“I close my eyes, only for a moment, and the moment’s gone 

All my dreams, pass before my eyes, a curiosity 

Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind…”

(“Dust In The Wind”, Kansas – Lyrics by Kerry Livgren)

This picture belongs to the series shot in my street in Varanasi (Benaras) while four men were emptying plaster bags from a truck.

It was very dusty, although they reminded me “butoh” dancers performing with white-body makeup.

This japonese contemporary dance came after the second world war and among several things the choreography is a remembrance of the suffering of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb.

It rises the question of how is it still possible to dance after such a thing and in some ways it is easy to compare this concept of art to those workers living in dust.

Stephane from Scrap Coloring is using the bird for an online colourbook app for children. Check it out. And if your child loves drawing, then remember to bookmark the site. It’s a great resource for children learning art.

despite what the the thermometers say, we are nearing december. we’re nearing the end of the term…i have a lot of blogging to catch up on. i also have a fair bit of marking to do. and a research proposal on my back. and that’s just in the next few days.

the blogging will come again, shortly, once i stop thinking about the irish o’quebec and starting thinking about last week’s class. but in the meantime, i needed a break, and i felt like sharing something pretty.

this is a most magical calendar, produced by atherton lin
out of london (england). it’s a way of re-imaging time and space, i guess. but perhaps that’s a stretch. perhaps, it’s just a very pretty calendar.

Kind yellow rain wakes.
Your heaven roughly finds spring.
Hairs move the lovers.

Ugly armies run.
A blackly walked star flutters.
Mud kisses vampires.

The papers flutter.
Triumphs break but wonder turns.
False girls fear petals.

Tough green beast wake.
Triumphs slickly wake stanzas.
Landscapes leave midnight.

Hard green autumn turns.
Shadows fall and cold loiters.
A young grotto burns.

Tough yellow mud plays.
Happiness walks for girls burn.
Wisdom carouses.

The shadows loiter.
Asses sing and poisons wait.
Love eats eagerness.

Silver gold stars walk.
Walked mouths kindly twist a pear.
Soft tall birds loiter.

“Dancers are the messengers of the gods. ” 
(Martha Graham – American dancer and choreographer, 1894-1991)

This series of pictures was shot last afternoon in my street in Varanasi (Benaras).
Men were emptying plaster bags from a truck.
I was in rush but I sopped and took several pictures, my enchanted mind decided that the truck would become a theatre stage while those workers happened to be “butoh” dancers performing.

“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
(Martin Luther King, Jr. – American Baptist Minister and Civil-Rights Leader. 1929-1968)

This is one more picture from the serie shot last afternoon in my street in Varanasi (Benaras).
Men were emptying plaster bags from a truck and they were reminding me “butoh” dancers.

“For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. 
As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. 
Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. 
Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.”
(Eugene Ionesco – French dramatist, 1909-1994)

This afternoon nearby the house in Varanasi (Benaras), those men were emptying a truck.
They seemed to be out of this world and they reminded me Butoh dancers “performing” in white-body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion.

“When your intellect will completely pierce the veil of delusion, then you will become indifferent to what has been heard and what is to be heard [from the scriptures].”
(Bhagavad Gita)

This man was taking a break as he kept on emptying plaster bags from a truck which stopped in my street in Varanasi (Benaras).
The amazing light and the dust gave a theatrical touch to what became my subject for a short while.
He was tired and I could se sweat melting with plaster on his skin, his expression could be taken for the state of piercing the veil of delusion…

Has anybody (aside from me) ever wondered why so many teas are named after colours? We’ve got Orange Pekoe, Green Tea, Earl Grey … Apparently there is even blue tea and as we all know, when some teas are well-steeped we call it black tea. Rooibos is often called Red Tea, we’ve got White Tea, even the rare Yellow Tea.

So let’s see: we’ve got red, orange, yellow, green, and blue … Even grey and white (and black, sort of). And the Famous Five are famous for their ‘pink teas’ (which I realize were events and not a type of tea). All we’re missing is purple tea!

BUT WAIT!

THERE’S MORE!

YES, THAT’S RIGHT – PURPLE TEA EXISTS. Or so they claim.

Anyway. Has anyone else ever noticed this? Can you think of any other teas named after a colour?

This has been “Talking Tea” with Amy.

Found objects from the Gower coastline. The tiny Teddy Bear with his red hat was washed up on Rhossili beach – see the picture below for how he looked when I found him. He now lives comfortably dry in the bowl shaped remains of a metal fishing float that I picked up on Whiteford Sands – “La Coquille” is embossed on the outer surface. The corrosion gives a rough weathered textural surface to the float; and inside there is a series of radiating ribs that make an interesting pattern. I used the piece of bright blue and yellow discarded fishing rope to carry the float home.

Poor Teddy!

 © Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

Are you ready to revise colors? Click here and play this game.

I had uploaded a lot more pictures, but they keep disappearing. So this will have to do.

This boy was standing a tthe entrance of the little akhara which is near Aurangzeb’s mosque in Kashi, the oldest part of Varanasi (Benaras). 
That afternoon the temperature reached 48° and he was trying to get some freshness under this piece of cloth.
He was waiting for his father who was training nearby.
We talked with eyes only, I was trying to understand all that he was thinking under this veil.

“What happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the power to speak out.” (John Pilger)

From this side of the Mediterranean sea we’ve often heard about people blowing themselves. Media have been calling it “terrorism”.

For many, the realization that Palestine has been reduced to a cage by Israel for such a long time explains the existence of hate and regret and their armed drift.

The point is that the abuse of force made by the IDF has not created another drift, not certainly a defence, but a slaughter.

