A Love Poem…

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go
To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star
This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far
To fight for [...]

Rose Antonia Maria Valland (November 1, 1898 - September 18, 1980) was a French art historian, a member of the French Resistance, a captain in the French military, and one of the most decorated women in French history. She secretly recorded details of the Nazi plundering of National French and private Jewish owned art from [...]

The mezzo-soprano (although she commonly sang soprano parts) Maria Malibran (March 24, 1808 – September 23, 1836), was one of the most famous opera singers of the 19th century. Malibran was known for her stormy personality and dramatic intensity, becoming a legendary figure after her death at age 28. Contemporary accounts of her voice describe [...]

Cecilia Bartoli (Italian pronunciation: [tʃeˈtʃilja ˈbartoli]; born June 4, 1966 in Rome) is an Italian mezzo-soprano opera singer and recitalist. She is best-known for her interpretation of the music of Mozart and Rossini, as well as for her performances of lesser-known Baroque and classical music. She is known for having the versatility to play both [...]

Soundtrack

One of the more familiar tunes is the opening theme, taken from the folk ballad “The Green Leaves of Summer”, composed by Dimitri Tiomkin and Paul Francis Webster for the opening of John Wayne’s movie “The Alamo” (1960). As is usual for a Quentin Tarantino film, the music used in the film is eclectic, but [...]

“We zijn nu op het punt aanbeland, omdat dat nou eenmaal zo hoort, om je een concept voor te leggen. Dit is misschien, maar hopelijk niet verassend, maar Gossy heeft geen concept. De bedoeling van een concept, zegt men, is om je duidelijk te maken waar we naar toe willen. Nou, wij van Gossy weten [...]

The Decameron (subtitle: Prencipe Galeotto) is a collection of 100 novellas by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, probably begun in 1350 and finished in 1353. It is a medieval allegorical work best known for its bawdy tales of love, appearing in all its possibilities from the erotic to the tragic. Some believe many parts of the [...]

In Greek culture each of the nine Muses oversaw a different field of human creation:

Calliope (the ‘beautiful of speech’): chief of the muses and muse of epic or heroic poetry
Clio (the ‘glorious one’): muse of history
Erato (the ‘amorous one’): muse of love or erotic poetry, lyrics, and marriage songs
Euterpe (the ‘well-pleasing’): muse of music and [...]

Miss Julie (Swedish: Fröken Julie) is a naturalistic play written in 1888 by August Strindberg dealing with class, love/lust, the battle of the sexes, and the interaction among them. Set on midsummer night of 1894 on the estate of a Count in Sweden, the young woman of the title, attempting to escape an existence cramped [...]

“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”-Goethe
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…..
As long as I love Beauty I am young,
Am young or old as I love more or less;
When Beauty is not heeded or seems stale,
My life’s a cheat, let Death end my distress.
William Henry Davies

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art…

http://www.maysstuff.com/womenid.htm

Western art is the art of European Countries, and those parts of the world that have come to follow predominantly European cultural traditions such as the Americas.
Written histories of Western art often begin with the art of the Ancient Middle East, Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Aegean civilisations, [...]

http://missaniela.com/

Photography (IPA: [fә'tɒgrәfi] or IPA: [fә'tɑːgrәfi][1]) (from Greek φωτο and γραφία) is the process, activity and art of creating still or moving pictures by recording radiation on a sensitive medium, such as a film, or an electronic sensor. Light patterns reflected or emitted from objects activate a sensitive chemical or electronic sensor during a timed exposure, usually [...]

Fantasy is a genre that uses magic and other supernatural forms as a primary element of plot, theme, and/or setting. Fantasy is generally distinguished from science fiction and horror by the expectation that it steers clear of technological and macabre themes, respectively, though there is a great deal of overlap between the three (collectively known [...]

When I have Fears That I may Cease To Be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high - piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may [...]

“A good writer or artist possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.-”Friedrich Nietzsche
“It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.“-Friedrich Nietzsche
“Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.”-Friedrich Nietzsche
“The best [...]

“The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we’re passing one another without a look of recognition.” -Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary [...]

