Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Picasso paintings reinterpreted [feedly]


   Repost!
 
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Picasso paintings reinterpreted

eugenio recuenco

eugenio recuenco

eugenio recuenco

eugenio recuenco

I love re-interpretations of art. Especially when it moves beyond the 2D – like these fashion photographs done by Eugenio Recuenco who created a new spin on Picasso's paintings.

Imagine what you could come up with if you reinterpret something? Especially by using a completely different medium from the original – now that's where it gets interesting. If you used the same medium as the original – unless you have a different point of view – it's not going to be quite as powerful.

[Via Lost at E Minor]

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Tuesday, April 2, 2013

A Major Step In The Fight For Street Artists To Protect Their Copyrights [feedly]


   Pretty cool. Repost from Wooster Collective. 
 
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A Major Step In The Fight For Street Artists To Protect Their Copyrights

A street artist creates a piece of original art and then puts it up in a public space for others to enjoy for free.

For most artists, this is a selfless act.

A fan comes across a piece of street art, takes a photograph of it with their mobile phone and then shares it with others on their Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook feed.

For most street art fans, this is also a selfless act.

A photographer visits street art locations around the world and takes hundreds of photographs of every single piece of street art they can find. The photographer then photoshops and crops the photographs so that only the artwork is seen in the frame, often making it look like the photograph is an actual print made by the artist in their studio. The photographer then sells these photographs in bulk to a middleman who then licenses them to a variety of poster companies and online print shops around the world.

For us, this is not a selfless act.

The reality is that most street artists have no idea that their art work is being sold commercially. And when they do find out, they don't have the financial resources to fight it. Because the large poster companies have thousands of images being licensed to them, and because they trust their suppliers, they often don't know who the artist is in the image they are selling, nor are they aware that the artist isn't being compensated from royalty payments made to the middlemen.

For years this practice of selling cropped street art photographs commercially has bothered us and countless artists.

Recently, we were invited to participate in a talk in New York sponsored by Art.com. The event is scheduled to take place this Thursday evening. But after agreeing to do the talk, we soon learned that Art.com currently offers hundreds of photographs of street art for sale, many of which the artist who's work is featured was never contacted nor compensated by the supplier. 

We made Art.com aware of this issue and told them that we could no longer participate in the talk without this matter being quickly addressed.

To our surprise, and to their credit, Art.com agreed to speak with us about this very issue. 

Today, we're pleased to announce that Art.com, the world's largest online specialty retailer of high-quality wall art, has agreed to remove every photograph of street art in which the artist whose work is in the photograph is not being compensated, and does not want photographs of their street work to be sold in this manner. 

While we're still working out the details, in the coming weeks we will be working with Art.com to help identify the artists who's work is being featured in over 600 street art photographs currently being sold on the site. If the artist wishes to have the photograph removed, Art.com has agreed to remove it. If the artist wishes to replace the existing unauthorized photograph with a new photograph or image that they own themselves, we will be assisting the artist in putting a licensing agreement in place for their work to be sold on the site.

We are very pleased that Art.com has agreed to work with us and the artists to provide compensation back to the artist if the artist wises to have their work sold. After speaking with the team at Art.com we feel strongly that their intentions are good and they do indeed want to take an active role in stopping photographs of street art from being sold commercially without the artist's permission. 

The agreement with Art.com is a major step in stopping this growing form of profiteering from street art. 

We hope that this will put other sites on notice, and that they will follow Art.com's lead and remove commercial photographs of street art from their sites as well. We have always believed that artists have the right to be compensated for the commercial exploitation of their work no matter how that work was publicly displayed. It is because of this that we have never run advertising on our website even though we could have made hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing so over the years. 

So in the spirit of cooperation with art.com we hope you will join Evan Pricco from Juxtapoz and us this Thursday evening. We'll be there and we hope you will as well. 

Marc and Sara Schiller, Wooster Collective


Monday, March 11, 2013

Theory

I have a theory. It came from a conversation with a coworker. She said she noticed I lost weight and asked what I've been doing to lose it. I did notice I had a lot less belly fat. That was weird. I've never lost belly fat with my losing weight. Usually it stays on or is the last to go. Now it's gone sooner - and I haven't lost that much weight. It's like my belly fat is burning at the same rate the rest of my weight loss is going.

Then I thought that my diet & exercise haven't been that drastic, but I had been meditating, stress relieving and letting go - working out my stress instead of holding it in.

