The 2018 Ampera Faraday is an all-electric hot-hatch, and the Sport version is its turbocharged sibling, featuring a slightly larger battery pack and upgraded electric wheel motors for faster pickup. Sporting Ampera's patented GearShift performance modulation package, the Faraday can perform in an extremely economical fashion, or in a more sporty fashion; it also has several vehicle emulation modes including performance, muscle, and comfort.

 

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Pablo Picasso (/pɪˈkɑːsoʊ, -ˈkæsoʊ/; Spanish: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso]; 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces.Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the slightly older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.Picasso's work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904–1906), the African-influenced Period (1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso's work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso,[1] a series of names honouring various saints and relatives.[9] Ruiz y Picasso were included for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish law. Born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López.[10] His mother was of one quarter Italian descent, from the territory of Genoa.[11] Though baptized a Catholic, Picasso would later on become an atheist.[12] Picasso's family was of middle-class background. His father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Ruiz's ancestors were minor aristocrats.Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were "piz, piz", a shortening of lápiz, the Spanish word for "pencil".[13] From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork.

The family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son's technique, an apocryphal story relates, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting, though paintings by him exist from later years.In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria.[15] After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home.[16] Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the jury admitted him, at just 13. The student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a small room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his drawings. The two argued frequently.Picasso's father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the country's foremost art school.At age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrolment. Madrid held many other attractions. The Prado housed paintings by Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco Zurbarán. Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco; elements such as his elongated limbs, arresting colours, and mystical visages are echoed in Picasso's later work.Picasso's training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any major artist's beginnings.[17] During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun.The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called "without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting."In 1897, his realism began to show a Symbolist influence, for example, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non-naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899–1900) followed. His exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favourite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.Picasso made his first trip to Paris, then the art capital of Europe, in 1900. There, he met his first Parisian friend, journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the language and its literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night while Picasso slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work was burned to keep the small room warm. During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid, where he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues. Soler solicited articles and Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. The first issue was published on 31 March 1901, by which time the artist had started to sign his work Picasso; before he had signed Pablo Ruiz y Picasso.Picasso's Blue Period (1901–1904), characterized by sombre paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colours, began either in Spain in early 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year.[22] Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from the Blue Period, during which Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In his austere use of colour and sometimes doleful subject matter – prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects – Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901 he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art..Pablo Picasso, 1905, Au Lapin Agile (At the Lapin Agile) (Arlequin tenant un verre), oil on canvas, 99.1 × 100.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904),] which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness is a recurrent theme in Picasso's works of this period, also represented in The Blindman's Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other works include Portrait of Soler and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.The Rose Period (1904–1906)[25] is characterized by a lighter tone and style utilizing orange and pink colours, and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who became his mistress, in Paris in 1904.[15] Olivier appears in many of his Rose Period paintings, many of which are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899–1901 period (i.e. just prior to the Blue Period) and 1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods.Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will".By 1905, Picasso became a favourite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Their older brother Michael Stein and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted portraits of both Gertrude Stein and her nephew Allan Stein. Gertrude Stein became Picasso's principal patron, acquiring his drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris. At one of her gatherings in 1905, he met Henri Matisse, who was to become a lifelong friend and rival. The Steins introduced him to Claribel Cone and her sister Etta who were American art collectors; they also began to acquire Picasso and Matisse's paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy. Michael and Sarah Stein became patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picasso.In 1907 Picasso joined an art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler was a German art historian and art collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubism that they jointly developed. Kahnweiler promoted burgeoning artists such as André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck and several others who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse at the time.Picasso's African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Picasso painted this composition in a style inspired by Iberian sculpture, but repainted the faces of the two figures on the right after being powerfully impressed by African artefacts he saw in June 1907 in the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro.[30] When he displayed the painting to acquaintances in his studio later that year, the nearly universal reaction was shock and revulsion; Matisse angrily dismissed the work as a hoax.[31] Picasso did not exhibit Le Demoiselles publicly until 1916.Other works from this period include Nude with Raised Arms (1907) and Three Women (1908). Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows.Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and "analyzed" them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque's paintings at this time share many similarities.Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre of cubism, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art. In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry, and Gertrude Stein. Apollinaire was arrested on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. Apollinaire pointed to his friend Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated.Between 1915 and 1917, Picasso began a series of paintings depicting highly geometric and minimalist Cubist objects, consisting of either a pipe, a guitar or a glass, with an occasional element of collage. "Hard-edged square-cut diamonds", notes art historian John Richardson, "these gems do not always have upside or downside".[33][34] "We need a new name to designate them," wrote Picasso to Gertrude Stein: Maurice Raynal suggested "Crystal Cubism".[33][35] These "little gems" may have been produced by Picasso in response to critics who had claimed his defection from the movement, through his experimentation with classicism within the so-called return to order following the war.At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Picasso was living in Avignon. Braque and Derain were mobilized and Apollinaire joined the French artillery, while the Spaniard Juan Gris remained from the Cubist circle. During the war, Picasso was able to continue painting uninterrupted, unlike his French comrades. His paintings became more sombre and his life changed with dramatic consequences. Kahnweiler’s contract had terminated on his exile from France. At this point Picasso’s work would be taken on by the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. After the loss of Eva Gouel, Picasso had an affair with Gaby Lespinasse. During the spring of 1916, Apollinaire returned from the front wounded. They renewed their friendship, but Picasso began to frequent new social circles.Towards the end of World War I, Picasso made a number of important relationships with figures associated with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Among his friends during this period were Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris, and others. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Erik Satie's Parade, in Rome; they spent their honeymoon near Biarritz in the villa of glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Errázuriz.After returning from his honeymoon, and in desperate need of money, Picasso started his exclusive relationship with the French-Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg. As part of his first duties, Rosenberg agreed to rent the couple an apartment in Paris at his own expense, which was located next to his own house. This was the start of a deep brother-like friendship between two very different men, that would last until the outbreak of World War II.Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and all the social niceties attendant to the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo Picasso,.who would grow up to be a dissolute motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova's insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso's bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of constant conflict. During the same period that Picasso collaborated with Diaghilev's troupe, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several drawings of the composer.In 1927 Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso's marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova's death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and fathered a daughter with her, named Maya. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso's death.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

 

Crystal Cubism (French: Cubisme cristal or Cubisme de cristal) is a distilled form of Cubism consistent with a shift, between 1915 and 1916, towards a strong emphasis on flat surface activity and large overlapping geometric planes. The primacy of the underlying geometric structure, rooted in the abstract, controls practically all of the elements of the artwork.This range of styles of painting and sculpture, especially significant between 1917 and 1920 (also referred to as the Crystal Period, classical Cubism, pure Cubism, advanced Cubism, late Cubism, synthetic Cubism, or the second phase of Cubism), was practiced in varying degrees by a multitude of artists; particularly those under contract with the art dealer and collector Léonce Rosenberg—Henri Laurens, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris and Jacques Lipchitz most noticeably of all. The tightening of the compositions, the clarity and sense of order reflected in these works, led to its being referred to by the French poet and art critic Maurice Raynal as 'crystal' Cubism.Considerations manifested by Cubists prior to the outset of World War I—such as the fourth dimension, dynamism of modern life, the occult, and Henri Bergson's concept of duration—had now been vacated, replaced by a purely formal frame of reference that proceeded from a cohesive stance toward art and life.As post-war reconstruction began, so too did a series of exhibitions at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie de L'Effort Moderne: order and the allegiance to the aesthetically pure remained the prevailing tendency. The collective phenomenon of Cubism once again—now in its advanced revisionist form—became part of a widely discussed development in French culture. Crystal Cubism was the culmination of a continuous narrowing of scope in the name of a return to order; based upon the observation of the artists relation to nature, rather than on the nature of reality itself.Crystal Cubism, and its associative rappel à l’ordre, has been linked with an inclination—by those who served the armed forces and by those who remained in the civilian sector—to escape the realities of the Great War, both during and directly following the conflict. The purifying of Cubism from 1914 through the mid-1920s, with its cohesive unity and voluntary constraints, has been linked to a much broader ideological transformation towards conservatism in both French society and French culture. In terms of the separation of culture and life, the Crystal Cubist period emerges as the most important in the history of Modernism.Cubism, from its inception, stems from the dissatisfaction with the idea of form that had been in practiced since the Renaissance. This dissatisfaction had already been seen in the works of the Romanticist Eugene Delacroix, in the Realism of Gustave Courbet, in passing through the Symbolists, Les Nabis, the Impressionists and the Neo-Impressionists. Paul Cézanne was instrumental, as his work marked a shift from a more representational art form to one that was increasingly abstract, with a strong emphasis on the simplification of geometric structure. In a letter addressed to Émile Bernard dated 15 April 1904, Cézanne writes: "Interpret nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone; put everything in perspective, so that each side of an object, of a plane, recedes toward a central point."Cézanne was preoccupied by the means of rendering volume and space, surface variations (or modulations) with overlapped shifting planes. Increasingly in his later works, Cézanne achieves a greater freedom. His work became bolder, more arbitrary, more dynamic and increasingly nonrepresentational. As his color planes acquired greater formal independence, defined objects and structures began to lose their identity.'Walpurgis Night, and The Angel that other master Alfred Kubin the Western Window (whose hero is the esoteric scholar John Dee). Picasso was also a member of this Order And it seems the same is true about Picasso, if we can trust the word of Marijo Ariens-Volker, who in her article "Alchemical, Kabbalistic, and Occult Symbolism in the Work of His Contemporaries (discussed in chapter 4), brings up several disturbing arguments. According to this researcher, Picasso, at the beginning of his stay in Paris, lived with his friend Ricardo Vines, who frequented the Librairie du Merveilleux, the general headquarters of the "independent group of esoteric studies" created by Papus. Among those closest to the painter at this time, we find André Salmon, who makes reference to Papus, the Martinists, and the Masons in several of his texts There were also Juan Gris an extremely assiduous Mason 38 Max Jacob, who considered kabbalah as his "life philosophy" and will be, before being expelled by Breton for impenitent Catholicism, frequently published in Littérature, and Guillaume Apollinaire who often spoke of Hermes Tres megistus and whose library held many books by Papus and other Martinists, as well as the official journals of the Order and even a document from the 1908 Spiritualist Congress. According to his grandson, Olivier Widmaier, Picasso was extremely well versed in the kabbalah, read the Zohar, and was a spiritualist his conversations with Brassai, Picasso admitted he had been a "member of an Order during his cubist period," probably the Martinist Order: some of the collages he made at this ime even bear signs that Ariens-Volker analyzes as allusions to the Martinist grade of unknown superior 40 210 Papus (whose "confused mysticism" would be denounced by Gérard Legrand in Médium in November 1953) claimed he had received Martinist initiation from the son of a close friend of Saint-Martin, but he also spent time with the "famous" theoretician of modern occultism, the "priest" (and Mason) Alphonse Louis Constant, alias Eliphas Levi 211 (Osiris is a black god," Breton writes in Arcanum 1 and was part of Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott's Theosophical Society. He wanted to make the Martinist order which was connected with Christian illuminism-a mystical society, "a school of moral chivalry that would strive to develop the spirituality of its members by the study of the invisible world and its laws through the exercise of devotion and intellectual assistance, and by the creation in each spirit of a faith that would be more solid by being based on by Papus's son Phillipe d'Encausse.

 

"Deriving directly from Christian Illuminism, Martinism had to adopt the principles [...]

The Order as a whole is above all a school of moral chivalry, striving to develop the spirituality of its members by studying the invisible world and its laws, by exercising devotion and intellectual assistance and by the creation in each spirit of a faith all the more solid as it is based on observation and on science.

Martinists do not do magic, either white or black. They study, they pray, and they forgive the insults as best they can.

Accused of being devils by some, clerics by others, and black magicians or insane by the gallery, we will simply remain fervent knights of Christ, enemies of violence and revenge, resolute synarchists, opposed to any anarchy from above or from below, in a word from the Martinists. ”

Papus, The Initiation, November 1906

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Cubism

 

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Other components of Picasso’s references: esotericism, the Rosicrucian movement and opium.

< Summary

> Credits

The magico-religious aspect of the Gosolan ceremonies, as well as their pagan and esoteric roots, must have attracted Picasso, who was superstitious and had been initiated into the occult by two masters, his close friends Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire68. In Gósol, the painter had the opportunity to enrich his training with in situ practices.

 

The Gosolan rites highlighted the continuity between the pagan world and the Christian one. This continuity was maintained by the Neoplatonists and, once the Inquisition was abolished, secret circles that had preserved the “living” tradition resurfaced, such as the Rosicrucians led by Sâr Péladan. The Grand Master sought, among other things, to merge the Rosicrucian movement with Christianity. Their ideas influenced Picasso’s entourage69 and Picasso’s Gosolan work reflects this union between pagan and Christian symbols.

 

Furthermore, opium, which Picasso and his circle appreciated, was linked to ancient mystery religions, in particular the cult of wheat presided over by Demeter and Persephone (fig.16). Opium facilitated access to knowledge, immortality of the soul and states of revelation. The flower from which opium is extracted, the poppy, is one of the emblems of the goddess Persephone. It is the flower that Picasso drew in his Gosolan notebook, his Carnet Catalan. Opium pipes are also represented in this notebook where the word “opium” is written, as well as a prescription for laudanum.

Opium, as Jean Cocteau, Sir Harold Acton, or Fernande71 explain, provides the opium smoker with the ability to constantly metamorphose, the sensation of being able to get anywhere he wants without the slightest effort, and an out-of-body experience that allows one to contemplate everything, oneself and the world, with impartiality72. Cocteau called opium “the flying carpet” and Picasso considered the scent of opium to be “the most intelligent of odors.”73

 

Opium placed these artists on the level of the ancient initiates, and the capacity for metamorphosis that it gave them allowed them to feel and see like them. The theatrical stagings of the ancient initiatory Mysteries in Parisian esoteric circles74 found some of their last real vestiges in Gósol.

 

Notes

 

68. RICHARDSON, JOHN, op. cit., Vol. I (1881-1906), pp. 207, 216, 331 and 334.

 

69. See the number of publications by Papus and Sâr Péladan, among other occultists, in the Apollinaire library: BOUDAR, GILBERT and DÉ-CAUDIN, MICHEL The library of Guillaume Apollinaire. Paris, Éditions du Center National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1983. See also M. FREIXA, op. cit., pp. 435-439; Gabriela di Milia, “Picasso and Canudo, a Couple of Transplants” in AA.VV. Picasso: the Italian journey 1917-1924, under the direction of Jean Clair, London, Thames and Hudson, 1998, pp. 75-77 and RICHARDSON, JOHN, op cit., Vol. I (1881-1906), p. 340.

 

70. According to Fernande Olivier, Picasso stopped smoking opium in 1908 following the suicide of a friend due to multiple intoxication. In Gósol, they were still smoking opium. The couple took refuge in the small village of Rue-des-Bois, in the suburbs of Paris, in 1908 to put an end to their opium addiction. OLIVIER, FERNANDE, op. cit., p. 183.

 

71. OLIVIER, FERNANDE Recuerdos íntimos. Escritos para Picasso. Barcelona. Ed. Parsifal. 1990 (1st ed. Souvenirs intimes: écrits pour Picasso, Calmann-Lévy, 1988), pp. 149 and 150 and OLIVIER, FERNANDE Picasso y sus amigos. Madrid. Taurus Ediciones. 1964 (Picasso and his friends, Stock, Paris, 1933), pp. 45 and p. 46.

 

72. COCTEAU, JEAN Opio. Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 2002 and ACTON, HAROLD Memorias de un esteta (originally Memoirs of an Aesthete), Valencia, Ed. Pre Textos, 2010, pp. 522 and 523.

 

73. RICHARDSON, JOHN El aprendiz de brujo. Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 2001. (1st edition The sorcerer’s Apprentice, 1991), pp. 313 and 314.

 

74. Sâr Péladan had organized theatrical performances of the ancient Mysteries. Reference consulted on May 9, 2011 on fratreslucis.netfirms.com/Peladan01.html

 

www.picasso.fr/details/ojo-les-archives-mars-2013-ojo-21-...

 

ANDRÉ BRETON AND HERMETICISM. FROM << MAGNETIC FIELDS >>> TO << THE KEY TO THE FIELDS >>>

 

Communication by Mrs. A. BALAKIAN (New York)

 

at the XIVth Congress of the Association, July 26, 1962.

 

In one of his most recent essays, "Before the Curtain," André Breton accused academic criticism of having made no formal effort to establish the esoteric schemes of art and poetry: "By abstaining until now from taking them into account, academic criticism has devoted itself purely and simply to inanity... thus the great emotional movements that still agitate us, the sensitive charter that governs us, would they proceed, whether we like it or not, from a tradition completely different from that which is taught: on this tradition the most unworthy, the most vindictive silence is kept (1)." Would not our investigation, "Hermeticism and Poetry," be a denial of this reproach?

 

It is true that hermeticism in all its forms has served as a cult for surrealism since Les Champs Magnétiques, the first surrealist document, until André Breton's last collection of essays, published under the cryptographic title of La Clé des Champs, which sums up the definitive position he reached after having searched for more than a quarter of a century for the occult foundations of the human pyramid. Already in he First Manifesto of the Magician Shepherd of the Magnetic Fields had proclaimed that Rimbaud's Alchemy of the Word should be taken literally. In the article, "Why I am Taking the Direction of the Surrealist Revolution", which dates from 1925, he had considered the surrealists as an army of adventurers who act under the orders of the marvelous. On many occasions he has traced the underground framework that, according to him, unites poetic minds since what he calls "the admirable fourteenth century" when Flamel mysteriously received the manuscript of the book of Abraham Juif, through the work of the alchemists of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, passing through the work of Martinès, Saint-Martin, Fabre d'Olivet, Abbé Contant, through that of the enlightened ones of the nineteenth century: Hugo, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, to a certain degree Mallarmé, and more recently up to the work of Jarry, Apollinaire, and Raymond Roussel; Breton thus marks the parallel between the occultists and the poets. The philosopher's stone does not simply transform metals but takes on a symbolic meaning; according to Breton it unleashes the human imagination, a word to which he attributes a very special meaning. It is not a deceptive faculty but a liberating one. Without it we are forced to live under the empire of rationalism, that is to say on the surface of things and according to the evident current of phenomena. According to Breton, imagination alone would be capable of delivering us from this condition. Indeed, he attributes to imagination this special characteristic of the human being that Hermes Trismegistus would have defined as "the intimate union of sensation and thought" . This faculty, not inert but latent, "domesticated" (the word is Breton's) for centuries, could find its repressed impulses to make us envisage an unexpected and dynamic rather than organized order of the world. The hermetic tradition that is perpetuated in an underground way at all times and under any form of culture, does not constitute a conscious influence; it is rather a kind of transfusion that at each new mystical crisis of humanity strengthens those

 

(1) La Clé des Champs, Sagittaire, 1953, p. 93.

 

www.persee.fr/doc/caief_0571-5865_1963_num_15_1_2248

The facade is relieved by horizontal and vertical bands of terra-cotta. The random false balcony and subtile modulation of the plane of the facade breaks up this block long assemblage.

Ok, let's take a look at the Batis 2/40 CF again in detail. Everyone is of course interested about the optical performance so I thought I should 'address the need' and start to investigate it. The MTF-diagrams published by ZEISS is a good starting point as they provide lot's of data and are easily comparable (with other ZEISS lenses). So, here are the MTF-diagrams of the Batis 2/40 CF.

 

People always look first for the resolution so they are mostly interested about the 40 lp/mm line, but I think the 10 lp/mm important as well, because it describes the amount overall contrast and 'pop' the lens is able to achieve. Wide open at f/2 the Batis 2/40 CF achieves more than 90% throughout the frame with 10 lp/mm and decreases to 80% only at very end of the frame. Anything above 80 % is usually considered to be excellent, but with the over 90% the Batis 2/40 shows outstanding contrast performance. For a reference the Otus 1.4/55 achieves only about 2% or 3% more (but then again the Otus is also about outstanding optical correction).

