Ah, Internet Cafes … it used to be just a place where you can browse the Internet and grab a cup of coffee, but competition being what it is, some Internet cafes are offering something a little different than a cup of joe:
… Hungry? How about some taco?
In Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Photo: dro!d
No? How about some Rice and Pea?
In West Yorkshire and Leeds, UK. Photo: St Stev
It’s almost impossible to talk about modern art without tipping your hat to these greats. Here are the masters who gave birth to the modern.
Les demoiselles d’avignon (1907)
Self-portrait (1907)
Girl with Mandolin (1910)
Le rêve (1932)
Guernica (1937)
Picasso [wiki] is the undisputed master of the modern movement. You have to go back to Michelangelo to find anyone of equal genius or stature. Convivial and energetic, he had a voracious appetite for the female sex, although his relationships with women were not always happy.
Creator of a vast output of work, he was equally inventive as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicists, and theater designer. His work displays a bewildering change of technical and stylistic originality with a wide-ranging Freudian response to the human condition, including many intimate references to sex and death, sometimes blissful, sometimes anguished.
Always highly autobiographical, Picasso had the rare ability to turn self-comment into universal truths about mankind.
Madame Matisse, “The Green Line” (La Raie Verte) (1905)
The Dessert: Harmony in Red (The Red Room) (1908)
La Danse (1909)
Icarus (1944)
Matisse [wiki] was the king of color and celebrated the joy of living through the exploration of his palette.One of the founders of the modern movement, Matisse achieved a joyous combination of subject matter (notably the open window, the still life, and the female nude) and a glorious exploitation of color, and proclaimed a new freedom to do his own thing without necessarily imitating nature. Matisse explored color independently from subject matter and turned color into something you wanted to touch and feel.
While he was at his best with paint and paper cutouts, he was also a brilliant and innovative printmaker and a gifted sculptor. As a personality however, he was professorial, social, but a bit of a loner.
Composition VII (1913)
Composition VIII (1923)
Yellow, Red, Blue (1925)
Composition X (1925)
Kandinsky [wiki] was one of the key pioneers of the modern movement and reputedly the creator of the first abstract picture. Russian born, he initially trained as a lawyer, which made him at ease with abstract modes of thought.
Possessor of a complex, multifaceted personality, Kandinsky cultivated an intellectual rather than an instinctive approach to art, backed up by much theoretical writing. Starting as a figurative artist, he worked his way via freely painted abstracts to a complex geometrical form of abstraction.
The common thread in all his work is color. He intellectualized his ideas and his art, but at the same time he had such a strong physical sensitivity to color that he could literally hear colors as well as see them (a phenomenon known as synesthesia)
Composition A: Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow and Blue (1920)
Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red (1939-42)
Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43)
Mondrian [wiki] was one of the pioneers of a pure abstract art. His most recognizable works have the simplest elements: black horizontal and vertical lines, a white background, and only the primary colors.
His aim was to find and express a universal spiritual perfection, but his imagery had a profound influence on 20th-century commercial and architectural design and has been endlessly recycled with little or no understanding of its underlying purpose.
As a personality he was austere and reclusive; he hated the green untidiness of nature but was addicted to jazz and dancing. Sadly, in his own lifetime he had no commercial success, but Mondrian was highly revered and tremendously influential on the movers and shakers of modern art and design.
Number 8 (1948)
Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)
Blue Poles: No. 11, 1952
“Jack the Dripper” [wiki] was the leading artist of the pioneer New York school. He was a tortured, monosyllabic, alcohol-dependent soul, swinging between sensitivity and machismo, elation and despair.
At his best he produced magnificent work that needs to be seen on a large scale to fully appreciate the passionate, heroic, and monumental nature of his achievement. When he rolled his canvases out on the floor and stood in the middle of them with a large can of house paint, he was literally and physically part of his work, thereby achieving an integration of the artist’s personality and the activity of artistic creation that had never before been realized with such expressive freedom.