That got me thinking. I saw this documentary on hormones. Some people with chemical imbalances (runs in my family), when they get stressed, actually release a ton more of the stress chemical cortisol, so they have these unusual extreme reactions to stress. Thats sort of how depression & such kick in. I feel like sometimes i have extreme health reactions like i get sick or i really take it hard when i get stressed. Sometimes its just chemical. Cortisol puts the body into panic mode - making it store fat in your belly. Stress making you fat - giving you a belly.

Low stress, less cortisol, more hormonal balance, more normal weight loss with exercise & diet.

It's just a theory, but I think that my stress relief meditation and "letting go" mentally of stress has seriously helped me stop storing belly fat. It's like my body is learning to be healthy & stopped storing needlessly.

Anyway I'm going to keep everything up. With the time change its a lot harder waking up early but I'm giving it a go tomorrow AM. Keep up meditating, keep healthy eating & regular exercise - mainly walking for a long time.

It's not about losing weight, it's about being healthy. I would rather be fatter & healthier than thinner & not as healthy. Anyway, am hoping :) interesting theory I think. We shall see.

Create a Sacred Space in Your Heart

Another neat post, except for the plug at the end.

 
 

Sent to you by Kareena via Google Reader:

 
 

via zenhabits by Leo on 3/5/13

'Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.' ~Thich Nhat Hanh

By Leo Babauta

Yesterday I had tea with a Daoist tea monk who said for tea to change you, you have to create a sacred space in your heart for the tea.

Imagine that space for a moment. How does it feel? What can reside in that sacred space? How different is it from mechanically drinking tea, without paying attention to it?

Now think about the difference between just drinking tea, as if you were drinking anything and not really paying attention … and drinking tea with that sacred space in your heart for that tea. It's profoundly different, and it changes everything.

You can do that for anything, not just tea. Anything that's important to you.

If you create a sacred space in your heart for something, it changes how you do it. It changes you, at the molecular level.

We crank through things these days — email, social networks, news, work tasks, calls, meetings, deadlines — and then the day is gone. This is a waste of a miracle, the day that we've been given.

Instead, create a sacred space for that which matters most:

  • meditation, yoga, tea
  • reading at bedtime with your child
  • having tea with your spouse
  • a daily walk
  • writing
  • your most important and creative work

Perhaps every moment should have a sacred space in our hearts, but we have to start somewhere. Pick something small but important, and create that space today.

Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world.' ~T'ien Yiheng

Mindful + Entrepreneur: A Seminar with Leo

In other news, I'm holding a 3-hour seminar here in San Francisco with my friend Jesse Jacobs (creator of the Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Tea):

Mindful + Entrepreneur Seminar The seminar will be held at Samovar Tea Lounge at the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco on March 21, 2013. Join us!

n this 3-hour seminar you will:

  • taste great tea and chocolate: learn how to be an expert taster
  • talk with Jesse Jacobs, founder of Samovar Tea Lounge, and Leo Babauta, founder of the Zen Habits website
  • learn to focus mindfully
  • learn to savor life more
  • find calm throughout the work day
  • learn how–and why–to single-task
  • learn how to deal with distraction
  • try some simple meditation techniques
  • create focused task lists
  • become good at change and discomfort
  • learn how to create habits
  • discuss the fundamentals of building an online and retail business
  • learn about how Jesse created Samovar, and how I created Zen Habits
  • talk about our main sources of revenue
  • discuss some of the lessons we've learned in building their businesses
  • ask us your burning questions questions so you don't make the mistakes they made

The seminar will be broken into two sessions: mindfulness, and entrepreneurship. A selection of Samovar Tea Lounge's handcrafted teas and chocolates will be provided.

This intimate and unique seminar is limited to 25 participants.

Mindful + Entrepreneur Seminar


 
 

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Zen Mind in the Middle of Chaos & Stress

A neat post.

 
 

Sent to you by Kareena via Google Reader:

 
 

via zenhabits by Leo on 3/8/13

By Leo Babauta

What do you do when your job, or your personal life, is a constant source of busy-ness, rushing, nose-to-the-grindstone work, and stress?

Or what do you do if your life is simple and relatively stress-free, but something blows up and you are in the middle of chaos and high stress all of a sudden?

This is when we could use a dose of Zen Mind, or the Art of Letting Go.

