Blog of Parag

Spencer Tunick

I remember seeing a documentary on HBO called 'naked states' on works of Spencer Tunick, a couple of years ago. He convinces hundreds and thousands of people to pose nude in public, arranges them in artistic and sometimes, bizzare formations (he calls them installations) and photographs them.

He started taking these photos in 1992 in New York. He was arrested in 1994 for photographing a nude woman at Rockefeller Center in NYC. His largest installations consisted of 7000 spaniards in Barcelona and 1700 english men and women in London. Many of these pictures are quite fascinating and very surreal. Check them out at these links.

Colin Mockery and Brad Sherwood show

Went to see the stars of the TV show, "Whose line is it anyway?". They kicked off the three-week long Ann Arbor Summer Festival. They were incredibly funny. Laughed more in that one and half hour than whole of last month combined. I think I almost peed in my pants a couple of times. It was one of the best improv shows that I have ever seen.

Vincent Van Gogh

Today is 152nd birth anniversary of Vincent Van Gogh, one of the best post-impressionist artists. He suffered from a mental illness and committed himself to many sanatoriums to cure it. His illness and treatments had an effect on his perception and drawing. Here are two paintings made by him over a period of one year. Although the subject of both the paintings is the same, the differences in style are astronomical. The one on left is "Starry Night over the Rhone" from 1888 and the one on right is "The Starry Night" from 1889, one of his most famous paintings. He painted the second one while he was in mental asylum of Saint-Remy.

   

He committed suicide about 13 months after he painted "The Starry Night". The last year of his life was very productive. He did 150 paintings during that period; 70 in last 70 days. He died a pauper but, his paintings are priced at tens of millions of dollars today.

Both the photos taken from WebMuseum

Very Escheresque

Check out the zoomquilt at the following link...

The Evil Tree

Quite amazing!!!

Thanks, premkudva.

This American Life

This American Life is one of my most favorite programs on NPR. It is an hour of storytelling at its best. They cover a very very wide range of topics. I can listen to it all day long if they made that many shows. It usually airs on weekend afternoons. Check the schedule in your area for show timings. All the old shows are available at their website and can be listened to using real player.

Friends: Finally over.

Tonight is the last ever episode of 'Friends'. Thank God! I just get this primal urge to hurl the nearest object I can find, towards the TV everytime I see Jennifer Aniston on it.

It is sickening how NBC is milking 'Friends' while it is on its way out. Last night there was a 2 hour special 'Dateline' about friends. I didn't watch that and have no intention of watching tonight's 2 hour final episode either. Can think of a million better things I can do in those 2 hours.

Update: If anyone manages to survive through the first hour of 'Friends', switch to your local PBS station at 9pm for Frontline. Tonight's program is on Cyberwar. Should be interesting.

Goodbye, Bob Edwards :(

I hope all of you NPR fans listened to "Morning Edition" this morning. Today was Bob Edwards' last day on the show. Here is a nice article in the Washington Post about him moving on with life after "Morning Edition". I sure will miss Bob, who has been a part of my mornings for a long time. Hopefully, this doesn't drive me to listening to Howard Stern every morning. ;)

In automotive world, today marks the end of an icon. Last Oldsmobile ever will be rolled off the assembly line today.

Drummers of West Africa

Last night, I was at the awesome performance of this group from Senegal. The leader, Doudou N'Diaye Rose is 74 years old, but, full of energy. He danced and played the drums with the same or even more vigor than younger members of the troupe who are all his family members. It was an amazing experience. There were only drums, no other musical instruments, but, it kept the audience in their seats for more than 2 hours.

Check out the following link for some interesting information on this master drummer. And don't miss a chance to sway to the drumbeats of this group if they visit your area. The Oral Tradition - Doudou N'Diaye Rose

Mosaics of Zeugma

Yesterday's Nova featured rescue of some roman artefacts from an escavated villa in Zeugma, Turkey. This site was to go under water after construction of Birecik dam on the Euphrates river. According to the archeological evidence, this site witnessed the last battle between the romans that lived there and their persian attackers.

They showed construction of the dam and how this site along with a village of 30,000 residents gradually submerged under the backwaters of the dam. It was impressive to see the water accumulate slowly over time, swell and capture houses, farms, orchards, anything that came within its reach. The program website
describes other sites around the world that are threatened by submerging under the backwaters of dams.
This includes the Narmada project in India and Three Gorges dam in China among others. The Sardar Sarovar and Narmada Sagar project in India has the great potential of improving life for millions, but, the sad part is that there is no
proper plan for relocation of all the displaced people and historical temples and monuments that will go underwater. Hopefully, the 'Narmada Bachao Andolan' will be successful in taking all this into account.

Anyway, the main focus of the program was the artefacts rescued from the roman site. Initially, they didn't find anything but, fallen pillars, some pottary and a collection of decorative items and coins. The archeologists had almost run out of time when they found some exquisite mosaic floors from some rooms of the villa. Here is an example...

This looks like a carpet, but, it is a mosaic made up of small colored tiles. The story depicted in this scene is that of Achilles...

When Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, was kidnapped to Troy, Menelaus called upon his fellow chieftains to help him recover
his wife. One of them was the great warrior Achilles. Achilles's mother, the immortal sea-nymph Thetis, knowing that her son's fate was to perish at Troy if he went, dispatched him to the court of King Lycomedes. There, at her urging, he disguised himself as a maiden and joined the king's daughters. Odysseus, learning that Achilles was at the palace, appeared before the women as a merchant, offering items for sale, including weaponry. While the daughters naturally gravitated towards the feminine objects, Achilles, as this mosaic depicts,
couldn't resist the arms. Thereby unmasked, Achilles quickly agreed to accompany Odysseus to Troy, where Achilles was eventually killed by a poisoned arrow that struck him in the heel. It was his one weak spot: When he was a baby, his mother Thetis dipped him in the River Styx, which made him invulnerable except where she held him at the heel.

Here is a closeup of one of the faces not from this mosaic but a similar one. It is unbelievably intricate, and must have taken months to make the whole mosaic. I was truly amazed at the detail that is captured in these mosaics. Reminds me of similar mosaics that we saw in Rome.

Here is another of those excellent mosaics.

This mosaic tells the story of Daedalus and Icarus...

When King Minos of Crete decided to keep alive a magnificent bull that Poseidon had given him for sacrifice, the sea god punished him by having Minos's wife Pasiphae (seated at left in the mosaic) fall in love with the bull. To satisfy her desire, the architect Daedalus and his son Icarus (second from right and far right, respectively) built her a hollow cow in which she could hide and mate with the bull. Their coupling produced the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, which was shut away in the maze-like Labyrinth (upper right). Later, when Minos had
Daedalus and Icarus shut up in the Labyrinth, they escaped using wings fixed to their bodies with wax. Daedalus safely reached Sicily, but Icarus, exulting in his new-found abilities, flew too close to the sun; the wax melted and he fell to his death in the sea.