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Crazy Jog in Paris
The race may be individual or team. The battle would start with warm jogging proposed by all participants with six obstacles spread across the entire course. The duration of the race may vary from 1 hour to I hour 30 minutes depending on the athletes level of racing. A test would be conducted for each set of individuals or teams. After the event there would be a massive award ceremony around 12:00. There would vibrant and lively animations for the children both before and after the event. All the contestants will have access to 7km of racing, and have to punctuate 6 obstacles with fun and original run. It´ll be a funny opportunity to run in an unusual place but a little competition is available here. In the meeting of the aftermath of Areva, the visitors can discover all the facts of superb athleticism and of the biggest stadium in France: its subways, its wings, its mythical lawns, 1.3 km road stage, 18 stairs 70 steps, etc. The site of the Stade de France will be accessible also to the non-participants who can follow and encourage the runners especially on big screens. More than 3,000 runners are expected for the 7 km run. Date: Sunday, July 10, 2011 Time: From 10am onwards. Fees: Until 30/04/2011 (€ 18.00) From 01/05 to 08/07/2011 (€ 20.00) 09 / 07/11 on the spot (€ 25.00) Address of this event : Stade de France St. Francis de Pressensé ZAC du Cornillon Nord 93200 Saint-Denis, France Tel: 0892 700 900 Register at www.crazyjog.com John So, what are you waiting for? Immediately register yourself for...
The Guell Palace in Barcelona reopens its doors to the public
In the cyclical dance of time, undoubtedly, there have been more prudish and puritan times in the Western World than nowadays. However, it is also true that not long ago, there have been incomparably freer and more permissive times regarding moral issues. This makes us feel as victims of a moral deterioration that is hardly bearable. While permissive times usually coincide with great intelligence and creativity explosions, puritan times coincide with times in which stupidity seems to be the dominant paradigm. Obviously, intelligence, creativity, good taste or style do not disappear from the face of the Earth. They just give the impression of being left aside from time to time. People get used to stupidity, absurdity and the lack of ideas in the political discourse –In fact, it seems to be dominated by lazy students who did not even have the honor of being the last ones of the class-. Also, the media, work and mass culture might make people end up forgetting there is another way to live, think, behave and govern. For example, there are constant negative comments about Amy Winehouse’s life on the edge. People sometimes forget that it is very difficult to expect moving and tender songs from a tormented artist who is surrounded by nicotine, drugs and love problems. People just forget that for some artists, their direct communication with pain is an essential part of their extraordinary works. It is as if we expected that artists with hard lives like Billie Holidays have a perfect like just by going to the gym every day and by reading self-improvement books (As if self improvement...
Fashion catwalk in Berlin subway
How necessary fashion is for us and how important it is for us to be aware of it. They are not only dress codes but also cultural trends: political game, genres that mix up and explode; lean figures on the catwalk in a performance that also represents the changing of seasons, and with each new season new desires, ways of dressing and understanding everything. Obviously, reality is dressed up, the world is dressed up. Your body is seized with a coat of cloth and plastic and latex and leather, culture has made you wear it so that you can move in it. Despite being naked, you are dressed but with other body, other signals, other rhythms. Berlin continues to be exhausted in provocative and “cutting edge” attitudes. Evidence of this is the Underground Catwalk, to be held on July 6 in the underground of this city which, despite wars, bombings and nefarious dictators, has been able to be undone and rebuilt, to become today, and since quite long ago, one of the world´s cultural capitals. F**k Paris! Yes Berlin! As the catwalk slogan says: “step into the underground!” This parade is marked by trends and irreverent, urban designs, all influenced by the “underground” fashion. The catwalk will take place in two different underground travels; one will be the Street-Couture and the other U-Couture. More than twenty different brands and exclusive designers will show the latest in street urban and sports fashion, and of course, influenced by the culture of rock, gothic, punk and pin-up aesthetic among others. Rockstar Models agency’s girls and boys will put into movement and madness...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“On my 90th birthday, I wanted to treat myself to a night of wild passion with a teenage virgin.” This is how “Memories of my sad whores” by Nobel Prize winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez starts. An elderly man who has resolved to arrange a sexual encounter with a teenage virgin is an idea which could have alarmed the morals of literature – but in fact, it is just the starting point for an interesting approach to the understanding of sex, love, life and death. Looking through the novels which take sex as their main theme, here I find a book which though I struggled with initially, I found in the end that the world constructed by Garcia Marquez captivated me with its sincerity, and the cadence of the prose of the narrator; a narrator with a great sense of knowledge. I won´t get carried away – lets get straight to the point: The old man falls in love with the girl. Each night, he pays the madame of the brothel to be able to see her, always in the same bedroom, which he starts to decorate so that the girl feels more comfortable. But the thing which could have been shocking (an old man having sex with a poor adolescent who has resorted to prostitution) becomes strangely more and more like a love story. He doesn´t touch her – at least not with desire: he never explores her naked body. Is it possible to feel pleasure, sexual feeling without any physical contact? It seems so. The old man falls in love – just by lying next to her, and...
