whitney conducted his own astronomical study of The Starry Night contemporaneously with but independent of Boime (who spent almost his entire career at U.C.L.A.). While Whitney does not share Boime's certainty with regard to the constellation Aries, he concurs with Boime on the visibility of Venus in Provence at the time the painting was executed. He also sees the depiction of a spiral galaxy in the sky, although he gives credit for the original to Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, whose work Flammarion reproduced.

Sketch of the Whirlpool Galaxy by Lord Rosse in 1845, 44 years before Van Gogh's painting

Whitney also theorizes that the swirls in the sky could represent wind, evoking the mistral that had such a profound effect on Van Gogh during the twenty-seven months he spent in Provence. (It was the mistral which triggered his first breakdown after entering the asylum, in July 1889, less than a month after painting The Starry Night.) Boime theorizes that the lighter shades of blue just above the horizon show the first light of morning.

The village has been variously identified as either a recollection of Van Gogh's Dutch homeland, or based on a sketch he made of the town of Saint-Rémy. In either case, it is an imaginary component of the picture, not visible from the window of the asylum bedroom.

Cypress trees have long been associated with death in European culture, though the question of whether Van Gogh intended for them to have such a symbolic meaning in The Starry Night is the subject of an open debate. In an April 1888 letter to Bernard, Van Gogh referred to "funereal cypresses," though this is possibly similar to saying "stately oaks" or "weeping willows." One week after painting The Starry Night, he wrote to his brother Theo, "The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts. I should like to make something of them like the canvases of the sunflowers, because it astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them." In the same letter he mentioned "two studies of cypresses of that difficult shade of bottle green." These statements suggest that Van Gogh was interested in the trees more for their formal qualities than for their symbolic connotation.

Schapiro refers to the cypress in the painting as a "vague symbol of a human striving." Boime calls it the "symbolic counterpart of Van Gogh's own striving for the Infinite through non-orthodox channels." Art historian Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski says that for Van Gogh the cypresses "function as rustic and natural obelisks" providing a "link between the heavens and the earth." (Some commentators see one tree, others see two or more.) Loevgren reminds the reader that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries."

Art historian Ronald Pickvance says that with "its arbitrary collage of separate motifs," The Starry Night "is overtly stamped as an 'abstraction'." Pickvance claims that cypress trees were not visible facing east from Van Gogh's room, and he includes them with the village and the swirls in the sky as products of Van Gogh's imagination.Boime asserts that the cypresses were visible in the east, as does Jirat-Wasiutyński. Van Gogh biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith concur, saying that Van Gogh "telescoped" the view in certain of the pictures of the view from his window, and it stands to reason that Van Gogh would do this in a painting featuring the Morning Star. Such a compression of depth serves to enhance the brightness of the planet.

Soth uses Van Gogh's statement to his brother, that The Starry Night is "an exaggeration from the point of view of arrangement" to further his argument that the painting is "an amalgam of images." However, it is by no means certain that Van Gogh was using "arrangement" as a synonym for "composition." Van Gogh was, in fact, speaking of three paintings, one of which was The Starry Night, when he made this comment: "The olive trees with white cloud and background of mountains, as well as the Moonrise and the Night effect," as he called it, "these are exaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of the ancient woodcuts." The first two pictures are universally acknowledged to be realistic, non-composite views of their subjects. What the three pictures do have in common is exaggerated color and brushwork of the type that Theo referred to when he criticized Van Gogh for his "search for style [that] takes away the real sentiment of things" in The Starry Night.

On two other occasions around this time, Van Gogh used the word "arrangement" to refer to color, similar to the way James Abbott McNeill Whistler used the term. In a letter to Gauguin in January 1889, he wrote, "As an arrangement of colours: the reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens. As an impressionist arrangement of colours, I’ve never devised anything better." (The painting he is referring to is La Berceuse, which is a realistic portrait of Augustine Roulin with an imaginative floral background.) And to Bernard in late November 1889: "But this is enough for you to understand that I would long to see things of yours again, like the painting of yours that Gauguin has, those Breton women walking in a meadow, the arrangement of which is so beautiful, the colour so naively distinguished. Ah, you’re exchanging that for something—must one say the word—something artificial—something affected."

While stopping short of calling the painting a hallucinatory vision, Naifeh and Smith discuss The Starry Night in the context of Van Gogh's mental illness, which they identify as temporal lobe epilepsy, or latent epilepsy. "Not the kind," they write, "known since antiquity, that caused the limbs to jerk and the body to collapse ('the falling sickness', as it was sometimes called), but a mental epilepsy—a seizing up of the mind: a collapse of thought, perception, reason, and emotion that manifested itself entirely in the brain and often prompted bizarre, dramatic behavior." Symptoms of the seizures "resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain."

Van Gogh experienced his second breakdown in seven months in July 1889. Naifeh and Smith theorize that the seeds of this breakdown were present when Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, that in giving himself over to his imagination "his defenses had been breached." On that day in mid-June, in a "state of heightened reality," with all the other elements of the painting in place, Van Gogh threw himself into the painting of the stars, producing, they write, "a night sky unlike any other the world had ever seen with ordinary eyes."

“Let’s flock together

Keep the rest behind

No more waiting in line

I got you, I m overtly fine”

 

[HaMeDi©aL 2008]

Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire (see also mural).

 

Graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered by property owners and civic authorities as defacement and vandalism, which is a punishable crime, citing the use of graffiti by street gangs to mark territory or to serve as an indicator of gang-related activities. Graffiti has become visualized as a growing urban "problem" for many cities in industrialized nations, spreading from the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s to the rest of the United States and Europe and other world regions

 

"Graffiti" (usually both singular and plural) and the rare singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched"). The term "graffiti" is used in art history for works of art produced by scratching a design into a surface. A related term is "sgraffito", which involves scratching through one layer of pigment to reveal another beneath it. This technique was primarily used by potters who would glaze their wares and then scratch a design into them. In ancient times graffiti were carved on walls with a sharp object, although sometimes chalk or coal were used. The word originates from Greek γράφειν—graphein—meaning "to write".

 

The term graffiti originally referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, and such, found on the walls of ancient sepulchres or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Historically, these writings were not considered vanadlism, which today is considered part of the definition of graffiti.

 

The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.

 

Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are 40,000 year old ones found in Australia. The oldest written graffiti was found in ancient Rome around 2500 years ago. Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was not considered vandalism.

 

Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there. One reads:

 

Wet with cool dew drops

fragrant with perfume from the flowers

came the gentle breeze

jasmine and water lily

dance in the spring sunshine

side-long glances

of the golden-hued ladies

stab into my thoughts

heaven itself cannot take my mind

as it has been captivated by one lass

among the five hundred I have seen here.

 

Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.

 

Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.

 

There are also examples of graffiti occurring in American history, such as Independence Rock, a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.

 

Later, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt in the 1790s. Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, Greece.

 

The oldest known example of graffiti "monikers" found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.

 

In World War II, an inscription on a wall at the fortress of Verdun was seen as an illustration of the US response twice in a generation to the wrongs of the Old World:

 

During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".

 

Modern graffiti art has its origins with young people in 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti. Eventually, throw-ups and pieces evolved with the desire to create larger art. Writers used spray paint and other kind of materials to leave tags or to create images on the sides subway trains. and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.

