Manuel Marino, Music and Thoughts » Culture

Would You Learn Chinese?

Allison Swenson — Tue, 25 May 2010 09:42:42 +0000

If you are up on the world economy, then you will understand that China is the fastest growing economy in the world. As a matter of fact, the Chinese language is getting so commonly used in business, the demand for resources teaching the Chinese language has more than tripled in the last half decade. Moreover, if you check out the course of study being provided in primary and secondary schools, you will see the Chinese language provided as a course. Conferring with ahead in to the time to come, it is estimated that a command of the Chinese language will be in front of the need for Spanish. Half of Asia already speaks some type of Chinese, or incorporates types of Chinese into their native language.

Why learn Chinese? Because today’s world nearly insists on it. With our increasing love for the Chinese culture, like the martial arts, or media (Who can forget Jacki Chan), or even Chinese food… we are quick merging cultures together today then we ever did in past. Great inspirations have come out of the eastern ways of life, and in a hungry way to consume them, and learn all about them, the call to learn Chinese has surfaced.

The Chinese culture itself, represents a solidarity in balance, peacefulness, and serenity. In the western world, the fast paced, time pressed crunches have taken their toll, and now we actively seek solace from other cultures, who we think, grasp the key. It is through understanding, learning and appreciation of other cultures in which we often find what we seek. To learn Chinese…whether it be the arts, the language, the ways, is frequently found tools to enrich our own daily lives and restore balance. Once more, by doing so, we’re merging another culture’s layers and sewn them in as our own. The influence of the Chinese culture is undeniable.

Why learn Chinese? Since you truly want to. You have the focus and goal to integrate the cultural know how for ambitions of your personal. Perhaps for an upcoming trip to China, or a spare time activity, or possibly just for simple understanding of a new friend, whatever the excuse for the spark, know it will be more than good for you to get hold of this knowledge and skill. And exhilarating to learn. There is a sense of accomplishment behind learning Chinese, even if it’s not for a job in china, or you cannot take a vacation there…having the richness of absorbing another’s culture into your world view is a step to an improved and higher comprehension of life itself.

Learn Chinese to have an experience culturally. Learn Chinese for application in your task. Learn Chinese for knowledge, for wisdom and balance in your life. Learn Chinese to be ahead of everybody else in business and careers. Learn Chinese to step into the time to come now. Learn Chinese for your upcoming vacation to china. But mostly, learn Chinese for yourself. As it is something you always had an urge to do. The impact of eastern culture is growing everyday, and will carry on as our ways and cultures merge.

You’ll never have to worry about Learn To Speak Chinese again! Visit us on the web at Learn To Speak Chinese to learn more.

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On Canvas Art

Manuel Marino — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:13:16 +0000

Charles Veilleux wrote this exclusive article for us. Charles is the owner of Veilleux Fine Art. On May 31, 2009, Veilleux Fine Art transitions into a private artist studio tour business. Charles has owned and operated contemporary art galleries in Santa Fe since 1993.

On Canvas Art

Art a term that is used so broadly, not to mention Modern Art comes with varied opinions, revised histories finally noting the women artists of history, and many categories. So, were do we begin?

Having worked in the gallery world for 28 years and being an artist myself I am sure that my views are varied further to say the least.

Contemporary Art, also have many definitions, it can quite simply mean living artists. It has also become a term that catches art that usually is not representational. It also can mean artists that push media to the limits presenting them in a new and contemporary way.

So, art in the modern time encompasses so many things which are exciting, challenging, and controversial at times. This art is a deep expression of the artists creating in a world that for lack of a better word currently dwells on the negative which is often the exact opposite of most artists’ works. It is true that many art images are a direct reflection of the times with images that cry out for social change, this can also be noted throughout history during times of war, and crimes against man and nature.

Living and working in the Santa Fe, the second largest art market in the United States, I tend to look at art as beauty, uplifting and inspiring.

With that said, you can see almost anything in Santa Fe; from the roots of the Native American and Spanish history so very rich in the culture here to everything else. Having the only Museum dedicated to a woman artist, Georgia O’Keeffe, to the NM Museum of Art, and the International Folk Art Museum, and the Native American Museum to name just a few of many.

