Month: July 2018

Mark Eliyahu, “Journey”

Mark Eliyahu, “Journey”

Mark Eliyahu: Kamanche;   Eldad Zitrin: Piano

Mark Eliyahu was born to a well-known family of musicians in Dagastan. His father, Piris Eliyahu, is a world renowned Tar master, composer and arranger and musicologist. At the age of four,  Mark Eliyahu began violin studies and at sixteen travelled to Greece to study Baglama and Greek-Turkish music with master Ross Daly. This was followed by two years in Azerbaijan of Kamanche and Persian-Azeric music studies with master Adalat Vazirov.

In 2001, the Mark Eliyahu Ensemble started extensive global touring to raving reviews continuing until this very date with performances at the Pompidou Center, City De-La Music, the Zorolu PSM; tours included festivals like Colors Of Ostrova , the Paris Jazz, the Helsinki Festival, Gibraltar World, the Israel Festival, Ankara World, the Jerusalem Season of Culture and many others.

Tribal Ritual Eshu

Tribal Ritual Eshu, Date Unknown, Wood and Seeds, Yoruba Tribe, Nigeria

An Orisha is a spirit who reflects one of the subordinate manifestations of the supreme deity. The Orisha are said to have previously existed in the spirit world or as human beings, recognized as deities upon their deaths due to extraordinary feats on Earth.

Eshu partially serves as an alternate name for Eleggua, the messenger for all Orishas. There are 256 paths to Eleggua—each one of which is an Eshu. It is believed that Eshu is an Orisha similar to Elugga, but there are only 101 paths to Eshu according to ocha, rather than the 256 paths to Eleggua according to Ifá. Eshu is known as the “Father who gave birth to Ogboni”, and is also thought to be agile and always willing to rise to a challenge.

Calendar: July 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of July

Aerial Flora

July 5, 1893 was the birthdate of the Wing Chun master Yip Kai-man, known as Yip Man.

Yip Man grew up in a wealthy family in Guangdong and received a traditional Chinese education. Hie started learning Wing Chun for Chan Wah-shun, a teacher and a healer, when he was twelve. Chan, at that time seventy years old, trained Yip Man for three years until his death; Chan’s second eldest disciple, Wu Chung-sok, continued Yip Man’s training.

At the age of sixteen, Yip moved to Hong Kong with the aid of a relative and attended Saint Stephen’s College, a school for wealthy families. It was at this period in his life that he started learning martial arts from Leung Bik. When he was twenty-four, Yip returned to his hometown, Foshan, and became a policeman. He taught Wing Chun to subordinates, friends and relatives informally and did not open an official martial arts school.

Yip went to Hong Kong later to live with his student Kwok Fu during the second Sino-Japanese War, returning after the war to Foshan to continue his career as a police officer. After the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War he left for Hong Kong and started a school there. Some of his students attained proficiency in Wing Chun and were able to start their own schools. Students and descendants sparred with other martial artists to compare their skills; and their victories helped increase Yip’s fame.

Yip died on December 2, 1972 in his Hong Kong apartment from throat cancer, only seven months before the death of one of most famous pupils, Bruce Lee. Yip’s legacy is the spread of the Wing Chun style of martial arts through the world. A number of films based on the life of Yip Man were made; the first one “Ip Man” focusing on his life in the 1930s and 1940s was released in 2008 starring Donnie Yen. “Ip Man2” and “Ip Man3” were released in the following years and again starred Donnie Yen.

Wong Kar-wai’s 2013 film about Yip Man titled “The Grandmaster” is one of the better films. It was created in an almost biographical style, highlighting parts of Asian history. It concentrated more on the end of an era in Chinese martial arts history as the second Sino-Japanese War broke out. Tony Leung, one of Asia’s most successful and recognizable actors, played the role of Yip Man. “The Grandmaster” focused also on the philosophies between martial arts and life, as well as the Yip Man’s life from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Neuendorf House

Claudio Silverstrin and John Pawson, Neuendorf House, Courtyard Enclosure, Mallorca, Balearic Islands

The Neuendorf House in Mallorca was designed by John Pawson in partnership with Claudio Silvestrin. Entry to the house involves a theatrical descent between narrow walls past a basin set in a full-height groove. The approach presents, with its acoustics, a calibrated experience of enclosure and compression against the vast landscape that is the house’s context.

