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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.
These images reflect the Blue Mass that marks the beginning of National Police Week in the Nation's Capital and Customs and Border Protection's involvement in paying tribute to Fallen Officers. The Archbishop of Washington D.C., Cardinal Donald William Wuerl, presides over the event annually. Photo by James Tourtellotte.
Students signup of "Suspenders" a sketch comedy club during the involvement fair, August 28, 2019. (Photo/Gus Ruelas)
The torment of Marsyas, 100-140 AD
In Greek mythology, the satyr Marsyas (Μαρσύας) is a central figure in two stories involving music: in one, he picked up the double oboe (aulos) that had been abandoned by Athena and played it; in the other, he challenged Apollo to a contest of music and lost his hide and life. In antiquity, literary sources often emphasize the hubris of Marsyas and the justice of his punishment.
In one strand of modern comparative mythography, the domination of Marsyas by Apollo is regarded as an example of myth that recapitulates a supposed supplanting by the Olympian pantheon of an earlier "Pelasgian" religion of chthonic heroic ancestors and nature spirits. Marsyas was a devoté of the ancient Mother Goddess Rhea/Cybele, and his episodes are situated by the mythographers in Celaenae (or Kelainai), in Phrygia, at the main source of the Meander (the river Menderes in Turkey). When a genealogy was applied to him, Marsyas was the son of the "divine" Hyagnis. His father was called Oeagrus or Olympus. Alternatively, the latter was said to be Marsyas' son and/or pupil.
Marsyas was an expert player on the double-piped double reed instrument known as the aulos. The dithyrambic poet Melanippides of Melos (c. 480-430 BC) embellished the story in his dithyramb Marsyas, claiming that the goddess Athena, who was already said to have invented the aulos, once looked in the mirror while she was playing it and saw how blowing into it puffed up her cheeks and made her look silly, so she threw the aulos away and cursed it so that whoever picked it up would meet an awful death. Marsyas picked up the aulos and was later killed by Apollo for his hubris. The fifth-century BC poet Telestes doubted that virginal Athena could have been motivated by such vanity. Some account informs about the curse placed on the bearer of the flute, i.e; Athena placed a curse that the one picking up the flute would be severely punished.
Later, however, Melanippides's story became accepted as canonical and the Athenian sculptor Myron created a group of bronze sculptures based on it, which was installed before the western front of the Parthenon in around 440 BC. In the second century AD, the travel writer Pausanias saw this set of sculptures and described it as "a statue of Athena striking Marsyas the Silenos for taking up the flutes [aulos] that the goddess wished to be cast away for good."
In the contest between Apollo and Marsyas, which was judged by the Muses or the Nysean nymphs the terms stated that the winner could treat the defeated party any way he wanted. Marsyas played his flute, putting everyone there into a frenzy, and they started dancing wildly. When it was Apollo's turn, he played his lyre so beautifully that everyone was still and had tears in their eyes. There are several versions of the contest; according to Hyginus, Marsyas was departing as victor after the first round, when Apollo, turning his lyre upside down, played the same tune. This was something that Marsyas could not do with his flute. According to Diodorus Siculus, Marsyas was defeated when Apollo added his voice to the sound of the lyre. Marsyas protested, arguing that the skill with the instrument was to be compared, not the voice. However, Apollo replied that when Marsyas blew into the pipes, he was doing almost the same thing himself. The Nysean nymphs supported Apollo's claim, leading to his victory.
Yet another version states that Marsyas played the flute out of tune, and hence accepted his defeat. Out of shame, he assigned to himself the penalty of being skinned for a winesack.
He was flayed alive in a cave near Celaenae for his hubris to challenge a god. Apollo then nailed Marsyas' skin to a pine tree, near Lake Aulocrene (Karakuyu Gölü in modern Turkey), which Strabo noted was full of the reeds from which the pipes were fashioned. Diodorus Siculus felt that Apollo must have repented this "excessive" deed, and said that he had laid aside his lyre for a while, but Karl Kerenyi observes of the flaying of Marsyas' "shaggy hide: a penalty which will not seem especially cruel if one assumes that Marsyas' animal guise was merely a masquerade." Classical Greeks were unaware of such shamanistic overtones, and the Flaying of Marsyas became a theme for painting and sculpture. His brothers, nymphs, gods and goddesses mourned his death, and their tears, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, were the source of the river Marsyas in Phrygia (Çine Creek, today), which joins the Meander near Celaenae, where Herodotus reported that the flayed skin of Marsyas was still to be seen, and Ptolemy Hephaestion recorded a "festival of Apollo, where the skins of all those victims one has flayed are offered to the god." Plato was of the opinion that it had been made into a wineskin.
Ovid touches upon the theme of Marsyas twice, very briefly telling the tale in Metamorphoses vi.383–400, where he concentrates on the tears shed into the river Marsyas, and making an allusion in Fasti, vi.649–710, where Ovid's primary focus is on the aulos and the roles of flute-players rather than Marsyas, whose name is not actually mentioned.
Among the Romans, Marsyas was cast as the inventor of augury and a proponent of free speech (the philosophical concept παρρησία, "parrhesia") and "speaking truth to power". The earliest known representation of Marsyas at Rome stood for at least 300 years in the Roman Forum near or in the comitium, the space for political activity. He was depicted as a silen, carrying a wineskin on his left shoulder and raising his right arm. The statue was regarded as an indicium libertatis, a symbol of liberty, and was associated with demonstrations of the plebs, or common people. It often served as a sort of kiosk upon which invective verse was posted.
Marsyas served as a minister for Dionysus or Bacchus, who was identified by the Romans with their Father Liber, one of three deities in the Aventine Triad, along with Ceres and Libera (identified with Persephone). These gods were regarded as concerning themselves specially with the welfare of the plebs. The freedom that the ecstasies of Dionysian worship represented took on a political meaning in Rome as the libertas that distinguished the free from the enslaved. The Liberalia, celebrated March 17 in honor of Liber, was a time of speaking freely, as the poet and playwright Gnaeus Naevius declared: "At the Liberalia games we enjoy free speech." Naevius, however, was arrested for his invectives against the powerful.
Marsyas was sometimes considered a king and contemporary of Faunus, portrayed by Vergil as a native Italian ruler at the time of Aeneas. Servius, in his commentary on the Aeneid, says that Marsyas sent Faunus envoys who showed techniques of augury to the Italians. The plebeian gens of the Marcii claimed that they were descended from Marsyas. Gaius Marcius Rutilus, who rose to power from the plebs, is credited with having dedicated the statue that stood in the Roman forum, most likely in 294 BC, when he became the first plebeian censor and added the cognomen Censorinus to the family name. Marcius Rutilus was also among the first plebeian augurs, co-opted into their college in 300, and so the mythical teacher of augury was an apt figure to represent him.
