22.11.09

and it begins...

and now for a entertaining short story:

guy goes do dj
guy meets model.
model likes guy.
model finds out she also likes guys hit song.
gal likes guy more
guy senses it but ignores it.
guy and gal chat while guy is tryin to dj...
making it a little difficult for guy to mix.
guys friend comes with her friends to support.
guy is happy.
gal noticed guys friend.
gal tries to make friends with guys friend.
later, she offer guys friend a line of coke.
!!!
guys friend refuses.
guys friend tells guy about what happened.
guy doesn't really believe it
thinking maybe she mistook gal to have said something else
.
mistake.
.
guy leaves with his friend.
.
2 days later.
.
guy goes to dj.
gal comes to say hi.
asks guy where he's going to party after djin
guy doesn't know.
gal gives an option
guys says he'll think about it.
guys brother and sister show up
guy is happy.
guy tells gal to let his brother and sister buy drinks on his tab.
gal says cool.
gals ask if thats guys girlfriend.
guys say "no it's my sister".
gal says ok.
girl offers guys sister a drink.
???
??
?
sister takes drink.
guy leaves with brother, sister, and friends.
gal invites them all to a club.
they go.
later sister feels sick.
sister feels really sick.
sister earls.
feels dizzy.
sister comes back to brother and guy.
tells them what happened.
says gal gave her a drink.
and since that drink she felt funny.
they all put 2 and 2 together and go home.

end story.

the shit some people will do when they want you. people are crazy out there.

and it begins....

^_^

silverchair...

...loved this song. reminds me of the younger days...it seems some of these post are just for me so I can come back to stuff I don't wanna forget.

^_^

18.11.09

Erwin Olaf

Born in Hilversum in the Netherlands in 1959, Erwin Olaf lives and works in Amsterdam since the early 80's. His current studio is situated in a former church hall.

Mixing photojournalism with studio photography, Olaf emerged in the international art scene in 1988 when his series 'Chessmen' was awarded the first prize in the Young European Photographer competition. This award was followed by an exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany. Since then Olaf has continued to explore issues of gender, sensuality, humor, despair and grace in each successive series.

Courtesy of: erwinolaf

Tribal by Herring & Herring

the days I loved....

had to sneak and watch these vids on rap city when I was younger...

^_^

dow jones

"Dow Jones" starring Common from Common

^_^

17.11.09

tom & iggy

^_^

and now for...

...a message from Tom Waits

^_^

brilliance!!!!

Born March 2, 1973, in Springfield Missouri and growing up in neighboring Kansas, Kris spent his youth in rural seclusion and isolation along with a blue-collar, working mother, two much-older brothers and an absent father. Open country, sparse trees, and alcoholic stepfather, perhaps paved the way for an individual saturated in imagination and introversion. His fascination with the unusual lent to his macabre art later in life. The grotesque to him, as it seemed, was beautiful. Reaching adulthood his art blossomed and created a breakthrough of personal freedom from the negative environment experienced during his youth. He soon discovered his distaste for the typical American life and pop culture, feeling that he has always belonged to the ‘Old World’. Yet, Kris’ work is about a new wilderness, refined and elevated, visualized as a cultivation emerging from the corrupt and demoralized fall of modern-day society. A place were new beginnings, new wars, new philosophies, and new endings exist.

Courtesy of: kuksi

^_^

stu'in like my daddy!!

The Junior 35 MPH Classic Corvette($300) is perfect for rich kids! This is the 2/3-scale, gasoline-powered replica of a 1956 Corvette C1, renowned for racing at Florida's famous Sebring International Raceway.Powered by reach a maximum speed of 35 mph, it can reach a maximum speed of 35 mph. It has automatic transmission; a single shifter controls forward, neutral, and backward movement. It can support 2 riders, supports up to 330 lbs.

Courtesy of: LikeCool.com

^_^

i don't feel like writing. <---- is it?

int(a)r(t)igue

Don't have her album, but from what I gather, she's a seductively violent mix between Tori Amos and Marilyn Manson sprinkled with pop powder. A potent mix I must say. Don't do it if you're not gonna make a mark.

"Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (born March 28, 1986), better known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American recording artist. After being signed to and quickly dropped from Def Jam Records at age 19, she began performing in the rock music scene of New York City's Lower East Side. During this time, she was also working at Interscope Records as a songwriter for several established acts, including Akon, who, after hearing Gaga sing, convinced Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine to sign her to a joint deal with the label and Akon's Kon Live Distribution label.

Her debut album The Fame, was released in August 2008 and was a critical and commercial success. In addition to receiving generally positive reviews, it has gone to number one in four countries, also topping the Billboard Top Electronic Albums chart in the United States. The album's first two singles, "Just Dance" and "Poker Face", have become international number-one hits, and the former was nominated for Best Dance Recording at the 51st Grammy Awards. In 2009, after having opened for New Kids on the Block and the Pussycat Dolls, Gaga embarked on her first headlining tour, The Fame Ball Tour.

Gaga is inspired by glam rockers such as David Bowie and Queen, as well as pop singers such as Madonna and Michael Jackson. She is also inspired by fashion, which she claims is an essential component to her songwriting and performances. To date she has sold over 20 million digital singles and more than four million albums worldwide."

^_^

27.10.09

one of those intrigues that could become a crush...

"Ebony Thomas also known as Ebony Bones! is a British singer-songwriter, record producer and actress. Prior to writing and producing her critically acclaimed debut album Bone Of My Bones, Ebony Bones was booked and performing globally before having released any records. Named one of the "40 Men And Women Who Make London" by Time Out for their 40th Anniversary edition as well as producing the soundtrack for Yves Saint Laurents Manifesto' campaign, Ebony Bones! performed live for Rolling Stone Magazine, and was named one of South by Southwest's best new acts of 2009.

Bones' self released 7" single We Know All About U depicting scenes of an Orwellian Britain, made an immediate impact through word of mouth. Making its radio debut as "Hottest Record In The World Today" as well as "Single Of The Week" by BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe, it also received daytime play, becoming Radio 1's most played single by an unsigned artist."

I have a feeling if I bite her, skittles will come out...

^_^

blank...

...

(I see the space.)

^_^

14.10.09

I will read it...so that I may understand...

Excerpt: 'Occult America'

by Mitch Horowitz

courtesy of: NPR

September 20, 2009 - WHAT IS THE OCCULT?

(And What Is It Doing in America?)

***

Religious history, like literary or any cultural history, is made by genius, by the mystery of rare human personalities.

—Harold Bloom, The American Religion

In the summer of 1693, the philosopher Johannes Kelpius and a small band of followers fled their Rhine Valley homeland. The region had once been a sanctuary of political independence and esoteric spirituality. It was now a charred land of devastation, crushed by the papal Habsburg Empire during the Thirty Years' War. The twenty-one-year-old Kelpius, a protege of mystical scholars who survived in the Rhine corridor, led his German pilgrims to the New World. Fewer than forty in number, they first traveled over land and later endured a five-month sea voyage, which proved less dangerous for the weather than for warring French and British ships crisscrossing Atlantic routes. By late June of 1694, the group reached Philadelphia, then a cluster of about five hundred houses. They settled along the wooded banks of the Wissahickon Creek outside town. There they lived a monastic existence, occupying caves and constructing a forty-foot-square log tabernacle topped with a telescope, from which they scanned the stars for holy signs. By sunlight and hearth fire, they studied astrology, alchemy, number symbolism, esoteric Christianity, Kabala, and other philosophies that had once flowered back home. Newcomers journeyed to America to join their Tabernacle in the Forest, and in the years following Kelpius's death from tuberculosis in 1708, they created a larger commune at Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

News drifted back to the Old World: A land existed where mystical thinkers and mystery religions — remnants of esoteric movements that had thrived during the Renaissance and were later harassedcould find safe harbor. And so began a revolution in religious life that was eventually felt around the earth. America hosted a remarkable assortment of breakaway faiths, from Mormonism to Seventh-day Adventism to Christian Science. But one movement that grew within its borders came to wield radical influence over nineteenth- and twentieth-century spirituality. It encompassed a wide array of mystical philosophies and mythical lore, particularly the belief in an "unseen world" whose forces act upon us and through us. It is called the occult.