The courtyard’s composition si emphatically vertical. The exaggerated height of the walls is dramatised by the narrow slot whose edges emphasizes the wall’s thickness. A modest contrasting horizontal form is added by a bench set very low to the ground. The contrast between the landscape outside and the courtyard space is underlined by the view of the sky above and the landscape seen through the wall’s gap.

Source: just-good-design.com

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer: Paintings from the “Walhalla” Series

Anselm Kiefer, a German painter and sculptor, was born in 1945 and grew up playing in the rubble of postwar Germany, a childhood that has had a huge effect on his life and art. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. He works incorporating materials into his work, such as straw, ash, clay, lead and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan, whose works were also affected by the horrors of the war, played a role in developing Kiefer’s themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust.

Lasha Fox Tsertsvadze

Photography by Lasha Fox Tsertsvadze

Lasha Fox is a 26 year old photographer currently living and working in Tbilisi, Georgia. He is currently working on several documentary and conceptual projects. He has been involved in photography for the last eight years, concentrating on photography among the gay community in Georgia for the last two years.

All images reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s sites: https://lashafox.tumblr.com  and  https://www.instagram.com/lashafox

Casey Cripe

Casey Cripe, Map Paintings from his “One is All is One” Series

San Francisco based artist Casey Cripe describes himself as an “artist-scientist”, and his multimedia works as maps of the infinite landscapes of self, life, and the universe. Cripe composes many of his works, which vary from the surreal to increasingly abstract, based on Renaissance diagrams and architectural drawings.

“These maps that I craft are not only to chart and guide my own path, but also the paths of all fellow humans. We as individuals and as a species are lost and blind, blundering through the historical landscape, hurtling through a dark cosmos of known and unknown existential threats, desperate for any and all navigational aids that might light the way toward our destination.” -Casey Cripe

Being and Nothingness

Artist Unknown, “Embrace Nothingness”, Collage, Noirgraph

“From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free.” –

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Image reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s site: https://noirgraph.tumblr.com

Calendar: July 4

A Year: Day to Day Men: 4th of July

Seeking New Horizons

July 4, 1924 was the birthdate of American actress and producer, Eva Marie Saint.

Eva Marie Saint’s introduction to television began working as an NBC page, the internship program where pages rotate through assignments in the media environment. She appeared in the very early live NBC TV show “Campus Hoopla” in 1946. Her performances on this program are recorded on rare kinescope and audio recordings of these telecasts are preserved in the Library of Congress.

Eva Marie Saint won the Drama Critics Award for her Broadway stage role in the 1953 Horton Foote play, “The Trip is Bountiful”, in which she co-starred with such experienced actors as Lillian Gish and Jo Van Fleet. She received her first Emmy nomination, a Best Actress award, for playing the young mistress of E. G. Marshall in “Middle of the Night”. She won another nomination for her role in the 1955 television musical “Our Town”, co-starring with Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra.

In the 1954 “On the Waterfront”, Eva Marie Saint made her first feature film appearance in the role of Edie Doyle- a performance for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She was also nominated by the British Academy of Film in the category of ‘Most Promising Newcomer’ for this role of Edie Doyle. “On the Waterfront” starring Marlon Brando was a major success and launched Saint’s movie career.

Director Alfred Hitchcock surprised many by choosing Eva Marie Saint over dozens of candidates for the femme fatale role in the 1959 suspense classic “North by Northwest” starring Cary Grant and James Mason. The change in Saint’s screen persona, coupled with her adroit performance as a seductive woman of mystery who keeps Cary Grant off balance, was widely heralded. The film became a box office hit and an influence on spy films for decades.

In the 1960s, Eva Marie Saint continued to distinguish herself in both high-profile and offbeat pictures. She co-starred with Paul Newman in the1060 “Exodus”, directed by Otto Preminger, a historical drama about the founding of the state of Israel adapted from Leon Uris’ novel. She also portrayed a tragic beauty in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film “All Fall Down”, with Warren Beatty, Karl Malden and Angela Lansbury.

Eva Marie Saint has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures at 6624 Hollywood Boulevard, and one for her television work at 6730 Hollywood Boulevard. Born in Newark, New Jersey, she is now 94 years old.