I’ve decided to go with a new hosted blog. I’ll be integrating shizaam into teabyrd.
December 3, 2006
The Unseen Beatles
A documentary film featuring unseen home footage and behind-the-scenes news film of the world’s most famous band. This programme reveals the truth about why, at the height of their fame, The Beatles never performed again following the 1966 US sell-out shows. The film shows how the seeds of discontent were sown which eventually lead to the split in 1970.
December 2, 2006
Art and the Semantic Web
Alright, this is the last Wall Street article for the day. Museums are beginning to open up their collections to the Web for tagging: Why Museums Want you to Catalog their Works
The idea: If works are labeled with simple terms that describe their content, a broader audience will be able to find them, particularly as these collections are digitized and placed online.
It’s an idea that’s at odds with curatorial conventions of grouping works by time period or school of art. But in recent years, some museums have reexamined that model. London’s Tate Modern made a splash in 2000 when it hung its collection by themes such as landscape, though this year it adopted a more traditional system
December 2, 2006
Wine Notes
Q. I was wondering what you two thought was the best way to keep opened wine fresh for more than 24 hours?
A. This is one of our most-asked questions. The trick is to keep air away from the wine and there are many ways to do that. One of the simplest (and cheapest) is simply to pour a half-empty bottle of wine into a cleaned, smaller bottle and put a cork in it. Some places sell gas that you pump into the bottle. Personally, we use the good old Vacu Vin, which is inexpensive and can be used for years. If you plan to keep the wine around for more than a day, pump it again every day. We keep opened whites in the refrigerator and reds in a cool place, though we know some people keep reds in the fridge, too. (The Vacu Vin is widely available at wine stores and at Web sites such as amazon.com.)
December 2, 2006
Matisse’s Shockingly Subversive work
Matisse – Le Bonheur de Vivre
From the Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal: A Modern Masterpiece
(view a high resolution photo of the painting)
But if his technical procedure was like that of the Renaissance masters, the result was something like the opposite. This nearly 6-by-8-foot canvas was so untraditional — and so subversive — that it effectively challenged the whole notion of what a masterpiece is. Instead of being made with the kind of masterly skill and evident craftsmanship expected of such a large depiction of figures in a landscape, Matisse’s painting was rendered with an aggressive looseness and primitive simplicity that undermined both the grand tradition of pastoral painting and the deeply entrenched notion that art should imitate nature. With its sinuous, undulating forms and brilliant colors, “Le Bonheur de vivre” was understood to be a deliberate challenge to everything that had come before it — the real beginning of 20th-century art. Its chromatic excess and rhythmic intensity shocked the people who first saw it, much as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” would outrage its audience a few years later.
Read the rest at WSJ.com
December 2, 2006
A Photograph’s Hidden History
The Wall Street Journal Weekend edition features a great piece on this 1979 photograph that has been anonymously attributed until now.
TEHRAN — On Aug. 27, 1979, two parallel lines of 11 men formed on a field of dry dirt in Sanandaj, Iran. One group wore blindfolds. The other held rifles. The command came in Farsi to fire: “Atesh!” Behind the soldier farthest to the right, a 12th man also shot, his Nikon camera and Kodak film preserving in black and white a mass execution.
Within hours, the photo ran across six columns in Ettela’at, the oldest newspaper in Iran. Within days, it appeared on front pages around the world. Within weeks, the new Iranian government annexed the offending paper. Within months, the photo won the Pulitzer Prize.
November 28, 2006
del.icio.us roundup
I should be working, but I just can’t bring myself to really do anything before my second cup of coffee, and so you get a del.icio.us roundup:
Literary Locales - More than 1,000 picture links to places that figure in the lives and writings of famous authors
Carthalia (Theatres on Postcard) – Andreas Praefcke’s postcard collection of theatres and concert halls worldwide
Create Your Own Planet – a Photoshop tutorial to create things like or this. See more at the flickr “create your own planet” group.
Kuler – Adobe launches a social color picking site for exploring, creating, and sharing color themes for creative work.
November 27, 2006
Neoliberalism and the City
If you’ve got 90 minutes, listen in (or watch, if you have enough hard drive space) to David Harvey’s keynote lecture:
podcast mp3 (audio), mp4 (video)
Internationally recognized urban geographer and social theorist David Harvey delivers a keynote lecture at the Middlebury College Symposium, “Urban Landscapes: The Politics of Expression.”
from the University Channel
Has anyone found other sites that bring together high quality lectures, speeches, etc…? As much as I enjoy podcasts, I’ve yet to find a site that acts as a filter for the millions of hours of audio out there on the web.
November 26, 2006
A spherical tree of life
Visualizing the five kingdoms. It really is worth it to boot up adobe reader to zoom in and out of the pdf.
November 24, 2006
a short break
I’ll be without Internet access for a couple days, so blog updates will be severely limited until Sunday evening at the earliest.