 

While the art had many advocates and appreciators—including the cultural critic Norman Mailer—others, including New York City mayor Ed Koch, considered it to be defacement of public property, and saw it as a form of public blight. The ‘taggers’ called what they did ‘writing’—though an important 1974 essay by Mailer referred to it using the term ‘graffiti.’

 

Contemporary graffiti style has been heavily influenced by hip hop culture and the myriad international styles derived from Philadelphia and New York City Subway graffiti; however, there are many other traditions of notable graffiti in the twentieth century. Graffiti have long appeared on building walls, in latrines, railroad boxcars, subways, and bridges.

 

An early graffito outside of New York or Philadelphia was the inscription in London reading "Clapton is God" in reference to the guitarist Eric Clapton. Creating the cult of the guitar hero, the phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in an Islington, north London in the autumn of 1967. The graffito was captured in a photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall.

 

Films like Style Wars in the 80s depicting famous writers such as Skeme, Dondi, MinOne, and ZEPHYR reinforced graffiti's role within New York's emerging hip-hop culture. Although many officers of the New York City Police Department found this film to be controversial, Style Wars is still recognized as the most prolific film representation of what was going on within the young hip hop culture of the early 1980s. Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 took hip hop graffiti to Paris and London as part of the New York City Rap Tour in 1983

 

Commercialization and entrance into mainstream pop culture

Main article: Commercial graffiti

With the popularity and legitimization of graffiti has come a level of commercialization. In 2001, computer giant IBM launched an advertising campaign in Chicago and San Francisco which involved people spray painting on sidewalks a peace symbol, a heart, and a penguin (Linux mascot), to represent "Peace, Love, and Linux." IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco collectively US$120,000 for punitive damages and clean-up costs.

 

In 2005, a similar ad campaign was launched by Sony and executed by its advertising agency in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, to market its handheld PSP gaming system. In this campaign, taking notice of the legal problems of the IBM campaign, Sony paid building owners for the rights to paint on their buildings "a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle, or a rocking horse".

 

Tristan Manco wrote that Brazil "boasts a unique and particularly rich, graffiti scene ... [earning] it an international reputation as the place to go for artistic inspiration". Graffiti "flourishes in every conceivable space in Brazil's cities". Artistic parallels "are often drawn between the energy of São Paulo today and 1970s New York". The "sprawling metropolis", of São Paulo has "become the new shrine to graffiti"; Manco alludes to "poverty and unemployment ... [and] the epic struggles and conditions of the country's marginalised peoples", and to "Brazil's chronic poverty", as the main engines that "have fuelled a vibrant graffiti culture". In world terms, Brazil has "one of the most uneven distributions of income. Laws and taxes change frequently". Such factors, Manco argues, contribute to a very fluid society, riven with those economic divisions and social tensions that underpin and feed the "folkloric vandalism and an urban sport for the disenfranchised", that is South American graffiti art.

 

Prominent Brazilian writers include Os Gêmeos, Boleta, Nunca, Nina, Speto, Tikka, and T.Freak. Their artistic success and involvement in commercial design ventures has highlighted divisions within the Brazilian graffiti community between adherents of the cruder transgressive form of pichação and the more conventionally artistic values of the practitioners of grafite.

 

Graffiti in the Middle East has emerged slowly, with taggers operating in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf countries like Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and in Iran. The major Iranian newspaper Hamshahri has published two articles on illegal writers in the city with photographic coverage of Iranian artist A1one's works on Tehran walls. Tokyo-based design magazine, PingMag, has interviewed A1one and featured photographs of his work. The Israeli West Bank barrier has become a site for graffiti, reminiscent in this sense of the Berlin Wall. Many writers in Israel come from other places around the globe, such as JUIF from Los Angeles and DEVIONE from London. The religious reference "נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן" ("Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman") is commonly seen in graffiti around Israel.

 

Graffiti has played an important role within the street art scene in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially following the events of the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Sudanese Revolution of 2018/19. Graffiti is a tool of expression in the context of conflict in the region, allowing people to raise their voices politically and socially. Famous street artist Banksy has had an important effect in the street art scene in the MENA area, especially in Palestine where some of his works are located in the West Bank barrier and Bethlehem.

 

There are also a large number of graffiti influences in Southeast Asian countries that mostly come from modern Western culture, such as Malaysia, where graffiti have long been a common sight in Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Since 2010, the country has begun hosting a street festival to encourage all generations and people from all walks of life to enjoy and encourage Malaysian street culture.

 

The modern-day graffitists can be found with an arsenal of various materials that allow for a successful production of a piece. This includes such techniques as scribing. However, spray paint in aerosol cans is the number one medium for graffiti. From this commodity comes different styles, technique, and abilities to form master works of graffiti. Spray paint can be found at hardware and art stores and comes in virtually every color.

 

Stencil graffiti is created by cutting out shapes and designs in a stiff material (such as cardboard or subject folders) to form an overall design or image. The stencil is then placed on the "canvas" gently and with quick, easy strokes of the aerosol can, the image begins to appear on the intended surface.

 

Some of the first examples were created in 1981 by artists Blek le Rat in Paris, in 1982 by Jef Aerosol in Tours (France); by 1985 stencils had appeared in other cities including New York City, Sydney, and Melbourne, where they were documented by American photographer Charles Gatewood and Australian photographer Rennie Ellis

 

Tagging is the practice of someone spray-painting "their name, initial or logo onto a public surface" in a handstyle unique to the writer. Tags were the first form of modern graffiti.

 

Modern graffiti art often incorporates additional arts and technologies. For example, Graffiti Research Lab has encouraged the use of projected images and magnetic light-emitting diodes (throwies) as new media for graffitists. yarnbombing is another recent form of graffiti. Yarnbombers occasionally target previous graffiti for modification, which had been avoided among the majority of graffitists.

 

Theories on the use of graffiti by avant-garde artists have a history dating back at least to the Asger Jorn, who in 1962 painting declared in a graffiti-like gesture "the avant-garde won't give up"

 

Many contemporary analysts and even art critics have begun to see artistic value in some graffiti and to recognize it as a form of public art. According to many art researchers, particularly in the Netherlands and in Los Angeles, that type of public art is, in fact an effective tool of social emancipation or, in the achievement of a political goal

 

In times of conflict, such murals have offered a means of communication and self-expression for members of these socially, ethnically, or racially divided communities, and have proven themselves as effective tools in establishing dialog and thus, of addressing cleavages in the long run. The Berlin Wall was also extensively covered by graffiti reflecting social pressures relating to the oppressive Soviet rule over the GDR.

 

Many artists involved with graffiti are also concerned with the similar activity of stenciling. Essentially, this entails stenciling a print of one or more colors using spray-paint. Recognized while exhibiting and publishing several of her coloured stencils and paintings portraying the Sri Lankan Civil War and urban Britain in the early 2000s, graffitists Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., has also become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos for singles "Galang" and "Bucky Done Gun", and her cover art. Stickers of her artwork also often appear around places such as London in Brick Lane, stuck to lamp posts and street signs, she having become a muse for other graffitists and painters worldwide in cities including Seville.

