Saturday, January 7, 2012

What Makes Naomi Run...


Naomi Verchovsky: Ein Hod Potter from zeev verchovsky on Vimeo.
Part of "What motivates them to create..."
Roy Spungin, Creator/Director
Niv Horowitz, Editor
artists
Robert Nechin
Nobuya Yamaguchi
Daniel Dworsky
Ayelet Shefer
Naomi Verchovsky
Julian Chagrin
Naaama Berckowitz
ein-hod.us/video/what-motivates-them-to-create

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

A Primitive Pottery

Found in a cinema in Derbyshire, a can of film labelled "A Primitive Pottery in Dorset" has found its way home.
Collaborating with Penny Copland-Griffiths,who presents this video, and her colleagues from the Verwood and District Potteries Trust, Trilith produced this 1917 film of Crossroads Pottery, Verwood, Dorset,together with interviews with Fred Thorne, the last "boy" to be taken on at the pottery, potter John Leach whose grandfather Bernard created the studio pottery movement in Britain,
and a section dealing with the archaeological dig in 2000, directed by AC Archaeology, prior to the last traces of the pottery being buried under a car park. Penny Copland-Griffiths brings the fruits of 30 years of research to this production. Produced, shot and edited by John Holman.
For 31 min. video go to VIMEO

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Eva Zeisel at 105


Born Eva Amalia Striker in Budapest on Nov. 13, 1906, she was the daughter of Laura Polanyi Striker and Alexander Striker. Her father owned a textile factory. Her mother was a historian, feminist and political activist.

In 1923, Ms. Zeisel entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest to study painting. She withdrew three semesters later, inspired by an aunt’s Hungarian peasant pottery collection to become a ceramist. She apprenticed to Jakob Karapancsik, a member of the guild of chimney sweepers, oven makers, roof tilers, well diggers and potters, and graduated as a journeyman.

Read more...

Friday, December 16, 2011

Christopher Hitchens Dead


In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker. Nietzsche was destined to find this out in the hardest possible way, which makes it additionally perplexing that he chose to include the maxim in his 1889 anthology Twilight of the Idols. (In German this is rendered as Götzen-Dämmerung, which contains a clear echo of Wagner’s epic. Possibly his great quarrel with the composer, in which he recoiled with horror from Wagner’s repudiation of the classics in favor of German blood myths and legends, was one of the things that did lend Nietzsche moral strength and fortitude. Certainly the book’s subtitle—“How to Philosophize with a Hammer”—has plenty of bravado.)
read more...

Thursday, December 15, 2011

George Whitman Is Dead at 98


In 1951, George Whitman opened a bookshop-commune in Paris. George, 92, still runs his "den of anarchists disguised as a bookstore," offering free, dirty beds to poor literati, cutting his hair with a candle and gluing the carpet with pancake batter. More than 40,000 poets, travelers and political activists have stayed at Shakespeare & Co, writing or stealing books, throwing parties and making soup or love while living with George's generosity and fits of anger. Illustrious guests include Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Jacques Prévert, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Welcome to the makeshift utopia of the last member of the Beat Generation.
Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Smooth Pricks and Sharper Brains

It has long been believed that humans evolved smooth penises as a result of adopting a more monogamous reproductive strategy than their early human ancestors. Those ancestors may have used penile spines to remove the sperm of competitors when they mated with females. However, exactly how this change came about is not known.
The researchers did not set out to study penile spines. Rather, they were looking for chunks of DNA that had been lost from the human genome but not the chimp genome, so they could then try to pinpoint what those chunks did.
Sex would be a very different proposition for humans if — like some animals including chimpanzees, macaques and mice — men had penises studded with small, hard spines.
Now researchers at Stanford University in California have found a molecular mechanism for how the human penis could have evolved to be so distinctly spine-free. They have pinpointed it as the loss of a particular chunk of non-coding DNA that influences the expression of the androgen receptor gene involved in hormone signalling.
more>>>

Friday, December 9, 2011

נפטר המשורר רומן באימבאיב


ביום (ה') המשורר רומן באימבאיב נפטר באופן פתאומי בגיל 55, עקב זיהום בגופו. באימבאיב אושפז בבית החולים איכילוב בתל אביב לפני מספר ימים כאשר חש ברע, ונפטר היום בשעות הבוקר המוקדמות. הלווייתו תתקיים היום ב-16:00 בבית העלמין קרית שאול.
באימבאיב נולד בצ'רנוביץ', אוקראינה, ב-1956. בתחילת שנות ה-70 עלה לישראל. בבגרותו למד הנדסת מכונות בטכניון, אך מעולם לא עסק בתחום זה, אלא בשירה ובאמנות פלסטית.
בתחילת שנות ה-90 שיתף פעולה עם האמן מיכאל רפופורט, ועבודות אמנות של השניים הוצגו במוזיאונים בישראל וברחבי העולם. בהמשך חייו החל להתמקד באמנות השירה, וב-98 פרסם את ספרו הראשון, "רומן באימבאיב מסכם את נסיונו" (הוצאת קונטרסט לשירה) אותו ערך המשורר נתן זך. בתקופה זו פרסם באימבאיב משירתו בכתבי עת שונים. ב-2006 פרסם את ספרו השני, "הלוואי וגודביי" (הוצאת אוריס מדיה) שלווה בתקליטור מוזיקלי בשיתוף עם האמן דני צוקרמן.