What is this Zen Mind? To be honest, I'm still learning what that is, but what I've been practising is a constant letting go. Let's take an example:

I have a major deadline approaching. It is stressing me out, man! But what is the source of the stress? It's not the work, which is just a series of actions. It's not the deadline, which is just a time constraint. It's my reaction to those external events — my fear that I'm not going to make it, that I'll mess up, that I'll look stupid or incompetent. This fear that is causing my stress reaction is rooted in my wanting things to turn out a certain way … wanting to meet the deadline and get things perfect and look good.

What if I could let go of wanting things to turn out that way? This is a fantasy, an ideal, that I'm holding onto. It might turn out that way, sure, but it could turn out a dozen other ways, and the truth is I don't have complete control over how it'll turn out. All I can do is do the work, and the fantasy, the fear and the stress are only getting in the way. So if I can let go of this ideal, this fantasy, I can let go of the fear, and the stress.

This is the Zen Mind that I'm learning about. It's simply letting go, and in doing so, you attain a peace of mind no matter what chaos and seemingly stressful event are going on around you. Again, I'm not good at this yet, but I'm learning. I'll share what I know with you.

The Art of Letting Go

So these are the steps to letting go:

  1. Notice why you're stressed. What external event is stressing you? Why is it stressing you out? What fear do you have?
  2. Notice what you're holding onto. If your response is fear, it's because you're holding onto something. It's probably a fantasy/ideal, or wanting to control something, wanting something to turn out a certain way, wishing things would meet the expectations you have. If you're saying, "He should do this" or "It should be like this" then you're holding onto an ideal/expectation/outcome.
  3. Realize that it's not real. This fantasy, this expectation, this wishing you could control things … it's just made up in your head. To be fair, we all do it. But it's not a real thing — and it can be let go of.
  4. See that it's hurting you. This thing you've made up is causing you stress, which is shortening your life, and making what short life you have less enjoyable. It's causing pain in your life. Realize this.
  5. Let go. If something you've made up is causing pain, why hold onto it? It's not worth it. By letting go, you release the pain, and are just left with you and the work you need to do.

Zen Mind in the Middle of Chaos

So you work long hours and are stressed out. It's work you love, perhaps, but still hard work, and still lots of stressors. Maybe you get to take some good breaks during the day, maybe you take weekends off, maybe you get some great vacations.

But the fact remains: no matter what kind of breaks and vacations you take, much of your life is spent doing the hard work, and stressed out. You need to be able to simultaneously work and be on vacation. This is the practice of Zen Mind that we're talking about — letting go and being able to breathe and smile in the middle of a stressful workday.

It's only stressful, of course, because of stuff we're making up in our heads. So if we can create a constant practice of awareness and letting go, we constantly let go of the stress.

Your boss dumps a new project on you with a close deadline. Yikes! You're instantly stressed. Notice, and let go. Breathe. Feel the stress floating away as you let go of an ideal and an expectation. You are now free, and you can just do the first task — after all, that's all you can ever do.

Your coworker or client is mad at you, and yelling at you. This is highly stressful. Until you realize that they are probably yelling for some problem that's not really about you — they are stressed out, they are having a bad day, they have problems dealing with stress. And you are holding onto the expectation that everyone around you should behave perfectly, which of course is an absurd fantasy. You let go of that, and reach out in your heart to this fellow human being who isn't happy. How can you make things better for this person, with an open heart?

Your son is stressing you out because he's not doing what he should be doing. You're mad! Why can't he just do what you ask? Of course, this is a fantasy. Your kids (or friends, or spouse) are not going to live up to these expectations you have of how they should behave — these expectations aren't anything real, just fantasies. You can't control their behavior — wanting to do so just stresses you out. So let go of that expectation and the desire to control, and the stress goes away. Instead, open your heart, and be open to who they are.

OK, so that's all easier said than done. In the real world, it takes a lot of practice. We often forget about this process when things hit the fan. That's OK. Life is a constant practice. Keep practicing, and let go of wanting to be perfect at it. Just in the attempt, you're already perfect.


 
 

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Sunday, March 3, 2013

Camping!

Husband and I went camping for the very first time ever together! It was at my mother in law's backyard, but still - the ultimate adventure!

Husband & I requested camping gear for our wedding 3 years ago, as we planned on camping up and down California. We got some great stuff, but never went. I'm planning for my birthday and I wanted to go camping finally. Since we're super rusty on camping, decided to try everything out and figure out if we're the camping types.

