Consider the trees

Consider the trees which allow the birds to perch and fly away without either inviting them to stay or desiring them never to depart. If your heart can be like this, you will be near to the Way.
 

Zen saying

Won't let go

I remember
how seeing the shape of your mouth
that first time, I kept staring
until my blood turned to rain.

Some things take root
in the brain and just don’t
let go.
 

T.S. Eliot, Slow Dance

Are you there?

Except for the tacky setting...beautiful

Yes, I’ve seen the works of a great civilization; I’ve seen your skyscrapers, your subways, and your Internet cafés, but why have I yet to meet any of your civilized persons? I only encounter specialists, artists who know nothing of science, scientists who know nothing of art, philosophers who have no interest in God … and politicians who only know other politicians.

W.H. Auden on what an ancient Athenian would say while being led through NY today

Naked Nude

To be naked is to be oneself.

To be nude is to be seen naked by others

and yet not recognized as oneself.

A naked body has to be seen as an object

in order to become a nude.

Nakedness reveals itself.

Nudity is placed on display.

To be naked is to be without disguise.

To be on display is to have the surface

of one’s own skin,

the hairs of one’s own body,

turned into a disguise which,

in that situation, can never be discarded.

The nude is condemned to never being naked.

Nudity is a form of dress.

 John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Episode 2 (1972)

Nude Naked

Roman curse tablet from Bath, England.

The beautiful. The tragic. The miraculous

The best part of all this. The beautiful, miraculous part of all this is the continuing belief that an innocent new-born child has just come into the World to sacrifice itself for us. A compelling and glorious desire.

What cannot be said will be wept.

Sappho

Never leave home without it

Beautiful Frida

So , so true

"Nobody really knows or understands and nobody has ever said the secret. The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest of all things to do."
Ernest Hemingway

As in all...yes?

"I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it."

Federico Fellini 

These wrinkles are nothing
These gray hairs are nothing,
This stomach which sags
with old food, these bruised
and swollen ankles,
my darkening brain,
they are nothing.
I am the same boy
my mother used to kiss.

Mark Strand
from “Selected Poems”

"It's beginning to look alot like..."

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu

“ To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. ” - Aristotle

Salman Rushdie

“Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.”

— Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

I adore this movie

American military installations around the world-amazing- PAX AMERICANA

http://empire.is/

The Great American Artform

Dec 13 2013 @ 6:16pm

Ads:

The preliminary report, a joint effort of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and National Endowment for the Arts, reveals that advertising dwarfs the economic clout of every single other creative endeavor, followed by arts education in a distant second place. The report finds that the total size of the arts and culture economy is 3.2 percent of GDP, coming in at $504 billion. In the broader leisure economy, the report notes, this sector supplants travel and tourism, which clocks in at 2.8 percent of GDP. The report also finds that the national economic recovery has lagged, jobs-wise, in the culture sector.
That advertising is a major fiscal engine should of course not be terribly surprising, but the small size of the “Independent artists and performing arts” ($48.9 billion) compared to the “Arts education” category ($104 billion) should provide some pause as far as the economic linkage that exists between arts education and the production of what we consider high (or “fine”) art: teaching art — i.e. the promise of art — is a more lustrous pearl than the actual messy business of producing it.

Chirurgia - Roger Frugard of Parma Chirurgia - 1st quarter of the 14th century, France

Jerry Saltz on the Met’s Incredible Boxer at Rest Sculpture

Jerry Saltz on the Met’s Incredible Boxer at Rest Sculpture

Thanks Kadi

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.

-Margaret Wheatley

Breathtaking

Yasmin Warsame

ahem

the price of living with other people...

Damn

Point taken

Now that's a faculty

    The Master on the roof of the Bauhaus building in Dessau, from left: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Oskar Schlemmer.

Top 10 Lost Technologies | Top 10 Lists | TopTenz.net

Well,well,well.

