JR exhibits his photographs in the biggest art gallery on the planet. His work is presented freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not museum visitors. His work mixes Art and Action; it talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xVNFEvC5ns]
JR’s career as a photographer began when he found a camera in the Paris subway. In his first major project, in 2001 and 2002, JR toured and photographed street art around Europe, tracking the people who communicate their messages to the world on walls. His first large-format postings began appearing on walls in Paris and Rome in 2003. His first book, Carnet de rue par JR, about street artists, appeared in 2005.
In 2006, he launched “Portrait of a Generation,” huge-format portraits of suburban “thugs” from Paris’ notorious banlieues, posted on the walls of the bourgeois districts of Paris. This illegal project became official when Paris City Hall wrapped its own building in JR’s photos.
In 2007, with business partner Marco, he did “Face 2 Face,” which some consider the biggest illegal photo exhibition ever. JR and a grassroots team of community members posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on both sides of the security fence/separation barrier.
He embarked on a long international trip in 2008 for his exhibition “Women Are Heroes,” a project underlining the dignity of women who are the target of conflict. In 2010, the film Women Are Heroes was presented at the Cannes Film Festival and received a long standing ovation.
JR is currently working on two projects: “Wrinkles of the City,” which questions the memory of a city and its inhabitants; and Unframed, which reinterprets famous photographs and photographers by taking photos from museum archives and exposing them to the world as huge-format photos on the walls of cities. It asks the question: What is the art piece then? The original photo, the photo “unframed” by JR or both?
JR creates pervasive art that spreads uninvited on buildings of Parisian slums, on walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa or in favelas in Brazil. People in the exhibit communities, those who often live with the bare minimum, discover something absolutely unnecessary but utterly wonderful. And they don’t just see it, they make it. Elderly women become models for a day; kids turn into artists for a week. In this art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators.
After these local exhibitions, two important things happen: The images are transported to London, New York, Berlin or Amsterdam where new people interpret them in the light of their own personal experience. And ongoing art and craft workshops in the originating community continue the work of celebrating everyone who lives there.
As he is anonymous and doesn’t explain his huge full-frame portraits of people making faces, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passerby/ interpreter.
This is what JR is working on: raising questions…
Portrait of JR photo credit: © Christopher Shay Original link and copy for this page (with more images) at TED.
In the city of Tarragona, Spain, castellers gather every two years to see who can build the highest, most intricate human castles. Pretty intense place, Catalonia. The tradition of building human towers originated in Valls, near the city of Tarragona, in the southern part of Catalonia towards the end of the 18th century. Later it developed a following in other regions of Catalonia even Majorca and, after prohibition under Franco, currently has become very popular in parts of Spain. However, the best and most skilled castellers are still found near Tarragona.
Check Mike Randolph's pics (like this one) - amaaaazing! He also took this video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1HWyUIZ5kk]
The motto of castellers is "Força, equilibri, valor i seny" (Strength, balance, courage and reason).
* Strength: A casteller is usually a stocky person. The first castellers were peasants that were accustomed to holding great weights and were under much physical exertion. * Balance: For supporting other above in the castell while relying on those below for support requires a strong sense of balance and trust. * Courage: The most important characteristic for castellers, especially for young children forming the highest levels of the castell. * Reason: Rehearsing and performing requires a great deal of planning and reasoning. Any error can cause the structure fail and break apart.
There's a good explanation of the different types (with pics) here.
Fog and mist are both made of tiny water droplets suspended in air. The difference between them is the density of the droplets. Fog is denser so contains more water droplets than mist.
Our atmosphere is made up of many gases, one of which is water vapour. It can hold a certain amount of water as invisible water vapour at any given temperature. If air is cooled it can hold less water and becomes super saturated. At saturation point, some of the water has to condense to form water droplets, which forms cloud.
Radiation fog Radiation fog is formed on clear, still nights when the ground loses heat by radiation, and cools. The ground in turn cools the nearby air to saturation point, thus forming fog. Often the fog remains patchy and is confined to low ground, but sometimes it becomes more dense and widespread through the night.
Ideal conditions for the formation of this type of fog are light winds, clear skies and long nights. Consequently, in the UK, the months of November, December and January are most prone to foggy conditions, particularly the inland areas of England and lowlands of Scotland in high pressure conditions.
After dawn, fog tends to disperse because it is 'burnt off' by the incoming solar radiation, some of which penetrates the fog and reaches the ground. The ground heats up, as does the layer of air near it. Eventually the air reaches a temperature where the minute fog droplets evaporate and the visibility improves. However, in winter fogs can be very persistent.