Israel was born from the dust of the Holocaust and that’s what underlines the entire paradox. It was decided and placed there and it surely was not meant to be an occupation (or was it?), but it clearly came out to be so, even bloody and cruel.

In these past days, I’ve seen the atrocity of some human beings using an “illegal” (the paradox in the paradox) weapon of mass destruction on other human beings, so the fact that such a shame is (still) a possibility.

When I look at the map of Israel and Palestine I also see the past tense of everyone who was involved in the 2ndWW, so then our sense of justice in a present tense.

It’s not just by chance that we can find a bunch of american outposts in Italy too. They surely have a nuclear arsenal there, even though we, the people, are not supposed to care or even know about it.

Italy is -somehow- a part of the west side of the world and that’s another thing that would require a deep historical analysis of facts and ideologies. For example, “they” want to get more oil from the Adriatic sea now by now and they don’t give a shit to what people, even those living by the coast, think. Many of us (the people) cannot keep thoughts in a such claustrophobic theatre and let them be part of a whole, the World, who’s talking about human rights and so on.

_
“Israel is of no use to anybody or anything but its own fantasies of domination” is the one thing i don’t really see. I’ve got to know how much an israeli can be impassable and zionism true as an illegal settlement, but i can’t understand how this could come out as the use of weapons like “Willy Pete” (the white phosphorus already used by the U.S. army in Vietnam and also by the israeli in Lebanon) if there was no relation to the U.S. economy, assuming that war can be seen by various points of view and that the economical one has always had a primary (even if hidden) role, as much as weapons can be sold and part of the american nuclear arsenal was set in Italy at the end of the 2ndWW.

Said so, I feel like I was a wounded kid in Babylon right now and even though I have my voice to rise, I try to keep it inside to do not cry, concentrating myself on reading and sharing and thanking everyone who’s active on making a future of peace sound true.

–

I think there’s a huge paradox in the international sense of civilty that’s been establisheb for ages: it’s the regulation of war, that makes it look like something that simply need to be regulated and not as something just wrong. When I hear or read the definition “war crimes” i see this paradox very clear. Imho, war itself is a crime against humanity.

—

La guerra è guerra ed è talmente istituzionalizzata che a livello internazionale esistono delle leggi che la regolamentano. Prima di essere una forza d’occupazione capace di ridurre la Palestina all’orrore più totale con l’uso massificato e massiccio di armi hightech (che dio se esiste sa bene da dove sono arrivate), Israele è stato una decisione presa a tavolino alla fine della 2^g.m., sulle ceneri dell’olocausto! E’ saltata la valvola di una pentola a pressione epocale e ad essere “in pericolo” sono anche le basi della nostra stessa civiltà.
Il paradosso nel paradosso sta nel fatto che esista una definizione come “crimini di guerra” e che la guerra in sè e per sè non venga considerata un crimine contro l’umanità.

—-

History is wider and deeper than the propaganda on terrorism, but it is as much bloody and cruel. Too damn much. War is never a solution, it is just a matter of imperialism. No anger, no regret, no revenge, not even defence can ever justify a genocide. Nazism is not just a ghost, we are not blind. It is time for a very deep change, for a safe and fair new world.

(26 gennaio 2009)

Oslobodjenje Building - Sarajevo, 1999

Pink Spirit

Die Anzahl unserer Neider bestätigen unsere Fähigkeiten.

Oskar Wilde

*

Um ponto de destaque em um visual casual cria um detalhe exclusivo. Tons de Rosa nas calças compridas são um bom exemplo disso. O rosa é uma cor super feminina. Faça uso dela. Uma bela aparência faz você tratar-se melhor e querer coisas melhores para si. Seu corpo é o conteúdo que deve ser valorizado pelas roupas que você veste.

A high point in a casual visual detail creates a unique. Shades of Pink in trousers are a good example. The pink is a color super feminine. Make use of it. A beautiful appearance makes you treat yourself better and want better things for you. Your body is the content that should be valued by the clothes you wear.

White Moments

Natürlicher Verstand kann fast jeden Grad von Bildung ersetzen,

aber keine Bildung den natürlichen Verstand.

Arthur Schopenhauer

*

]]> http://karlaburns.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/bicycle-film-festival-09-trailer/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:33:53 +0000 karlaburns http://karlaburns.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/bicycle-film-festival-09-trailer/

I adore this video, it is absolutely amazing, I was so excited when I first saw it. The Bicycle Film Festival ‘09 trailer was created by Marco Mucig. It is such an innovative and interesting way of presenting type, and presenting a title of an event. The layout and flow is effortless, and it looks so simple but this is what makes it so visually appealing, it just pulls you in right up until the final second. The set up of the frames are gorgeous, the use of light adds to the vibrancy of the scenes. It is just a highly polished, quirky piece of video, that is exciting from start to finish. Marco Mucig has a very ecclective selection of his work on his website, which is a visual explosion of colour and illustration it is absolutely stunning work, check it out HERE!

Gasoline spill on an Ottawa road yields wonderful metallic colours.

Web site: www.robhuntley.ca
Click on the image to go straight to the same image on my website.

  Ah, colours…isn’t this why we turn to painting ? Who doesn’t love them. Whether it’s the colours of the rainbow or black and white or the many shades of grey, plus all the other shades that you sometimes cannot put a name to, we artists love ‘em all !! Put down the right colours in the right tone and shape on your canvas, and voila… a lovely picture shines back at you ! A signature in yet another colour, claiming joyfully that YOU made that pretty painting, is all the steam you need to press on to your next one !