Monday, August 12, 2013

Betty White and Ham the Chimp

Betty White at home with her dog in 1952

Ham the chimp returns to Earth following his historic 16 minute space flight in 1961.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

'I FINK U FREEKY' by DIE ANTWOORD (Official)

Uploaded on Jan 31, 2012

Directed by Roger Ballen & NINJA
Director of Photography Melle Van Essen
Edited by Jannie Hondekom @ Left
Post Production by Blade
We luf u Fraser

www.RogerBallen.com
www.DieAntwoord.com

ZEF FILMS 2012

Category
Music
License
Standard YouTube License

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You're a commercial success, and that includes pop culture too. Your video for "I Fink U Freeky" helped put the South African group Die Antwoord on the map internationally. The clip has been viewed more than 33 million times on YouTube.

Ballen: I knew the artists for many years. Seven years ago the vocalists contacted me and told me they identified with my work. Both of them, Ninja and Yolandi, sent some of their music videos. At first I didn't know what to do with them because I wasn't a video maker. Two years later, they came from Cape Town to Johannesburg, where I live, and I took my first pictures of them. In 2010, we integrated my drawings into one of their videos. It went viral, and that's also when their career took off.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What was it like to direct "I Fink U Freeky?"

Ballen: Our relationship is built on seeing eye to eye. They like the aesthetic I represent: strong, intense photographs that penetrate people's psyche. All this is also relevant to their music. But it was real teamwork, and things just clicked into place: their music combined with my backgrounds and subjects that I have worked with for years.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: When did you get into photography?

Ballen: When I was 18 I finally got my first serious camera, a Nikon FTN. From 1968 to 1972, I studied psychology at Berkeley, and I did a lot of photography during those years. It was a pivotal time in the national culture, and Berkeley epitomized the counterculture. At the time, my work was quite socially and politically oriented, focused on anti-Vietnam protests and civil rights.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: After you graduated, you moved to South Africa, which was still under apartheid. How does a Berkeley graduate arrive at such an idea?

Ballen: I got to South Africa in a rather roundabout way. After 5 years of traveling the world and putting together my first book, "Boyhood," I went to the Colorado School of Mines, and graduated with a Ph.D. in Mineral Economics in 1981. I didn't find it easy to be in America at that time. I felt overwhelmed with the competitive and corporate nature of society. What I liked about South Africa when I first visited in the 1970s was that you lived as though you were in the First World but also had a lot of Third World around you.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But surely apartheid didn't just pass you by?

Ballen: Not at all. I felt the best way for me to make political change was through photography -- my kind of photography. My book "Platteland" had a huge impact on South Africans' perceptions of themselves. It showed white people who lived at the margins of society. It broke the myth of white supremacy. When it was published, I was subjected to a lot of accusations. I was considered a whistleblower like Edward Snowden at the time.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Does that make "Platteland" a primarily political book?

Ballen: Not in my eyes. For me, the purpose of the book was to deal with aspects of the human condition as I perceived it. And that comes across to this day. The images in "Platteland" have meaning even to a generation in the United States and Europe that knows little about apartheid.
From:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-photographer-roger-ballen-a-913152.html

Link: http://youtu.be/8Uee_mcxvrw

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Tuesday, July 9, 2013

RAVENS ARE VERY CLEVER INDEED.

RAVENS ARE CLEVER ENOUGH TO HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR AND TO BE MISCHIEVOUS.

Ravens in the Tower of London

According to legend, the Kingdom of England will fall if the ravens of the Tower of London are removed.

It had been thought that there have been at least six ravens in residence at the tower for centuries.

The earliest known reference to a Tower raven is a picture in the newspaper The Pictorial World in 1883.

This and scattered subsequent references, both literary and visual, which appear in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, place them near the monument commemorating those beheaded at the tower, popularly known as the “scaffold.”

This strongly suggests that the ravens, which are notorious for gathering at gallows, were originally used to dramatize tales of imprisonment and execution at the tower told to tourists by the Yeomen Warders.

There is evidence that the original ravens were donated to the tower by the Earls of Dunraven, perhaps because of their association with the Celtic raven-god Bran.

However wild ravens, which were once abundant in London and often seen around meat markets (such as nearby Eastcheap) feasting for scraps, could have roosted at the Tower in earlier times.

During the Second World War, most of the Tower's ravens perished through shock during bombing raids, leaving only a mated pair named "Mabel" and "Grip."

Shortly before the Tower reopened to the public, Mabel flew away, leaving Grip despondent. A couple of weeks later, Grip also flew away, probably in search of his mate. The incident was reported in several newspapers, and some of the stories contained the first references in print to the legend that the British Empire would fall if the ravens left the tower.

Since the Empire was dismantled shortly afterward, those who are superstitious might interpret events as a confirmation of the legend. Before the tower reopened to the public on 1 January 1946, care was taken to ensure that a new set of ravens was in place.