“The whole idea of changing the future has been brought up before, but this time instead of changing the future by altering the past it brings new perspective by altering the present by adding new info from the future”
http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/The_Jacket.html

The future: time’s excuse
to frighten us; too vast
a project, too large a morsel
for the heart’s mouth.
Future, who won‘t wait for you?
Everyone is going there.
It suffices you to deepen
the absence that we are.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Kill Bill is the fourth film by writer-director Quentin Tarantino. Originally conceived as one film, it was released in two separate volumes (in late 2003 and early 2004) due to its running time of approximately four hours. The movie is an epic-length revenge drama, with homages to earlier film genres, such as Hong Kong martial [...]

Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 — January 28, 1996), born Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (Russian: Иосиф Александрович Бродский) was a Russian poet and essayist who won the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature and was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992.
In 1963, he was arrested and in 1964 charged with parasitism by the [...]

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of William Shakespeare about two teenage “star-cross’d lovers“[1] whose untimely deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare’s most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays.

I dreamed as in my bed I lay,
All night’s fathomless wisdom come,
That I had shorn my locks away
And laid them on Love’s lettered tomb:
But something bore them out of sight
In a great tumult of the air,
And after nailed upon the night
Berenice’s burning hair.
William Butler Yeats

At least 24 operas have been based on Romeo and Juliet.[127] The earliest, Romeo und Julie in 1776, a Singspiel by Georg Benda, omits much of the action of the play and most of its characters, and has a happy ending. It is occasionally revived. The best-known is Gounod’s 1867 Roméo et Juliette (libretto by [...]

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow–
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream [...]

In visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departed-
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.
Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?
That holy dream- that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me [...]

All people dream, but not equally.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind,
Wake in the morning to find that it was vanity.
But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people,
For they dream their dreams with open eyes,
And make them come true.
D.H Lawrence

“Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.“-Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005), was an acclaimed American writer born in Canada of Russian-Jewish origin. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and the National Medal of Arts in 1988.[1]
Bellow’s [...]

“The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?”-D.A.F de Sade
Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, Marquis de Sade (June 2, 1740 – December 2, [...]

To Memory
Strange Power, I know not what thou art,
Murderer or mistress of my heart.
I know I’d rather meet the blow
Of my most unrelenting foe
Than live—as now I live—to be
Slain twenty times a day by thee.
Yet, when I would command thee hence,
Thou mockest at the vain pretence,
Murmuring in mine ear a song
Once loved, alas! forgotten long;
And [...]

Natalie Wood, born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko (July 20, 1938 – November 29, 1981) was an American actress.
Following her film debut at the age of five, Wood became a successful child actor in such films as Miracle on 34th Street (1947). A well received performance opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), brought her [...]

“O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.“-William Shakespeare
Don Quixote is a ballet originally staged in four acts and eight scenes, based on an episode taken from the famous novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Originally choreographed by Marius Petipa to the music of Ludwig [...]

“And muse on Nature with a poet’s eye.“-Thomas Campbell
Plot outline
The plot is taken from two chapters in Cervantes’ novel of the same name. It concerns the unsuccessful attempt by the rich and foppish Gamache (Camacho in Cervantes’s novel) to marry the beautiful Kitri (known as Quiteria in the novel), who in turn is in love [...]

“Illustrious acts high raptures do infuse, And every conqueror creates a muse.“-Edmund Waller
Analysis
Today Don Quixote is considered one of the most joyous and festive of the classical ballets, brimming with spectacular virtuoso dancing. At the same time this abundance of dancing is well organised, showing a clear choreographic and dramatic vision (particularly in the Kirov [...]

http://www.ballerinagallery.com/makhalin.htm

Ballet is a formalized form of dance with its origins in the French court, further developed in France and Russia as a concert dance form. It is a highly technical form of dance with its own vocabulary. It is primarily performed with the accompaniment of classical music. It has been influential as a form of [...]

http://bacharachonline.com/

http://www.elviscostello.com/

That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made [...]

“I hated the self created in her by others. Others feel because of her; and because of her, others write poetry; because of her, others hate; others, like Henry, love her in spite of themselves.”-Anais Nin

June met Henry Miller in 1923 when she worked as a taxi dancer on broadway in New York and [...]