In 213 BC, two years after suffering one of the worst military defeats in its history at the Battle of Cannae, Rome was in the grip of a reactionary fear that led to excessive religiosity. The senate, alarmed that its authority was being undermined by "prophets and sacrificers" in the forum, began a program of suppression. Among the literature confiscated was an "authentic" prophecy calling for the institution of games in the Greek manner for Apollo, which the senate and elected officials would control. The prophecy was attributed to Gnaeus Marcius, reputed to be a descendant of Marsyas. The games were duly carried out, but the Romans failed to bring the continuing wars with the Carthaginians to a victorious conclusion until they heeded a second prophecy and imported the worship of the Phrygian Great Mother, whose song Marsyas was said to have composed; the song had further relevance in that it was also credited by the Phrygians with protecting them from invaders. The power relations between Marsyas and Apollo reflected the continuing Struggle of the Orders between the elite and the common people, expressed in political terms by optimates and populares. The arrest of Naevius for exercising free speech also took place during this period.
Marsyas was also claimed as the eponym of the Marsi, one of the ancient peoples of Italy. The Social War of 91–88 BC, in which the Italian peoples fought to advance their status as citizens under Roman rule, is sometimes called the Marsic War from the leadership of the Marsi. The Roman coloniae Paestum and Alba Fucens, along with other Italian cities, set up their own statues of Marsyas as assertions of their political status. During the Principate, Marsyas became a subversive symbol in opposition to Augustus, whose propaganda systematically associated him with the silens’ torturer Apollo. Augustus's daughter Julia held nocturnal assemblies at the statue, and crowned it to defy her father. The poet Ovid, ultimately exiled by Augustus, twice tells the story of Marsyas's flaying by Apollo, in his epic Metamorphoses and in the Fasti, the calendrical poem left unfinished at his death. Although the immediate cause of Ovid's exile remains one of literary history's great mysteries, Ovid himself says that a "poem and transgression" were contributing factors; his poetry tests the boundaries of permissible free speech during Rome's transition from republic to imperial monarchy.
Pliny indicates that in the 1st century AD, the painting Marsyas religatus ("Marsyas Bound"), by Zeuxis of Heraclea, could be viewed at the Temple of Concordia in Rome.The goddess Concordia, like the Greek Harmonia, was a personification of both musical harmony as it was understood in antiquity, and of social order, as expressed by Cicero's phrase concordia ordinum. The apparent incongruity of exhibiting the tortured silen in a temple devoted to harmony has been interpreted in modern scholarship as a warning against criticizing authority. --Wiki
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This is an interdisciplinary course that involves the participation of Independent Study Sculpture students, Marine Biology students, Welding students, Art History students, the OC Audio/Visual recording lab, and volunteers to create an art exhibit that will display a life size baby gray whale made from steel rod, fencing wire and plastic bags. A looped audio recording telling the story of the Life Cycle of the Gray Whale and the dangers of plastic to our marine life will be playing throughout the the exhibit. The exhibit opens to the public at the Gallery at OC on October 4th at 4pm.
12 May 12
I have been ridiculously excited about the Art Car Parade for at least two weeks now. It is the largest Art Car parade in the world involving over 200 entries. They have everything crazy from hearses painted with cats, to giant paper paper elephant cars, to a car shaped like a shoe, to snake cars, you name it. Knowing that the event was going to happen on Saturday, I pre-packed my camera bag two days ago alongside my collapsible chair. I texted friends and begged them to come with...but bestie flies back out today for Chicago..again (btw: did not get to see her at all while she was here this week), and other friends had to work, but I was determined to go see this thing.
8pm Friday...all hell breaks loose with the weather. I was watching something on tv and the National Weather Service broke in to inform me that my area and just about all other surrounding areas were in for flash flooding, hail, lighting, thunder, and that I should hunker down in an interior room of the house on the first floor. At the time it had just started to rain. And then it reallllly started to rain. Everything the weather service said sans the hail was in full force. The trees were shaking, the street was flooded, and how do you know its bad...there are two frogs that live in the old patio posts in my backyard, and about an hour in to the storm, I look out and they are hopping away and not a moment too soon, because the holes quickly flooded!
Usually storms like this last an hour to 2 hours and its no big deal, but this was something else. It just raged on and on. The rain gutters around my house were so full of debris from the pecan tree above, that they were overflowing and it looked like mini waterfalls coming off the side of the house. Storm still going strong, at 1:29am, the power went out. The lights had flickered off an on 2 hours earlier, but now they were out. It was so pitch black. I went and got the flashlight and lit up some candles. I looked at my cell phone, and thankfully I had charged this thing fully because I played some apps to pass the time hoping the light would come back on soon. I would have used the laptop, but I need a replacement battery big time, and it only works now if plugged in. An hour went by and still no power and the games had drained the battery half way, so I turned my phone off and went to sleep.
At exactly 4:28am I re-awoke in the dark and I thought, the power is still off and no sooner had I thought that, then it literally came back on. It was soo freaky. I mean, how random is that. I felt like one of those dogs that barks like mad when they know a storm is coming. Like here it is, power. I turned on the news and wanted to see if they were canceling the parade because there was city wide flooding but they kept saying the weather would be nice again by 1pm parade start time, but looking out the window...it was still storming full force! So I thought, surely, they are just doing a wait and see and off I went to finally get some sleep.
So, who has two thumbs and didn't set an alarm and woke up really late...this gal! I woke up at 12:46pm! I was so annoyed. Even more annoying was I popped up the windows and it was a sunny 86 degrees out, not a drop of rain in sight. Since the parade is two hours long, I thought ok, still have time to make it, but then I thought...well, what's the point if I miss some of it, plus I needed gas for the car and to take a shower, and to iron some clothes...well, I definitely pulled this one out of my arse, because I was out the door at 1:05 and I figured, okay I'll get there thirty late, but I'll get there.
You know when you make plans, the universe laughs...yeah...got downtown after having to stop at two gas stations because the one near my house was closed for remodeling with all the pumps shut down!!! and what do I find...over half the streets are closed off. I knew the parade routes would be shut down, but they were also doing construction and so round and round and around I drove...then I hit the parade path and cops detoured me around in yet another circle and from the brief corner of my eye, I saw the parade passing by with one of my favorite floats from other parades, the dancing queen, but it was back around town. It was hot. Car has no a/c. I was getting frustrated. This parade is a free event and the only parking was going to cost me 7-10$ for what would amount to about an hour and a half of the event. No thanks. I figured I could park further down, but every meter, every street parking spot was taken and construction consumed everything else. So with deep annoyed breath, I called it a day and rode home. So this marks year four I have missed this thing. I think I can officially call it...this event is cursed.
In other failure news, at the start of this year, I said I was going to be more active in the events and goings on in the city and to see and experience what's out there b/c I've been such a non participant...each month, I said I would check out at least one event. So far I've only managed to do this for January and for February. In subsequent months I missed the Japanese festival because I got the dates mixed up, I missed Mardi Gras because my besty had to go out of town...again and I wasn't going to that alone...so here is to hoping I can get back on track for June.
Children from Chinsali town, Zambia.
Photo by Jeff Walker/CIFOR
If you use one of our photos, please credit it accordingly and let us know. You can reach us through our Flickr account or at: cifor-mediainfo@cgiar.org and m.edliadi@cgiar.org
Photos by www.RonSombilonGalleryPhotography.com
ABOUT ROAMING DRAGON
Roaming Dragon came to life as two lifelong friends identified a major void in Vancouver’s food scene…the absence of restaurant quality food being served via Food Trucks!