 

Next, the 40 lp/mm line tells us something about the maximum resolution and definition the lens can achieve. Wide open at f/2 the resolution looks – again – outstanding at the center. There are lenses that achieve similar resolution only at stopped down to f/5.6 and achieving such as resolution already at f/2 is very good indeed. The maximum resolution drops a bit at midframe, but at 50-60% it is totally acceptable (let's remember the lens measured wide open here). In short, the wide open performance is very, very good.

 

When the lens is stopped down to f/4 the performance of course increases a bit. The large scale contrast (10 lp/mm) is very similar to wide open behavior which is actually a compliment to wide open performance: this lens pushes maximum contrast already at wide open. The maximum resolution (40 lp/mm) jumps up a bit as is spread out very evenly throughout the frame and the lens shows no field curvature. Tangential and sagittal lines differ a bit here, which means a slight astigmatism at the midframe, but this is really nitpicking as the lines are still very convergent as a whole (you should see some zoom lenses). In short, the MTF-diagrams shows outstanding optical performance for the Batis 2/40 CF. But to be honest, this was to be expected because it's designed by ZEISS and the competition in Sony Alpha ecosystem is very hard at the moment, so the crafty people at Oberkochen has to push the envelope even further.

 

One thing I should note here is that ZEISS always provides MTF-data measured with white light from real lenses. With the most other manufacturers this is not the common practice. With Sony, for example, you only see theoretical MTF-data and they don't even publish the 40 lp/mm precision (only 10 and 30 lp/mm), which of course makes the diagrams look good, but the truth is that you cannot trust them. Manufacturing tolerances as also properties of glass, proper alignment, etc. affects the lenses so that one never gets the theoretical performance. Therefore it's more fair and truthful to see the measurements from real lenses. Also, I should add that Sony isn't even that bad as some other manufacturers that regularly publish MTF-diagrams with lines peaking at 100% – only it's just that it is physically impossible due the diffraction limitations of optical systems. Kind of wrecks their credibility. ZEISS is a rare exception, because their MTF comes always from the real lenses.

 

What I always do when ZEISS announces a new lens is that I compare it to other lenses in their catalogue. This is a good way to position the new lens compared to others (and of course to speculate how good ZEISS has succeeded this time). So here's the Batis 2/40 CF compared to Batis 2/25 and Batis 1.8/85 which present the obvious peer group.

 

Wide open and at the center of the frame the Batis 2/40 CF is the best of these three lenses. The performance is very similar to Batis 1.8/85 which is a compliment to Batis 2/40 because being a moderately wide lens it is more difficult the design than the short tele lens. Being familiar with the Batis 1.8/85 performance I think this is great news as it is about the best lens I've ever tested regarding wide open performance. I'm also happy to see that wide open Batis 2/40 is clearly better than the Batis 2/25. Don't get me wrong, the Batis 2/25 is also one of best wide angles you can get for Sony Alpha cameras (the new Sony 1.4/24 might be better), but the center resolution is clearly better with the Batis 2/40. Stopping down to f/4 all three become very similar with each other. Those who are already familiar with the Batis performance should be very well home here with the new Batis 2/40 CF.

 

So, the Batis 2/40 CF seems to fit very nicely to Batis lens family, but what about the other ZEISS lenses, like some similar from the Milvus lens family. Okay, so here is Batis 2/40 CF compared to Milvus 1.4/35 and Milvus 1.4/50.

 

The Milvus lenses are one stop faster so it's a kind of unfair comparison because stopped down they would do better, but still one can only admire the wide open performance of the Batis 2/40: plenty of contrast and resolution. Stopped down to f/4 the Milvus 1.4/35 takes a winning position here as it should because it is a large and uncompromised lens weighting a whopping 1174 g (quite a difference compared to 361 g Batis). But then compared to Milvus 1.4/50 the Batis has a very similar performance.

 

Every now and then I hear people claiming that Otus & Milvus represent ZEISS's premium lenses while the autofocusing Batis and Touit are only 'almost-premium lenses' (to put it nicely). This comparison doesn't support it. Sure there are some different design limits with different lenses, but unlike other companies like Sony, Canon or Nikon, ZEISS doesn't categorize their lens families similar way. Everything they do represents the professional lenses because it's in their brand and they don't do separate product lines for consumer lenses. If in doubt, they a look at the Touit MTF-diagrams, very similar looking curves there.

 

Ok, that's about all I'm going to say about the Batis 2/40 CF MTF-diagrams, but how does the optical performance look like in practice, you might wonder? Come back tomorrow and I'll show you!

 

www.30daysofbatis.com

Ego psychology is a school of psychoanalysis rooted in Sigmund Freud's structural id-ego-superego model of the mind.

 

An individual interacts with the external world as well as responds to internal forces. Many psychoanalysts use a theoretical construct called the ego to explain how that is done through various ego functions. Adherents of ego psychology focus on the ego's normal and pathological development, its management of libidinal and aggressive impulses, and its adaptation to reality.[1]

  

Contents

1History

1.1Early conceptions of the ego

1.2Freud's ego psychology

1.3Systematization

1.3.1Anna Freud

1.3.2Heinz Hartmann

1.3.3David Rapaport

1.3.4Other contributors

1.4Decline

2Contemporary

2.1Modern conflict theory

3Ego functions

4Conflict, defense and resistance analysis

5Cultural influences

6Criticisms

7See also

8References

9Further reading

History[edit]

Early conceptions of the ego[edit]

Sigmund Freud initially considered the ego to be a sense organ for perception of both external and internal stimuli. He thought of the ego as synonymous with consciousness and contrasted it with the repressed unconscious. In 1910, Freud emphasized the attention to detail when referencing psychoanalytical matters, while predicting his theory to become essential in regards to everyday tasks with the Swiss psychoanalyst, Oscar Pfister.[2] By 1911, he referenced ego instincts for the first time in Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning and contrasted them with sexual instincts: ego instincts responded to the reality principle while sexual instincts obeyed the pleasure principle. He also introduced attention and memory as ego functions.

 

Freud's ego psychology[edit]

Freud began to notice that not all unconscious phenomena could be attributed to the id; it appeared as if the ego had unconscious aspects as well. This posed a significant problem for his topographic theory, which he resolved in his monograph The Ego and the Id (1923).[3]

 

In what came to be called the structural theory, the ego was now a formal component of a three-way system that also included the id and superego. The ego was still organized around conscious perceptual capacities, yet it now had unconscious features responsible for repression and other defensive operations. Freud's ego at this stage was relatively passive and weak; he described it as the helpless rider on the id's horse, more or less obliged to go where the id wished to go.[4]

 

In Freud's 1926 monograph, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, he revised his theory of anxiety as well as delineated a more robust ego. Freud argued that instinctual drives (id), moral and value judgments (superego), and requirements of external reality all make demands upon an individual. The ego mediates among conflicting pressures and creates the best compromise. Instead of being passive and reactive to the id, the ego was now a formidable counterweight to it, responsible for regulating id impulses, as well as integrating an individual's functioning into a coherent whole. The modifications made by Freud in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety formed the basis of a psychoanalytic psychology interested in the nature and functions of the ego. This marked the transition of psychoanalysis from being primarily an id psychology, focused on the vicissitudes of the libidinal and aggressive drives as the determinants of both normal and psychopathological functioning, to a period in which the ego was accorded equal importance and was regarded as the prime shaper and modulator of behavior.[5]

 

Systematization[edit]

Following Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalysts most responsible for the development of ego psychology, and its systematization as a formal school of psychoanalytic thought, were Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and David Rapaport. Other important contributors included Ernst Kris, Rudolph Loewenstein, René Spitz, Margaret Mahler, Edith Jacobson, and Erik Erikson.

 

Anna Freud[edit]

Anna Freud focused her attention on the ego's unconscious, defensive operations and introduced many important theoretical and clinical considerations. In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), Anna Freud argued the ego was predisposed to supervise, regulate, and oppose the id through a variety of defenses. She described the defenses available to the ego, linked them to the stages of psychosexual development during which they originated, and identified various psychopathological compromise formations in which they were prominent. Clinically, Anna Freud emphasized that the psychoanalyst's attention should always be on the defensive functions of the ego, which could be observed in the manifest presentation of the patient's associations. The analyst needed to be attuned to the moment-by-moment process of what the patient talked about in order to identify, label, and explore defenses as they appeared. For Anna Freud, direct interpretation of repressed content was less important than understanding the ego's methods by which it kept things out of consciousness.[6] Her work provided a bridge between Freud's structural theory and ego psychology.[7]

 

Heinz Hartmann[edit]

Heinz Hartmann (1939/1958) believed the ego included innate capacities that facilitated an individual's ability to adapt to his or her environment. These included perception, attention, memory, concentration, motor coordination, and language. Under normal conditions, what Hartmann called an average expectable environment, these capacities developed into ego functions and had autonomy from the libidinal and aggressive drives; that is, they were not products of frustration and conflict, as Freud (1911) believed. Hartmann recognized, however, that conflicts were part of the human condition and certain ego functions may become conflicted by aggressive and libidinal impulses, as witnessed by conversion disorders (e.g., glove paralysis), speech impediments, eating disorders, and attention-deficit disorder.[5]

 

Through Hartmann's focus on ego functions, and how an individual adapts to his or her environment, he worked to create both a general psychology and a clinical instrument with which an analyst could evaluate an individual's functioning and formulate appropriate therapeutic interventions. Based on Hartmann's propositions, the task of the ego psychologist was to neutralize conflicted impulses and expand the conflict-free spheres of ego functions. By doing so, Hartmann believed psychoanalysis facilitated an individual's adaptation to his or her environment. Hartmann claimed, however, that his aim was to understand the mutual regulation of the ego and environment rather than to promote adjustment of the ego to the environment. Furthermore, an individual with a less-conflicted ego would be better able to actively respond to and shape, rather than passively react to, his or her environment.

 

Mitchell and Black (1995) wrote: "Hartmann powerfully affected the course of psychoanalysis, opening up a crucial investigation of the key processes and vicissitudes of normal development. Hartmann's contributions broadened the scope of psychoanalytic concerns, from psychopathology to general human development, from an isolated, self-contained treatment method to a sweeping intellectual discipline among other disciplines" (p. 35).

 

David Rapaport[edit]

David Rapaport played a prominent role in the development of ego psychology and his work likely represented its apex.[5] In Rapaport's influential monograph The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory (1960), he organized ego psychology into an integrated, systematic, and hierarchical theory capable of generating empirically testable hypotheses. According to Rapaport, psychoanalytic theory—as expressed through the principles of ego psychology—was a biologically based general psychology that could explain the entire range of human behavior.[8] For Rapaport, this endeavor was fully consistent with Freud's attempts to do the same (e.g., Freud's studies of dreams, jokes, and the "psychopathology of everyday life".)

 

Other contributors[edit]

While Hartmann was the principal architect ego psychology, he collaborated closely with Ernst Kris and Rudolph Loewenstein.[9]

 

Subsequent psychoanalysts interested in ego psychology emphasized the importance of early-childhood experiences and socio-cultural influences on ego development. René Spitz (1965), Margaret Mahler (1968), Edith Jacobson (1964), and Erik Erikson studied infant and child behavior and their observations were integrated into ego psychology. Their observational and empirical research described and explained early attachment issues, successful and faulty ego development, and psychological development through interpersonal interactions.

 

Spitz identified the importance of mother-infant nonverbal emotional reciprocity; Mahler refined the traditional psychosexual developmental phases by adding the separation-individuation process; and Jacobson emphasized how libidinal and aggressive impulses unfolded within the context of early relationships and environmental factors. Finally, Erik Erikson provided a bold reformulation of Freud's biologic, epigenetic psychosexual theory through his explorations of socio-cultural influences on ego development.[10] For Erikson, an individual was pushed by his or her own biological urges and pulled by socio-cultural forces.

 

Decline[edit]

In the United States, ego psychology was the predominant psychoanalytic approach from the 1940s through the 1960s. Initially, this was due to the influx of European psychoanalysts, including prominent ego psychologists like Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein, during and after World War II. These European analysts settled throughout the United States and trained the next generation of American psychoanalysts.

 

By the 1970s, several challenges to the philosophical, theoretical, and clinical tenets of ego psychology emerged. The most prominent of which were: a "rebellion" led by Rapaport's protégés (George Klein, Robert Holt, Roy Schafer, and Merton Gill); object relations theory; and self psychology.

 

Contemporary[edit]

Modern conflict theory[edit]

Charles Brenner (1982) attempted to revive ego psychology with a concise and incisive articulation of the fundamental focus of psychoanalysis: intrapsychic conflict and the resulting compromise formations. Over time, Brenner (2002) tried to develop a more clinically based theory, what came to be called “modern conflict theory.” He distanced himself from the formal components of the structural theory and its metapsychological assumptions, and focused entirely on compromise formations.

 

Ego functions[edit]

 

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Reality testing: The ego's capacity to distinguish what is occurring in one's own mind from what is occurring in the external world. It is perhaps the single most important ego function because negotiating with the outside world requires accurately perceiving and understanding stimuli. Reality testing is often subject to temporary, mild distortion or deterioration under stressful conditions. Such impairment can result in temporary delusions and hallucination and is generally selective, clustering along specific, psychodynamic lines. Chronic deficiencies suggest either psychotic or organic interference.[11]

Impulse control: The ability to manage aggressive and/or libidinal wishes without immediate discharge through behavior or symptoms. Problems with impulse control are common; for example: road rage; sexual promiscuity; excessive drug and alcohol use; and binge eating.

Affect regulation: The ability to modulate feelings without being overwhelmed.

Judgment: The capacity to act responsibly. This process includes identifying possible courses of action, anticipating and evaluating likely consequences, and making decisions as to what is appropriate in certain circumstances.

Object relations: The capacity for mutually satisfying relationship. The individual can perceive himself and others as whole objects with three dimensional qualities.

Thought processes: The ability to have logical, coherent, and abstract thoughts. In stressful situations, thought processes can become disorganized. The presence of chronic or severe problems in conceptual thinking is frequently associated with schizophrenia and manic episodes.

Defensive functioning: A defense is an unconscious attempt to protect the individual from some powerful, identity-threatening feeling. Initial defenses develop in infancy and involve the boundary between the self and the outer world; they are considered primitive defenses and include projection, denial, and splitting. As the child grows up, more sophisticated defenses that deal with internal boundaries such as those between ego and super ego or the id develop; these defenses include repression, regression, displacement, and reaction formation. All adults have, and use, primitive defenses, but most people also have more mature ways of coping with reality and anxiety.

Synthesis: The synthetic function is the ego's capacity to organize and unify other functions within the personality. It enables the individual to think, feel, and act in a coherent manner. It includes the capacity to integrate potentially contradictory experiences, ideas, and feelings; for example, a child loves his or her mother yet also has angry feelings toward her at times. The ability to synthesize these feelings is a pivotal developmental achievement.

Reality testing involves the individual's capacity to understand and accept both physical and social reality as it is consensually defined within a given culture or cultural subgroup. In large measure, the function hinges on the individual's capacity to distinguish between her own wishes or fears (internal reality) and events that occur in the real world (external reality). The ability to make distinctions that are consensually validated determines the ego's capacity to distinguish and mediate between personal expectations, on the one hand, and social expectations or laws of nature on the other. Individuals vary considerably in how they manage this function. When the function is seriously compromised, individuals may withdraw from contact with reality for extended periods of time. This degree of withdrawal is most frequently seen in psychotic conditions. Most times, however, the function is mildly or moderately compromised for a limited period of time, with far less drastic consequences' (Berzoff, 2011).

 

Judgment involves the capacity to reach “reasonable” conclusions about what is and what is not “appropriate” behavior. Typically, arriving at a “reasonable” conclusion involves the following steps: (1) correlating wishes, feeling states, and memories about prior life experiences with current circumstances; (2) evaluating current circumstances in the context of social expectations and laws of nature (e.g., it is not possible to transport oneself instantly out of an embarrassing situation, no matter how much one wishes to do so); and (3) drawing realistic conclusions about the likely consequences of different possible courses of action. As the definition suggests, judgment is closely related to reality testing, and the two functions are usually evaluated in tandem (Berzoff, 2011).

 

Modulating and controlling impulses is based on the capacity to hold sexual and aggressive feelings in check with out acting on them until the ego has evaluated whether they meet the individual's own moral standards and are acceptable in terms of social norms. Adequate functioning in this area depends on the individual's capacity to tolerate frustration, to delay gratification, and to tolerate anxiety without immediately acting to ameliorate it. Impulse control also depends on the ability to exercise appropriate judgment in situations where the individual is strongly motivated to seek relief from psychological tension and/or to pursue some pleasurable activity (sex, power, fame, money, etc.). Problems in modulation may involve either too little or too much control over impulses (Berzoff, 2011).

 

Modulation of affect The ego performs this function by preventing painful or unacceptable emotional reactions from entering conscious awareness, or by managing the expression of such feelings in ways that do not disrupt either emotional equilibrium or social relationships. To adequately perform this function, the ego constantly monitors the source, intensity, and direction of feeling states, as well as the people toward whom feelings will be directed. Monitoring determines whether such states will be acknowledged or expressed and, if so, in what form. The basic principle to remember in evaluating how well the ego manages this function is that affect modulation may be problematic because of too much or too little expression. As an integral part of the monitoring process, the ego evaluates the type of expression that is most congruent with established social norms. For example, in white American culture it is assumed that individuals will contain themselves and maintain a high level of personal/vocational functioning except in extremely traumatic situations such as death of a family member, very serious illness or terrible accident. This standard is not necessarily the norm in other cultures (Berzhoff, Flanagan, & Hertz, 2011).

 

Object relations involves the ability to form and maintain coherent representations of others and of the self. The concept refers not only to the people one interacts with in the external world but also to significant others who are remembered and represented within the mind. Adequate functioning implies the ability to maintain a basically positive view of the other, even when one feels disappointed, frustrated, or angered by the other's behavior. Disturbances in object relations may manifest themselves through an inability to fall in love, emotional coldness, lack of interest in or withdrawal from interactions with others, intense dependency, and/or an excessive need to control relationships (Berzhoff, Flanagan, & Hertz, 2011).

 

Self-esteem regulation involves the capacity to maintain a steady and reasonable level of positive self-regard in the face of distressing or frustrating external events. Painful affective states, including anxiety, depression, shame, and guilt, as well as exhilarating emotions such as triumph, glee, and ecstasy may also undermine self-esteem. Generally speaking, in dominant American culture a measured expression of both pain and pleasure is expressed; excess in either direction is a cause for concern. White Western culture tends to assume that individuals will maintain a consistent and steadily level of self-esteem, regardless of external events or internally generated feeling states (Berzhoff, Flanagan, & Hertz, 2011).

 

Mastery when conceptualized as an ego function, mastery reflects the epigenetic view that individuals achieve more advanced levels of ego organization by mastering successive developmental challenges. Each stage of psychosexual development (oral, anal, phallic, genital) presents a particular challenge that must be adequately addressed before the individual can move on to the next higher stage. By mastering stage-specific challenges, the ego gains strength in relations to the other structures fothe mind and thereby becomes more effective in organizing and synthesizing mental processes. Freud expressed this principle in his statement, “Where id was, shall ego be.” An undeveloped capacity for mastery can be seen, for example, in infants who have not been adequately nourished, stimulated, and protected during the first year of life, in the oral stage of development. When they enter the anal stage, such infants are not well prepared to learn socially acceptable behavior or to control the pleasure they derive from defecating at will. As a result, some of them will experience delays in achieving bowel control and will have difficulty in controlling temper tantrums, while others will sink into a passive, joyless compliance with parental demands that compromises their ability to explore, learn, and become physically competent. Conversely, infants who have been well gratified and adequately stimulated during the oral stage enter the anal stage feeling relatively secure and confident. For the most part, they cooperate in curbing their anal desires, and are eager to win parental approval for doing so. In addition, they are physically active, free to learn and eager to explore. As they gain confidence in their increasingly autonomous physical and mental abilities, they also learn to follow the rules their parents establish and, in doing so, with parental approval. As they master the specific tasks related to the anal stage, they are well prepared to move on to the next stage of development and the next set of challenges. When adults have problems with mastery, they usually enact them in derivative or symbolic ways (Berzhoff, Flanagan, & Hertz, 2011).