Three Rockwell Classics Bring Nearly $57.8 Million

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: December 4, 2013

Three paintings by Norman Rockwell celebrating homey, small-town America, among the most popular of his 322 covers for The Saturday Evening Post, sold at Sotheby’s on Wednesday morning for a total of nearly $57.8 million, about twice their high estimate.

Enlarge This Image

The Saturday Evening Post Illustration, owned by SEPS. Licensed by Curtis Licensing.

Norman Rockwell's "Saying Grace" appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on Nov. 24, 1951.

Enlarge This Image

The Saturday Evening Post Illustration, owned by SEPS. Licensed by Curtis Licensing.

“The Gossips” ran on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on March 6, 1948.

Enlarge This Image

The Saturday Evening Post Illustration, owned by SEPS. Licensed by Curtis Licensing.

Rockwell based “Walking to Church” on a Vermeer painting, “The Little Street,” translating the scene to fit his idealized vision of an urban street scene.

The auction house’s York Avenue salesroom in Manhattan, filled with American art dealers and collectors, went dead quiet while a tense nine-and-a-half-minute bidding battle played out for “Saying Grace,” one of Rockwell’s best-loved scenes. It brought $46 million, well over its high estimate of $20 million and the most ever paid at auction for his work.

Two contenders on different telephones — one represented by Elizabeth Goldberg, director of American art for Sotheby’s, and the other, Yasuaki Ishizaka, managing director of Sotheby’s Japan — tried to buy the painting, which ended up selling to Ms. Goldberg’s unidentified client.

The 1951 oil, which depicts a boy and an elderly woman bowing their heads in prayer at a diner, topped a 1955 readers’ poll at The Saturday Evening Post four years after it appeared. (The magazine paid Rockwell $3,500 for the cover painting, equivalent to about $30,500 today.) Wednesday’s auction price smashed the previous high flyer, “Breaking Home Ties,” depicting a fresh-faced boy leaving home for the first time, which brought $15.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2006.

Another favorite, “The Gossips,” a finger-wagging montage of friends, neighbors and Rockwell himself, was expected to bring $6 million to $9 million but was snapped up for $8.45 million by another telephone bidder. When the image ran on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on March 6, 1948, the magazine was flooded with inquiries from readers wanting to know what the heads were gossiping about.

The third canvas, “Walking to Church,” sold for $3.2 million to Rick Lapham, an American paintings dealer who said he bought it for a client. Mr. Lapham was one of only two bidders for the painting, from the April 4, 1953, cover of The Post. Rockwell based its composition on a Vermeer painting, “The Little Street,” translating the scene to fit his idealized vision of an urban street scene, with family members in their Easter best, each clutching Bibles. He used a composite of different buildings in Troy, N.Y., and a church steeple in Vermont. The painting sold for $3.2 million with fees. It had been expected to fetch $3 million to $5 million. Asked why there was not more competition for the painting, Mr. Lapham replied, “It’s stylistically different,” referring to Rockwell’s translation of an old master painting.

(Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent of the first $100,000; 20 percent from $100,000 to $2 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

All three paintings had belonged to the magazine’s longtime art director, Kenneth J. Stuart, who had received them as presents from Rockwell while the two men worked together, from World War II to the eve of the Vietnam War. And Wednesday’s auction was the final chapter in years of bitter legal battles. When Stuart died in 1993, he left his entire estate to his sons — Ken Jr., William and Jonathan — in equal shares. But shortly after his death, William and Jonathan sued their older brother, Ken Jr., claiming that he had taken advantage of their ailing father, forcing him to sign papers to gain control of the fortune and contending that Ken Jr. had used estate assets for his own expenses.

The brothers, who were secreted in a skybox above Sotheby’s salesroom watching the proceedings, only recently settled out of court.