Since launching in June 2010, Roaming Dragon has earned praise for our menus, our involvement as leaders in the food truck revolution, and for elevating the food truck experience across Canada.
Roaming Dragon can be seen on the streets of Vancouver, catering the city’s most exciting events, at a Farmers Market, or participating in charity events.
We specialize in authentically unauthentic Pan-Asian deliciousness. We offer unique interpretations of dishes and flavours familiar throughout Southeast Asia.
Street Food. Catering. Events.
As crazy as it may sound, the Dragon is so much more than a truck that serves food…the Dragon has a spirit and energy of its own!
From the aesthetics of the Dragon to the delicious smells, the music to the welcoming lanterns, the amazing food to our incredible staff…the Dragon has heart and soul.
The combination of food, music, smells, and smiles from our team make the journey to the Dragon special. We’re PROUD of our team, PROUD of our food, PROUD of our suppliers, and most of all PROUD to serve our customers.
We fundamentally believe that you DESERVE the finest ingredients, prepared with care and respect, and presented in unique and delicious ways.
We’re PROUD to know where our food comes from, that it was raised ETHICALLY and NATURALLY. Our team takes PRIDE in bringing you the most INNOVATIVE Pan-Asian cuisine you’ll ever come across!
.
A Consumers Energy employee explains the "Respect the Flags" program to attendees of the 2012 CADPA Contractor Expo in Mason on March 2.
Saturday 15 April 2017: Tatopani (2444 m) - Pelma (2425 m) - Guibang / Gulbang (2680 m) - Dhule (3328 m)
6.20am bed tea after strange dreams involving tiger cubs and trains. Time for a few photos of Tatopani camp from the path ahead before settling down to breakfast under blue skies - cheese toasty and veg omelette. Yum.
We set off around 7.30am. A steep section up from the Pelma Khola bridge followed by some contouring brought us to the lovely village of Pelma. Well built stone houses, goats in the fields, ladies at home tending chickens and shelling walnuts. Rakshi and roti on offer.
Onwards on a good trail, hugging the hillside. Steep drops down to the river. Val distributed a few LED solar lights at the farmsteads we passed.
Up, up, up to a large village - Guibang / Gulbang - set on the steep hillside, houses with flat roofs stacked with winter wood and pitched ones clad in wooden shingles. A young mum was taking her baby, sporting a sparkling bonnet and a green balloon, on a tour of the village with her friends - a birthday perhaps?
A further climb brought us to a flat area and the school, then it was more relentless ascent up steep slopes wooded with rhododendron, oak, pine and birch. Hot work, but as we climbed we got superb views of the mountains, covered with fresh snow from last night’s storm.
The trail emerged from the woods through narrow gulley of sparkling mica, the pass a gateway to the village of Dhule nestling in its protective bowl of green. Before heading down to the village - smart houses and a couple of lodge-shops attested to the money to be made from yarsa gumba - we followed a trail from the pass along a short ridge to "Lone Pine Peak" which provided a fabulous panorama: the pyramid of Putha Hiunchuli (7246 m), Churen Himal (7385 m) and Dhaulagiri (IV 7661 m or VI 7268 m - I’m not sure which), the route we’d come from the Takur La / Phalgune Dhuri, and more snowy peaks and ridges to the south. Lots of photos, and some fun shots at the Lone Pine.
Down in Dhule the kitchen crew had set up shop on the volleyball pitch, but water was proving elusive. Lunch would be a while, so Ernst, Steffi and I set off up to the prayer flags, fluttering over a ridge looking west. Deep valleys and more snowy ridges beyond. A lovely spot to soak up the sun and take in the views.
We returned to our camp to be greeted by hot juice and Val and Christine who, it transpired, had been drinking rakshi at the Blue Roof House! Leisurely lunch on the tarp c2.30pm and tents pitched soon after. Late afternoon we all headed up to the Blue Roof House where the lady of the house provided us with mugs of her home made rakshi with wild honey. Noodles for dinner rounded off a great day. Bed c 8pm.
Read more on SparklyTrainers: Val Pitkethly's Dolpo Expedition 2017.
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River Dargle Flood Defence Scheme.
These images were taken towards the end of the second week of February 2017.
These are the critical stabilisation works at the Silverbridge site, adjacent to the N11 dual-carriageway:
Back in November 2014, we'd observed bank stabilisation works here involving excavation, repair and building of a support wall structure -- carried out by JONS Construction on behalf of the National Roads Authority.
We would occasionally catch sight of this work in the distance. Quite an impressive little piece of structural engineering.
Having built a retaining concave wall, backfilled for solidity, they were also drilling, fixing and sealing ground anchors to pin the entire structure together.
Now we see that further works are being undertaken.
Word has it that extra ‘stabilisation work’ had to be done to protect the integrity of the riverbank.
At the section here we can see that there’s not much space between the edge of the rock face and the Armco at the side of the dual-carriageway.
Have yet to determine what precisely that will entail. Serious work to reinforce the side access ramp down to the river.
The N11 carriageway runs adjacent to this sunken side of the riverbank -- barely 2 (large) paces divide the two. Even with twin strips of Armco along the roadside, it's perilously close. Traffic speeds along this stretch (maximum speed 100 kmp). Only needs a touch from a heavy vehicle to cause secondary impact, which (worst possible scenario) could result in something going airborne.
Working in these confined spaces puts a premium of safety and communication.
The guys have hard-filled a working shelf on the riverbed, to allow machinery access to the rockface. Obviously some serious drilling is called for before a form of extra 'pinning' is put in place.
They have sunk a series of hollowed tubes/casings -- obviously to form the foundations of a more extensive structure.
And some investigative work around the transverse buttress of the access bridge, parallel to the heavy-duty pipeline carrying water down from the Vartry reservoir.
At a (rough) guess -- I'd say the foundations were sunk to a depth of approx 4+m.
With such secure foundations in place, they would then look to construct a substantial bank of material, and/or retaining wall (similar to that in place further along the roadside bank).
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Previously the guys drilled and sunk 4+metre deep reinforced tubing and rods along a newly laid concrete base. Those stubs were then used to attach steel rod cradles -- which, in turn, were filled with poured concrete. Result - the wall quickly rises. Variation on the method they've used elsewhere along this stretch of the river.
A continuous stretch of protective wall has now been poured, and joined up with the section originally erected back in 2014.
As we can see from the side-on shot, the base of the wall has pre-cut openings for the retaining pins that have been driven into the side wall of the roadside cliff. These have been sealed and capped.
Progress has been rapid, the full stretch of wall is completed, and the guys are now working on back-filling the empty space between the protective wall and the roadside rock face. You don't just throw in a few trucks loads of soil and hope for the best. You load, layer, level and compress.
And, at the same time, the guys are clearing away material used to build access ramps down into the riverbed.
The thought crossed my mind -- in doing so (removing the stone-filled gabions etc,) are they potentially exposing the river bank on that side to erosion, slippage etc?
We know the destructive force of fast running waters. Hell, this is precisely why the protective works have been carried out along the rest of the stretch, down to the Bray Harbour. Unless they have other plans to stabilise it, what is going to be left here is loose soil -- very close to the access road into the halting site itself.
Some repair/reinforcing work is going on here to protect the (old) buttress that supports the pipework carrying water to the Bray region.
