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homerenovationvancouver-blog · 5 years

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The Kitchen Renovation Doesn't Have to Be As Painful As You Might Think

You've reached your own personal tipping point: the toaster won't work when the coffeemaker's on, you're down to one working burner on your stove, only one person can be in the kitchen at a time so your family eats in shifts, and finally the microwave blew on the morning of your big presentation at work, and you decided, "Enough is enough. We need a new, functional kitchen!"

You're not alone. Usually everyone has a particular tipping point; that one last thing that sends them into the renovation pool. You try to hold on for as long as you can because you're dreading the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the disruption to your daily life. When your space becomes unusable, it's time to do something. But you can't just jump into a renovation, particularly one as costly, time consuming and inconvenient as a kitchen renovation, you need a well thought out plan of attack if you're going to pull it off in the quickest amount of time with the least amount of inconvenience and expense.

Start by developing a Design Plan: A renovation will only be as successful as the research and planning that's put into it. Like any business proposal you develop for work, you need to have a clear goal of what you want to achieve with the renovation. Do you yearn for updated electrical wiring, maximizing storage space, adding an eating area, appliances that work?

You can start by popping into kitchen renovation stores to look at the latest available features in kitchen design. Speak to the staff, tell them you're at the beginning of your journey and see if they have any ideas for you.

Cut out photos of kitchens you love from magazines and put them in a folder. Identify why you like the kitchens you've chosen - is it the space? The lighting? The colour? The style of cabinetry or countertops? It is even helpful to give your designer images of things you definitely do not like. That way they won't propose those very things in your dream kitchen. When you determine what you really want, it will help your kitchen designer draw up the plans that suit you.

If you have a friend who's recently renovated her kitchen, take pictures and identify what you like about it as well and stick it in the folder with your other pictures.

Toronto architect Jacqueline Rhee says that when she sits down with potential clients and they say to her, "Design us something gorgeous," she has to explain that they aren't giving her enough information. She says, "What their idea of 'gorgeous' is and what I might have in mind could very well be two different things. Maybe they want French Country, but I have an idea that they might prefer a sleek contemporary kitchen." The more direction clients can give their designer about their likes, dislikes and what their goals for the space are, the better the design can live up to their expectations.

Budget: The good news regarding a kitchen renovation is that it tends to be a good investment. The Appraisal Institute of Canada estimates that a kitchen renovation will return 75-100% of your investment if you were to turn around and sell your home. However, the sky is never the limit, even for Donald Trump. Just as you would plan your company's annual marketing budget, you need to develop a budget for your kitchen renovation. A general rule of thumb for how much to spend on a kitchen renovation is up to 10-15% of the value of your home. But don't feel like you have to spend that much; if you can do more with less, do it. For example, if your cabinets are in the right location and sturdy but just tired and outdated, consider refacing them. Refacing comes in at about 50-75% of the cost of new custom cabinetry.

Hiring a Kitchen Company and/or Contractor: Most people hire a contractor or kitchen designer through word of mouth. If you've been to a friend's recently renovated house and you like what you see, start asking questions: Who did the work? Did you work well together? Was he on time and on budget? Is the end result what you expected? Was he well-organized or did you scramble to get finishes at the last minute? Were there any major problems during construction, and if so, how did he handle them? If you liked the answers your friend gave you - assuming your friend isn't shell-shocked from the direct grilling she's just received - get his card. Now, find at least two other contractors and/or kitchen companies so you can compare quotes.

Meeting with the Designer and Contractor: If, while you're meeting with a designer or contractor, your gut tells you that no matter how great the work is you couldn't stand being in the same room with him for more than a minute, cross him off your list of candidates. You may have to meet with this person every day. If your personalities don't mix, you'll never be able to solve problems together. Likely, however, if you're getting that vibe, the contractor or designer is too; it's best to part ways before a relationship has begun.

If, on the other hand, your first meeting is fantastic and you're bowled over with his enthusiasm and ideas and you get along as if you'd known each other your entire lives, you still need to do your research. Ask him how many jobs he can handle at once and how many he has going currently and make sure he is bonded and insured.

Further necessary research - the internet is your new best friend: Researching kitchen companies and contractors has become a whole lot easier with the age of the internet. Now there are websites which are specifically focused on capturing word-of-mouth reviews from consumers online. If the companies you're interested in using don't have any reviews, you may want to look at other companies that do and compare their services. Also check out the company's website. If they don't have one, you have to wonder how professional they are.

Another tip you can try is entering the company's name in search engines like Google and Yahoo!. You may find some feedback people have posted on them on various forums. You can also post a question asking if anyone has ever used this company. Finally, check the references he or she gives you as well, talk to a few of his past clients and go see the work he or she did for them.

Once you've chosen your designer, contractor and/or kitchen company, get ready: Ask yourself if you can live through the renovation by setting up a second kitchen in the garage or basement. Do you have toddlers who would be better off away from the construction site? Make arrangements to be out of the house for a specific amount of time and make sure that you and your project team have discussed the most reasonable move-out and move-in dates.

Did you have to factor furniture storage into your budget or can it be wrapped and stored on site? Again, your contractor will tell you which is the best option depending on the size of the job and your storage space availability on site.

During the renovation: Assumptions: One of the breakdowns in communication between homeowner and contractor is in assumptions made by one party or the other. For instance, one woman had purchased bathroom sinks and fixtures for a brand new home. The contractor saw that the powder room fixture would be outfitted with separate taps and a faucet and so drilled three holes in all the sinks because he assumed that all the fixtures were the same. Unfortunately, they weren't and the homeowner had to replace the other fixtures to match the holes.

But incorrect assumptions can just as easily be made by the homeowner. A homeowner handed a water filter kit to the contractor and asked him to install it. The homeowner had read on the box that the water filter was good for the whole house and could be fitted on the main water supply. When she returned at the end of the day, the contractor had installed it under the kitchen sink. She'd never told him where it was to go, she had just assumed that he knew it was meant for the entire house.

Problem solving: In any renovation, no matter how minor, there always seem to be unforeseen problems. It's not as surprising as you might think. What happens behind the walls stays behind them until they're ripped apart. Up until then, you might not know that the insulation used was actually newspaper, or that the plumbing went through the wall that needs to be demolished. How your contractor and you handle these problems depends on how proactive your contractor is.

During Sue and Leon's main floor renovation, the designer had called for the laundry room backsplash to consist of stainless steel tiles; beautiful, but at a cost of approximately $5,000. Sue balked. The contractor suggested instead a row of the tiles, two feet high, just behind the washer and dryer at a cost of $500. Sue was grateful that contractor made her aware of the costs and had an alternative suggestion for her.

The end result -- your dream space: Living through the dust, noise and strangers in your house for weeks to months on end can be tiring. Even though you get along well with the crew and your contractor, you can find your temper becoming short, particularly if there are delays during the project leading to prolonged construction. Recognize that delays are often unavoidable and that one day, you will be back in your home, the workers will be gone and your new beautiful kitchen will be all yours.

On-line Resources: This Old House: This website is a DIYer's dream. There are videos and tips on probably every aspect of renovating a kitchen. Kitchens.com: A wealth of information on everything you ever wanted to know about kitchens, including information on "greening your kitchen." Better Homes and Gardens has an extensive section on renovating your kitchen including an "inspiration gallery" to give you some ideas. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation: CMHC has an excellent website for any renovation or home purchase. The kitchen renovation area has downloadable charts you can use for reference guides as you go about your renovation planning. Appraisal Institute www.homerenovationvancouver.ca of Canada: The Renova section of this website allows you to input the cost of your renovation and it will calculate how much of a return you would receive if you sold your home.

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toldnews-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/lifestyle/the-chic-octogenarian-behind-barbies-best-looks/

The Chic Octogenarian Behind Barbie’s Best Looks

LOS ANGELES — Carol Spencer, 86, may be the most influential fashion designer you’ve never heard of.

In the mid-1960s, she made a red pencil skirt with a white sleeveless blouse that had red stitching and three red buttons down the front. Short white gloves came with it. Thousands sold.

In the 1970s, well aware that the counterculture’s loosening dress code and mores had made it to the mainstream, Ms. Spencer designed a red bandanna halter maxi-dress and a matching leisure shirt for men. Those designs were popular, too.

In the Nancy Reagan 1980s, Ms. Spencer aimed for high-end appeal, making a one-shouldered ball gown in blue jacquard with an organza flower at the nipped-in waist and a cape. One of Mrs. Reagan’s go-to couturiers personally approved the gown to be sold under his name: “Oscar de la Renta for Barbie.”

Ms. Spencer has made wedding dresses, saris, go-go boots and caftans. All in miniature. From 1963 to 1999, she was Barbie’s fashion designer, a career celebrated in her new book, “Dressing Barbie” (HarperDesign).

Ms. Spencer also made her own clothes, and had an easy time working with the doll’s famously unusual proportions, she said, because they weren’t so far from her own. “I have shrunk but in those days, I was tall and skinny,” she said. “I had a 16-inch waist and something on top, too, I sure did, but Barbie’s legs were better than mine.”

She was sitting in her dining room, wearing a blouse in a shade that can only be described as Barbie pink, with a Barbie brooch and a Barbie digital watch that legions of girls probably begged to get for Christmas in the 1990s.

It was a different body part that was most important for her job, Ms. Spencer said: “I have small hands.” She set down the Barbie teacup filled with lemonade she had been clasping to show her fingers. They are small and jut out at angles from the joint, a disfiguration likely caused by years of grasping little needles and bottles of glue.

In creating a wardrobe for Barbie and the entourage (Skipper, Ken, Midge, Big Jim, Baby Sister Kelly, Cara, Stacey, Christie, P.J., Steffie and Miss America), Ms. Spencer was part of a team that has inspired the work of designers including Bob Mackie, Nicole Miller, Jeremy Scott and Jason Wu, who once said he played with Barbie dolls when he was a child.

For a Moschino fashion show in Milan in 2014, Mr. Scott had a Barbie waiting on front-row chairs and sent models down the runway in blond bouffants and pink skirt suits.

Last month, to celebrate the doll’s 60th birthday, Mattel hosted a profusely pink Barbie bacchanal in New York City with Instagram-friendly Dream House backdrops, intended to draw in a new generation of fans who are too young to know that Barbie was the original influencer.

1. Ms. Spencer designed Ski Party Pink for Barbie in 1982. The sweater had Dolman sleeves and a cowl neck. In her ankle-strap high-heels, she was ready to hit the bars, not the slopes.

2. Released in 1979, this City Sophisticate outfit had a faux-fur-trimmed coat and skirt accented by a yellow soutache braid.

3. A Mattel employee accidentally ordered 2,500 yards of gold-and-white striped fabric, instead of 250 yards. Ms. Spencer’s 1965 Country Club Dance fashions made use of the excess.

4. The 1992 Totally Hair Barbie was one of Mattel’s best sellers. Ms. Spencer designed a Pucci-inspired mini.

5. Ms. Spencer wanted to create an “evening pajama” look for Barbie after Barbra Streisand wore a Scaasi version when accepting an Academy Award in 1969. Ms. Streisand’s outfit was see-through, so Ms. Spencer made Barbie special panties.

Saving the Dune Buggy

Even since her retirement, Ms. Spencer has devoted her time to Barbie. Inducted in 2017 into the Women in Toys, Licensing & Entertainment Hall of Fame, she has spent her golden years attending Barbie collectors events, doing research and amassing artifacts.

For years she has worked on “Dressing Barbie,” which is sized for a coffee table and subtitled “A Celebration of the Clothes That Made America’s Favorite Fashion Doll, and the Incredible Woman Behind Them.” Laurie Brookins, a writer and stylist, helped Ms. Spencer with the project.

The book combines styled vintage fashion photography with memoir. Born in 1932 and raised in Minneapolis, Ms. Spencer rejected the wife-and-mother path that prevailed in the American midcentury and instead made a career for herself. “I truly fell in love with Barbie the first moment I created her clothes and accessories,” she writes in the book.

Barbie has been a go-to emblem of all that has ill-served girls and young women in American culture. Living in a world that is almost exclusively white, the doll has breasts that are disproportionately large compared with her hips, and her feet are contorted into a permanent “floint” (short for flexing your toes back as you point the rest of your foot).

Her hair seems to be bleached blond, never with dark (or gray) roots. At times she dressed the part of a doctor or politician but has seemed unable to hold down a job. And there’s the place in Malibu. Does it come from a trust fund or Ken?

But Ms. Spencer would like to counterpunch the Barbie bashing. She points out the doll’s humble origins, with her proportions modeled after paper dolls cut from newspapers. She also defends Barbie as a healthy alternative to video games; an engine of imagination for girls and boys, who can project onto a Barbie doll whoever they may wish to become.

“It’s wholesome play,” she said, as she pulled from a case one of the many hundreds of dolls in her home. This one was wearing a yellow chiffon-like pleated tunic with see-through pajama pants, inspired by the Arnold Scaasi transparent ensemble Barbra Streisand wore to the 1969 Oscars when she won a best actress award for “Funny Girl.”

Ms. Spencer’s house is filled with books like “Barbie: Her Life and Times” and “Dream Doll: the Ruth Handler Story,” about Ms. Handler, who, with her husband, Elliot, and Harold Matson, founded Mattel in 1945. The Barbie fashion doll was released in 1959.

Over a cluttered desk are posters of Barbie, like one showing the same image of the original 1959 doll, displayed against four different bright backgrounds, à la Warhol. (It was made to celebrate Mattel’s 35th Anniversary Barbie Festival, in 1994.)

Ms. Spencer is a scavenger for treasures in a toss-everything world. One day at the Mattel offices, then located in Hawthorne, Calif., she noticed someone was about to throw away an important piece of Barbie memorabilia.

“It was the prototype for Barbie’s dune buggy,” she said. “They were tossing it, and I said, ‘Would you toss it my way?’”

She learned thrift as a child. “During World War II, things were scarce and I remember the family would get the Sunday paper,” Ms Spencer said. “When they’d get through with it, they’d hand me the comic pages so that I could cut out the paper dolls.”

She began to create paper fashion for these paper dolls. Soon she was making her own clothes. But being a fashion designer didn’t seem like a realistic goal in those days, she recalled. “You could be a teacher, nurse, secretary or clerk,” she said. “But wife and mother were the big ones.”

She was engaged to a medical student but when she realized she was expected to work to help pay for education before quitting to be a “doctor’s wife,” she broke the engagement. Then she enrolled at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she got a bachelor of fine arts with a focus on fashion design.

In May 1955, as she was about to graduate, she received a telegram from New York letting her know that her application for a “guest editor” slot at Mademoiselle magazine had been approved. Instead of sticking around for her commencement ceremony, Ms. Spencer took her first plane trip and moved in to the Barbizon Hotel for Women, for a month.

During her time in New York, she attended a reception at the home of the cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein, visited the recently opened United Nations, danced with West Point cadets at the St. Regis hotel and interviewed the designer Pauline Trigère in her studio.

Ms. Spencer was in the same class of Mademoiselle guest editors as Joan Didion. “It was about as far from Minneapolis as you could get,” she writes.

She returned to her hometown to work, designing children’s wear for Wonderalls Company and then moved to Milwaukee to become a “misses” sportswear designer.