Along side of the museums are over 200 art galleries making Santa Fe an art center of the southwest. We have the pioneer galleries that brought contemporary art to Santa Fe before it was popular here to now having a very large selection of contemporary galleries including Veilleux Fine Art.

Often times I am asked about how to invest in art, or why to collect a certain artist, of do I think it will match the sofa? All good and important questions as you are selecting something very personal for your home or office.

My response is that you should buy art because you love it. All the other factors will work themselves out. If you collect what you love it will go with the sofa and the artist may be a noted artist in history one day. Of course it is always good to know what level an artist is currently, which is often reflected in the pricing of an artist.

Then there is always the current trend in art which seems to be Asian at the moment, so you will see serge of art in American galleries and museums. I often wonder why everyone hops on the band wagon with trendy art. With that said, there is room for all art as it is the creative expression of the artist weather we appreciate it or not. If art provokes emotion that it truly has done its job.

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To the audience of music

Manuel Marino — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 13:58:19 +0000

Gunnar Colding is a former professional cellist who for 25 years has been employed by chamber orchestras as well as symphony orchestras of Sweden. This is an exceptional article he wrote for us.

To the audience of music

There was recently given a concert in New York mainly consisting of works by Mozart. When a soprano afterwards would perform some songs by Webern (music soon a hundred years old but Atonal) the audience BOOED her out! OPUS, the leading musical magazine of Sweden, therefore put the question, why Swedes don’t boo at concerts.

The short answer is simple. They are brought up not to, and whoever violates the pattern therefore risks “making a fool of himself”. The longer answer is somewhat more complicated, but still logic to those who have the energy to look a little deeper into the crystal ball.

All avant-gardists who have advanced to some level live in some kind of symbiosis with the culture knowledgeables of the media. Together they form a hype and a trademark. This trademark is in most cases equivalent to the personal name of “the artist”. After a number of times in the limelight they are suddenly celebrities.

Then it’s especially important to remember, that this celebrity status has only been reached by “State sponsorship” and clever (culture) lobbyists who all pull in the same direction tonally. All this, however, has been done over the heads of the audience, which, at a first night, has no choice but to join in the collective ritual of applauses.

The only alternative would be to boo or to refuse to applaud, that is civil disobedience, which most people lack the civil courage to carry through in for instance a direct transmission. If the audience would be disinterested, it wouldn’t come to a first night at the town concert hall? Oh yes, it certainly would.

The programme committees always place the new work together with great acknowledged music on the same concert. So the audience gets force-fed in the same way as by water chlorination. The audience has no possibility to drop the newwritten piece by going home in advance, although they would want to. For then they would miss also the rest of the repertoire for which they bought an expensive subscription!

Certainly there are many who are curious about “novelties”, but how many would return, if the work is given a second or a third time, to a separate concert, without tickets paid for in advance? If in spite of all the audience would hear this novelty one more time, it would for sure be allocated by quotas by some State financed institution or commission, for instance the music radio channel, only acclaimed by the Modern Music Ghetto people themselves.

Just look at for instance the statistics of the radio Concerts by Request for the last 30 years. In this sole instance, where the audience decides the programme, yours truly can not recall one single Atonal work, although it must have occurred in later years, as a particular exception…

European and especially Swedish musical audiences have thus become reduced to a kind of “cattle voice”, the acclaim of which seldom marks the quality of a piece. The applauses have become more concerned about the celebrated soloist, conductor or symphony orchestra and their performances!

To complete the hypocrisy, all reviewers then write about “standing ovations” and “the critically acclaimed work” etc. etc. Do you think they ever disclose, that the “voluntary” demand in the record shops by the audience is completely absent? All contemporary known composers have lobbyists and pushers everywhere in every single musical institution. Together with the media they constitute today a formidably heavy group.

They have succeeded in the trick of forcing commissioners to also view the matter as an issue of equality between Atonal and Tonal music! At the same time the audience is indirectly accused of being rigid and to have prejudices that have to be broken. So, all natural processes of selection have been eliminated, just like they are in the world of the wars between the sexes by quota allocation.

By this system and evolutionary science, nothing will then be created fit for life. Men and women do have most in common in their constitution and are therefore of equal value as human beings. This is so to say scientifically proved. But it is equally scientifically proved, that the language of the Atonal music has nothing in common with its Tonal counterpart!

Atonal music lacks a grammar understandable to the ear. Therefore everything sounds like undefinable dissonances with no possibility of memorization. Tonal music (pop and classical) on the other hand has a very well defined grammar consisting of major and minor keys, which can be perceived by anyone except the deaf.

In that kind of music both consonance and dissonance are intermixed according to an accepted grammar. In a study from ”Brain – A Journal of Neurology” the researchers even arrived at the conclusion that only brain-damaged people could have preferences for music mainly consisting of dissonances.

Contrary to what avant-gardists with interpretation monopolies advocate, the Tonal music language is neither culturally nor socially determined. Preferences to Tonal music have, hark well, a purely biological explanation in the brain.

This has been easily proved by studies in babies and animals, after which a highly merited fundamental researcher in psychology (Diana Deutsch, USA) proved already in 1983, that not even normal, grown-up musicians’ brains could ”process” Atonal music.

Therefore I hereby nominate the modern “Atonal sect” to one of the most arrogant groups ever within culture.

All necessary research, analysis and background to these claims are presented in the book “Reverse Polka, or, Cheated of the Music”. (Yet only published in Sweden: “Baklängespolkan går eller Blåst på musiken”)

The painful thing is, that even without pressure groups, the works of the dead Tonal composers remain a hundredfold more alive than the works of their modern “colleagues”.
Classical music has only diverse “Societies” that run a sort of internal activity of meeting and sharing mutual interests.

That music has no other “pushers” than Unorganized private consumers without “votes”, commonly called the audience. My question to the modern State quota people: For whose benefit are you working? For the benefit of the audience or for the benefit of all potentially unemployed “composers”? I already know the answer. You only work by instructions “from above” as they vaguely call it…

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Surveying the Land of Scape

Manuel Marino — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:59:19 +0000

Taegen Carter is a movie director. He is also the owner of Mythmaker Entertainment, a company that produces shorts and features in the genres of adventure, sci-fi, thriller and drama. Taegen tells us about the production of Scape, that should be completed around June of ’09. Let’s read his words, in this exclusive article that could be a page of a well written diary or a best selling novel.

Surveying the Land of Scape

Making a film sucks. It’s hard. Really hard. When it’s finished, and people sit in darkness, silently watching in a matter of minutes what may have cumulatively taken years of work, it’s worth it. But really, the process couldn’t be harder. Start with the fact that an alarmingly high number of people will look at you in utter pity when you mention you’re making a feature film. Mix in some healthy doses of family doubt, maybe a pinch or two of high school friends making ten times more money than you in a real job, and that’s just the beginning. But don’t get me wrong, I’m an optimist.

Maybe it’s my optimism that continues to lead me, often blindly, toward my goal of becoming a professional (see definition of professional: paid) director. Having directed a ninety-five minute feature film already, you might be wondering if the guy writing this article enjoys pain. Sure, maybe a little. But with experience at my fingertips, my second feature had to be easier, right? No. Not a chance. The following is a chronicle of my pain experience, and some of the many problems that arose.

I spent six months writing the script and raised a budget mainly by begging investors (see definition of investors: family) for money. The sum of which was not very much. Just enough to pay a skeleton crew of ex-students, get a deal with the acting union SAG and rent some camera equipment. The law of filmmaking says this: the closer one gets to filming, the more will go wrong. One week before filming and things were really getting dicey. I was still converting my script to a series of shots that I wanted to film, rehearsing with actors, coordinating logistics and dealing with problems. That’s what filmmaking really is, by the way, problem solving.

Problem A: the actor in your opening scene, the scene that is the most important save for the ending scene, tells you a week before filming that he doesn’t own a car and the filming location is 300 miles away. Problem B: the costume rental house will not accept insurance, so you must charge 4 times the value of the clothes on your credit card as insurance. And it’s a period piece movie, so there’s a lot of expensive clothes. And the total charge is so much you don’t have enough credit cards to put the charges on. Scratch that, there’s a credit card you never use in your chest of drawers at home. So you max out your credit cards, hope to hell no one damages or loses or steals the clothes, buy your actor an Amtrak ticket and make a note to pick up a very large bottle of antacids at Costco to help stave off ulcers that you know are on their way. Yes, this is all true.

Even now, I dread looking at a FICO score. Four days before we were to leave from Los Angeles for Santa Cruz, disaster struck. A quarter mile from the sixty-acre horse ranch we were going to film on, a fire started. I had no backup locations. Half the budget for the film had already been paid out. I couldn’t get it back. We had to film. I checked the fire report hourly, popped antacid tablets and realized that we’d film in some random forest even if it meant getting arrested for trespassing or filming without a permit.

All ten of us drove up to a summer rental house and crammed ourselves into our tiny, modest hovel. Later that day the fire dissipated, the police barricades came down, and we found out our location had been saved. Now came the fun stuff. Filming. I had a total of 12 days to film 76 pages. A Hollywood film typically shoots about 3 pages per day. Do the math on my movie. Yeah, we had a lot to film in a really short amount of time. The first shot of the first day took place in a colony for the diseased. We had ten extras to help make the colony feel real. Five actually showed up on a very cold morning. Three actually got back into their cars thirty minutes before filming and left. And these were people who were going to get paid! We had two extras to make a colony feel like a colony. Equipment wasn’t working right. Light was changing fast. And as always, there were lots of things to think about. Those antacids became like Pez to me. I put myself and most of the crew in early nineteenth century clothes and we started filming. Problem solved. Kind of.

Every second on set sends a problem the director’s way. People have questions. People want to know what you think about fill-in-the-blank. It is a director’s medium, for his better or worse. Throughout the twelve days, we had more problems than grains of sand on every beach in the world. I had arguments with the crew. A production assistant got bored four days in and left. Not good when your production assistant is also your makeup artist, wardrobe and caterer. The main prop for the film, a mask the villain wears, showed up very very late into filming via mail.

And on top of all of that, our opening scene became a disaster. If you can’t hook people in the first five minutes of your film, what’s to keep them from continuing to watch? No pressure. The opening included two horses. Not a problem when shooting on a horse ranch, right? The ranch would only give us one horse, and told us this fact an hour before filming. Next problem, it was an Appalachian horse. And it kicked my actor off several times. I was near tears. The scene was definitely not working. The actor who came up via Amtrak for the day had come in vain. And he was going to leave for Los Angeles the next morning. And I had four days of filming left. I was not going to cover the number of pages I needed to finish the film. And on top of that, I now needed to write a new opening scene after a very difficult and very long 12-hour day.

Every morning, after 6 hours of sleep, I would get up, figure out what scenes we were shooting and prepare for each scene. We’d spend the entire day and sometimes nights filming. We’d usually get back to the house around 8pm, eat dinner, watch the footage we shot during the day, transfer the footage and sound to hard drives, go to sleep and start the process over. Now, with only 4 days left, I also had to come up with a new opening. I wrote something and we filmed it on our last day. Having already cut 8 pages from the script while we were filming, I wasn’t too happy about filming a scene twice.

But the new opening scene has cut together incredibly well. In fact, the film is my finest work to date. If a filmmaker’s problem solving skills are his tools to building the film, then problems are the essence of filmmaking. Without these problems, creativity stagnates and the product is awful. I’m convinced that Scape wouldn’t be as good as it is without the stomach-churning dilemmas that appeared throughout the process. Now, as I finish writing this, I’m preparing to write my next screenplay. You’re probably wondering if I read what I just wrote. I know, I don’t make sense. Oh well, you have to do what you love. I wonder if the person who coined that phrase did?

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Social Networking and the Left Coast Eisteddfod 2009

Manuel Marino — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:16:35 +0000

Ceri Shaw is a Web Designer and freelance writer. If you remember, he wrote What is Anglo-Welsh Literature and why Should Anyone Care?. Ceri is a former college lecturer from Cardiff, South Wales. He wrote this article for us.

Social Networking and the Left Coast Eisteddfod 2009

There is an art to constructing social networks. Anyone can join Facebook, start a group, give it a catchy title and invite everyone on their contacts list. But building a true online “community” involves a lot more than that. My preferred tool for this job is the “Ning” platform.

One such project that I am involved in at the moment is Americymru. The site itself is an American Welsh heritage site and it welcomes members from anywhere in the world who are either Welsh, of Welsh ancestry or who have a love of Wales ( Cymruphiles? ) for whatever reason. The site has proved highly popular and is rapidly approaching the 1000 member mark.

The question is, of course, what purpose should such a site serve? Should we all vie with one another in forum discussions for the distinction of being the most enthusiastic supporter of Welsh culture? Should we all devote ourselves to learning the Welsh language? ( not a bad idea ) Or perhaps we should all exchange holiday snaps of our most recent visits to Snowdonia? Of course Americymru is a social network and so it is used for all of the above purposes and a host more besides.

How much better though to put these networks to a novel and creative purpose. In Wales the “Eisteddfod” tradition ( which is basically a talent competition ) dates back to the 12th century. Here is how the Wikipedia defines it:-

‘An eisteddfod is a Welsh festival of literature, music and performance. The tradition of such a meeting of Welsh artists dates back to at least the 12th century, when a festival of poetry and music was held by Rhys ap Gruffydd of Deheubarth at his court in Cardigan in 1176 but, with the decline of the bardic tradition, it fell into abeyance. The present-day format owes much to an eighteenth-century revival arising out of a number of informal eisteddfodau. The word eisteddfod is derived from the Welsh word eistedd, meaning “sit”.’

We decided to use Americymru to organise an international “online” Eisteddfod.

We have departed from the traditional formula in several significant respects. There are Welsh Pirate Lookalike and Tom Jones Impersonators competitions along side the standard literary and poetic categories. We feel that these features will enhance the appeal of the “event” and give it a more contemporary feel

All the competitions are open to everyone. Neither Americymru membership nor Welsh origin are requirements.

The poetry and short story competitions are already starting to attract some talented entrants and judges Lloyd Jones ( short stories ) and Peter Thabit Jones and John Good ( poetry ) will have some hard choices to make.

The online Eisteddfod will culminate in a live event in Portland in August 2009. It is here that winners will be announced and prizes awarded. It is also our intention to hold a series of concerts featuring major Welsh and American Welsh artists and performers. In short the “Left Coast Eisteddfod” will be a celebration of all things Welsh and in particular of the American Welsh heritage which has so enriched the history of the American nation. It will also introduce this tradition to a whole new audience and seek to involve the widest possible participation.

It is also possible to build a “constellation” of supporting blogs around your social networking “event”. In our own case we have been fortunate to enjoy the support of artists such as David Western who is probably the worlds finest carver of traditional Welsh lovespoons. He explains the reasons and the means of his supoport for the event in the following quote from his “David Western’s Portland Eisteddfod Lovespoon” blog:-

“To support the development of the Left Coast Eisteddfod next year, I am donating a handcrafted, one-of-a-kind Welsh lovespoon which Americymru will raffle off to help raise needed funds.

I’m proud to be able to contribute to the creation of the Eisteddfod and to help highlight Welsh people and their culture here in North America. Everyone knows the Scottish and Irish and it is through events like the Eisteddfod that people will come to know the Welsh.”

David’s blog has already encouraged others to try their hands at this ancient craft and his work in general is vital in order to ensure that this art form continues and thrives into the 21st century.

It is my belief that the potential for social networks to drive artistic creation and collaboration is immense and I am very excited to be a part of a project which is exploring this potential.

In closing I would urge you check out the online Eisteddfod ( linked and accessible from the home page of Americymru ), consider entering one of the competitions and above all, think of novel ways to utilise your own social networks so that they can become a real spur to human creativity and not merely glorified “chat” rooms.

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