Until the Rockwell works arrived at Sotheby’s this fall, they had been on loan to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., for the past 18 years. But during Stuart’s lifetime, “Saying Grace” had adorned his office at The Post, and when he left the magazine, it hung in the family’s living room in Wilton, Conn. “Walking to Church” had been in the bedroom of Stuart’s wife, Katharine. (He never hung “The Gossips,” according to his children.) Wednesday’s auction also included several works on paper by Rockwell, also from the Stuarts. Top among them was a color study for “Breaking Home Ties,” from 1954, which brought $905,000, more than three times its $300,000 high estimate. Again, the buyer was bidding by telephone.

Who bought the works remains a mystery. Sotheby’s isn’t saying, nor are the buyers. Among this country’s top Rockwell collectors are the filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, as well as the businessman H. Ross Perot and Alice L. Walton, the Walmart heiress. None could be spotted in the audience or in any of Sotheby’s skyboxes.

Jonathan Stuart said that he had no clue who bought the family’s artworks, but he said everyone was “very happy, exhilarated.”

“We set an American art record,” he added, referring to the $46 million sale of “Saying Grace,” which Sotheby’s was touting as the highest price ever paid for a painting at an American art auction. “It’s be

oh

"claiming Egypt was other than African"

EUROPEANS TAUGHT FOR CENTURIES that Africa had no written history, literature or philosophy (claiming Egypt was other than African). When roughly 1 MILLION manuscripts were found in Timbuktu/Mali covering , according to Reuters “all the fields of human knowledge: law, the sciences, medicine,” IT DID NOT MAKE MAINSTREAM NEWS as did the lies taught by Europeans concerning Africa

Someone asked me to somehow “verify” that this story is real.
Of course it’s real! The PROBLEM with the coverage regarding these manuscripts is that they’re constantly portrayed as being in “danger” because many of them are still in the possession of Malian descendants. About 700,000 have been cataloged so far, and they have had to be moved in part because apparently extremist groups have tried to firebomb them. Many others are still in the possession of the families they have been passed down in.
Many of these collected manuscripts are being housed in exile, but mold and humidity have been a constant threat. They have been raising funds to try and preserve these manuscripts-you can read more about the project to house and protect them here.
A bit of the history of these manuscripts from National Geographic:

These sacred manuscripts covered an array of subjects: astronomy, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, judicial law, government, and Islamic conflict resolution. Islamic study during this period of human history, when the intellectual evolution had stalled in the rest of Europe was growing, evolving, and breaking new ground in the fields of science, mathematics, astronomy, law, and philosophy within the Muslim world.
By the 1300s the “Ambassadors of Peace” centered around the University of Timbuktu created roving scholastic campuses and religious schools of learning that traveled between the cities of Timbuktu, Gao, and Djénné, helping to serve as a model of peaceful governance throughout an often conflict-riddled tribal region.
At its peak, over 25,000 students attended the University of Timbuktu.
By the beginning of the 1600s with the Moroccan invasions from the north, however, the scholars of Timbuktu began to slowly drift away and study elsewhere. As a result, the city’s sacred manuscripts began to fall into disrepair. While Islamic teachings there continued for another 300 years, the biggest decline in scholastic study occurred with the French colonization of present-day Mali in the late 1890s.

So yeah, basically the story of this collection’s source more or less ends with “…but unfortunately, colonialism”, as do most of the great cities of Africa, the Americas, and some parts of Asia.
Also, as an additional consideration:

With the pressures of poverty, a series of droughts, and a tribal Tureg rebellion in Mali that lasted over ten years, the manuscripts continue to disappear into the black market, where they are illegally sold to private and university collections in Europe and the United States.

Notice where the blame is placed here via language use: on the people in poverty forced to sell their treasures, as opposed to the Universities in Europe and the U.S. buying them.
It’s really just another face of Neocolonialism.

栗山千明 Chiaki Kuriyama

栗山千明 Chiaki Kuriyama, a photo by g2slp on Flickr.

Francisco Goya - Bandit Murdering a Woman ca.1798-1800

Must have been a Monday