*Richard Hamilton (February 24, 1922 – September 13, 2011) was an English painter and collage artist.
The White Album: How Richard Hamilton Brought Conceptual Art to the Beatles
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/the-white-album-how-richard-hamilton-brought-conceptual-art-to-the-beatles
Jobs’s friend Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, had a private jet, and he designed its interior with a great deal of care. One day, Jobs decided that he wanted a private jet, too. He studied what Ellison had done. Then he set about to reproduce his friend’s design in its entirety—the same jet, the same reconfiguration, the same doors between the cabins. Actually, not in its entirety. Ellison’s jet “had a door between cabins with an open button and a close button,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs insisted that his have a single button that toggled. He didn’t like the polished stainless steel of the buttons, so he had them replaced with brushed metal ones.” Having hired Ellison’s designer, “pretty soon he was driving her crazy.” Of course he was. The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies—his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness—in the service of perfection. “I look at his airplane and mine,” Ellison says, “and everything he changed was better.”
FROM http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/14/the-tweaker
[Renata Scotto] began vocal studies when she was 14, and moved to Milan when she was 16. In 1952, when she was just 19, she made her debut as Violetta (La traviata) at the Teatro Nuovo, followed by her La Scala debut as Walter in La Wally. However, only a few years later she had a vocal crisis, losing most of her upper range; she now credits her recovery to Alfredo Kraus (himself renowned for a solid technique and vocal longevity), who introducing her to his teacher, Mercedes Llopart. After completely restudying her technique, she re-began her career as a coloratura, making her London debut at the Stoll Theater as Adina in L’elisir d’amore. She returned to La Scala, and in 1957, replaced Maria Callas (whom she had greatly admired) as Amina in La Sonnambula.
– See more at:
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/renata-scotto-mn0000681028/biography
http://musicalworld.com/artists/renata-scotto/biography.html
Thanks to the outstanding Facebook page A Mighty Girl, https://www.facebook.com/amightygirl I learned today about the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website: http://www.crmvet.org/index.htm Their stated purpose: “This website is created by Veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement (1951-1968). It is where we tell it like it was, the way we lived it, the way we saw it, the way we still see it. With a few minor exceptions, everything on this site was written, created, or spoken by Movement activists who were direct participants in the events they chronicle.”
The site contains a wealth of letters, diary entries, interviews, personal narratives, essays, and more. They also have a large collection of photographs taken during that era, allowing us to see history as it was being made.
This morning come two of Captain Cooke’s boys, whose voices are broke, and are gone from the Chapel, but have extraordinary skill; and they and my boy, with his broken voice, did sing three parts; their names were Blaewl and Loggings; but, notwithstanding their skill, yet to hear them sing with their broken voices, which they could not command to keep in tune, would make a man mad–so bad it was.
John Blow was an English Baroque composer and organist whose opera Venus & Adonis is considered the earliest surviving British opera and which is believed to have influenced Henry Purcell’s later opera Dido and Aeneas.
After Purcell, opera in England languished until the arrival of George Frideric Handel (born February 23, 1685) who, however, wrote most of his operas in Italian. Acis and Galatea is Handel’s only work for the theatre that is set to an English libretto.
Andy Warhol Died 29 Years Ago Today,
Here’s a Look at One of His First Silkscreens.
artnetnews
Blake Gopnik, Monday, February 22, 2016 Andy Warhol died 29 years ago today in a hospital in New York, after a routine gallbladder operation. It seems only fitting to commemorate the end of his artmaking by revisiting its beginnings. The work I’ve chosen as today’s Daily Pic was made in the spring of 1962, as one of the very first of the silkscreened canvases that became Warhol’s signature mode for the next quarter century. It’s the titular work in a touring exhibition called “Open This End: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Blake Byrne,” curated by the art historian Joseph Wolin and now at the Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/andy-warhol-died-29-years-ago-today-here-is-when-he-started-to-matter-431666
Andy Warhol, A Documentary Film~
The Andy Warhol Museum~ http://www.warhol.org/museum/
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts~ http://warholfoundation.org/
For ten minutes, the statues of the main divinities of the time, Ra-Horakhty, Amun-Ra and the deified king Ramesses glow from the morning sun’s first rays. The creator god of Memphis, Ptah, being associated with the underworld in one of his guises, remains partially in the shadows.
This solar alignment used to occur a day earlier; however the remarkable moving of the temple to higher ground in the 1960s saw the solar event occurring one day later than it did originally. The two temples at Abu Simbel were relocated, block-by-block, to save them from the rising waters of the new Aswan High Dam’s reservoir, Lake Nasser.
The original dates, October 21 and February 21 are often cited as being chosen to acknowledge Ramesses’ birthday and coronation days, however there is no evidence at all to support the idea. It is probably more likely that the dates have an important religious significance.
https://www.nilemagazine.com.au/2015-october/2015/10/22/the-abu-simbel-sun-festival
Abu Simbel: The Temples That Moved~ https://www.livescience.com/37360-abu-simbel.html
Photographs: Egypt’s Twice-Annual Sun Phenomenon Wows Crowds~
https://www.voanews.com/a/egypt-sun-festival/4266365.html
Joachim Nicolas Eggert (1779-1813)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Nicolas_Eggert
Buddy Tate (1913-2001)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/buddy-tate-mn0000631071/biography
The New Yorker debuted on February 21, 1925 — and its cover was graced with the first of many appearances by the magazine’s mascot Eustace Tilley. The illustration was by Rea Irvin (1881-1972), the man responsible for the eternal look of The New Yorker right down to designing the logo typeface, named “Irvin” for its creator.
In 1924, Irvin joined an advisory board to help launch The New Yorker. For the cover of the magazine’s debut issue the next year, Irvin created Eustace Tilley, a smartly attired dandy with a monocle and top hat. This amusing and worldly, yet somewhat detached, character embodied the spirit of the new publication. Tilley quickly became Irvin’s signature piece and has reappeared on the magazine’s cover every year since, with one exception–1994.
Between 1925 and 1958, Irvin’s work appeared on 169 covers of The New Yorker. Hundreds of other illustrations by Irvin were also published inside the magazine. http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa398.htm (dead link)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rea_Irvin
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/01/22/rea-irvin
Irvin had been art editor at Life, and Ross trusted
his taste, which—as others have noted—in turn shaped his
own. Ross biographer Dale Kramer describes his influence: “[Irvin]
had a quick, accurate eye for good craftsmanship. More important, he
knew what changes were necessary to make mediocre work passable and
passable work better.” Born in San Francisco, Irvin had worked as
a newspaper illustrator, stage and screen actor, comic strip artist, and
piano player before arriving at Life. Irvin’s diversity of
aesthetic experience was as essential to his invention of The New
Yorker’s visual style as Ross’s vagabond generalism was
to his conception of the subject matter. http://www.printmag.com/article/everybody_loves_rea_irvin/
Opening reception in the picture gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 681 Fifth Avenue, February 20, 1872. Wood-engraving published in Frank Leslie’s Weekly, March 9, 1872.
View image here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Metropolitan_opening_reception.jpg
The Misty Miss Christy 