In late 1962, Ms. Spencer spotted an advertisement in Women’s Wear Daily. “A national manufacturer who leads its industry with annual sales in excess of $50 million seeks a cost-conscious fashion designer-stylist for its suburban Los Angeles facility.”

She sent a résumé and heard nothing back. Still, sensing this mysterious job was her destiny, she and her aunt packed up their 1959 Ford Fairlane and drove across the country to California.

In April 1963, she saw an ad in the California Apparel News for the same job, and this time her application got a response. It was from Mattel, the toymaker already known for the postwar bombshell: Barbie.

Ms. Spencer went to the company headquarters for an interview and was asked to make a suite of outfits for this creature. She made a halter-top-and-boy-short bikini, a one-piece in the same shade of orange-pink. There was a cover-up and a wrap skirt. She got the job.

Pink Pills Nixed

At that time, Mattel made about 125 different outfits a year for Barbie, and the fashion department, run by Charlotte Johnson, could be cutthroat.

“Charlotte had a theory,” Ms. Spencer said. “If you have four designers, you put them in four corners. And it was always competitive and you were pitching your product. Sometimes the competition was kind of dirty.”

How so? She wouldn’t say. “I’m out of it, I’m retired, I’m enjoying life, I’ll put it that way,” she said, and she took a sip of lemonade from her Barbie teacup.

Some of her early successes, all of which she has cataloged, included Country Club Dance (a white and gold striped gown), From Nine to Five (a midcalf blue dress with an embroidered vest and hair scarf) and Debutante Ball (an aqua satin gown with a fur stole).

Ms. Spencer took her cue from the culture around her. As the Jane Fonda aerobics craze of the 1980s took off, Barbie got a purple leotard and leg warmers. When NASA’s space shuttle exploration was in full tilt, Barbie became an astronaut (albeit one in thigh-high boots and silver capes).

And there was inspiration from her own life as well. When she needed a biopsy on her breast, Ms. Spencer was transfixed by the white coats doctors wore. The biopsy was negative, but the fashion was positive. Guess who became, however briefly, a surgeon?

There were missteps too, like when she gave Dr. Barbie a case of pink pills without knowing that at that time pink pills were known to be methamphetamines. “Let me tell you, that caused quite a stir,” she said. (Her faux pas was caught before Meth-Head Barbie made its way to children’s dollhouses.)

There are hundreds and hundreds of designs that are Carol Spencer originals, with only a small portion bearing her name. Until the mid-1990s, Mattel didn’t put designer names on Barbie’s packaging.

But Ms. Spencer remembers each of her creations, and many of them are in her home, which her sister, Margaret, 88, will be moving into soon. But even though Ms. Spencer gets out less these days, and relies on a walker to take more than a few steps, she said she feels surrounded by good company.

“You’re never alone when you have dinner at my house,” she said. “Barbie is always with you.”

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hmel78 · 4 years

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In conversation with Dave Oberle ...

A Gryphon, is a legendary creature with the head, talons, and wings of an eagle, and the body of a lion - they’re also a band from the UK who, following a lengthy absence, have returned from various personal quests, to once more bring forth their magical sounds to knights and maidens throughout our wondrous lands. What am I talking about?

Gryphon - like the mythical creature which inspired the group's name - is a hybrid of astounding musicians, from varying backgrounds, whose aim was to fuse several different musical styles into their own original music.

The group formed out of the Royal College of Music in London, in the early 1970s. Whilst the founder members were studying classical courses, both had strong musical interests in other spheres ; fascinated from an early age, by medieval and pre-classical music, with a passion for everything from Church music to contemporary folk and progressive rock. This diversity of tastes and influences encouraged them to form a group with a 3rd member, who had predominantly folk and jazz-tinged tastes. For a short while they existed as a trio - playing in simulated medieval eating houses! - until ‘Gryphon's’ line-up was, for then, completed by the arrival of former rock band drummer, David Oberle, in 1972 ; securing his roles of lead vocalist, and percussionist.

From that point on, the group really took shape. Drawing initially on a nucleus of renaissance pieces and re-arranged folk tunes, they easily developed their own distinctive style. By the beginning of 1973 they had started recording their first album for Transatlantic: "Gryphon (TRA 262) - and, with that record's release, there was a great surge of interest in the group. 5 albums, and a number of high profile tours later, Gryphon were lauded in a wide variety of newspapers, had appeared on several major television shows, and performed the unique feat of appearing on BBC Radio's 1 - 4 (inclusive) all in one week!

All this served to highlight how ‘Gryphon's’ music was universally acceptable. It stimulated the interest of folk, rock and classical buffs alike, and delighted all age groups. And then ... they went away. But where did they go? Were they whisked away on some fairytale adventure?

38 years passed by before the band reformed to play live shows, and it’s taken them 41 years to release their 6th album, aptly titled “ReInvention” (out now and available from all the usual places).

Sounds jumped at the opportunity to speak to Dave Oberle, who despite ‘Gryphon’s’ inactivity over the years, has certainly kept himself busy - he was a key member of the original Sounds Magazine team , and went on to be a founder member of rock magazine Kerrang! He’s also a producer of heavy rock bands via his label Communique Records. We caught up with him, whilst he took a break from wandering the not so mystical realms of social media ... DO : It’s a great thing, Facebook, for discovering who your fans are. We have a great number of under 25’s that have tapped into our music, and it pleases me hugely to see the rise of interested younger people in the progressive scene. It’s great for us to see what’s beginning to happen - kids are getting in touch with us as they’re discovering our records in their father’s collections, and loving it!

HR : So, you’re inspiring future audiences - Are they musicians too?

DO : I think a lot of them are. I think Gryphons root fan base has always been musicians - without wanting to sound pretentious, Gryphons music IS musicians music. You have to have some understanding of music to appreciate what the hell we’re doing! I think it would be fair to assume that most people who follow us play an instrument, but you never really know ...

Over the years we’ve all agreed that we felt our music reached people who liked all sorts of music - we’re pretty eclectic ourselves - there are a lot of influences , right the way from rock through baroque, medieval, renaissance, blues, jazz, classical - everything you can think of in one huge melting pot.

HR : In the very beginning, what prompted you to combine traditional folk music with medieval?

DO : It started off - Richard Harvey and Brian Gulland met each other at the Royal College of Music. Brian was studying choral and Richard was studying early music. They both played in a classical music ensemble called ‘Musica Reservata’. Gryphon came together properly once Graeme Taylor, the guitarist , joined ; who’s influences were people like John Renbourn and that style of guitar playing ; then rather unusually they approached me to join them - bear in mind at the time I was playing in a heavy rock band. So bringing a heavy rock drummer into something like that was a little strange ... but it worked! The one thing that was missing, I think, was a solid rhythm. I had to adapt what I was doing to fit in - it was quite difficult for me to go from playing rock to playing 5/4, or 7/4!

We started playing in folk clubs, really because they were the most open minded to what we were doing and took us seriously , with our folk influence. Further than that we didn’t know what was going to happen.

HR : Quite - You were pioneers of the sound at that time ...

DO : Well there were bands around like Jethro Tull, Amazing Blondell, which were in a similar vein and leant towards folk with a medieval tinge, but we were certainly the first band to step into that area and bring in front of the general public.

HR : I can’t imagine that Crumhorns and Bassoons had ever been used in rock music before ...

DO : NO and probably never will be again! [laughs] I think the actual sound of Gryphon is what attracted people because nobody had heard instruments like that - not quite true with the people who were interested in medieval music - they would have know what a Crumhorn was, but the average person in the street wouldn’t have had a clue!

I suppose it was a period of education for people who weren’t sure what was going on. Once the band got going I remember we did a concert at the Victoria & Albert museum in London, which was more like a lecture where we explained what the instruments were, and where they came from - from there the whole thing just expanded ; suddenly medieval instruments became interesting, and people associated the sound with what we were doing, and it was a very different sound - it still is.

We were out playing recently and I was amazed by how many people come up who are fascinated by the vast array of instruments that we have on stage. Between the 6 of us in the new line-up we’re playing between 50 and 60 instruments. It’s a hugely diverse sound.

HR : The expanse of festival stage is really ideal then, when you have what is essentially a mini orchestra! Gryphon had had quite a hiatus before you reformed to play live - what inspired the reunion?

DO : When the band split up in 1977 we really just disappeared without trace as many bands did under the onslaught of Punk.

The idea of doing a farewell/reunion gig had been on the cards for quite a few years but it had never been talked about seriously. Finally he were all together one evening and it was decided that we should go ahead and just do it. It was 2009, and at that time we had nearly 200,000 hits on our website, so we thought that there was definitely something going on and that the support for the band was still very evident.

We decided on a London venue - Queen Elizabeth Hall on the south bank - and we managed to fill the place without any advertising. Then it all fell flat again because the various members of the band had other commitments, but our presence started to grow through social media from there, and in 2014 we decided to put our toes in the water again. In 2015, we did 6 shows all of which were brilliantly well attended, and in 2016 we were invited by Fairport to go and open Cropredy too - which was just perfect.

HR : It’s remarkable really, especially as you didn’t have any new music to promote at the time ...

DO : No. We were not in a position at that time to have a new album ready, so we decided that we would just go out and play material from the first 4 albums plus a couple of new dances.

HR : You’ve got quite a spectrum of musical styles to perform, but from a recording perspective, why did you move from acoustic to electric on the early albums?

DO : After “Midnight Mushrumps” when we got to “Red Queen”, we’d be taken on by Worldwide Artists - which was run by Brian Lane , who at the time was managing YES, Rick Wakeman and couple of others. Rick was a friend of Richard and Brian’s from the RCM, and he introduced us to Brian Lane. Within a few weeks of being signed up, we were on our way to America to support YES.

During that time, we’d all been great fans of the prog scene, and the Canterbury scene - Caravan, King Crimson etc - and whilst we weren’t pressured in any way, “Red Queen” was really our first step into prog ; using a lot more electronic instruments, and taking a bit of a step back from the medieval side of things - Brian was still playing his bassoon and we still used Krum Horns and recorders, but it wasn’t to such a great extent. Richard now had a great Rick Wakemanesque bank of keyboards surrounding him for a start, and we moved into a different phase ... “Red Queen” was the album that we toured the states with.

HR : I can’t imagine the magnitude of touring with YES - they were huge! DO : It was amazing! The response in America was great because we were so quintessentially English , playing all these really weird instruments, and so we went down a storm. We played at places like the Houston Astrodome, and Madison Square Gardens in New York. Definitely the highlights of my musical career would centre around those dates. We came back to the UK and did another leg with them here - probably 150 dates in all. It got to the point where we knew their music as well as they did, and for the last few dates of the American tour in the mid 1970s we would go onstage and join them for their encores, which was quite an experience.

HR : Given that exposure, and the fact that you’d already changed your sound for “Red Queen”, was it a conscious decision to move back to a more traditional sound?

DO : Sort of, yes. The album after “Red Queen”, was “Raindance” - there were still hangovers from “Red Queen”, but there were a lot more, I suppose commercial sounding shorter tracks - we’d been into doing 10 - 15 minute tracks, and suddenly we were producing 2 and 3 minute songs.

The thing about ‘Gryphon’, I believe, is that if I was to play all 5 albums to someone who didn’t know ‘Gryphon’, they would think they were listening to 5 completely different bands. There’s nothing that really specifically links the albums, apart from certain sounds, but in terms of composition and arrangement they are 5 VERY different albums. If you listen to the 1st and the 5th, there is no comparison - you’d be very hard pushed to say “Yes that’s the same band!”

HR : Does that mean that you’ve never labelled yourselves?

DO : We got labelled by other people .... I worked for Melody Maker and for Sounds, so I knew why it happened , journalistically - back then, things had to be pigeon-holed because if you didn’t fit in a pigeon-hole you didn’t fit, full stop. These days music is so diverse that you can’t put a band into a pigeon-hole, a band is what it is, but back then we were classed as “medieval folk rock”. Actually Chris Welch tagged us “13th Century Slade”!

HR : [laughs] that’s brilliant, but I probably shouldn’t laugh ...

DO : No, it took a long time to shake off! It was very funny, and a great thing for our PR guys, but we weren’t Slade. Having said that though, in the popularity stakes - our average audience did, and still does, range from Hells Angels to Nuns, and so far as I know we are the only band who have ever managed to get onto BBC Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the same week - which gives you an idea of the breadth of our audience, and even BBC 6 Music recently played the whole of “Midnight Mushrumps”.

HR : You have quite a few unique achievements to your name ...

DO : We have?

HR : Weren’t you the only band ever to play at the Old Vic?

DO : Ah, yes! The reason for that was - we were approached by Sir Peter Hall , who was running the National Theatre at the time and he asked us if we’d write the music for the Royal Shakespeare Companies production of “The Tempest” ; which is where a lot of the music from “Midnight Mushrumps” came from. It was originally written for the RSC, but was adapted and is how “Midnight Mushrumps” came into existence. That was a huge honour, and a one off.

‘Gryphon’ are a bit of a one off really, aren’t we? I don’t think there are any comparisons - I seriously can’t think of anything that gets even close to what we are and what we’re doing. There have been a few copy cat bands along the way, and a few bands who have gone along similar lines but I still think Gryphon is unique, and all 5 of the albums are unique in their own way - but what it really comes down to, more than anything else is the standard of musicianship and composition - and now we’ve got Graham Preskett in the band too, who has played with everyone under the sun, and getting him onboard was a major achievement. He was Gerry Rafferty’s keyboard player and arranged all the big hits like Baker Street and Night Owl, and things like that. He knew Richard at college too, so there’s some old school stuff going on there, and he’s been invaluable in terms of helping to recreate the sound.

HR : That kind of chemistry is very important

DO : Oh completely. You have to have the right people in a band like ‘Gryphon’ or it wouldn’t work. And it does work. People are still playing the music, people are still interested, and really Helen, what proves it to us is the amount of people who came out to see us last year. I’m immensely proud of the band and the guys that I work with. Richard in particular, who’s gone onto write film music and work with Hans Zimmer, and worked in Hollywood with a lot of people - he’s an incredibly talented musician. It’s very strange, how a bunch of naughty school boys as we were back then, have all ended up being in prominent places in the music, and film industry.

HR : Is it not the naughty schoolboy edge that keeps it fresh for everybody?

DO : Absolutely! The other thing about ‘Gryphon’ is that it was all very irreverent and a big joke as we were concerned, certainly at 18 and 19 years old - but what is great is that feeling has carried on even after 38 years of not playing together. When we get back on stage we slip straight back into the flinging insults at each other, and it keeps the audience involved.

HR : 38 years was quite a break though ...

DO : [laughs] yes - yes, and mainly because everyone had gone off doing other things, there was no other reason for it - it just wasn’t until 2 or 3 years ago that we could take up the gauntlet again. Richard had been out on the road with John Williams, the guitarist, who decided to retire from touring - and that was the first time that he was available, and with him being the front man, we could NOT do ‘Gryphon’ without him. He wanted to carry on playing live, because writing film music is actually quite a lonely existence, and the only time you ever get to hear what you’ve written is when the orchestra is playing it, and its being recorded, and then it’s gone. I think in every musician, whatever they do, there is a desire and a need to play live. It’s completely different to being in the studio where you can overdub, and re-record and correct mistakes - out there live, you’re exposed and what you produce that night is what you produce and that’s it - from that perspective for any musician, playing live is incredibly important. It comes and it goes. You create in that moment. If you’re lucky, when you try to record or film a live album, you’ll capture the essence of what you’re trying to create, but it’s tough, and can go really wrong! We played at the Union Chapel in 2015, and we filmed the 3rd movement of “Midnight Mushrumps”, which really gave people who can’t come and see us, a taste of what they’re missing!