Photos by www.RonSombilonGalleryPhotography.com
ABOUT ROAMING DRAGON
Roaming Dragon came to life as two lifelong friends identified a major void in Vancouver’s food scene…the absence of restaurant quality food being served via Food Trucks!
Since launching in June 2010, Roaming Dragon has earned praise for our menus, our involvement as leaders in the food truck revolution, and for elevating the food truck experience across Canada.
Roaming Dragon can be seen on the streets of Vancouver, catering the city’s most exciting events, at a Farmers Market, or participating in charity events.
We specialize in authentically unauthentic Pan-Asian deliciousness. We offer unique interpretations of dishes and flavours familiar throughout Southeast Asia.
Street Food. Catering. Events.
As crazy as it may sound, the Dragon is so much more than a truck that serves food…the Dragon has a spirit and energy of its own!
From the aesthetics of the Dragon to the delicious smells, the music to the welcoming lanterns, the amazing food to our incredible staff…the Dragon has heart and soul.
The combination of food, music, smells, and smiles from our team make the journey to the Dragon special. We’re PROUD of our team, PROUD of our food, PROUD of our suppliers, and most of all PROUD to serve our customers.
We fundamentally believe that you DESERVE the finest ingredients, prepared with care and respect, and presented in unique and delicious ways.
We’re PROUD to know where our food comes from, that it was raised ETHICALLY and NATURALLY. Our team takes PRIDE in bringing you the most INNOVATIVE Pan-Asian cuisine you’ll ever come across!
.
Microscopic photo showing paratrabecular aggregations of lymphoma cells. PAS stain. 10X Jian-Hua Qiao, MD, FCAP, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
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THE AWARENESS MUSCLE TEAM had the pleasure and the difficult mission to take care ot the Press conference of (I) Independent people @Rejkavik art festival ( it hapeen the 20 / 05/2012 ) films will come ... @ Jonatan Habib Engqvist kindly pass on his plattform "the press conference " the collaboration happened at 10 am a sunday morning at the blue lagoonhttp://www.emergencyrooms.org/THE_AWARENESS_MUSCLE.html
thanks also to with help Kristín Scheving and the festival and the art critics that joined independentpeople.is/info/exhibition/
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DONT USE PHOTO WITHOUT ASKING 1@colonel.dk
Reykjavík Arts Festival 2012 announces (I)ndependent People, a large-scale collaborative international visual arts project that will involve many of Reykjavík’s exhibition spaces, museums, galleries and public space during the festival season and throughout the summer. Focusing on contemporary visual art from the Nordic and Baltic countries, (I)ndependent People asks if and how collaboration can operate in continual negotiation between contesting ideas and desires, yet allowing unplanned and transformative action.
Whether they have been working together for a long time or been composed to undertake a temporary collaboration, all the artists participating in this project do so as part of a joint venture. Artists’ collectives, partnerships, workshops and exchanges permit an investigation of artistic subjectivity and authorship, allowing knowledge to be acquired so that it may be shared with others. Both thematically and performatively, the construction, intention and focus of this exhibition may be seen to parallel the notion of a ‘third space’ (Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994).
This allows seemingly incommensurable differences to be negotiated, rendering meaning ambivalent and warping the mirror of representation. In turn, cultural knowledge is revealed as a hybridised, open and expanding code. Such an intervention – made possible through exchange between a cluster of museums, galleries, artist-run spaces and institutions in Iceland and abroad – quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenising, unifying force. This further relies on participants relinquishing their subjectivity, or momentarily placing it in parenthesis; in this way, artists create the specific uncertainty that makes the third, other, hybrid identity possible. Through this process, a position is generated at which the in-between of collaboration can potentially become a site for social and cultural transformation – a locus around identities, at which becoming can resist the impetus toward homogeneity.
Often labelled as either ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’, several of the participating groups address questions concerning the structure of the mediated (art) world. By moving beyond ideas of national representation, concepts of public and private, author and audience, this context might provide a nuanced discourse about commonality. By describing a place between subjectivities, ideologies, interests and structures, the temporary, in-between space created in Reykjavík can become a proposition for unimagined ideas to be examined, planned and constructed. This position has been portrayed as a vessel without sharp contours – as ambiguous, vague and indefinable; however, these are the very qualities that often make contemporary art worthy of hope. Or, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, “The space in between things is the space in which things are undone, the space to the side and around, which is the space of subversion and fraying, the edge of any identity’s limits. In short, it is the space of the bounding and undoing of the identities, which constitute it”. (Elisabeth Grosz, Architecture From Outside, MIT Press, 2001).
The extensive project brings together 29 artist-collectives with the collaboration of over 100 participants. (I)ndependent People is curated by Swedish curator and theorist Jonatan Habib Engqvist and made possible through exchange and collaborative undertakings between a cluster of museums, galleries, artist-run spaces and institutions. Venues include Reykjavík Art Museum, The National Gallery of Iceland, The Nordic House, Kling & Bang, The Living Art Museum, The Icelandic Sculpture Association and ASÍ Art Museum, together with public space in Reykjavík and off-site events. Saturday May 19 will be dedicated to openings of the exhibitions with receptions and events at the venues from morning to evening and Sunday May 20 will host an international seminar.
Curator: Jonatan Habib Engqvist
Project Manager: Kristín Scheving
Reykjavík Arts Festival 2012 announces (I)ndependent People, a large-scale collaborative international visual arts project that will involve many of Reykjavík’s exhibition spaces, museums, galleries and public space during the festival season and throughout the summer. Focusing on contemporary visual art from the Nordic and Baltic countries, (I)ndependent People asks if and how collaboration can operate in continual negotiation between contesting ideas and desires, yet allowing unplanned and transformative action.
Whether they have been working together for a long time or been composed to undertake a temporary collaboration, all the artists participating in this project do so as part of a joint venture. Artists’ collectives, partnerships, workshops and exchanges permit an investigation of artistic subjectivity and authorship, allowing knowledge to be acquired so that it may be shared with others. Both thematically and performatively, the construction, intention and focus of this exhibition may be seen to parallel the notion of a ‘third space’ (Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994).
This allows seemingly incommensurable differences to be negotiated, rendering meaning ambivalent and warping the mirror of representation. In turn, cultural knowledge is revealed as a hybridised, open and expanding code. Such an intervention – made possible through exchange between a cluster of museums, galleries, artist-run spaces and institutions in Iceland and abroad – quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenising, unifying force. This further relies on participants relinquishing their subjectivity, or momentarily placing it in parenthesis; in this way, artists create the specific uncertainty that makes the third, other, hybrid identity possible. Through this process, a position is generated at which the in-between of collaboration can potentially become a site for social and cultural transformation – a locus around identities, at which becoming can resist the impetus toward homogeneity.
