Vicsmuse: April 2012

Friday, April 27, 2012

Babatunde Olatunji - From Love Drum Talk

Babatunde Olatunji

Long Distance Lover

Sare Tete Wa

Love Drum Talk

Monday, April 23, 2012

Visit To The Carter Family Fold

A Visit To The Carter Family Fold, Hiltons, Virginia
April 2012

More at:
http://www.carterfamilyfold.org/

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Levon Helm

"A friend of mine took me to Memphis advised me that I should get in the musicians' union. He gave me a set of drums and said, Stay on the job, son."

"With horns and a full rhythm section, the drums always looked like the best seat in the house."

"Drums just always sounded like the most fun part of that good music for me."

"Anytime I switch to another instrument, I immediately turn it into another kind of drum so that I can understand it better."

"Well, somebody's got to sing. They won't hire you unless you sing."

Interview on CBS

The Band - Back To Memphis (at Watkins Glen)

"Lord, when the song wants to pick up and go a little faster towards the end, it's hard for me to resist."

Evangeline - with Sheryl Crow and Emmylou Harris

"If you give it good concentration, good energy, good heart and good performance, the song will play you."

W. S. Walcott Medicine Show

"I never subscribe to the stay-at-home policy. I'm not sick of the road or sick of eating in good restaurants around the country. I like to travel."

"I like to get within handshaking distance of the crowd. If it happens, they know it, we know it, and that's all we came here for".

The Girl I Left Behind

"My dad and I played music. He teaches me a song or two every time I'm home."

The Band - Ophelia

"Most of our stuff was trial and error. You live with a tape recorder, you turn it on, you play the song and you listen to it."

"I've had all the lessons I could get. I've learned from everybody I've ever met."

"There were no rules, other than that the song should sound good and be fun to play."

Blues So Bad - with RCO All Stars

"Good times don't last long sometimes."

"If you pour some music on whatever's wrong, it'll sure help out."

Anna Lee

"The way to do it is to put as much life into the song as I can. You can either get it to breathe or you can't."

When I Go Away

The Band - The Weight

"We're all dealt with the same hand here, so to speak. I feel like I've had it a lot better than most people. I've had the opportunity to travel and play music all my life."

More at:

http://www.levonhelm.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levon_Helm

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Kahlil Gibran - from The Prophet

Kahlil Gibran

On Buying and Selling

To you the earth yields her fruit, and you shall not want if you but know how to fill your hands.
It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that you shall find abundance and be satisfied.
Yet unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger.

When in the market place you toilers of the sea and fields and vineyards meet the weavers and the potters and the gatherers of spices,
Invoke then the master spirit of the earth, to come into your midst and sanctify the scales and the reckoning that weighs value against value.

And suffer not the barren-handed to take part in your transactions, who would sell their words for your labour.
To such men you should say,
"Come with us to the field, or go with our brothers to the sea and cast your net;
For the land and the sea shall be bountiful to you even as to us."

And if there come the singers and the dancers and the flute players, buy of their gifts also.
For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and food for your soul.

And before you leave the market place, see that no one has gone his way with empty hands.
For the master spirit of the earth shall not sleep peacefully upon the wind till the needs of the least of you are satisfied.

On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

from Crime and Punishment

I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot
rise beyond the highest which is in each of you,

So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower
than the lowest which is in you also.

And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with
the silent knowledge of the whole tree,

You cannot separate the just from the unjust
and the good from the wicked;

For they stand together before the face of the
sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together.

And when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the
whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Interview with Anna Karina

Anna Karina

One of her first interviews

More at:

http://annakarina.org/

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/anna-karina.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karina

Lumiere Brothers - First Films

Auguste and Louis Lumiere

"The cinema is an invention without a future." - Louis Lumiere

Arrival of A Train At La Ciotat

"But then something suddenly clicks, everything disappears, and there on the screen a railroad train appears. It speeds like an arrow directly towards you - watch out! It looks as if it is making a beeline for the darkness in which you are sitting, and is going to turn you into a tattered bag of skin, filled with crushed flesh and ground bones, and turn the cinema hall into rubble and ashes and destroy this house that is full of wine, women, music and vice." - Maxim Gorki, on the occasion of the first public demonstration of the cinematographe in Russia.