Gryphon - “Magic Mushrumps 3rd Movement”, live at Union Chapel 2015 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYMK6tWbUOA

HR : Talking of studio albums - It’s been 41 years Dave ...

DO : [laughs] We’d been promising our fans for a long time, but because of various things going on for various members of the band, it’s just been impossible. I’m sure people think “but you’re musicians, you can write an album in a week and get it recorded” but with ‘Gryphons’ music we probably write about 3 minutes in a week!

HR : But it is here ... FINALLY! Are you happy with it?

DO : Yes we are. We all think that it works very well. New material but with the feel of the old Gryphon. We have indeed ReInvented ourselves. A difficult thing to do after 41 years. Our fans have responded really well to it and we appear to be getting some good airplay and reviews.

HR : Was the material written over that vast break, or is it all pretty recent?

Most of the material is recent apart from “Ashes” which should have been included on the “Raindance” album but was rejected by the record company much to our annoyance. We have given it a makeover and are very pleased with the result. The longest Track “Haddock’s Eyes” was written by Graeme and is based on the ‘White Knight’s Tale’ from Alice Through The Looking Glass. We have tried to re-connect with our ‘Alice’ roots and John Hurford who did the cover artwork and design was really helpful with this.

HR : Did you feel that it was important to stay true to ‘Gryphons’ original sound?

DO : I think that any band who forget their roots and where they came from are in danger of losing their way. We did for a while after “Red Queen” so when a new album was finally discussed we felt it important to ourselves and our fans, to remain true to that original direction. You can hear it very strongly on “ReInvention”. It’s everything you would expect from a Gryphon album, Folk, Prog, Jazz, a strong medieval flavour, classical overtones and downright straight Rock.

HR : I have to say that I think it’s worth the wait, so Congratulations! And in the personal life of Dave - are you working on any new projects outside of Gryphon at the moment?

DO : No – Gryphon is taking up all my time at the moment. HR : You haven’t been completely off the musical radar over the years though have you - can we mention your involvement with ‘Gandalf’s Fist’? They seem to be very popular ...

DO : Aaaaagh! ‘Gandalf’s Fist’. Yes! I recorded vocal sessions for their “Clockwork Fable” album. Dean Marsh is a very talented young man, and I have great hopes for them - Even more so after Classic Rock Magazine voted them number 3 in their top 100 albums. That’s really quite an achievement, and I’m chuffed and quite proud to be involved with them. It was the first thing I’d been happy to put my name to in the past 10 years.

HR : Well, between them and Gryphon, you’re doing a sterling job at helping to keep the British prog scene alive so - thanks Dave!

DO : You’re very welcome. It’s nice to know that people are still following what we’re up to, after having taken such a long break. When you come back after that length of time, you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen. We could have leaped out there and ended up playing to 3 people, but we didn’t, and it’s nice to know that the music is still appreciated ...

HR : It’s called standing the test of time ...

DO : Which is more than we have! [laughs]

For more info, or to get your hands on a copy of "ReInvention", please visit http://www.thegryphonpages.com/

#gryphon #progressive rock #orchestral rock #crumhorn #kerrang #reinvention #drumminglife #percussions #drummer #daveoberle

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weekegg2-blog · 5 years

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A ‘freaking fag revolutionary’ remembers the early years of gay liberation in Chicago

When the annual Pride Parade steps off from the intersection of Broadway and Montrose at noon on Sunday, June 30—with Lori Lightfoot, Chicago's first openly gay mayor, serving as honorary grand marshal—it will represent a very different mind-set from the event that launched the pride parade tradition. This year's parade is expected to draw more than a million participants and onlookers to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28 and 29, 1969. Thus the theme Stonewall 50: Millions of Moments of Pride.

I was a teenaged member of Chicago Gay Liberation, the loose-knit, short-lived group that organized the first pride parade on Saturday, June 27, 1970. Most of our group thought of ourselves, proudly if irreverently, as members of the "freaking fag revolution"—to borrow the phrase used by Thomas Aquinas Foran, the U.S. attorney who had prosecuted the so-called "Chicago Seven" anti-war activists charged with conspiracy and incitement to riot as a result of their protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

The first parade wasn't even a parade. It was a march, which meant we were allowed to walk on the sidewalks but not in the streets. There were no floats, no cars, no politicians, no crowds, no corporate sponsors pitching their brands to onlookers. The last thing on our minds was the possibility of any mayor, let alone an openly gay one, leading the way; we were happy the city's then-mayor, "Boss" Richard J. Daley, didn't set his cops on us.

The day began at noon with a rally in Washington Square Park across the street from the Newberry Library—known as "Bughouse Square" because of its storied history as a free-speech forum. From there we walked to the historic Water Tower at the intersection of Michigan and Chicago Avenues. Then, instead of dispersing as we had originally planned, we impulsively headed south on Michigan into the Loop, chanting "Out of the closets and into the streets!" as we wended our way through throngs of Mag Mile shoppers. The march ended with another rally in Civic Center Plaza (now Daley Plaza), where the event culminated in a joyous circle dance around the Picasso statue.

Between 150 and 300 people (depending on which account you read) showed up to celebrate what our flyer promoting the event declared (in all capital letters) was: "THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF GAY PEOPLE TELLING THE WARPED, SICK, MALADJUSTED, PURITAN AMERIKAN SOCIETY THAT THEY HAVE HAD ENOUGH SHIT."

That flyer is on display as part of "Out of the Closets & Into the Streets: Power, Pride & Resistance in Chicago's Gay Liberation Movement," a new exhibit at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, the midwest's largest LGBTQ library and research center. Conceived by the library's director, Wil Brant, and curated by a team of young volunteers including professional librarians Chase Ollis and James Conley and designer Kurt Conley, the display is drawn from Gerber/Hart's extensive archival collection.

The march marked the first anniversary of a riot in New York City on June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay nightclub in Greenwich Village owned by the Genovese crime family, reacted violently to what had begun as a routine police raid. That event, and the events leading up to and following it, are well covered in a new book, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History by Marc Stein (NYU Press).

But that first Stonewall anniversary march wasn't the first activity of Chicago Gay Liberation, which started up in fall 1970 after University of Chicago grad student Henry Wiemhoff placed an ad in the Chicago Maroon student newspaper seeking a gay roommate. Not only did he get a roommate—a female taxicab driver named Michal Brody—he got a discussion group. We met in Wiemhoff and Brody's Hyde Park apartment and then, as our numbers grew, began to gather at the Blue Gargoyle, a community center and coffeehouse in the multicultural, nondenominational University Church on the University of Chicago campus.

Talking soon led to action. The first public Gay Lib event I participated in was a protest four months before the Stonewall march, on the snowy afternoon of Wednesday, February 25, 1970, outside the Loop headquarters of the Women's Bar Association of Illinois. The group was hosting a program on "Youthful Offenders" with a Chicago police officer, Sergeant John Manley, as guest speaker. But for us, the offender was Manley himself. The blond, muscular cop was notorious for entrapping gay men in Lincoln Park restrooms; wearing street clothes, he would pretend to solicit guys for sex and then arrest them if they responded to his invitation. Mattachine Midwest, an established "homophile" organization in town, published Manley's picture in its mimeographed monthly newsletter and mockingly suggested Manley himself was a closet case: "If I were gay and I didn't want anybody to know, and I felt very, very guilty, I think I might get a job where I could cruise in the public interest," wrote David Stienecker, the newsletter's editor. On February 7, 1970, Manley made an early morning appearance at Stienecker's third-floor apartment to arrest him for criminal defamation.

"After I unsuccessfully attempted to make a phone call, Manley called for a police van and I was escorted from my apartment in handcuffs," Stienecker now recalls. "Upon arriving at the precinct house, Manley suggested that if I just pleaded guilty the judge would only give me a slap on the wrist." But Stienecker, represented by the diligent and fierce lesbian attorney Renee Hanover, fought the charges. After several court appearances, most of which Manley missed, the case was thrown out of court, but Stienecker lost his job as an editor at World Book Encyclopedia due to the ensuing publicity—there then being no legal protection against employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Manley later rose to the rank of captain in the police force, but his career crashed and burned in the mid-1990s when he was fired for sexually harassing female officers under his supervision. Some 20 years later, his name popped up in the news again when he was ticketed for, of all things, impersonating a government official after he posed as a U.S. Maritime Service "special agent" to avoid a parking ticket. Stienecker, who went on to a successful career writing educational books for children, is credited as a program supporter of Gerber/Hart's "Out of the Closets" exhibit.

In March 1970, we responded to the release of The Boys in the Band, the film version of the 1968 off-Broadway stage hit. Our aim was not to boycott the movie—which used waspish humor to illustrate the pathological, self-hating behavior of a group of gay New York men—but to use it as a teaching opportunity. We handed out flyers on the street outside the Carnegie Theatre on Rush Street (where Gibsons Bar & Steakhouse is now), which read in part: "The pain and cruelty typified by The Boys in the Band should be understood as the expression of human lives damaged by an environment of condemnation, suspicion, job discrimination, and legal harrassment [sic]."

Gay Liberation also organized dances, which drew large crowds from around the city. Though same-sex dancing wasn't illegal, it was forbidden in the mob-owned gay bars in Boss Daley's Chicago, where periodic police raids were a given. The first two Gay Lib dances were held in the protected environs of the University of Chicago campus. (It inspired other LGBTQ student groups to hold their own dances at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle—now UIC—and Northwestern University. At the latter, music was provided by the Siegel-Schwall Band, then one of Chicago's hottest blues-rock bands. )

When the U. of C. demanded that CGL move its dances off campus because the crowds were getting too big, we booked the Coliseum, located on South Wabash between 14th and 16th Streets, a huge venue that had hosted several Republican presidential conventions, sports events, rock concerts, and, a few weeks previously, a congress of Black Muslims. As historian Timothy Stewart-Winter, author of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press), recounts in a Slate article titled "Beyond Stonewall: How Gay History Looks Different From Chicago":

"[T]here was a problem: The venue required an insurance policy, and every insurance agent the organizers approached said the risk was too great that the police would raid the dance, cart the attendees off to jail, and levy fines. Only on the day before the dance did the activists find a broker who'd sell them a policy—a black man whose company had insured the Nation of Islam's annual convention at the same venue."

About 2,000 people showed up at the Coliseum to dance for liberation on April 18, 1970. So did the police. But when the cops entered the hall and came face to face with a phalanx of attorneys—including the formidable Renee Hanover—primed to document any civil liberties violations, they shrugged and went away.

The Gerber/Hart exhibit includes copies of the mimeographed newsletters that Gay Lib used to spread its message in those long-ago pre-Internet days. Also on display is a copy of the Chicago Seed, the city's hippie/radical underground paper, which published an eight-page Gay Liberation supplement in one issue. There's also a well-deserved tribute to the late Frank Robinson, who gave Chicago's LGBTQ community the first professional- quality publications we could call our own. Robinson was a closeted middle-aged editor for Playboy magazine; unable to come out for our demonstrations, he devoted himself to behind-the-scenes messaging. After publishing a one time "Gay Pride" paper to promote the 1971 Pride Parade (which by then had been relocated to the Lincoln Park/Lakeview area on the north side), Robinson put out two editions of The Paper, a 1972 tabloid that covered local LGBTQ arts and politics. The Paper ran interviews with local counterculture celebrities such as painter Ed Paschke, lesbian singer-songwriter Linda Shear, female impersonators Roby Landers and Wanda Lust, and stage director Gary Tucker, aka "Eleven," whose gender-bending Godzilla Rainbow Troupe was then running its hit production of Charles Ludlam and Bill Vehr's outrageous Turds in Hell. A copy of The Paper on display at Gerber/Hart shows a photo from another landmark of Chicago's fledgling off-Loop theater movement, the Organic Theater's sci-fi epic Warp!, featuring André De Shields (who just won a Tony for his performance in the Broadway hit Hadestown) as Xander the Unconquerable. In 1973, Robinson had relocated to San Francisco, where he became the speechwriter for a camera store owner and activist with aspirations to a political career—Harvey Milk. But by then the city had its first (more or less) regularly published newspaper, the Chicago Gay Crusader, edited by activist Michael Bergeron with copy editing supervision by his lover Bill Kelley.

The success of the June 1970 Stonewall anniversary march (no one got arrested!) encouraged members of Gay Liberation to start developing a larger agenda. Inevitably, there were conflicts. Some wanted to merge Gay Lib into a broader leftist coalition; others preferred to keep the focus on LGBTQ issues. GL's women's and Black caucuses went off in their own directions; the Black caucus turned into Third World Gay Revolutionaries, led by Ortez Alderson, who went to prison for destroying draft records in downstate Pontiac. And in September 1970, as reported in a CGL newsletter displayed in the Gerber/Hart exhibit, "Tensions that had been brewing for some weeks finally came to a head . . . with the result that the group suffered a schism and a large number of members announced they were forming a new group—not a new caucus—to be called 'The Chicago Gay Alliance.' . . . Though there . . . were moments of acrimony, the parting was amicable. . . . All present expressed a desire to avoid the infighting of competitive groups in other cities"—a reference to the internecine turf wars that tore at the fabric of New York's gay community around the same time.

The debut issue of the CGA newsletter in November 1970 explained: "The Chicago Gay Alliance is actively interested in alleviating the ghetto (whether spiritual or physical) conditions of homosexuals, in dispelling the psychological and sociological mythology that has grown up about the subject of homosexuality, in providing referral services to homosexuals, in helping homosexuals 'coming out' develop a sense of pride in who they are and courage in facing the generally hostile outside world, to provide additional social outlets so that homosexuals can meet each other as human beings, to change repressive laws and end police and political harassment, and to improve communications between the homosexual and the heterosexual communities."

In 1971 CGA gave Chicago its first LGBTQ community center, a ramshackle red-brick two-story rented house on an Old Town side street at 171 W. Elm. By 1973 the center had closed for lack of financial support, and CGA ceased operations. But the activism continued. A July 1973 issue of the Chicago Gay Crusader reported that 20th Ward alderman Cliff Kelley, working with a group called Illinois Gays for Legislative Action, had introduced legislation in the Chicago City Council to prohibit discrimination in jobs, housing, and public accommodations based on sexual orientation. It took 15 years for the City Council to finally vote an LGBTQ-inclusive Chicago Human Rights Ordinance into law on December 21, 1988.

The Old Town community center paved the way for today's gleaming Center on Halsted. The Gay Crusader was succeeded by the weekly newspaper GayLife, founded in 1975 by the late Grant Ford, and then by Windy City Times, cofounded in 1985 by Tracy Baim, now publisher of the Reader, and still publishing in print and online 34 years later. (I served as editor of both GayLife and WCT in the '80s.)