Often labelled as either ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’, several of the participating groups address questions concerning the structure of the mediated (art) world. By moving beyond ideas of national representation, concepts of public and private, author and audience, this context might provide a nuanced discourse about commonality. By describing a place between subjectivities, ideologies, interests and structures, the temporary, in-between space created in Reykjavík can become a proposition for unimagined ideas to be examined, planned and constructed. This position has been portrayed as a vessel without sharp contours – as ambiguous, vague and indefinable; however, these are the very qualities that often make contemporary art worthy of hope. Or, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, “The space in between things is the space in which things are undone, the space to the side and around, which is the space of subversion and fraying, the edge of any identity’s limits. In short, it is the space of the bounding and undoing of the identities, which constitute it”. (Elisabeth Grosz, Architecture From Outside, MIT Press, 2001).
The extensive project brings together 29 artist-collectives with the collaboration of over 100 participants. (I)ndependent People is curated by Swedish curator and theorist Jonatan Habib Engqvist and made possible through exchange and collaborative undertakings between a cluster of museums, galleries, artist-run spaces and institutions. Venues include Reykjavík Art Museum, The National Gallery of Iceland, The Nordic House, Kling & Bang, The Living Art Museum, The Icelandic Sculpture Association and ASÍ Art Museum, together with public space in Reykjavík and off-site events. Saturday May 19 will be dedicated to openings of the exhibitions with receptions and events at the venues from morning to evening and Sunday May 20 will host an international seminar.
Curator: Jonatan Habib Engqvist
Project Manager: Kristín Scheving
Competitive Trail Riding - Our first time!
On the May long weekend I signed up for a Competitive Trail Ride with 2 of my students (Marcie and Erin). We've been training since March to get our horses in shape for riding 25 miles (approx 40km)!
The Ontario Competitive Trail Riding Association (OCTRA) hosts a variety of events that involve long distance riding. The one you've probably heard of is Endurance riding. Originally we thought we would like to compete in endurance, but we realized the Competitive Trail Ride would be a better start for us.
Endurance riding is like a race - but over long distances of usually 50 or 100 miles and through forest and country trails. There are vet checks where your horse will be checked over to make sure the horse is 'fit to continue', and if your horse is still healthy you are allowed to continue racing.
To ride in endurance races, and have a chance of placing or doing well, you need to be very well practiced and your horse has to be very fit. Many endurance riders choose Arabs because they can handle long distances, and their heart rate can usually come down a lot quicker than other breeds - so they are more likely to be 'fit to continue' at the vet check point.
Given that we've only been practicing since March, and we were taking 2 Thoroughbreds and a mustang, we wanted something that would be more fair to our horses.
We decided to try Competitive Trail Riding (CTR). A CTR is a long distance course, we did 25 miles. An 'optimal time' is set based on the trail. For novice riders (riders new to CTR) it was 5 hours and 45 minutes. For open riders (experienced) it was 5 hours and 15 minutes.
The goal of CTR is to have the best horse for a long distance ride - it teaches you how to pace a long distance ride, and take care of your horse during a long distance ride. You are scored at the beginning of a ride and every little scrape, swelling, scratch, etc is recorded. When you finish your ride, your horse is assessed again and you get points for every new scrape, swelling, etc. The goal is to have a score of 0.
You get points if your horse's heart rate is too high during the vet checks, the horse finishes with more scrapes/scratches/lameness, if you are too slow or fast on the ride (if you don't finish within 5 minutes of the optimal time), if your horse doesn't behave well during the vet checks, or anything negative about the horse's health could give you points.
One neat thing about OCTRA events is that it is a 'camp with your horse' type of event. People come for the weekend and set up temporary paddocks/stalls for their horses. They pitch a tent or bring a camper, and stay for the weekend. It is a very neat experience because I am used to hunter/jumper shows where typically you arrive and leave the same day, or if you need to stay over you rent a stall and book a hotel room.
We arrived Sunday morning at 6am with the first two horses - I have a 2 horse trailer and was taking 3 horses... but I only lived about 30 minutes away from ride. Dream and Shawna were the first to be dropped off. However, as Dream backed off the trailer she stepped off the side of the ramp and scraped her leg a little bit. Nothing major, but it was bleeding a small amount.
I didn't think much of it, so I headed out and picked up Thetis. So far everything was on schedule and I was back with Thetis at about 7:30am, and ready to take our horses for their first vet check. We headed over and had our vet check, but Dream wasn't allowed to ride because of her hind leg. Although this wasn't good news, I am happy that OCTRA really looks out for the well being of the horse.
So the ride manager was really nice and allowed us to delay our start time so that I could go take Dream home and pick up Flower instead for Marcie to ride. We were supposed to ride at 9:03am, but instead we started at 10:14am.
Because everyone is riding through the forest, they start riders in groups of 1-3, a few minutes a part so that the trails don't get too congested.
We were very excited and headed out on our ride - myself on Thetis, Marcie on Flower, and Erin on Shawna. Before we left we were instructed to follow the white trail. This is because there was a white, blue, and orange trail that had been marked for 3 different types of rides happening that day. We were doing a 25 mile ride and instructed to follow the white ribbons.
We head out on our trail. It started with a little loop along the field, into the forest, onto the edge of a crop field, and then we came to the road. We saw an orange arrow pointing left, but didn't see a white ribbon so we continued straight. After about a kilometre or so of not seeing anymore white ribbons, we realized we were a bit lost.
We rode back to the last white ribbon, and continued straight again. We didn't see any white turn offs so we decided to follow the orange arrow left. Sure enough we turn the corner and there was a white ribbon in sight. Silly us!!
We continue down a road that leads to another forest trail, across a hay field, down some more forest, and onto another road. This leads us to the Ganaraska forest and we spent many kilometers in the forest. Eventually we get to some water troughs that have been set out for us. We let our horses drink, and we sponge them with cool water to help lower their heart rate.
We continued riding through the forest, and then back to a road. Then we reached the ½ mile mark. There was another water trough to stop and cool your horse and let your horse drink. We were instructed to take our time, but when we were ready that we would have to trot the ½ mile into the vet check point. This is so the vet can take a pulse.
We cool our horses and then do as instructed. We trot into the vet check point. We are instructed to take 4 minutes to unsaddle our horses and cool them off. Wow does 4 minutes go fast! There was enough time to give our horses a quick sponge over, and then into the vet check we went.
Shawna had a perfect score and was allowed to continue, but Erin would have to wait for Marcie or I to ride with her, because she is under 18, she needs to be with an adult on the trail at all times. Both Thetis and Flower had heart rates that were too high, so we were given another 10 minutes to cool our horses.
Mustangs are also known to be really good for long distance, and Shawna has been training since March - so it wasn't surprising that Shawna had such an excellent recovery time. Flower is also a mustang, but she hasn't been training because Marcie thought she would be riding Dream. Thetis has been training, but is a Thoroughbred, so they take more time to get into long distance riding.
We sponged cold water on our horses for 10 minutes and then had them checked again. Both Thetis and Flower passed the heart check, but Flower was starting to get a girth rub so she wasn't allowed to continue. This was disappointing for Marcie, but at least she was able to do the loop.
The ride was set up with the start, middle, and finish to be all at the same spot. The 25 mile ride was a 12.5 mile loop that you ride twice. This meant Marcie had already gotten to see the whole trail, but just wouldn't able to ride the second half.
So Erin and I headed out on Thetis and Shawna for the second loop. This time we remembered to turn at the orange arrow! We also had to ride faster because our first loop we took extra time getting lost, but also we went slower because Flower wasn't in the same good shape as Thetis and Shawna.
