David Nesta Marley, better known as Ziggy Marley, was born in Trenchtown in 1968 and is one of the children (perhaps the most successful musically speaking) of the most important legend in the world of reggae music: Bob Marley.

Ziggy at first was completely eclipsed by the shadow of his famous father, but eventually managed to earn a place in the hearts of reggae lovers and was able to create his own style, which brought him to earn a Grammy the most important prize in the world of music.

In 1986 Ziggy formed his first band that was called Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, the first album they released was called “Hey World” and it was more related to pop that reggae.

But later, in 1988, they recorded their second production called “Conscious Party” a fully turned-fledged reggae album produced by Virgin label. In this LP was the song “Tomorrow People”, which is considered as one of the greatest hits that Ziggy had throughout his career.

Ziggy’s career has a wide range of 13 studio productions and also formed his own record label called “Ghetto Youth United” in Kingston, Jamaica, with the aim to publicize the new values of reggae. This project included his brother, who also became very famous within the environment of reggae, Damian Marley.

Ziggy inherited not only the love for music from his father, but also the need for personal involvement in humanitarian activities, that is why he was named “Young Ambassador of the United Nations”. In addition, helped and took part in projects being undertaken by UNICEF and eventually founded a foundation called URGE (Unlimited Resources Giving Enlightenment).

Also, if while watching one of his videos you have the impression that you have seen him before; it is perhaps because he also worked as an actor in various films like “The Shrink is In” or “New York Undercover.” Perhaps the most famous of his films is “Shark Tale,” released in 2004, in which he used his voice to give life to the Rastafarian Ernie squid. He also did a duet with Sean Paul to make the official song of the movie “Three Little Birds,” a song originally composed his father.

More information: http://www.lacigale.fr/en/

La Cigale: 120 bd Rochechouart, 75018 Paris

MiLK

Ziggy is now married to Orly Agai and has two sons (Judah Victoria Marley, who is 6 and Gideon Robert Nesta Marley, who is 4), but that did not stop him to tour around the world. If you want to see him live and enjoy a true musical show, rent apartments in Paris and enjoy the concert that will be on the 4th of July 4 at La Cigale.

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Translated by: Hans
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In the wide universe of the Net, which remains always the same and always different at the same time, there is a cult film that is circulating. It formulates an interesting hypothesis that has been convincingly argued. According to it, the director Stanley Kubrick –who said once that directing a film is like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park– is the alleged author of the polemic images that are supposedly the documentary evidence of the first man in the moon.

That does not necessarily mean that the mission of Apollo 11 was just a big farce. It would simply prove that fiction is often the best way to generate images that can transmit convincingly the feeling of reality. It is necessary to fake something so that it can be really credible. The government of the United States feared that “real” images of their spacecraft, captured by the television cameras, seemed fake to the spectators.

After having initially refused the idea, Kubrick, who by that time was filming his seminal science fiction and philosophical movie “A space Odyssey”- during the editing process in which the scenes of the moon would have been filmed-, apparently accepted to take part in the farce, with the condition that one of the most sophisticated and advanced optical inventions of the NASA would be provided to him as payment: a lens whose prodigious sensitivity would allow him to film movies only using a candlelight. The moon scenes would have been filmed on a Sunday in absolute secrecy. This would have been the best kept secret (which corresponds to the well known need of the humankind to find an explanation for everything, no matter how improbable or imaginative it can be) of the unforgettable movie Barry Lyndon, in which Kubrick reproduced the awesomeness of the paintings from the 18^th century with an impressive accuracy, in the interior and exterior scenes, where the characters are often seen on the candlelight.

It was said once that somehow Barry Lyndon is to the 18^th century painting as Spartacus is to the ancient Roman classical statues, with his devotion to the cult of the body and to the folds of the robes. Both of them could be considered as important films in their genre. This is also the case of each one of Kubrick’s films, in which he directed black cinema, comedy, science fiction, horror and epic movies. He also explored methods that nobody else had explored before, and with each one of his movies, he left a mark on the history of cinema, as well as on his spectators’ minds.

Until July the 31^st, the exhibition of Kubrick’s works can be seen at the Cinémathèque Française (http://www.cinematheque.fr/). This exhibition is the perfect introduction to his incomparable universe.

Paul Oilzum

The exposition, which was organized in collaboration with his wife, Christiane Kubrick, also analyses two of his biggest projects, the movies about Napoleon and the Nazi concentration camps. Do not miss this exhibition while staying in apartments in Paris

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Translated by: Hans
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Throughout the history of occultism, there hasn’t been a more brilliant and mysterious character that the Count of Saint Germain. Most biographies seem to place his life between 1696 and 1784 but if we consider the mystery of his legend we will dismiss any time frame.