The Gerber/Hart exhibit's narrative arc climaxes with a major event from 1977, chronicled in an issue of GayLife on display. On June 14 of that year, singer, orange-juice industry spokeswoman, and former Miss America Anita Bryant arrived in Chicago for a concert at the historic Medinah Temple at Wabash and Ohio (it's now a Bloomingdale's home furniture store). The concert had been booked before Bryant achieved national notoriety as leader of an anti-LGBTQ initiative in Dade County, Florida. LGBTQ activists, including me, picketed the Bryant concert in Chicago, despite being cautioned by gay establishment leaders that our action would be an embarrassing failure. By then, it was thought, the activist energy of the early 1970s had waned, and the only time queers turned out en masse was for the Pride Parade. But a spontaneous, unexpected turnout of 3,000 to 5,000 (depending on whom you ask) proved the naysayers wrong.

Chicago Gay Liberation, the Chicago Gay Alliance, and the other groups that sprang up in the wake of Stonewall ran out of steam by the end of the decade, but the sense of empowerment they gave the community—and the lessons we learned from their successes and setbacks—guided us into the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic and the struggle for civil rights at the city, county, and state level drove a new activist spirit. "The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long," notes Gerber/Hart's James Conley. "As transformative as those groups were, they were temporary. But the impact they had in their short span of existence was monumental and lasting." v

Special thanks to Amber Lewis at Columbia College Chicago

Correction: This article has been revised to reflect that the Siegel-Schwall Band played at a dance held on the campus of Northwestern University, not that of the University of Chicago.

Source: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/gerber-hart-gay-pride-history/Content?oid=70924510

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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opticallyaddicted · 7 years

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A Message from Liz Wrightson

Bernie Wrightson has passed away March 19, 2017

It is with great sorrow that I must announce the passing of my beloved husband, Bernie. We thank you for all the years of love and support. His obituary is below:

After a long battle with brain cancer, legendary artist Bernie Wrightson has passed away.

Bernie “Berni” Wrightson (born October 27, 1948, Baltimore, Maryland, USA) was an American artist known for his horror illustrations and comic books. He received training in art from reading comics, particularly those of EC, as well as through a correspondence course from the Famous Artists School. In 1966, Wrightson began working for The Baltimore Sun newspaper as an illustrator. The following year, after meeting artist Frank Frazetta at a comic-book convention in New York City, he was inspired to produce his own stories. In 1968, he showed copies of his sequential art to DC Comics editor Dick Giordano and was given a freelance assignment. Wrightson began spelling his name “Berni” in his professional work to distinguish himself from an Olympic diver named Bernie Wrightson, but later restored the final E to his name.

His first professional comic work appeared in House of Mystery #179 in 1968. He continued to work on a variety of mystery and anthology titles for both DC and its principal rival, Marvel Comics. In 1971, with writer Len Wein, Wrightson co-created the muck creature Swamp Thing for DC. He also co-created Destiny, later to become famous in the work of Neil Gaiman. By 1974 he had left DC to work at Warren Publishing who were publishing black-and-white horror-comics magazines. There he produced a series of original work as well as adaptations of stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1975, Wrightson joined with fellow artists Jeff Jones, Michael Kaluta, and Barry Windsor-Smith to form “The Studio,” a shared loft in Manhattan where the group would pursue creative products outside the constraints of comic book commercialism. Though he continued to produce sequential art, Wrightson at this time began producing artwork for numerous posters, prints, calendars, and coloring books.

Wrightson spent seven years drawing approximately 50 detailed pen-and-ink illustrations to accompany an edition of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, which the artist considers among his most personal work. Wrightson drew the poster for the Stephen King-penned horror film Creepshow, as well as illustrating the comic book adaptation of the film. This led to several other collaborations with King, including illustrations for the novella “Cycle of the Werewolf,” the restored edition of King’s apocalyptic horror epic, “The Stand,” and art for the hardcover editions of “From a Buick 8” and “Dark Tower V.” Wrightson has contributed album covers for a number of bands, including Meat Loaf. The “Captain Sternn” segment of the animated film Heavy Metal is based on the character created by Wrightson for his award-winning short comic series of the same name.

Characters he worked on included Spiderman, Batman and The Punisher, and he provided painted covers for the DC comics Nevermore and Toe Tags, among many others. Recent works include Frankenstein Alive Alive, Dead She Said , the Ghoul and Doc Macabre (IDW Publishing) all co-created with esteemed horror author Steve Niles, and several print/poster/sketchbooks series produced by Nakatomi.

As a conceptual artist, Bernie worked on many movies, particularly in the horror genre: well-known films include Ghostbusters, The Faculty, Galaxy Quest, Spiderman, and George Romero’s Land of the Dead, and Frank Darabont’s Stephen King film The Mist.

Bernie lived in Austin, Texas with his wife Liz and two corgis – Mortimer and Maximillian. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, John and Jeffrey, one stepson, Thomas Adamson, and countless friends and fans. A celebration of his life is planned for later this year.

#art #drawing #Illustration #Bernie Wrightson #obituary #horror #passed away

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funface2 · 5 years

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How a joke about the milkman inspired Psychonauts' best level – PC Gamer

The Milkman Conspiracy started, as many great things do, in a Thai restaurant. Or maybe it didn’t. Tim Schafer can’t remember exactly. Somebody—perhaps him—came up with the phrase ‘I am the milkman, my milk is delicious’, and it may or may not have been during a Double Fine team meal. “I wish someone had said it at the restaurant, because their milk was delicious,” he says.

Either way, those eight words unified ideas that had been buzzing around his head for a conspiracy theory-themed Psychonauts level. It’s how most levels for the zany platformer started: Schafer brought the concept, the artists re-imagined it, the designers dreamt up the gameplay, and then the world builders and programmers brought it to life. So how did The Milkman Conspiracy go from a simple, silly phrase to one of the most beloved levels in a beloved game?

How did The Milkman Conspiracy go from a simple, silly phrase to one of the most beloved levels in a beloved game?

Schafer has always been fascinated by people who genuinely believed conspiracy theories, and wanted to know what was going on inside their heads. “I loved the movie Capricorn One when I was a kid, on faking the moon landing. Just the idea that someone would think [it was true] was so funny to me, in the same way some people think flat earthers are funny now, but I find it very sad, because it’s just a symptom of how scary and misleading the internet can be,” he says.

He drew up a chart of conspiracies and linked them all to a central character, Boyd. Some of the theories were famous, or taken from movies. Some were inspired by office chats, others by a homeless man named Doug, who lived on the streets nearby. “We’d pay him $10 a week to sweep our driveway,” Schafer says. “He had ups and downs. Certain days he thought the government was trying to do things with him, and some days he didn’t. It was interesting to talk to him… trying to get inside of his head was very inspirational for the level. I still see him around the neighbourhood.”

Psychonauts was an exercise in dealing with mental illness in a comic way—the team were conscious of never “punching down” and wanted players to empathise with the characters, Schafer says. For Boyd, that meant showing the problems he’d been wrestling with: Being fired from a string of jobs and having an alter-ego implanted in his mind by Psychonauts villain Oleander.

That alter-ego was, of course, the Milkman.

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Visually, Schafer imagined Boyd’s mind world as a giant spider’s web, with Boyd’s house at the centre. He also wanted it to give it a retro, ’50s spy vibe, and thought a suburban neighborhood would be the perfect setting: Relatively mundane on the surface, but hiding a dark secret. He gave the concept to his artists.

Art director Scott Campbell tells me he wanted to emphasise paranoia, and he drew eyes and binoculars popping out of trashcans, mailboxes and bushes to make the player feel like they were being watched. He also came up with the G-Men, who kept an eye out for suspicious activities.

“I based their outfits on the classic ’50s G-Men detectives in their overcoats and hats, reminiscent of the Spy vs Spy comics in Mad magazine and every single TV show from that time period,” he says. “I just loved that spies always wore those overcoats and people were supposed to not notice them in hotel lobbies or on park benches with their newspapers covering their faces, with just their eyes showing.”

Campbell says the team found it funny to simply give the G-Men a single object as a disguise, and have them act out what was clearly the wrong use for that object. It’s why you see G-Men using red stop signs to hammer in imaginary nails, or playing a bouquet of flowers like a guitar, and it’s the root of much of the level’s humour.

Schafer recalls the initial magic of the level coming from a drawing by concept artist Peter Chan. “Suburbia is supposed to look mundane, but what if it was all just vaulted up against the sky? He had this drawing of the roads bent and twisted in the air, like [Boyd’s] thinking was twisting back on itself and illogical.

“And I was like, ‘woah’, the programmers were like, ‘woah’.”

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Schafer knew instantly that was the road to pursue, but he still had no idea what the gameplay would look like, so he brought in lead designer Erik Robson. Up until that point in the game, the team hadn’t used the player’s inventory much, and Robson was keen on an adventure game-style level where players combined items in their inventories to solve puzzles.

Those puzzles would be themed around the G-Men guarding certain areas, and the players would have to carry the right item to blend in. It fit well with Clairvoyance, a psychic power that let protagonist Raz see through the eyes of other characters, which had come from Schafer’s research into psychic abilities.

The trick, Robson tells me, was to make every possible item and Clairvoyance interaction entertaining, including failures. The team knew players would try to combine seemingly unconnected items, or try out their powers on inanimate objects, so they created a huge spreadsheet of every possible interaction, filling each box with a new idea.

“We know we have to have something fun for if I use the clairvoyance on the feather I’m holding, for example,” he says, “We knew those interactions would all be possible… it ends up being a situation where a bunch of creative people have to brainstorm and come up with fun solutions, and hopefully, that ends up being entertaining for a player.”

Sometimes those interactions would be simple: When used on a keypad, Raz is seen as a giant finger. But others would require more time and effort, and one of the brilliant things about Double Fine was that three designers were allowed to take three days to come up with the right concept.

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All the things that seem like antagonists, in the level, are… like an immune system trying to understand an alien body in its midst.

Designer Erik Robson

The Milkman Conspiracy ended up much larger than originally planned, partly because of the team’s relative gravity tech. The programmers came up with a way to flip gravity as you moved between the twisted, spiralling streets that Chan had drawn, and the camera would react in kind. It worked brilliantly, and the level naturally expanded as Robson took players off in different directions.

The sprawling design also fit into the theme, he says. “Broadly, the goal of every Psychonauts mind level was to express the personality of the character in whatever way possible. I think there was something appealing about it being an open-air maze. That’s a weird contradiction that seems consistent with Boyd: ‘I’m lost, but I can see everything. I see my goals, but I can’t suss out how I’m going to get there.'”

In the end, Robson feels Milkman sprawled too much. “There’s maybe two or three of those ambient houses when there should really only be one. As a level designer, my proclivity is to make things too big, so there might be a bit of guilt kicking in there.”

Robson also wishes the team could’ve better expressed Boyd’s inner turmoil throughout the level. The opening sequence, where the player uses Clairvoyance on Boyd and sees the conspiratorial scrawls he’s made on the walls of his house, is an example of when it worked, because it gave the player a sense of what was to come while revealing something about Boyd’s character, Robson says.

“All the things that seem like antagonists, in the level, are… like an immune system trying to understand an alien body in its midst. And that alien body is the what the Milkman represents, this thing that is there and buried, but he can’t get rid of, and he knows something bad is going to happen as a result. There are a bunch of things I think we did get, the sort of confusion and how nothing is quite what it seems, the open-air maze. But I think that would have been cool to kind of drive that emotional point home better.”

[embedded content]

Partly because of these niggles, Robson says he’s never thought of Milkman as a standout level. But he says it’s one of the funniest, and Schafer’s writing undoubtedly brings the whole thing together. Simply written down, the jokes—”The most pleasant sewers can be found in Paris, France”—have almost zero impact. But their deadpan delivery works so well in the context of the level, and the ultra-serious G-Men talking about how “rhubarb is a controversial pie flavor” as they try hopelessly to blend in with their given roles proves to be hilarious.

That was only possible because writing all the dialogue came last. After the designers and gameplay programmers had finished, Schafer would assess every piece of the level, and write dialogue based on all the work that came before. “That was the most solid foundation for the jokes to get layered on top,” Robson says. “Half of my memory of Milkman is playing it without any of that dialogue, so that stuff still almost feels like a sort of recent edition. And then after you’re done with the level, six or eight weeks later, this dialogue appears all of a sudden in the game.”

Schafer tells me he wanted Erik Wolpaw to write the dialogue, but Wolpaw ended up being too busy. “So I ended up writing all the G-Men dialogue myself and I’m so happy I did, because it was so fun,” he says. “It’s just that matter of fact, straight-laced: ‘Who was the milkman? What was the purpose of the goggles?’

“We just happened to be talking about pie a lot, about people thinking rhubarb can be dangerous if you cook it wrong. You can poison people. So it’s a very controversial variety of pie—being able to sneak stuff like that in was really fun. It was really relaxing to write in that flat tone. ‘My helicopter goes up and down.'”

It’s those jokes that I, and many other players, remember best about The Milkman Conspiracy. But for Double Fine, it carries its own legacy: a reminder that “no one person makes a level”, Schafer says. “I didn’t think of the twisting roads, and I didn’t think of the way the G-Men functioned. But I still feel like the ideas that I cared about are in there, and each department got to contribute an essential part of the level. Any one piece of that, you took it away, and it’s not the same,” he says.

(Image credit: Double Fine)

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biofunmy · 5 years

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‘Miracle house’ in Ohio draws pilgrims amid sainthood push

Late in the summer of 1939, crowds of strangers started showing up at Rhoda Wise’s house next to a city dump in Ohio after she let it be known that miracles were occurring in her room.

Eight decades later, people still make pilgrimages to the wood frame bungalow at the edge of Canton, Ohio, seeking their own miracles. Wise died in 1948, but her legend as a Christian mystic has blossomed with time. And last fall, after years of discussions, the local Roman Catholic diocese petitioned the Vatican to make Wise a saint, renewing interest in her former home.

The story starts with the sickly Wise, who lived with her alcoholic husband and young daughter, claiming she was healed of a terminal illness and was visited by Jesus Christ as she suffered in her bed.

When word got out, people began arriving at all hours, seeking spiritual guidance and asking to see the wooden chair where Jesus sat. They stood in lines around the block to file past her bed when she appeared to suffer stigmata — bloody wounds on her head, hands and feet like those Jesus suffered on the cross — until she implored the church to take her off display.

Newspapers and national magazines sent reporters to write about Ohio’s “miracle house.”

The parade of pilgrims slowed down after Wise’s death but never stopped. Her house — now with beige vinyl siding and a good-sized parking lot — has remained an under-the-radar destination for the faithful and curious.

Her former home is one of dozens of Catholic shrines and pilgrimage sites in the United States, ranging from modest to grand.

Among them are one of the largest crucifixes in the world in the woods of Michigan, an altar inside a 50-foot-high cave carved into a cliff in Oregon, and a small chapel in Minnesota built as a tribute to the Virgin Mary, to whom the locals prayed when a plague of grasshoppers devastated crops in the 1870s.

In 1996, a popular shrine developed in the parking lot of an office building in Clearwater, Florida, where thousands believed a 60-foot image of Mary had appeared on the mirrored glass. That lasted until 2004, when a high school boy with a slingshot shattered some of the panes.