The Little Girl and Her Cat

Snowball Fight

Street Dancers

Babies Quarrel

More at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_and_Louis_Lumi%C3%A8re

Photographer Francesca Woodman

Polka Dots by Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman
Victoria Miro, Exhibition London
Review by Sean O'Hagan
The Observer, Saturday 20 November 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/nov/21/francesca-woodman-photographs-miro-review

Francesca Woodman has been called a modernist, a surrealist and, even, a gothic artist. Her work carries echoes of all three traditions, but it evades categorisation. As a young woman, she photographed herself obsessively but often she appears as a blur of movement or a half-hidden figure, someone constantly trying to escape or hide. The end result is not self-portraiture, but a series of stills from a continuous performance in which she plays with the notion of the self, disguising, transforming and defacing her own body.

At Victoria Miro, around 50 of Woodman's photographs – small, old-fashioned-looking prints that seem to belong to a much earlier time – pay testament to a short, but creatively productive life. It ended, while still in full flow, when she threw herself off a building in New York in January 1981, following a long bout of depression. She was just 22, but left an archive of some 800 images, many of which have still not been seen.

Like Sylvia Plath, Woodman is an artist whose death has often impinged on the various readings of her work, imbuing these already complex images with another layer of mystery and, in some cases, foreboding. In a series of photographs she made in the mid-70s, when she was a student of photography at Rhode Island School of Design, her blurred, shadowy self is spectral, ghost-like.

It seems unlikely, though, that Woodman was prefiguring her own death in her work, rather than playing with themes of identity and with the role that photography, and in particular portrait photography, can play in constructing a fixed – and therefore false – identity.

Sometimes she dresses up like the heroine of a Victorian novel – she collected vintage clothes long before it was fashionable – or as Alice about to disappear through the looking glass. In one famous image, she stands alongside two other naked women, each of them concealing their face behind a photograph of her face, while a different Francesca Woodman face, in a self-portrait pinned to the wall, gazes out at us too. As an exercise in undercutting the objectifying gaze of the camera, it is both provocative and playful. There is a mischievous imagination at work here, too, that has often been overlooked in critical studies of her work.

Seeing so many photographs of Woodman, mostly naked, often posing in empty rooms with peeling paint and fading wallpaper, is a slightly disconcerting experience, though. It's not just that she becomes more elusive the more photographs you see, it's more the tightrope walk she takes between an almost adolescent self-obsession and artistic self-exploration. There are echoes in her work of older photographic, as well as artistic, traditions. Her nudes often recall Bellocq's haunting Storyville portraits of New Orleans prostitutes. One startling photograph of her legs bound tightly in ribbon or tape, her hand holding a striped glove that rests between her legs, has traces of the disturbing doll photographers of the German surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer.

For all that, there is a consistency to Woodman's vision that is almost a signature of sorts, and, as such, rare in one so young. The handful of coloured prints made near the end of her life are beautiful in their own way – softer in tone and almost painterly in their use of colour – but they highlight the importance of black-and-white film in her work, how it makes her locations more mysterious and, yes, gothic, but also more intimate. The prints are small but that, too, adds to their atmosphere, their shadowy but powerful presence.

One cannot help but leave this show with a sense of regret for what might have been, though. The earliest photograph here was taken in Boulder, Colorado, in 1972. It is called simply Self-Portrait at Thirteen. In it, the young Woodman is fully clothed, her long hair entirely concealing her face, her left hand pressing a shutter lead that extends in a blur towards the camera – and us. It is as mysterious and elusive as any of her later nudes or performance photographs, and tells us that, even at 13, Woodman had found a way to hide in front of the camera, and, in doing so, had also found her abiding theme. Nearly 30 years after her death, she is still hiding from us in full view, as elusive and beguiling as ever.

Untitled from Angel Series

Seashore Circle

Untitled from Angel Series

Untitled

Space

Untitled

Film clip

More at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Woodman
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/8130041/Francesca-Woodman-eerie-visions-from-a-life-cut-short.html
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=1777&calctitle=1&pageSubject=344&title_id=7750&edition_id=10936&lang=cy-GB

La Jetee - A Film by Chris Marker

Chris Marker

Part 1

Part 2

More at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_jet%C3%A9e

Doumar's - The First Ice Cream Cone

Making ice cream cones

More at:

http://www.doumars.com/

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Kids These Days (Part 2) - The Intel Science Competitions

Intel 2012 Science Talent Search (STS) Winners

Intel 2012 International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) Winners

Homepage for Intel Competitions

http://www.intel.com/about/corporateresponsibility/education/competitions/index.htm

