User:Xcentaur/Todo

Merge

 * 5150 Studios => Eddie Van Halen
 * Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate <=> The General Directorate for State Security Investigations <=> The General Directorate for State Security Investigations
 * Guo Shiguang => Water Margin
 * Sound reinforcement system=>Public address=>Live sound reproduction

Cleanup

 * Child prodigy => mar6+48h
 * Baetic Cordillera - cleanup,wikify,reasearch
 * The House of Gaunt - cleanup
 * Ashok Banker - vanity page
 * this worries me
 * [Lee Klein well now, where do we start?]

(R &amp; D)

 * Paul Schlack - father of nylon deserves more on his page than 2 lines
 * Westfields - shopping centres - massive
 * Cheri DiNovo - research, issues related to her history

Stub-out Redlinks

 * Subdivisions of Micronesia
 * List of pigeon breeds

AfC

 * Hans-Dieter Evers - from Articles_for_creation/2006-01-20
 * Adela Dalto <=>
 * Carlos Damas <=>
 * Francisco Mora Catlett <=>

Electronics

 * Multiplexer - cascading muxs, use of demux
 * Frequency-shift keying - transfer from my class notes
 * Encoder - add stuff from my class notes
 * Counter - update types
 * Direct coupled - freq resp diag
 * Multistage amplifiers - class notes
 * Phasors (electronics)
 * [[Biasing (electronics)
 * Discrete Bipolar Transistor Biasing
 * Single-stage transistor amplifiers

List of Westfields
Firstly, I assume you know there are two different lists for Westfields - one for Australia and one for the rest of the world. My rationale here is the Australian ones are Shopping Centres the other ones are Malls. What's the difference? Australian English local dialect mainly. We don't use Mall to refer to a shopping centre a mall is usually a street restricted to pedestrian traffic. Sorry if that is obvious to you but I have debated the issue with others.

Secondly - Sorry but I'm not making any real effort to maintain the list of... articles. I look at some of the articles occaisionally. My preference would be to have one Westfield Group article with one article summarising activities in each of Australia, USA, UK and NZ. But consensus isn't with me so instead of about five good articles there are a plethora of articles of widely varying quality - but none of them come anywhere near being FA class.

Having said all that, quite a few Australian Westfield related articles are on my watchlist and I !vote quite heavily either keep or merge should I notice any Westfield article go to AfD. Garrie 06:00, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
 * The generic problem with articles related to the Westfield Group is, there is too much reliance on primary sources. Any issue related to size of building, leasable floor space, gross return, relative size of centre in relation to region/state/country/world - should be coming from an independant source. Common lines include "largest shopping complex in it's catchment" - well you could quite easily define the catchment for a shopping complex exactly the way you want to in order to get the press / prestige you are after.
 * So - to improve any of the articles - look for statements regarding size, value, turnover, and provide a link to an independant source.
 * Secondly - these articles don't really look like they have a common theme. Sure the topic is all "a shopping complex owned by the Westfield Group" but they don't have a commonality of layout, infobox or anything like that which ties them together.
 * Finally - the way to make sure every article is included in the relevant list is by comparing the list of... article to the similar category. I asked for a bot to do the checking a while ago but nobody got back to me. I tend to rely more on categories than lists.
 * Thanks for your interest and I'm happy to discuss anything you are trying on for size.Garrie 20:32, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Billy Thermal & Efren
Efren Espinosa Villarreal was born on September 19th in Los Angeles, California. He is the second of four sons born to Baudel and Guadalupe Espinosa and is first generation Mexican-American. Efren was very involved in the music industry during both the punk and disco eras. He played drums/vocals for Edwin Starr, who sang the anti-war theme, War...What is it good for?? for Motown records. During the punk rock era, Efren played drums and sang vocals with Billy Thermal, a punk band led by Billy Steinberg, who remains one of the nation's sought after composers. Other members of the group included Bob Carlisle (Butterfly Kisses), and Craig Hull. Efren returned to school in the late 80's and received a Master of Arts degree in Psychology from the Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology. He is currently employed with a local government agency. As an avocation, he continues performing under the name Vince Michaels as a tribute to his adult son Vincent Michael Espinosa and is currently recording a CD that is set to be released in 2007. He has been married to Jacki Polito Espinosa for 27 years. His brothers are Eddie, Arnold, and Roland Espinosa. Efren's niece is Eden Espinosa, an American singer, who is currently on Broadway in the Musical Wicked as Elphaba.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Efrenespinosa"

Temple of Jupiter
The Roman Temple of Jupiter was constructed in the 1st century AD. An inscription on top of a column shaft indicates that it was nearing completion in the year 60. The Great Court was added in the early 2nd century. The temple was unique not only in its great size, but in its Eastern architectural influences and in its financing in large part by non-Romans, an indicator that the local people regarded the Heliopolitan Jupiter fully as their own. Construction of the Temple of Bacchus began in the later 2nd century under Antoninus Pius, after the cult of Bacchus had become popular in the empire. Construction of the great temple complex continued until the conversion of Constantine to Christianity in the early 4th century, when it came to halt with many details left unfinished.

Under Roman rule, the supreme god worshipped at Baalbeck/Heliopolis was Jupiter Heliopolitan, a complex fusion of a Baal and Jupiter. The statue that stood in the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbeck was described by ancient writers as holding a thunderbolt with ears of corn and being flanked by two bulls. He was part of a Helipolitan Triad of Jupiter, Mercury and Venus. The religious rituals at the temple were more Syrian than they were Greco-Roman, but the site did include an oracle that was consulted by emperors.