 

Graffitist believes that art should be on display for everyone in the public eye or in plain sight, not hidden away in a museum or a gallery. Art should color the streets, not the inside of some building. Graffiti is a form of art that cannot be owned or bought. It does not last forever, it is temporary, yet one of a kind. It is a form of self promotion for the artist that can be displayed anywhere form sidewalks, roofs, subways, building wall, etc. Art to them is for everyone and should be showed to everyone for free.

 

Graffiti is a way of communicating and a way of expressing what one feels in the moment. It is both art and a functional thing that can warn people of something or inform people of something. However, graffiti is to some people a form of art, but to some a form of vandalism. And many graffitists choose to protect their identities and remain anonymous or to hinder prosecution.

 

With the commercialization of graffiti (and hip hop in general), in most cases, even with legally painted "graffiti" art, graffitists tend to choose anonymity. This may be attributed to various reasons or a combination of reasons. Graffiti still remains the one of four hip hop elements that is not considered "performance art" despite the image of the "singing and dancing star" that sells hip hop culture to the mainstream. Being a graphic form of art, it might also be said that many graffitists still fall in the category of the introverted archetypal artist.

 

Banksy is one of the world's most notorious and popular street artists who continues to remain faceless in today's society. He is known for his political, anti-war stencil art mainly in Bristol, England, but his work may be seen anywhere from Los Angeles to Palestine. In the UK, Banksy is the most recognizable icon for this cultural artistic movement and keeps his identity a secret to avoid arrest. Much of Banksy's artwork may be seen around the streets of London and surrounding suburbs, although he has painted pictures throughout the world, including the Middle East, where he has painted on Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side. One depicted a hole in the wall with an idyllic beach, while another shows a mountain landscape on the other side. A number of exhibitions also have taken place since 2000, and recent works of art have fetched vast sums of money. Banksy's art is a prime example of the classic controversy: vandalism vs. art. Art supporters endorse his work distributed in urban areas as pieces of art and some councils, such as Bristol and Islington, have officially protected them, while officials of other areas have deemed his work to be vandalism and have removed it.

 

Pixnit is another artist who chooses to keep her identity from the general public. Her work focuses on beauty and design aspects of graffiti as opposed to Banksy's anti-government shock value. Her paintings are often of flower designs above shops and stores in her local urban area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some store owners endorse her work and encourage others to do similar work as well. "One of the pieces was left up above Steve's Kitchen, because it looks pretty awesome"- Erin Scott, the manager of New England Comics in Allston, Massachusetts.

 

Graffiti artists may become offended if photographs of their art are published in a commercial context without their permission. In March 2020, the Finnish graffiti artist Psyke expressed his displeasure at the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat publishing a photograph of a Peugeot 208 in an article about new cars, with his graffiti prominently shown on the background. The artist claims he does not want his art being used in commercial context, not even if he were to receive compensation.

 

Territorial graffiti marks urban neighborhoods with tags and logos to differentiate certain groups from others. These images are meant to show outsiders a stern look at whose turf is whose. The subject matter of gang-related graffiti consists of cryptic symbols and initials strictly fashioned with unique calligraphies. Gang members use graffiti to designate membership throughout the gang, to differentiate rivals and associates and, most commonly, to mark borders which are both territorial and ideological.

 

Graffiti has been used as a means of advertising both legally and illegally. Bronx-based TATS CRU has made a name for themselves doing legal advertising campaigns for companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Toyota, and MTV. In the UK, Covent Garden's Boxfresh used stencil images of a Zapatista revolutionary in the hopes that cross referencing would promote their store.

 

Smirnoff hired artists to use reverse graffiti (the use of high pressure hoses to clean dirty surfaces to leave a clean image in the surrounding dirt) to increase awareness of their product.

 

Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist, and anti-consumerist messages throughout the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names such as "De Zoot", "Vendex", and "Dr Rat". To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started that was called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there was already a vibrant graffiti culture.

 

The student protests and general strike of May 1968 saw Paris bedecked in revolutionary, anarchistic, and situationist slogans such as L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire ("Boredom is counterrevolutionary") and Lisez moins, vivez plus ("Read less, live more"). While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the 'millenarian' and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers.

 

I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like. Excuse the French, we're not a bunch of p---- artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we're a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.

 

The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming, or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s with the rise of Street Art, a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints and non-traditional forms of painting.

 

Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicize other art forms, and have used the prison sentences enforced on them as a means of further protest. The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each other's practices. For example, the anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.

 

Berlin human rights activist Irmela Mensah-Schramm has received global media attention and numerous awards for her 35-year campaign of effacing neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist graffiti throughout Germany, often by altering hate speech in humorous ways.

 

In Serbian capital, Belgrade, the graffiti depicting a uniformed former general of Serb army and war criminal, convicted at ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnian War, Ratko Mladić, appeared in a military salute alongside the words "General, thank to your mother". Aleks Eror, Berlin-based journalist, explains how "veneration of historical and wartime figures" through street art is not a new phenomenon in the region of former Yugoslavia, and that "in most cases is firmly focused on the future, rather than retelling the past". Eror is not only analyst pointing to danger of such an expressions for the region's future. In a long expose on the subject of Bosnian genocide denial, at Balkan Diskurs magazine and multimedia platform website, Kristina Gadže and Taylor Whitsell referred to these experiences as a young generations' "cultural heritage", in which young are being exposed to celebration and affirmation of war-criminals as part of their "formal education" and "inheritance".

 

There are numerous examples of genocide denial through celebration and affirmation of war criminals throughout the region of Western Balkans inhabited by Serbs using this form of artistic expression. Several more of these graffiti are found in Serbian capital, and many more across Serbia and Bosnian and Herzegovinian administrative entity, Republika Srpska, which is the ethnic Serbian majority enclave. Critics point that Serbia as a state, is willing to defend the mural of convicted war criminal, and have no intention to react on cases of genocide denial, noting that Interior Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vulin decision to ban any gathering with an intent to remove the mural, with the deployment of riot police, sends the message of "tacit endorsement". Consequently, on 9 November 2021, Serbian heavy police in riot gear, with graffiti creators and their supporters, blocked the access to the mural to prevent human rights groups and other activists to paint over it and mark the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism in that way, and even arrested two civic activist for throwing eggs at the graffiti.

 

Graffiti may also be used as an offensive expression. This form of graffiti may be difficult to identify, as it is mostly removed by the local authority (as councils which have adopted strategies of criminalization also strive to remove graffiti quickly). Therefore, existing racist graffiti is mostly more subtle and at first sight, not easily recognized as "racist". It can then be understood only if one knows the relevant "local code" (social, historical, political, temporal, and spatial), which is seen as heteroglot and thus a 'unique set of conditions' in a cultural context.

 

A spatial code for example, could be that there is a certain youth group in an area that is engaging heavily in racist activities. So, for residents (knowing the local code), a graffiti containing only the name or abbreviation of this gang already is a racist expression, reminding the offended people of their gang activities. Also a graffiti is in most cases, the herald of more serious criminal activity to come. A person who does not know these gang activities would not be able to recognize the meaning of this graffiti. Also if a tag of this youth group or gang is placed on a building occupied by asylum seekers, for example, its racist character is even stronger.

