In 2001, Rwanda replaced its old flag because of its associations with the genocide, and brought in this brand new lovely flag. Blue symbolises happiness and peace, while yellow stands for economic development. Green means the hope of prosperity, and the sun represents unity and the fight against ignorance.
Reblog this to help us celebrate a unified, peaceful and prosperous Rwanda in 2014!
The Veiled Eiffel Tower from the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, 1944
From Lee Miller’s War
“Every city is simultaneously a seedbed of novelty and a hothouse of nostalgia, and modern New York presents a daily dialectic of progress and loss. As Colson Whitehead notes in “The Colossus of New York,” you become a New Yorker — or perhaps a true resident of any place, whether you were born there or not — when you register the disappearance of a familiar spot. “You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city.” But this subjective landscape of memory and desire is built on an infrastructure of social and economic reality, on the concrete facts of race and class that Mr. Lee insisted on pointing out.
New Yorkers, like most Americans — white, upper-middle-class Americans in particular — prefer to address such matters through an elaborate lexicon of euphemism and code, speaking of “good schools,” “sketchy” blocks and “improvements” in the retail and culinary amenities. National politics has a tendency to revert, in the age of Obama, to the shadow language of white supremacy, with its rhetoric of laziness, dependency and cultural pathology. The word “class” is uttered sanctimoniously when preceded by “middle” and scoldingly when followed by “war” but is more often swallowed up in numbers and abstractions. We’d much rather talk about the 1 percent or the 47 percent, inequality or envy, diversity or opportunity than about labor, wealth and power. But maybe Brooklyn is a place to start, and perhaps culture, rather than politics, is a more fruitful area of investigation. The name of New York’s most populous borough does not signify what it used to, and embedded in that change of meaning are some clues about the current state of our old friends the cultural contradictions of capitalism.
The new Brooklyn is easily mocked — and almost as easily embraced — as a utopia of beards, tattoos, fixed-gear bikes and do-it-yourself commerce. Everyone is busy knitting, raising chickens, distilling whiskey, making art and displaying the fruits of this activity in pop-up galleries and boutiques, farm-to-table kitchens and temples of mixology. “Brooklyn” might as well be a synonym for the Portland of “Portlandia,” or for the sweet, silly, self-important, stuff-white-people-like Gestalt that television series has come to represent. Its ethic is both countercultural and entrepreneurial, offering an aesthetic of radicalism without the difficult commitment of radical politics. The tension built into the “Brooklyn” brand is that it’s both a local, artisanal, communal protest against the homogenizing forces of corporate culture and a new way of being bourgeois, and as such participating in the destruction of non-middle-class social space. Its rebellious energies are focused largely on restaurants, retail and real estate.
Not everyone in Brooklyn has a chin-strap beard or a sleeve tattoo or a home bacon-curing operation, of course, but with remarkable speed this image of a county of 2.5 million people has become a global brand. And it has almost entirely displaced an older Brooklyn, whose image was once almost as pervasive.”
La Mulâtresse Solitude (1772-19 November 1802), was a slave rebel and heroine of the fight against slavery in Guadeloupe.
Originally a slave, she was freed by the abolition of slavery in 1794 during the French revolution. When slavery was reintroduced on Guadeloupe by Napoleon in 1802, she joined Louis Delgrès call to fight for her freedom and took part in the Battle of the 18 May 1802.
She was captured and executed by hanging after being granted to wait out her pregnancy.
The Deliverance of Peter. 1624. Hendrick Ter Brugghen. Dutch 1588-1629. oil/canvas.
Armenian women, 1895.
To the right, Eghisapet Sultanian, great grandmother of musician Derek Sherinian during the 1895 Hamidian massacres, when the Armenians of Zeitun (modern Süleymanlı), fearing the prospect of massacre, took up arms to defend.
The Maya archaeological site of Cerros, Belize.
Located on a peninsula that juts into Corozal Bay, Cerros was initially a fishing and trading hamlet, and remained so during about 350-100 BC. Even during this early period we have evidence for long-distance trade: as far south as the highlands of El Salvador and Guatemala, and as far north as the northern coast of Yucatán.
The construction of large-scale architecture started from about 50 BC, and as David Freidel, Maynard Cliff, and Robin Robertson state, this “involved such an explosive transformation that it is fitting to speak of massive urban renewal.” The site reached its peak from about 50 BC- AD 100.
The shown monument from Cerros is ‘Structure 5C-2nd’. Thought to have been built around 50 BC, it is particularly noted for its four stucco mask reliefs, which flank either side of the stairway. Freidel & Schele (1988) write: ”The main mask on the lower west panel depicts the Jaguar Sun-second born of the Ancestral Heroes’-identified by the k’in, Sun, day or light, glyph on his cheeks (Freidel and Schele 1988; Freidel 1986a). Flanking the Sun are his objects.”
Photos taken by chistletoe1. Joyce Kelly’s An Archaeological Guide to Northern Central America: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (1996) was of use when writing up this post. As was David Freidel & Linda Schele’s 1988 publication ‘Late Preclassic Maya Lowlands: The Instruments and Places of Ritual Power’, in American Anthropologist, 90(3), pp. 547-567.
Nicolás de Bussy
The Triumph of the Cross · ‘La Diablesa’ (The She-Devil), 1694
Museo Arqueológico Comarcal, Orihuela, Spain
Processional float (‘paso’) commissioned by the Farmers Guild for the Holy Week. The sculptural group still plays an important role in the Holy Week parades in Orihuela, and is carried through the streets during the procession on Holy Saturday. It is prohibited from entering the churches nor the Cathedral during the procession, as it contains a depiction of the Devil. (+)
John Singer Sargent, Dr. Pozzi at Home, 1881
This painting is an example of the somewhat decadent and super refined world of Aestheticism in Paris. Its followers believed in art for art’s sake, with no obligation to promote morality or tell a story. Aesthetes believed that art shouldn’t imitate life; instead, art is about the search for abstract beauty.
Dr. Pozzi is an example of the artfulness that permeated this movement. His appearance is carefully cultivated, with a flamboyant flair tied into the sensuality of his hands. His fingers are playing with the neck of his robe, while his other hand is dragging down the tasseled cord. Many people of the time thought that Sargent was pushing the boundaries of good taste with this portrait, partly because of how he portrayed Dr. Pozzi, but also because this portrait was not commissioned; Sargent approached Dr. Pozzi about painting his likeness, and this was the result.