I definitely am. Husband, still deciding. Lol. I don't mind roughing if, being a little stinky and uncomfortable, and not having all my creature comforts. I think it gives me a challenge and makes me more creative.

The everyday ease of life is removed, and we are faced with prioritizing bare essentials - food, shelter, warmth, etc. Sort of helps you appreciate the running water & comfort of your kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Lighting is another huge difference. It gets dark and cold, so fires, flashlights and warmth become priority. No tv or internet. It's like going back to the basics.

Then there's nature. I loved breathing the fresh night air as I was snug in my sleeping bag. We took the "roof" off our tent & I could lie down, look up and see the night sky and like 3 stars living in LA. You can hear birds & creatures. You saw green and wild around you.

It's uncomfortable and unusual, in a really good and healthy way. It takes a ton of planning and as we found out the safe way with mom 20 feet away, we still need to get a ton of stuff to be totally prepared. It was more to get comfortable with our gear and figure out if its something we want to do. For me, this weekend confirmed that I really want to go camping.

Camping puts you literally outside your box, and I think that's why I love it.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

10 Craziest Things You Can Buy in China

Another blog I subscribe to. Ya... interesting.

 
 

Sent to you by Kareena via Google Reader:

 
 

via Listverse by JFrater on 2/19/13

If you want to step outside your comfort zone, go skydiving. If you want to forget you ever had a comfort zone, buy a ticket to China. If you already live in China, you're two sentences ahead of me and just a few yuan away from owning some of the most bizarre items ever available on the legal free market. Here are ten of the craziest things you can buy in China. And if you know of anything that can top the items on this list, feel free to put it in the comments.

10
Live Crabs From Vending Machines

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In 2010 the Twin Lakes Crab Co., a Chinese crab supplier, decided that sometimes a grocery store just isn't convenient enough. So they built a vending machine that dispenses live crabs to be installed in subway stations in the city of Nanjing. Picture a typical snack vending machine, then replace all the chips and cookies with aerated plastic boxes containing living, moving crabs and you'll have a perfect image of what this looks like.

The crabs are kept at a constant 5 degrees Celsius (41 F), which is cold enough to put them in a temporary stasis, but not so cold it kills them. They sell for the equivalent of about two US dollars, and the bottom row of the machine also offers bottles of ginger vinegar—a combo sort of like ketchup and french fries.

9
Panda Tea

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Let's just go ahead and say it: Panda Tea is a drink made from panda poop, and it's the single most expensive tea in the world—one dried kilo of the tea will run you about US $77,000. Why would anybody want to drink it? The theory is that pandas really only use about 30 percent of the bamboo they eat, eliminating the rest of the unprocessed bamboo in their fecal matter. It's believed that, among other nutrients, bamboo contains antioxidants that can prevent cancer, so panda tea is marketed as an anti-cancer tonic and a weight loss aid.

The facility is located in the Sichuan Province, and the owner of Panda Tea, Yanshi An, started his company with 11 tons of dung that he bought from a nearby panda sanctuary.

8
Food Prepared, Cooked, And Served By Robots

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From noodles to spicy chicken, everything tastes better when it's prepared by the cold, metallic dicing hooks of a robot. This isn't just one isolated example, either—it's three isolated examples, showing a growing trend in robotic food service.

In 2011, inventor Cui Runquan created Chef Cui, a humanoid robot that prepares shaved noodles, a popular noodle variety in China in which the noodles are shaved by hand off a block of dough and then boiled. The robots are being mass produced and sold for the equivalent of US $2,000, and over 3,000 have already been sold.

A fast food chain in Shanghai is also using robots—but this time as the actual chefs. The obvious benefit is the efficiency: one robot can wash a dirty pot, combine the ingredients, cook the dish, and have the finished order on a plate in only three minutes. The downside? Yet one more integration that will make it easier for robots to kill us all.

Finally, if cooking wasn't enough, you can also go to the Dalu Rebot Restaurant and have your food brought to you by a robot server. The six robots follow a rotation that allows them to serve the restaurant's twenty-one tables before returning to the kitchen to refill their trays.

7
Canned Air

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If you want a breath of fresh air in China, it's going to cost you about five yuan. That's how much Chen Guangbaio is selling his new line of canned air for, which is literally a soda can filled with air. This product is part publicity stunt and part environmental statement on Chinese air pollution, which is now so bad that the haze is visible from space in some areas of the country (seriously).