By making the graffiti less explicit (as adapted to social and legal constraints), these drawings are less likely to be removed, but do not lose their threatening and offensive character.

 

Elsewhere, activists in Russia have used painted caricatures of local officials with their mouths as potholes, to show their anger about the poor state of the roads. In Manchester, England, a graffitists painted obscene images around potholes, which often resulted in them being repaired within 48 hours.

 

In the early 1980s, the first art galleries to show graffitists to the public were Fashion Moda in the Bronx, Now Gallery and Fun Gallery, both in the East Village, Manhattan.

 

A 2006 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum displayed graffiti as an art form that began in New York's outer boroughs and reached great heights in the early 1980s with the work of Crash, Lee, Daze, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It displayed 22 works by New York graffitists, including Crash, Daze, and Lady Pink. In an article about the exhibition in the magazine Time Out, curator Charlotta Kotik said that she hoped the exhibition would cause viewers to rethink their assumptions about graffiti.

 

From the 1970s onwards, Burhan Doğançay photographed urban walls all over the world; these he then archived for use as sources of inspiration for his painterly works. The project today known as "Walls of the World" grew beyond even his own expectations and comprises about 30,000 individual images. It spans a period of 40 years across five continents and 114 countries. In 1982, photographs from this project comprised a one-man exhibition titled "Les murs murmurent, ils crient, ils chantent ..." (The walls whisper, shout and sing ...) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

 

In Australia, art historians have judged some local graffiti of sufficient creative merit to rank them firmly within the arts. Oxford University Press's art history text Australian Painting 1788–2000 concludes with a long discussion of graffiti's key place within contemporary visual culture, including the work of several Australian practitioners.

 

Between March and April 2009, 150 artists exhibited 300 pieces of graffiti at the Grand Palais in Paris.

 

Spray paint has many negative environmental effects. The paint contains toxic chemicals, and the can uses volatile hydrocarbon gases to spray the paint onto a surface.

 

Volatile organic compound (VOC) leads to ground level ozone formation and most of graffiti related emissions are VOCs. A 2010 paper estimates 4,862 tons of VOCs were released in the United States in activities related to graffiti.

  

In China, Mao Zedong in the 1920s used revolutionary slogans and paintings in public places to galvanize the country's communist movement.

 

Based on different national conditions, many people believe that China's attitude towards Graffiti is fierce, but in fact, according to Lance Crayon in his film Spray Paint Beijing: Graffiti in the Capital of China, Graffiti is generally accepted in Beijing, with artists not seeing much police interference. Political and religiously sensitive graffiti, however, is not allowed.

 

In Hong Kong, Tsang Tsou Choi was known as the King of Kowloon for his calligraphy graffiti over many years, in which he claimed ownership of the area. Now some of his work is preserved officially.

 

In Taiwan, the government has made some concessions to graffitists. Since 2005 they have been allowed to freely display their work along some sections of riverside retaining walls in designated "Graffiti Zones". From 2007, Taipei's department of cultural affairs also began permitting graffiti on fences around major public construction sites. Department head Yong-ping Lee (李永萍) stated, "We will promote graffiti starting with the public sector, and then later in the private sector too. It's our goal to beautify the city with graffiti". The government later helped organize a graffiti contest in Ximending, a popular shopping district. graffitists caught working outside of these designated areas still face fines up to NT$6,000 under a department of environmental protection regulation. However, Taiwanese authorities can be relatively lenient, one veteran police officer stating anonymously, "Unless someone complains about vandalism, we won't get involved. We don't go after it proactively."

 

In 1993, after several expensive cars in Singapore were spray-painted, the police arrested a student from the Singapore American School, Michael P. Fay, questioned him, and subsequently charged him with vandalism. Fay pleaded guilty to vandalizing a car in addition to stealing road signs. Under the 1966 Vandalism Act of Singapore, originally passed to curb the spread of communist graffiti in Singapore, the court sentenced him to four months in jail, a fine of S$3,500 (US$2,233), and a caning. The New York Times ran several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called on the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy with protests. Although the Singapore government received many calls for clemency, Fay's caning took place in Singapore on 5 May 1994. Fay had originally received a sentence of six strokes of the cane, but the presiding president of Singapore, Ong Teng Cheong, agreed to reduce his caning sentence to four lashes.

 

In South Korea, Park Jung-soo was fined two million South Korean won by the Seoul Central District Court for spray-painting a rat on posters of the G-20 Summit a few days before the event in November 2011. Park alleged that the initial in "G-20" sounds like the Korean word for "rat", but Korean government prosecutors alleged that Park was making a derogatory statement about the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the host of the summit. This case led to public outcry and debate on the lack of government tolerance and in support of freedom of expression. The court ruled that the painting, "an ominous creature like a rat" amounts to "an organized criminal activity" and upheld the fine while denying the prosecution's request for imprisonment for Park.

 

In Europe, community cleaning squads have responded to graffiti, in some cases with reckless abandon, as when in 1992 in France a local Scout group, attempting to remove modern graffiti, damaged two prehistoric paintings of bison in the Cave of Mayrière supérieure near the French village of Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in archeology.

 

In September 2006, the European Parliament directed the European Commission to create urban environment policies to prevent and eliminate dirt, litter, graffiti, animal excrement, and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems in European cities, along with other concerns over urban life.

 

In Budapest, Hungary, both a city-backed movement called I Love Budapest and a special police division tackle the problem, including the provision of approved areas.

 

The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 became Britain's latest anti-graffiti legislation. In August 2004, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign issued a press release calling for zero tolerance of graffiti and supporting proposals such as issuing "on the spot" fines to graffiti offenders and banning the sale of aerosol paint to anyone under the age of 16. The press release also condemned the use of graffiti images in advertising and in music videos, arguing that real-world experience of graffiti stood far removed from its often-portrayed "cool" or "edgy'" image.

 

To back the campaign, 123 Members of Parliament (MPs) (including then Prime Minister Tony Blair), signed a charter which stated: "Graffiti is not art, it's crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of this problem."

 

In the UK, city councils have the power to take action against the owner of any property that has been defaced under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005) or, in certain cases, the Highways Act. This is often used against owners of property that are complacent in allowing protective boards to be defaced so long as the property is not damaged.

 

In July 2008, a conspiracy charge was used to convict graffitists for the first time. After a three-month police surveillance operation, nine members of the DPM crew were convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal damage costing at least £1 million. Five of them received prison sentences, ranging from eighteen months to two years. The unprecedented scale of the investigation and the severity of the sentences rekindled public debate over whether graffiti should be considered art or crime.

 

Some councils, like those of Stroud and Loerrach, provide approved areas in the town where graffitists can showcase their talents, including underpasses, car parks, and walls that might otherwise prove a target for the "spray and run".

 

Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney at Camperdown (2009)

In an effort to reduce vandalism, many cities in Australia have designated walls or areas exclusively for use by graffitists. One early example is the "Graffiti Tunnel" located at the Camperdown Campus of the University of Sydney, which is available for use by any student at the university to tag, advertise, poster, and paint. Advocates of this idea suggest that this discourages petty vandalism yet encourages artists to take their time and produce great art, without worry of being caught or arrested for vandalism or trespassing.[108][109] Others disagree with this approach, arguing that the presence of legal graffiti walls does not demonstrably reduce illegal graffiti elsewhere. Some local government areas throughout Australia have introduced "anti-graffiti squads", who clean graffiti in the area, and such crews as BCW (Buffers Can't Win) have taken steps to keep one step ahead of local graffiti cleaners.