 

Conflict, defense and resistance analysis[edit]

According to Freud's structural theory, an individual's libidinal and aggressive impulses are continuously in conflict with his or her own conscience as well as with the limits imposed by reality. In certain circumstances, these conflicts may lead to neurotic symptoms. Thus, the goal of psychoanalytic treatment is to establish a balance between bodily needs, psychological wants, one's own conscience, and social constraints. Ego psychologists argue that the conflict is best addressed by the psychological agency that has the closest relationship to consciousness, unconsciousness, and reality: the ego.

 

The clinical technique most commonly associated with ego psychology is defense analysis. Through clarifying, confronting, and interpreting the typical defense mechanisms a patient uses, ego psychologists hope to help the patient gain control over these mechanisms.[12]

 

Cultural influences[edit]

The classical scholar E. R. Dodds used ego psychology as the framework for his influential study The Greeks and the Irrational (1951).[13]

The Sterbas relied on Hartmann's conflict-free sphere to help explain the contradictions they found in Beethoven's character in Beethoven and His Nephew (1954).[14]

Criticisms[edit]

Many[who?] authors have criticized Hartmann's conception of a conflict-free sphere of ego functioning as both incoherent and inconsistent with Freud's vision of psychoanalysis as a science of mental conflict. Freud believed that the ego itself takes shape as a result of the conflict between the id and the external world. The ego, therefore, is inherently a conflicting formation in the mind. To state, as Hartmann did, that the ego contains a conflict-free sphere may not be consistent with key propositions of Freud's structural theory.

 

Ego psychology, and 'Anna-Freudianism', were together seen by Kleinians as maintaining a conformist, adaptative version of psychoanalysis inconsistent with Freud's own views.[15] Hartmann claimed, however, that his aim was to understand the mutual regulation of the ego and environment rather than to promote adjustment of the ego to the environment. Furthermore, an individual with a less-conflicted ego would be better able to actively respond and shape, rather than passively react to, his or her environment.

 

Jacques Lacan was if anything still more opposed to ego psychology, using his concept of the Imaginary to stress the role of identifications in building up the ego in the first place.[16] Lacan saw in the "non-conflictual sphere...a down-at-heel mirage that had already been rejected as untenable by the most academic psychology of introspection'.[17] Ego psychologists responded by doubting whether Lacan's approach is ever applied to clinical work with real patients who have real illnesses, specific ego functions mediating those illnesses, and specific histories.[18]

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_psychology

When the painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985) agreed for the first time to create the stained glass windows of a cathedral, that of Metz in 1959, he was at the same time revealing a secret part of his art. Chagall also knew how to play admirably with the opposition of colors to bring out and oppose different worlds and stories. Each time, he knew how to use these strong oppositions by using different pigments to make us discover another reality. Thus, on the one hand, we discover the quasi-monochromy of yellow in the stained glass window of the Creation, this one corresponding more to solar representations.On the other hand, the midnight blue with the fiery red of the two bays of the interior ambulatory seem to be more associated with nocturnal, crepuscular, telluric but also lunar images. On the one hand, that of the stained glass window of the Creation which narrates the paradisiacal scenes where Eve and Adam evolve with the dominant yellow. And on the other hand, the other world, that of the aftermath of the fall, of the exit from Eden, according to the two bays of the interior ambulatory. These relate the history of the chosen people, with dark and violent colors such as night blue and fire red. All this to signify that we are no longer in the Edenic times but in those where humanity will know sin and death. At the same time, one will also notice that each stained glass window is crossed by an astonishing dynamism. This dynamism increases and always evolves in the same direction, from left to right. Thus we can follow the story of each representation always in the same direction.

 

The first stained glass window, that of the Creation, begins in the first lancet with the scene of the creation of the man Adam and finally ends in the last lancet with the expulsion of the couple Adam and Eve from paradise. At the same time, in the other two bays of the interior ambulatory, we see a long historical continuum that goes from the Sacrifice of Isaac to the deportation of the Jews to Babylon. It is worth noting that each time, the story told by the stained glass windows ends with a dramatic exit!

 

Finally, the deep source of this dynamism must be sought in Hasidism, a Jewish religious movement that strongly influenced Chagall. Most of the Israelites in Vitebsk were all Hasidim. For the Hasid, spontaneous emotion counts as much as the law or the rite. Hence the painter's insistence on often showing us festive scenes where everyone gives free rein to the expression of their spontaneous joy. Thus, often the Chagallian characters seem to be invaded by this enthusiasm inherited from Hasidism. This Russian painter succeeds in associating us with the vitality of the spectacle of human history to a more intense force that animates us. This mysterious divine energy, is it not ultimately what this artist wants to reveal to us with this other reality? To lead us in fact to fly always higher in the image of his Luftmensch?

 

This is not surprising, since the artist has always been a special case in modern painting. While abstraction appeared to many as the ultimate achievement of pictorial creation, he, on the contrary, always clung as fiercely to figuration. Not because of a concern for conformism or academicism, but rather because he considered it to be the most appropriate way to show another reality. Revealing notably by the magic of the representation and the color, the inaccessible, the unsuspected because this artist had always had the concern to reveal the most intimate and the most mysterious thing of the being. Father Couturier (1897-1954), who first encouraged him to work as a stained glass artist in the church of Assy in 1956-1957, had well grasped the soul of this painter by affirming that: "Chagall is not an explorer of the depths of the soul: he is a tree with deep roots whose fruits have the color of the Sun. But it is also thanks to his work on the Bible that the brush of this painter will allow other discoveries. The effect of the saving storm of the God of the Old Testament will indeed act powerfully on him. Hence the same impression that the visible reality of this painter becomes something else thanks to his palette. However, if his representations surprise by their sometimes irrational side, he is not for all that a surrealist painter, even if he makes us reach another world. Later, when he discovered at the age of 70 the possibilities offered by the technique of stained glass, it is also undeniable that this art of luminescence will stimulate his inspiration even more. The first cathedral of his career, the Cathedral of Saint-Etienne in Metz, will give him the opportunity to highlight certain facets of this other reality. First of all, to bring it out, he knew how to take advantage of a perfect use of the place. Indeed, his first stained glass windows often located in a relatively dark and secluded space will lead him to develop more than elsewhere his proximity to the painter Rembrandt, painter of the soul and chiaroscuro. Then, another complicity that we discover in this painter is that with Jacob, the patriarch of the Bible, with whom he will be able to emphasize his Luftmensch. Finally, he will play more than elsewhere with the partitions and polarities that underlie all his work. On this occasion also, he will be able to highlight with great mastery all the force that animates his stained glass work, which is totally subordinated to movement and dynamism. When he was offered to work for the cathedral of Metz, he was initially quite disappointed with the spaces he was given. Indeed, he was initially offered to practice his art in relatively secluded and dark areas of the cathedral, since they were located in the north apse, more precisely in the inner ambulatory. With the windows located at the beginning of the choir's perimeter and where the sun practically never appeared, his work might not benefit from maximum visibility and this had not escaped the painter. So he began with the window furthest back, the one with three lancets, and then the one further forward with four lancets. He called this three lancet window the "wounded stained glass window". Chagall called it that because the left side of the window was cut off when the turret was created, giving it a lame look. The median axis of the rose window is indeed off-center to the left of the current median axis of the lancets. As we will see later, Chagall knew perfectly how to illustrate his world by playing on partitions and polarities. Here, in these dark spaces, it will be the world of the night and the penumbra representing the lunar star opposed to the world of the day and the Sun. The solar world will be the one he will inaugurate some time later in the North transept with the stained glass window of the Creation. This is why, as a painter and to illuminate and "counterbalance" this world of night, he will use two dominant colors which are the dark blue associated with the aggressive red. He thus uses his proven technique of the preponderant color. This technique goes back to his very first years in painting, during his years spent in Saint Petersburg in 1906-1907. His master at the time, Leon Bakst, always advised him to limit the world of colors to better dominate them. During this same period, he also produced a number of paintings with scenes that took place mostly at night (The Birth, The Peasant Woman Eating, The Kermesse, The Procession, The Holy Family). His taste for tenebrism brings him closer to Caravaggio, but especially to Rembrandt. One can also explain his attraction for the half-light because, for lack of means, he worked at the time most often in a cramped room in St. Petersburg which was particularly dark. Thus, the affinities with the great Flemish painter will become more and more obvious. Firstly, in the use of chiaroscuro, which Chagall had to use in view of the places where he had to execute his work, in particular in the interior ambulatory of the cathedral in Metz. Then in the treatment itself of certain scenes. Indeed, we discover obvious similarities with a Rembrandt painting of 1635 when he tackles the first lancet of the four lancet stained glass window, in the scene of the Sacrifice of Isaac. We see the same strong chromatic opposition of contrasts between the dark blue in Chagall's work or the dark brown in Rembrandt's that invades the figure of Abraham and the whitish clarity of Isaac's body. We also detect an identical treatment in the softness and transparency of the half-tones. In these two painters, the same effects of light modulation are used to reveal the deep truth of the beings. Chagall, in this stained glass window, plays on the variation of blues, going from the most intense and darkest to the most luminous. In the same way, in these two artists, Isaac is violently illuminated while we never really see his eyes. We cannot see the victim's gaze because it is the gaze of God that we risk encountering. The work is here an unveiling. The artist then reveals another reality: the victim will be recognized by God and saved by him alone!.

 

www.blelorraine.fr/2021/05/des-vitraux-de-chagall-a-la-ca...

untitled (searching)

2016_08_13

charcoal pastel and graphite on manila tagboard

12" x 12" (30.48 x 30.48)cm

Matt Niebuhr

West Branch Studio

www.mattniebuhr.com

shop.mattniebuhr.com

Frequency range: 1.5 to 31 MHz; CW, AM, NFM and SSB modulation. And a built in speaker.

Acrylic silver paint lettering on black Fabriano paper

This is what happens when an engineer runs out of electricity to power his domicile and is left with his dogged, stale imagination, a few self-made LED Throwies and a LED torch wrapped in violet sheath. The light on my face is triggered by pulse modulated LED illumination and the light trails are hand propagated with the torch previously mentioned.

 

The possessed guy standing in the middle is ME , by the way :D I had my earphones in my..err..ears constantly playing "Are We In Trouble Now"-by Mark Knopfler.

 

I was going to call this "When Poltergeists attack" and then thought "Something latin would be so much cooler."

 

...and oh, I'M BACK BITCHES! GOT MY STITCHES CUT TODAY.

 

Crazy Fact: I don't know why or when, but apparently I wrote "Fiat Lux" inside the flaps of my money bag sometime ago...possibly while pondering upon something composed by Abba.

 

# Taken with the Nikon D90

# Unedited , cropped in Adobe PS

# Taken in "The Bulwark of Bariwala Haroon"

.

 

Oh, almost forgot...Larger and denigrated...although, nothing too special this time.

Finally it is summer break. I have time to catch up with my painting.

I had a lot fun working on this still life. I tried to keep it as simple as possible and still it took three hours.

Under cover of dusk, a dark knight enters the holding bays.

Only the blue glow of a semi-powered coupling hints at the new entry in the 2011 Podracer

 

Challenge.

 

In a separate bay a short 'skrit' sound alludes to the challenge for team rivals as they face the

 

days ahead.

 

Morning reveals that a new BatPodracer has joined the lineup and given it's updated design

 

characteristics, its pilots expectations run high.

 

The engines themselves are at the peak of earthly efficiency, front weighted with a core booster

 

surrounded by six gimble mounted subthrust assemblys (please note that the 2 and 11 o'clock

 

assemblies have been muffled to prevent support arm blast damage).

 

It is by mere coincidence that the mid-mount stabliser fins are adjustable to include all

 

Podracer heights and are basically ornamental in design though sloped backward to meet the

 

current sponser safety regulations.

 

In a Podracer first, the energy bindings modulation packs have been fitted with pivotal cover

 

fins for extra debris and elemental protection.

 

The Pod itself houses a single pilot and from the rear sprouts two sonar amplification receivers

 

to enable advanced recognition tactics.

 

Two pivoting side wing-shaped 'flaps' beat in time with the engine thrusts to create, along with

 

an aft spoiler, an almost weightless effect on the pod in times of extreme manouver to assist

 

navigation in the most challenging of circumstances.

 

The head of the module is enhanced with left and right 'ear brakes' in case of the need for a

 

speedy shutdown. When forced to full front they are able to slow the Pod to a halt in a fraction

 

of a khelter giving the pilot enough time to navigate whatever tragedy may have announced itself

 

in its path.

 

Well, two things about this build...

 

1. I didn't want to do Batman, I felt the competition on this theme would be rampart; so we shall

 

see...

 

2. I didn't want to use black...I don't like building in black; it's hard to see and even harder

 

to photograph.

 

But I'll be damned if this thing didn't keep building itself.

 

So please absorb and enjoy the BatPodRacer in all of its striking Black Beauty as she thrusts

 

herself into the official FBTB 2011 Podracer Challenge.

Mallard Duck (Disambiguation) (ˈmælɑːrd, ˈmælərd) or Wild Duck (Anas platyrhynchos)

 

The mallard (/ˈmælɑːrd, ˈmælərd/) or wild duck (Anas platyrhynchos) is a dabbling duck that breeds throughout the temperate and subtropical Americas, Eurasia, and North Africa, and has been introduced to New Zealand, Australia, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, the Falkland Islands, and South Africa. This duck belongs to the subfamily Anatinae of the waterfowl family Anatidae. The male birds (drakes) have a glossy green head and are grey on their wings and belly, while the females (hens or ducks) have mainly brown-speckled plumage. Both sexes have an area of white-bordered black or iridescent blue feathers called a speculum on their wings; males especially tend to have blue speculum feathers. The mallard is 50–65 cm (20–26 in) long, of which the body makes up around two-thirds the length. The wingspan is 81–98 cm (32–39 in) and the bill is 4.4 to 6.1 cm (1.7 to 2.4 in) long. It is often slightly heavier than most other dabbling ducks, weighing 0.7–1.6 kg (1.5–3.5 lb). Mallards live in wetlands, eat water plants and small animals, and are social animals preferring to congregate in groups or flocks of varying sizes. This species is the main ancestor of most breeds of domestic ducks.

 

The female lays eight to 13 creamy white to greenish-buff spotless eggs, on alternate days. Incubation takes 27 to 28 days and fledging takes 50 to 60 days. The ducklings are precocial and fully capable of swimming as soon as they hatch.

 

The mallard is considered to be a species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Unlike many waterfowl, mallards are considered an invasive species in some regions. It is a very adaptable species, being able to live and even thrive in urban areas which may have supported more localised, sensitive species of waterfowl before development. The non-migratory mallard interbreeds with indigenous wild ducks of closely related species through genetic pollution by producing fertile offspring. Complete hybridisation of various species of wild duck gene pools could result in the extinction of many indigenous waterfowl. The wild mallard is the ancestor of most domestic ducks, and its naturally evolved wild gene pool gets genetically polluted by the domestic and feral mallard populations.

  

Taxonomy and evolutionary history

 

The mallard was one of the many bird species originally described in the 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus. He gave it two binomial names: Anas platyrhynchos and Anas boschas. The latter was generally preferred until 1906 when Einar Lönnberg established that A. platyrhynchos had priority, as it appeared on an earlier page in the text. The scientific name comes from Latin Anas, "duck" and Ancient Greek πλατυρυγχος, platyrhynchus, "broad-billed" (from πλατύς, platys, "broad" and ρυγχός, rhunkhos, "bill"). The genome of Anas platyrhynchos was sequenced in 2013.

 

The name mallard originally referred to any wild drake, and it is sometimes still used this way. It was derived from the Old French malart or mallart for "wild drake" although its true derivation is unclear. It may be related to, or at least influenced by, an Old High German masculine proper name Madelhart, clues lying in the alternative English forms "maudelard" and "mawdelard". Masle (male) has also been proposed as an influence.

 

Mallards frequently interbreed with their closest relatives in the genus Anas, such as the American black duck, and also with species more distantly related, such as the northern pintail, leading to various hybrids that may be fully fertile. This is quite unusual among such different species, and is apparently because the mallard evolved very rapidly and recently, during the Late Pleistocene. The distinct lineages of this radiation are usually kept separate due to non-overlapping ranges and behavioural cues, but have not yet reached the point where they are fully genetically incompatible. Mallards and their domestic conspecifics are also fully interfertile.

 

Genetic analysis has shown that certain mallards appear to be closer to their Indo-Pacific relatives, while others are related to their American relatives. Mitochondrial DNA data for the D-loop sequence suggest that mallards may have evolved in the general area of Siberia. Mallard bones rather abruptly appear in food remains of ancient humans and other deposits of fossil bones in Europe, without a good candidate for a local predecessor species. The large Ice Age palaeosubspecies that made up at least the European and West Asian populations during the Pleistocene has been named Anas platyrhynchos palaeoboschas.

 

Mallards are differentiated in their mitochondrial DNA between North American and Eurasian populations, but the nuclear genome displays a notable lack of genetic structure. Haplotypes typical of American mallard relatives and eastern spot-billed ducks can be found in mallards around the Bering Sea. The Aleutian Islands hold a population of mallards that appear to be evolving towards becoming a subspecies, as gene flow with other populations is very limited.

 

Also, the paucity of morphological differences between the Old World mallards and the New World mallard demonstrates the extent to which the genome is shared among them such that birds like the Chinese spot-billed duck are highly similar to the Old World mallard, and birds such as the Hawaiian duck are highly similar to the New World mallard.

 

The size of the mallard varies clinally; for example, birds from Greenland, though larger, have smaller bills, paler plumage, and stockier bodies than birds further south and are sometimes classified as a separate subspecies, the Greenland mallard (A. p. conboschas).

  

Description

 

The mallard is a medium-sized waterfowl species that is often slightly heavier than most other dabbling ducks. It is 50–65 cm (20–26 in) long – of which the body makes up around two-thirds – has a wingspan of 81–98 cm (32–39 in) and weighs 0.7–1.6 kg (1.5–3.5 lb). Among standard measurements, the wing chord is 25.7 to 30.6 cm (10.1 to 12.0 in), the bill is 4.4 to 6.1 cm (1.7 to 2.4 in), and the tarsus is 4.1 to 4.8 cm (1.6 to 1.9 in).

 

The breeding male mallard is unmistakable, with a glossy bottle-green head and a white collar that demarcates the head from the purple-tinged brown breast, grey-brown wings, and a pale grey belly. The rear of the male is black, with white-bordered dark tail feathers. The bill of the male is a yellowish-orange tipped with black, with that of the female generally darker and ranging from black to mottled orange and brown. The female mallard is predominantly mottled, with each individual feather showing sharp contrast from buff to very dark brown, a coloration shared by most female dabbling ducks, and has buff cheeks, eyebrow, throat, and neck, with a darker crown and eye-stripe.

 

Both male and female mallards have distinct iridescent purple-blue speculum feathers edged with white, which are prominent in flight or at rest but temporarily shed during the annual summer moult. Upon hatching, the plumage of the duckling is yellow on the underside and face (with streaks by the eyes) and black on the back (with some yellow spots) all the way to the top and back of the head. Its legs and bill are also black. As it nears a month in age, the duckling's plumage starts becoming drab, looking more like the female, though more streaked, and its legs lose their dark grey colouring. Two months after hatching, the fledgling period has ended, and the duckling is now a juvenile. Between three and four months of age, the juvenile can finally begin flying, as its wings are fully developed for flight (which can be confirmed by the sight of purple speculum feathers). Its bill soon loses its dark grey colouring, and its sex can finally be distinguished visually by three factors:

1) the bill is yellow in males, but black and orange in females;

2) the breast feathers are reddish-brown in males, but brown in females; and

3) in males, the centre tail feather (drake feather) is curled, but in females, the centre tail feather is straight.