For the purest air, you can pick up a flavor called Pristine Tibet, and if you're feeling nostalgic you can buy Revolutionary Yah'an or Post-Industrial Taiwan flavored air.

6
Traffic Jam Stand-Ins

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For a country with 1.3 billion people, it's not surprising that China sometimes has some pretty long traffic jams—sometimes lasting for weeks. But a few entrepreneurs have turned lemons into the Chinese version of lemonade by offering a service that provides a person who will actually sit in your car for you while it's stuck in traffic.

It works like this: If you find yourself stuck in a gridlock, you can call the service, tell them where you are, and wait for two men to arrive on a motorcycle. The stand-in will sit in your car, and the motorcycle driver will take you anywhere you need to go. The service is mostly offered around Wuhan in Central China, which typically has some of the worst traffic in the country.


5
Dwarf Tours

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The Kingdom of the Little People is sort of like a cross between a theme park and the Shire—located in the Yunnan Province, it encompasses 13,000 acres set aside to build a miniature world that will be populated exclusively by dwarfs and open for tours like a safari. Don't bother reading that sentence again; it's even more offensive the second time.

The brainchild of entrepreneur Chen Mingjing, the Kingdom of the Little People is still being built, but already has over 30 tiny cottages to house the dwarfs and a parody presentation of Swan Lake, which is now open to the public. Although a lot of people are offended by the idea, Chen claims that it will provide people with permanent job opportunities when they would otherwise struggle in a difficult economy, and many of the residents of the Kingdom are proud to be part of the community.

4
Obama Fried Chicken

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From morally ambiguous dwarfism to vaguely racist copyright infringement, China truly has it all. In 2011, a businessman in Beijing opened China's first OFC—Obama Fried Chicken. The restaurant uses a KFC-styled banner and logo complete with a cartoonishly grinning caricature of Barack Obama and sells fried chicken.

Believe it or not, this isn't actually the first Obama Fried Chicken to grace the planet—or the first time China has used Obama's image to sell chicken. The first OFC opened in Brooklyn in 2009, but closed down a short time later. And in a completely unrelated stunt, the official KFC in China released this ad in 2011 which features an actor who looks like Obama giving a speech before being crushed by a giant chicken sandwich. There's some sort of message here…but we're totally not spelling it out.

3
Live Turtle Key Rings

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Arguably one of the oddest things you can buy in China is a tiny live animal on a key ring. The animals—usually a miniature Brazilian turtle or a kingfish—are enclosed in a small bag or plastic bubble that is filled with a nutrient-rich liquid that's supposed to be able to feed the creature for up to three or four months.

Of course, the sealed container raises a lot of questions about how the animal is supposed to get oxygen, and several animal welfare services in China have understandably raised a public outcry that call these trinkets a particularly severe form of animal abuse. One of the reasons people buy them is for good luck, but supposedly many people will buy one just to set the animal free.

2
White People

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At the risk of sidestepping premise for a second here, you can't actually buy white people in China—but you can rent them, which is close enough. Chinese businessmen will often rent white actors to stand beside them at important events and, well, that's about it.

The idea is that Western businesses are successful (China's words, not mine), and so for a Chinese businessman to be seen with a guy who could be an overseas business partner is a symbol of status and prestige. Sometimes the actor just stands there, sometimes he gives a speech, and sometimes he'll be given a small role to play, complete with fake business cards. One actor named Jonathan Zatkin was paid to give a speech for the opening of a jewelry store and describe "how wonderful it was to work with the company for 10 years."

According to Zatkin, "The requirements for these jobs are simple. 1. Be white. 2. Do not speak any Chinese, or really speak at all unless asked. 3. Pretend like you just got off of an airplane yesterday."

1
Tea Picked By The Mouth Of A Virgin

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Here's a fun sentence: The Jiuhua tea plantation in the Henan Province hires virgins with C-cup breasts to pick tea by grabbing the leaves with their lips and then dropping them into a wicker basket nestled between their breasts.

The women can not touch the leaves or the basket with their hands, and in addition to specifically requesting C-cup breasts, the plantation also requires that the women have no visible scars or wounds. According to the spokesperson for the company, this odd requirement comes from a legend about how the tea used to be picked by the mouths of fairies. With this method, the tea is supposed to be infused with the virility and purity of the virgins, which is then passed on to the person who drinks the tea.

The post 10 Craziest Things You Can Buy in China appeared first on Listverse.


 
 

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