The Wise house stands out because it doesn’t stand out, blending in with a row of Habitat for Humanity homes, built across the street in recent years, and the rest of the frayed residential neighborhood. These days, there’s a golf course where the dump used to be.

Regardless of the validity of the Rhoda Wise narrative — scoffers note that she was known to have mental health problems — people still arrive by the busload. They come to view her 9-foot-square bedroom, pray and sit in the Jesus chair, which has been repaired numerous times through the years and now is painted gold. There is no admission fee. Donations pay the bills.

Canton native Karen Sigler, 66, visited with a group in the early 1980s and was recruited by Wise’s daughter Anna Mae to become the live-in caretaker, a position she has held now for 36 years.

“We live in a world that’s really hard to have faith in today. Really hard,” Sigler said, trying to explain the attraction. “A lot of people want to hold on to it. And Rhoda’s strength to endure everything she did with such a great love of God is inspiration for them.”

Precise numbers aren’t kept, but a guest book shows visitors from more than a dozen states and Canada since late spring. Most are already believers, like 49-year-old Denise Kleinhenz. She came with her family recently from their home on the other side of the state.

“She saw Jesus,” said Kleinhenz, wonder in her voice. “And he came more than just once. It just makes me think about, that he exists.”

The room where Wise was bedridden for years now is an altar room crowded with statues and relics. Bandages claimed to be those that absorbed Wise’s blood during stigmata are mounted in frames on the wall. Photos of Wise bleeding from the head and hands also are displayed.

The “Acts of the Case” advocating for her sainthood have been sent to Rome, but the next steps of the arduous process could take years.

Whether scientific explanations might exist for things that happened to Wise makes little difference by now, said Michele Dillon, a University of New Hampshire sociology professor who has written on Catholic beliefs.

Nobody can prove or disprove that miracles occurred at house or as a result of people visiting and praying there, Dillon said. And the continued involvement of the church has given the story a stamp of legitimacy.

“People do believe in prayer and miracles,” Dillon said. “And there’s also a social piece to that — if so many others are going, they must be on to something. If the story is compelling, it will attract a following.”

One of Wise’s granddaughters, 71-year-old Darlene Zastawny, was raised in the house and still stops around to talk to visitors. Her earliest memories, she said, involve strangers showing up at the door.

“I always wondered who all these people were that my mother would let in,” she said. “I’d be getting ready for school when I was little and there would be a stranger sitting with us because she wouldn’t tell them no. I knew it was special, but sometimes I wished it was more of a home. There was somebody coming all the time, but you get used to it.”

———

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pressreleaseping-blog · 5 years

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At age 78, Grandma of Brazil becomes an influencer of fashion and behavior on Instagram

Pictures in exuberant landscapes and laborious looks, in the style of bloggers. None of this is new when we are talking about an Instagram profile. But when these pictures are being taken and posted by a nice 78-year-old lady, it draws the attention on the social networks.

Santa Catarina, Brasil, May 15, 2019 /PressReleasePing/ - Izaura Demari draws so much attention wherever she goes that some have even asked: “from which fairy tale have you come out of?”

The digital influencer is Izaura Demari, who, with her extravagant combinations, has already more than 10 thousand followers on her social media. The Paraná-native profile aggregates pictures of her two passions: traveling and taking care of her looks. “I feel very happy [with the repercussion], very well. I like to take get dressed, going out to the mall, taking pictures with my friends,” says the influencer, who thanks to all this hubbub has already appeared in fashion magazines and TV shows.

The idea of posting the pictures came out after the reaction people had with her style. She says that she was often approached while walking through the mall or down the street. As well as asking to take pictures with her, people began to question how they could follow her on social media. It was then that her son, 50-year-old Márcio Aurélio Demari, decided to create a Facebook page and an Instagram profile. The answer was instantaneous, and grandma Izaura, as she calls herself in the networks, has obtained 5 thousand followers in a single week.

“Every day has a striking moment”

There were so many special moments and so much affection from the people that Izaura is not able to list the better ones. “Ladies would even stop looking at art works in museums to talk to me,” Izaura remembers from a trip she took to Gramado with her son.

“Once a woman saw her in the street and stopped the car just to hug her. She asked from which fairy tale she had come out of,” remembers the proud son.

The lifestyle of the near-octogenarian has a positive influence on several other women. Those who are in her age group feel inspired to become more daring in their outfits, and go out more. “This is a joy in my life, I feel very happy,” she says.

Izaura used to cultivate orchids at her home. But since her husband died, 16 years ago, and she moved to an apartment, she decided to rethink her routine. It was then that her passion for traveling came about. Four months ago she moved once again, this time to Florianópolis, the setting of many of her pictures.

Her three sons, five grandsons and three great-grandsons are taking advantage of the fame, along with Izaura. They buy newspapers to show their friends, and proudly show off their grandmother’s social networks. “My sister says: ‘mother, I can’t be like you!’”, says Márcio, laughingly.

Izaura’s trademark is her style, but the son points out that she focuses on different and cheap clothes – and not expensive or famous brands. Including hats, kerchiefs, and turbans, she has already over 400 pieces of clothing. And she is not interested in minimalism, on the contrary – the influencer likes color, high heels, necklaces and large sunglasses. The rule is to have fun.

Source of matter: Maria Miqueletto / Portal Gazeta do Povo / Brazil

Press Contact: Marcio Demari Assessor Escritório Digital Santa Catarina, Brasil 55-48-988348552 https://www.instagram.com/voizaurademari/

#fashionosta fashion blogger Fashion Editorial Influencer of Brazil Izaura Demari

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Controlling the Spice, Part 1: Dune on Page and Screen

Frank Herbert in 1982.

In 1965, two works changed the face of genre publishing forever. Ace Books that year came out with an unauthorized paperback edition of an obscure decade-old fantasy trilogy called The Lord of the Rings, written by a pipe-smoking old Oxford don named J.R.R. Tolkien, and promptly sold hundreds of thousands of copies of it. And the very same year, Chilton Books, a house better known for its line of auto-repair manuals than for its fiction, became the publisher of last resort for Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel Dune. While Dune‘s raw sales weren’t initially quite so impressive as those of The Lord of the Rings, it was recognized immediately by science-fiction connoisseurs as the major work it was, winning its year’s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel (the latter award alongside Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal).

It may be that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can to a large extent judge the importance of The Lord of the Rings and Dune by their thickness. Genre novels had traditionally been slim things, coming in at well under 300 pocket-sized mass-market-paperback pages. These two novels, by contrast, were big, sprawling works. The writing on their pages as well was heavier than the typical pulpy tale of adventure. Tolkien’s and Herbert’s novels felt utterly disconnected from trends or commercial considerations, redolent of myth and legend — sometimes, as plenty of critics haven’t hesitated to point out over the years, rather ponderously so. At a stroke, they changed readers’ and publishers’ perception of what a fantasy or science-fiction novel could be, and the world of genre publishing has never looked back.

In the years since 1965, almost as much has been written of Dune as The Lord of the Rings. Still, it’s new to us. And so, given that it suddenly became a very important name in computer games circa 1992, we should take the time now to look at what it is and where it came from.

At the time of Dune‘s publication, Frank Herbert was a 45-year-old newspaperman who had been dabbling in science fiction — his previous output had included one short novel and a couple of dozen short stories — since the early 1950s. He had first been inspired to write Dune by, appropriately enough, sand dunes. Eight years before the novel’s eventual publication, the San Francisco Examiner, the newspaper for which he wrote, sent him to Florence, Oregon, to write about government efforts to control the troublesomely shifting sand dunes just outside of town. It didn’t sound like the most exciting topic in the world, and, indeed, he never managed to turn it into an acceptable article. Yet he found the dunes themselves weirdly fascinating:

I had far too much for an article and far too much for a short story. So I didn’t know really what I had—but I had an enormous amount of data and avenues shooting off at all angles to get more… I finally saw that I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was, for a science-fiction writer anyway, an easy step from that to think: what if I had an entire planet that was desert?

The other great spark that led to Dune wasn’t a physical environment, nor for that matter a physical anything. It was a fascination with the messiah complex that has been with us through all of human history, even though it has seldom, Herbert believed, led us to much good. Somehow this theme just seemed to fit with a desert landscape; think of the Biblical Moses and the Exodus.

I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, society, or race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?

Herbert worked on the novel off and on for years. Much of his time was spent in pure world-building — or, perhaps better said in this case, galaxy-building — creating a whole far-future history of humanity among the stars that would inform and enrich any specific stories he chose to set there; in this sense once again, his work is comparable to that of J.R.R. Tolkien, that most legendary of all builders of fantastic worlds. But his actual story mostly took place on the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, the source of an invaluable “spice” known as melange, which confers upon humans improved health, longer life, and even paranormal prescience, while also allowing some of them to “fold space,” thus becoming the key to interstellar travel. As the novel’s most popular and apt marketing tagline would put it, “He who controls the spice controls the universe!” The spice has made this inhospitable world, where water is so scarce that people kill one another over the merest trickle of the stuff, whose deserts are roamed by gigantic carnivorous sandworms, the most valuable piece of real estate in the galaxy.

The novel centers on a war between two great trading houses, House Atreides and House Harkonnen, for control of the planet. The politics involved, not to mention the many military and espionage stratagems they employ against one another, are far too complex to describe here, but suffice to say that Herbert’s messiah figure emerges in the form of the young Paul Atreides, who wins over the nomadic Fremen who have long lived on Arrakis and leads them to victory against the ruthless Harkonnen.

Dune draws heavily from any number of terrestrial sources — from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, from the more mystical end of Zen Buddhism, from the history of the Ottoman Empire and the myths and cultures of the Arab world. Nevertheless, the whole novel has an almost aggressively off-putting otherness about it. Herbert writes like a native of his novel’s time and place would, throwing strange jargon around with abandon and doing little to clarify the big-picture politics of the galaxy. And he shows no interest whatsoever in explaining that foremost obsession of so many other science-fiction writers, the technology and hardware that underpin his story. Like helicopters and diving suits to a writer of novels set in our own time and place, “ornithopters” and “stillsuits,” not to mention interstellar space travel, simply are to Dune‘s narrator. Meanwhile some of the bedrock philosophical concepts that presumably — hopefully! — unite most of Dune‘s readership — such ideas as fundamental human rights and democracy — don’t seem to exist at all in Herbert’s universe.

This wind of Otherness blowing through its pages makes Dune a famously difficult book to get started with. Those first 50 or 60 pages seem determined to slough off as many readers as possible. Unless you’re much smarter than I am, you’ll need to read Dune at least twice to come to anything like a full understanding of it. All of this has made it an extremely polarizing novel. Some readers love it with a passion; some, like yours truly here, find it easier to admire than to love; some, probably the majority, wind up shrugging their shoulders and walking away.

In light of this, and in light of the way that it broke every contemporary convention of genre fiction, beginning but by no means ending with its length, it’s not surprising that Frank Herbert found Dune to be a hard sell to publishers. The tropes were familiar enough in the abstract — a galaxy-spanning empire, interstellar war, a plucky young hero — but the novel, what with its lofty, affectedly formal prose, just didn’t read like science fiction was supposed to. Whilst allowing what amounted to a rough draft of the novel to appear in the magazine Analog Science Fiction in intermittent installments between December 1963 and May 1965, Herbert struggled to find an outlet for it in book form. The manuscript was finally accepted by Chilton only after being rejected by over twenty other publishers.

Dune in the first Chilton edition.

Those other publishers would all come to regret their decision. Dune took some time to gain traction with readers outside science fiction’s intelligentsia; Herbert didn’t make enough money from his fiction to quit his day job until 1969. But the oil embargoes of the 1970s gave this novel that was marked by such Otherness an odd sort of social immediacy, winning it many readers outside the still fairly insular community of written science fiction, making it a trendy book to have read or at least to say you had read. For many, it now read almost like a parable; it wasn’t hard to draw parallels between Arrakis’s spice and our own planet’s oil, nor between the Fremen of Arrakis and the cultures native to our own planet’s great oil-rich deserts. As critic Gwyneth Jones puts it, Dune is, among other things, a depiction of “scarcity, and the kind of human culture that scarcity produces.” It was embraced by many in the environmentalist movement, who read it it as a cautionary tale perfect for an era in which we earthbound humans were being forced to confront the reality that our planet’s resources are not infinite.

So, Dune eventually sold a staggering 12 million copies, becoming by most accounts the best-selling work of genre science fiction in history. And so we arrive at one final parallel to The Lord of the Rings: that of a book that was anything but an easy read in the conventional sense nevertheless selling in quantities to rival any beach-and-airport time-waster ever written. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was famously described at the height of its 1980s popularity as a book that everyone owned and almost no one had ever managed to get all the way through. Dune may very well be the closest equivalent in genre fiction.

Herbert wrote five sequels to Dune, none of which are as commonly read or as highly regarded among critics as the first novel.1 One might say, however, that the second and third novels at least — Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976) — are actually necessary to appreciate Herbert’s original conception of the work in its entirety. He had always conceived of Dune as an epic tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, but reading the first book alone can obscure this fact. That book is, as the science-fiction scholar Damien Broderick puts it, typical pulp science fiction in at least one sense: it satisfies “an adolescent craving for an imaginary world in which heroes triumph by a preternatural blend of bravery, genius, and sci.” It’s only in the second and third books that Paul Atreides, the messiah figure, begins to fail, thus illustrating how a messiah can, as Herbert says, “destroy a civilization, society, or race.” That said, it would be the first novel alone with which almost all media adaptations would concern themselves, so it will also monopolize our attention in these articles.

Dune‘s success was such that it inevitably attracted the interest of the film industry. In 1972, the British producer Arthur P. Jacobs, the man behind the hugely successful Planet of the Apes films, acquired the rights to the series, but he had the misfortune to die the following year, before his plans had gotten beyond the storyboarding phase.

Yet Dune‘s trendiness only continued to grow, and interest in turning it into a film remained high among people who wouldn’t have been caught dead with any other science-fiction novel. In 1974, the rights passed from Jacob’s estate to Alejandro Jodorowsky, a transgressive Chilean director who claimed to once have raped one of his actresses in the name his Art. Manifesting an alarming obsession with the act, he now planned to do the same to Frank Herbert:

It was my Dune. When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It’s like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white. You take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to… to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, raping, like this! But with love, with love.

The would-be rape victim could only look on in disbelief: “He had so many personal, emotional axes to grind. I used to kid him, ‘Well, I know what your problem is, Alejandro. There is no way to horsewhip the pope in this story.’”

Jodorowsky planned to fill the cast and crew of the film, which would bear an estimated price tag of no less than $15 million, with flotsam washed up from the more dissipated end of the celebrity pool: Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Charlotte Rampling, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Alain Delon. But, even in this heyday of Porno Chic, no one was willing to entrust such an erratic personality with such a budget, and the project fizzled out after Jodorwsky had blown through $2 million on scripts, concept art, and the drugs that were needed to fuel it all.

In the meantime, the possibilities for cinematic science fiction were being remade by a little film called Star Wars. Indeed, said film bears the clear stamp of Dune, especially in its first act, which takes place on a desert planet where water is the most precious commodity of all. And certainly the general dirty, lived-in look of Star Wars, so distinct from the antiseptic futures of most science fiction, owes much to Dune.