 

During the final period of maturity leading up to adulthood (6–10 months of age), the plumage of female juveniles remains the same while the plumage of male juveniles gradually changes to its characteristic colours. This change in plumage also applies to adult mallard males when they transition in and out of their non-breeding eclipse plumage at the beginning and the end of the summer moulting period. The adulthood age for mallards is fourteen months, and the average life expectancy is three years, but they can live to twenty.

 

Several species of duck have brown-plumaged females that can be confused with the female mallard. The female gadwall (Mareca strepera) has an orange-lined bill, white belly, black and white speculum that is seen as a white square on the wings in flight, and is a smaller bird. More similar to the female mallard in North America are the American black duck (A. rubripes), which is notably darker-hued in both sexes than the mallard, and the mottled duck (A. fulvigula), which is somewhat darker than the female mallard, and with slightly different bare-part colouration and no white edge on the speculum.

 

In captivity, domestic ducks come in wild-type plumages, white, and other colours. Most of these colour variants are also known in domestic mallards not bred as livestock, but kept as pets, aviary birds, etc., where they are rare but increasing in availability.

 

A noisy species, the female has the deep quack stereotypically associated with ducks. Male mallards make a sound phonetically similar to that of the female, a typical quack, but it is deeper and quieter compared to that of the female. When incubating a nest, or when offspring are present, females vocalise differently, making a call that sounds like a truncated version of the usual quack. This maternal vocalisation is highly attractive to their young. The repetition and frequency modulation of these quacks form the auditory basis for species identification in offspring, a process known as acoustic conspecific identification. In addition, females hiss if the nest or offspring are threatened or interfered with. When taking off, the wings of a mallard produce a characteristic faint whistling noise.

 

The mallard is a rare example of both Allen's Rule and Bergmann's Rule in birds. Bergmann's Rule, which states that polar forms tend to be larger than related ones from warmer climates, has numerous examples in birds, as in case of the Greenland mallard which is larger than the mallards further south. Allen's Rule says that appendages like ears tend to be smaller in polar forms to minimise heat loss, and larger in tropical and desert equivalents to facilitate heat diffusion, and that the polar taxa are stockier overall. Examples of this rule in birds are rare as they lack external ears, but the bill of ducks is supplied with a few blood vessels to prevent heat loss, and, as in the Greenland mallard, the bill is smaller than that of birds farther south, illustrating the rule.

 

Due to the variability of the mallard's genetic code, which gives it its vast interbreeding capability, mutations in the genes that decide plumage colour are very common and have resulted in a wide variety of hybrids, such as Brewer's duck (mallard × gadwall, Mareca strepera).

  

Distribution and habitat

 

The mallard is widely distributed across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres; in North America its range extends from southern and central Alaska to Mexico, the Hawaiian Islands, across the Palearctic, from Iceland and southern Greenland and parts of Morocco (North Africa) in the west, Scandinavia and Britain to the north, and to Siberia Japan and South Korea. Also in the east, it ranges to south-eastern and south-western Australia and New Zealand in the Southern hemisphere. It is strongly migratory in the northern parts of its breeding range, and winters farther south. For example, in North America, it winters south to the southern United States and northern Mexico, but also regularly strays into Central America and the Caribbean between September and May. A drake later named "Trevor" attracted media attention in 2018 when it turned up on the island of Niue, an atypical location for mallards.

 

The mallard inhabits a wide range of habitats and climates, from the Arctic tundra to subtropical regions. It is found in both fresh- and salt-water wetlands, including parks, small ponds, rivers, lakes and estuaries, as well as shallow inlets and open sea within sight of the coastline. Water depths of less than 0.9 metres (3.0 ft) are preferred, with birds avoiding areas more than a few metres deep They are attracted to bodies of water with aquatic vegetation.

  

Behaviour

 

Feeding

The mallard is omnivorous and very flexible in its choice of food. Its diet may vary based on several factors, including the stage of the breeding cycle, short-term variations in available food, nutrient availability, and interspecific and intraspecific competition The majority of the mallard's diet seems to be made up of gastropods, insects (including beetles, flies, lepidopterans, dragonflies, and caddisflies), crustaceans, worms, many varieties of seeds and plant matter, and roots and tubers. During the breeding season, male birds were recorded to have eaten 37.6% animal matter and 62.4% plant matter, most notably the grass Echinochloa crus-galli, and nonlaying females ate 37.0% animal matter and 63.0% plant matter, while laying females ate 71.9% animal matter and only 28.1% plant matter. Plants generally make up the larger part of a bird's diet, especially during autumn migration and in the winter.

 

The mallard usually feeds by dabbling for plant food or grazing; there are reports of it eating frogs. However, in 2017 a flock of mallards in Romania were observed hunting small migratory birds, including grey wagtails and black redstarts, the first documented occasion they had been seen attacking and consuming large vertebrates. It usually nests on a river bank, but not always near water. It is highly gregarious outside of the breeding season and forms large flocks, which are known as "sordes."

 

Breeding

 

Mallards usually form pairs (in October and November in the Northern Hemisphere) until the female lays eggs at the start of the nesting season, which is around the beginning of spring. At this time she is left by the male who joins up with other males to await the moulting period, which begins in June (in the Northern Hemisphere). During the brief time before this, however, the males are still sexually potent and some of them either remain on standby to sire replacement clutches (for female mallards that have lost or abandoned their previous clutch) or forcibly mate with females that appear to be isolated or unattached regardless of their species and whether or not they have a brood of ducklings.

 

Nesting sites are typically on the ground, hidden in vegetation where the female's speckled plumage serves as effective camouflage, but female mallards have also been known to nest in hollows in trees, boathouses, roof gardens and on balconies, sometimes resulting in hatched offspring having difficulty following their parent to water.

 

Egg clutches number 8–13 creamy white to greenish-buff eggs free of speckles. They measure about 58 mm (2.3 in) in length and 32 mm (1.3 in) in width. The eggs are laid on alternate days, and incubation begins when the clutch is almost complete. Incubation takes 27–28 days and fledging takes 50–60 days. The ducklings are precocial and fully capable of swimming as soon as they hatch.[citation needed] However, filial imprinting compels them to instinctively stay near the mother, not only for warmth and protection but also to learn about and remember their habitat as well as how and where to forage for food. When ducklings mature into flight-capable juveniles, they learn about and remember their traditional migratory routes (unless they are born and raised in captivity).In New Zealand, where mallards are naturalised, the nesting season has been found to be longer, eggs and clutches are larger and nest survival is generally greater compared with mallards in their native range.

 

In cases where a nest or brood fails, some mallards may mate for a second time in an attempt to raise a second clutch, typically around early-to-mid summer. In addition, mallards may occasionally breed during the autumn in cases of unseasonably warm weather; one such instance of a ‘late’ clutch occurred in November 2011, in which a female successfully hatched and raised a clutch of eleven ducklings at the London Wetland Centre.

 

During the breeding season, both male and female mallards can become aggressive, driving off competitors to themselves or their mate by charging at them.[86] Males tend to fight more than females, and attack each other by repeatedly pecking at their rival's chest, ripping out feathers and even skin on rare occasions. Female mallards are also known to carry out 'inciting displays', which encourages other ducks in the flock to begin fighting. It is possible that this behaviour allows the female to evaluate the strength of potential partners.

 

The drakes that end up being left out after the others have paired off with mating partners sometimes target an isolated female duck, even one of a different species, and proceed to chase and peck at her until she weakens, at which point the males take turns copulating with the female. Lebret (1961) calls this behaviour "Attempted Rape Flight", and Stanley Cramp and K.E.L. Simmons (1977) speak of "rape-intent flights". Male mallards also occasionally chase other male ducks of a different species, and even each other, in the same way. In one documented case of "homosexual necrophilia", a male mallard copulated with another male he was chasing after the chased male died upon flying into a glass window.[89] This paper was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2003.

 

Mallards are opportunistically targeted by brood parasites, occasionally having eggs laid in their nests by redheads, ruddy ducks, lesser scaup, gadwalls, northern shovellers, northern pintails, cinnamon teal, common goldeneyes, and other mallards. These eggs are generally accepted when they resemble the eggs of the host mallard, but the hen may attempt to eject them or even abandon the nest if parasitism occurs during egg laying.

  

Predators and threats

 

In addition to human hunting, Mallards of all ages (but especially young ones) and in all locations must contend with a wide diversity of predators including raptors, mustelids, corvids, snakes, raccoons, opossums, skunks, turtles, large fish, felids, and canids, the last two including domestic ones. The most prolific natural predators of adult mallards are red foxes (which most often pick off brooding females) and the faster or larger birds of prey, e.g. peregrine falcons, Aquila eagles, or Haliaeetus eagles. In North America, adult mallards face no fewer than 15 species of birds of prey, from northern harriers (Circus hudsonius) and short-eared owls (Asio flammeus) (both smaller than a mallard) to huge bald, (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), and about a dozen species of mammalian predator, not counting several more avian and mammalian predators who threaten eggs and nestlings.

 

Mallards are also preyed upon by other waterside apex predators, such as the grey heron (Ardea cinerea), the European herring gull (Larus argentatus), the wels catfish (Silurus glanis), and the northern pike (Esox lucius). Crows (Corvus spp.) are also known to kill ducklings and adults on occasion. Also, mallards may be attacked by larger Anseriformes such as swans (Cygnus spp.) and geese during the breeding season, and are frequently driven off by these birds over territorial disputes. Mute swans (Cygnus olor) have been known to attack or even kill mallards if they feel that the ducks pose a threat to their offspring.

 

The predation-avoidance behaviour of sleeping with one eye open, allowing one brain hemisphere to remain aware while the other half sleeps, was first demonstrated in mallards, although it is believed to be widespread among birds in general.

  

Status and conservation

 

Since 1998, the mallard has been rated as a species of least concern on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species. This is because it has a large range–more than 20,000,000 km2 (7,700,000 mi2)–and because its population is increasing, rather than declining by 30% over ten years or three generations and thus is not warranted a vulnerable rating. Also, the population size of the mallard is very large.

 

Unlike many waterfowl, mallards have benefited from human alterations to the world – so much so that they are now considered an invasive species in some regions. They are a common sight in urban parks, lakes, ponds, and other human-made water features in the regions they inhabit, and are often tolerated or encouraged in human habitat due to their placid nature towards humans and their beautiful and iridescent colours. While most are not domesticated, mallards are so successful at coexisting in human regions that the main conservation risk they pose comes from the loss of genetic diversity among a region's traditional ducks once humans and mallards colonise an area. Mallards are very adaptable, being able to live and even thrive in urban areas which may have supported more localised, sensitive species of waterfowl before development. The release of feral mallards in areas where they are not native sometimes creates problems through interbreeding with indigenous waterfowl. These non-migratory mallards interbreed with indigenous wild ducks from local populations of closely related species through genetic pollution by producing fertile offspring. Complete hybridisation of various species of wild duck gene pools could result in the extinction of many indigenous waterfowl. The mallard itself is the ancestor of most domestic ducks, and its naturally evolved wild gene pool gets genetically polluted in turn by the domestic and feral populations.

 

Over time, a continuum of hybrids ranging between almost typical examples of either species develop; the speciation process is beginning to reverse itself. This has created conservation concerns for relatives of the mallard, such as the Hawaiian duck, the New Zealand grey duck (A. s. superciliosa) subspecies of the Pacific black duck, the American black duck, the mottled duck, Meller's duck, the yellow-billed duck, and the Mexican duck, in the latter case even leading to a dispute as to whether these birds should be considered a species (and thus entitled to more conservation research and funding) or included in the mallard species. Ecological changes and hunting have also led to a decline of local species; for example, the New Zealand grey duck population declined drastically due to overhunting in the mid-20th century. Hybrid offspring of Hawaiian ducks seem to be less well adapted to native habitat, and using them in re-introduction projects apparently reduces success. In summary, the problems of mallards "hybridising away" relatives is more a consequence of local ducks declining than of mallards spreading; allopatric speciation and isolating behaviour have produced today's diversity of mallard-like ducks despite the fact that, in most, if not all, of these populations, hybridisation must have occurred to some extent.

  

Invasiveness

 

Mallards are causing severe "genetic pollution" to South Africa's biodiversity by breeding with endemic ducks even though the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds – an agreement to protect the local waterfowl populations – applies to the mallard as well as other ducks. The hybrids of mallards and the yellow-billed duck are fertile, capable of producing hybrid offspring. If this continues, only hybrids occur and in the long term result in the extinction of various indigenous waterfowl. The mallard can crossbreed with 63 other species, posing a severe threat to indigenous waterfowl's genetic integrity. Mallards and their hybrids compete with indigenous birds for resources, including nest sites, roosting sites, and food.

 

Availability of mallards, mallard ducklings, and fertilised mallard eggs for public sale and private ownership, either as poultry or as pets, is currently legal in the United States, except for the state of Florida, which has currently banned domestic ownership of mallards. This is to prevent hybridisation with the native mottled duck.

 

The mallard is considered an invasive species in New Zealand, where it competes with the local New Zealand grey duck, which was overhunted in the past. There, and elsewhere, mallards are spreading with increasing urbanisation and hybridising with local relatives.

 

The eastern or Chinese spot-billed duck is currently introgressing into the mallard populations of the Primorsky Krai, possibly due to habitat changes from global warming. The Mariana mallard was a resident allopatric population – in most respects a good species – apparently initially derived from mallard-Pacific black duck hybrids; unfortunately, it became extinct in the late 20th century.

 

The Laysan duck is an insular relative of the mallard, with a very small and fluctuating population. Mallards sometimes arrive on its island home during migration, and can be expected to occasionally have remained and hybridised with Laysan ducks as long as these species have existed. However, these hybrids are less well adapted to the peculiar ecological conditions of Laysan Island than the local ducks, and thus have lower fitness. Laysan ducks were found throughout the Hawaiian archipelago before 400 CE, after which they suffered a rapid decline during the Polynesian colonisation. Now, their range includes only Laysan Island. It is one of the successfully translocated birds, after having become nearly extinct in the early 20th century.

  

Relationship with humans

 

Domestication

 

Mallards have often been ubiquitous in their regions among the ponds, rivers, and streams of human parks, farms, and other human-made waterways – even to the point of visiting water features in human courtyards.

 

Mallards have had a long relationship with humans. Almost all domestic duck breeds derive from the mallard, with the exception of a few Muscovy breeds, and are listed under the trinomial name A. p. domesticus. Mallards are generally monogamous while domestic ducks are mostly polygamous. Domestic ducks have no territorial behaviour and are less aggressive than mallards. Domestic ducks are mostly kept for meat; their eggs are also eaten, and have a strong flavour. They were first domesticated in Southeast Asia at least 4,000 years ago, during the Neolithic Age, and were also farmed by the Romans in Europe, and the Malays in Asia. As the domestic duck and the mallard are the same species as each other, It is common for mallards to mate with domestic ducks and produce hybrid offspring that are fully fertile. Because of this, mallards have been found to be contaminated with the genes of the domestic duck.

 

While the keeping of domestic breeds is more popular, pure-bred mallards are sometimes kept for eggs and meat, although they may require wing clipping to restrict flying, or training to navigate and fly home.

 

Hunting

 

Mallards are one of the most common varieties of ducks hunted as a sport due to the large population size. The ideal location for hunting mallards is considered to be where the water level is somewhat shallow where the birds can be found foraging for food. Hunting mallards might cause the population to decline in some places, at some times, and with some populations. In certain countries, the mallard may be legally shot but is protected under national acts and policies. For example, in the United Kingdom, the mallard is protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which restricts certain hunting methods or taking or killing mallards.

 

As food

 

Since ancient times, the mallard has been eaten as food. The wild mallard was eaten in Neolithic Greece. Usually, only the breast and thigh meat is eaten. It does not need to be hung before preparation, and is often braised or roasted, sometimes flavoured with bitter orange or with port.

  

[Credit: en.wikipedia.org/]

I always prefer photographing in available light – or Rembrandt-light I like to call it – so you get the natural modulations of the face. It makes a more alive, real, and flattering portrait. Alfred Eisenstaedt

 

lford HP5 plus @ ASA320

 

© www.markdanielphoto.com

 

The Recipe

5 mins pre soak

7.5 mins Ilford ID11 - Ilford Agitation Method

1 min Ilford Stop

5 mins Ilford Fixer

10 mins wash

wash aid

In my "glory days" I was pretty good at math. This was/is one of my all-time favorite books: Harry Van Trees' first volume on Detection, Estimation, and Modulation Theory. This is an old book: I wonder what book or books are used in the Universities now on this subject.

 

My kids don't really know that part of me.

19 x 14 cm collage

Voigtlaender Vitessa L, Fuji Neopan Acros II, F5.6, 1/60sec, 千葉県, 船橋市

From the appearance of the original photo print, I can tell that it was taken using my mom's Olympus Pen-D half-frame camera. Photo taken circa late Summer of 1966 when our house was freshly landscaped and only a few months old. We moved in during August of 1966. That Japanese black pine tree in front of the large window still exists today albeit a bit larger now.

 

A bit of College Park East (CPE) life back then:

 

At this point in time, this side of Elder Avenue was the furthest south to which College Park East was yet built; it was all clear and unbuilt from here to the San Diego Freeway (I-405). The tall concrete sound wall that separates this neighborhood from the freeway was not yet erected. This meant that we could stand on the 2nd floor balcony of the house and see the traffic whizzing by on the freeway.

 

Mailboxes needed to be curbside at first, so they had to be on the parkway as apparent here. By the time the subsequent blocks or units of homes were constructed, parkways were no longer included. This meant that sidewalks on later homes would be right next to the curb. Only the first units of homes, those that are located in the northeast portion of College Park East, have the benefit of parkways between the sidewalk and the curb.

 

At the time we moved in during August, 1966, Lampson Avenue in Seal Beach consisted of only two lanes, one in each direction. Shortly thereafter, two additional lanes were paved, allowing two lanes in both directions, its current configuration.

 

Also at this time, the Los Angeles-based Helms Bakery was still in business, so their delivery trucks would make their routes through the neighborhood in those earlier years. Similarly, Adohr Farms delivered milk and other dairy products.

 

Because my parents both worked, my mom made arrangements with the Helms Bakery truck driver to leave a loaf of bread on top of the clothes dryer in the garage whenever she placed the Helms sign in the window. She would leave money on top of the dryer for this. This, of course, meant that we would leave the garage door unlocked on those days.

 

Unlike the rest of Seal Beach, College Park East and College Park West were served then by the Los Alamitos School District for grades K through 6 and by the Anaheim Union High School District for grades 7 through 12.

 

To register me for school, my mom and I drove to the old Laurel School building that faced Florista just east of Los Alamitos Blvd. I was rather disappointed in that I had the impression that this deteriorating site was going to be the school that I would attend that fall. The buildings and the land seemed to me to be in a state of disrepair - the large, painted word "Laurel" in script form on the side of the pink-painted building was beginning to peel off and the baseball diamond on the southwest corner of the lot (where Katella Avenue intersects with Los Alamitos Boulevard) appeared to be neglected. It was only after my mom suggested that we drive to see my new school within Rossmoor that I realized (with relief) that the Laurel School was simply used for administrative purposes.

 

That first year of 1966-67, elementary students from College Park East were distributed among several schools in the Los Alamitos School District, transported by bus. All who were 6th Graders attended Francis Hopkinson Elementary School in Rossmoor. All 5th Graders attended Rossmoor Elementary School, 4th Graders to Benjamin Rush Elementary, etc. The other schools in the rotation were Los Alamitos and Thomas Jefferson Elementary Schools, both located on Bloomfield between Katella Ave. and Ball Rd. For some reason, neither Jack L. Weaver nor Richard Henry Lee Schools, two other schools within Rossmoor, were in the mix for College Park East students, or at least the bus on which I rode never stopped there. In retrospect I wonder if perhaps there might have been another bus, say for Kindergarteners, who may have had shorter school hours. I do not know. The school bus that I rode served all of College Park East.

 

The buildings for Benjamin Rush Elementary School no longer exist; only its site, Rush Park remains. Rush School appeared to be nearly identical to Hopkinson School nearby. The appearance of Hopkinson as viewed from Kensington is how Rush appeared as viewed from Blume.