I used an app on my blackberry to track our kilometers and time so I knew how fast we needed to be going. Most of the trail we trotted, with walk breaks when our horses needed them or on the gravel road. We did some gallops on the open wide stretches too.
We ended up making up all of our time and reached the ½ mile mark with about 15 minutes to spare before the optimal time. We were able to drench our horses with cold water to cool them off before going into the final vet check.
We made it back and had our final vet check. Shawna had a perfect score. She only had a few points for 'lack of impulsion' when she trotted for the vet, and her presentation - total score of 7.25 points (remember 0 is perfect). Thetis got perfect on most things except she was a grade 2 lameness on her right hind - I remember on the ride we were on a hill and she stumbled a bit, I suspect she pulled something so we took it easy the little distance we had left. Thetis also needed the extra 10 minutes to have her heart rate back down. We finished with 22 points.
We finished up, let the horses eat, and had some BBQ food ourselves. After dinner they presented the awards. Thetis was 6th and Shawna was 2nd! We were really excited about that, and it was really neat to read the score card to see how we were graded.
After a long day we finally headed home. All and all it was a great learning experience and something I am looking forward to doing again!
Check out pictures at:
USC students for the first time in over a years attend the involvement fair in person on Trousdale Parkway, August 30, 2021. (USC Photo/Gus Ruelas)
Consumers Energy employees, family members and friends volunteered to raise money and Walk For Warmth in Zeeland, Michigan on February 11, 2012.
7 Ways Toward Successful Student Social Media Involvement
PST Poster Sessions Track
Tuesday,
3:30
–
5:00
PM
As social media visionary Vanilla Ice once said, the keys to Web 2.0 success are to "Stop! Collaborate and listen!" By stopping to collaborate with and listen to our students and future students, SUNY Oswego has built an increasingly user-centered social media presence. How do we involve students in managing, creating and influencing what we do? Let me count the ways: 1. Student bloggers; 2. Interns managing the Facebook page and class of 2010 groups; 3. Twitter guides; 4. Flickr photosets; 5. YouTube videos; 6. Geosocial: i.e. FourSquare/Gowalla stops; 7. Feedback loops and focus groups.
Presenter
Tim Nekritz
Director of Web Communication, SUNY Oswego
Tim serves as Director of Web Communication at SUNY Oswego after spending the last several years as chief content editor of oswego.edu, canary in the coal mine for all social media efforts, coordinator of student bloggers, and much more.
TIP! Small business marketing involves using available software and modern technology. If you are not following the trend and missing some opportunities, your company will not be successful.
If you want to draw in as a lot of customers as possible, why not try Internet marketing? Finding out about the the best ways to use Online marketing to your advantage is a matter of learning some basic techniques. This information will demonstrate several ways that you can develop your prowess for small business marketing.
Small Business Marketing Ideas
TIP! Create a captivating "Link to Us" clickable button for your site to encourage your visitors to link back to your small business website. Anyone who likes your site will be more than happy to provide a link back to your site, just as long as you provide a link to their site, too.
If you want people to affiliate themselves with you, make a button they can put on their site that is very appealing. Like-minded individuals will be grateful to click on that button, embedding your site on theirs forever, and ensuring that anytime someone brows through their site, they'll see, and possibly click on, a link to yours as well.
TIP! To encourage visitors to click on your ads, use a small image with a link to your item's description or sales page. Use matching text from the information and put it at the start and finish.
Your website's tag is the primary indicator for how people see your small business, so make sure it accurately defines your purpose. Located in the browser window, this tag is critical to how people identify what your site is about. If your tags are weak, then the response you get from search engines and consumers alike will also be weak.
TIP! Make the best use of email for marketing your small business. Free newsletters are are a good way to keep your customers up to date on your products, as well as give them some interesting content to consider.
Like any other small business endeavor, web marketing required dedication and knowledge. Look for successful Internet marketers and ask them to help you start your system. It's possible to find expert advice from people proven in the internet marketing field for little or no cost. Be sure to choose a system that you can follow, and utilize it effectively. It may start slowly, but it is definitely worth the time you put into it.
Small Business Marketing Woes
TIP! It's essential for internal links to promote your keywords. Keywords are how search engines find your small business, so it's an important part of small business website building.
If you get disheartened with website marketing, do not throw in the towel. Since you never know how close you are to success, giving up can cause you to miss out on your marketing goals. When you are planning a product or service launch, you must make sure you have done all your research. Success in any pursuit requires dedication and work and Website marketing is no exception. Always stay focused, and remember the work will pay off later.
TIP! Allow customers to leave ratings and (screened) reviews of your products, including explanations of why they chose those ratings. With honest feedback, you can improve your product offerings.
Use popular websites to advertise your wares. This practice could lead to major exposure of your site. Look for pages that receive lots of traffic on a daily basis, which introduces your business to large numbers of potential customers.
TIP! Listed here is some wonderful "small business marketing" advice! Deliver to your site's visitors a worry-free online experience. Add a link to your site's privacy policy on each page in a visible location above the fold.
As you can see, you can use web marketing to get visibility for your products. The only way to have Affiliate marketing success is by knowing exactly how to deal with it. The advice given to you in the above information was created for you to become both knowledgeable and successful at small business marketing.
Small business marketing involves using available software and modern technology. Like any other small business endeavor, web marketing required dedication and knowledge. Listed here is some wonderful "small business marketing" advice! As you can see, you can use web marketing to get visibility for your products. The advice given to you in the above information was created for you to become both knowledgeable and successful at small business marketing. workwithjohnwhite.com/small-business-marketing/
I am on the brink of an amazing holiday.
This will involve train journeys across Europe, starting in Poland and encompassing Germany and Belgium.
The occasion is a celebration of 50 years of friendship and my friend Judith and I are fulfilling a life long ambition to visit Berlin.
As young Civil Servants together in London in the 1960's we were not allowed to go to Berlin, but could travel around the rest of Germany, which we did..
So........we are going to Berlin now, just because we can.
A holiday of a lifetime.
This the start of my holiday journal and I have made it from various weights of paper with a cover made from watercolour paper. I have dyed this with teabags and used stencils and printing blocks for decoration.
I do hope that Judith doesn't object to the term "Old biddies".
We shall see.
Student Involvement Fair at Crossley Softball Field, 19 September, 2020. Photography by Glenn Minshall.
Consumers Energy employees, family members and friends volunteered to raise money and Walk For Warmth in Zeeland, Michigan on February 11, 2012.
Photos by www.RonSombilonGalleryPhotography.com
ABOUT ROAMING DRAGON
Roaming Dragon came to life as two lifelong friends identified a major void in Vancouver’s food scene…the absence of restaurant quality food being served via Food Trucks!
Since launching in June 2010, Roaming Dragon has earned praise for our menus, our involvement as leaders in the food truck revolution, and for elevating the food truck experience across Canada.
Roaming Dragon can be seen on the streets of Vancouver, catering the city’s most exciting events, at a Farmers Market, or participating in charity events.
We specialize in authentically unauthentic Pan-Asian deliciousness. We offer unique interpretations of dishes and flavours familiar throughout Southeast Asia.
Street Food. Catering. Events.