In the wake of Star Wars, Dino De Laurentiis, one of the great impresarios of post-war Italian cinema, acquired the rights to Dune from Jodorowsky’s would-be backers. He secured a tentative agreement with Ridley Scott, who was just finishing his breakthrough film Alien, to direct the picture. Rudy Wurlitzer, screenwriter of the classic western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, wrote three drafts of a script, but the financing necessary to begin production proved hard to secure. Thus in 1981 the cinematic rights to Dune, which Herbert had sold away for a span of nine years to Arthur P. Jacobs back in 1972, finally reverted to the author after their extended but fruitless world tour.

Yet De Laurentiis remained passionate about his Dune film — so much so that he immediately entered into negotiation with Herbert to reacquire the rights. Having watched various filmmakers come close to doing unspeakable things to his creation over the previous decade — even Wurlitzer’s recent script reportedly added an incest plot line involving Paul Atreides and his mother — Herbert insisted that he must at least be given the role of “advisor” to any future film. De Laurentiis agreed to this.

He was so eager to make a deal because Dune had suddenly looked to be back on, for real this time, just as the rights were expiring. His daughter, Raffealla De Laurentiis, had taken on the Dune film as something of a passion project of her own. She was riding high with a brand of blockbuster-oriented, action-heavy fare that was quite different from the films of her father’s generation. She was already in the midst of producing Conan the Barbarian, starring a buff if nearly inarticulate former bodybuilding champion named Arnold Schwarzenegger; it would become a major hit, launching Schwarzenegger’s career as Hollywood’s go-to action hero over the next couple of decades. But the Dune project would be a different sort of beast, a sort of synthesis of father and daughter’s priorities: a big-budget film with an art-film sensibility. For Ridley Scott had by this time moved on to other projects, and Dino and Raffealla De Laurentiis had a surprising new candidate in mind to direct their Dune.

David Lynch and Frank Herbert. Interviewers were constantly surprised at how normal Lynch looked and acted in person, in contrast to his bizarre films. Starlog magazine, for example, wrote of his “sculptured hair [and] jutting boyish features,” saying he was “extremely polite and well-mannered, the antithesis of enigma. Not a hint of phobic neurosis or deep-seated sexual maladjustment.”

David Lynch was already a beloved director of the art-film circuit, although his output to date had consisted of just two low-budget black-and-white movies: Eraserhead (1977), a surrealistic riot of a horror film, and The Elephant Man (1980), a mournful tragedy of prejudice and isolation. He would seem to stand about as far removed from the family-friendly fare of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s new Hollywood as it was possible to get. And yet that mainstream of filmmakers saw something — something having to do with his talent for striking, kinetic visuals — in the 36-year-old director. In fact, Lucas actually asked him whether he would be interested in directing the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, whereupon Lynch rather peremptorily turned the offer down, saying he wasn’t interested in making sequels to other people’s films. But when Dino De Laurentiis approached him about Dune he was more receptive. Lynch:

Dino’s office called me and asked if I had ever read Dune. I thought they said “June.” I never read either one of ’em! But once I got the book, it’s like when you hear a new word. And I started hearing it more often. Then, I began finding out that friends of mine had already read it and freaked out over it. It took me a long time to read. Actually, my wife forced me to read it. I wasn’t that keen on it at first, especially the first 60 pages. But the more I read, the more I liked. Because Dune has so many things that I like, I said, “This is a book that can be made into a film.”

Lynch joined screenwriters Eric Bergen and Christopher De Vore for a week at Frank Herbert’s country farmhouse, where they hammered out a script which ran to a hopelessly overlong 200 pages. As the locale would indicate, Herbert was involved in the creative process, but kept a certain distance from the details: “This is a translation job. I wouldn’t presume to be the person who should translate Dune from English to French; my French is execrable. It’s the same with a movie; you go to the person who speaks ‘movie.’”

The script was rewritten again and again in the months that followed, the later drafts by Lynch alone. (He would be given sole credit as the screenwriter of the finished film.) In the process, it slimmed down to a still-ambitious 135 pages. And with that, and with the De Laurentiis father and daughter having lined up a positively astronomical amount of financing from Universal Pictures, who were desperate for a big science-fiction franchise of their own to rival 20th Century Fox’s Star Wars and Paramount’s Star Trek, a real Dune film finally got well and truly underway.

Raffealla De Laurentiis and Frank Herbert with the actors Kyle MacLachlan and Francesca Annis on the set of Dune, 1983.

Rehearsals and pre-production began in the Sonora Desert outside of Mexico City in October of 1982; actual shooting started the following March, and dragged on over many more months. In the lead role of Paul Atreides, Lynch had cast a 25-year-old Shakespearean-trained stage actor named Kyle MacLachlan, who had never acted before a camera in his life. Nor, at six feet tall and 155 pounds, was he built much like an action hero. But he was trained in martial arts, and he gave it his all over a long and difficult shoot.

Joining him were a number of recognizable character actors, such as the intimidating Swede Max von Sydow, cast in the role of the Fremen leader Kynes, and the villain specialist Kenneth McMillan, all but buried under 200 pounds of fake silicon flesh as the disgustingly evil — or evilly disgusting — Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Patrick Stewart, later to become famous in the role of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played Paul’s martial mentor Gurney Halleck. In a bit of stunt casting, Sting of the rock band the Police, deemed “biggest band in the world” by any number of contemporary critics, took the role of one of the supporting cast of villains — a role which would, naturally, be blown out of all proportion by the movie’s promoters. To a person, everyone involved with the shoot remembers it as being uncomfortable at best. “I was taxed on almost every level as a human being,” says MacLachlan. “Mexico City is not one of the most pleasant spots in the world to be.” The one thing they all mention is the food poisoning; almost everyone among cast and crew got it at one time or another, and some lived with it for the entirety of the months on end they spent in Mexico.

Universal Pictures had given David Lynch, this young director who was used to shooting on a shoestring budget, an effective blank check in the hope that it would yield the next George Lucas and/or the next Star Wars. Lynch didn’t hesitate to spend their money, building some eighty separate sets and shooting hundreds of hours of footage. Even in Mexico, where the peso was cheap, it added up. Universal would later claim an official budget of $40 million, but rumblings inside Hollywood had it that the real total was more like $50 million. Either figure was more than immense enough to secure Dune the title of most expensive Universal film ever. (For comparison’s sake, consider that the contemporary big-budget blockbusters Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom cost approximately $40 million and $30 million respectively.)

The shoot had been difficult enough in itself, but the film first began to show the telltale signs of a doomed production only in the editing phase, as Lynch tried to corral his reams of footage into a finished product. He clashed repeatedly with Raffealla De Laurentiis and Universal, both of whom made it clear that they expected a relatively “clean,” PG-rated film with a coherent narrative through line for their money. Such qualities weren’t, of course, what David Lynch was known for. But the director had failed to secure final-cut rights to the film, and he was repeatedly overridden. Finally, he all but removed himself from the process altogether, and Raffealla De Laurentiis herself cobbled together much of the finished film, going so far as to shoot her own last-minute bridging scenes whilst layering clumsy voice-overs and internal monologues over the top, all in a (failed) effort to make the labyrinthine plot comprehensible to a casual audience. Meanwhile Universal continued to spew forth a fountain of hype about “Star Wars for adults” and “the end of the pulp era of science-fiction movies,” whilst continuing to plaster Sting, looking fetching in his black leather, across their “Coming Attractions” posters and trailers as if he was the star. Dune was set for a fall.

And, indeed, the finished product, which arrived in theaters in December of 1984, provided a rare opportunity for every corner of movie fandom and criticism to unite in hatred. The professional critics, most of whom had never read the book, found the film, even with all the additional expository voice-overs, as incomprehensible as Raffealla De Laurentiis had always feared they would. Fans of the novel had the opposite problem, bemoaning the plot simplification and the liberties taken with the story, complaining about the way that all of the thematic texture had been lost in favor of Lynchian weirdness for weirdness’s sake. And the all-important general audience, for their part, stayed away in droves, making Dune one of the more notorious flops in cinematic history. Just like that, Universal Pictures’s dream of a Star Wars franchise of their own went up in smoke.

Whatever else you can say about it, David Lynch’s Dune is often visually striking.

Seen today, free of the hype and the resultant backlash, the film isn’t as bad as many remember it; many of its scenes are striking in that inimitable Lynchian way. But it doesn’t hang together at all as a holistic experience, and its best parts are often those that have the least to do with its source material. Many over the years have suspected that there’s a good film hidden somewhere in all that footage Lynch shot, if it could only be freed from the strictures of the two-hour running time demanded by Universal; Lynch’s own first rough cut, they point out, was reportedly at least twice that long. Yet various attempts to rejigger the material — including a 1988 version for television that ballooned the running time to more than three hours — haven’t yielded results that feel all that much more holistically satisfying than the original theatrical cut. The film remains what it was from the first, a strange hybrid stranded in a no-man’s land between an art film and a conventional blockbuster, not really working as either. At bottom, the film reflects a hopeless mismatch between its director and its source material. What happens when you ask a brilliant director with very little interest in plot to film a novel famous for its intricate plot? You get a movie like David Lynch’s Dune. Perhaps the kindest thing one can say about it is that it is, unlike so many of Hollywood’s other more misbegotten projects, an interesting failure.

Lynch disowned the film almost immediately. He’s generally refused to talk about it at all in interviews since 1984, beyond dismissing it as a “sell-out” on his part. The one positive aspect of the film which even he will admit to is that it brought Kyle MacLachlan to his attention. The latter starred in Lynch’s next film as well, the low-budget psychological-horror picture Blue Velvet (1986), which rehabilitated its director’s critical reputation at a stroke at the same time that it marked the definitive end of his brief flirtation with mainstream sensibilities. MacLachlan would go on to find his most iconic role as the weirdly impassive FBI agent Dale Cooper in Lynch’s supremely weird television series Twin Peaks.

The Dino de Laurentiis Corporation had invested everything they had and then some in their Dune film. They went bankrupt in the aftermath of its failure — but, in typical corporate fashion, a phoenix known as the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group soon emerged from the ashes. Just to show there were no hard feelings, one of the reincarnated production company’s first films was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Surprisingly in light of the many readers who complained so vociferously about the liberties the Dune film took with his novel, Frank Herbert himself never disowned it, speaking of it quite warmly right up until his death. But sadly, that event came much earlier than anyone had reckoned it would: he died in 1986 at age 65, the victim of a sudden blood clot in his lung that struck just after he had undergone surgery for prostrate cancer.

Dune did come to television screens in 2000, in a rather workmanlike miniseries adaptation that was more comprehensible and far more faithful to the novel than Lynch’s film, but which lacked the budget, the acting talent, or the directorial flare to rival its predecessor as an artistic statement. Today, almost half a century after Arthur P. Jacobs first began to inquire about the film rights, the definitive cinematic Dune has yet to be made.

There is, however, one other sort of screen on which Dune has undeniably left a profound mark: not the movie or even the television screen, but the monitor screen. It’s in that direction that we’ll turn our attention next time.

(Sources: the books The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn and Frank Herbert by Timothy O’Reilly; Starlog of January 1983, May 1984, October 1984, November 1984, December 1984, February 1985, and June 1986; Enter of December 1984; the online articles “Jodorowsky’s Dune Didn’t Get Made for a Reason… and We Should All Be Grateful For That” and “David Lynch’s Dune is What You Get When You Build a Science Fictional World With No Interest in Science Fiction” by Emily Asher-Perrin.)

As for the flood of more recent Dune novels, written by Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, previously a prolific author of X-Files and Star Wars novels and other low-hanging fruit of the literary landscape: stay far, far away. ↩

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/controlling-the-spice-part-1-dune-on-page-and-screen/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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evolvelocks-blog · 5 years

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The Kitchen Renovation Doesn't Have to Be As Painful As You Might Think

You're not alone. Usually everyone has a particular tipping point; that one last thing that sends them into the renovation pool. You try to hold on for as long as you can because you're dreading the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the disruption to your daily life. When your space becomes unusable, it's time to do something. But you can't just jump into a renovation, particularly one as costly, time consuming and inconvenient as a click here , you need a well thought out plan of attack if you're going to pull it off in the quickest amount of time with the least amount of inconvenience and expense.

If you have a friend who's recently renovated her kitchen, take pictures and identify what you like about it as well and stick it in the folder with your other pictures.

On-line Resources: This Old House: This website is a DIYer's dream. There are videos and tips on probably every aspect of renovating a kitchen. Kitchens.com: A wealth of information on everything you ever wanted to know about kitchens, including information on "greening your kitchen." Better Homes and Gardens has an extensive section on renovating your kitchen including an "inspiration gallery" to give you some ideas. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation: CMHC has an excellent website for any renovation or home purchase. The kitchen renovation area has downloadable charts you can use for reference guides as you go about your renovation planning. Appraisal Institute of Canada: The Renova section of this website allows you to input the cost of your renovation and it will calculate how much of a return you would receive if you sold your home.

On-line Forums: Forums are a great place to ask questions about all kinds of different topics. Search forums first to see if a thread already exists on the topic you're interested in.

HomeStars Forum.

This Old House Forum.

Bob Vila's Forum.

Style at Home Forum.

Canadian House and Home Forum.

Holmes on Homes Forum.

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joel-furniss-blog · 6 years

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Contemporary Art and it’s Histories: Complete Essay

The following text will discuss the relationship between the current contemporary art sphere and its predecessor in the form of the modernist era. Chapter one will introduce the contemporary work of artist Damien Hirst, specifically his sculpture For the Love of God. The second chapter will identify the modernist examples of memento mori and still life that Hirst took influence from. The final chapter will understand the visual and thematic relationship between Hirst’s works, and the modernist influences that inspired them.

Chapter One.

The sphere of contemporary art suffers from a problem. As a whole it is ultimately limited by its own nature, the same problem that many media of the current age face, it is almost impossible to define the monument pieces, those which lead a lasting impression not just within the art world but on the wider mainstream audience as well. In other words the ‘Old Masters’, the revered ‘Great Artists’ of our time, spanning from the initial measured beauty of the classical Renaissance artisans into the self-reflective and contextually radical free-thinkers of the Modern Art period, whose work is seen multiple times as staples of the present history and culture. The examples are numerous, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, the list is near endless in its examples of the classics, the revered pieces that become landmarks in time.

Time is the most important factor in creating the classics, it allows for introspection, where the critics, artists, patrons, and the public herald it and build it as benchmark for the period and accept it into the art canon, the conventional timeline of fundamental examples. For this reason, defining ‘classic’ works in the contemporary age is difficult, as ‘classics’ are born through age and scrutiny by the people. However, sometimes there are modern classics, or those artist that create and push in such bold directions, who stir the artworld in such ways that they cannot be ignored.

One of the most famous (and sometimes infamous) contemporary artists to be considered for this league is Damien Hirst, a British artist and entrepreneur famous for his involvement with the Young British Artist (YBA) generation and creating grand statement and spectacle pieces. His catalogue is considered to be incredibly influential to the contemporary canon, with works such as A Thousand Years and The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living becoming infamous in the present-day artistic sphere, hotly debated pieces blown into monumental proportions by both the patrician and the public. However there is a relatively newer and equally controversial work by Hirst that is deserving of as much deliberation and consideration.