The teachers and purveyors of the American occult — colorful, audacious, and often deeply self-educated men and women — shattered every stereotype, real and imagined, of the power-mad dabbler in dark arts. Rather than seeing mystical or magical ideas as a means to narcissistic power or moral freedom, they emphasized an unlikely ethic of social progress and individual betterment. These religious radicals, acting outside the folds of traditional churches and mostly overlooked or ignored in the pages of history, transformed a young nation into the launching pad for the revolutions in therapeutic and alternative spirituality that swept the earth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even reigniting mystical traditions in the East.

Sons of Frankenstein

In her 1818 novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley offered a stirring portrait — not sympathetic, but not as unsympathetic as many suppose — of the European occult in the Age of Enlightenment in the 1700s. Her budding scientist Victor Frankenstein was torn between the occult visions that drew him to science as a child and the materialist philosophy of his peers: "It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed.... I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth." In the public mind, the occultist craved immortality, deific power, and limitless knowledge. It was an image that popular occultists often fed. The nineteenth-century French magician Eliphas Levi fancied the occult arts "a science which confers on man powers apparently superhuman." England's "Great Beast" Aleister Crowley extolled self-gratification in his best-known maxim: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

The standard-bearers of the American occult took a different path. They sought to remake mystical ideas as tools of public good and self-help. The most influential trance medium of the nineteenth century, Andrew Jackson Davis — called the "Poughkeepsie Seer" after his Hudson Valley, New York, home — enthralled thousands with visions of heaven as a place that included all the world's people: black, white, Indian, and followers of every religion. In early America, the occult and liberalism were closely joined, especially in the movement of Spiritualism — or contacting the dead — whose newspapers and practitioners were ardently abolitionist and suffragist. For women, Spiritualist practices, from seances to spirit channeling, became vehicles for the earliest forms of religious and political leadership. The first American-born woman to become a recognized public preacher was Jemima Wilkinson. In 1776, at age twenty-four, she claimed to have died and returned to life as a medium of the Divine spirit, calling herself the "Publick Universal Friend." The Friend, like the Rhine Valley mystics and Andrew Jackson Davis, remained a Christian. While her claims of supernatural rebirth and spirit channeling fell squarely within the occult framework, her religious perspective was unmistakably Scriptural. For a time, this was the nature of most American occultists (and it would never fully disappear). Few of them expressed any feelings of contradiction between Christian devotion and arcane methods of practice. Eventually, the occult and its acolytes came to branch ever more clearly into a separate and distinct spiritual culture, though not necessarily shedding a Christian moral outlook.

In the years between the Civil War and World War II, Americans took a do-it-yourself approach to many aspects of life, including the occult. Their enthusiasms resulted in strange inventions like the Ouija board, a boom in pop astrology, and a revolution in metaphysical mail-order courses and "how-to" guides. Breaking with the habits of the Old World, American occultists often proved wary of secret lodges and brotherhoods; they wanted to evangelize occult teachings as tools that ordinary men and women could use to contend with the problems of daily life. In their hands, methods that had once seemed forbidden or even sinister in the Old World — such as Mesmerism, soothsaying, and necromancy — morphed into a bevy of friendlier-sounding philosophies, some involving mindbody healing, positive visualization, and talking to angelic spirits. The early-twentieth-century progressive minister Wallace D. Wattles, whose writing later inspired the book and movie The Secret, conceived of a psychical "science of getting rich," which he saw more as a program of wealth redistribution than a means of personal enrichment. Similarly, the black-nationalist leader Marcus Garvey attempted to harness the "mind power," or positive-thinking principles so popular within American mysticism, as a path to black liberation. Even at the highest rung of American politics, the Iowan farmerseeker Henry A. Wallace, who served as Franklin Roosevelt's second vice president, drew ethical ideas from his lifelong passion for the occult and envisioned the dawn of a spiritually enlightened "New Deal of the Ages."

Since the mid-nineteenth century, denizens of the American occult had foretold a "New Age" in education, cooperation, and inner awakening. In the depth and reach of their careers, in their marriage of arcane methods with self-improvement philosophy, and in their determination to bring mysticism to the masses, they remade occultism into the harbinger of a new era in self-empowering and healing spirituality. Its arcane roots, however, became overgrown and forgotten.

