all I want ....

Eliza Dolittle, a simple flower girl, who has literally nothing much to go by sings of all she wants in the 1964 American musical " My Fair Lady". The film was an adaptation of the Lerner and Lowe stage musical of the same name, which in turn was based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.

With a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and directed by George Cukor, the film stars Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison in the lead roles, and is remembered as one of the greatest musicals ever.

for more, visit : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady_(film)

step back

The "moving forward' quote sprung  to fore, the idea of whether or not life is Linear.And whether a graphic could be created to signify how one's life has been shaped over the years. We called it the 'Life Lines' exercise and asked several people to participate . The participants, aged between nine years to seventy five years of age, sent in their own 'lifelines' that were their individual takes on their own lives. We are sharing some of the phenomenal results that we got for this exercise. And would like you to send in yours too. We will include it with all the other fantastic lifelines!

flowers

The Zundert Flower Parade has been running since 1936. Around twenty hamlets near the town of Zundert build the best floats they can in order to establish their name at the annual flower parade. The flower parade uses only dahlias. After a whole year of work and preparations, the parade is celebrated on the first Sunday of September each year. The colorful creations of the Zundert Flower Parade attract tens of thousands of visitors every year.

Everything is done by volunteers, even the cultivation of the dahlias. In order to prepare the floats for the big parade, hundreds of people join together. The art of building the Zundert Parade floats has been passed down from generation to generation. A staggering six to eight million dahlia flowers are used to produce the floats. Huge floats are made of wire, cardboard and papier-mâché and entirely covered in dahlias in intricate designs. The dahlias for grown specifically for the parade and thousands of them are required just to cover one float. The floats are made by twenty different hamlets and each of them consists of hundreds of builders, aged 1 to 100, who are all equally crazy about the Bloemencorso. The older members of the hamlet are often responsible for planting and growing the dahlias, while the younger ones build the float in large temporary tents that are built exclusively for the event. In Zundert, flower floats aren’t just pretty but they contain movement, can be blown up, frozen in ice or besmirched in paint.The floats are prepared as early as May or June with papier-mâché and wire - but to ensure the brilliance of the flowers the dahlias are only attached three days before the parade.

During the Zundert Flower Parade the town is charged with excitement. On Sunday and Monday, all kinds of music and theater performances are conducted for all. Zundert is on the border with Belgium, so the flower parade for both Dutch and Belgians to enjoy.

The tiny town of Zundert is most famously known as the birthplace of master painted Vincent Van Gogh, and the Bloemencorso parade honors his artistic spirit. The town’s tradition is to only use dahlia flowers to decorate each float, shows the transformative power that flowers can achieve with a little imagination!

for more, visit : http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/09/corso-zundert-flower-parade-2014/

music takes you places

It takes a few drum beats to transport one to Africa instantly. These pieces of tribal music are so identifiable and distinct that they bring the geography of its origin along with it. Tribal music has its origins in the sounds created by mundane everyday tasks of the tribe. How these sounds are cleverly woven into beautiful and haunting music is truly mesmerising. Nature provides the raw material to create instruments and man with his incredible ingenuity transforms these into music producing devices. An ingenious person can convert even trash into musical instruments.There is no movement without rhythm the tribes believe.Simplicity is truly divine and what better example than tribal music that is natural, straight from the heart and carries emotion.True, culture has to live on....it just has to!

credits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVPLIuBy9CY

FOLI (there is no movement without rhythm) original version by Thomas Roebers and Floris Leeuwenberg

rise again

The 'Phoenix" an installation by Chinese artist Xu Bing in the Church of St. John the Divine, New York, is an art work made out of the debris gathered from construction sites. It unfolds the story of 'rising again' from the fire, both literally and figuratively as it also has a resonance in the story of migrants creating a new life for themselves in new lands,

for more, visit: stjohndivine.org ,  http://www.wnyc.org/story/giant-birds-hang-inside-cathedral/ http://www.architecturaldigest.com/blogs/daily/2014/03/xu-bing-cathedral-of-st-john-the-divine-new-york

belief

Leonardo da Vinci, possibly the most celebrated personality of the Renaissance,  was as much a man of science as he was an artist. Besides his very famous works of art, he made a whole lot of sketches of machines that were way ahead of his times. The flying machine (also known as ornithopter) in the above sketches had an intended wingspan of more than 33 feet and the frame was to be made of pine covered in raw silk to create a light but sturdy membrane. He believed that " a bird is an instrument  working according to mathematical law" More importantly, he believed that man could take a flight into the skies on the strength of his beliefs!

for more, visit : 

http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199920105/obo-9780199920105-0033.xml

http://www.da-vinci-inventions.com/flying-machine.aspx

http://www.flyingmachines.org/davi.html