For the Love of God [fig. 1] is a 2007 sculpture by Hirst. Much like the previously mentioned The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the piece caused much contention when first announced to the public, instantly inspiring news articles and bold, emblazoned headlines pondering ‘Is this art?’ The media stir around the piece was born from the same stir that caused Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living to be commented on in the media, the spectacle. The spectacle of Hirst’s previously mentioned work was the use of a 14-foot tiger shark, but while For the Love of God is comparatively much smaller, its physical construction demands even more hysteria.

The piece’s foundation come in the form of a human skull measuring 171 x 127 x 190 mm (6.7 x 5 x 7.5 in). The skull was purchased from a taxidermist shop Get Stuffed in Islington, London and with bioarchaeological analysis and radiocarbon dating was found to have previously belonged to a 35-year-old man of European/Mediterranean ancestry living between the years 1720 – 1810. Although the skull itself is not the most interesting feature of the work, as it simply acts as a cast for the 32 individual platinum plates which have been moulded around it, forming a metallic cast of the shape. Attached over the entire expanse of the platinum cast are 8,601 small diamonds ranging from VVS (meaning ‘very very slightly’ imperfect) to flawless in quality, pavé-laid (set into the surface of the metal) over the entire surface of the skull. The piece is completed by a collection of pear-shaped pink diamonds arranged ornately in the centre of the skull’s forehead as well as the inclusion of the skull’s original teeth being placed back into their platinum-cast sockets. The production of the skull was handled by sculptor and jeweller Jack du Rose working with Piccadilly based jewellers Bentley & Skinner Ltd. who ethically sourced all the gemstones used during the manufacturing. When completed the piece weighed 1,106.18 carats (221.236 grams) and was budgeted at approximately fourteen million pounds total. When first announced, Hirst set the work with an asking price of £50 million.

For the Love of God was first displayed for private viewing on 1st June 2007, housed in an illuminated glass casing on the top floor of art dealer Jay Jopling’s White Cube gallery, London. The skull was part of an exhibition entitled Beyond Belief which displayed other works by Hirst, but For the Love of God remained the standout piece in the exhibition for the one year it was housed there, eventually gaining enough traction to become a solo installation abroad at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio in 2008 and 2010 respectively. The piece was later moved back to London’s Tate Modern as part of a Damien Hirst solo exhibit between 4th April – 25th June 2015, and in 2013 it accompanied Hirst in his first solo exhibit to the Middle East, being housed at Al Riwaq Exhibition Center in Doha, Qatar between 10th October – 22nd June 2014. The piece’s most recent exhibition was between 16th September – 15th November 2015 as part of another Hirst solo exhibit in Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, Norway. The piece was rumoured to be sold on 30th August 2007 for its £50 million asking price to an anonymous consortium, the deal was reportedly made in cash, leaving no paper trail. Due to the anonymous nature of the purchase and lack of purchase records due to its cash transaction, claims that Hirst never actually sold the piece were made, with Christina Ruiz, editor of The Art Newspaper stating that Hirst had failed to find a purchaser and had lowered the price to £38 million. Also due to the work’s lapidary relevance, Harry Levy, the vice chairman of the London Diamond Bourse and Club estimated the piece’s pure carat value to be “… between £7 million and £10 million.” (Owen and Dunbar, 2007) Finally, David Lee, editor of visual arts magazine The Jackdaw claimed that: “… Hirst hasn't sold the skull. It's clearly just an elaborate ruse to drum up publicity and rewrite the book value of all his other work.” (Owen and Dunbar, 2007) It was later revealed that the consortium that purchased the work included Hirst himself, and in a 2012 interview with Time Magazine Hirst is quoted saying "In the end I covered my fabrication and a few other costs by selling a third of it to an investment group, who are anonymous." (Hirst, 2012)

Elaborating on the inspiration of the work, Hirst drew from multiple classical, modern, and contemporary ideas and sources as an amalgamation into one piece, but the work holds a theme that Hirst has almost adopted as his signature, the motif of death. Hirst’s ideas of death provide a near prefect sum of the piece, with him saying: “You don’t like it, so you disguise it or you decorate it to make it look like something bearable – to such an extent that it becomes something else.” (Hirst and Burn, 2001) Hirst set to describe the human relationship with the concept of death, something he had explored before in works such as the previously mentioned A Thousand Years and The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Where For the Love of God differs from the latter works is its cultural relevance, signified by his use of rare and precious gemstones as a method to draw publicity. A normal skull would have gone unnoticed by the public and the art world, but encrust it with stones costing millions of pounds and there becomes a draw where people are suddenly intrigued and stunned by its dazzling beauty or gaudy exaggeration. In that they discover the theme that Hirst supposedly placed there. Hirst also had held a relationship with precious stones before For the Love of God, often collecting jewellery and musing its inherent worth or whether it was: “just a bit of glass, with accumulated metaphorical significance? Or [whether they] are genuine objects of supreme beauty connected with life.” (Hirst and Burn, 2001) Hirst also relates the ruthless and often fatal nature of the diamond industry in third-world countries they originate from and the capitalist first-world countries that continuously ignore and support it as central to the work’s concept, specifically a comment on the bawdy decoration and the grim demise that are present in the lifespan of a diamond. However, there might be another explanation and idea behind the works creation. In the art world it is almost a running gag that Damien Hirst is businessman first, artist second, meaning he holds the money and the trade of art over the work and the creation. As of 2010, Hirst is valued as the richest living artist ever with a total net worth estimated at around £215 – £235 million and as a result, has often come under fire from the art community at large for his inflated independent economic ventures as well as detached work method, mainly using assistants and workers in a production line setting rather than himself actually producing the work. Art critic Robert Hughes labelled the artist as "functioning like a commercial brand" (Thorpe, 2008). For the Love of God may have been a self-referential comment on Hirst’s own reputation within the art community, a collection of the first two things that come to mind when Hirst is mentioned, his relationship with money, and his emphasis on death.

Hirst’s public figure is a complicated one, possibly being one of the most controversial artists of the contemporary age, he is a man that everyone in the art sphere has an opinion on, some more vehement than others. But despite his poor artworks, questionable production methods, and overall handling of his disputed ‘legendary status’, there is no debate to say he and his works are not influential to the canon of contemporary art, and as a result, art history as a whole. For the Love of God represents Hirst’s artistic summation, loading up possibly as controversial a piece as he could, a head-turning article that follows his methods and themes to a monetary and artistic conclusion.

Chapter Two

Despite Hirst’s impassive and disinvolved artistic demeanour and public image, he has a habit of wearing his influences on his sleeve quite boldly, even to a point of possible plagiarism. The same wholly goes for his thematic motifs, a limited range of concepts that almost exclusively involve elements of faith, science, value, and most famously, mortality. His conceptual scope is best described by art critic Sarah Kent who said: “Hirst alludes to heavy topics – health, meaningful living/living death, art as a live entity, the extinction of the individual and the species – with a brilliant, angst-free clarity.” (Kent, 2012).

With the previously discussed For the Love of God, the thematic inspiration is apparent, the enigma of death (in the form of the skull) juxtaposed with the concept of value and preciosity in our society (represented by the diamonds). This quite plainly stated juxtaposition of themes is not an invention of Hirst’s, but is him using a well know theory and practice in the art canon, memento mori. Memento mori (meaning “remember that you have to die” or simply “remember death”) is a Latin Christian theory which revolves around reflecting and being aware of one’s own mortality and, as a result, the transient nature of all physical goods and earthly life which. As an idea it can be traced to the Plato’s dialogue Phædo which recounted the trial and execution of Socrates during his last days, specifically his philosophical lamentations on death and the afterlife. He culminated his thoughts in his discussion on philosophical practice as a whole and described it as: “about nothing else but dying and being dead” (Plato, 360 B.C.E).This philosophical approach to understanding one’s own transient life was manifested in a number of artworks from the classical and early Christian eras all the way up to the modern period, in which the reoccurring objects associated with the still life based theme are adapted to burgeoning and well-established modern methods of artistic representation and style. Now wilting flowers, rotting fruit, near-finished hourglasses, and almost always a signature inclusion of a skull were updated by the new masters and given (ironically) a new sense of life.

Famous modernist works that utilize the thematic imagery of memento mori include Francis Picabia’s oil-on canvas Dada work Portrait of a Doctor and Pablo Picasso’s proto-cubist lithograph Black Jug and Skull (1946) which follow the more traditional artistic sensibilities of previous vanitas works, to much more avant-garde and disconnected works that still hold a common thematic resonance such as Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987) and Robert Rauschenberg’s Animal Magic (1955-59), all of which involve some element of death juxtaposed with the fleeting physical frivolousness of earthly possessions and the dissonance between them.

An artist whose work captures the element of still life and memento mori well is post-impressionist Paul Cézanne, whose oil paintings during his final period and up to his death in 1906 encapsulated the sense of reflection on his ephemerality and inevitable demise that was seen in Plato’s account with Socrates, but where Socrates created dialogue, Cézanne painted. Between the years 1890-1906, Cézanne became withdrawn from portraiture as a result from multiple afflicting events that briefly caused him to leave his usual dwelling of Paris for his hometown, Aix-en-Provenance. Described by Nathanial Harris, his life was “…outwardly uneventful. He seemed to have been forgotten by the art world, and ceased even to submit his works to the Salon [Salon des Refusés]” (Harris, 1983). During the final years of his life Cézanne’s isolation was only interrupted by various letters he would send to multiple of his subjects, reading these letters reveals an increased consideration to the artist’s own mortality: "For me, life has begun to be deathly monotonous"; "As for me, I'm old. I won't have time to express myself"; "I might as well be dead." (Cézanne, 1897, 1900, 1905) During the same timeframe his mother passed away and his own heath began deteriorating, both factors being thought as to accelerate his lamentations on death. His climatic resignation of his own life inspired a number of still life watercolours and oils which visually approach the theology and imagery of memento mori. This small series of skull paintings have become some of Cézanne’s best known works, not only for their assaulting yet near-domestic arrangement and deeply personal visuals that almost seem like the skulls were painted as portraits rather than still lifes, but the intriguing and tragic context behind the paintings enhances their visual aspects thoroughly.

On the aspects of still life, it remains another example of an inspiration towards the previously mentioned contemporary artwork that deserves its own discussion. The quite visually sparse and ultimately singular For the Love of God isn’t comparable to the impressionist work of the latter discussed Cézanne, nor the later cubist arrangements of Picasso, both of which are visibly loud and dramatic. Hirst’s work, despite the inclusion of radiant collection of diamonds, is quite tonally subdued and constructed of only a few colours on the brighter side of the monochromatic scale, paired with the sparse use of space, a tightly bunched visual point presented with a lot of surrounding area that creates a certain inflated level of draw towards the main appeal of the piece. This class of visually thinly populated still life became a visible trend in the modernist period, particularly by one artist: Giorgio Morandi. Painter and printmaker Morandi specialized near exclusively in painting still lifes of mundane, decorative objects such as jugs, bottles, vases, bowls, cans, and boxes, all of which were distinguished for their tonal subtlety as well as their unusual, bunched composition of objects tightly gravitated to the direct centre of the painting. Morandi’s mid-1900’s still life works straddle a border between the relatable imagery of modern realism, and the unrecognizable surrealism of the Metaphysical art style, in essence the painting resonate with the viewer due to their understanding of how such objects can exist and be juxtaposed together, but the visual elements of Morandi’s rough near-impressionist style brushwork paired with the filtered and dulled pigments he used to construct the painting adds a certain level of disconnect within the observer. His particular technique and composition is described well by sculptor and contemporary follower of Morandi Tony Cragg (2006): “Artists’ show through their strange ways of life, their physiologies, the processes they go through, they show us something about our rough generalised pictures of realities, they show us something specific, and a new way of seeing. And one can imagine that the world would be a much poorer place without his [Morandi’s] work…” (Cragg, 2006)

When creating art a singular inspiration is difficult to pin, and with For the Love of God, there is ultimately too much both visually and thematically to associate with one singular artist or work, but there is undoubtedly a connection with the famous instances of still life artwork in the modern period, both in the thematic standing of Hirst’s works as well as the visual elements he used.

Chapter Three

Hirst’s relationship with the modernist employment of the memento mori theme as well as the visually transgressive still life artworks of the mid-20th-century are, as previously mentioned, apparent. This is especially seen in his discussed work, For the Love of God, in which Hirst bypasses his usual work-arounds in dealing with the themes directly, meaning his methods of alluding people away from his inspirations are stripped away for a less subtle work.

This method of dressing his works as thematically and visually fresh is best seen with his most infamous ‘preserved animal’ works. When taken to its most basic concepts and compositions For the Love of God is, in essence, a wholly exposed version of these collections, a simplified redux of past works with added flair. Hirst’s works, including For the Love of God, typically include the main focal point as an embodiment of death, that of a preserved carcass, or a skull in the current case. The skull is small and relatively discernible to the viewer, on the other hand, the animals are colossal and shocking but both ultimately represent the same thematic objective. This physical representation of death is taken from the vanitas art of fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, a subgenre of the popular still life composition that employed elements of memento mori to highlight the futility of earthly pursuits. The oft-Netherlandish artists had a myriad of resort objects that they used as physical representations of mortality, these included fruits, flowers, timepieces, candles, lanterns, weapons, smoking pipes, bubbles, etc, but the main symbol of any vanitas composition, regarded as the crown of sorts, is an inclusion of a skull. This is even discussed in relation to For the Love of God by Richard Fuchs in the Beyond Belief exhibition catalogue: “As the single most important object in a vanitas still life, the skull has to dominate the scene like a mountain looms over a landscape.” (Fuchs, 2007). Famous vanitas works that capitalize on this motif are Edward Collier’s Still Life with a Volume of Wither’s ‘Emblemes’ (1696) which is subtle with its imagery, especially the signature skull which sits against the border of the top left corner, relatively subdued in contrast to the shinning trinkets dressed in bold silver and lacquered wood. On the other hands there are works such as Philippe de Champaigne’s Vanité (1671) which present their symbolism head on, making the skull the entire middle section of a composition, and therefore unavoidable. On to the modern sphere, Cézanne practically loads the entire canvas with the symbolic entities in Pyramid of Skulls (1901), taking de Champaigne’s structured set composition to its logical conclusion, or the earlier mentioned work Portrait of a Doctor by Francis Picabia, who’s visually bizarre Dada portrait is injected with a skull in the bottom right corner, taking the more subtle approach of Collier. Hirst’s For the Love of God takes the visually audacious approach, but it also plucks another symbolic resonance from the vanitas artworks of the 16th century, one that his other death-focused works sorely lacks.

The entire symbolic concepts of vanitas all fall back to mortality, but they also explore the concept of futility, specifically the futility of earthly goods and pursuits in the face of an all-encompassing death, described by art historian Sybille Ebert-Schifferer it is: “despite the Bible, which is opened to the beginning of Ecclesiastes and the familiar phrase ‘vanity of vanities’, it's chief interest is the creation of an ideal collection of rarities”. (Ebert-Schifferer, 1998) These are seen through the symbols of wealth or knowledge, jewellery, currency, globes, portraits, fine fabrics, books, instruments, compasses, quills, and other such decorative goods only seen by the wealthy and elite. The way Hirst portrays this is through the platinum cast of the skull’s visage, relating the piece to the looming fear of mortality, as well as the 8,601 diamonds set into the cast which represent the disregard for fiscal excess that vanitas works hold as a theme, although Hirst utilizes a sense of admitted irony in his use of actually diamonds, whose perceived value is much more literal than the painted examples seen previously.