Advection fog Advection fog is formed when very mild moist air moves over a cold ground. This can often happen in early spring in the UK when mild southwesterly winds moving across the country over snowy or icy ground. The lower layers of the air get cooled down rapidly to below the temperature at which fog forms.
Hill fog Hill fog or upslope fog, as its name implies, is formed as mild moist air is forced to ascend a hill or mountain range. As the air moves up the windward side of the mountain it cools down, and again if the air becomes saturated then cloud is formed which, if below the top of the hills, gives fog.
Coastal fog Some coastal regions of the British Isles suffer from 'sea fog' which forms when moist air is cooled to saturation point by travelling over a cooler sea. The wind may then take the fog into coastal regions. This type of fog tends to occur in spring and Summer, and particularly affects south western and North Sea coasts.
Steam fog 'Steam fog' is sometimes seen rising from the ground after a shower. If the ground is warm, the water from the shower may evaporate. If the air above it is saturated and cannot hold any more water, the excess moisture condenses and looks like steam. This 'steaming' can also be seen at the Poles, when cold air sweeps over a slightly warmer sea. The sea warms the air a little and some water evaporates. The warmer damper air then rises, cools again and the moisture condenses.
Freezing fog Freezing fog is made of supercooled water droplets (i.e. ones which remain liquid even though the temperature is below freezing-point). One of the characteristics of freezing fog is that rime - feathery ice crystals - is deposited on the windward side of vertical surfaces such as lamp-posts, fence-posts, overhead wires, pylons and transmitting masts.
ps - if it's foggy and you're driving in the countryside, don't put your headlamps on full beam because it reflects in the water droplets and dazzles you. Which is scary. And sort of looks like aliens are coming to get you.
I've blogged a few nuggets by Slovenian philosopher Zlavod Zizek a couple of times before (once on the hypocrisy of conscious consumerism, once on America's own problems with fundamentalists). Now it's time to listen to him on love.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg7qdowoemo&w=700]
The man
does not
hold back.
"Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures."
Hmm.
Anyway, if you liked that, you might like this article by Kathleen O'Dwyer, which goes into a little more detail on his thoughts on and attempts at unraveling the nature of love. Here's a taster from the intro:
The postmodern psychoanalyst-philosopher Slavoj Žižek is noted for his flamboyant style, his embrace of contradiction, and his often controversial exposure of the dualities, deceptions and disavowals which characterize contemporary culture. Reflecting on these aspects of Žižek’s work, his biographer Tony Myers states that “Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher. He is, however, no ordinary philosopher, for he thinks and writes in such a recklessly entertaining fashion, he constantly risks making philosophy enjoyable.” What makes Žižek different from ‘ordinary philosophers’, according to Myers, is his persistent sense of wonder and amazement, which he expresses in a limitless questioning of everything: “With all the guile of a child asking his parents why the sky is blue, Žižek questions everything that passes for wisdom about who we are, what we are doing and why we do it.” As an astute commentator on historical and contemporary disasters and difficulties, Žižek examines political, social and individual issues with a combination of philosophical reflection and cultural analysis. One such issue is the concept of neighbourly love.
Žižek’s analysis of the Christian injunction ‘to love one’s neighbour as oneself’ queries both its possibility and its expediency. His argument centres on the assertions that the universal love so promoted disavows that which is unlovable in human nature, and that love must in some sense be an autonomous decision (simply, that love cannot be commanded)...[read the rest here]
France, 2005. Copyright me.
Charles Bukowski, born in 1920, began writing at a young age and was first published in the 1940s. Then Bukowksi gave up writing for the world of work and bars, not publishing, not writing, so the myth goes, for nearly twenty years. Ten of those years were spent roaming from odd job to odd roominghouse from the East coast to the West. The other ten years, Bukowski worked for the United States Postal Service in Los Angeles, a job that took no effort except for the strength to show up and the patience to perform mindless operations. During that time, his life bordered on insanity and death, two prevalent themes in his writing. According to his own myth making, Bukowski returned to writing the day that he quit the Postal Service, but his bibliography shows that indeed, he had been publishing several years before that. “Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.”
“Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.”
“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
“Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live”
“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
“There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.”
“There are worse things than being alone,”
“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
“It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.”
“To do a dull thing with style-now THAT'S what I call art.”
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
“Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.”
Shoes by Charles Bukowski when you're young a pair of female high-heeled shoes just sitting alone in the closet can fire your bones; when you're old it's just a pair of shoes without anybody in them and just as well.
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[[ps - please check out some of my other quote collections here - The Guy Quote]]
Life as seen through the Facebook interface. Very good short made by Maxime Luere (pinched off Felix's blog). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2n8Ma7y4-I]
(thanks Henry)
This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. Click HERE or on the image to see the full, interactive version. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble. You might also see multiple bubbles for certain supplements. These is because some supplements affect a range of conditions, but the evidence quality varies from condition to condition. For example, there’s strong evidence that Green Tea is good for cholesterol levels, but evidence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting.