Who gave thee, O Beauty!
The keys of this breast,
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Say when in lapsed ages
Thee knew I of old;
Or what was the service
For which I was sold?
When first my eyes saw thee,
I found me thy thrall,
By magical drawings,
Sweet tyrant of all!
I drank at thy fountain
False waters of thirst;
Thou intimate stranger,
Thou latest and [...]

“I experienced first popularity
as boys queued up and asked to read
the comic strip under my slip.
One offered half a snickers
so I lifted my skirt.”-Angela Readman
http://www.accidentalpoet.co.uk/

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”-Rachmaninoff
http://www.rachmaninoff.org/

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the [...]

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er [...]

Cantonese opera is one of the major categories in Chinese opera, originating in southern China’s Cantonese culture. It is popular in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Malaysia. Like all versions of Chinese opera, it is a traditional Chinese art form, involving music, singing, martial arts, acrobatics, and acting. 粵劇 (Yuèjù) should not be [...]

“O Muses,O high genius,aid me now!
O memory that engraved the things i saw,
Here shall your worth be manifest to all!”-Dante Alighieri

‘O for a Muse of fire,that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
Akingdom for a stage,princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!”-William Shakespeare
In Greek mythology, the Muses (Ancient Greek αἱ μοῦσαι, hai moũsai [1]: [...]

Wie bouwde Thebe met de zeven torens?
In de boeken staan de namen van koningen.
Hebben die koningen de stenen gesleept?
En het meermaals verwoeste Babylon -
Wie bouwde het zovele malen op?
In welke huizen van het goudstralende Lima
Woonde de bouwvakkers?
Waarheen gingen ’s avonds, nadat de Chinese muur klaar was
De metselaars?
Het grote Rome
Is vol van triomfbogen. Wie bouwde ze?
Over [...]

You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain;
I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care.
As the peach-blossom flows down stream
and is gone into the unknown,
I have a world apart that is not among men.-Li Po

Throw away thy rod,
Throw away thy wrath :
O my God,
Take the gentle path.
…..
Though I [...]

The Yueju opera player, Mao Weitao is a household name. She is celebrated for her performances of the male role over the last 25 years, and is now the head of the famous Xiaobaihua troupe in Zhejiang province, a troupe especially well known for its all-women cast. Now 42 years of age, Mao Weitao is [...]

“I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.”-Franco Zeffirelli
Shaoxing opera (or Yueju - simplified Chinese: 越剧; traditional Chinese: 越劇; pinyin: Yuèjù , Yue opera) is a relatively new local Chinese opera popular in the southern regions of the Yangtze River. It originated [...]

Velen klagen erover, dat de woorden der wijzen altijd weer slechts gelijkenissen zijn,
niet te gebruiken in het dagelijkse leven,en alleen dat hebben wij.
Wanneer de wijze zegt:”ga naar de overzijde,”dan bedoelt hij niet dat je naar de overkant
moet gaan, wat je in ieder geval nog zou kunnen doen,als het resultaat de moeite waard
zou zijn, maar hij [...]

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.“-Edgar Allan Poe

A thing of beauty
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of [...]

The eyes of beauty
You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
But all the sea of sadness in my blood
Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o’er,
That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
By woman’s tooth and talon; ah, no more
Seek in [...]

http://www.kirov.com/
The Mariinsky Ballet, is a classical ballet company based at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Russia. Founded in the 19th Century and originally known as the Imperial Russian Ballet, the Mariinsky Ballet is one of the world’s leading ballet companies. Internationally, the Mariinsky Ballet is most commonly known by its former Soviet name the [...]

The flower invites the butterfly with no-mind;
The butterfly visits the flower with no-mind.
The flower opens, the butterfly comes;
The butterfly comes, the flower opens.
I don’t know others,
Others don’t know me.
By not-knowing we follow nature’s course.

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which exists independently of visual references to the world.[1] Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. [...]

“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.“-Jeremy Irons
http://www.jeremy-irons.com/

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.“-Aristotle

http://www.utelemper.com/

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away!
Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life’s busy throng,
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!
Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea
Mermaids are [...]

“I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms.“-Giacomo Casanova
http://www.federicofellini.com/

“For my future I have no concern, and as a true philosopher, I never would have any, for I know not what it may be.”-Giacomo Casanova
The future is a time period commonly understood to contain all events that have yet to occur.[1] It is the opposite of the past, and is the time after the [...]