 

Our bus driver for elementary school that first year was Jerri Sawyer. I can still picture her now, her auburn hair neatly pinned up, dressed in a clean white buttoned shirt with sleeves rolled up and with dark slacks. She was so consistent and reliable, always coming to a complete stop at every stop sign and railroad track crossing*, looking in all directions before proceeding. By observing her drive the bus, I learned how a manual transmission was operated, coordinating gear selection using the floor-mounted stick shift with clutch pedal modulation in order to start moving from a dead stop. Then in the second half of that school year, that bus was replaced with a brand new GMC that was equipped with an automatic transmission.

 

We as students riding on the bus were pretty well-behaved but still rather talkative. However, she was serious about maintaining order on her bus. I remember just a couple of times when she parked the bus and then came down the aisle with a serious look on her face in order to give a rider or two a serious 'talking-to.' She was always there to pick us up at Fir Circle; I don't recall even one day on which she wasn't our bus driver. The bus route was always thus: Hopkinson-Rush-Rossmoor-Los Alamitos-Jefferson.

 

Junior high and high schools that served College Park East and College Park West were part of the Anaheim Union High School District then. That first year, my sister along with other junior high level students from CPE attended Oxford Jr. High in Cypress, years before that campus was converted to The Oxford Academy High School. I don't recall with certainty, but I suspect that the first high school students from College Park went to Western High School in Anaheim as Los Alamitos High School did not start until the 1967-68 school year. That first year of Los Al High was held at the site of McAuliffe Middle School now. Only the Class of 1970 attended at that location for that single school year. Then from the 1968-69 school year forward, Los Al High students attended the current campus on Cerritos Ave. at Los Alamitos Blvd. That same year, junior high students from College Park East began to attend Pine Jr. High instead of Oxford. Pine Jr. High is now known as McAuliffe Middle School. The junior high school was renamed as McAuliffe in memory of Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire school teacher who perished in the Challenger Space Shuttle accident.

 

Despite being in Orange County, the telephones in College Park had 213 as the Area Code as did the rest of Seal Beach. Ditto for Rossmoor and Los Alamitos. In Seal Beach, Los Alamitos and Rossmoor, the phone numbers began with 43 or 59. This was because these areas were serviced by the General Telephone Company out of Long Beach rather than by Pacific Telephone. When the 213 area contracted circa 1991, the Area Code for these areas changed to 310. Then after another area contraction circa 1997, the phone numbers in these areas changed to the current 562 Area Code.

 

*There was still a railroad track that crossed Bloomfield at that time. It was located along the north side of Los Alamitos Elementary School. That track crossed Los Alamitos Blvd., too, near Catalina St. at that time. The track is gone now but the subtle rise of Bloomfield at this location reminds me that it was once there.

90 mins of Trippy Techno set recorded live @ Music For The Soul

You can watch it on Youtube: youtu.be/Ycs6GN_m5h8

▼ Follow DIRTYANGEL Iwish:

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[zeno.fm/dj-dirtiangel-radio/D... RADIO]

 

▼ Tracklist:

[0:00]Unclear - Mind

[4:50]Autechre - Foil

[7:11]Kryss Hypnowave - Cielo Stellato

[11:08]Animum - Astral

[16:16]Animum - Next Walking

[20:39]Anders Hellberg - Thriving Tribe (Doctrina Natura Remix)

[22:49]Violent - Rage For Order

[26:35]Basis Change - Taygeta

[30:16]Basis Change - Cease

[32:59]Anders Hellberg - Concomitant Modulation

[38:37]The Alchemical Theory - Esoteric

[40:45]NFEREE - Koppen

[45:21]Atis - Cradled

[48:40]One Release - Hela's Mjolnir

[54:22]Robin Kampschoer - Rattling Sticks

[57:03]Anders Hellberg - Unpredictable Event

[01:01:52]Mown - Patience (Floating Machine Remix)

[01:06:08]Rasser - Shape Position

[01:08:22]Vinicius Honorio - The Brotherhood of Shadow

[01:11:43]Ricardo Garduno - Resistencia

[01:14:13]MSDMNR - Saturn Crisis

[01:18:18]Black Lotus - Alienated Souls

[01:21:15]Aphex Twin - Digeridoo

Small, British collectors card in the Film Stars series by Player's Cigarettes (John Player & Sons), Third Series, no. 39. Illustration: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

 

German-American-British film actress Luise Rainer (1910-2014) was the first to win multiple Academy Awards and the first to win back-to-back for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). At the time of her death, thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient, a superlative that had not been exceeded as of 2020.

 

Luise Rainer was born in 1910 in Düsseldorf, in then the German Empire (now Germany). Her parents were Heinrich and Emilie (née Königsberger) Rainer. Her father was a businessman who settled in Europe after spending most of his childhood in Texas. Rainer's rebellious nature made her appear to be a "tomboy" and happy to be alone. She started her acting career in Berlin at age 16, under the pretext of visiting her mother, she traveled to Düsseldorf for a prearranged audition at the Dumont Theater. In the 1920s the theatre director Louise Dumont separated from her husband. Dumont was attached to a number of young actresses including Fita Benkhoff, Hanni Hoessrich, and Rainer. It has been presumed that Dumont was bisexual. Rainer later began studying acting with the leading stage director at the time, Max Reinhardt. By the time she was 18, several critics felt that she had an unusual talent for a young actress. She became a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's theatre ensemble. She also appeared in several German-language films. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by MGM talent scout Phil Berg, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. He thought she would appeal to the same audience as Swedish MGM star Greta Garbo. Mayer assigned actress Constance Collier to train her in speech and dramatic modulation, and Rainer's English improved rapidly.

 

Luise Rainer's first American film role was in the romantic comedy Escapade (Robert Z. Leonard, 1935) with William Powell. It is a remake of the popular Austrian Operetta film Maskerade/Masquerade (Willy Forst, 1934). The film generated immense publicity for Rainer, who was hailed as "Hollywood's next sensation." The following year she was given a supporting part as the real-life character Anna Held in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936), featuring William Powell. Despite her limited role, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Oscar for Best Actress. She was later dubbed the "Viennese Teardrop" for her dramatic telephone scene, attempting to congratulate Ziegfeld on his new marriage, in the film. On the evening of the Academy Award ceremonies, Rainer remained at home, not expecting to win. When Mayer learned she had won, he sent MGM publicity head Howard Strickling racing to her home to get her. She was also awarded the New York Film Critics' Award for the performance. For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife opposite Paul Muni in The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937), based on Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The humble, subservient, and mostly silent character role was such a dramatic contrast to her previous vivacious character that she again won the Oscar for Best Actress. Rainer and Jodie Foster are the only actresses ever to win two Oscars by the age of thirty.

 

However, Luise Rainer later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill. A few months before the film was completed, Irving Thalberg died suddenly at the age of 37. Rainer commented years later: "His death was a terrible shock to us. He was young and ever so able. Had it not been that he died, I think I may have stayed much longer in films." After four more, insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, and she was dubbed "Box Office Poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners of America. Adding to her rapid decline, some feel, was the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets. She ended her brief three-year Hollywood career and returned to Europe where she helped get aid to children who were victims of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, she was not released from her MGM contract and, by 1940, she was still bound to make one more film for the studio. Some film historians consider her the "most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood mythology". Rainer studied medicine and returned to the stage. In 1939, she made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester in Jacques Deval's play 'Behold the Bride', and later played the same part in her London debut at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Returning to America, she played the leading part in George Bernard Shaw's 'Saint Joan' in 1940 at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. under the direction of German emigrant director Erwin Piscator. In 1943, she made an appearance in the film Hostages (Frank Tuttle, 1943). Rainer abandoned film making in 1944 after marrying publisher Robert Knittel. She made sporadic television and stage appearances, appearing in an episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. She appeared in the film The Gambler (Károly Makk, 1997), starring Michael Gambon. It marked her film comeback at the age of 86. Luise Rainer passed away in 2014, in Belgravia, London, England. She was 104. Rainer married Clifford Odets in 1937 and they divorced in 1940. Her second husband was publisher Robert Knittel. They were married from 1945 till his death in 1989 and lived in the UK and Switzerland for most of their marriage. The couple had one daughter, Francesca Knittel.

 

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Vintage postcard. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

 

German-American-British film actress Luise Rainer (1910-2014) was the first to win multiple Academy Awards and the first to win back-to-back for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). At the time of her death, thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient, a superlative that had not been exceeded as of 2020.

 

Luise Rainer was born in 1910 in Düsseldorf, in then the German Empire (now Germany). Her parents were Heinrich and Emilie (née Königsberger) Rainer. Her father was a businessman who settled in Europe after spending most of his childhood in Texas. Rainer's rebellious nature made her appear to be a "tomboy" and happy to be alone. She started her acting career in Berlin at age 16, under the pretext of visiting her mother, she traveled to Düsseldorf for a prearranged audition at the Dumont Theater. In the 1920s the theatre director Louise Dumont separated from her husband. Dumont was attached to a number of young actresses including Fita Benkhoff, Hanni Hoessrich, and Rainer. It has been presumed that Dumont was bisexual. Rainer later began studying acting with the leading stage director at the time, Max Reinhardt. By the time she was 18, several critics felt that she had an unusual talent for a young actress. She became a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's theatre ensemble. She also appeared in several German-language films. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by MGM talent scout Phil Berg, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. He thought she would appeal to the same audience as Swedish MGM star Greta Garbo. Mayer assigned actress Constance Collier to train her in speech and dramatic modulation, and Rainer's English improved rapidly.

 

Luise Rainer's first American film role was in the romantic comedy Escapade (Robert Z. Leonard, 1935) with William Powell. It is a remake of the popular Austrian Operetta film Maskerade/Masquerade (Willy Forst, 1934). The film generated immense publicity for Rainer, who was hailed as "Hollywood's next sensation." The following year she was given a supporting part as the real-life character Anna Held in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936), featuring William Powell. Despite her limited role, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Oscar for Best Actress. She was later dubbed the "Viennese Teardrop" for her dramatic telephone scene, attempting to congratulate Ziegfeld on his new marriage, in the film. On the evening of the Academy Award ceremonies, Rainer remained at home, not expecting to win. When Mayer learned she had won, he sent MGM publicity head Howard Strickling racing to her home to get her. She was also awarded the New York Film Critics' Award for the performance. For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife opposite Paul Muni in The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937), based on Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The humble, subservient, and mostly silent character role was such a dramatic contrast to her previous vivacious character that she again won the Oscar for Best Actress. Rainer and Jodie Foster are the only actresses ever to win two Oscars by the age of thirty.

 

However, Luise Rainer later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill. A few months before the film was completed, Irving Thalberg died suddenly at the age of 37. Rainer commented years later: "His death was a terrible shock to us. He was young and ever so able. Had it not been that he died, I think I may have stayed much longer in films." After four more, insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, and she was dubbed "Box Office Poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners of America. Adding to her rapid decline, some feel, was the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets. She ended her brief three-year Hollywood career and returned to Europe where she helped get aid to children who were victims of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, she was not released from her MGM contract and, by 1940, she was still bound to make one more film for the studio. Some film historians consider her the "most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood mythology". Rainer studied medicine and returned to the stage. In 1939, she made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester in Jacques Deval's play 'Behold the Bride', and later played the same part in her London debut at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Returning to America, she played the leading part in George Bernard Shaw's 'Saint Joan' in 1940 at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. under the direction of German emigrant director Erwin Piscator. In 1943, she made an appearance in the film Hostages (Frank Tuttle, 1943). Rainer abandoned film making in 1944 after marrying publisher Robert Knittel. She made sporadic television and stage appearances, appearing in an episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. She appeared in the film The Gambler (Károly Makk, 1997), starring Michael Gambon. It marked her film comeback at the age of 86. Luise Rainer passed away in 2014, in Belgravia, London, England. She was 104. Rainer married Clifford Odets in 1937 and they divorced in 1940. Her second husband was publisher Robert Knittel. They were married from 1945 till his death in 1989 and lived in the UK and Switzerland for most of their marriage. The couple had one daughter, Francesca Knittel.

 

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

British postcard by Art Photo, no. 151. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

 

German-American-British film actress Luise Rainer (1910-2014) was the first to win multiple Academy Awards and the first to win back-to-back for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). At the time of her death, thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient, a superlative that had not been exceeded as of 2020.

 

Luise Rainer was born in 1910 in Düsseldorf, in then the German Empire (now Germany). Her parents were Heinrich and Emilie (née Königsberger) Rainer. Her father was a businessman who settled in Europe after spending most of his childhood in Texas. Rainer's rebellious nature made her appear to be a "tomboy" and happy to be alone. She started her acting career in Berlin at age 16, under the pretext of visiting her mother, she traveled to Düsseldorf for a prearranged audition at the Dumont Theater. In the 1920s the theatre director Louise Dumont separated from her husband. Dumont was attached to a number of young actresses including Fita Benkhoff, Hanni Hoessrich, and Rainer. It has been presumed that Dumont was bisexual. Rainer later began studying acting with the leading stage director at the time, Max Reinhardt. By the time she was 18, several critics felt that she had an unusual talent for a young actress. She became a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's theatre ensemble. She also appeared in several German-language films. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by MGM talent scout Phil Berg, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. He thought she would appeal to the same audience as Swedish MGM star Greta Garbo. Mayer assigned actress Constance Collier to train her in speech and dramatic modulation, and Rainer's English improved rapidly.

 

Luise Rainer's first American film role was in the romantic comedy Escapade (Robert Z. Leonard, 1935) with William Powell. It is a remake of the popular Austrian Operetta film Maskerade/Masquerade (Willy Forst, 1934). The film generated immense publicity for Rainer, who was hailed as "Hollywood's next sensation." The following year she was given a supporting part as the real-life character Anna Held in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936), featuring William Powell. Despite her limited role, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Oscar for Best Actress. She was later dubbed the "Viennese Teardrop" for her dramatic telephone scene, attempting to congratulate Ziegfeld on his new marriage, in the film. On the evening of the Academy Award ceremonies, Rainer remained at home, not expecting to win. When Mayer learned she had won, he sent MGM publicity head Howard Strickling racing to her home to get her. She was also awarded the New York Film Critics' Award for the performance. For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife opposite Paul Muni in The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937), based on Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The humble, subservient, and mostly silent character role was such a dramatic contrast to her previous vivacious character that she again won the Oscar for Best Actress. Rainer and Jodie Foster are the only actresses ever to win two Oscars by the age of thirty.

 

However, Luise Rainer later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill. A few months before the film was completed, Irving Thalberg died suddenly at the age of 37. Rainer commented years later: "His death was a terrible shock to us. He was young and ever so able. Had it not been that he died, I think I may have stayed much longer in films." After four more, insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, and she was dubbed "Box Office Poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners of America. Adding to her rapid decline, some feel, was the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets. She ended her brief three-year Hollywood career and returned to Europe where she helped get aid to children who were victims of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, she was not released from her MGM contract and, by 1940, she was still bound to make one more film for the studio. Some film historians consider her the "most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood mythology". Rainer studied medicine and returned to the stage. In 1939, she made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester in Jacques Deval's play 'Behold the Bride', and later played the same part in her London debut at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Returning to America, she played the leading part in George Bernard Shaw's 'Saint Joan' in 1940 at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. under the direction of German emigrant director Erwin Piscator. In 1943, she made an appearance in the film Hostages (Frank Tuttle, 1943). Rainer abandoned film making in 1944 after marrying publisher Robert Knittel. She made sporadic television and stage appearances, appearing in an episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. She appeared in the film The Gambler (Károly Makk, 1997), starring Michael Gambon. It marked her film comeback at the age of 86. Luise Rainer passed away in 2014, in Belgravia, London, England. She was 104. Rainer married Clifford Odets in 1937 and they divorced in 1940. Her second husband was publisher Robert Knittel. They were married from 1945 till his death in 1989 and lived in the UK and Switzerland for most of their marriage. The couple had one daughter, Francesca Knittel.

 

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Ok, I saw the new Transformers movie last week and thought I would share my thought on it with you guys.

 

For the most part it was a disappointment to me. It's a shame because I think there were some really good ideas in this movie, but they threw in all kinds of stupid things that detracted from it.

 

I'm breaking it down by what I considered to be "good" and "bad" about it.

 

The “Good”:

 

1)The Autobots have teamed with human soldiers who are part of a team called “NEST” (what the heck does that stand for? Does anyone know?). I thought this was a good idea which seems to have no precedent in other Transformers fiction. Hey, if they can’t give us a live action GI Joe/Transformers crossover, this is the next best thing. I like the idea of the Autobots having official human allies, although generally having too many human characters in the mix annoys me, this is an exception at least these guys serve a purpose and they did a nice job of portraying the bond between these soldiers and the Autobots.

  

2)Agent Simmons was used well in this film, I liked the idea that he saw himself as a patriot who was betrayed by his government when they shut down Sector 7, but was still willing to go to bat for his country when it needed him. I love the idea of this guy being a legend in his own mind. His dropping trou in every film seems to be a running gag. The Rail Gun he uses to destroy Devastator was a great homage to G2, where Megatron gets a rail gun to replace his fusion cannon.

 

3)There was a pretty cool shot through a hole in the wall of a building that Sam and Mikela are hiding in.

 

4)The battle where Prime was killed was excellent! Seeing Prime take on a bunch of ‘Cons al at once was awesome. Megatron only kills him by sneaking up on him from behind like a chump. Definitely one of the best ‘bot vs. ‘bot fights I’ve ever seen!

 

5)Ravage and Soundwave were both executed well. They might be the only toys from this movie I bother to buy. Sure, the fact that Soundwave lacked his characteristic voice modulation was a disappointment, but I still enjoyed him nonetheless. Having him be a communications satellite was an appropriate alt mode considering that Bay’s determination to avoid size-changing Transformers means we’ll never see him as a tape deck or Mp3 player on the big screen. Ravage was just awesome all around. If only they had worked Rumble into it somehow!

 

6)In general, I was happy with how the Decepticons were handled in this movie as compared to the last one. They had more lines (in English!) and had a lot more personality this time around. We got to see Megatron smacking Starscream around several times, as he should. Megatron looked better in this film; it’s nice to see him in his tank mode, although I wish he had a REALISTIC earth tank mode. At least he uses his arm cannon a lot in the film. I was also happy that the concept of switching sides was introduced in this film.

 

7)the plot of this movie was a bit more interesting than the last one.

 

8)The pretender who is disguised as a girl at Sam’s college was pretty cool. Although it scared the crap out of my 5 year old son! Oh well, maybe it’ll discourage him from tongue kissing girls anytime ion the near future!

 

9)Nice homage to the comics to have Sam get the knowledge of the Allspark in his head, very similar to when Buster Witwicki had Prime put the knowledge of the Matrix in his mind in the Marvel series.

 

10)Good continuity to have Melaka’s criminal dad in one scene.

 

11) The Matrix! Even though it serves a different purpose, it‘s still nice to see a version of it in the movie continuity. Sam’s near death experience nicely echoes when Rodimus Prime enters the Matrix to consult with the wisdom of the spirits of Primes past!

  

12)The movie ‘bots DO run off of Energon as all proper Transformers should!

 

13)The Fallen is cool. I like the idea of bringing this character into the movie continuity. One can only hope that his evil is a result of being tainted by a movieverse Unicron. His pseudo-Egyptian look rocks!

 

14)Supermodes! Prime gets a “power up” from Jetfire and kicks much butt.

  

The Bad:

 

1)Characters from the first movie such as Ironhide and Ratchet only have a few lines and zero character development! New (to the movie franchise) characters that seem very cool like Sideswipe and Arcee similarly get barely any screen time.

