“The real things are under the surface.” When video artist Bill Viola was 6 years old he fell into a lake, all the way to the bottom, to a place which seemed like paradise. “There’s more than just the surface of life,” Viola explains. American Bill Viola (born 1951) is a pioneer in video art.…
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Bankruptcy and jail by Anton Foek Amsterdam, October 21st 2021– The story of William Smith is simply fascinating: the orphaned son of an English country blacksmith, who became obsessed with creating the world’s first geological map and ultimately became the father of modern geology. Craters on Mars named after him as well as an annual lecture of the…
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Pleasure rules at Vauxhall Part II source:bbc af Amsterdam, 18 May 2021–Music was a major draw for the 1,000 or so nightly visitors to Vauxhall, which hosted the leading musicians and composers of the day; George Frederic Handel made regular appearances; and Thomas Arne – best known for “Rule, Britannia!” – was Tyers’ in-house composer.…
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The Vauxhall Gardens from the bbc Amsterdam, 18 May 2021– A flash of green amid traffic-choked roads, elevated railway lines and anonymous high-rise apartment and office blocks, Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is a well-kept but unremarkable south London park. When I visited on a sunny spring afternoon, wildflowers dotted the grass and shouts sounded from the football…
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The New China Story Amsterdam, Feb. 18th 2021 “Making the Foreign Serve China” was one of Chairman Mao’s favoured strategies, as epitomised by his decision to grant access in the 1930s to the American journalist Edgar Snow. The resulting book, Red Star Over China, was instrumental in winning western sympathy for the Communists, whom it…
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The New China Story Amsterdam, Feb. 18th 2021– But foreign journalists working at Xinhua, the state-run news agency, see their stories reaching much larger audiences. Government subsidies cover around 40% of Xinhua’s costs, and it generates income – like other news agencies, such as the Associated Press – by selling stories to newspapers around the…
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