 

Many state governments have banned the sale or possession of spray paint to those under the age of 18 (age of majority). However, a number of local governments in Victoria have taken steps to recognize the cultural heritage value of some examples of graffiti, such as prominent political graffiti. Tough new graffiti laws have been introduced in Australia with fines of up to A$26,000 and two years in prison.

 

Melbourne is a prominent graffiti city of Australia with many of its lanes being tourist attractions, such as Hosier Lane in particular, a popular destination for photographers, wedding photography, and backdrops for corporate print advertising. The Lonely Planet travel guide cites Melbourne's street as a major attraction. All forms of graffiti, including sticker art, poster, stencil art, and wheatpasting, can be found in many places throughout the city. Prominent street art precincts include; Fitzroy, Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick, St. Kilda, and the CBD, where stencil and sticker art is prominent. As one moves farther away from the city, mostly along suburban train lines, graffiti tags become more prominent. Many international artists such as Banksy have left their work in Melbourne and in early 2008 a perspex screen was installed to prevent a Banksy stencil art piece from being destroyed, it has survived since 2003 through the respect of local street artists avoiding posting over it, although it has recently had paint tipped over it.

 

In February 2008 Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister at that time, announced a government crackdown on tagging and other forms of graffiti vandalism, describing it as a destructive crime representing an invasion of public and private property. New legislation subsequently adopted included a ban on the sale of paint spray cans to persons under 18 and increases in maximum fines for the offence from NZ$200 to NZ$2,000 or extended community service. The issue of tagging become a widely debated one following an incident in Auckland during January 2008 in which a middle-aged property owner stabbed one of two teenage taggers to death and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.

 

Graffiti databases have increased in the past decade because they allow vandalism incidents to be fully documented against an offender and help the police and prosecution charge and prosecute offenders for multiple counts of vandalism. They also provide law enforcement the ability to rapidly search for an offender's moniker or tag in a simple, effective, and comprehensive way. These systems can also help track costs of damage to a city to help allocate an anti-graffiti budget. The theory is that when an offender is caught putting up graffiti, they are not just charged with one count of vandalism; they can be held accountable for all the other damage for which they are responsible. This has two main benefits for law enforcement. One, it sends a signal to the offenders that their vandalism is being tracked. Two, a city can seek restitution from offenders for all the damage that they have committed, not merely a single incident. These systems give law enforcement personnel real-time, street-level intelligence that allows them not only to focus on the worst graffiti offenders and their damage, but also to monitor potential gang violence that is associated with the graffiti.

 

Many restrictions of civil gang injunctions are designed to help address and protect the physical environment and limit graffiti. Provisions of gang injunctions include things such as restricting the possession of marker pens, spray paint cans, or other sharp objects capable of defacing private or public property; spray painting, or marking with marker pens, scratching, applying stickers, or otherwise applying graffiti on any public or private property, including, but not limited to the street, alley, residences, block walls, and fences, vehicles or any other real or personal property. Some injunctions contain wording that restricts damaging or vandalizing both public and private property, including but not limited to any vehicle, light fixture, door, fence, wall, gate, window, building, street sign, utility box, telephone box, tree, or power pole.

 

To help address many of these issues, many local jurisdictions have set up graffiti abatement hotlines, where citizens can call in and report vandalism and have it removed. San Diego's hotline receives more than 5,000 calls per year, in addition to reporting the graffiti, callers can learn more about prevention. One of the complaints about these hotlines is the response time; there is often a lag time between a property owner calling about the graffiti and its removal. The length of delay should be a consideration for any jurisdiction planning on operating a hotline. Local jurisdictions must convince the callers that their complaint of vandalism will be a priority and cleaned off right away. If the jurisdiction does not have the resources to respond to complaints in a timely manner, the value of the hotline diminishes. Crews must be able to respond to individual service calls made to the graffiti hotline as well as focus on cleanup near schools, parks, and major intersections and transit routes to have the biggest impact. Some cities offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of suspects for tagging or graffiti related vandalism. The amount of the reward is based on the information provided, and the action taken.

 

When police obtain search warrants in connection with a vandalism investigation, they are often seeking judicial approval to look for items such as cans of spray paint and nozzles from other kinds of aerosol sprays; etching tools, or other sharp or pointed objects, which could be used to etch or scratch glass and other hard surfaces; permanent marking pens, markers, or paint sticks; evidence of membership or affiliation with any gang or tagging crew; paraphernalia including any reference to "(tagger's name)"; any drawings, writing, objects, or graffiti depicting taggers' names, initials, logos, monikers, slogans, or any mention of tagging crew membership; and any newspaper clippings relating to graffiti crime.

As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president.

 

This protection, embodied in the amendment’s often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government—and also from any equivalent office and position of power in the sovereign states and their subdivisions—any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies.

 

J. Michael Luttig is a former federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Laurence H. Tribe is a University professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School.

This lioness seemed fixated by the flightless storks next door. Although she wasn't quite so overt as to lick her chops, she still couldn't take her eyes away.

Rich Simmons.

 

Princess Diana, still manipulating the press when convenient !.

 

LR2443

[View on full screen.]

 

“A song of Orpheus”

 

This is a slideshow from the antipodes (the ancient Greeks would understand that even if they never knew of Tasmania). But it also has very strong links - through the music I have chosen - to the concept of a journey, a flight from the city (polis – source of our word “politics”) and a return to nature. The music comes from one of Iceland’s greatest composers, the minimalist Jóhann Gunnar Jóhannsson (1969-2018). When he died suddenly in Berlin at the age of 48 the world lost someone of very special gifts. There is a reason why contemporary classical music has taken a minimalist turn: Max Richter, Ludovico Eunaudi, and Jóhann Gunnar Jóhannsson to name a few. And let’s not forget the older brigade that go back to John Cage, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. You see it is music overtly for meditation, a return to the spiritual. There is a thirst for it.

 

If you want to just enjoy the images and music then please do so. But perhaps you might want to come back here sometime and reflect on these thoughts.

 

Johannsson’s last recorded work was his “Orphée” (Deutsche Grammophon, 2016). It begins with this piece, “Flight from the City”. I will try to sum up these thoughts as briefly as possible. The Greek hero Orpheus was often pictured with his lyre. Throughout Western music he has become an archetypal figure for the consummate musician. You see music in the ancient world had more to do with spirituality than with entertainment. It was a means of initiation into the sacred rites. Orpheus was devoted to the sun god, Apollo (as indeed was the founder of Western philosophy, Parmenides himself). Orpheus was the minstrel hero who made the stones dance.

