BRAN CASTLE
The Small town of Bran is probably the most popular tourist site in Romania. Situated only 28 km southwest of Brasov, the town commands the entrance to the pass of the same name, formerly the main route into Wallachia. The Saxons of Kronstadt (Brasov) built a castle here in 1377-82 to safeguard this vital trade artery, and although what’s now billed on every tourist brochure as “Dracula Castle” has only tenuous associations with Vlad the Impaler- it’s likely he attacked in 1460 during one of his raids on the Burzen Land-, the fib is understandable as Bran does look rather like a vampire count’s residence. Perched on a rocky bluff, it rises in tiers of towers and ramparts from the woods, against a glorious mountain backdrop, living up to the Gothic fairy-tale image that Stoker’s book evokes.

MICHAEL JACKSON still alive?

The beginning of the year was stormed out by some extraordinary online media news. Michael Jackson fans worldwide shivered at the sound of an audio stream featuring the King of Pop in an vocal interpreting of a new song, one that no one has ever heard before. “Another day”, an artistic upshot of Michael Jackson and Lenny Kravitz joint talent, first leaked on the internet in a tempered version- which included the vocal interference of some obscure DJ jam. Lenny Kravitz, denied any implication in the leaking and even posted a clarification video detailing on the song recording and explaining that the track was not in its final version anyways. Kravitz describe the entire recording experience as "the most amazing experience I've had in the studio." The track was soon removed from the internet by Sony label, backed by Jackson's estate lawyers. The audio stream created a storm of comments and postings on the internet, as some of the fans already put their hopes high claiming that this is might be the long awaited proof that MJ is still alive. However, while the hazardous hopes have yet little support, the scandal may either turn in just “ Another day” of showbiz desperate marketing, or in the day that marks the beginning of an endless mystery (similar with the one wrapping Elvis Presley’s death). Or maybe both!

CUBISM

CUBISM

Cubism was the single most important departure in the twentieth-century new art of the West. A contemporary critic first coined the term to describe the paintings of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963). Cubism emerged in the heady turn-of-the-century cultural climate that also fostered new physics, philosophies that questioned the adequacy of rationality, psychoanalysis, atonality in music, and growing sensitivities to non-Western culture. Each of this developments in a very real sense led to a refocusing of perspective in painting, as Picasso and Braque rejected the five hundred old idea of painting as constituting a window looking onto the depiction of the real world and rather saw painting as an autonomous realm of art itself with no purpose beyond itself. Echoing the art of Egypt, medieval primitives and Africa, Picasso and Braque represented only two dimensions in painting. The two artists made little or no effort to go beyond the flatness of the surface itself. They, attempted to include on a single surface as many angles, shapes or views of the painted object as possible and transformed “reality” in an experience constructed from multiple perceptions (...) .