The beautifull art of Beth Cavener

The amazing sculptures by American artist Beth Cavener, who explores the emotions and the dark sides of the human psyche featuring animals in powerful and captivating compositions. Rabbits, wolves, foxes or snakes transpose human fear, anger or aggression in beautiful clay sculptures, impressive by their dynamism and fine detail. I also recommend you the video introducing the artist Beth Cavener, at the end of the photo's.

kort

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"Terwijl je ladderzat op de ladder zat, proefde ik de goedkope tequila in je onverstaanbaar binnensmonds gebrabbel"

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Words, that gentle fall in my mind as raindrops fall of the leaves in a forest after the rain, a beautiful echo of the past.

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"En terwijl ze voorbij loopt, ruik ik de lente in de bloeiende bloemen van haar te vroeg gedragen zomerjurkje"

Valentinos Ghost, Why We (USA) Hate Arabs

Valentino's Ghost: Powerful Documentary Explores How US Foreign Policy in the Middle East Drives Islamophobia at Home.
Experts ranging from Robert Fisk to John Mearsheimer and Melani McAlister explain how the U.S. media and government are the source of fear and loathing of Arabs, Muslims and Islam. 

This updated version of Valentino’s Ghost addresses four current topics that weren’t in existence at the film’s premiere in 2012, offering radically different views from those of our national narrative, addressing such questions as: were the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists engaging in cultural bullying of the weakest ethnic minority in France? Did the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza seriously damage Israeli’s image abroad when Palestinians were able to upload phone videos of the bombings to the Internet? Are American Armed Forces’ killings and torture more barbaric that that of groups like ISIS? Is the movie American Sniper’s inherent racist viewpoint one reason for its phenomenal popularity?

Read! Debts-Slaves, Read!

We have been mentally damaged by 

a carefully orchestrated historical amnesia, 

a state-induced stupidity,

challenging human dignity and our collective validity! 

We willingly gave up our freedom as we watch

the world through a screen with a virtual view.

The history is written by all 

and taught selectively by the few. 

The peoples history is no mystery 

if we would pick up a book 

and drops the screen.

What is seen cannot be unseen.

The weak protected by the strong 

 was the just way of our ancestors. 

and now!

We, the warriors and protectors 

became cashcows, AGENTS and debt collectors. 

As the history stays unexplored,

we walk the streets 

wielding our cellphones like swords.

Not knowing that we are being controlled

by our overlords.

As I light another rolled sigaret,

I am gonna make a bet!

We are not gonna make it 

if our only intake is what is being fed.

Because the biggest secret that is kept

is that modern slaves are not in chains

"They are in debt"  

A Shameless Worship of Heroes

by Will Durant

the many ideals which in youth gave life a meaning and radiance missing from the chilly perspectives of middle age, one at least has remained with me as bright and satisfying as ever before -- the shameless worship of heroes. In an age that would level everything and reverence nothing, I take my stand with Victorian Carlyle, and light my candles, like Mirandola before Plato's image, at the shrines of great men.

I say shameless, for I know how unfashionable it is now to acknowledge in life or history any genius loftier than ourselves. Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths.

If we may believe Mr. Wells, Caesar was a numbskull and Napoleon a fool. Since it is contrary to good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating how inferior are the great men of the earth. In some of us, perhaps, it is a noble and merciless asceticism, which would root out of our hearts the last vestige of worship and adoration, lest the old gods should return and terrify us again.

For my part, I cling to this final religion, and discover in it a content and stimulus more lasting than came from the devotional ecstasies of youth. How natural it seemed to greet Rabindranath Tagore by that title which so long has been given him by his countrymen, Gurudeva – "Revered Master." For why should we stand reverent before waterfalls and mountain tops, or a summer moon on a quiet sea, and not before the highest miracle of all -- a man who is both great and good? So many of us are mere talents, clever children in the play of life, that when genius stands in our presence we can only bow down before it as an act of God, a continuance of creation. Such men are the very life-blood of history, to which politics and industry are but frame and bones.

Part cause of the dry scholasticism from which we were suffering when James Harvey Robinson summoned us to humanize our knowledge, was the conception of history as an impersonal flow of figures and "facts," in which genius played so inessential a role that histories prided themselves upon ignoring them. It was to Marx above all that this theory of history was due; it was bound up with a view of life that distrusted the exceptional man, envied superior talent, and exalted the humble as the inheritors of the earth. In the end men began to write history as if it had never been lived at all, as if no drama had ever walked through it, no comedies or tragedies of struggling or frustrated men. The vivid narratives of Gibbon and Taine gave way to ash-heaps of irrelevant erudition in which every fact was correct, documented, and dead.

No, the real history of man is not in prices and wages, nor in elections and battles, nor in the even tenor of the common man; it is in the lasting contributions made by geniuses to the sum of human civilization and culture. The history of France is not, if one may say it with all courtesy, the history of the French people; the history of those nameless men and women who tilled the soil, cobbled the shoes, cut the cloth, and peddled the goods (for these things have been done everywhere and always) -- the history of France is the record of her exceptional men and women, her inventors, scientists, statesmen, poets, artists, musicians, philosophers and saints, and of the additions which they made to the technology and wisdom, the artistry and decency, of their people and mankind. And so with every country, so with the world; its history is properly the history of its great men. What are the rest of us but willing brick and mortar in their hands, that they may make a race a little finer than ourselves? Therefore I see history not as a dreary scene of politics and carnage, but as the struggle of man -- through genius -- with the obdurate inertia of matter and the baffling mystery of mind; the struggle to understand, control and remake himself and the world.

I see men standing on the edge of knowledge, and holding the light a little farther ahead; men carving marble into forms ennobling men; men molding peoples into better instruments of greatness; men making a language of music and music out of language; men dreaming of finer lives, and living them. Here is a process of creation more vivid than in any myth, a godliness more real than in any creed.

To contemplate such men, to insinuate ourselves through study into some modest discipleship to them, to watch them at their work and warm ourselves at the fire that consumes them -- this is to recapture some of the thrill that youth gave us when we thought, at the altar or in the confessional, that we were touching or hearing God.

In that dreamy youth we believed that life was evil, and that only death could usher us into paradise. We were wrong; even now -- while we live -- we may enter it. Every great book, every work of revealing art, every record of a devoted life is a call and an open sesame to the Elysian Fields.

Too soon we extinguished the flame of our hope and our reverence. Let us change the icons, and light the candles again.