 

2)The Twins!! They’re just awful! In his infinite wisdom, Bay has given us not just one, but TWO “Jar-Jars”! And just like Jar-Jar, they have been accused of being racist stereotypes, and I have to admit that this does seem a pretty valid charge. Sure there have been Transformers in the past that seem to be “black” like Jazz and Blaster, but these characters were never portrayed as being complete idiots “We don’t do much read’in!” – gimme a break! Obviously I don’t think the filmmakers intended for these characters to be perceived as racist, it was a misguided attempt to market to the very audience they are insulting. Most real life gangstas have at least more street-smarts than these characters do and are more useful in a fight, although I must admit that I actually enjoyed the scene where the twin that was “eaten” by Devastator busts out and smashes up his face from the inside – that was the ONLY cool thing any of them did in the entire movie. I was even happier when Bumblebee walks in and smashes them into each other and tosses them out of the room. One strange thing about this movie is that they seem to put in lots of characters who are deliberately annoying and even visibly annoy characters in the film (Sam’s roommate is another example) so that the audience will be happy when they get knocked out. I’m especially mad that the Twins get so many lines and screen time that other, better characters could be using. The only “Twins” I wanted to see in this movie were Sideswipe AND Sunstreaker. Instead, Sideswipe gets barely any screen time and Sunstreaker is completely absent. Instead of making up crappy new characters, they should’ve given us more movie versions of fan favorite characters like Wheeljack, or Perceptor, or Hot Rod, or Ultra Magnus or Prowl, or…I could go on and on! I’m sure many fans would’ve much rather seen any of these characters in the film than these ridiculous new characters.

 

3)Megan Fox is just eye candy. Sure she’s pretty, but her performance is pretty flat. I’d love to see an actress who can act in this role for a change, instead of a walking pin-up. There is no fire in her belly, no spark in her eye. She should’ve never been cast to begin with, but I guess we’re stuck with her now.

  

4)While I admit that most of the comedy in this film got at least a chuckle out of me, I think they overdid it. It’s like they have to turn every scene with the human characters into a comedy routine so we will tolerate the boringness of having all these fleshlings polluting a film that should mainly be about giant robots beating the tar out of each other. In doing so they run the danger of turning the whole thing into a giant farce. It was far too obvious that this film was written to appeal to 12 year olds and older people who are hopelessly mired in that mindset. It has all of the raunchiness of South Park, but lacks the brilliant social satire that redeems that show.

 

5)The language was much fouler than in the first film. I’m certainly no prude, but as the parent of a young child, it sucks to bring your kid to something like this and worry about hearing that your kid had been repeating lines from the movie in daycare or school. C’mon guys! It’s based on toys that are sold to children! You can find ways to make it seem more sophisticated and adult without resorting to such language so often – like maybe giving us a better story? Or decent character development? In the first movie the “bad” language was more natural, like the real reactions someone would have to seeing a car suddenly stand up and turn into a robot – but it’s more forced and pointless in this movie.

 

6)Lots of cornball moments in the movie. Did anyone really think that Sam was really dead? But the director milks that moment for all it’s worth (and then some!)even though you’d have to be brain dead to buy it. Excessive use of slow motion is a crime!

  

7)Megatron is The Fallen’s bitch? WHAAAAT??? Megatron is NOBODY’S servant or disciple! That is the main thing I like about the character! Even when faced with the ultimate bad guy, Unicron, he only accepts his overlordship at the last moment to preserve himself just long enough to figure out a way to betray him. I didn’t enjoy seeing Megs play second fiddle to The Fallen. He seemed genuinely crestfallen when The Fallen is killed, like he’d just lost his hero. Megatron is his own hero! He follows no one! That said, I did like his attempts to sway Optimus to his side during their battle by trying to persuade him that the future of their race depended on them exploiting the new energon source found on earth. This rang true to my perception of the character – that as evil as he appears to be, he actually does believe that he is doing the right thing for the survival of his race.

 

8)I don’t like the fact that so many characters in this film had wheels in place of legs. Sure, it makes some degree of sense in that one can imagine that they would move faster in ‘bot mode with wheels for legs, but only over normal terrain. There are many DISADVANTAGES to having a wheel instead of legs, like it makes it impossible to climb things and makes jumping very hard – and what on earth do they do when they get a flat? Plus I think it just looks bad. It makes it seem like the designers got bored halfway though creating the ‘bot mode of the characters. It makes me feel cheated somehow. Sure there is a precedent in Transformers lore (Hello, Beast Machines!) but it still sucks!

 

9)Devastator looked like a pile of trash.

 

10) Much of the action is too fast and choppy to properly follow upon a single viewing. This is a general problem with many modern action films.

 

The Just Plain Confusing (AKA food for thought):

 

1)Why couldn’t a bunch of Primes kill The Fallen? If “it takes a Prime to destroy The Fallen” (the equivalent of “fighting fire with fire” since The Fallen was once a “Prime”), surely 5 of them were up to the job! It seems stupid for them to sacrifice themselves to create a tomb to hide the Matrix in and leave someone so powerful and dangerous at large and leave nobody else around who is strong enough to take him on. And how did they go on to “father” Optimus if they all transformed into a tomb? Jetfire seems amazed that there is a “living Prime” around so obviously there wasn’t one( that he was aware of) around before he left Cybertron. So where the heck DOES Optimus come from exactly? I guess it makes SOME degree of sense if they couldn’t find The Fallen and were so terrified of the concept of him getting the Matrix and using it to make our sun go nova or whatever unless they locked it up good ASAP. It still seems like bad strategizing to me.

 

2) TFs reproduce sexually? Jetfire mentions having both a mother and a father! It’s not quite as silly as it seems since TFs seem to mimic most biological functions mechanically presumably using nanobots the same way we organics use cells. I just wish they would come out and clarify it already. Hey, it’s not as ridiculous as it seems, in G2 it was revealed that TFs once reproduced asexually in a process similar to cellular division.

Maybe that would explain the presence of female ‘bots in the movie – or in general? Why couldn’t ‘bots combine parts of their Sparks to forma unique new one, or their robotic equivalent of DNA (made up of nanobots) ? The background info for the first movie states that Megs and Prime are brothers (which Primes actually says in dialogue from the first movie, although he could’ve been speaking metaphorically) and that Megs killed their Father. So this info although not explicitly stared in the films themselves and therefore of dubious canocity, seems to back up this concept. Of course if this is true, why isn’t Megs “a Prime”?

  

2) What is up with those protoforms or whatever they are that the Decepticons are keeping in their ship? The ones Starscream says are too weak to mature without enough energon? Where did they come from? How did the Decepticons get them? Did the Allspark spit them out before it was launched into space? Or if Transformers do reproduce sexually as the movie implies, do they lay eggs (these things seem to be in some sort of transparent eggs)? If so, SOMEBODY had been getting a lot of action!

 

3) The Primes created the Allspark? The movie seems to imply that if they didn’t create it, then at the very least they kept it charged up with Energon extracted from suns. If they DID create it, it implies that the Primes are older than Cybertron since Optimus Prime says in the first movie that the Allspark is older than Cybertron. It also implies that the Primes created the rest of their race. Of course if you look at the Allspark Cube as just a physical artifact used to interface with a movieverse equivalent of Primus this makes sense. Perhaps Primus is the TRUE Allspark which as this movie states cannot really be destroyed, with the cube just being a man(or more accurately TF) made object used to access and channel his power. So maybe movieverse Primus makes the Primes and gives them the knowledge to create the Allspark Cube and keep it charged up? This is similar to the Beast Machines concept of the Allspark being a dimension that Primus resides in.

 

4) I still don’t get why the Allspark and its fragments only seems to create Decepticons, or at the very least Transformers whose first instinct upon birth is to shoot up everything in sight.

 

5) Optimus seems to know absolutely nothing about The Fallen when his name is first mentioned in the film. He claims that the Allspark held all the history of their race and when it was lost, so was that history. C’MON! Like being the leader of one half of the Transformer race means you can get away with having absolutely no knowledge for your own history? Who put Prime in charge if he is so damned ignorant? Every Decepticon in the film seems to be aware of the Fallen! You mean to say that even a rumor or legend of him was never been extracted from a single Decepticon in interrogation in all their countless years of battling each other? Yet once Optimus is revived by the Matrix he seems to be suddenly aware that the Primes were the brothers of The Fallen. Huh? Did the Matrix give him a sudden infusion of historical data? Did he have an awesome near death vision like Sam did that we were not privy to? WTF?

  

So overall what did I think of this movie? Well, I do feel that the first film was better, although there are many things in this movie that I think were improvements, there were just as many problems with it. I was entertained throughout, which after all is the goal of a movie such as this. While I am no great fan of Michael Bay (the only other movie of his I enjoyed was Independence Day, corny as it was), I do think he gets unfairly bashed. There is a reason why major studios keep on giving him millions of dollars to crank out movies like this. They are entertaining to a vast number of people! I think critics know this and can’t stands this fact because they know that he entertains primarily by playing to the lowest common denominator in human nature and they can’t stand this, or the fact that it is so consistently successful. It shatters their intellectual hubris that we are somehow progressing as a species and have evolved beyond the point of being still be entertained by stupid caveman humor and lots of explosions. It makes them realize that they are surrounded by “idiots” and they hate to be reminded of this - of how truly isolated they are from the general mindset of the great unwashed masses and makes them want to slink back into their intellectual ivory towers and hide there forever.

 

Sure it sucks! I’d rather see almost anyone else in charge of bringing the Transformers to the big screen, almost anyone would do a better job - but you also can’t deny that despite its many, many flaws, the final product is still pretty entertaining and is therefore still successful on some level. I am not so divorced from the passions of the “common man” (whatever the hell that means) to deny this. Parts of it will annoy you, but unless you’re a complete tool, you will be entertained which is the main reason we went to see movies the last time I checked. There are worse ways to spend a few hours. This is hardly a great piece of movie making but neither is it the steaming turd some critics would have you believe it is. It’s worth checking out for a laugh if you’re feeling bored. The Transformers franchise deserves better – but you knew that already when you saw the first film. If Hasbro itself doesn’t believe that – how do you think we’ll ever convince anyone else?

 

What do I know? I'm just some guy. Go see it for yourself and make up your own mind. Or don't. I don't care.

 

I'm now done talking about this- forever!

Sample image taken with a Fujinon XF 56mm f1.2 R mounted on a Fujifilm XT1 body; each of these images is an out-of-camera JPEG with Lens Modulation Optimisation enabled. These samples and comparisons are part of my Fujinon XF 56mm f1.2 R review at:

 

cameralabs.com/reviews/Fujifilm_Fujinon_XF_56mm_f1-2_R/

 

Feel free to download the original image for evaluation on your own computer or printer, but please don't use it on another website or publication without permission from www.cameralabs.com/

The Upanishads have said that all things are created and sustained by an infinite joy. To realise this principle of creation we have to start with a division--the division into the beautiful and the non-beautiful. Then the apprehension of beauty has to come to us with a vigorous blow to awaken our consciousness from its primitive lethargy, and it attains its object by the urgency of the contrast. Therefore our first acquaintance with beauty is in her dress of motley colours, that affects us with its stripes and feathers, nay, with its disfigurements. But as our acquaintance ripens, the apparent discords are resolved into modulations of rhythm. At first we detach beauty from its surroundings, we hold it apart from the rest, but at the end we realise its harmony with all. (Rabindranath Tagore)

 

Found this beautiful poppy next to a railway track near Gstaad train station, Switzerland.

Jpeg straight out of the camera, no photoshop, post processing or whathaveyou.

 

The bitmap being fed into the LED strip ought to have been rotated by 90 degrees, but it sort of worked out OK like this. A bit of pulsewidth modulation to make the yellow LEDs appear as dots seems to lend interesting texture, but I sort of feel it could have done with maybe a couple of stops down on the aperture to make everything a bit brighter.

Free download under CC Attribution (CC BY 2.0). Please credit the artist and rawpixel.com

 

Hu Zhengyan (c. 1584-1674) was a Chinese traditional painter, calligrapher, seal carver and publisher during the transition of the Ming and Qing dynasties. He produced China’s first printed publication in color, and was famous for his incredible techniques achieving gradation and modulation of shades in woodblock prints.

 

Higher resolutions with no attribution required can be downloaded: rawpixel

 

In December and January the light can prove to be very testing for out-of-doors photographers and even more so when the sun shines brilliantly. Dark shadows and over-modulation are the most common difficulties and we have to pick our locations carefully for the shot to be successful. And just to make things even more complicated there are the usual issues of images that are moving and obstructions at the wrong moment.

 

In the heart of Links Links is Dennis Dart SLF, Plaxton Pointer SPD number 87 (SN53 AUX) on a Service 21. This bus is newly repainted and to mine eyes looks quite fabulous with its new coat of weinrot und weiss paint.

 

An 8-bit sythesizer made with arduino, with MIDI-in, audio output, can do sine, triangle and saw waves and bitwise modulation between them. Sounds nasty. See this blog post for more information.

in an instant

A Realistic Patrolman PRO 3 Monitor from the early 1970s.

 

Radio Shack promoted this would be "the only monitor receiver you'll ever need" - little did they know the changes that would come. In the mid 1970s the UHF band was expanded to 512 MHz. In the 1980s came the opening of the 800MHz band and trunked radio systems, and today the 700MHz band is also used for public safety - not to mention today's digital trunking and modulation.

Cycles is a unique step sequencer for crafting complex and experimental percussion patterns on the iPad. This is a proof of concept in the early stages of development.

NOS - Purchased from a seller in Belarus. Here is part of the description provided by the seller - All-wave military radio with power from batteries or from a network of 220 volts. It is designed to receive broadcasts with amplitude modulation in the bands DV, SV and KV and frequency modulation in the UHF band. The radio receiver is efficient at ambient temperature from - 10 to + 50С and relative humidity up to 95% at 25С. Rated output power - 1 W.

“Claremont Road” has five Arduino UNO microcontrollers which control train movements along with PWM (servo adapted) points/turnouts, and signals according to pre-written programs or “sketches”. This is a completely different concept from DCC.

 

The master co-ordinating UNO gets feedback from the track through 14 enbedded infra-red proximity detectors,

 

Slaves 1-3 are UNO “train drivers”,

 

Slave 4 handles the display and lights. The orange display shows the current mode and commands being passed between the UNOs via a short-wire protocol known as I2C.

A nerdy challenge: how to portray the Servitors of the Outer Gods while avoiding their popular representation playing incongruous flutes. They emit high-pitched ululating sounds, according to Lovecraft, but I don't think he was referring to them being cosmic flutists and pipers. Initial stages of a work in progress: prior photo documentation and first sketches inspired by it, including details of the modulation of a wheezing respiratory system.

Free download under CC Attribution (CC BY 2.0). Please credit the artist and rawpixel.com

 

Hu Zhengyan (c. 1584-1674) was a Chinese traditional painter, calligrapher, seal carver and publisher during the transition of the Ming and Qing dynasties. He produced China’s first printed publication in color, and was famous for his incredible techniques achieving gradation and modulation of shades in woodblock prints.

 

Higher resolutions with no attribution required can be downloaded: rawpixel

 

Free download under CC Attribution (CC BY 2.0). Please credit the artist and rawpixel.com

 

Hu Zhengyan (c. 1584-1674) was a Chinese traditional painter, calligrapher, seal carver and publisher during the transition of the Ming and Qing dynasties. He produced China’s first printed publication in color, and was famous for his incredible techniques achieving gradation and modulation of shades in woodblock prints.

 

Higher resolutions with no attribution required can be downloaded: rawpixel

 

Yoko Ono

 

It was a sad and a little spooky to walk into the Dakota on this dark and rainy winter night, an evening not unlike the one on which John Lennon was killed here twelve years earlier. It seemed like no time had passed since I stood here in shocked silence with hundreds of others on the terrible day after, the old iron gate woven with flowers. And now I was back at that same gate, but this time with an appointment to go inside and talk to Yoko. To enter the old building, one passes through the bleak guard’s station, a gloomy room made more mournful by the recognition that this was where John staggered and fell, before being taken to the hospital.

 

But none of this gloom pervades the warm, elegant interior of Yoko’s apartment, with it’s enormous windows overlooking Central Park, the rainy streets below sparkling like glass. As you enter the apartment, you’re asked to take off your shoes in traditional Japanese style (having known this in advance I wore my best socks), and ushered by one of her assistants into the famous “white room,” with its giant white couch and tuxedo-white grand piano. It was at that keyboard that John was filmed performing “Imagine” as Yoko slowly opened up the blinds, letting in light.

 

Suddenly she arrived- she didn’t seem to walk in the room, but somehow simply appeared- and her gentle demeanour and warm smile instantly caused all nervousness to dissolve. As soon as I met Yoko, I understood why John loved her. She’s charming and beautiful, with a gentle smile in her eyes that photos never seem to reveal. Though she was a few months shy of 60 when we met, she looked younger and prettier than ever, especially without the dark aviator shades she wore like a veil through much of the last decade. In their place, she wore clear, round spectacles, the kind still commonly referred to as “John Lennon glasses.” She was barefoot, and in blue jeans, and nestled comfortably on the white couch.

 

Yoko’s speaking voice is soft and melodious, her accent bending English into musical, Japanese cadences. Contrary to the usual depictions of her in the press, she’s quite humorous, joking frequently and punctuating her comments with little bursts of laughter. She’s also quite humble about her work and her influence on John and other artists. “People can listen to the music,” she suggested softly, “and make their own judgement.”

 

“spring passes

and one remembers one’s innocence

summer passes

and one remembers one’s exuberance

autumn passes

and one remembers one’s reverence

winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance

there is a season that never passes

and that is the season of glass”

 

-Yoko Ono, 1981

 

She wrote this poem more than a decade ago now, a time she said “passed in high speed.” And like so many of the songs she wrote herself and with John, the truth in them remains constant, undiminished by passing time. In this verse she miraculously conveyed what millions around the world were feeling during those dark days following that darkest day in December of 1980 when John died. That this was a season that wouldn’t pass, a tragedy that wouldn’t be trivialized by time, a wound that wouldn’t heal. And in a way, we didn’t want it to.

 

But perhaps the one thing that has shifted since then is that the work of Yoko Ono can begin to be seen in a new light. Rykodisk Records released a six-CD set of Yoko’s recorded works call Onobox in 1992, and for the still uninitiated this collection serves well as a revelation about one of the world’s most famous yet still misunderstood songwriters.

 

Known for the high-pitched, passionate kind of “Cold Turkey” wailing she has employed through the years- what she refers to as “voice modulations”- in truth she sings the majority of her songs in clear and gentle tones, usually wrapped in rich layers of vocal harmonies. When her father discovered that Yoko as a teen wanted to be a composer, he objected and suggested instead that she become a professional singer. “I knew the whole world would laugh”, she said, cognizant of the common misconceptions about her music, “but I had a good voice.” She studied piano and music theory while growing up in Japan, and can both read and transcribe music- something none of the Beatles ever learned.

 

She’s a musician who worked in experimental music for years before she inspired and aided in the creation of “Revolution 9,” the most avant-garde track ever included on a Beatles’ album. In New York circa 1965, along with the composer John Cage and others, Yoko delved into areas of “imaginary music” and “invisible sounds,” concentrating on the creation of an unwritten music, a music that transcended our need to notate. “You can’t translate the more complex sounds into traditional notation,” she said. “I wanted to capture the sounds of birds singing in the woods…”

 

She put on concerts with great jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden in the years before John insisted she record her songs with some of his “friends,” an above-average assemblage of musicians that included George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Klaus Voorman and Ringo Starr. Most of her work with this group were jams at first, musical improvisations based on her poems. But gradually she started crafting songs, composing melodies as eloquent as her poetry. And contrary to the idea that John arranged and produced her songs, Yoko always had a firm grasp on the translation of her inner visions into recorded music. “Though, of course, you do make little mistakes,” she admitted, laughing.

 

She’s known both dire poverty and great wealth in her life, and has boomeranged between the two. She was born in Tokyo into a wealthy banking family in March of 1933, the Year of the Bird. The descendant of a ninth century emperor, she was raised mostly by servants as her father was often away on business in America, and her mother tended to social obligations. When she was 11 in wartime 1945, much of Tokyo was being destroyed by American bombers, and her family were forced, in her father’s absence, to flee from their home. Yoko was sent by her mother with her brother and sister to a small village called Karuizawa. Until the end of the war they lived there in a little house on a cornfield, raising money by selling off kimonos and other possessions until they simply had to beg for food from door to door. Yoko and the other children were almost always hungry. After the war the family was able to gradually return to their wealthy lifestyle.

