Conspicuous Consumption

I found the article on Conspicuous Consumption @ http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1963.cfm interesting + insightful. I think it's status-conscious syndrome that's driving the trend.

Useful link:
www.bls.gov/cex

Young People For Change

Footprintfriends.com is an interesting social networking site set up by young people to share a passion for protecting natural environment.

I think they are good role models. I liked it.

Useful links:
www.footprintfriends.com
www.bsi-global.com

The Voice

I love Frank Sinatra's voice + his innate genius will be found in these songs:
- I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes)
- I've Got You Under My Skin
- One For My Baby (And One More For the Road)
- You Make Me Feel So Young
- Theme From New York, New York

Useful links:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/05/a_frank_exchange_of_views.html
Frank Sinatra gallery here.

It was once said that he sang not about himself but from himself. How true!

Britain's Bling Capital

I found the article The rocks that Northampton got @ http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/05/bling_blog.html very interesting + how many of us actually know how much the jewelry we are wearing is worth? A five carat question!

Heard On The Street

I have told several traders exactly what I do, some made money, some lost…but all of us had the same rules.

The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch + Jeffrey Zaslow is a great inspirational/insightful book. The lecture is available online.

Useful link:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Imeem No.1

According to Compete.com , Imeem has becoming the No. 1 streaming music site in the United States via on-demand music from all four majors + indies + social networking + blogs + industry analysts believe that the most popular options for listening to music online are free.

Useful links:
www.imeem.com
www.compete.com

WorldWide Telescope

(via BBC) Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that stitches together images from some of the best ground- and space-based telescopes. Collections include pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The web-based tool also allows users to pan and zoom around the planets, and trace their locations in the night sky.

Useful link:
www.worldwidetelescope.org

I think the pictures were beautiful.

Too Precious To Wear Campaign

I think SeaWeb’s Too Precious To Wear campaign to create demand for coral conservation is a brilliant idea + I also believe one way to help save it is to reduce coral in fashion.

Useful links:
www.tooprecioustowear.org
www.seaweb.org
www.tiffanyandcofoundation.org
www.coralreef.noaa.gov
www.cites.org

Random Thoughts

Life is risk. Nothing we do that is of any importance carries with it a guarantee of success. Nothing we can do is absolutely sure to secure even our own personal safety or well­being from one hour to the next. Yet we are constantly faced with choices. Lots of decisions, no guarantees. We all, in some way or another, adopt strategies for living, ways of approaching the world, ways of making choices that aim at the attainment of what we consider good. These strate­gies are all, to some extent or another, calculated gambles. We have no compelling proofs that our strategies will work. None of them is a sure thing. But we are used to the risk. We are accustomed to living without many true certainties, to the extent that we ordinarily forget that life is risk.

- Blaise Pascal

Nike Art Project

(via Wired) Claudio Sinatti was commissioned to shoot Italian footballer Marco Materazzi for the Nike 'Art of Football' exhibition. He built a special frame to hang on the player to film from all angles + the mix of high and low tech behind the scenes were brilliant. I liked it.

Useful links:
www.nike.com/nikelab
www.claudiosinatti.com
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/05/nike-art-projec.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwFbQ3sKnsA

Robert Rauschenberg

(via Wiki) Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his 'Combines' of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. While the 'Combines' are both painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg has also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. Rauschenberg had a tendency to pick up the trash that interested him on the streets of New York City and bringing it back to his studio to use it in this works. He claimed he 'wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing.' In 1953, Rauschenberg stunned the art world by erasing a drawing by de Kooning. In 1964 Rauschenberg was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale (Mark Tobey and James Whistler had previously won the Painting Prize). Since then he has enjoyed a rare degree of institutional support. Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida until his death on May 12, 2008, from heart failure.

Useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rauschenberg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ

I am a huge fan of Robert Rauschenberg + I think his life/art + experimentation/innovation will be an inspiration for next-generation artists worldwide. He will be remembered forever.

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping

Finally, the 1995 portrait, entitled Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, a life-sized Lucian Freud painting of a sleeping, naked woman was sold by auction house Christies in New York for $33.6 million (£17.2 million) setting a new world record price for a work by a living artist.

Useful link:
www.christies.com

The Art Of Today

(via The Outline of Art) Frank Rutter writes:

The foundations of Mr Augustus John’s reputation were also laid in the drawings which he showed at the New English Art Club during the first decade of the present century. The exuberant flow of his line, his powerful modeling of form by subtleties of light and shade; the extraordinary vitality of his heads in chalks and sanguine—all seemed to suggest that in Augustus John was reincarnated the princely art of Rubens. One thing alone at that time limited his popularity. It was asked why did he draw such ‘ugly’ people. The truth was that Mr John, having an exceedingly original mind, found beauties in new types. A Welshman by birth and descent, John in his early days was a Borrow in paint, happiest and most at home among the Romanies. The apparent strangeness of his early drawings and paintings was largely due to his preference for gipsy types. While teaching at the Liverpool University School of Art, round about 1904, he would periodically disappear to go roving with the gipsies and then reappear, bringing with his pictures of the raggle-taggled life of the caravan. These pictures, bright and clear in color, incisive in line, and effective in composition, were a new thing in painting. As a painter John did not possess the precocious facility of Orpen, and his early work often shows a certain heaviness of handling when compared with his present day pictures, and in acquiring mastery of the brush John gradually evolved two distinct manners. Influenced to some extent by the modern French painters already mentioned in this Outline, he has shown a tendency to simplification which is most marked in his decorative work. In mural decorations, like ‘The Mumpers’ at the Tate Gallery, John deliberately sacrifices roundness of form for decorative effect. Like Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), the great painter of the Ste. Geneviève series in the Panthéon, Paris, John found that the qualities he aimed at necessitated a certain flatness of treatment. At the same time his color in these decorative works has become lighter and brighter. To this extent, in so far as it has tended to simplify rather than to complicate painting, the art of Augustus John may be said to illustrate a reaction from Impressionism. But while his decorative works often have primitive qualities, in his portraits he uses his full power of expressing form, and one of his most recent masterpieces ‘Madame Suggia’, proves that when this is his aim, John is second to no living man in realistic force and characterization. While infinitely various, there is an intense individuality in his draughtsmanship which unifies all his work and makes it recognizable as a ‘John’. His landscapes are closer to his decorative work than to his realistic portraiture. Finding his favorite subjects among the mountains and lakes of his native Wales, John has invented a new genre in landscape. Emphatic in their design, simplified in form, and brilliant but still in color, they strike a new note in British art.