On the right (once you click through to the full version on InformationIsBeautiful) there's a little tab that says "show me". Click that to navigate different conditions and so on.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr8N7JuhFTM]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr8N7JuhFTM]
Spotted by @jamesreilley on WetJetSet.
After spending time in Shanghai, french photographer Alain Delorme expresses what he saw culturally with his latest exhibition, Totems at the Magda Dansyz Gallery. Each photo displays enormous stacks of goods piled and carried around the urban grid. By people, rickshaw or wagon each stack suggests a supernatural ability and slight obsession.
Cast your mind back. Back. Little bit further. Good. Elizabethan England. Henry VIII and his split from the church in Rome wasn't all that long ago. Catholics v Protestants in fanatical ideological struggles (you would be passionate too if your immortal soul was on the line), and the Catholics had definitely got the shitty end of the stick. They had been fiercely persecuted under Elizabeth I, though not without provocation, as a series of plots and attacks - among them the war with Spain - sought to oust her and bring Catholicism back to Britain. The declaration that Catholic Mass was illegal though, predates the Spanish Armada.
When she died in 1603, English Catholics hoped that her successor, James I, would be more forgiving. His mum, after all, was Catholic. They were wrong though (it's more complicated than that, obviously, but read this to find out more), and a group of 13 men came together under the leadership of Robert Catesby to do something about it. Their plan? Blow up the House of Lords. They'd get James I, a whole bunch of MPs who hated them, maybe even the Prince of Wales too for good measure.
Does this ring any bells? It should. Religion polarising people to such an extent that a fanatical, disaffected group comes together to make a stand - violence their final recourse. It could be modern-day London, Washington, you name it. Then they were conspirators, today they'd be terrorists. But it's hard not to have some sympathy for their cause.
The conspirators got hold of 36 barrels of gunpowder, enough to pulverise the House of Lords, and stored them in a cellar just under the building. Guy Fawkes, who had 10 years of military experience fighting in the Spanish Netherlands in suppression of the Dutch Revolt, was given charge of the explosives. But as the group worked on the plot, it became clear that innocent people would be hurt or killed in the attack, including some people who even fought for more rights for Catholics. Some of the plotters started having second thoughts. One of the group members even sent an anonymous letter warning his friend, Lord Monteagle, to stay away from the Parliament on November 5th (though this may have been a fake).
The warning letter reached the King, and the King's forces made plans to stop the conspirators. At midnight on 4 November, 1605, they stormed the cellars and caught Fawkes. Most of the conspirators fled London, trying to enlist support along the way. Several made a stand against the pursuing Sheriff of Worcester and his men at Holbeche House; in the ensuing battle Catesby was one of those shot and killed. At their trial on 27 January 1606, eight of the survivors, including Fawkes, were convicted and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
The Gunpowder Plot struck a very profound chord for the people of England. In fact, even today, the reigning monarch only enters the Parliament once a year, on what is called "the State Opening of Parliament". Prior to the Opening, and according to custom, the Yeomen of the Guard search the cellars of the Palace of Westminster. Nowadays, the Queen and Parliament still observe this tradition. On the very night that the plot was foiled, bonfires were set alight to celebrate the safety of the King. The thwarting of the event was for years commemorated with church services, bell ringing and burning effigies of Guy Fawkes on a bonfire - hence today's Guy Fawkes Night.
Are we partying in support of Fawkes' execution or honoring his attempt to do away with the government? Perhaps it doesn't really matter any more - politics have always been best sanitised by masquerading as a celebration.
In Lewes, fireworks night is a bit darker than at other paces. Bonfire societies parade down the streets in costumes, lighting fireworks, burning crosses and effigies as they go, all under the "no popery" standard. The event's roots commemorate the burning of 17 Protestant martyrs by Catholics in the 16th century. Now, as well as the Pope and Guy Fawkes, you'll see tableux and effigies of modern day baddies being burnt - George Bush, Saddam, even John Prescott. It's an annual day of misrule, the costumes were originally to stop participants being recognised. Of course, while it's not exactly politically correct, it's hugely popular. If it does get shut down, it'll probably because so many people go that Lewes can't cope, not because we don't want to see Iranian presidents being chucked on bonfires.
Now watch this, it's worth it:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIF63jhRQcw]
...and he ROCKS.
I wouldn't sleep there if I were you... [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZJf0yWUYjA]
There's an app for that (and other things that rhyme with @)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhkxDIr0y2U]