Saint Germain may be or may not be eternal, for once immortality is removed  his figure becomes vague, just like other cases of celebrities such as Fulcanelli (author of dark books where he hides the formula to eternal life) or Aleister Crowley. It is the Gnostic myth of Sophia and Simon the Magician which make his figure resonate. Famous and shocking is the story about an elderly French woman who was the ambassadors wife in Venice in the sixties of the seventeenth century and told him how much he resembled his father, Saint Germain said that it was not his father but he who remembered her so well, then providing convincing details of the time in which they had both met in the Italian city. Naturally he  looked exactly the same, this was , regardless of his immutable physical appearance, a consummate dandy with a strict and elegant black dressing code  which was altered only by collars, cuffs of white linen and the brightness of his buckle of his shoes and the diamond rings he wore on his fingers. It is also said that he had  loose gemstones and diamonds in his pockets rather than money.

Astonishing were his admirably commentaries on his speeches at the Council of Nicea in 325, where he called for the canonization of the mother of the Virgin Mary, Santa Ana, under the good memories that she had  kept  at the wedding at Cana and warned  Christ to be careful because she foresaw a  tragic ending

No one ever knew what was his true name and origin was. He had also an itinerant life. Sometimes he vanished entirely from his surrounding until suddenly reappearing from Asia or the European courts. There he was devoted to the study of ancient Vedic texts written in Sanskrit language, language which like French, German, Italian, Chinese and Arab he spoke fluently and whose extensive wisdom was  incorporated in his own writings of cabalistic, esoteric and alchemical nature which eventually became some of the basic pillars of theosophy as much of this strange new pseudo-discipline of metaphysics called rather childishly Occultism.

Saint Germain, who naturally, as their “contemporaries” Casanova and Mozart is immediately associated with the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, was  part of an adventurer, courtier, inventor, writer, mathematician, composer, pianist and violinist but essentially a philosopher, that is in the language of the adepts, an alchemist, an Occultist.

Paul Oilzum

His lab was not far from the frightful tower of Saint-Jacques. It is said that he is still working on certain nights, so maybe it is not impossible to bump into him when you rent apartments in Paris

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Translated by: Marc
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The history of human creation abounds in cases of artists who after enjoying a spell of critical and / or public admiration, disappear suddenly without a trace, leaving behind only the obscure references made in their art works, which become a point of obsession and scrutiny for some specialist or other.

The master pieces of literature, theatre, music, art etc are not as monumental as it is often so easy to believe, but merely subjects of all the conditions of the time, and sensibilities which accompany them. Far from the history of “taste” being linear, and progressive, we can say that there have been eras which for different reasons resound with other, distant ones – eras which have points of contact much stronger than with the ones which precede or follow them. As Morelli pointed out, it wouldn’t make sense to posit an absolute temporal history. Perhaps more likely, there are different epochs which parallel, coinciding in preoccupations and aesthetic sensibilities. And the effect is, like with life in general, is fragmentary.

The Odyssey, to give an example, didn’t actually get its current legendary status until the 18th century, and it was only down to a series of circumstances. At the same time, one only has to to revisit historical sources to see the considerable number of artists who were lauded as essential at their time, only to fall off the cultural radar shortly after. So thanks to resonances between eras, there have been certain artists who have been rediscovered.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Dutch painter and all round character Kees Van Dongen (1877-1968) shared, in the legendary Bateau Lavoir in bohemian neighbourhood Montmartre, a home and workshop with Pablo Picasso (as well as some model or other, like Fernande Olivier, companion to the Malaga artist, who has been immortalised in iconic paintings such as The Women of Avignon). Van Dongen’s work gradually infiltrated the bourgeoisie scene, until he became one of the key figures of modern art of the time – to the point that by the 1920s, he had moved to Montparnasse, and was the biggest portraitist in the art world of the between war period. This, along with his reputation as a central figure of the party scene, has led to comparisons with Andy Warhol.

His book, a powerful work of Fauvist art (he was one of the principal exponents of the movement) illustrates just one side to his extravagant personality – the focus of the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris (http://www.mam.paris.fr/en/expositions/van-dongen), which is on until the 17th of July. The show succeeds in revalidating his name, identifying him as one of the great artists of the 20th century.

