Dragobete

'Dragobete, the traditional lovers’ day in Romania, is celebrated on February 24, ten days after the Western European and American counterpart Valentine’s Day. The Dragobete traditional story goes that, clothed with holiday suits, young men and women meet in front of the church and go searching the woods and meadows for spring flowers. They sit around fire on the hills of the village and talk. At noon, the girls run to the village, each followed by one boy who had fallen for them. If the boy is fast and reaches the girl of his choice and if she likes him, she kisses him in front of everyone.  This tradition triggered the expression “Dragobete kisses the girls!” (Dragobetele saruta fetele). The kiss show the two lovers’ engagement, Dragobete being an opportunity to show the love in front of the community.

There are a number of Dragobete customs in rural areas, many of which are not kept by modern Romanians anymore. On this day, no animals are sacrificed because it would ruin the point of mating. In the old days, single women used to gather the last remnants of snow, called “the fairies’ snow”, and the water resulted from the melted snow was used throughout the year for various beauty treatments and love spells.

The tradition goes that men should not hurt women, nor argue with them, otherwise they will not do well the whole year. Youngsters believe that on this day they should be joyous and respect the holiday, so that they can be in love the whole year.'

sursa : romania-insider.com 

Vlad Condurache, vlad@romania-insider.com

Corina Saceanu, corina@romania-insider.com

Constantin Brâncuși

'Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.' 

Constantin Brancusi 

Constantin Brâncuși
portrait by Daliana Pacuraru 

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BIO

Constantin Brancusi was born February 19, 1876, in Hobitza, Romania and was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered a pioneer of modernism, one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought inspiration in non-European cultures as a source of primitive exoticism, as did Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, André Derain and others. But other influences emerge from Romanian folk art traceable through Byzantine and Dionysian traditions.He studied art at the Scoala de Meserii (school of arts and crafts) in Craiova from 1894 to 1898 and at the Scoala Natzionala de Arte Frumoase (national school of fine arts) in Bucharest from 1898 to 1901. Eager to continue his education in Paris, Brancusi arrived there in 1904 and enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1905. The following year, his sculpture was shown at the Salon d’Automne, where he met Auguste Rodin.
Soon after 1907, Brancusi’s mature period began. The sculptor had settled in Paris but throughout these years returned frequently to Bucharest and exhibited there almost every year. In Paris, his friends included Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, and Henri Rousseau. In 1913, five of Brancusi’s sculptures were included in the Armory Show in New York. Alfred Stieglitz presented the first solo show of Brancusi’s work at his gallery “291,” New York, in 1914. Brancusi was never a member of any organized artistic movement, although he associated with Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, and many other Dadaists in the early 1920s. In 1921, he was honored with a special issue of The Little Review. He traveled to the United States twice in 1926 to attend his solo shows at Wildenstein and at the Brummer Gallery in New York. The following year, a historic trial was initiated in the United States to determine whether Brancusi’s Bird in Space was liable for duty as a manufactured object or as a work of art. The court decided in 1928 that the sculpture was a work of art.
Brancusi traveled extensively in the 1930s, visiting India and Egypt as well as European countries. He was commissioned to create a war memorial for a park in Turgu Jiu, Romania, in 1935, and designed a complex that included gates, tables, stools, and an Endless Column. After 1939, Brancusi continued to work in Paris. His last sculpture, a plaster Grand Coq, was completed in 1949. In 1952, Brancusi became a French citizen. He died March 16, 1957, in Paris.(guggenheim )

http://www.yatzer.com/brancusi-in-new-york-paul-kasmin-gallery

Age Of Loneliness

Carly don't be sad
Life is crazy
Life is mad
Don't be afraid

Carly Don't be sad
That's your destiny
The only chance
Take it, take it in your hands

Songwriters: DUDLEY, ANNE/COLEMAN, JEREMY/CRETU, MICHAEL

Age Of Loneliness lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group

Dan Puric

"Visul meu este ca toti oamenii sa viseze. Romanul a uitat sa viseze, stie numai sa se conduca dupa reguli. Daca incetam sa visam, si aici ma refer la vis ca posibilitate, suntem distrusi." 

Dan Puric 

Hearts for Sale

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/daliana-pacuraru.html?tab=artworkgalleries&artworkgalleryid=64594

"Stairway to Heaven" is a song by the English rock band Led Zeppelin. It was composed by guitarist Jimmy Page and vocalist Robert Plant for the band's fourth unnamed studio album, (see Led Zeppelin IV (1971)). The song was voted #3 in 2000 by VH1 on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock Songs.[1] It was the most requested song on FM radio stations in the United States in the 1970s, despite never having been released as a single there.[2] In November 2007, through download sales promoting Led Zeppelin's Mothership release, "Stairway to Heaven" hit #37 on the UK Singles Chart

The Horse God Built

“For anybody who loves horses, and for all of those who are thrilled by horse racing and the behind-the-scenes drama of the track, The Horse That God Built is must reading."
--Michael Korda, author of Horse People

Secretariat A Moment of Eternity 

Secretariat tribute - The Chronicle of the Horse

Most of us know the legend of Secretariat, the tall, handsome chestnut racehorse whose string of honors runs long and rich: the only two-year-old ever to win Horse of the Year, in 1972; winner in 1973 of the Triple Crown, his times in all three races still unsurpassed; featured on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated; the only horse listed on ESPN’s top fifty athletes of the twentieth century (ahead of Mickey Mantle). His final race at Toronto’s Woodbine Racetrack is a touchstone memory for horse lovers everywhere. Yet while Secretariat will be remembered forever, one man, Eddie “Shorty” Sweat, who was pivotal to the great horse’s success, has been all but forgotten---until now.

In The Horse God Built, bestselling equestrian writer Lawrence Scanlan has written a tribute to an exceptional man that is also a backroads journey to a corner of the racing world rarely visited. As a young black man growing up in South Carolina, Eddie Sweat struggled at several occupations before settling on the job he was born for---groom to North America’s finest racehorses. As Secretariat’s groom, loyal friend, and protector, Eddie understood the horse far better than anyone else. A wildly generous man who could read a horse with his eyes, he shared in little of the financial success or glamour of Secretariat’s wins on the track, but won the heart of Big Red with his soft words and relentless devotion.

In Scanlan’s rich narrative, we get a groom’s-eye view of the racing world and the vantage of a man who spent every possible moment with the horse he loved, yet who often basked in the horse’s glory from the sidelines. More than anything else, The Horse God Built is a moving portrait of the powerful bond between human and horse.

Secretariat (March 30, 1970 – October 4, 1989) was an American Thoroughbred racehorse that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. He set race records in all three events in the series – the Kentucky Derby (1:59 2/5), the Preakness Stakes (1:53), and the Belmont Stakes (2:24) – records that still stand today

( wiki )