 

Algis Uždavinys (1962–2010) was a Lithuanian philosopher who also died at the age of 48. He spent some time in Australia too. Like Jóhannsson, he was devoted to the traditions for which Orpheus speaks. His last book published a year after his death was called, “Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism” (Matheson Trust, 2011). In the world of Classical Greece Orpheus was also the theologian par excellence. His influence even extended across the Mediterranean to Egypt. The ideas of Orphic religion are extremely complex, and my point here is not to survey them (Uždavinys is a good place to start). But taking the theme with which Jóhann Jóhannsson starts his album on Orpheus, “Flight from the City”, we have these words from Uždavinys:

“…the deeper spiritual life comes to be associated with the private and non-political realm, beyond the socially demanding framework of the polis.” (p57).

 

Polis, the Greek word for city, is also at the root of what we mean by politics. The little journey we have taken in this slideshow with Jóhannsson’s music, is a chance to put aside the hustle and bustle of urban life and an invitation to return to our roots – in a Garden (Paradise) - the clear realm of Nature. You see, all the people we met on our walk around the Freycinet National Park were happy and communicating freely. That’s what Nature can do for us. It is city life (the politics of the polis) that is driving the world insane. And Orpheus has much to say about that kind of madness. But that’s a story for another day.

 

www.thejohannjohannssonfoundation.org/

 

www.radikaliai.lt/didysis-zaidimas/3235-voices-of-the-fir...

   

North Adelaide Congregational Chapel

The foundation stone of the new chapel, to be erected in North Adelaide, for the church and congregation under the pastoral care of the Rev Mr Jefferis, will be laid this afternoon by the Rev T Q Stow. It is to be hoped that a numerous attendance may be present.

Should the designs be carried out, the intended new Chapel will be one of the most beautiful churches in the colony, if not the most beautiful of all. Those who may be unable to attend at the laying of the foundation stone will have an opportunity of taking part in the subsequent proceedings of the day, which include a tea, and public meeting in the evening. The services connected with the laying of the foundation stone are advertised to commence at half-past 3 o'clock.

Ref: South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide SA) Tuesday 15 May 1860

 

FIFTY YEARS AGO

A RELIGIOUS JUBILEE

BROUGHAM-PLACE CHURCH

For many years one of the handsomest and most conspicuous buildings in Adelaide has been the Congregational Church in Brougham Place, North Adelaide.

The excellent proportions of the main structure and of a shapely tower have always been a source of pride, not only to its congregation, but also to the whole community. From whatever elevated position in the metropolis North Adelaide is viewed that classic tower "pointing heavenward" is a feature of attraction.

 

The church speaks silently but with eloquence of the faith and confidence of the Congregationalists of a by-gone generation, for although so long a period has passed since it was originally opened the edifice is still worthy to stand in the front rank of the ecclesiastical buildings of the capital, which is known all over Australia, whether rightly or wrongly, as "the city of churches."

 

The time of jubilee has come, and tomorrow the series of services in honour of that notable event will begin.

 

Dr Jefferis has prepared a valuable record in connection with its first half-century. He deals not only with the building itself, as also with the growth of the cause of which it is the commodious home. To the Colonial Missionary Society, he remarks, is owed "the first overt act to found a Congregational Church, in South Australia."

 

In the year 1837 the Rev T Quinton Stow was sent to Adelaide, where he arrived when the State was barely a year old. He conducted service first in a tent, next in a pine hut thatched with reeds, and then in a church in Gawler Place, which now forms part of the factory of Messrs A Simpson & Son. Thence the congregation passed to Stow Memorial Church in Flinders Street. Mr Stow it was who selected the site for the future church in North Adelaide, and collected the money to pay for it. Two members of his church resident in that part of the city (Messrs Thomas Frost and Manoah Morris) were associated with him in the initiatory work.

 

On the advice of Dr Halley, principal of New College, the Rev J Jefferis, pastor of Saltaire Church, who had been urged by his doctors to seek a warmer climate, was invited to come to Adelaide. He accepted, and on April 24, 1859 he arrived with his newly-married wife. In the meanwhile a hall in Tynte Street, North Adelaide, had been secured and the first services were held there on May 15, 1859 the Revs T Q Stow and F W Cox taking part. Three months later at a public meeting it was resolved "without delay to secure the erection of the intended Congregational Church," and a committee of 32 was appointed with that object.

 

On October 20, 1859, the church was formed by 52 persons entering into fellowship.

 

The first church meeting was held on December 2, when the Rev J Jefferis accepted the offered pastorate. Mr George Fife Angas presented the Sunday School, which began with 16 classes and 180 scholars, with a library. Mr Frost was the first superintendent. Sunday and weekday church services were all well attended.

 

At the last church meeting of the year the pastor announced that the building committee had selected a design for the church submitted by Messrs Hamilton & Wright. The tenders being too high the basement of the building was begun under the supervision of Mr Frost on May 15, 1860, exactly a year after the first service in the hall.

 

Mr Stow laid the foundation stone, and later there was a tea and public meetings in Archer Street Methodist Church. Among the gentlemen who took part in the gathering, and who are still living, were Sir Charles Todd and Mr R A Tarlton. In aid of the building fund there was a course of lectures in White's Rooms (now the Tivoli Theatre) by Sir Richard Hanson, Sir Charles Todd, the Revs Isaac New and Dr Jefferis.

 

A bazaar yielded £705. One Sunday an unknown friend put £100 in the collection plate, and Mr R Barr Smith gave £500, with £100 a year for current expenses.

 

On February 22, 1861, the new church, still in an unfinished state, was opened by the Rev T Q Stow.

 

On March 4, 1861, the Young Men's Society was definitely begun, and it was the first of its kind in the State, if not in Australia.

"In the early years of the society an audience of 400 or 500 listeners was readily secured," says Dr Jefferis, for lectures.

 

The Sunday School flourished, too, and within a year 250 scholars were admitted, while it attained a strength of 400, with 40 teachers, and its juvenile Missionary Society raised £1,000 in five years for the London Missionary Society.

The Young Christians' Union was established in 1874, its aims and methods being singularly like those of the Christian Endeavor movement," of which it was the forerunner.

The mission to Lower North Adelaide then known as Irishtown - was started in November, 1860. An empty store was engaged there as a Sunday School, with Mr Richard Searle as Superintendent. Today it is the chief auxiliary of the church.

For some time the Houghton Church pulpit was supplied by lay brethren from North Adelaide, and in 1876 the two churches were affiliated. High-water mark was reached at North Adelaide in 1876, in which year the church income was £1,343.

 

In March, 1877, Dr Jefferis left for Sydney after a happy ministry of 18 years. He was succeeded by the Rev Osric Copland in May, and during his pastorate the Medindie church was built. The Rev Samuel Hebditch followed in 1884, and in 1889 he gave place to the Rev Frederic Hastings, who remained until November, 1893. In January 1894, Dr Jefferis, who had in the meantime gone to England, returned as pastor, and five years later the Rev W H Lewis, of Ballarat, became co-pastor. Dr Jefferis retired on March 6, 1901, having been pastor altogether for a quarter of a century. Mr Lewis remained until February, 1905 and then resigned.

 

For two years and four months the church was without a minister, but on May 29, 1907, the Rev A E Gifford, of Malvern, Victoria, accepted the charge of the church, and he still fills the pastorate.

