Advent in Wien

Freedom Fight

Empty frontpages of two weekly cultural magazines against the planned new media-policy of the rightist government which aims to control the freedom of speech and press in Hungary.

View from my Window

Winter Dusk in Budapest

Death and the Maiden

David Chancellor: Huntress with Buck

Christmas 2010

at Selfridges

Layers

in Moscow

of memory

and birds

in the paintings of 
Anna Parkina

Fragments

Kurtág: Kafka Fragments
in Barbican

"None sings as purely as those in deepest hell;

it is their singing that we take for the singing of angels."

Autumn

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."

Albert Camus

Food Art

Csaba Pavlicsek Hungarian Food Sculptor

Ombra Mai Fu

Ombra mai fù

di vegetabile,

cara ed amabile,

soave più.

A shadow never was

of any plant,

more dear and lovely,

more gentle.

Handel: Xerxes - Cecilia Bartoli

Egg - Bud

A Blue Butterfly's egg on the powderpuff buds of a Mimosa

Christ vs Apollon

Christ on the Cross - Apollo Belvedere

"There is something about the entire crucifixional tradition that strikes me as a mean, as backward, as medieval in the worst sense... Greece provided a better civilizational idea than Judeo-Christianity... Hellenism as an alternative to Christianity... was the sole vision of the good life... When Hellenism failed... humanism went bankrupt."

J. M. Coetzee: Elisabeth Costello

""Whenever I shut my eyes I see Jesus on the cross." [Her son David, 4 years old]

It's time for Homer, I think. The best way to divert these morbid individualized religious fancies is to overwhelm them by the impersonal Homeric bloodbath."

Susan Sontag: Reborn - Early diaries 1947-1964

My Hero Anfione

Anfione, King of Thebe
Niobe
Royal Opera House London

Anfione doesn't want power any more. The vision of heaven threatens him, frightens him. He is praying to the spheres to help him to put in motion what stays and give it a harmony.

Embrace

"To reach an agreement in a conflict ... you need more than justice: you have to be willing to embrace the other ... one needs to maintain the boundaries of the self, but also keep the boundaries porous."

Miroslav Volf: Exclusion and Embrace

Open Your Heart

Frog-guts by Bascom Hogue

Dalai Lama - Pope

The Pope in London 2010

The Dalai Lama in Budapest 2010

Nope Pope

Protesters in Whitehall

There is a controversy in deeply secular Britain around the papal visit as after some funny demonstrations thousands marched in central London yesterday in the biggest protest of his 5-year papacy.

Child abuse scandals around the world, labelling gay people "evil", telling Africans that condoms "increase the problem" of HIV, the church faces its deepest crisis in history.

Men in woman's dress with sinful secrets, their eyes turned on the sky with bad conscience, giving sermons while abusing young altar-boys in the sacristy, banning women out of their world - it is time for the church to open their stained glass windows and let in some fresh air.

Invite women to be priests and priests to marry, banish criminal priests - it may help the church to survive.

Men wearing angel wing costumes to protest against Pope Benedict

Bébi 1994 - 2010

"...the limitations most of us encounter in our relations with other animals reflect not their shortcomings, as we so often assume, but our own narrow views about who they are and the kind of relationships we can have with them... So open your heart to the animals around you and find out for yourself what it's like to befriend a nonhuman person." J.M.Coetzee: The Lives of Animals

Redhead Nightmare

Alice Anderson

"when you have red hair people look at you like you are a monster"

Reading Writing

Geek and Nerd - Fox and Hedgehog?

Geek wedding ring

Today they are called geeks and nerds, but the idea is a little bit confusing and people cannot really see the difference. While both type of mainly young people are related to some sort of computer-gadgetry fascination, the geeks can be viewed as someone with a large amount of knowledge that is sometimes rather mundane, fun and even bizarre while they are socially very comfortable, the nerds are someone with an extremely intense interest or fascination in an academic field with less social skills.

To better understand this distinction we should turn to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin who said that you you could divide people according to a saying by the Greek poet Archilochus: " The fox knows many little things but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

Hedgehog

Skin - Love

Libidinis Rosa & Mercedes Peris

Woman Reading

Drawing
Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, ENO

Woman Reading

textile appliqué 100/100 cm

2010

Battle of Letters - Rammellzee

Rammellzee by Iris van Gelder

Rammellzee, the New York based artist who died this June was rarely photographed without wearing one of his elaborate science-fiction-inspired masks and costumes - a way of deconstructing the clothing code of modern society.

In his theory of Gothic Futurism he aimed to liberate the mystical power of letters from modern alphabetical standardization. He also had an anarchic plan to revise the role of language in society. In his statement he describes the "academic language" and its verbal absurdity as an exclusion of masses from culture and stacking them into slums and ghettos. For these masses writing=graffiti, and to be able to understand its means one have to communicate with people in poor quarters.

Graffiti artist's symbolic warfare of letters in Budapest

What a Marvellous Life!

found on the street today...

Balaton Magic

Before storm

After storm

Dark Force

Darth Vader from Star Wars

Vader is the most iconic, charismatic and fearsome villain in the history of film, an evil cyborg who acts as the supreme commander of the brutal Galactic empire in the Star Wars trilogy of George Lucas.

Pop Vader

The iconic Vader Project collection features 100 Darth Vader Helmets re-imagined by today's most notable artists.

Message in a Bottle

Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle by Yinka Shonibare

The new artwork on the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square in London is a giant scale replica of HMS Victory, in a bottle. The ship's enormous sails are made of the richly patterned textiles commonly associated with African dress. These fabrics are, in fact, inspired by Indonesian batik design, mass produced by the Dutch and sold to the colonies in West Africa. By the 1960s the material was popularly assimilated in Africa and became symbolic of African identity and independence. Tying together historical and global threads and traversing oceans and continents, this work considers the complexity of British expansion in trade and Empire, made possible through the freedom of the seas that Nelson’s victory provided.
"This piece is an expression of Nelson's legacy, a legacy which has contributed to the diversity of this city." says Yinka Shonibare.

Pentecostal Thoughts

Tiziano Vecellio: Pentecost - Detail

Pentecost - the descent of the Holy Spirit from Heaven

Birth - the arrival of the Spirit to the body

Creation - the presence of the Spirit in the work

Death - the departure of the Spirit from the body

Visions of Satan

Black leopard bares its teeth in the wildlife shot by Jonathan Griffiths

Satan chewing the naked sinners in the Last Judgement by Fra Angelico

The Winner Is: Glamour, Elegance, Beauty

Threshold of a new era

David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg: "until today we were rivals and now we are colleagues".

Dreadful Boys

Ahmed Farooqui The Fall

"Panic is in the air over children - dreadful creatures that we can't control and who frighten us, drugged and dangerous. Working class white boys who lack ambition, black boys abandoned by their fathers, muslim boys that are waiting to blow us up."

My Hero

Tom Waits

Because he is another, unique universe

Seed Bank in the Wind

British designer Thomas Heatherwick has created the British Pavilion of the Shanghai Expo 2010: a 20 metre high building made up of 60,000 transparent acrylic filaments, each of which holds a seed from Kew Gardens' huge Millennium Seed Bank – a worldwide project to preserve a quarter of the world's plant species.

The 7.5 metre long spikes sway gently in the breeze

Microcosm

Kew Gardens Millenium Seed Bank has embarked on a mission to save seed of as many plant species as possible. The mission to save seeds in our time of dangerous climate change is very important - since virtually all life on earth is dependent on plants and each little seed is a microcosm of the plant itself.

Seed of Castilleja flower, popularly known as Indian paintbrush or prairie-fire

Pollen of Helleborus orientalis or Lenten rose

Eastern sun (Scutellaria orientalis) seed

Seed of the Paulownia tree

Electron microphotos of seeds preserved at the Kew Gardens Millennium Seed Bank.