Ravens in the Tower of London

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_ravens

Portrait by Colin O’Brien

LINK: http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/late-shift-1/lecture-creative-connections-spitalfields-life-25072013.php

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Cookies

Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing.

GRAY MATTER
Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing

By ROBERT J. ZATORRE and VALORIE N. SALIMPOOR
Published: June 7, 2013

MUSIC is not tangible. You can’t eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn’t vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music — or well beyond prized, loved it.

In the modern age we spend great sums of money to attend concerts, download music files, play instruments and listen to our favorite artists whether we’re in a subway or salon. But even in Paleolithic times, people invested significant time and effort to create music, as the discovery of flutes carved from animal bones would suggest.

So why does this thingless “thing” — at its core, a mere sequence of sounds — hold such potentially enormous intrinsic value?

The quick and easy explanation is that music brings a unique pleasure to humans.

Of course, that still leaves the question of why. But for that, neuroscience is starting to provide some answers.

More than a decade ago, our research team used brain imaging to show that music that people described as highly emotional engaged the reward system deep in their brains — activating subcortical nuclei known to be important in reward, motivation and emotion.

Subsequently we found that listening to what might be called “peak emotional moments” in music — that moment when you feel a “chill” of pleasure to a musical passage — causes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, an essential signaling molecule in the brain.

When pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum — an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well — which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine.

But what may be most interesting here is when this neurotransmitter is released: not only when the music rises to a peak emotional moment, but also several seconds before, during what we might call the anticipation phase.

The idea that reward is partly related to anticipation (or the prediction of a desired outcome) has a long history in neuroscience.

Making good predictions about the outcome of one’s actions would seem to be essential in the context of survival, after all.

And dopamine neurons, both in humans and other animals, play a role in recording which of our predictions turn out to be correct.

To dig deeper into how music engages the brain’s reward system, we designed a study to mimic online music purchasing. Our goal was to determine what goes on in the brain when someone hears a new piece of music and decides he likes it enough to buy it.

We used music-recommendation programs to customize the selections to our listeners’ preferences, which turned out to be indie and electronic music, matching Montreal’s hip music scene. And we found that neural activity within the striatum — the reward-related structure — was directly proportional to the amount of money people were willing to spend.

But more interesting still was the cross talk between this structure and the auditory cortex, which also increased for songs that were ultimately purchased compared with those that were not.

Why the auditory cortex? Some 50 years ago, Wilder Penfield, the famed neurosurgeon and the founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute, reported that when neurosurgical patients received electrical stimulation to the auditory cortex while they were awake, they would sometimes report hearing music.

Dr. Penfield’s observations, along with those of many others, suggest that musical information is likely to be represented in these brain regions.

The auditory cortex is also active when we imagine a tune: think of the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — your cortex is abuzz!

This ability allows us not only

- to experience music even when it’s physically absent, but also

- to invent new compositions and

- to re-imagine how a piece might sound with a different tempo or instrumentation.

We also know that these areas of the brain encode the abstract relationships between sounds — for instance, the particular sound pattern that makes a major chord major, regardless of the key or instrument.

Other studies show distinctive neural responses from similar regions when there is an unexpected break in a repetitive pattern of sounds, or in a chord progression.
This is akin to what happens if you hear someone play a wrong note — easily noticeable even in an unfamiliar piece of music.

These cortical circuits allow us to make predictions about coming events on the basis of past events.

They are thought to:

a. - accumulate musical information over our lifetime,

b. - creating templates of the statistical regularities that are present in the music of our culture and

c. - enabling us to understand the music we hear in relation to our stored mental representations of the music we have heard.

So each act of listening to music may be thought of as both:

a. - recapitulating the past and

b. - predicting the future.

When we listen to music, these brain networks actively create expectations based on our stored knowledge.

Composers and performers intuitively understand this: they manipulate these prediction mechanisms to give us what we want — or to surprise us, perhaps even with something better.

In the cross talk between:

a. - our cortical systems, which analyze patterns and yield expectations, and
b. - our ancient reward and motivational systems, may lie the answer to the question:

does a particular piece of music move us?

When that answer is yes, there is little (in those moments of listening, at least) that we value more.

Robert J. Zatorre is a professor of neuroscience at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University.

