Common Jezebel; Photo Credits: Aparna
Delias eucharis, also known as Common Jezebel, is a colorful butterfly with yellow background color on its under-hindwings intersected by black veins and red spots fanning outwards at wings’ edge. Continue reading
Bharatpur, Rajasthan
Photo credits: Sastha Prakash
Thaipooyam is a colorful “kavadiyattom” festival. It is a vigorous dance that starts in the morning, when a small group of people richly decorated with wooded arches and other materials take to the streets to celebrate.
For our design-oriented readers/viewers, a worthy eight minutes from the folks at Universal Everything:
Referencing the utopian visions of 1960’s architecture practice Archigram, Walking City is a slowly evolving video sculpture. The language of materials and patterns seen in radical architecture transform as the nomadic city walks endlessly, adapting to the environments she encounters. Continue reading
Photo credits: MN Shaji
Located near Kozhikode, Kadalundi Bird Sanctuary spreads over a cluster of islands in a scenic area surrounded by hillocks where the Kadalundi River flows into the Arabian Sea. Continue reading
Photo credits: Renjith
Pickles are a traditional condiment served with Indian meals. Called achaar in Kerala, they are an important part of a traditional sadya meal, always served next to the salt on the upper lefthand corner of the banana leaf. Continue reading
For many people “The Boston Tea Party” refers to an historical event that formed the tipping point for the American Revolution. But two centuries later (give or take) the name relates to a completely different, but no less iconic, moment in time. In the late 1960’s and early 70’s the #53 Berkeley Street Boston Tea Party was a legendary live-music venue featuring musicians from local bands to the Blues, Rock and Pop icons of day.
Music wasn’t the only dimension to a Boston Tea Party experience. Filmmaker Ken Brown cut his “creative teeth” as part of the team creating the venue’s light shows and visual effects.
We actually have one of the coveted DVDs of this work, but those not lucky enough to have one or to have been in Boston 40 years ago have the opportunity to make up for it now …
On Sunday at 7 p.m. at [Boston’s] Institute of Contemporary Art, Brown will screen “Psychedelic Cinema,” a 55-minute compilation of his Tea Party work, and answer questions afterward. The silent film will be accompanied by a live performance by Ken Winokur of Alloy Orchestra, Beth Custer of Club Foot Orchestra, and Jonathan LaMaster of Cul de Sac. Brown’s Tea Party work screened at the Coolidge Corner Theater in 2008, one of only a handful of public showings. We spoke by phone this week. Continue reading
Ganeshgudi, Karnataka
Photograph by Martin Rollins.
Thanks to Maria Konnikova on the New Yorker‘s website for this post showing how one’s personal experience, for example with weather, can impact one’s perception of broader range of phenomena, such as climate change:
The winter of 2010 was brutal. In February, three blizzards smashed into the mid-Atlantic in the span of three weeks, burying the region under record amounts of snow. Thousands of people lost power; grocery-store shelves were stripped bare; cars were abandoned on highways; even the federal government shut down. The first two blizzards, which were Category 3 winter storms, paralyzed cities from Washington, D.C., to New York and became known, collectively, as the Snowmageddon. Lisa Zaval, a researcher studying perceptions of global warming, told me that she noticed that the storm also had a “strange side effect: an increase in skeptical remarks about global warming.” News reports, she said, expressed disbelief in the phenomenon, while blogs like If Global Warming Is Real Then Why Is It So Cold? began to pop up. “People seemed to be taking the extreme cold weather as evidence against global climate change,” she said. Continue reading
Photo credits: Immanuel Abraham
Kerala has more than 20,000 temples dotting its landscape. Unique in their design and construction they stand out when compared to other Indian temples. Unlike other regions of the country, Kerala’s temples are primarily wooden structures that stress horizontal lines rather than tall towers and pillars. Continue reading
While we complete our design and planning for the menu and the musical accompaniment at 51, the restaurant at Spice Harbour, we seem to have hit two birds with one stone in our research today. We tend more and more to the preferences of vegetarian travelers, and to the tendency of many non-vegetarian guests generally to reduce consumption of animal protein. And everyone loves good music. So this caught our attention, thanks to a slideshow on the Reuters newsfeed; this orchestra’s website tells the story (with a great video here):
Worldwide one of a kind, the Vegetable Orchestra performs on instruments made of fresh vegetables. The utilization of various ever refined vegetable instruments creates a musically and aesthetically unique sound universe.
The Vegetable Orchestra was founded in 1998. Based in Vienna, the Vegetable Orchestra plays concerts in all over the world. Continue reading
Prakash Singh/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. Travelers waiting at immigration counters at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi on July 14, 2010.
The program started recently, to ease the red tape for visiting India, has been deemed successful enough to be worthy of expansion; and then some. Thanks to India Ink for pointing out this news, which will be welcome news to Raxa Collective’s many visitors from outside India:
India said it would seek to expand its visa-on-arrival program to tourists from 180 countries, including the United States and China, to encourage more people to visit the country. Continue reading
Kanakakunnu Palace was built during the reign of Sree Moolam Tirunal (1885-1924), one of the most popular ruler’s of Travancore state. Situated near the Napier Museum, it was mainly used for the Royal family guest entertainments. Continue reading
Photograph by Alex Livesey/Getty.
Samanth Subramanian–an author we hope will pay us a visit in Kerala one day soon, considering how much of his authorship overlaps with our own interests, especially this book–has posted on the New Yorker‘s website a blog post about a remarkable young man, and two fellow countrymen from India, very much worth the read. The Jamaican bobsled team gets all the attention, and it is well deserved, but they are, rather surprisingly, in good company. We excerpt from the second half of the post because the first half is a too-familiar “dirty laundry” story which we would rather not repeat, but what follows is inspirational:
…The thirty-two-year-old Keshavan will be participating in his fifth Winter Games. He set a speed record for Asia in 2012 and won the Asian Luge Cup in 2011 and 2012, but he has not been so dominant on the world stage; his best Olympic performance remains a twenty-fifth-place finish at Turin, in 2006. Continue reading
Seneca Falls, NY
Thanks to the Atlantic for this link over to the 33 photos chosen as finalists for this great annual competition; from the website of the WPO:
…Selected from 139,544 images from 166 countries, WPO today reveals the shortlist for the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards. The highest number of entries in the awards’ seven year history, this year’s jury selected an eclectic shortlist representing the very finest in international contemporary photography from 2013. Continue reading
This post is simply a link to a resource that we think furthers the case for the liberal arts tradition. In case you do not yet know it, get to know it here:
The epigraph stamped on The Baffler no. 1, from Arthur Rimbaud’s “Morning of Drunkenness,” introduced it as a punk literary magazine. It was the summer of 1988. The founders, Thomas Frank and Keith White, were recent graduates of the University of Virginia. They named their magazine as a joke on academic fads like undecidability, then in fashion. The Baffler was born to laugh at the baffling jargon of the academics and the commercial avant-garde, to explode their paralyzing agonies of abstraction and interpretation. Continue reading
Organikos 