Visual Festival Brasil 2011
The ninth edition of the Festival Visual Brazil will take place at Centro Cultural Punt Multimedia in Barcelona, over 1st and 2nd of July. Activities this year will be themed around multiculturalism, and integration through art, and how it can contribute to different modes of communication. Festival Visual Brazil was created as an event which would open space for creativity, and experimentation, developing thoughtful discussion, exchange and new ideas for audiovisual arts. Discussing art and multiculturalism might seem a complicated task, particularly because culture is all about our relations with the world, and ways of living – a social process which connects language, religion, ideology; things which are often difficult to distinguish and comprehend. However, with art, the limits of culture become diffused, producing a dialogue which facilitates a meeting between different worlds. This is made possible by the symbolic language of emotions expressed through art. In this sense, sadness, anger, helplessness, and other feelings have universal representations in different cultures. A example of this multicultural fusion is the project from VJ JAM, with the audiovisual collective Folcore from Barcelona, who have chosen to fuse the sounds on the margins of the mainstream, with ethnic music, or those belonging to African and Latin American cultures. The aesthetic objective is deconstruction in order to produce a meeting between different cultures, via a fusion of images and music. Participating in the project are VJ Eletroiman, recent winner of Festival Torna 2011 in Rome, VJ O´Video and Damian. Mastigando Humanos by Daniel Peixoto is a mixture of electronic sound with traditional tones, where the audiovisual impacts with rapid, video-clip images. It´s a...
Yayoi Kusama at the Reina Sofia in Madrid
In one of their first denouncing artworks the collective feminist group Guerrilla Girls (formed anonymously in the eighties by a diverse group of female artistic writers and filmmakers of all ages, ethnicity, sexual orientation and degree of professional success) specified with penetrating irony the advantages of being a woman in art. Among them was the advantage of working without the pressure of success, not having to share presentations with men, escaping the world through self-employment, knowing that there was room for their work to be recognized once they were over eighty years of age , to be sure that whatever work they accomplished it would invariably be labeled as feminist, to have the opportunity to choose between a career and motherhood, to have more time to work when their couples abandon them for someone younger or not having to feel embarrassed when they are called geniuses and see how their ideas continued to live in the work of others. It is difficult, for example, to not appreciate her influence from Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell. She also maintained a close relationships with Yves Klein and Frank Stella. The influence and stimulating effect of hard work are difficult to discuss, however for many years she suffered the stigma of being a beautiful and unbalanced woman (she spent more than thirty years voluntarily interned in a psychiatric hospital almost as a contemporary reincarnation of the myth of hysteria. For some time, she even suffered the distrust of a certain division of feminist critic circle, which considered opportunist they way she used her beautiful body to promote her work, posing, naked for...
Cyndi Lauper ‘Memphis Blues Tour’ in Rome
The Foundation Music for Rome presents on July 11 this extraordinary concert Memphis Blues Tour by the controversial singer Cyndi Lauper, to be held at the Auditorium Parco della Musica. The organization has considered this concert as the most important musical event of this summer season in Italy, and seeks to take Lauper together again with the Italian public and lovers of music and the voice of this unique singer, who has Italy in her genes. Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper, known as Cyndi Lauper, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953. She did not have an easy childhood, her mother of Italian-American origin, who she inherited her expressiveness from, worked as a waitress after a marriage breakdown. Cyndi grew up listening to the music of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Judy Garland and the Beatles, an explosive mix for a girl who loved urban sounds. At the early age of 12 she began writing her own songs, besides playing guitar with virtuosity. The sounds of adolescence and the bustle of the suburbs were the first stimulus to compose love songs. Her desire to excel led her to experiment with clothes and hair, transforming her image radically with odd trends and hair colors, which were then her sign on stage. She didn’t highlight in the studies and, despite having been accepted into a special school for the training of young talents in audiovisual, she left without finishing her degree. Determined to finish her studies, she made her way to Canada, but her intention was also unsuccessful. She finally finished her art studies at Johnson State College in Vermont. Her first...
Vila-Matas, Paris never ends
In his novel from 2003 Paris never ends writer Enrique Vila-Matas from Barcelona pays a strange homage to Marguerite Duras and Ernest Hemingway, and through them, a way of being in the world that is not understood unless its learnt from books and words. In more than one sense it is a novel of sentimental education, a book about the ways in which a young man starts on the road of life and art. The book´s title comes from the last paragraph of the autobiographical novel by Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, where the American writer says of the French capital that if you lived in it, it is a city that never ends, to which one always returns -in a different way- according to each individual. For Hemingway, as stated in the last sentence of the novel, a golden memory remains of the years of his youth in which in Paris he was very poor and at the same time very happy. To this luminous Hemingway memory, Vila-Matas sadly and ironically stamps his own, for he too was a very poor young man in Paris, but unlike the Nobel Prize also a very unhappy being and that is what he intends to tell in his book, the first two years in the early seventies when he was very poor and very unhappy in Paris due to his ignorance of how to proceed correctly in both life and in literature, fields in which he was firmly installed in a cult of the black This nihilistic and the despairing, irreplaceable synonymous that he thought of elegant and distinguished due to his...
Surprising findings in the Alhambra
We tend to have a black and white vision of reality so that any new archaeological discovery is likely to either be dismissed, ignored or deactivated so you mark it as casual and unrepresentative, either being described as revolutionary and capable of creating a new paradigm when it is convenient. In all likelihood the epithet “grotesque” (Grotta, an Italian word that means a cave or a crypt) comes from an accidental discovery that occurred in Rome during the height of the Renaissance (XV century) in the subsoil of the Titus hot water springs. There were a number of ornamental paintings whose essential features was in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin, author of the brilliant book The popular culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance an “a fantastic unusual and delicious mix of plants, animals and humans that intertwined and transformed fantastically together” Since this type of art did not match the current renaissance ideas of aspiring to be synonymous of the recovery of the full civilization of antiquity, it was considered at first to be an anomaly, a product perhaps of the demented imagination of a solitary artist. Only with the passage of time, when more examples of this art was found in different parts of ancient Greece, they had to accept that the grotesque was a common manifestation in the classical natural world we lived in with what we considered that the time after his only aesthetic canon, pushing through the idea of ??historical overlaping of different forms that catch the substrates above the elements that are convenient for them due to political legitimacy reasons that have...