Valorie N. Salimpoor is a postdoctoral neuroscientist at the Baycrest Health Sciences’ Rotman Research Institute in Toronto.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 9, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/why-music-makes-our-brain-sing.html?hp&_r=0

Thursday, June 13, 2013

The only difference between me and a madman
is that I am not mad. -Salvador Dali

I suppose the limitations are just the
visions of the designer; there aren't any
physical limitations. -Seymour Cray, 1982

Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.
-William "Lord Kelvin" Thompson

An absolute monarch would be absolutely wise and good.
But no man is strong enough to have no interest.
Therefore the best king would be Pure Chance.
It is Pure Chance that rules the Universe; therefore,
and only therefore, life is good. -Aleister Crowley

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable
that we have to alter it every six months. -Oscar Wilde

I practice absurdity quite religiously. -Alfred Hitchcock

This maxim
["God created the integers and the rest is the work of man"]
spoken by the algebraist Kronecker reveals more about his past
as a banker who grew rich through monetary speculation
than about his philosophical insight. -René Thom

The more I see of men, the better I like my dog. -Blaise Pascal

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in
the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that
his wife is beautiful and his children smart. -H. L. Mencken

I'm subversive as hell. -Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel

I don't know how long a musical form like rap,
with no harmonic content, virtually no melodic content,
and ultra-repetitive rhythms can hold people's attention,
but I guess we're going to find out. -Ed Macan

Remember, we don't really need the sun,
because it's very bright in the daytime.
We need the moon because it's dark at night.
-John Whateley

When I was young, I used to think that wealth and power
would bring me happiness. I was right. -Gahan Wilson

It is easy for us to ridicule Descartes* now, but we should
remember Berry Campbell's criterion: the greatness of a man's
contribution can be measured by how long he has held up progress.
Half a millennium is surely world class! -Joseph Bogen
(*for propounding dualism)

Neil Young: Don't Let It Bring You Down, It's Only Castles Burning

1971 - Don't Let It Bring You Down

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

May All Beings Be Healthy, Happy And Living In The Present

Thursday, February 28, 2013

My Modern Metropolis

Incredible Archives of a Nuclear Bomb Test Underwater

As part of a series of US nuclear weapon tests known as Operation Crossroads in 1946, a 23-kilotun nuke called Baker was blasted at about 90 feet underwater at Bikini Atoll and caused a tidal wave that reached over 2 miles high. The images that resulted from the test are breathtaking, both in the beautiful and terrifying sense. The vertical movement of such an…
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Added by Pinar on February 27, 2013

My Modern Shop Spotlight #4 - Swan Kick by Chow Hon Lam

From beautiful landscapes and powerful portraits to colorful art prints and hilarious graphic designs, we're re-introducing the wonderful works of some of our favorite artists and photographers who have been featured here on My Modern Met. Better yet, prints and canvases of their works are available through My Modern Shop. As part…
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Added by Pinar on February 26, 2013

Statues of Blinded Men Ascending High into the Sky

Karma is an intriguing sculptural installation by Korean artist Do Ho Suh that presents countless men sitting atop one another while shielding each other's eyes. Like his Cause & Effect piece, which features a spectacular tornado of figurines, Karma presents figurative sculptures…
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Added by Pinar on February 26, 2013 at 9:30am — No Comments

Artist Transforms Landfills Into Beautiful Chinese Landscapes

Photographer Yao Lu captures images of heaps of garbage covered in green protective netting and digitally manipulates them to look like a beautiful, mountainous expanse inspired by traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Yao's New Landscapes series manages to transform said garbage dumps with a few additions of carefully placed animals, ancient architecture, mist, waterfalls, and foliage.…
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Source:
Pinar's Blog - My Modern Metropolis

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blog/list?user=37g0o08b0kpj7

The Curious World of Children Bodybuilders - My Modern Metropolis

The Curious World of Children Bodybuilders

This digitally altered photo series titled Bodybuilder's World by Belgian photographer Kurt Stallaert takes a look at a rarely imagined world filled with people, young and old, who have clearly spent every waking moment pumping iron. While it may seem strange for every single person to be so ripped, it's definitely the fully developed and extremely fit figures attached to wholesome children that warrants a double-take.
I have to admit that it took a second to acknowledge that something was amiss in these photographs. It wasn't a very long second, but upon realizing what I was looking at, it seemed hard for me to ever see past these children whose sweet, innocent faces sit atop unusually muscular bodies. The brawny batch of kids would certainly have a hard time going unnoticed in our world, but it seems to be the norm in their alternate universe where little girls exhibit the physical strength to bench press double their body weight, easily. I suppose this is one extreme alternative to childhood obesity.

Kurt Stallaert website

The Curious World of Children Bodybuilders - My Modern Metropolis

Photography Award Winners

2011 International Photography Award Winners

Advertising: Fashion, 2nd Place Winner John Wright

If you love photography contests like we do, then you'll want to check out The International Photography Awards. The annual competition was created to salute the achievements of the world's finest photographers, to discover new and emerging talent, and to promote the appreciation of photography.

Recently, the category winners were announced. Out of the thousands of entries IPA received this year, only the main category winners will move on as finalists to compete for IPA's top award of International Photographer of the Year. The winner will be announced at the annual Lucie Awards which is held at the Lincoln Center, New York on October 24th, 2011. That person will earn the coveted Lucie Statue and a cash prize of $10,000.

To view all the winners, you can go to this page on the IPA website or you can check out 25 of our very favorites, below. (We included 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners. These are all professionally taken photos.) It's a diverse compilation of some excellent and inspiring work!