Hirst’s take on the visual composition of For the Love of God also suffers slightly from a uniform standard he has created. This can be seen too with his ‘preserved animals’, where a larger than life object is posted minimally in the gallery and presented with a certain muted tone, usually a cool blue colour palette as a result of the formaldehyde bath. As a result, the piece is supplied with an inherent contrast and juxtaposition between the subject and its presentation, but with For the Love of God, because it is on such a relatively small scale compared to previous works, is left a little more bare compositionally, much like the bone it shows. This harkens back to the more avant-garde understanding of the still life format that was birthed in the modernist period, particularly the work of the previously discussed Giorgio Morandi, whose blend of realist and metaphysical art produced some of the most visually simplistic yet compositionally strong still lifes of the modernist period. Morandi’s command of shape and structure in a painting, utilizing familiar forms, a strong control over colour, and quality of light all helped set him as a significant member of abstract painters. His pictorial signature is his tightly organized arrangement of objects, with many of his still life studies showing multiple objects all tightly bunched toward the centre of the canvas, often lined-up, stacked, or otherwise organised in groups with little to no space between objects in a visually pacified arrangement. Compare this to the classical still life, or even the modernist still lifes such as Leslie Hunter’s Post-Impressionist A Still Life of Fruit and Flowers with Persian Curtain (date unknown) or Moradi’s contemporary Henri Matisse, whose works such as Still Life with Pineapples and Lemons (1925) and Still Life with Sleeper (1940) are visually bombastic in their naturalistic arrangement and structure. This makes Morandi’s work all the more powerful, its construction is expertly controlled and planned, a trait that makes it impossible to ignore amongst its contemporaries. It’s as much a study of the metaphysical construction of an artwork itself as it is paintings of jugs and bowls.

It is also impossible to ignore Morandi’s peculiar use of colour, an aspect of his artwork that works hand-in-hand with his irregular composition. Morandi’s colour palette is limited to the very basic lighter end of the monochromatic scale, his paintings built with shades of stony light-grey to dusty off-whites with colour often being sparse or entirely absent. A fine example of this is his painting Still Life 1946, presented with a green-grey painterly background, a softer eggshell-esque complexion for the object’s plinth, but in the centre reaching upwards is a long-necked bottle dressed in radiant white, with a similarly shaded cup to its left. But stationed in front of the two white monoliths are three coloured pieces of dinnerware, a small decorated bowl on the right, a straight-sided pot in the middle, and a circular container on the left. These three objects are all stand-outs in the piece through their limited display of colour, the left container using a pale lemon yellow on its top half, the middle pot features a dark orange band near the rim, and the ribbed bowl is decorated intermediately in a gradient lilac moving towards the lip. The colours are all sparse and muted, blending expertly with the otherwise grayscale paints of the other objects into a very mellow overall visual that achieves a “… spiritual harmony, and a serene balance between all of the factors affecting it.” and presenting his works as a “meditation on form and colour, ignoring the substance of the depicted object, and they in turn become objects of meditation.” (Ebert-Schifferer, 1998). Hirst utilizes Morandi’s metaphysical composition and subdued monochromatic colour quality for his work, the skull is presented against a completely black negative space, seen head on in the direct centre of its housing/print and featuring an exclusively near-white colour set as result of the combination between platinum, diamond and bone.

Overall Hirst’s work is constructed through the lens of other, he takes inspiration from the public, but also a myriad of his predecessors. Described by critic and historian Richard Shone, Hirst “has always been hyper-receptive to the work of his contemporaries and forebears - in film, music, television and books as much as in art.” (Shone, 2001) Direct influences are difficult to pin, especially with Hirst’s reserved manner for discussing his work, but he suffers from wearing his influences a little too loudly in most cases, and with For the Love of God, influences are apparent to the point of easy analysis.

In conclusion, Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God found its thematic and visual construction between the memento mori/vanitas work of modernist impressionist Paul Cézanne, specifically his focus on mortality in his later works, and metaphysical artist Giorgio Morandi, whose use of composition and colour are apparent in Hirst’s work. Overall Hirst’s work, while interesting, bears striking resemblance to the past masters, as well as his own past examples.

fig. 1. Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, (2007)

Bibliography

Books

Hirst, D and Burn, G. (2001) On the Way to Work. London: Faber and Faber Limited

Cicelyn, E, Codognato, M, Mitra, D’Argenzio. (2006) Damien Hirst: Napoli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale. Milan: Electa

Hirst, D, Gallagher, A. (2012) Damien Hirst. London: Tate

Bostock, D. (1986) Palto’s Phaedo. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Harris, N. (1983) The Art of Cézanne. London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited.

Cézanne, P. (1897). Letter to Joachim Gasquet. [letter] Translated by Danchev, A. The Letters of Paul Cézanne. London: Thames and Hudson Limited.

Cézanne, P. (1900) Letter to Paul Cézanne Junior. [letter] Translated by Danchev, A. The Letters of Paul Cézanne. London: Thames and Hudson Limited.

Cézanne, P. (1905) Letter to Émile Bernard. [letter] Translated by Danchev, A. The Letters of Paul Cézanne. London: Thames and Hudson Limited.

Coldwell, P. (2006) Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art. London: Philip Wilson Publishers Limited.

Hirst, D., Self, W., Fuchs, R., Obrist, H-U. (2007) Beyond Belief (Essay by Will Self). London: Other Criteria Limited.

Ebert-Schifferer, S. (1998) Still Life: A History. Translated from German by Stockman, R. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated.

Shone, R. (2001) Damien Hirst: Pictures from the Saatchi Gallery. London: Booth-Clibborn Editions.

Hirst, D. (2007) For the Love of God. London: Other Criteria Limited.

Internet Sources

n/a. (2018) Canon of Art History | Glossary. National Gallery. [online] Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/glossary/canon-of-art-history [Accessed 5th March 2018]

n/a. (2014) A Thousand Years. Damien Hirst. [online] Available at: http://damienhirst.com/a-thousand-years [Accessed 13th March 2018]

n/a. (2014) The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Damien Hirst. [online] Available at: http://damienhirst.com/the-physical-impossibility-of [Accessed 13th March 2018]

n/a. (2014) For the Love of God. Damien Hirst. [online] Available at: http://www.damienhirst.com/for-the-love-of-god [Accessed 13th March 2018]

n/a. (2007) For the Love of God. Wikipedia. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Love_of_God [Accessed 13th March 2018]

Owen, G and Dunbar, P. (2007) Did Damien Hirst really sell diamond skull for £50m? Daily Mail. London: DMG Media. [online]. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-480729/Did-Damien-Hirst-really-sell-diamond-skull-50m.html [Accessed 14th March 2018]

n/a. (2009) Jeremy Deller: The avant gardener. London Evening Standard. London. [online]. Available at: https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/jeremy-deller-the-avant-gardener-6789104.html [Accessed 15th March 2018]

Hirst, D. (2012) 10 Questions For Damien Hirst. Time Magazine. New York: Time Inc. [online]. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2105436,00.html [Accessed 16th March 2018]

n/a. (2003) Damien Hirst. Wikipedia. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Hirst [Accessed 15th March 2018]

Thorpe, V. (2008) Top critic lashes out at Hirst's 'tacky' art. Guardian. London: Guardian Media Group. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/sep/07/damienhirst.art [Accessed 15th March 2018]

Savvine, I. (2018) Paul Cézanne Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. The Art Story. [online] Available at: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-cezanne-paul.htm [Accessed 17th April 2018]

n/a. (2001) Paul Cézanne. Wikipedia [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne [Accessed 17th-18th April 2018]

Archino, S. (2018) Giorgio Morandi Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. The Art Story. [online] Available at: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-morandi-giorgio.htm [Accessed 18th April 2018]

n/a. (2004) Giorgio Morandi. Wikipedia [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Morandi [Accessed 19th April 2018]

Adamou, N. (2016) ‘Still Life’, Giorgio Morandi, 1946. Tate [online] Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/morandi-still-life-n05782 [Accessed 3rd May 2018]

n/a. (2011) Pyramid of Skulls. Wikipedia [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Skulls [Accessed 2nd May 2018]

fig. 1. Damien Hirst, For the Love of God. (2007) Platinum, diamonds and human teeth. 171 x 127 x 190 mm. [online] Available at: http://www.damienhirst.com/for-the-love-of-god#_ftn2 [Accessed 16th March 2018]

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Ex-Costa Rican football chief banned for lifestyles by means of FIFA

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Ex-Costa Rican football chief banned for lifestyles by means of FIFA

The previous president of the Costa Rican Football Association, Eduardo Li, became banned from the sport for life by using FIFA’s impartial Ethics Committee on Friday, the corporation stated.

Li is considered one of forty-two people and entities charged in a U.S. investigation into the biggest corruption scandal in the history of FIFA. He became among seven soccer officials arrested at a Zurich luxury motel in Can also 2015.

Li, who become also a former member of the executive of CONCACAF, the nearby confederation for North and Valuable America, pleaded responsible in a United states federal court in October to taking masses of lots of dollars in bribes.

U.S. Prosecutors alleged Li and others engaged in schemes regarding over $2 hundred million in bribes and kickbacks that had been sought and received by using football officers for advertising and marketing and broadcasting rights to tournaments and suits.

In court docket, Li had stated he negotiated a $500,000 bribe, of which $three hundred,000 he truly acquired, to award a Miami-based totally unit of Brazil’s Traffic Institution media and advertising rights for 2022 World Cup qualifier suits.

Li also stated he had agreed to simply accept a separate $500,000 bribe, $230,000 of which he obtained, from Panama-primarily based intermediaries in trade for awarding a U.S. enterprise a contract to be the Costa Rican national team’s uniform sponsor.

2014 International Cup: Costa Rica Made history – The Strength Of Passion The Ballot ‘s Legacy

At the 1987 Pan American Sports activities Video games in Indianapolis (U.S.), Costa Rica’s swimmer Sylvia Ballot Arenas, at sixteen, earned eight Pan American medals, stunning the sector. The young Costa Rican produced 3 gold (a hundred-meter freestyle, 2 hundred-meter freestyle and one hundred meter backstroke), 3 silver (50-meter freestyle, 200-meter backstroke and 800-meter freestyle relay) and a pair of bronze (400-meter freestyle relay and four-hundred-meter medley relay), a game dominated by swimmers from America (Kenny, 1988). In reality, she is one of the maximum embellished swimmers in Pan American records.

Due to her amazing performance in the international meets, she became appeared as the “First-rate Latin American Athlete of the Yr” from 1987 to 1988 by means of defeating pinnacle athletes along with Javier Sotomayor of Cuba, Diego Armando Maradona of Argentina and Ayrton Senna from Brazil (Valle, 1989). Formerly, in 1986, she had gained 8 gold medals within the type-Olympic Principal American and Caribbean Video games on Santiago de Caballeros (Dominican Republic). She retired from the sport after competing in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and her successor becomes her sister, Claudia Poll, who then turned into sought-after international Because of her Olympic victory for the duration of the XXVI Summer Olympics on U.S. Soil in 1996 (Guevara & Chaname, 1998).According to the united states of America’s largest Spanish-language newspaper Los Angeles Nación, Germany’s Franziska van Almsick become the big preferred to win the Olympic trophy, however, she did no longer win (Quesada, 1996).

Following a sensational victory over Almsick inside the Summer Games, Claudia became Latin The USA’s first girl swimmer to get hold of an Olympic title by way of prevailing a gold medal in women’s two-hundred-meter freestyle, putting game at the countrywide time table for the first time in Costa Rica’s records (the world Almanac, 1997).

After those wins, the Valuable American republic of Costa Rica had no longer some other length of glory to date when it amazed absolutely everyone by using triumphing the proper to compete within the quarterfinals of the 2014 International Cup in Brazil, turning into one of the 8 most exceptional teams on the earth, along France, Germany, Argentina, Colombia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the host crew. For many days Costa Rica changed into the largest story of Latin The united states’s newspaper and Sports activities-oriented magazines.

Costa Rica: A Tiny u . S . With A huge Ardour

A democratic u . S . since the Nineteen Fifties, Costa Rica is positioned in the Central American Isthmus, surrounded via republics —Nicaragua and Panama— whose Passion is baseball (Almanaque Mundial, 1999). Geographically, CR is one of the smallest international locations inside the Western Hemisphere with an area of nineteen,seven-hundred squaremi.(the sector Almanac, 1997). On the other hand, it has a populace of 4.eight million population. San José is the country’s capital city.

Returned in the Fifties, CR have become the arena’s first non-European/North American democracy at a time when Latin America was plagued by means of navy dictatorships (Guevara & Chaname, 1998). because the 1980s, it has emerged as a champion of human rights, democracy, women’s rights, and ecology (one-fourth of the USA’s land is nationally protected as a wildlife sanctuary) on the world stage, showing icons along with Laura Chinchilla (Important The united states’s 1/3 lady head of state) and Oscar Arias Sánchez, the Nobel Prize winner for peace and former statesman.

Athletically, CR is a state with worldwide wins in Sports along with swimming and football.

CR: one of the Global��s pinnacle eight groups

Previous to competing within the 2014 Global Cup, CR’s side turned into a little-regarded crew within Latin The usa, in spite of having competed in 4 versions of the FIFA Global Cup among 1990 and 2014— setting a Primary American record that no group from that vicinity has crushed. Similarly to being a 3-time Olympic squad (Moscow’eighty, Los angeles’eighty four & Athens’04) and 4-time World Cup competitor, CR also has played in different fundamental international events, inclusive of the Copa The united states (or South American Championship), Concacaf Gold Cup, Below-17 and Below-20 International Championships.

Costa Rica certified for Brazil 2014 following a victory 2-1 over Mexico within the Costa Rican capital of San José in overdue 2013, completing runner-as much as America inside the Concacaf World Cup Qualifying, amongst 35 international locations and dependencies —like Montserrat (Uk), Aruba (Holland) and the united states Virgin Islands. In Brazil, CR completed an notable comeback.

for the duration of its debut within the 2014 Global Cup, the inspired squad of Costa Rica scored a marvel win over Uruguay, in one of the least anticipated wins in Brazil. Earlier than losing 3-1 to CR the South American republic of Uruguay become the heavy preferred. Then, the pre-match favourite Italy become every other victim of Costa Rica’s squad as they have been defeated 1-0 at Recife’s Pernambuco Stadium, Brazil. Ultimately, the Costa Rican aspect had a draw (0-zero) with the effective squad of britain, claiming the pinnacle spot in Organization D and qualifying for the knock-out levels of the 2014 Global Cup. After scoring four dreams with handiest 1 scored in opposition to them in the first round, they started out receiving sizeable attention for their feat. But, more sudden still changed into CR’s 1-0 victory in opposition to Greece (2nd spherical) thanks to an fantastic overall performance by using Keylor Navas (CR’s goalie became-national hero after that recreation), securing its region within the quarterfinals. With their Ardour and love for Costa Rica, they’ve thrilling fanatics everywhere in the World.

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