As crazy as it may sound, the Dragon is so much more than a truck that serves food…the Dragon has a spirit and energy of its own!
From the aesthetics of the Dragon to the delicious smells, the music to the welcoming lanterns, the amazing food to our incredible staff…the Dragon has heart and soul.
The combination of food, music, smells, and smiles from our team make the journey to the Dragon special. We’re PROUD of our team, PROUD of our food, PROUD of our suppliers, and most of all PROUD to serve our customers.
We fundamentally believe that you DESERVE the finest ingredients, prepared with care and respect, and presented in unique and delicious ways.
We’re PROUD to know where our food comes from, that it was raised ETHICALLY and NATURALLY. Our team takes PRIDE in bringing you the most INNOVATIVE Pan-Asian cuisine you’ll ever come across!
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School awareness campaign on forest preservation in Yangambi - DRC.
Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR
If you use one of our photos, please credit it accordingly and let us know. You can reach us through our Flickr account or at: cifor-mediainfo@cgiar.org and m.edliadi@cgiar.org
Consumers Energy employees participated in the Jackson, Michigan Walk for Warmth hosted by the local Community Action Agency on February 24, 2012. The walk began in front of the Consumers Energy headquarters and more than 255 employees, friends and family volunteered and donated. Funds raised from the walk will help provide home heating assistance to low-income individuals.
Selbstbildnis mit ausgebreiteten Armen/Self-Portrait with Outstretched Arms, 1911
Bleistift, Aquarell und Deckfarben/Pencil, watercolor and gouache
Albertina
The Albertina
The architectural history of the Palais
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
Image: The oldest photographic view of the newly designed Palais Archduke Albrecht, 1869
"It is my will that the expansion of the inner city of Vienna with regard to a suitable connection of the same with the suburbs as soon as possible is tackled and at this on Regulirung (regulation) and beautifying of my Residence and Imperial Capital is taken into account. To this end I grant the withdrawal of the ramparts and fortifications of the inner city and the trenches around the same".
This decree of Emperor Franz Joseph I, published on 25 December 1857 in the Wiener Zeitung, formed the basis for the largest the surface concerning and architecturally most significant transformation of the Viennese cityscape. Involving several renowned domestic and foreign architects a "master plan" took form, which included the construction of a boulevard instead of the ramparts between the inner city and its radially upstream suburbs. In the 50-years during implementation phase, an impressive architectural ensemble developed, consisting of imperial and private representational buildings, public administration and cultural buildings, churches and barracks, marking the era under the term "ring-street style". Already in the first year tithe decided a senior member of the Austrian imperial family to decorate the facades of his palace according to the new design principles, and thus certified the aristocratic claim that this also "historicism" said style on the part of the imperial house was attributed.
Image: The Old Albertina after 1920
It was the palace of Archduke Albrecht (1817-1895), the Senior of the Habsburg Family Council, who as Field Marshal held the overall command over the Austro-Hungarian army. The building was incorporated into the imperial residence of the Hofburg complex, forming the south-west corner and extending eleven meters above street level on the so-called Augustinerbastei.
The close proximity of the palace to the imperial residence corresponded not only with Emperor Franz Joseph I and Archduke Albert with a close familial relationship between the owner of the palace and the monarch. Even the former inhabitants were always in close relationship to the imperial family, whether by birth or marriage. An exception here again proves the rule: Don Emanuel Teles da Silva Conde Tarouca (1696-1771), for which Maria Theresa in 1744 the palace had built, was just a close friend and advisor of the monarch. Silva Tarouca underpins the rule with a second exception, because he belonged to the administrative services as Generalhofbaudirektor (general court architect) and President of the Austrian-Dutch administration, while all other him subsequent owners were highest ranking military.
In the annals of Austrian history, especially those of military history, they either went into as commander of the Imperial Army, or the Austrian, later kk Army. In chronological order, this applies to Duke Carl Alexander of Lorraine, the brother-of-law of Maria Theresa, as Imperial Marshal, her son-in-law Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, also field marshal, whos adopted son, Archduke Charles of Austria, the last imperial field marshal and only Generalissimo of Austria, his son Archduke Albrecht of Austria as Feldmarschalil and army Supreme commander, and most recently his nephew Archduke Friedrich of Austria, who held as field marshal from 1914 to 1916 the command of the Austro-Hungarian troops. Despite their military profession, all five generals conceived themselves as patrons of the arts and promoted large sums of money to build large collections, the construction of magnificent buildings and cultural life. Charles Alexander of Lorraine promoted as governor of the Austrian Netherlands from 1741 to 1780 the Academy of Fine Arts, the Théâtre de Ja Monnaie and the companies Bourgeois Concert and Concert Noble, he founded the Academie royale et imperial des Sciences et des Lettres, opened the Bibliotheque Royal for the population and supported artistic talents with high scholarships. World fame got his porcelain collection, which however had to be sold by Emperor Joseph II to pay off his debts. Duke Albert began in 1776 according to the concept of conte Durazzo to set up an encyclopedic collection of prints, which forms the core of the world-famous "Albertina" today.
Image : Duke Albert and Archduchess Marie Christine show in family cercle the from Italy brought along art, 1776. Frederick Henry Füger.
1816 declared to Fideikommiss and thus in future indivisible, inalienable and inseparable, the collection 1822 passed into the possession of Archduke Carl, who, like his descendants, it broadened. Under him, the collection was introduced together with the sumptuously equipped palace on the Augustinerbastei in the so-called "Carl Ludwig'schen fideicommissum in 1826, by which the building and the in it kept collection fused into an indissoluble unity. At this time had from the Palais Tarouca by structural expansion or acquisition a veritable Residenz palace evolved. Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen was first in 1800 the third floor of the adjacent Augustinian convent wing adapted to house his collection and he had after 1802 by his Belgian architect Louis de Montoyer at the suburban side built a magnificent extension, called the wing of staterooms, it was equipped in the style of Louis XVI. Only two decades later, Archduke Carl the entire palace newly set up. According to scetches of the architect Joseph Kornhäusel the 1822-1825 retreaded premises presented themselves in the Empire style. The interior of the palace testified from now in an impressive way the high rank and the prominent position of its owner. Under Archduke Albrecht the outer appearance also should meet the requirements. He had the facade of the palace in the style of historicism orchestrated and added to the Palais front against the suburbs an offshore covered access. Inside, he limited himself, apart from the redesign of the Rococo room in the manner of the second Blondel style, to the retention of the paternal stock. Archduke Friedrich's plans for an expansion of the palace were omitted, however, because of the outbreak of the First World War so that his contribution to the state rooms, especially, consists in the layout of the Spanish apartment, which he in 1895 for his sister, the Queen of Spain Maria Christina, had set up as a permanent residence.
