The Wayland Rudd Collection A Project Organized By Yevgeniy Fiks

Firework shows welcome 2014

Reblogged from Flickr Blog:

The night skies around the world hosted an array of firework shows in a magnificent farewell to 2013 and collective greeting for 2014.

See, and share, more celebration photos in the New Year Celebrations gallery and Firework…

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Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln has excited great debate between reviewers, historians, and commentators. Here, Kelly Candaele leads us through the many strands of the argument:

One of the most gratifying aspects of Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln has been the debate that its release has generated among historians and journalists, a debate more important than the movie itself. What were the complex dilemmas that Lincoln faced as President? What were the political realities and conduct of the time? How should we interpret the decisions that Lincoln and others made? What role did slaves and free blacks play in their own liberation?

Despite the fact that the film focuses on a short period of time in Lincoln’s presidency and deals primarily with the political cut and thrust associated with the passage of the 13th Amendment, there is a real sense in which the film can be described as deeply philosophical. Lincoln is portrayed as a man of discipline, concentration, and energy, all characteristics that sociologist Max Weber defined as part of the serious politician’s vocation. By forging an effective and realized political character — one aspect of Weber’s definition of charismatic authority — an astute politician can change the nature of power in society. By controlling his all-too-human vanity, he can avoid the two deadly political sins of lack of objectivity and irresponsibility. For Weber, a certain “distance to things and men” was required to abide by an “ethic of responsibility” for the weighty decisions that leaders are often required to make.

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CELLINI, Benvenuto

Perseus

1545-54

Bronze, height 320 cm

Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

Adolph Gottlieb, Equinox, 1963

From the Phillips Collection:

Once he felt he had exhausted the myriad possibilities of his pictographs, Gottlieb began to simplify his symbols and composition in order to enhance his theme of universality. By the 1960s, he was creating paintings like Equinox, in which the grid is reduced to an implied (although occasionally delineated) horizontal division that separates the image into two halves. Within each half, a few shapes—circles, squares, or calligraphic gestures—float against a field of color, vying for focal supremacy. Gottlieb creates a tension between the two forms struggling against each other, but in their balance and containment within a field of color, he also achieves a harmonious resolution.

Duncan Phillips acquired his two examples of Gottlieb’s work soon after each was painted, evidence of his appreciation of his art. Although no specific reference to Gottlieb appears in Phillips’s surviving writings, he could have had Gottlieb in mind when he declared in 1955, “I admire the aesthetic interpretations of the age we live in—even the symbols for the anarchy, the turmoil and the inner tensions.”

Lacey Roop - “For Billy” (WoWPS 2014)

"Crack the glowsticks in your halo. Burn so beautiful that if the sun ever looked at you he’d go blind." Performing during prelims at the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam.

न्याय : परिदृश्य और परिप्रेक्ष्य

न्याय : परिदृश्य और परिप्रेक्ष्य प्रसन्न कुमार चौधरी प्रस्तावना मानव समाज के शैशव-काल से न्याय का प्रश्न मानव जाति की आत्म-पहचान और उसके आत्म-संगठन का केन्द्रीय प्रश्न रहा है और बदलते स्वरूप में आज तक बना हुआ है । प्रकृति को जानने और उसे बदलने के जरिये जीवनयापन करने वाले मानव-जनों को न सिर्फ अपने और प्रकृति के बीच के सम्बन्धों को, बल्कि मानव-जनों के बीच के सम्बन्धों को भी परिभाषित करना पड़ा…

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'Sentiment must be outlawed from the domain of science and things should be judged from an objective standpoint. For myself I shall find as much pleasure in a positive destruction of my own ideology, as in a rational disagreement on a topic, which, notwithstanding many learned disquisitions, is likely to remain controversial forever.' Dr. BR Ambedkar, 'Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development'.

IMG_7809 by Pooja Pant