 

Yoko’s father decided to pursue business in America, and the family moved to suburban New York. Yoko attended Sarah Lawrence College in Scarsdale and began spending a lot of time in Manhattan. It was there that she met a young Japanese composer named Toshi Ichiyangi who was studying at Juilliard. In time she moved into a loft with Toshi and married him, much to her parent’s dismay, and the two experienced a repeat of the poverty Yoko knew as a child.

 

In New York Yoko began to gradually establish a reputation for herself as an avant-garde performance artist. She put on a series of shows at the Carnegie Hall Recital Hall, performances such as the infamous “Cut Piece” in which she sat onstage in a black shroud holding scissors and invited the audience to step up and cut away portions of her gown, which they did, until she was nearly naked. She also wrote and published a book of instructions on how to see the world in new ways called Grapefruit, and launched a movement known as “Bagism” in which people would be invited to come onstage and get into large black bags with other people, their mysterious shapes creating an ever-moving art piece. She divorced Toshi around this time and married New York artist Tony Cox, with whom she had a daughter, Kyoko.

 

Yoko met John Lennon in London 1966 at the Indica Gallery. It was the ninth of November, the number nine always prominent in their lives. When they eventually came together, many months after that evening, they made art before they ever made love, collaborating on the experimental recording Two Virgins until sunrise.

 

For days before John died, he and Yoko had been busy in New York’s Hit Factory working on a song that surprised both of them for its fire and passion, Yoko’s amazing “Walking on Thin Ice.” Though they had released their dialogue of the heart, Double Fantasy, only weeks earlier and it was racing up the Top Ten, nothing on it matched the pure electric fury of this record. “It was as if we were both haunted by the song,” Yoko wrote in the liner notes for the single. “I remember I woke up in the morning and found John watching the sunrise and still listening to the song. He said I had to put it out right away as a single.”

The next music of Yoko’s we heard was the album she started working on just months after John’s death, Season of Glass. It’s a phenomenal work, expressing the sequence of emotions she experienced, passing through shock, denial, outrage, madness, horror, pure sadness, and ultimately unconditional, undying love. It’s an undeniable masterpiece of songwriting straight from the soul, and even critics who routinely attacked her music for years recognized in print the pure, naked power of this album.

 

Some of Yoko’s sweetest love songs are here, such as the Spanish-tinged “Mindweaver,” “Even When You’re Far Away,” and the irrepressible “Nobody Sees Me Like You Do.” It also contains recordings of found sounds that expressed this time in her life: gunshots, screams, and her son Sean’s voice. As always, she left no barriers between her life and her art, which is immediately apparent on the album’s cover. It’s a photograph she took in early morning with the skyline of Manhattan across Central Park looking purple and blurry in the background. In the forefront there’s a table top on which sits the clear-rimmed spectacles John was wearing the night he was shot, one half splattered with blood, reflected in the transparent surface of the table. Beside the spectacles is a glass halfway full of water.

 

As Yoko expected, many people were outraged by this image. But they missed the fact that she was simply revealing the actuality of her life in her art as she always has, refusing to hide the real horror she had to endure. “It was like I was underwater,” she confirmed. “Like I was covered in blood.”

 

People also missed the fact that on the back of the album Yoko included a sign of hope. She’s sitting beside the same table by this same window, and in the same spot where John’s glasses were now sits a potted geranium, happily reaching towards the trees and blue Manhattan sky. Next to that germanium is a glass of water. And the glass is full.

 

From the beginning of her career, Yoko Ono’s message has been a positive one. Though dark and negative motivations have consistently been attributed to her, any analysis of her songs reveals a dedicated optimist at work more than anything. A quick survey of titles makes this clear; “Give Peace A Chance” (written with John, of course), “It’s Alright,” “I See Rainbows,” “Hard Times Are Over,” “Goodbye Sadness,” and so on. When John first met Yoko at her art exhibit at London’s Indica Gallery on that legendary day in 1966, it was the fact that her message was positive, that there was a magnified “Yes” at the top of the ladder he climbed, that bought them together. And when I asked her about her hardships as a child during the war, she remembered the light in the darkness, “I fell in love with the sky during that period,” she said, “The sky was just beautiful in the countryside. The most beautiful thing about it.”

 

Through the eighties after John was gone, again and again her mission has been to give hope, and the exuberance of her music was reflected in this affirmation. It’s Alright, which followed Seasons of Glass, is one of the most hopeful and inspiring albums ever made.

 

Despite all of it, though, Yoko Ono has been subject to some of the most extreme and bitter criticism any songwriter has ever had to endure. For years, hordes have held on to the notorious notion that she “broke up the Beatles,” still refusing to give John Lennon credit for making his own choices. That John’s life, both personal and professional, was entirely transformed when he fell in love with this woman, was never Yoko’s fault. If anything, she deserves praise for her profound influence on his art. He felt reborn when he and Yoko came together, and his enthusiasm for artistic expression was renewed. “I was awake again,” he said. “[Yoko] inspired all this creation in me. It wasn’t that she inspired the songs. She inspired me.”

 

When the criticism came, though it wasn’t ever easy to abide, it was anything new for Yoko Ono. When she was a kid growing up in Japan, her writing was roundly rejected by schoolteachers who objected to the fact that it didn’t fit into existing forms and that she had no desire to make it fit. “It’s not that I consciously tried not to conform,” she explained, smiling, “I was just naturally out of the system.” Since that time she’s bravely made her art regardless of whether it was embraced or rejected by the critics of the world. “It cost me my dignity sometimes,” she recalled. “But who needs dignity?”

   

When did you first start writing songs?

I was sort of a closet writer [laughs]. I was writing in the style of atonal songs but with poetry on top of it. I liked to write poetry and I liked to make it into music, into songs. It was something I liked very much to do anyway.

 

And then in London I think I was writing a couple of songs before getting together with John. The songs were in quite an interesting style, really. I don’t know how to put it. Maybe there’s some tape that’s left.

 

It was some interesting stuff I was doing. It was mostly acapella, because I didn’t have any musicians with me in London. And doing a kind of mixture of Oriental rhythm & blues, I suppose [laughs].

 

I think “Remember Love” was the first so-called pop song that I wrote but before that, before I met John, I wrote a few songs and one of them was “Listen, The Snow is Falling.” I made that into a pop song later. “Remember Love” was probably the first one I wrote as a pop song from the beginning.

 

Do you generally have the same approach to writing songs?

I can’t stand being in a rut, so I sort of always jump around. That’s me.

[Laughs]

 

Do you write on piano?

Yes. I use the piano because I don’t know any other instrument, really. I tried the guitar once and it hurt my fingers so much and I didn’t like it. John said, “Try it” so I tried it in L.A., when we stayed in L.A. But I didn’t like it at all. So, I just naturally go to the piano.

 

If I’m not at the piano, I can write riding in the car. And I just write down the notes and bring it in to the piano later.

 

Do you find your songs come in a flash, or do they come from the result of a lot of work?

No, it’s always a flash. And if I don’t catch it [laughs] and write it down, or put in a tape [softly], it just goes. Never comes back. Isn’t that funny?

 

Can you control when that flash comes? Do you ever sit down to write a song?

No, I never did that. But I mean, the point is that sometimes words do come back. The words are a different thing. Sometimes I will forget to write the music down and I’ll have only the words. And then I’ll put it to music at the piano, and it becomes a totally different song, you know.

 

When you first me John, did you have much enthusiasm for rock music?

Well, I started to have an incredible enthusiasm. In the beginning when I was sitting in the Beatles’ sessions, I thought that it was so simplistic. Like a kind of classical musician, avant-garde snobbery. And then I suddenly thought, “This is great!” I just woke up. And then I really felt good about it.

 

There’s an incredible energy there. Like primitivism. And no wonder. It’s a very healthy thing an no wonder it’s like a heartbeat. It’s almost like the other music appealed to a head plane, like brain music, and then they forgot about the body.

 

[Softly] It’s a very difficult to go back to your body. You know that bit about without the body we don’t exist. You forget that! It’s almost like we can just live in our heads. And a lot of intellectual, academic people, they tend to be that.

 

So I thought, “This is great!” It’s a total music.

 

Then I realized what was wrong with the other music. It was removed from the body. It lost that kind of energy. And I thought, “No wonder I was just sort of wondering around. Okay, well, this is great.” I went back to my body. It’s true.

 

It seemed that you had a big effect on their music by being there. Even McCartney said that he felt that he had to be more avant-garde when you were around.

I don’t know. It might have affected them that way on a peripheral level, the fact that I was there. But I was just living my own world inside. Dream world. [Laughs] I was sitting there just thinking about all the stuff I’m doing in my head. So I was there and in a way I wasn’t there.

 

Some of your die-hard fans felt that being with John Lennon was detrimental to your art, while other have said that your work blossomed in a new way.

 

Probably it would have been easier for me, career-wise, if I didn’t get together with him. In a way, I lost respectability or dignity as an artist. But then, what is dignity and what is respectability? It’s a kind of thing that was a good lesson for me to lose it. What am I supposed to be doing, carrying respectability and dignity like a Grand Dame of the avant-garde for twenty years? That would have been… boring. [Laughs]

 

That was a kind of option that was open to me, you know, and [softly] I didn’t take it. It was quite more fun to go forward into a new world.

 

John’s famous song “Imagine” originated from an idea in one of your poems from Grapefruit about imagining a different world. Do you feel people ever understood the source?

No. A song like that, it’s a political statement in a way, and it’s about changing people’s heads. And I think that people don’t have to understand anything except the message of the song, and hopefully that will get to them.

 

With John, people have named his songs to get his response, but no one has done that with you. May I?

Oh, sure. Do you mind if I just get my cigarettes? I still can’t shake it, you know?

 

“Dogtown.”

I was in an apartment on Bank Street with John. It was early in the morning and John was still asleep in the other room. I was at the window and the window was in such a way that the front room was very dark. The room was a few steps down from the pavement so from the window you would kind of look at people walking. It was like that feeling. Early morning. It was just that. I lit my cigarette and listened to the early morning sounds. The song was almost like a diary, describing what I was doing.

 

I didn’t want to wake up John. I had an electric piano that you can tone down very very quiet, and you’re the only one who can hear it, you know? That’s how I made “Dogtown.” [Laughs]

 

So it started as a quiet song.

Well I wasn’t thinking quiet, I was just making sure that he couldn’t hear.

 

“Death of Samantha.”

Oh, yeah. I know that one. There was a certain instant and I felt like I was really sad, so that’s when it happened. Something terribly upsetting happened to me and then the next time we were at the studio, while the engineers were sort of putting the board in order, it flashed to me. So I just wrote it down.

 

This is funny because with “Death of Samantha,” while I was writing I sort of saw this graveyard. It’s not a graveyard, because when you think of a graveyard, you think of many, many gravestones. It’s just a kind of grey kind of day, grey scene, and grey people standing around like somebody has died. And after John’s death people said, “You were writing about his vigil, did you know that?” And I read the lyrics that they sent me from “Death of Samantha” and I just reread it and realized, oh, that’s true. Of course, I didn’t realize it then. So it’s very strange. You know, images come to me.

 

Many of your songs told future things.

It’s scary in a way.

 

Why do you think that is?

I don’t know what it is. So I’m very careful about what I say or what I think or do. Cause it could mean something later.

 

“Yang Yang.”

Oh, “Yang Yang” was based on a chord change. I like to use, kind of an ascending harmonic change. I showed it to John that instead of ascending by half-notes, you can ascend by whole notes, and that gives a kind of vital power that is interesting. And “Yang Yang” is the first thing that came to me with those chords.

 

That song is in E minor and a lot of songs from this period are also in that key. Do keys have different significances for you?

Yeah. Each chord has a difference significance astrologically. I use F# a lot, and E minor too. And I’m thinking why, and it seems like it’s agreeable to my astrology.

 

I was also thinking why I sometimes use the key of C [major] because C is so simplistic, most composers probably avoid it. But I don’t avoid it. Why not? Why do I do that? C s a key of communication, I understand. So I used it in a song I had to communicate. The kind of songs that I wrote in the key of C or rewrote in the key of C, like “Give Peace a Chance” or that sort of thing, it’s all to do with communication, of course. The widest communication you want, so you go back to the simplest key, which is C.

 

That’s interesting. I’ve noticed that TV commercials are often in C, probably for the same reason.

Oh, yeah. It’s fascinating. And I think that most writers instinctively go for something simple to communicate.

 

Your song “Silver Horse” is in C major.

Yeah. [Laughs] You know what it was? “Silver Horse” is like a fairy-tale. It’s like a story that you tell your child. It just happened, you know. It’s that kind of nursery rhyme feeling I was trying to give.

 

I love the spoken part on that song when you say, “I came to realize the horse had no wings,” and then you ask yourself, “No wings?”

[Laughter] Oh, by the way, John loved that song. Yeah. He kept saying, “Oh, that’s a great song” because he liked the fact that I say, “It wasn’t so bad, you know.” [Laughs]

 

I know John also loved your song, “Nobody Sees Me Like You Do,” which has a wonderful chord progression.

Yeah, he liked the chord sequence. It’s a chord sequence that is probably pretty prevalent in country music but you don’t use that much in rock.

 

That’s one of your happiest songs, and yet you bring in the sadness in the line, “The feeling of loneliness hangs over like a curse…”

We’re all complex people, you know. You can’t just sort of be happy all the time, you know, like zombies. [Laughs]

 

Another one of your happiest songs, which was also on the It’s Alright album, is “My Man.”

You like that?

 

Very Much.

I wanted to make a real pop one, you know? A lot of people think that wasn’t artistic, like it’s sort of silly or something. Which is true: “Bab-a-lou, bab-a-lou.” I liked that. [Laughs] Dumb but nice, you know?

 

On “Woman of Salem,” you used the year 1692 without knowing that was the actual year of the witch trials?

Isn’t it amazing that I didn’t know that year? After I finished Salem, you know, I just thought of it. It’s incredible. It’s uncanny, isn’t it?

 

Yes. Any explanation?

No. [Laughs] I went to see her house and I was nearly crying. I mean, you talk about witches and it’s not a witch at all. It’s a sensible doctor’s house, you know? Very intellectual, artistic kind of person living there, you just know it.

 

It makes me think of your song, “Yes, I’m A Witch” in which you say “I don’t care what you say, my voice is real and speaking truth.”

Yeah, I know. That’s me.

 

“A Story.”

Okay., “Story.” That, again, is like a nursery rhyme. It’s a simple story, you know? I think it was in C, wasn’t it?

 

One of the songs I’ve been especially loving on Onobox is “Yume O Moto” which you sing in Japanese.

That’s nice, isn’t it?

 

Very. What does it mean?

Let’s have a dream. Yume o moto.

 

Do you find that it’s more natural or pleasing to sing in Japanese than in English?

I don’t think so. I don’t feel that way.

 

The author Vladimir Nabokov said that English is like a blank canvas, that it doesn’t have an inherent beauty the way other languages do. Do you find that?

I don’t find that. I think English is a very beautiful language. All languages are beautiful, really.

 

Do you think in English?

Sometimes I think in Japanese, sometimes I think in English. But mainly in English at this point, you know. I mean, when I’m talking in English, of course I think in English.

 

Do you dream in English?

Yeah!

 

“Yume O Moto” was from an album called A Story which you recorded in 1973 during your separation from John, what you both called your “lost weekend.” You decided not to release it at the time, and have included it here as the final disk of the Onobox. There are so many great songs on it, hearing it now it’s surprising that you didn’t want to put it out.

Well, you know, there are many things that I just chucked, you know, or shelved, you know. Like from my early days, like the stories that I wrote, that it was just in the course of going from one country to another or one relationship to another. Something I lost or whatever. It was one of those things. I didn’t think that much about it.

 

John recorded Walls and Bridges during that time and he released it.

I know, John can do it, I can’t right? There’s a difference.

 

Many of your best songs, such as “Loneliness” and “Dogtown” came from that album. Had you released it, do you think people might have recognized you as a songwriter earlier in your career?

Well, I couldn’t put it out then, anyway. Let’s put it that way.

 

Why not?

Well, I don’t know, it’s just… Look. Listen to Feeling the Space. That’s a pretty good album. There’s some good songs in there too, you know that, right? So? That was out there but nobody cared. It’s the same thing. Now you say that people might have known I was a songwriter. At the time, putting out Feel the Space, people should have know, or putting out Approximately Infinite Universe, people should have known that I’m a songwriter, and they didn’t, so what are we talking about? You know, one more album is not going to help, you know?

 

In a way, it’s good that came out now. You get it? Then if people hear it, without kind of the Yoko-bashing… I didn’t think so. I thought it was going to be bashed again. But obviously they’re taking it differently now. I don’t know why. Let’s put it that way. I’m very lucky because I could have died without hearing about it.

 

I think there’s a small group of hardcore fans who had to literally go through the same bashing that I went through just because they like my music. So I’m doing it for them, too, this box. I felt I really had to make sure that every note was right. For them.

 

I’ve been surprised by some of the resistance to your work, especially when Season of Glass came out, because it was such a meaningful album.

I wasn’t too aware of what was going on then, but it seems that it’s easy to concentrate on the kind of things that I was doing, it was easier to concentrate on that than to go into the outside world.

 

“It’s Alright.”

Oh, that was so difficult. It was a very difficult one to make, really. But I loved it. That was after John’s death and everything and I was really trying to get into music. So it was like getting into harmony, and putting in all the harmonies. There were many things that I wanted to get in, so I intentionally made it so that there were holes in it. And I filled those in with different kinds of little choruses. It was like a collage, and it was a big production. A big production with not many people, not many musicians. In other words, all those sort of overdub things that I did.

 

“Mindweaver.”

Oh, “Mindweaver,” oh… [Pause] I wanted to make it like a duet with the guitar and my voice. And I was thinking of basically making it like a Spanish mourning song. It has that kind of dignity.

 

“It Happened.”

Oh, “It Happened” was actually composed in 1973 and at the time it had to do with moving away from each other. But then, when John died, I thought, “Oh, that’s what it was about” [laughs] and I put it on the back of “Walking on Thin Ice.”

 

I look at that period of separation like a rehearsal.

 

A rehearsal for what?

For the big separation that I didn’t know would happen. It was very good that I had that rehearsal in terms of moving along. That helped me later.

 

“Cape Clear.”

“Cape Clear” was first called “Teddy Bear.” [Laughs] I was writing at the piano. I was writing at this piano in The Dakota and in Cold Spring Harbour. In those days I still had Cold Spring Harbour. And it was just one of those songs. Central Park gave me that inspiration, you get it? Like the girls are sitting in the park and the clouds passing by, you know? I was looking over Central Park and I was thinking, “Oh. I could be sitting there.” It sort of flashed in my mind.

 

How about “Walking on Thin Ice”?

Oh. [Laughs] “Walking on Thin Ice.” What about it?

 

It’s such a powerful songs, both musically and lyrically. Do you recall where it came from, or how you wrote it?

I was thinking of Lake Michigan. I went to Chicago. And Lake Michigan is so big that you don’t know the end of it when you look at it. I was visualizing Lake Michigan. I was just thinking of this woman that is walking Lake Michigan when it is totally frozen, and is walking and walking but not knowing that it’s that huge. [A siren sound starts from outside, getting louder.] I’m like one of those people. “Oh it’s ice but I can walk on it.” I walk like that in life.

 

That song is about yourself?

Yes. I think so. The spoken part, “I knew a girl…” and all that, that feeling came to me after we recorded it. But I wasn’t sure about it. I just knew it had something to do with a girl who is walking. Then I sang the song, and I was still sitting in the chair by the mike, waiting for them to change the tape. That’s when it just came. So I just wrote it down quickly. I said, “I got it!” And I told them I was just going to do something after the singing, and I just did it.