The Silver Moon

Mysteries can be found wherever you look — especially when you're not sure what you're looking for. My brush with the occult began on a quiet Sunday morning in the mid-1970s at a diner in the Queens neighborhood where I grew up, a place of bungalow-size houses and cracked sidewalks that straddles the invisible boundary between the farthest reaches of New York City and the suburbs of Long Island. As a restless nine-year-old, I fidgeted at a table crowded with parents, aunts, and older cousins. Bored with the grown-up conversation, I wandered toward the front of the restaurant — the place where the real wonders were: cigarette machines, rows of exotic-looking liquor bottles above the cashier counter, brochure racks with dating-service questionnaires, a boxy machine that could print out your "biorhythm." It was a carnival of the slightly forbidden.

One vending machine especially caught my eye: a dime horoscope dispenser. Drop in a coin, pull a lever, and out would slide a little pink scroll wound in a clear plastic sleeve. Unroll it and there appeared a brief analysis for each day of the month. I was a ripe customer. I had just borrowed a book of American folklore from our local library. It contained an eerie pentagramlike chart over which, eyes closed, you could hover a pin and bring it down on a prophecy: A NEW LOVE; LOSS; GOOD HEALTH; and so on. My prophecy read: A LETTER. At nine, letters rarely found me. But the very next day, one arrived — from the library. My hands shook when I opened it, only to remove a carbon-copied overdue slip. But still. In the 1970s, the supernatural was in the air: I overheard my big sister on the phone discussing whether ex-Beatle Ringo Starr had shaved his head in solidarity with the youth culture's Prince of Darkness Charles Manson. Books on ESP, Bigfoot, and "true" hauntings appeared in the Arrow Book Club catalogs at my elementary school. Friends huddled in basements for seances and Ouija sessions. The Exorcist was the movie that no one on the block was allowed to see. On TV, Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas chatted with clairvoyants, astrologers, and robed gurus. Everything seemed to hint at a strange otherworld not so far away from our own.

Or so it seemed that Sunday morning as I bounded back to the table to show off my star scroll. "Look what it says!" I announced, reading out predictions that were always just reasonable enough to come true. "Does it also say you're a sucker?" asked my grandfather, the perpetually exhausted manager of a flower shop. His lack of even the slightest curiosity about the mysteries of the world was as impossible for me to understand as my boyish enthusiasm was for him. While I didn't yet know the lines from Hamlet — There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy — I felt their meaning in my guts. Peering down at my star scroll, I wondered: Where did this stuff come from? The zodiac signs, their symbols, the meanings — all this came from somewhere, somewhere old. But where — and how did it reach Queens? Although I wouldn't know it until many years later, my dime-scroll philosophy contained a surprising likeness to the ideas of Claudius Ptolemy, the GrecoEgyptian astrologerastronomer of the second century A.D. who had codified the basic principles of heavenly lore in his Tetrabiblos. In Ptolemy's pages stood concepts that had already stretched across millennia and followed a jagged path — sometimes broken by adaptations and bastardizations. They ranged from the philosophy of primeval Babylon to classical Egypt to Ptolemy's late Hellenic era to the Renaissance courts of Europe to popularizations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, finally, to the star scroll bought by a nine-year-old one morning in a local diner (a place aptly named the Silver Moon). In Ptolemy's day, astrology remained a mainstay of royal courts and academies, but by the fourth century A.D. it would fall into disfavor under the influence of early Church fathers, who warned that divinatory practices were an easy portal for demonic powers. In the Church's zeal to erase the old practices — practices that had endured throughout the late ancient world (even Rome's first Christian emperor, Constantine, personally combined Christianity with sun worship) — bishops branded pantheists and nature worshippers, astrologers and cosmologists, cultists and soothsayers in ways that such believers had never conceived of themselves: as practitioners of Satanism and black magic. It was a new classification of villainy, entirely of the Church's invention. Once so characterized, the religious minority could be outlawed and persecuted, just as early Christians had been by pagan powers.

