I STILL LIKE ROUND THINGS

PAT METHENY'S ORCHESTRION ACCORDING TO JAPANESE CARTOONIST

SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM

Uwem Akpan's words have inspired the Benin-born, Grammy Award-winning recording artist Angélique Kidjo to record "Agbalagba," a song written with her longtime collaborator Jean Hebrail in the Yoruba language. "Agbalagba" roughly translates to "the ancestors," as the song pertains to young peoples' responsibility to those who came before them. Angélique Kidjo commented, "I immediately felt a bond with Uwem. . . . The second we met, it was as if we had always known each other. I'm proud to contribute a song to his beautiful collection of stories."

 "I am very excited that my stories have inspired such a powerful song, and I hope that both the song and the book will bring readers and listeners a greater understanding of the problems of people in Africa," ...Uwem Akpan

THE ADVENTURES OF THE LITTLE MERMAID

In 1964 the Danish Artist Jørgen Nash cut off

 the head of the Little Mermaid.

It was a protest against the city development

and culture at that time.

In 2010 The Little Mermaid moved to China

for the World Expo 2010 where it will be exhibited in

The Danish Pavillion under

Welfairytales

April Fools Day 2010

PS: We are now awaiting the

cultural exchange installation

 by Ai Wei Wei

will it be the

Weifairytales

And this is the end of the fairytale

You, little mermaid, have tried with all your heart to do the same. You have suffered and borne

your suffering bravely; and that is why you are now among us, the spirits of the air. Do your good deeds

and in three hundred years an immortal soul will be yours."

The little mermaid lifted her arms up toward God's sun, and for the first time she felt a tear. She heard

noise coming from the ship. She saw the prince and the princess searching for her. Sadly they looked at

the sea, as if they knew that she had thrown herself into the waves. Without being seen, she kissed the

bride's forehead and smiled at the prince; then she rose together with the other children of the air, up into

a pink cloud that was sailing by.

"In three hundred years I shall rise like this into God's kingdom," she said.

"You may be able to go there before that," whispered one of the others to her. "Invisibly, we fly through

the homes of human beings. They can't see us, so they don't know when we are there; but if we find a

good child, who makes his parents happy and deserves their love, we smile and God takes a year away

from the time of our trial. But if there is a naughty and mean child in the house we come to, we cry; and

for every tear we shed, God adds a day to the three hundred years we already must serve."

AI WEI WEI

Ai Weiwei on Politics

Totalitarian society creates a huge space that, as we know, is a wasteland. The great success of this system is that it makes the general public afraid of taking responsibility; afraid of taking a position or giving a definite answer; or even of making mistakes. There is no revolution like the communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change. This has continued for generations – after just two or three generations deprived of continuity in education we inevitably become completely cut off from our own past. (Kirby, p. 25)


“So many crimes have been done to humanity and were never really publicly revealed-a lack of awareness, a tack of individual responsibility. And it's still the same system, the same party there. Even if it looks like it has broken, there are still some major facts that need to be cleared up. Without doing that, we can't be a democratic society, can't be a liberal-thinking society, and there's no true freedom of speech… I've said this in as many public forums as possible, but of course they will not publish it. So I put it in my personal blog, but there is danger in that also. People always warn me, telling me that I've touched on some areas you should never touch, that I'm the only person doing that. So many people today, they avoid it." (Thea, p. 29)

NEW YORK IS FULL OF LONELY PEOPLE

SIWAN

Oh! my chosen one among all beings ...my star ...my moon!

Oh! a willow branch when she moves

Oh! the look of a gazelle in her gaze

Oh! perfumed scent of the garden stirred by the breeze of dawn

Oh mistress of this languishing look which enslaves me

For you i shall give my sight and my hearing

When shall i recover from this lovesickness

يا صفوتي من البشر

شعر المعتمد بن عباد

يا صفوتي من البشـر ..... يا كوكبا بل يـا قَمـر

أيا غصنـا إذا مشـى ...... يـا رشـا إذا نظـر

يا نفس الروضة قـد ..... هبت لها ريح سحـر

يا ربة اللحـظ الـذي ..... شـد وثاقـا إذ فتـر

متى أداوي يـا فـداك ..... السمع مني والبصر

ما بفؤادي من جـوى ..... بما بفيك من خصـر

The focus of Siwan is not one of strict musical scholarship, but rather the imagining of what music would have sounded like at a certain place and time lost to antiquity. That time and place is medieval Andalusia, the southern most region of Spain, where Muslim, Christian, and Jewish intellectual cultures mingled unmolested before the Spanish Inquisition. Balke's studies of the history and writings of the region revealed a thematic universality among the Sufi poets and the Catholic and Sephardic mystics, a fact clearly evident in the texts chosen for this special recital: literary works as seemingly diverse as the martyred Moor Al- Aallaj's "Thualthiayat" and San Juan de la Cruz's (St. John of the Cross), ecstatic "Todo ciencia trascendiendo" ("Rising Beyond All Science").

INTERMEZZO

LA TABERNA

La Taberna del Gourmet

monastrell

Sevilla - forgot the name :- )

I didn't eat there...