Paul Oilzum

Walking through the huge, varied show, which dates up to 1931 – the year the artist fell from grace, and was accused of repeating himself. A wonderful exhibition to visit if you rent apartments in Paris

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Translated by: Poppy
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In at least three chapters of his beautiful and melancholic book “The eight year calculation” the Samoan writer Albert Hanover analyses different opinions about the concept of country. Due to the nomadic lifestyle that he has had since he was a kid, Hanover never felt that cultural roots were something physical. From a very young age, he associated the sense of national belonging with the territory of imagination. For him, childhood, or the memories about it can be considered as one’s country (which gives the country a mobile and mutable nature that matched well with his ideas on identity and life, as well as with his itinerant existence). He also considers language as one’s country –not only native language, but also all the languages spoken by an individual, which represent a common territory and a worldview of all the inhabitants of a country-. Once, he even was surprised to read the case of a writer who considered that his only country was the Portuguese language. For Hanover this was even more beautiful when he found out that the writer did not either speak or understand that language.

It was alsox difficult for him to identify himself with only one city. He loved several of the cities where he had lived, in a painful and passionate way, without any hierarchical order. He loved especially those cities where one feels a stronger bond as one is allowed to feel like a foreigner in its streets. He even knew that he could belong to some cities he had never visited. He also knew that despite his feelings of affection for those cities, he did not feel that he belonged to other cities where he had lived for several years. One of the cities he loved was Paris. Unlike San Francisco, (one of his favorite cities), he did know Paris directly but he had never lived there, despite the fact that in almost five occasions he was about to move there with his family, before he was 16. Nevertheless, the fact that he did not live there did not prevent him from having memories and dreams with hundreds of its streets and squares.

The cinema allowed him to get to know Paris so well. Since his adolescence, Hanover had seen so many New Wave movies that took place in the capital of France, to the point that he felt he was born and raised in Paris, where he had also suffered the pain of unrequited love. It was a girl from the French Musical Youth (Jeunesses Musicales de France) who preferred to be his friend and not his lover.

Later, he saw that story reflected in a short movie directed by Truffait, Antoine et Colette, which is the second, out of five movies based on the biography of Antoine Doinel. When he observed the character of the girl, he did not care that his heart had been broken into pieces or the consequences that this first experience would have in his future sentimental life.

That girl he saw in the movie was Marie-France Pisier, one of the legends of the New Wave and also of May 1968. On April 2011, her body was found floating in the swimming pool of her home in Saint Cyr sur Mer.

Paul Oilzum

This is a new episode of the end of a glorious time that perhaps did not change the world, but that did leave us ineffaceable images of fabulous countries where the sea roars below all the apartments in Paris

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Translated by: Hans
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In at least three chapters of his beautiful and melancholic book “The eight year calculation” the Samoan writer Albert Hanover analyses different opinions about the concept of country. Due to the nomadic lifestyle that he has had since he was a kid, Hanover never felt that cultural roots were something physical. From a very young age, he associated the sense of national belonging with the territory of imagination. For him, childhood, or the memories about it can be considered as one’s country (which gives the country a mobile and mutable nature that matched well with his ideas on identity and life, as well as with his itinerant existence). He also considers language as one’s country –not only native language, but also all the languages spoken by an individual, which represent a common territory and a worldview of all the inhabitants of a country-. Once, he even was surprised to read the case of a writer who considered that his only country was the Portuguese language. For Hanover this was even more beautiful when he found out that the writer did not either speak or understand that language.

It was alsox difficult for him to identify himself with only one city. He loved several of the cities where he had lived, in a painful and passionate way, without any hierarchical order. He loved especially those cities where one feels a stronger bond as one is allowed to feel like a foreigner in its streets. He even knew that he could belong to some cities he had never visited. He also knew that despite his feelings of affection for those cities, he did not feel that he belonged to other cities where he had lived for several years. One of the cities he loved was Paris. Unlike San Francisco, (one of his favorite cities), he did know Paris directly but he had never lived there, despite the fact that in almost five occasions he was about to move there with his family, before he was 16. Nevertheless, the fact that he did not live there did not prevent him from having memories and dreams with hundreds of its streets and squares.

The cinema allowed him to get to know Paris so well. Since his adolescence, Hanover had seen so many New Wave movies that took place in the capital of France, to the point that he felt he was born and raised in Paris, where he had also suffered the pain of unrequited love. It was a girl from the French Musical Youth (Jeunesses Musicales de France) who preferred to be his friend and not his lover.

Later, he saw that story reflected in a short movie directed by Truffait, Antoine et Colette, which is the second, out of five movies based on the biography of Antoine Doinel. When he observed the character of the girl, he did not care that his heart had been broken into pieces or the consequences that this first experience would have in his future sentimental life.