The fall of Rome meant the almost total collapse of esoteric and pre-Christian belief systems in Europe, as ancient books and ideas were scattered to the chaos of the Dark Ages. Only fortresslike monasteries, where old libraries could be hidden, protected the mystery traditions from complete destruction. By the time GrecoEgyptian texts and philosophies started to reemerge in the medieval and Renaissance ages, astrology and other divinatory methods began to be referred to under the name "occultism." Occultism describes a tradition — religious, literary, and intellectual — that has existed throughout Western history. The term comes from the Latin occultus, meaning "hidden" or "secret." The word occult entered modern use through the work of Renaissance scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who used it to describe magical practices and veiled spiritual philosophies in his three-volume study, De occulta philosophia, in 1533. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first instance of the word occult twelve years later. Traditionally, occultism deals with the inner aspect of religions: the mystical doorways of realization and secret ways of knowing. Classical occultism regards itself as an initiatory spiritual tradition. Seen from that perspective, the occultist is not necessarily born with unusual abilities, like soothsaying or mind reading, but trains for them. Such parameters, however, are loose: Spiritualism is impossible to separate from occultism. Whether believers consider channeling the dead a learned skill or a passive gift, its crypto-religious nature draws it into the occult framework. Indeed, occultism, at its heart, is religious: Renaissance occultists were particularly enamored of Jewish Kabala, Christian Gnosticism, EgyptoHellenic astrology, EgyptianArab alchemy, and prophetic or divinatory rituals found deep within all the historic faiths, especially within the mystery religions of the Hellenic and Egyptian civilizations. They venerated the ideas of the Hermetica, a collection of late-ancient writings attributed to the mythical GrecoEgyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. The name Hermes Trismegistus meant "Thrice-Greatest Hermes," a Greek term of veneration for Thoth, Egypt's god of writing, whom the Greeks conflated with their own Hermes (and later with the Roman Mercury). The Hermetica reflected the final stages of the magicoreligious thought of Alexandria and formed a critical link between ancient Egypt and the modern occult.

The sturdiest definition of classical occult philosophy that I have personally found appears not in a Western or Egyptian context but in Sino scholar Richard Wilhelm's 1950 introduction to the Chinese oracle book The I Ching or Book of Changes:

...every event in the visible world is the effect of an "image," that is, of an idea in the unseen world. Accordingly, everything that happens on earth is only a reproduction, as it were, of an event in a world beyond our sense perception; as regards its occurrence in time, it is later than the suprasensible event. The holy men and sages, who are in contact with those higher spheres, have access to these ideas through direct intuition and are therefore able to intervene decisively in events in the world. Thus man is linked with heaven, the suprasensible world of ideas, and with earth, the material world of visible things, to form with these a trinity of primal powers.

Of Dime Horoscopes

Back, for a moment, to the Silver Moon diner. What of the coin machine where I bought my horoscope that morning? It had its own story, one perhaps less august than that of ancient scholars or Renaissance courts but, to a young boy, no less fascinating. It was invented in 1934 by a clothing and securities salesman named Bruce King — or, as he was better known by his nom de mystique, Zolar. ("It comes from 'zodiac' and 'solar system,'" he explained. "Registered U.S. trademark.") His initiation was not in the temples of Egypt but on the boardwalks of Atlantic City, New Jersey. There he witnessed a goateed Professor A. F. Seward thrusting a pointer at a huge zodiac chart while lecturing beachgoers on the destiny of the stars. Professor Seward sold one-dollar horoscopes to countless vacationers — so many, rumor went, that he retired to Florida a millionaire. (The rumor, as will be seen, was true.)

Bursting forth from the boardwalks, Bruce King knew he had what it took to sell mysticism to the masses. "I felt the competition wasn't great," he told John Updike in The New Yorker in 1959, "and I could become the biggest man in the field." Zolar immersed himself in astrology, Tarot, palmistry, and all the "magical arts," on which he could expound with surprising erudition. "Everything I've ever known I've taught myself," he said. "I've studied psychiatry, sociology, and every field of human relations as well as the occult." For all his have-I-got-a-deal-for-you pitch, Zolar knew his material. His biggest breakout came in 1935, when the dime-store empire Woolworth's agreed to sell his pocket-sized daily horoscopes, the first generation of the mass-marketed horoscope booklets that now adorn the racks at supermarket checkout lines. The secret to Zolar's success was that he spoke in a language everyone could understand. "I'm like the old two-dollar country doctor — a general practitioner," he once said. "If you want a specialist, you go somewhere else." Zolar could even sound like my grandfather when giving a reporter the lowdown on the resurgence of astrology in 1970: "It sounds kind of crazy — but you know that screwy play Hair that has that Aquarian thing?" Zolar was speaking, of course, of the rock musical's rousing opener, "Aquarius." "I think that's sold five million horoscopes."