 

Where do you think those kinds of thoughts come from?

No idea. It’s very interesting because it could be something that came totally from somewhere else. But, of course, it’s about me, and that’s how I was looking at it. But then, I don’t know. I didn’t think it was about me, really. I was just looking at this girl who is walking, you know.

 

It seems like a visual message. You see, in my mind, sound and visual is all very closely connected. It’s mixed almost. So when I hear sound, I almost hear it in colour as well.

 

When you listen to something like “What a Bastard the World Is,” or something, you probably see something, some filmic image.

 

Many of your songs are very visual.

Yes. Because that’s how I see it and I hear it. Seeing and hearing is very closely connected.

 

When I said, “I knew a girrrl…,’ that I thought was to accentuate certain syllables that it’s odd to accentuate. And that was like Alban Berg. Let’s do like Alban Berg.

 

That’s some of John’s most passionate guitar playing.

Oh, incredible. He did great guitar playing on “Woman Power” and “She Hits Back.” Very good. But also, not talking about those normal ones, what did you think about “Why”? He’s so good, isn’t he?

 

Yes. On something like that or on “Walking On Thin Ice” did you give him the kind of sound or direction that you heard in your head?

Kind of, yeah. I mean, we’d talk about it. Like I would say, “I’m going to go like this, you go like this.” I don’t mean “go like this” in terms of notes, but just the mood of it.

 

It depends. On “Cambridge” he wanted to know how to do it, so I kind of explained it to him before we went to Cambridge. With “Why” I was talking about the kind of dialogue we could do in terms of my voice and his guitar. But it’s not like telling him what note to play.

 

Speaking of a dialogue, you also wrote songs in dialogue on Double Fantasy.

Yes. We sort of vaguely had this idea about doing a dialogue album. But some of the songs, like “I’m Moving On,” were written before. In putting together an album, I’d bring out a song and say, “What about this then?” When you do ‘I’m Losing You’ I’ll do this.” That part of the dialogue was a conscious sequence.

 

“Sisters O Sisters.”

“Sisters O Sisters” was written for a rally in Michigan for John Sinclair in 1971. When we were in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the concert, John said, “She’s got something, Yoko’s got something,” I said, “This is for the sisters of Ann Arbour, Michigan.” And we sung it, and that was the premiere. [Laughs] And afterwards I didn’t think much of it until we were making Sometime in New York City, which probably was in ’72. At the time we did that, we did it in the recording studio for the first time with Phil Spector. And the way I’m singing in Ann Arbour, Michigan is very different from the way I sung in the Phil Spector version. And I think Phil Spector version is a good one.

 

Seasons of Glass was such a powerful record, and so meaningful at that time for so many people.

When I made Season of Glass, I felt like I was still like walking underwater or something, so I didn’t really know people’s reaction.

 

In that poem you wrote, “There is a season that never passes, and that is the season of glass.” Which echoed the way so many felt after John’s death, that this is a time that won’t pass. Do you feel that we’re still in the season of glass?

I don’t know, because I may have been talking about something more than John’s death in a way. At the time, of course, I was talking about my private experience. But I’m doing a piece right now for a gallery show which is about a family that is sitting in the park at meltdown time, and I was thinking in terms of the meltdown of the human race and the endangered species. And somebody said that it looked like genocide as well.

 

So it’s like the season of glass is still here in terms of the whole world. We’re still not reaching a point of not having… bloody glasses.

 

A very positive message you put out that I think people have missed is that on Season of Glass, on the back cover, the glass of waster that was half-full on the front is now full.

Yeah, Oh, you mean you noticed it? Very few people noticed that.

  

Do you think your positive messages often were overlooked?

Well, some people got them and some didn’t. It depends on the person, too. I mean, you noticed something, you know? [Laughs] But most people didn’t notice it.

 

So many of your songs are positive. Does an artist have an obligation to have a positive message?

No. Some artists are writing depressive songs and killing themselves, you know? [Laughs] It depends on the artist. There are some depressive moments in my work, but, yeah, generally I try to fight back.

 

John was attracted to the word “Yes” in your art show when you first met.

Yeah. Well, we just have to, you know? It’s not like I don’t know that the world has various negative aspects. But writing about that is not going to help anybody.

 

Would it be okay if I asked you your response to some of John’s songs?

Sure.

 

“Strawberry Fields.”

I love it. You know what it is? That was the first John Lennon song that I encountered. And there was a party at the editor of the Art Magazine’s house in London. And I went to that, and I think I was a bit earlier than the others and I was in the house and the editor said, “Oh, listen to this, Yoko. When a pop song comes to this point, what do you think?”

 

And he played “Strawberry Fields,” in London. And I thought, “Hmmmmm…” Because there were some dissonant sounds and I thought it was pretty good. For a pop song. [Laugh]

 

It thought it was cute. I thought it was some cute stuff. Because I was making songs with all dissonant sounds. It impressed me. I was surprised a pop song could be that way.

 

I like the song. Musically, it was very terrific. And there’s a lot of connections about it. I mean, I think of John as an artist, a songwriter, a fellow artist. But also, he was my husband, you know. And I remember all his pain as a child, sort of looking at Strawberry Fields, which was an orphanage, you know. He always told me about his Aunt Mimi saying, whenever he was out of hand, Mimi would say, “You can go there. You’re lucky you’re not there, John.” So, Strawberry Fields to him was connected with this strange kind of fear and love, love for the kind of children that were very close to his condition. John was in a better position. So there’s that love and that strange fear for it.

 

It’s very strong thing for him. That sort of painful memory that he had of Strawberry Fields, he transferred that into a song. And made it positive. And that song was transferred into a park. [Laughs] It’s a very strong thing that I witnessed. So it means a lot to me.

 

“Come Together.”

Oh. Oh, that’s a beautiful song. Well, that’s very John. That’s a very John song. And a lot of people came together to his music. It’s like a symbol of that, you know?

 

“Starting Over.”

Well… that’s a nice song, isn’t it? [Laughs]

 

Yeah. It’s very happy.

Like me and him, right? [Laughs]

 

“Across the Universe.”

Oh, “Across the Universe.” That’s beautiful poetry. And also, “Across the Universe,” the kind of melody and rhythm and all that, reminds me of the beginning of the so-called New Music.

 

“Bless You.”

Oh, “Bless You,” of course. I have a special emotional thing about it, don’t I? I remember when he first came and played it to me.

 

“Julia.”

Well, that’s very beautiful. I was there when he wrote it. I think it’s such a strong melody.

 

He wrote so many beautiful melodies, yet McCartney has the reputation for being the melody writer.

No, no, no, no. It’s not true at all. John was a great melody writer.

 

Is it true that “Because” was based on “The Moonlight Sonata” which he asked you to play backwards?

When you really listen to it, you see that he did play the chords backwards at one point but I think eventually it cleaned up a bit into a pop format. So he didn’t use all the chords. But that was the initial inspiration.

 

There were many songs he wrote with your name in it, such as “Dear Yoko,” “Oh Yoko,” “The Ballad of John & Yoko” in which you became almost a folk hero…

Well, I don’t know about that. I think that from where I come from, in the art world, Picasso’s always painting the wife, or Modigliani only had one model, who was his wife, so that kind of thing is normal. So it didn’t strike me as anything unusual.

 

Did you and John ever discuss songwriting?

For me, it’s so natural to use so many different chords. Because in classical music, you just do this. The kind of thing he would show me was that instead of using so many different chords, just use two chords. It’s funkier. That’s a great trick. That’s the kind of thing that classical musicians or composers lost, of course.

 

Do you have a favourite song that John wrote?

“In My Life” is a pretty good one, isn’t it?

 

McCartney’s son “Get Back” seemed to be directed at you.

We thought that.

 

Did you have any inner response to that?

No. I don’t know. That’s another thing that is the strength of an artist, probably. Artists always think, “Oh, maybe they’re trying to hurt me,” or whatever. You think that but in the next minute you’re thinking about your own songs, your own art or sculpture or films or whatever. So by doing that, you shake it off. So it doesn’t stick so much.

 

You’ve had a lot of tragedy in your life. Do you feel that tragedy helps an artist to open up in any way?

I think that tragedy comes in all forms. No one should encourage artists to pursue tragedy so that they might become a good artist. I wouldn’t encourage that. You don’t have to have tragedy to create, really.

 

Was there ever a feeling on your part that you would want to leave the Dakota, and live elsewhere?

Not really. It was the spot that my husband died, you know? It was… like you don’t want to leave there, you know?

 

These days this place represents teenagers, Sean and Sean’s friends. It’s quite a different scene, and it’s very nice.

 

Early in your career you worked with John Cage and you called “imaginary music” and music that can’t be notated. Later you said you felt that the pop song was more powerful because it could reach more people. What do you think now?

I still feel that there’s kind of an extra-sensory perception kind of area where you can pursue that sort of communication and sound vibration on that level, et cetera. But, yes, I really think the pop song, or rock, is a very good means of communication.

 

Do you think the songform is restrictive?

Yes.

 

You once said that you felt songs were like haikus.

Yes, definitely. But also it’s either way. Even when it’s twenty minutes or an hour, in the context of the big world, it’s very small [laughs], you know what I mean? It’s all very relative, you know.

 

Was it difficult for you to continually create in the face of people’s negative energy? Even when you were a little girl, your teachers were harsh with your writing, yet you always had the bravery to do your art regardless.

In a sense because of that I lost many writings. Because they would discourage me so I would keep on writing, but I wouldn’t hold onto them. And the same with the tapes. A lot of tapes I did, like “London Jam” kind of things with John, it’s a pity that they’re lost. And the reason why they were lost was because there was so much antagonism about it.

 

I would insist on going on and doing something, but I wouldn’t keep them. It’s not like I would intentionally destroy them. But it’s like easy to let it slip out of your hands. That’s how it’s manifest.

 

In looking back at all this work, do you have a favourite song?

That’s a difficult question, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know. The other day I was listening and I thought, “What Did I Do” was one I liked very much. But that’s just in passing. I did like, “No, No, No” a lot but now I don’t feel like listening to it. It’s like different times, you know, something fixes in your head. Of course, I did like “Walking on Thin Ice” but [laughs] how long can you like “Walking on Thin Ice”? I got over it.

 

The number nine has been significant in your life, and we’re in the nineties. Are you optimistic about these times, and times to come?

Yeah, I think that we’re going back to a good age. The 1980s were hard because it was a material age and people were just into materialism, I think. But I always liked it that I didn’t go into that expansion thing. I think that this decade people are going to start to sober up a bit, and start to really understand or appreciate the value of real things. So you can’t just con them with a bit of commercial music. People are going to be more interested in real music. Genuine emotion.

 

Do you think songwriters can still write real songs?

We have to strive to be real, that’s all. Being real is not something that just happens to you. You have to sort of keep at it.

 

In “Dogtown” you write about “the true song I never finished writing all my life.” Do you feel that you have finished yet or are you still working on it?

I’m still working [laughs]

 

Do you feel that songs are timeless, and that they can last?

Oh, sure. I think that if you’re really communicating on a basic level, you’re going to be communicating all the time. Once it’s there. Once a song becomes a song, it has its own fate.

 

A Place to Bury Strangers graces us with their presence once again. I'm still surprised this avant garde experimental band comes to St. Louis. The crowd, though not large, understands and appreciates this unique band. You have to see them to understand their artistry and power.

The subtitle of this series is the "madness of photographing in stobe lights". I asked Oliver Ackermann before they played if they were going to have strobes likes the first time I saw them. I just wanted to be ready for them. He laughed and, "Maybe." Oh yes there were strobes and they were even more intense than last time. It was a smaller more independent venue this time and maybe that made it easier to put on the show they REALLY wanted to. Though 60% of my shots were black, I managed to get a few.

 

#amy buxton

#Fall

#St. Louis

#A Place to Bury Strangers

#band

#music

#noise manipulation

#Off Broadway

#wave modulation

#Death By Audio

#Dion Lunadon

#Oliver Ackermann

#experimental rock

#space rock

#strobe light

#strobe

#concert

 

This moving lens test features a long water-trough that sides the start of the main street in the village of Gistain in the Haut-Aragon of Spain. The trough is fed by a natural open tap from a network of deep mountain limestone fissures. I was filming the cold water as it released back into the sun, when the clang of sheep bells turned from a background soundtrack to a chance encounter. The long water-trough took stage for a mixed herd of goats and sheep, stopping in the village for their 'pause for thought', a metaphorical 'cup of coffee' before they continued to the valley... The shepherd asked us to be patient and pointed to alternative paths, but, as with the villagers and some small children, we had stopped and were both watching and listening to the herd's clickle-clackle. As they passed from one mountain meadow to another, they ate anything that was green, so weeds from back corners and geraniums (and some pots) all had to say a goodbye.

 

Your breath is sweet

Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky

Your back is straight, your hair is smooth

On the pillow where you lie

But I don't sense affection

No gratitude or love

Your loyalty is not to me

But to the stars above

 

Although the lyrics of this song describe an asymmetry of affection in an affair, they may also align to a relation with an elemental 'mother earth'. The woman of the song perhaps has the qualities of a realistic mother earth. Mother earth guarding the spirit of life (the moving animate) over death (inanimate), with the liaison between mineral and life-force perhaps occurring in apt landscape features, for example natural 'venus hills' in the configuration of a resting lady.

 

The vast majority of plants and animals from the earth's 'life force' seem to know or subscribe to a narrative of their own... and 'to the stars above'. And as a shepherd looks out over the seasons and the night stars, the blooms of flowers and the insects and birds, he understands that they are alive with him, but not necessarily loyal to him.

 

As the lyrics unfold, the narrative follows a vignette of a wandering lifestyle, a father and generations of ways of being. Dylan sings with his face dusted white (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujgqOgMIwfA) - a gesture recognisable in many native cultures. He wears hand-made and elements of nature that go beyond the freak fantasies of earlier hippy subsets and into a perceived 1970's authenticity of the gypsy and the pastoral. With this performance, Dylan's voice has the oscillation of Iberian moor (audable here with the example of Manolo Caracol www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZMEzU4OxY) and general comparisons can be found with Hendrix's desire for authenticity with his 'Band of Gypsy's' from five years prior and Stevi Nick's work with Fleetwood Mac from around the same period - a 1970s belief in a deep spirituality and authenticity from rural areas and their deep traditions. For another take, Allen Ginsberg's exalted sleeve notes from the original LP talks of ancient blood singing...".

 

Whilst there are no direct references to pastoralism in the song "One more cup of coffee", Dylan has addressed 'mountain sheep' in the track "Ring them bells". My own feeling is that both the footage and the song from the LP 'Desire' grow wider from being set side-by-side.

 

The Live 'Rolling Thunder review' years are documented in this box set: ASIN: B01JT73FYM. The LP version of the same song appeared a year later in 1976, and whilst the violin sound is perhaps improved, I favour this earlier live performance due to the astonishing artful modulations in Dylan's vocal delivery. His sense of the visual seems to open up the very words he sings, presenting their component phonemes as elemental 'objects' to watch and follow.

 

AJM 19.12.19

 

Press play and then 'L' and even f11. Escape and f11 a second time to return.

 

Nectar-bearing information is carried by members of the earth and water elementals, while vibrational-information is conveyed by the elementals of air. The thought energies transferred by the fire elementals, because of the energy’s upward and lightweight composition, are predominantly relayed by means of photosynthesis. All of these energy centers of communication are maintained by the universal astral light which nourishes the elementals who inhabit various parts of nature. The residue left by the scorched wings of the Angels of Light left a harmonic pitch which carries information between the elementals. This modulation is maintained in crystal transceivers within the earth, and relayed by the vibrations between earth’s magnetic poles. The elementals serve as the nerves of the planet using this crystalline harmonic communication to form a candid, botanical parrhesia in which to disseminate the expressions of Gaia.

 

denniscordell.zenfolio.com

 

www.elephantjournal.com/2020/12/some-notes-on-nature-spir...

 

Recently composed this. It's a bare bones version, and uses a chip tune soundfont. May change it up later.

 

For now, enjoy! ;3

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ7TjQsCGkE&feature=youtube_g...

How many notes does it have? Enough. :p

156 W. 44th Street, New York

Continuous Entertainment

Four Little White Pianos

 

Lumitone

CAPA-002959

 

Mailed from New York, New York to George L. Jones at Radio Store in Hazardville, Connecticut on October 22, 1945:

 

Monday Morning 10-22

Dear George: Last nite from my driveway, I worked Jim King - he said I had a very heavy carrier, but my modulation was so down he could barely read me, in fact, we had to sign. I heard him working KZU later. Do you think it's the mike or what?

Regards, Ernie

The science of photonics includes the generation, emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and detection/sensing of light. The term photonics thereby emphasizes that photons are neither particles nor waves — they are different in that they have both particle and wave nature. It covers all technical applications of light over the whole spectrum from ultraviolet over the visible to the near-, mid- and far-infrared. Most applications, however, are in the range of the visible and near infrared light. The term photonics developed as an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s and optical fibers developed in the 1970s.

 

~~~~~

  

yes i am on tumblr

 

buy prints!

Or: How to change your mind, with psychedelics and optogenetics.

 

Genevieve introduced the closing keynote for the PSFC Summit today: Karl Deisseroth is the pioneer of the mind-reading and writing tool (optogenetics.org at Stanford) that allows for individual neuron targeting and manipulation, and his new work looks at the effects of mind-altering drugs on brain function in detail.

 

For a sense of the power of his methods: he can take a pair of mice than were just mating happily, and with a flip of a switch, they become violent to each other. He made a mouse walk in an infinite left turn loop when a fiber optic is flipped on in the motor cortex (with no apparent awareness or distress at being controlled this way). Another team selectively turned on subsets of parenting behavior (like bringing wandering young back to the nest or grooming behaviors). They can also probe three different sub-states of anxiety that we only experience as a bundle.

 

How does this work? Before the plant kingdom evolved chlorophyll to harvest energy from sunlight, the more ancient bacteria used rhodopsins in a membrane-bound proton-pump to do the same. The rhodopsins captured a swath of the sun’s spectrum, tilting the algae to the leftover parts of the spectrum not yet absorbed, and this is why plants are green. Karl introduced these bacterial light-triggered elements into neurons of interest using a viral vector to the brain. He can then trigger neuronal firing optically, as the rhodopsin pump supplements the ion channels in the neuron. He can also trigger reporter molecules from the bacterial world to read out brain activity as the brain is functioning.

 

So, for example, he has observed a 3 Hz cycling in the retrosplenial cortex of a mouse brain on ketamine, and he has been able to reproduce the effects with optogenetic stimulation to achieve similar effects. He has also found that the dissociative drugs (ketamine and PCP) allow for reflexes to pain (e.g., heat on paw or puff of air to eyes) to continue normally, while the protective cognitive reactions (licking the paws after heat or squinting in anticipation of the next puff) disappear, a disassociation of mind and body reflexes.

 

He is diving deeper into the brain to investigate how this works, finding that the various subregions of the thalamus are regulated by disassociative drugs by overpowering the voting circuits with a pulsing 3 Hz modulation of the ketamine-enhanced circuits. The other nodes in the thalamus are operating as before, but do not achieve as powerful a consensus. The thalamus regulates where we spend our attention and conscious focus, to avoid doing everything we might be tempted to do simultaneously, and thereby not really doing any of them well.

 

In his latest work, he has found that MDMA operates very differently than Ketamine (work to be published later this year).

 

The implications of this level of understanding are enormous. The questions we can now ask using optogenetics will transform how we understand mental disorders and also call into question some deep philosophical questions surrounding consciousness and free will. It may also unveil the mysteries about how psychedelics operate in the brain, allowing us to optimize the use cases for testing in human clinical trials. Exciting work is going on with psilocybin for alcohol use disorder, extreme OCD and the eating disorders (which are also a disassociation of mind from body).

 

Location: Olaiya Street, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

 

About: Geometrical shapes is one of the important features in the Modern Architecture... For More info. if you are interested about Modernism Movement Wikipedia

 

Software: Lightroom

 

Explore:#74 on Monday, October 26, 2009