That girl he saw in the movie was Marie-France Pisier, one of the legends of the New Wave and also of May 1968. On April 2011, her body was found floating in the swimming pool of her home in Saint Cyr sur Mer.

Paul Oilzum

This is a new episode of the end of a glorious time that perhaps did not change the world, but that did leave us ineffaceable images of fabulous countries where the sea roars below all the apartments in Paris

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Translated by: Hans
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Their forms were strange, but some of them played a key role in the development of Greece. Such is the case of Cecrops, whose body was a blend of man and snake, held by most of the Hellenic mythological traditions as the first king of Athens. These same traditions often praise and highlight his  intelligence and his undoubted talent for the political game. Cecrops would not only have invented writing and designed the blueprint for census, but also men would have  learned the art of building walls and burying  their dead from him. Gifted for metaphor, it was he who abolished the practice of sacrifice based on blood and replaced it by offerings of barley cakes. All these actions seem to emphasize the power of mediation between the then existing powers, illustrated by his own anatomy, where, not unlike perhaps the representation of  the God of medicine and his son of Apollo, Asclepius, Apollo himself torn by from his dead mother’s womb while the body is lying out  on a funeral pyre in crackoling flames, increasing the element  of virility and energy balanced by the feminine force  that evolved from the primordial earth symbolized by the serpent.

Such power was a mediating role in the religious patronage of Athens. According to the stories of Apollodorus the reign of Cecrops coincided with the period when the Gods decided to establish themselves as devoted cults in the Greek cities. Poseidon and Athena were the main contenders in the dispute for the control of the cities of Attica. In this context Poseidon, who created a spring of fresh water in the city after hitting the ground with his trident, claimed to be the first to come to Athens. But the gods, urged by Zeus to settle the issue as judges tended to favor giving the city of Athens to Athena  after hearing the testimony of Cecrops, who told Zues that  the goddess had planted an olive tree in the city prior to the arrival of Poseidon.

Some of the best statues representing Cecrops and Athena can be seen in Paris at the Louvre (http://www.louvre.fr/llv/commun/home.jsp)

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Paul Oilzum

When you rent apartments in Paris strolling through the magnificent rooms of the museum dedicated to the Hellenic statuary is not a bad way to feel the numinous vertigo of Greek mythology.

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Translated by: Marc
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This building had been a vacant apartment from 10 years when some artists were able to make their way from the back window, began to settle inside. The society complained against the illegal occupation, and the artists approached the mayor of Paris for help. He promised to regularize the premises, and the building was left to the renovators. After waiting for years, they re-entered a real workplace, but this time through the front door as the atmosphere was legal. In fact the mayor himself welcomed them. With this 59 Rivoli is no more an artist squat, it is an after squat. “The after squat Rivoli”.

The building is now a multidisciplinary area which combines different artistic practices representing a wide range of contemporary expression (painting, sculpture, installations, video, photo, collage, dance, and singing) with a gallery at 1^st and 2^nd floor where anybody can walk through and see magnificent creations of renowned artists. There is also a cosmopolitan place that favors the mixing of cultures by allowing artists from around the world, share their artistic practices within the collective. This is an unusual way of expressing something, in a manner deconsecrating. The workshops are indeed open to the public. The artists have been waiting impatiently.

With the most fascinating and different collections, you will be compelled to buy something once you visits the place and if you don’t like them, you can at least appreciate the toil and struggle they have gone through.

The 59 Rivoli welcomes you from Tuesday to Sunday (closed Mondays)
Saturday from 11h to 20h and every other day from 13h to 20h.

The building is located at 59, Rue De Rivoli, Paris, 75001. http://www.59rivoli.org/

amit bansal

If you do not want to spend a large sum of money, to buy some of the revolutionized paintings of extraordinary talented artists, then you must rent apartments in Paris and you can go to 59, Rue De Rivoli and buy anything you like from these lovely artists.

Until the 4^th of July the Pompidou Center will exhibit Réinstallations, the first retrospective by François Morellet, organized with 27 installations created from the beginning of the 1960’s until 2005, when they were exhibited on the Nuit Blanche (White night) on the banks of the Seine River. His work, conceived as an ephemeral installation, was done in situ and was built for precise places with light methods.

François Morellet was born in Cholet, Maine et Loire, France, in 1926. He is a contemporary painter, engraver and sculptor. He is an exponent of the geometric abstraction. The beginning of his career was marked by the figurative art. Only until the 50’s he adopted a pictorial language of simple geometric shapes, where squares, triangles and straight lines would become his esthetic mark.