Picture: The "audience room" after the restoration: Picture: The "balcony room" around 1990
The era of stately representation with handing down their cultural values found its most obvious visualization inside the palace through the design and features of the staterooms. On one hand, by the use of the finest materials and the purchase of masterfully manufactured pieces of equipment, such as on the other hand by the permanent reuse of older equipment parts. This period lasted until 1919, when Archduke Friedrich was expropriated by the newly founded Republic of Austria. With the republicanization of the collection and the building first of all finished the tradition that the owner's name was synonymous with the building name:
After Palais Tarouca or tarokkisches house it was called Lorraine House, afterwards Duke Albert Palais and Palais Archduke Carl. Due to the new construction of an adjacently located administration building it received in 1865 the prefix "Upper" and was referred to as Upper Palais Archduke Albrecht and Upper Palais Archduke Frederick. For the state a special reference to the Habsburg past was certainly politically no longer opportune, which is why was decided to name the building according to the in it kept collection "Albertina".
Picture: The "Wedgwood Cabinet" after the restoration: Picture: the "Wedgwood Cabinet" in the Palais Archduke Friedrich, 1905
This name derives from the term "La Collection Albertina" which had been used by the gallery Inspector Maurice von Thausing in 1870 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts for the former graphics collection of Duke Albert. For this reason, it was the first time since the foundation of the palace that the name of the collection had become synonymous with the room shell. Room shell, hence, because the Republic of Austria Archduke Friedrich had allowed to take along all the movable goods from the palace in his Hungarian exile: crystal chandeliers, curtains and carpets as well as sculptures, vases and clocks. Particularly stressed should be the exquisite furniture, which stems of three facilities phases: the Louis XVI furnitures of Duke Albert, which had been manufactured on the basis of fraternal relations between his wife Archduchess Marie Christine and the French Queen Marie Antoinette after 1780 in the French Hofmanufakturen, also the on behalf of Archduke Charles 1822-1825 in the Vienna Porcelain Manufactory by Joseph Danhauser produced Empire furnitures and thirdly additions of the same style of Archduke Friedrich, which this about 1900 at Portois & Ffix as well as at Friedrich Otto Schmidt had commissioned.
The "swept clean" building got due to the strained financial situation after the First World War initially only a makeshift facility. However, since until 1999 no revision of the emergency equipment took place, but differently designed, primarily the utilitarianism committed office furnitures complementarily had been added, the equipment of the former state rooms presented itself at the end of the 20th century as an inhomogeneous administrative mingle-mangle of insignificant parts, where, however, dwelt a certain quaint charm. From the magnificent state rooms had evolved depots, storage rooms, a library, a study hall and several officed.
Image: The Albertina Graphic Arts Collection and the Philipphof after the American bombing of 12 März 1945.
Image: The palace after the demolition of the entrance facade, 1948-52
Worse it hit the outer appearance of the palace, because in times of continued anti-Habsburg sentiment after the Second World War and inspired by an intolerant destruction will, it came by pickaxe to a ministerial erasure of history. In contrast to the graphic collection possessed the richly decorated facades with the conspicuous insignia of the former owner an object-immanent reference to the Habsburg past and thus exhibited the monarchial traditions and values of the era of Francis Joseph significantly. As part of the remedial measures after a bomb damage, in 1948 the aristocratic, by Archduke Albert initiated, historicist facade structuring along with all decorations was cut off, many facade figures demolished and the Hapsburg crest emblems plunged to the ground. Since in addition the old ramp also had been cancelled and the main entrance of the bastion level had been moved down to the second basement storey at street level, ended the presence of the old Archduke's palace after more than 200 years. At the reopening of the "Albertina Graphic Collection" in 1952, the former Hapsburg Palais of splendour presented itself as one of his identity robbed, formally trivial, soulless room shell, whose successful republicanization an oversized and also unproportional eagle above the new main entrance to the Augustinian road symbolized. The emocratic throw of monuments had wiped out the Hapsburg palace from the urban appeareance, whereby in the perception only existed a nondescript, nameless and ahistorical building that henceforth served the lodging and presentation of world-famous graphic collection of the Albertina. The condition was not changed by the decision to the refurbishment because there were only planned collection specific extensions, but no restoration of the palace.
Image: The palace after the Second World War with simplified facades, the rudiment of the Danubiusbrunnens (well) and the new staircase up to the Augustinerbastei
This paradigm shift corresponded to a blatant reversal of the historical circumstances, as the travel guides and travel books for kk Residence and imperial capital of Vienna dedicated itself primarily with the magnificent, aristocratic palace on the Augustinerbastei with the sumptuously fitted out reception rooms and mentioned the collection kept there - if at all - only in passing. Only with the repositioning of the Albertina in 2000 under the direction of Klaus Albrecht Schröder, the palace was within the meaning and in fulfillment of the Fideikommiss of Archduke Charles in 1826 again met with the high regard, from which could result a further inseparable bond between the magnificent mansions and the world-famous collection. In view of the knowing about politically motivated errors and omissions of the past, the facades should get back their noble, historicist designing, the staterooms regain their glamorous, prestigious appearance and culturally unique equippment be repurchased. From this presumption, eventually grew the full commitment to revise the history of redemption and the return of the stately palace in the public consciousness.
Image: The restored suburb facade of the Palais Albertina suburb
The smoothed palace facades were returned to their original condition and present themselves today - with the exception of the not anymore reconstructed Attica figures - again with the historicist decoration and layout elements that Archduke Albrecht had given after the razing of the Augustinerbastei in 1865 in order. The neoclassical interiors, today called after the former inhabitants "Habsburg Staterooms", receiving a meticulous and detailed restoration taking place at the premises of originality and authenticity, got back their venerable and sumptuous appearance. From the world wide scattered historical pieces of equipment have been bought back 70 properties or could be returned through permanent loan to its original location, by which to the visitors is made experiencable again that atmosphere in 1919 the state rooms of the last Habsburg owner Archduke Frederick had owned. The for the first time in 80 years public accessible "Habsburg State Rooms" at the Palais Albertina enable now again as eloquent testimony to our Habsburg past and as a unique cultural heritage fundamental and essential insights into the Austrian cultural history. With the relocation of the main entrance to the level of the Augustinerbastei the recollection to this so valuable Austrian Cultural Heritage formally and functionally came to completion. The vision of the restoration and recovery of the grand palace was a pillar on which the new Albertina should arise again, the other embody the four large newly built exhibition halls, which allow for the first time in the history of the Albertina, to exhibit the collection throughout its encyclopedic breadh under optimal conservation conditions.
Image: The new entrance area of the Albertina
64 meter long shed roof. Hans Hollein.
The palace presents itself now in its appearance in the historicist style of the Ringstrassenära, almost as if nothing had happened in the meantime. But will the wheel of time should not, cannot and must not be turned back, so that the double standards of the "Albertina Palace" said museum - on the one hand Habsburg grandeur palaces and other modern museum for the arts of graphics - should be symbolized by a modern character: The in 2003 by Hans Hollein designed far into the Albertina square cantilevering, elegant floating flying roof. 64 meters long, it symbolizes in the form of a dynamic wedge the accelerated urban spatial connectivity and public access to the palace. It advertises the major changes in the interior as well as the huge underground extensions of the repositioned "Albertina".
Christian Benedictine
Art historian with research interests History of Architecture, building industry of the Hapsburgs, Hofburg and Zeremonialwissenschaft (ceremonial sciences). Since 1990 he works in the architecture collection of the Albertina. Since 2000 he supervises as director of the newly founded department "Staterooms" the restoration and furnishing of the state rooms and the restoration of the facades and explores the history of the palace and its inhabitants.