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Sonya Tayeh to choreograph Jeff Buckley’s Last Goodbye in Williamstown
In case you missed it, Sonya Tayeh choreographed Jeff Buckley‘s version of “HALLELUJAH” on So You Think You Can Dance on June 16th. The judges declared it to have raised the bar for the entire show!
Get ready to see Sonya’s amazing choreography live in THE LAST GOODBYE in Williamstown this summer.
Jeff Buckley
Detroit is the home of Motown, Techno, and many forms of inventive dance, where Sonya experienced the freedom of freestyle movement up until she reached the age of 17. At that time, Sonya realized that with this rooted style there needed to be, a form, and a technique. Searching for a foundation, she decided to study dance at Wayne State University. She received her BFA in Dance emphasizing dance history, anatomy, and performance. Sonya now teaches a self-titled class called Combat Jazz, which incorporates her deeply rooted form with the essence of contemporary technique mixed with her own ‘quirky’ style.
About Jeff Buckley:
Jeff Buckley was born in California’s Orange County in 1966 and died in a tragic drowning accident in Memphis on May 29, 1997. He had emerged in New York City’s avant-garde club scene in the 1990′s as one of the most remarkable musical artists of his generation, acclaimed by audiences, critics, and fellow musicians alike.
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The Magical World of Maurice Sendak
about 1 year ago - No comments
Best known for his children’s books, Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen, Maurice Sendak has spent the past fifty years bringing to life a world of fantasy and imagination. His unique vision is loved around the globe by both young and old. Beyond his award-winning work as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, Sendak has produced both operas and ballets for television and the stage.
Maurice Sendak
Born in Brooklyn, New York (June 10, 1928), to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Sendak was a frail and sickly child. Spending much of his young life indoors, he turned to books at an early age. His view of the outside world was often limited to the family that came to visit him and the little that he could see from his window. It was during this time that he began to draw and to allow his imagination to run free. At age twelve, he went with his family to see Walt Disney’s Fantasia. This animated world, constructed completely of invented characters and fantasy, had a great influence on him.
Throughout high school, Sendak continued to draw, and after graduating, published a handful of illustrations in the textbook Atomics For The Millions. In 1948, he began working for F.A.O. Schwartz as a window dresser and continued there for four years while taking night classes at the New York Art Students League. After finding work illustrating Marcel Ayme’s The Wonderful Farm and Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is To Dig, Sendak left F.A.O. Schwartz to become a full-time, freelance children’s book illustrator.
Throughout the 1950s, Sendak worked regularly, producing nearly fifty illustrated children’s books. He saw in book illustration the opportunity to expand the imaginary world of the reader. While many illustrators had concentrated on clarifying the images in the text, Sendak believed that an illustration should add to the mystery of the work. His oddly grotesque characters seemed strangely inviting in their imperfections. Unlike much of the Disney cartoons and the illustration that followed it, Sendak’s artistic imagery brought a self-conscious attention to its origin and its maker.
Where The Wild Things Are
By the early 1960s, Sendak had already gained a following as one of the more expressive and interesting illustrators in the business. In 1963, his book, Where The Wild Things Are brought him international acclaim and a place among the world’s great illustrators. For this project, Sendak worked as both the illustrator and the writer. It is the story of a young boy named Max, who is sent to his room only to find his imagination has created a new world there, populated by wild geographies and monsters of all kinds. Initially, its graphic portrayal of the toothy wild things concerned parents, but before long it was a favorite among children everywhere, having been translated into fifteen languages and selling more than two million copies.
Over the following years, Sendak created dozens of popular children’s books including one of his best known, IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN (1970). In the late 1970s, Sendak turned his attention to other forms. While continuing to write and illustrate, Sendak began producing and designing performances. Incorporating much of the same imaginative design that had made his books so popular, Sendak put on a number of operas, including Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Prokofiev’s “Love for Three Oranges”. In 1979, he turned his book, Where The Wild Things Are into a popular opera, and four years later designed a winning production of Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker”.
Throughout the past fifty years, Maurice Sendak has been one of the most consistently inventive and challenging voices in children’s literature. His books and productions are among the best-loved imaginative works of their time. Like the Grimm brothers before him, Sendak has created a body of work both entertaining and educational, which will continue to be popular for generations.
Alien-inspired “Ozark Melody” – A Collaboration with Jeff Buckley
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In 1997, Jeff Buckley got together with friends Joe Tripician and Fred Reed, an engineer at New York spot Fez where Buckley played frequently, for an afternoon of hanging out that eventually led to recording of the song ‘Ozark Melody’. “[Jeff] would come over to my apartment to jam and listen to records”, Reed tells Spinner. “It was years later he came up to Joe’s place to see my studio and check things out”.
Jeff Buckley
The three of them shared an interest in music, but also, it turned out, in aliens. “I had just signed a deal to publish my first book, it was a humor book called ‘The Official Alien Abductees’ Handbook: How to Recover From Alien Abduction’,’” Tripician says. “Fred was saying, ‘Joe has written this book about aliens,’ and he was immediately interested in the subject.”