By the decade of the 1960’s, he joined the discussions about art, becoming part of the Groupe Recherche d’Art Visuel (Visual Art Research Group), which was formed by artists like Horacio García Rossi, Hugo de Marco, Julio Le Parc, among others. They devoted themselves to study the lighting, chromatic and visual effects of art. Based on these effects, they created works that encouraged the participation of spectators. The group, which was dissolved in 1968, made a manifesto that emphasized the role of the interpretation of works over materials, which attributed a higher value to the spectator than to the work itself.

That time, Morellet started creating the installations, as well as interesting works with neon, slide-projections and movement. In his work Labyrinths he used intermittent neon tubes. Nevertheless, the geometrical abstraction continued to be a tendency in the aesthetic composition of his works and installations.

Grids, lines, circles and geometric lattices are the main elements of Morellet’s works. This way, the perfect architecture of each detail, where even the irregularities are finely organized, gives the spectator the impression of a studied and refined meticulosity.

It is inevitable to think about Piet Mondrian’s work as one observes Morellet’s lighting installations, which are marked by mathematical precision when organizing the grids in a precise place.

The installations that will be presented at this exhibition are not included in the catalogs of the usual exhibitions, because the process of creating a catalog takes more time than creating the installations, especially when Morellet adapts them to the specific space they will occupy.  For that reason, seeing one of his installations is an opportunity to observe a unique work, which cannot be seen in any other museum.

His work “Reflections in water deformed by the spectator” is composed of a grid with 6 white neon bars on a black background, where there is another grid deformed by neon bars. The work has the marvelous rigidity of minimalism and the seriousness of conceptual art, which leads us to see the contradiction caused by the apparent movement of a motionless place, as well as light and the contrasts between the black background and the white tubes.

For more information, please visit: http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/AllExpositions/79D12BE7B900936CC12577E50038C91D?OpenDocument&sessionM=2.2.1&L=2

Nancy Guzman

Morellet’s works are beautiful, delicate and sensitive. That is why visiting the Pompidou Center is such a great idea. For having a relaxing stay, rent apartments in Paris near the Pompidou Center.

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Translated by: Hans
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The 2011 world tour of The Wall Live is coming to the Paris Bercy Omnisports on June 30. Roger Waters will perform two concerts which promise to be highlights of the Paris summer events calendar.

Georges Roger Waters was born in Great Bookhan, Surrey, England, in 1943. His father, Erick Water, was a teacher and soldier who died in the Battle of Anzio in Italy during the Second World War when Roger was only 5 months old. After this Roger’s mother, a primary school teacher, moved with her children to Cambridge.

Roger went to Cambridgeshire High School where he met Syd  Barret and David Gilmour, with whom he would go on to form Pink Floyd. At the early age of 15 he became involved in the anti-war movement, designing posters in support of nuclear disarmament and proselytising against warfare. In 1962 he began a degree in architecture at the University of Westminster where he met Nick Mason and Richard Wright – who would also become founding members of Pink Floyd.

The band began at the end of the 60s, with Waters playing bass and sharing lead vocal duties with Syd Barret. When Barret left, Gilmour became the other singer in the group. By 1968, Waters was the conceptual leader of the band and the principal composer of the songs that would garner them most success, such as The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall.

In 1985, owing to creative differences, Waters left Pink Floyd and began a legal battle for the name and creative rights of the songs. The dispute over rights was only resolved in 1987.

His extraordinary ability to create innovative music has turned Waters into an icon of conceptual music. His eclecticism led him to compose a three-act opera in 2005 called Ça Ira, with a libretto by Roda Gil and his wife Nadine Delahaye, based on the French Revolution.

Nonetheless, the piece of music that had the greatest and most long-lasting repercussions was The Wall, a harsh criticism of the rigid British education system which attacked the Victorian-style culture of the country’s society. In 2010 he began The Wall Live tour, a critically acclaimed performance that has been described as the most ambitious and complex rock show ever performed.

In writing The Wall, Waters became an emblem for a generation, a figure who successfully combined musical creation with social protest. Since 2007 Waters has dedicated much of his energy to warning the world about the dangers of climate change.

For more information: http://www.lastfm.es/venue/8781813+POPB+%252F+Palais+Omnisports+de+Paris-

Nancy Guzman

Waters is a true legend of rock, so if you have the chance to book apartments in Paris during these dates then make sure you don’t miss The Wall Live.

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Translated by: Ben Palmer
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