So it had — and in America the old mysteries were on the move.

^_^

22.9.09

.
..
.....I..
...am...
..in...
.awe....
.....of....
.....your.........
....distant....
...........destruction........
...
..
.

^_^

Spazzz....

I'm on some sea saw shit...
figuring it out through the outs and ins..whens and hows...
been waiting for my time...
thats my problem....
waiting...
on...

.
.
.
you.

^_^

I have a playground crush...

...on this lady...

"Amber Rose is the daughter of an Italian-American father and Cape Verdean mother. Rose is known for her distinctive appearance, specifically her buzz cut hairstyle, which she bleaches blonde. Rose claims that her head is the only area of her body where she has hair. Rose is open about her bisexuality and says she enjoys relationships with both men and women, although not simultaneously."

doubt I can take her home to moms though...but still...thank you lord!

^_^

Put this in my room now!

Digital wallpaper.

Hirzberger Events - Digital Wallpaper from Gregor Hofbauer on Vimeo.

courtesy of: trendsnow

^_^

LMAO!!!

yep!

^_^

7.8.09

I have a crush ...

on this blog...this commentary on artistic splendor...

...and the sista who writes/runs it...hmmm....thank you Lord.

^_^

the circus that is me is profoundly running in my head. 3 rings of unsure certainty plague the very make-up of who I "is". Tired of the habitual yawning my soul has become accustomed to. My brain is full of buttons, yet auto pilot seems to be the most shiny. A star has no need to try and, well...shine. So why do I find myself in the awe and splendor of "maybe they'll notice me if I".... tears are a waste of time...my eyes sweat instead. how does one become an enigma unto themselves? The bottomless pit of I must have a a firm foundation of which I can stand. For if we don't stand...(falling)(falling)(falling)(falling)(falling)...

so I choose, with every bit of "me" I can muster...no longer sharing my dreams for free...letting them wane in the wind....from now on I choose....to

stand.

^_^

17.6.09

I want to have some influence...

I want to eat too....

consider me now eating the cake I've made....
...oh, and spending it too...

^_^

Not dead yet...

Tyga - Cali Love

^_^

11.6.09

'horizon' interactive light wall installation
image courtesy flynn talbot

'horizon' is in operation 24 hours a day at 72 erskine st, sydney, australia until june 14, 2009.

courtesy of designboom

YES!!
Put it in my room....NOW!

^_^

27.5.09

The euphoric self sacrificial feeling
found in the newness is love
is a precious thing.
One God left uncursed.

^_^

26.5.09

Love is a "calvaric" ritual...
.so.
madam...
...crucify me...
.
nail me to your heart...
...only to rise to you again...
...whole...
in
the
morning.

Jonathan Hamilton ©2009

yebo yes!!!

^_^

20.5.09

We are going there...yes...we are going there.

Rabbai, I want one. I WANT ONE NOW!!!

yes!

^_^

12.5.09

beauty in distortion...

rugged rose. beauty to me.

Zoe K from Elevator Fight.

Lord, you are good and your creations are uncomparable.
yes!

^_^

29.4.09

The Kaleidoscopic Eye...

"We’re all for sensory stimulation, which is what The Kaleidoscopic Eye exhibition opening in Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum this month, is all about."

"Featuring works from the internationally renowned Thyssen Bornemisza collection, the show offers sensory titillation on many levels – playing with imagination, memory, light and sound."

courtesy of: Wallpaper

I want my wall to do this...
thank you very much.

^_^

Frozen shark...