Though Buckley had never played mandolin until that day, he took to the instrument, to no one’s surprise. “Jeff picked it up and started playing it like he was born playing it. I’d never met anyone so naturally gifted musically in my life”, Tripician says. “He was just sitting there strumming mandolin and making jokes about aliens, ‘Oh, the aliens are coming’ in this kind of hillbilly voice, so I went to the other room right next to the studio and started typing up some lyrics. I printed out a couple of sheets of lyrics and handed them out to Fred and Jeff. Jeff looked at them [and said], ‘Hey, this is pretty cool’ and they started working together on the melody, the chorus, and the bridge and I kept writing more lyrics. Within four hours, we had the song written, scored, recorded and it was just a complete natural session I’ll never forget.“
‘Ozark Melody’ was originally released on a website Tripician had set up for the book in April of 1997, but Buckley tragically died a month later, drowning in the Mississippi River. Reed still recalls the tragedy vividly. “His memorial service was like the saddest event I think I ever attended because he just had so much talent,” he says. “It was just such a criminal waste for someone like that to die at the age he did and the way he did.”
“I find it hard still, to this day, to listen to ‘Grace’ and to ‘Live At Sin-E’, ” Reed says, but he has no such problems with ‘Ozark Melody’. “It was just kind of such a silly song, but every time I listen to it, it makes me laugh,” he says. “This wasn’t a regular recording session for Jeff — it was just like hanging out with friends. At the time he recorded this with us, he had enormous pressure on him. I think ‘Grace’ had come out a year or two before and they were working up on a follow-up, so he was just having fun on a weekend afternoon, and I was having fun too. We were joking around with the lyrics, no pressure. It was just the Jeff I knew, who liked to jam, liked to fool around. ”
Tripician and Reed want fans to see that side of their friend and they found Buckley followers were anxious to hear the song. “Just recently this year, I had posted it up on again on a community bulletin board, MetaFilter, and it received an enormous amount of interest,” Tripician says of ‘Ozark Melody.’ “I asked some of the people posting comments on it, ‘Hey, would you like to hear some of the original unmixed tracks?’ ‘Yes, sure, absolutely.’ I called Fred up and asked him to go through his vault and pull out the original recordings, so we decided to do the same thing we did with the song, release them for free, let people who are fans of Jeff enjoy it and put it out there.”
To hear more from Tipician and Reed, head to iTunes to hear their ‘Remembering Jeff Buckley’ podcast. After listening to ‘Ozark Melody’ below, head over to Indaba to hear the unmixed tracks of the songs.
Corabie descoperită sub locul în care se aflau turnurile gemene din New York
about 1 year ago - No comments
Descoperire arheologică importantă, chiar în locul unde s-au aflat, până pe 11 septembrie 2001, turnurile gemene din New York. Săpăturile arheologilor au scos la iveală o corabie, care datează din secolul al XVIII-lea.
corabie
Vasul de aproape zece metri lungime şi vechi de aproximativ 200 de ani a fost descoperit în urma săpăturilor pe locul fostelor turnuri gemene. Arheologii au muncit trei zile în continuu pentru a scoate la suprafaţă corabia.
Oamenii au fost nevoiţi să acţioneze repede, dar cu foarte multă atenţie. Şi asta pentru că vasul se află într-o stare fragilă, iar în contact cu aerul exista riscul de a se deteriora. Orele de muncă nu i-au descurajat pe arheologii încântaţi peste măsură de descoperirea făcută.
Mai mult, alături de corabie, arheologii au descoperit şi o ancoră de 45 de kilograme.
Deocamdată nu există informaţii foarte clare despre marea descoperire. Vasul ar fi putut fi folosit, spun experţii, ca material pentru a asana partea joasă şi inundabilă a Manhattanului şi pentru a extinde astfel terenul de construcţie către râul Hudson.
Pentru a stabili exact vechimea corabiei, arheologii vor face mai multe analize, care vor fi în măsură să aducă şi răspunsul aşteptat.
Extraordinary Human Abilities – Part 1: Eidetic memory
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When a person has photographic memory or total recall this is called eidetic memory.
It is the ability to recall sounds, images, or objects from one’s memory with extreme accuracy. Examples of eidetic memory include the effort of Akira Haraguchi who recited from memory the first 100,000 decimal places of pi and the drawings of Stephen Wiltshire (who is an autistic savant) – his recreation of Rome is shown in the video below.
Stephen Wiltshire
Kim Peek, the inspiration for the autistic (Peek is not actually autistic though) character of Raymond Babbit in the movie Rainman, also possesses eidetic memory – among other things he can recall some 12,000 books from memory.
Whether true photographic memory exists in adults is still a controversial issue, but it is accepted that eidetic abilities are distributed evenly between men and women. One also cannot become an eidetiker through practice.
Stephen Wiltshire has been called the “Human Camera”.
In this short excerpt below from the film Beautiful Minds: A Voyage into the Brain, Wiltshire takes a helicopter journey over Rome and then draws a panoramic view of what he saw, entirely from memory.
Also, here are some samples of his amazing work:
