I heart The Black Keys

This video made me super happy this morning.  Thanks to Veronika for originally posting it.  Turn it up and dance!

Petition to Protect Arts Funding in Toronto

City Hall in Toronto is currently considering cutting funding to the City's major arts organizations (there is a Star article here).  I am completely biased (since I used to work in the arts and have music and museum studies degrees), but I think that the arts are what make Toronto vibrant, progressive, and attractive to tourists and economic investment.  I have signed THIS PETITION and urge you to consider doing the same.   What is your take on municipal funding for the arts?

Art is the stored honey of the human soul.  

~Theodore Dreiser

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work.  I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw.  She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?"  

~Howard Ikemoto

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.  

~John Updike

Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.  

~John Lubbock

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.  

~Albert Camus

The question of common sense is always what is it good for? - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.  

~James Russell Lowell

Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money.  

~Ernst Levy

Poster from the National Campaign for the Arts in UK.

Yo-Yo Ma and Lil Buck

I found this incredibly moving - it's like Lil Buck is floating on sound...  And kudos to Mr. Ma for continuously exploring the boundaries of music and performance!  I can't wait to see him in 2012 with the TSO.  What do you think?

From YouTube:
The other day, I was lucky enough to be at an event to bring the arts back into schools and got to see an amazing collaboration between Yo-Yo Ma and a young dancer in LA, Lil Buck. Someone who knows Yo-Yo Ma had seen Lil Buck on YouTube and put them together. The dancing is Lil Buck's own creation and unlike anything I've seen. Hope you enjoy. --Spike Jonze

Thanks for the link David!

The Ballet Project

I just LOVE these photos by Dane Shitagi.  He combines his love of dance, fashion, and the urban landscape in arresting ways.  Having never danced in his life, he was inexplicable drawn to ballet dancers, with their amazing strength, physicality and emotion.  His Ballet Project now has 82,000 followers on Facebook.  I love the fluid, soft but incredibly powerful dancers in such unexpected locations.  For a great interview with Dane (and where I got most of this information) there is a great article here.

 Thanks for Kate of For me, For You for the images.