No. 6 from Campbell’s Soup 1 (1968)
No. 1 from Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn) (1970)
Sure, Andy Warhol [wiki] may have been a neurotic surrounded by drug addicts, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a key artistic figure. Warhol’s work represented one of art’s turning points because he changed the role model of the artist into one that all aspiring young contemporary artist now follow – no longer the solitary genius expressing intense and personal emotion (like Pollock) but the artist as businessman. He placed artists on a par with hollywood stars and Madison Avenue advertising executives.
Understandably, he loved and exploited iconic images drawn from the world of glamour, mass media, and advertising, and you can still find his Campbell soup cans and Marilyn Monroe-themed prints everywhere.
The son of Czech immigrants, Warhol acted out an oft-repeated American dream cycle – pursuing a driving need to be famous and rich (like his subjects) but destroying himself in the process.
Here are some of the weirdest haircuts throughout history:
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Mohawk leader Joseph Brant with a scalp lock
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Mohawk (Image: Taishar [Wikipedia])
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Clonycavan Man
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THE STYLE: Originally sported by warriors of various Native American tribes, the hairstyle was adopted by a squad of U.S. Army’s bad-to-the-bone 101st Airborne Division during World War II, before being commandeered by the punk rockers in the 1970s.
THE STORY: Up until a few years ago, no one would have questioned the mohawk’s [wiki] roots. However, in 2003, an Irish peat harvester made a discovery that would change the hairstyle’s history forever - a 2,300-year-old corpse, remarkably well preserved by the unique chemistry of a peat bog, sporting a bonafide ‘hawk.
THE SHOCKER: The ancient Irish punker, dubbed Clonycavan Man [wiki], had gel in his hair, which archaeologists determined was made from vegetable oil mixed with resin from southwestern France or Spain. Today, scientists are still working hard to determine whether Clony was a prehistoric punker or just an Iron Age metrosexual.
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Elvis’s pompadour
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Madame de Pompadour
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THE STYLE: If the word brings to mind images of pink Cadillacs and bouffant ‘dos, you’re on the right track. But in the same way America borrowed rock ‘n’ roll from the blues and method acting from the Russians, the key to those 1950s locks lies in 18th-century France.
THE STORY: The Marquise de Pompadour [wiki] was King Louis XV’s über-fashionable mistress, and her elaborately teased, upswept hair was imitated by high-society women throughout the country. While 20th-century pompadours were considerably tinier than those of its namesake’s, the modern version claims one definitive advantage: technology. Where today’s science has yielded hair wax, putty, glue, and paste to cement them into place, pomps of yore depended on beef tallow, bear grease, and other artery-cloggers.
THE SHOCKER: Not surprisingly, slathering one’s hair with animal remains tended to attract animals (insects and other nasties), which occasionally turned the originalpompadour [wiki] into, quite literally, a rats’ nest.
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Marie Antoinette
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B-52 “Balls Eight” Stratofortress
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Marge Simpson
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THE STYLE: Speaking of rats’ nests (and the Marquise de Pompadour, for that matter), the beehive [wiki] of the 1960s is itself a 200-year throwback to the 1760s Big Hair Days.
THE STORY: There’s more to those 18th-century bouffant styles than meets the eye. Whereas the modern beehive is nicknamed “the B-52″ for its uncanny resemblance to the B-52 bomber’s distinctive nose, Marie Antoinette and her gal pals stowed actual warships in their hair - or at least miniature replicas of them.
THE SHOCKER: Like precursors to the Cracker Jack box, these 18th-century ‘dos served as treasure troves, housing exotic prizes like tiny caged birds, cupid dolls, and other bulky curios. Of course, not every hairdo was a winner. When millions of hungry peasants revolutionized France, the over-the-top hairstyle quickly fell out of fashion - landing in that little basket just below the guillotine.
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Nurhaci, the Manchu emperor who brought the queue to China
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A queue wrapped around the head
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THE STYLE: When the Manchu invaded China in the 17th century, they brought over a killer fashion trend - killer as in, adopt it or else.
THE STORY: The Manchu sported the queue, a shaved-in-front, pony-tail-in-the-back haircut, and forced the Han Chinese to do the same. The effect? Quite a lot of protest.
THE SHOCKER: While much of China eventually submitted to the do-or-die trend, many thousands bravely chose to keep their hair - and lose their heads. So what was the big deal with getting a little shave? Aside from the queue not being such as flattering cut (even compared to, say, the mullet), it also happened to be against the religion of millions of long-haired Confucian Chinese, who believe that one’s skin and hair are sacred.
THE STYLE: A fad gone bad or the most reviled haircut in history? Popularized by David Bowie and others during the glam ‘ol days of the 1970s, the mullet
[wiki] was adopted (and expanded voluminously upon) in the 1980s by hard rockers and their headbanging army of fans. As hair metal gave way to grunge and alternative music in the early 1990s, a term was coined to describe those who still clung to the headbangers’ signature cut - “mullet heads.”
THE STORY: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which inducted “mullet” into its venerable lexicon in 2001, the word (as it refers to the hairstyle) was “apparently coined, and certainly popularized, by U.S. hi-hop group the Beastie Boys” in their 1995 song ”Mullet Head.”
THE SHOCKER: Since making it into the OED, ridicule of the bemulletted has grown increasingly vocal and, judging from a random sampling of anti-mullet Web sites, rather virulent. The mullet is one haircut Americans love to hate - and give funny names to. To list a few: The Tennessee Top Hat, The Kentucky Waterfall, and The Camaro Crash Helmet. Our personal favorite, however, is The Missouri Compromise, which manages to reference both the haircut’s “business in front, party in the back” policy, as well as the shameful Compromise of 1820, which regulated slavery in developing U.S. territories.
On last friday, 11th April 2008, a group of cell members from 3 cell groups come to have All-You-Can Eat steamboat at Summer, Mentari Malaysia.
Over there, about 25 over people celebrated the ‘hungry ghost’ season where we eat like nobody business! Some people go to take drinks, noodles, prawn, chicken, beef, and much more as the opening steamboat!
We are filled with joy and food in our stomach as Kevin khoo entertaining us with his jokes! Kevin made us laugh with his so called Grilled Steam Chicken, which actually a thigh that Rebecca put into the steam pot and Kevin said it was supposed to be grilled… 
After much eating, at the last we celebrated Yunn Yuan and ventsin Birthday that fall on that day!
Happy b’day to both of you. May the blessings of God be upon you everyday!
Here are the collections of the pictures:
In the Japanese paperfolding art of origami, cutting the paper is frowned upon. But in 1981, Masahiro Chatani, professor of Architecture at Tokyo Institute of Technology proved that papercutting could indeed produce stunning pieces of art.
Along with his colleague Keiko Nakazawa, Chatani developed Origamic Architecture, a variation of kirigami (itself a variation of origami where cuts were allowed), where you only needed an X-acto knife and a ruler to create complex 3-dimensional structures out of a single sheet of paper.
Origamic Architecture sculptures range from (the relatively simple) geometric patterns to famous buildings’ facades. It’s like 3-D pop-up greeting cards, but much, much more complex. While looking at the examples below, keep this in mind: everything’s done with the simple cuts of the knife.
Simple cuts can result in stunning geometric shapes - from Gerry Stormer’s gallery (click the artist’s name for more):
Stairs to Paradise by Gerry Stormer (Photo: Carl Uetz)
Diagonal Steps by Gerry Stormer (Photo: Carl Uetz)
From the master himself, Masahiro Chatani’s origamic architecture creations:
More Origamic Architecture buildings, by Willem (see also his new exhibit: Topography-Memory, Origamic Architecture through India):
Here are some MC Escher inspired designs, from the fantastic gallery of Ingrid Siliakus:
By Ingrid Siliakus, based on Escher’s Ascending and Descending (comparison)
By Ingrid Siliakus, based on Escher’s Cycle (comparison)
Some are very artistic, like the Origamic Architecture sculptures by Maria Victoria Garrido (Marivi):
Marivi’s Heraldy is also a very creative use of Origamic Architecture:
Some Origamic Architectures sculptors took it a step further: creating a fully 3-dimensional sculptures that “pop” out of the card when opened. For example, take a look at Keiko Nakazawa’s art:
Rat by Keiko Nakazawa
The Hare by Keiko Nakazawa
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06 16th, 2008| 