 

The original committee of the church, appointed in 1855 were Captain Bagot, Messrs Thomas Graves, Robert Stuckey, Alexander MacGeorge, John Richardson, Daniel Kekwick, Thomas Frost and Manoah Morris

Ref: Advertiser (Adelaide SA) Saturday 16 October 1909

I know what I have said about not liking overt HDR in the past but it is a cold & wet Sunday, I had a play in Photomatix...normal service will resume tomorrow!!

Modèle / Model : Mercedes-Benz Sprinter II

Affectation / Assignment : Service Départemental d'Incendie et de Secours de Seine-et-Marne (SDIS 77) / Departmental Fire and Rescue Service of Seine-et-Marne

Caserne / Fire station : Centre d'Incendie et de Secours (CIS) de Meaux (MUX 284) / Center of Fire and Rescue of Meaux

Fonction / Function : Véhicule de Secours Nautique (VSN) / Vehicle of Nautical Rescue

Mise en service / Commissioning : Juin 2015 / June 2015

Équipementier / Maker : Behm

Indicatif / Indicative : 56597

 

Événement / Event : Journée Porte Ouverte du Centre d'Incendie et de Secours de Lognes (77) / Open Day of the Center of Fire and Rescue of Lognes

Well to my pleasant surprise it is! The colour woodblock print here is by Utagawa Hiroshige and titled, “Rough Sea at Naroto, Awa Province” (1853-56). Hiroshige (1797-1858) is considered one of the great masters of the ukiyo-e genre of Japanese prints. He is famous for his colour and light, particularly night scenes.

 

Hiroshige also worked on poetic landscapes in both horizontal and vertical formats. A younger contemporary of Hokusai (1760-1849), Hiroshige had a huge influence on Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh loved his use of colour and we have a number of Vincent paintings in existence which overtly copied Hiroshige prints.

 

The porcelain and enamel dish (Nabeshima ware) is known as the Tatsuta River design and dates from the late 17th to early 18th centuries.

 

Nothing too overt, just a little flirt

In a city where the town hall is a sheik’s palace, the Chamber of Commerce is a Turkish harem, and the train station is a mosque, you would probably expect to be somewhere in the Middle East. But no, this is Opa-Locka, Florida, a diminutive city northwest of Miami with the nation’s largest and strangest collection of Islamic Revival architecture.

 

Opa-Locka was built during the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s, when films like Rudolf Valentino’s orientalist fantasy The Sheik and Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Baghdad had harnessed the sultry and romantic appeal of the Middle East into a full-blown cultural fad.

 

Florida was hot and tropical enough to feel exotic, so when developer Glenn Curtiss built Opa-Locka, he did so around an overt One Thousand and One Nights theme. In addition to the orientalist architecture, the streets were given names such as Ali Baba Avenue and Sabur Lane.

 

Though the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 destroyed a number of Opa-Locka buildings, several of the Moorish buildings survived and have since been added to the National Register of Historic Places. The crowning jewel is the former Opa-Locka City Hall building, an onion-domed and minaret-sporting marvel inspired by the description of the palace of Emperor Kosroushah in One Thousand and One Nights.

 

Opa-locka is currently in a state of advanced decay as the cash-strapped city faces financial collapse. Many of the Arabian-inspired buildings are falling apart, and the former City Hall itself is boarded up and in a state of advanced disrepair, but a walk through the little town still offers a look at the 1920s’ idea of exotic luxury.

 

The building is at the intersection of Fisherman Street and Sherazad Street, about two blocks from the current (modern) city hall; the old city hall is clearly visible from the new one. There is ample free parking in the Sherbondy Park lot.

 

Credit for the data above is given to the following website:

 

www.atlasobscura.com/places/opa-locka-city-hall

I'm sad to say this is the best full shot I got of this cake. My cake pics are just as important to me as the cake ; )

 

Struggled with this cake, I planned on stacking them, but the Barn was too large. So luckly I had a 18" board on hand to overt my disaster.

 

Barn is marble cake with vanilla buttercream

 

Garden and pasture cake is vanilla and vanilla buttercream

Premade Background - Kerstin Frank - thank you.

Best in Lightbox.

 

CATurday..... The weather is overcast and slightly breezy so I had the front door open and the boys laid down. Normally Ty is not overtly cuddly but when tiny and frail Sipi curled up into him, he was accepting and they laid there for a long time. The photo doesn't quite capture it but Ty is the largest/heaviest cat and Sip is the smallest/thinnest cat. I finally pulled the camera out of the box and took a few quick shots, not that great..I've not even read the manual to play with settings... another day.

 

The vet has increased Sipapu's insulin starting today to 3cc in am and pm. I'm also doing another curve so testing every three hours. He's not happy and neither am I. I hate sticking him.

Also the groomer came and bathed him (not that well) and shaved him haphazardly, he' s not happy, right now he's nothing but eyes and bones which is upsetting... but this way he's a bit cleaner (I hope).

 

I'm having doubts which is not good, I want to do what is right but after 3 weeks of testing and still high sugar, i'm not at all sure what is going on. I don't have enough experience or knowledge and I get flustered really easy because I want him well. I just hope I can continue to do this. I debated posting a shot of him shaved but decided not to, poor guy deserves his dignity.

 

Thanks you for taking the time to visit and comment. Have a great weekend and rest of the week ahead. ♥

  

Ok…I must confess, I’m a sucker for a lone tree in a snow covered field at sunrise! I can’t help it, for some reason that particular cliché refuses to shift from my consciousness and when preparing myself for the appearance of the light, I gravitate to one of nature’s few overtly graphical structures, (well in a snow covered field anyway).

 

Anyway, recently I had a fascinating conversation with Mrs Theaker about who we are on different levels, (cellular molecular subatomic kind of thing) and apparently down on a quantum level we are more space than matter… (Disclaimer: I didn’t really understand having not read as much as my wife), but what I found dramatically profound about this, is how at this level we are not who we think we are. It’s as though the laws of physics fundamentally change and the collection of energy that chooses to inhabit the same space we inhabit, collectively becomes us. There are no edges between us and air…Anyway, the reason I’m meandering off on a winding path into my own imagination… (Err sorry), is that for some reason I gravitate towards trees… Yes yes, I know there are millions of subtle reasons my socialisation points me in that direction, but I just wonder if there are other reasons of my gravitation towards them…I know it’s a tenuous link, but I felt like exploring something that I haven’t a clue about, because when thinking outside the convention, I really do feel alive, (like when I photograph solitary trees at dawn in a specular sunrise).

 

It's difficult photographing works under glass. But in this instance I decided to go full reflective mode and incorporate myself into the photograph. I saw the pattern of light and dark in the original photograph created an interesting abstract effect with my reflection on the glass. It also plays with the idea of a photograph within a photograph.

 

The original photograph by is by John Kauffmann from 1920 and entitled The National Bank. Comparing this to his 1914 overtly Pictorialist photograph I showed you in the previous collage, it marks a shift to a Modernist approach in photography that was being popularised in America by Paul Strand (1890-1976).

 

www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/13134/

Hi there everyone.

I remember when I was studying Shakespeare in the US how difficult it was to grasp the meanings of old English. I do remember struggling with the history and language trying to understand what I was reading. I mean imagine that I read some lines, then watch the play recorded on a video tape and then discover that there was a joke said and that I could even guess it was a joke. I remember that it usually took me two weeks of continuous reading to finish reading one play. I am talking here about reading the text not the criticism and the history of the play.