Limitations of space prevent all but te briefest mention of another member of the New English Art Club, who has created a new type of landscape. Sir Charles John Holmes, the erudite Director of the National Gallery, was born in 1868. The son of a Cornish clergyman, he distinguished himself as a classical scholar at Eton and Oxford, and made a reputation as a writer on art before his watercolors and paintings became generally appreciated. Always a sytlist in design, simplicity is the outstanding quality in his work, and while he has painted many impressive landscapes of the grim, gaunt scenery of the Lake Country, it has been his peculiar distinction to invent ‘industrial landscape’, pictures in which factories and power stations of modern industrialism are powerfully presented with their surrounding landscapes. ‘The Burning Kiln’ is a fine example of the imaginative grandeur with which Sir C J Holmes invests these new subjects.

Another pupil of Professor Brown, Mr Walter W Russell (born 1867), added to the laurels of the New English Art Club by his brilliant portrait, ‘Mr Minney’, which was the picture of the year in the Academy of 1920.

In recent years the two most distinguished artists who have come from the Royal Academy Schools have been Mr Frederick Cayley Robinson (born 1862) whose poetic and decorative work shows a mingling of Pre-Raphaelite ideals with the noble simplicity of Puvis de Chavannes, and Mr Charles Sims (born 1873) who, after first attracting attention by the sheer beauty of his romantic idylls, astonished even his admirers by his exquisitely gracious and accomplished portrait ‘The Countess of Rocksavage and Son’, which was universally conceded to have won premier honors in the Academy of 1922.

Proverbially, art is long and talent today is so multitudinous that to attempt any adequate survey of present day achievements in Great Britain alone would be to embark on a voyage as lengthy as that which the reader has already traveled. Had space permitted it, it would have been gratifying to record successes in sculpture as well as in painting. Among the academic sculptors Sir George Frampton has acquired the widest popularity with his ‘Peter Pan’ in Kensington Gardens, while among the independent sculptors Mr Jacob Epstein’s bronze busts and Mr Eric Gill’s ‘Stations of the Cross’ in the Westminster Roman Catholic Cathedral are works which the present generation can leave with confidence to the judgment of posterity.

It is regretted that the scope of the present work has made it impossible to deal separately with etching, wood engraving, lithography, and other arts which are being practised today with skill and accomplishment. But all the pictorial and plastic arts are so intimately linked that the aims and ideals which animate them from generation to generation may to a great extent be deduced from a historical survey of painting. Without any pretence to be final or exhaustive, it is hoped that this work may contribute to a clearer understanding of the course followed by the main stream of European art from the thirteenth century to the present day.

Eric Janszen

The Wired + Eric Janszen interview on clean technologies @ http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2008/03/cleantech_bubble was informative and useful.

Useful link:
www.itulip.com

Random Thoughts

He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

- St. Francis of Assisi

Kolkata Museum Of Modern Art

First of its kind in Asia: Kolkata Museum of Modern Art (India), a joint venture with the West Bengal government and center, will be set up on 10 acres in New Town of Rajarhat, on the outskirts of Kolkata metropolis, with National Gallery + Western Galleries + Far-Eastern Galleries + Academic Wing, where a national collection of fine art ranging from the 19th century to the contemporary period will be exhibited + the project will be designed by Herzog & de Meuron, based in Basel, in Switzerland.

Useful link:
www.wbgov.com

World Fair Trade Day 2008

I think World Fair Trade Day in 2008 was an exciting and challenging opportunity to raise consumer awareness = learning something new and different via sustainable earth-centered community = transformational experiences.

Useful links:
www.wftday.org
www.fairtraderesource.org
www.fairtradetownsusa.org

The San Francisco Earring Study

I found the report entitled 'Nickel release from earrings purchased in the United States: The San Francisco earring study," published online in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology via http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080512/aqm093.html?.v=45 interesting + insightful.

Useful links:
www.eblue.org
www.aad.org

Look for jewelry labeled nickel-free.

The Great Debaters

(via Wiki) The Great Debaters is a 2007 film produced by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions, based on an article about the Wiley College debate team by Tony Scherman written for American Legacy for its '97 Spring issue. It is directed by Denzel Washington who also stars in the film along with Forest Whitaker, Kimberly Elise, Denzel Whitaker, Nate Parker, Gina Ravera, and Jurnee Smollett. The screenplay was written by Suzan-Lori Parks and Robert Eisele. It was released on December 25, 2007.

Useful links:
www.thegreatdebatersmovie.com
www.imdb.com/title/tt0427309

I think it was a wonderful movie + those passionate and inspirational speeches beautifully delivered by the winning actors will be remembered forever.