Last weekend saw the DAMIEN HIRST’s first grand spectacle of 2009 when his daunting career retrospective “Requiem” opened at the PINCHUK ART CENTER in the unlikely city of Kiev, Ukraine. Not exactly known as an epicenter of fine art (unless you count the Ukrainian girls, that is), resident steel billionaire and obsessed Hirst collector VICTOR PINCHUK aims to change that by launching the epic visual spectacle that includes over 100 works (a vast amount of which came from Pinchuk’s private collection) by the British artist from 1998 – 2008 in his own privately funded art palace that holds the title as the largest private museum in the former Soviet Union. The fact that this grandiose show of power comes at a time when the Ukraine is especially compromised economically as a result of the crippling global economic downturn seems to only heighten the poignancy of the show which includes a great number of pieces overtly—and quite graphically—devoted to the theme of the perverse effects of money and power.

Courtesy of: supertouchart

I want this in my place...the frozen shark just might beat Will's pet jelly fish...though the pet jelly fish was damn fresh!..minus the suicide of course...

^_^

Set sail...

"The Marble Boat, also known as the Boat of Purity and Ease (Qing Yan Fǎng), is a lakeside pavilion on the grounds of the Summer Palace in Beijing, China.

It was first erected in 1755 during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor. The original pavilion was made from a base of large stone blocks which supported a wooden superstructure done in a traditional Chinese design.

In 1860, during the Second Opium War, the pavilion was destroyed by Anglo-French forces. It was restored in 1893 on order of the Empress Dowager Cixi. In this restoration, a new two-story superstructure was designed which incorporated elements of European architecture. Like its predecessor, the new superstructure is made out of wood but it was painted to imitate marble. On each "deck", there is a large mirror to reflect the waters of the lake and give an impression of total immersion in the aquatic environment. Imitation paddlewheels on each side of the pavilion makes it look like a paddle steamer. The pavilion has a sophisticated drainage system which channels rain water through four hollow pillars. The water is finally released into the lake through the mouths of four dragonheads.

The boat design of the pavilion may relate to a quote attributed to Wei Zheng, a chancellor of the Tang Dynasty renown for his honest advice. He is said to have told the emperor "the waters that float the boat can also swallow it", implying that the people can support the emperor but can also topple him. With this in mind, Emperor Qianlong might have chosen to construct the Marble Boat on a solid stone base to indicate that the Qing Dynasty was not to be overthrown.

The Marble Boat is often seen as an ironic commentary on the fact that the money used to restore the Summer Palace largely came from funds originally earmarked for building up a new imperial navy. The controller of the Admiralty, the 1st Prince Chun, owed much of his social standing as well as his appointment to the Empress Dowager, who had adopted his oldest son to become the Guangxu Emperor. Because of this, he probably saw no other choice than to condone the embezzlement.

The pavilion is 36 meters long. It stands on the northwestern shore of Kunming Lake, near the western end of the Long Corridor."

you say yatch, I say Marble Boat...
^_^

Grace...and Beauty

Misty Copeland

"Misty Copeland is an African American ballerina, described by many accounts as the first African American female soloist for the American Ballet Theatre (ABT), one of the three great American-style classical ballet companies on the world stage today (along with New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet). However, Nora Kimball, who was with the ABT in the mid 1980s preceded her. In this role as the second African-American ballerina and first in two decades with ABT, she has endured the cultural pressure associated with it.

Copeland is considered a prodigy who rose to stardom despite not starting ballet until the age of 13. By age 15, Copeland's mother and ballet teachers, who were serving as her custodial guardians, fought a custody battle over her. Meanwhile, Copeland, who was already an award-winning dancer, was fielding professional offers. The 1998 legal proceedings involved filings for emancipation by Copeland and restraining orders by her mother. Both sides dropped legal proceedings, and Copeland moved home to begin studying under a new teacher who was a former ABT member.

In 1998, Copeland won the Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Award as the best dancer in Southern California. After two summer workshops with the ABT, she became a member of the Studio Company in 2000, a member of the corps de ballet in 2001, and a soloist in 2007. Stylistically, she is considered a classical ballerina and was regarded as such during her early years in the ABT. As a soloist since the autumn of 2007, she has been described as having matured into a more contemporary and sophisticated dancer."

amen.
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