I tried hard to translate some Arabic lines of poetry to you. Being no poet at all, this was very difficult. I then chose to ask our great friend Google about some trials of translating Arabic poetry to English. I found a great site and want to tell you about it. On this site, a hundred Arabic love lines of poetry are translated into English. You may love them, you may not. Remember that this is a different culture than yours. Remember also that it is very difficult to translate a line of poetry to another language. I mean we are not taking about translating words. Read here to know what is invloved in translating poetry:

“Poetry translation may be defined as relaying poetry into another language. Poetry's features can be sound-based, syntactic or structural or pragmatic in nature. Apart from transforming text, poetry translation also involves cognition, discourse, and action by and between human and textual actors in a physical and social setting. A poetry translation project usually aims to publicize a poet or poets. Poetry translation is typically overt. Poetry translators are concerned to interpret a source poem's layers of meaning, to relay this interpretation reliably, and/or to ‘create a poem in the target language which is readable and enjoyable as an independent, literary text. Poetry translation involves challenges and these are highlighted in this article. Poetry accounts for a tiny proportion of world translation output. Case studies and examples taken from poetry, however, have dominated theory-building in translation studies at the expense of more frequently translated genres.”

www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/97801992393...

I chose some lines from this site vb.3dlat.com/showthread.php?t=140764 I did include the Arabic line of poetry and the translation of it. I Hope you enjoy these lines:

وما كنتُ ممن يدخلُ العشقُ قلبَهُ = ولكنّ من يُبصِرْ جفونكِ يَعشقُ

 

Love was never able to enter my heart; but seeing your eyes one inevitably falls in love

 

وما عجبي موت المحبينَ في الهوى = و لكن بقاءَ العاشقينَ عجيبُ

 

I never wonder why lovers die of love; but I am amazed how those who fall in love can remain alive

 

وإني لأهوى النومَ في غير حينهِ = لعلَ لقاءً في المنامِ يكونُ

 

O, how I desire to fall asleep at any moment, perchance I may see the beloved in my dreams

 

نقـّلْ فؤادكَ حيث شئتَ من الهوى = ما الحبُّ إلا للحبيبِ الأولِ

 

Let your heart roam and browse in fields of affection, true and lasting love, however, belongs only to the first love.

إذا شئتَ أن تلقى المحاسنَ كلها = ففي وجه من تهوى جميعُ المحاسنِ

 

If you wish to see all the charming and beautiful things in the world, you need not look beyond the face of your beloved.

رأيتُ بها بدراً على الأرض ماشياً = ولم أرَ بدراً قـّط يمشي على الأرض

 

In her, I saw a full moon walking on earth, though never before have I seen a moon on earth walking

ضممتكِ حتى قلتُ ناري قد انطفتْ = فلمْ تـُطفَ نيراني وزيدَ وقودها

 

When I embraced you so close, I thought the fire of my passion would die down; my fires never subsided, their flames roared instead

و قلتُ شهودي في هواكِ كثيرة ٌ = وأَصدَقهَا قلبي ودمعي مسفوحُ.

 

I said there are many who bear witness to my love for you; most truthful are my heart and my copious tears

 

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Black%20Kite/167/144/24

 

You rez ankle deep in water and if you know enough to get to the covenant as directed (with extreme prejudice) you see this:

  

"It is up to YOU as a guest of this homestead to READ the covenant. Ignorance is not an excuse for your behavior to take advantage of another person's kindness.

Black Kite Homestead

Is owned (rented) by theblackcloud Oh since 2011, possibly 2010 ... but my memory kind of sucks.

The Black Kite homestead is actually a residential sim and home of theblackcloud Oh, and her friends. You are visiting the sim as a guest - I cannot stress how important that is. Please be kind enough to act like one!

Building Access

If you would like access to drop poses and props for photos, or videos, you need to join the "Go Fly A Kite" group. Access to this group gives you the following:

You may drop poses/props for photos and videos.

You may even set your home here.

While you have building access please do not use Black Kite as a sandbox, please do not rez buildings in the sky and for the love of whatever god you worship ... please clean up after yourself.

Nudity at Black Kite"

While this is a Moderate sim, I do allow nudity at Black Kite for those who are taking photos and making videos. If you see someone who is naked, and it offends you, please derender them. DO NOT HARASS OR ATTACK them, that will end up with YOU being banned from Black Kite. DO NOT send me the conversation you've had with them, that is against the TOS and YOU will be reported. We are all adults, well most of us as the teen grid is closed, so let's act like adults.

However, if you see someone who is nude and is clearly not taking a photo or making a video, please do IM me and I will address the issue with both parties.

Voice

The Black Kite homestead is a voice friendly sim. If you do not wish to hear others in voice, turn your voice off.

With access to voice this does not allow you to ghetto blast your music or whatever other noise you think if funny while you're here. I would really like to continue to have voice here for the people who visit the sim, so be don't be a douchebag and ruin it for everyone else.

8f8

My dear friend iBi has his in world store located at Black Kite. You as a customer of 8f8 must contact, 8f8 Store Manager, Iku Solo for any issues related with his store. For any issues related with Black Kite, you must contact theblackcloud Oh. While there is a store on this sim, Black Kite is still a residential sim and home to people in Second Life ... I can only hope you have read the above.

Ban Lines

Yes, oh the horrors, I have ban lines up. Please respect this space as you have full run of the sim minus one small corner. If people continue not to respect this, I will be forced to close the sim to the public. And it goes without saying, if you enter the parcel you will be banned and reported.

The Rules

I don't have many rules, so please try to follow them.

1. All areas are free to explore to visitors minus:

A. The home area of theblackcloud Oh, and friends.

B. The building area of theblackcloud Oh, and friends.

C. Any area 300 meters above the ground.

2. No flying above 300 meters. Fly is turned off for a reason. If I see you on the radar, above 300 meters, I will ask you to go back down to the ground. Failure to do so will get you kicked from the sim. Repeated offenses will get you banned.

3. Don't act like a douchebag. Not sure what that is? Read on:

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=douchebag

With that said ... if you want somewhere to act as YOU see fit, get YOUR own land.

Failure to follow any rule will result in a warning, after the second time you will be banned.

Home Stead Rating

The Black Kite homestead is a Moderate sim. This means there should not be any overt sexual acts or overt violence by guests. If you want to get your sex on, go to a adult sim. If you want to get your violence on, go to a combat sim.

Read more about the Moderate rating here: community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Maturi...

If you have any questions, or if another visitor is bothering you, please feel free to IM me as all IMs go directly to my email. You're also welcome to send me a notecard, though if I don't respond it has most likely gotten lost, please then IM me.

Thank you for visiting, enjoy your stay, and I hope you come back to visit again and again.

- theblackcloud Oh"

 

Tessa drops exhausted to the ground. Oops the water.

 

"I don't have many rules, so please try to follow them." Rolls on the floor laughing. Oops no floor. coughs up gallons of swamp water

Actually it's all pretty reasonable but rivals in length the constitutions of many countries.

 

My only comment

Wonderful place to live if you like living in a swamp. Perfect for crocodile dreaming totems

 

Our heroine is wearing Utopia Moonlight