2012 Semi finalist list STS
http://www.societyforscience.org/page.aspx?pid=850

2012 Finalist list with bio's STS
http://apps.societyforscience.org/sts/71sts/finalists.asp

2012 Top 10 Winners STS
http://www.intel.com/about/corporateresponsibility/education/sts/winners.htm?cid=cim:ggl|sts_us_brand|jnCF6D|s

Nithin Tumma STS

2012 ISEF Winners Matthew Fedderson and Blake Marggraff

Andrey Sushko STS

Mimi Yen STS

2011 Top 10 Winners STS
http://download.intel.com/education/sts/winners_archive2011.pdf

Evan O'Dorney STS

Matthew Miller STS

Shree Bose ISEF 2011

2010 Top 10 Winners STS
http://download.intel.com/education/sts/winners_archive2010.pdf

2010 Winners
Erika DeBenedictis STS

David Liu STS

2009 STS
Phillip Streich

2008 STS
Graham Van Schalk

INTEL STS 2012: The Experience

Cool Science Video

Monday, April 2, 2012

GNH - Gross National Happiness

National Pursuit of Happiness Day - April 13, 2012

The birth date of Thomas Jefferson - April 13, 1743

Because we have "certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The United States Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776

Thomas Jefferson, principle author

What is GNH:

Bhutan's fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, coined the phrase GNH in 1972 on the belief that people's happiness did not depend on the nation's economic wealth alone. Many of the GNH indicators find their roots in Buddhism. Psychological well-being, for example, includes measures of meditation, prayer, nonviolence, and reincarnation.

GNH nine components of happiness:

psychological well-being

ecology

health

education

culture

living standards

time use

community vitality

good governance

What is GNH video

GNH Quotes

“We should take seriously the idea of measuring our gross national happiness, because it brings us back to our founding ideals. It makes us ask: Are we improving as a nation in protecting and exercising our right to pursue happiness? What can we – what should we do differently? If we’re serious about pursuing happiness, what should we as citizens demand of our leaders, present and future?”

Arthur C. Brooks, Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America and How We Can Get More of It

“The overwhelming majority of our people seek a greater opportunity for humanity to prosper and find happiness. They recognise that human welfare has not increased and does not increase through mere materialism and luxury, but that it does progress through integrity, unselfishness, responsibility and justice …”.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1934 State of the Union address

“There is a tremendous yearning in people’s hearts for an integrated solution to problems and GNH shows a systematic approach to all of them. People want to work together towards that. … More and more people in the world are material-oriented but there is also a yearning of the human soul beyond material possession, that’s why GNH has touched so many hearts. Will Brazil follow USA where Gross National Product increased three times in the past 50 years but people are less happy? Where community vitality has been extremely degraded, the number of people who don’t visit neighbours increased by four times, violence tripled, one in every 100 people jailed and one in every four people unhappy or depressed? Now is the time for Brazil to follow a new formula and GNH offers the most complete set of indicators for true progress.”
Psychologist and educator Dr. Susan Andrews, founder of Future Vision Ecological Park and coordinator of GNH in Brazil, November 25, 2008

“The legacy of this crisis will be a worldwide battle over ideas – over what kind of economic system is likely to deliver the greatest benefit to the most people.”
Joseph Stiglitz, coined G-192, chaired group of experts that prepared General Assembly of the UN on the economic crisis in June 2009

“For 60 years gross domestic product, or GDP for short, has been the yardstick by which the world has measured and understood economic and social progress. However, it has failed to capture some of the factors that make a difference in people’s lives and contribute to their happiness, such as security, leisure, income distribution and a clean environment–including the kinds of factors which growth itself needs to be sustainable. … We have known for years that human economic activity exhausts our natural resources and damages our fragile environment, yet economists and governments have been slow to incorporate them into their measurements. …What we measure affects what we do. We will never have perfect measures—and we need different measures for different purposes. But our work so far has shown that there is considerable room for improvement in our measures. There are reforms that can be instituted immediately; others will require more research. … Producing better, truer, ways of measuring economic, environmental and social performance, is a critical step in making progress towards building a better world.”
Joseph Stiglitz, renowned professor, author and the 2001 Nobel laureate in economics, from his article “Progress, What Progress?” in the March 2009 Observer. Stiglitz also chairs the “Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” launched in 2008 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The commission includes four other Nobel laureates, with Kenneth Arrow, James Heckman and Daniel Kahneman as members and Amartya Sen as advisor.

Economics of Happiness 2011 Trailer