The most famous sight at Baalbeck is the Temple of Jupiter, whose six remaining columns are the largest anywhere in the Roman world. The famous statue of Jupiter Heliopolitan stood in the rear of the temple on a raised adytum (holy of holies), which only initiated priests could approach. The great temple was fronted by a hexagonal forecourt added by Philip the Arab (244-49), the layout of which can still be clearly seen.

The Temple of Bacchus is the best-preserved structure at Baalbeck, and in fact the best preserved Roman temple of its size anywhere. The Temple of Bacchus is larger than the Parthenon, with an interior span of 62 feet and a monumental gateway 21 feet wide and nearly 42 feet high. Although dwarfed by those of the Temple of Jupiter, the Bacchus temple's stone blocks still weigh tens of tons each.

The temple's size was matched by its quality in construction (the blocks fit together perfectly) and in elegant decoration. Some figurative reliefs depicting Greek gods have survived, though in a very damaged state. Yet, despite its clear importance, very little is known about the purpose of the impressive building. Even its dedication to Bacchus is far from certain. It is positioned oddly, a huge building that nevertheless stands in the shadow of the great complex of the Temple of Jupiter, pushed nearly to the end of the forbiddding wall that supports the Great Court.

The Temple of Venus is small and round, a major contrast with the giant rectangular temples of Jupiter and Bacchus. The Temple of Venus has six columns that probably once supported a dome. It is carved everywhere with niches, sculptures (now lost) and other elegant decorations.

The Hexagonal Forecourt is a six-sided area built between the Propylaea and the Great Court in the early 3rd century AD. It incorporated 30 granite columns. By the early 5th century, it had been covered with a dome and transformed into a church.

Deconstructing Neith Nevelson
Named after an Egyptian goddess, Neith Nevelson was born in New York City in 1946, to a family whose name will forever be associated with that of the respected female sculptor, Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), Neith’s grandmother.

Assuredly, simply by being related to such a well-known master of modern painting, Neith’s childhood was unique in many ways, a childhood that, as an adult, would become reflected in her art.

Neith lived a dual citizenship mostly between Florence, Italy, and the United States with her mother, Susan Nevelson, and later on in the mid 1960’s with her grandmother at Louise’s studio in New York City.

Not surprisingly, though Neith grew up in a world which included horse-back riding, home-taught schooling, and a typical bohemian lifestyle, most of these things never made much of an impression on her. Suffice it to say that even recognizing the fact that by the time she was a teenager her grandmother had become an icon in the art-world neither Nevelson’s seemed to be very impressed by all the trappings of fame, money or the obvious regality that followed. In fact, similar to Neith, her grandmother had worked so hard and for so long for some name-recognition that when it did happen, she would shun the world that had seen her rise from poverty and obscurity to the woman she is known to be today.

Unfortunately, the immediate association to the Nevelson last name has worked against Neith’s development as an artist, something which is tragic in many ways, and unfair. Immediately, as by association, most people tend to associate the Nevelson name with Louise, while immediately discounting the merit and worth of Neith’s own oeuvre.

In 1991, a critic for the Miami Herald went so far as to write that though well-intentioned and with “lots of heart,” Neith’s art proved, nonetheless, that “talent is not always passed down in the DNA.” What this critic failed to point out was that Louise Nevelson’s own defiance against the artistic convention of the times, would eventually become masterly achieved and uniquely priceless works of art achieved by after a long process of trying to find her own artistic vision and after being influenced by many artists of her times-- as it is obvious if one pays close attention to Louise's works pre-dating the 1960's.  In fact, Louise and Neith do share something in common. They were never comfortable with the art world and they would always be outsiders.

The question, though, then becomes this: why has Neith’s merit as artist go unrecognized for so long, often being criticized in ways that are anything but professional when her art, is viewed in its entirety, its development and maturity, is impressive. The proclivity by many in the art world to shun Neith as an artist of merit is disturbing, and such discussion is timely.

Neith’s art is complex, representative of tragedy by the emotional evocation it causes. Experimental combinations of colors, quick brushstrokes, and an obsessive desire to fill every inch of the canvas, can often make it difficult to understand. But this is hardly a problem. The energy is counterbalanced by a fine proportion between line and color, a proportion that makes the overall effect delicate, vulnerable almost. And the more we observe, analyze, scrutinize, the more it becomes obvious that what we are seeing is 1) a painting that may have begun as a dialogue between the artist and her inner world, and then the empty canvas; 2) a dialogue that ended with our own projections.

Neith’s art is not art for art’s sake, and one thing is not is commercialized and therefore overpriced. Her art does represent something. It means something. What exactly these are is what’s so baffling about them. If you seek to interpret them, usually the lack of balance, solidity or proportion makes the attempt impossible. There are traces of cubism in her paintings, as has often been pointed out especially during a period of intense artistic maturity that lasted for most of the 1990s, especially 1996. But even though this period was also Neith’s most intense, she never seemed comfortable with the one-dimensionality of cubism, especially as they applied to faces which are laden with such overpowering human emotions.

At her most complex and overbearing, and at her most uncategorized, Neith takes over the canvas as if possessed by a force larger than herself; making large, monstrous creatures reminiscent of Picasso’s Guernica, a fact that has often been pointed out by art critics but which, again, fail to see the essential vision that makes her so different. Unlike Picasso’s large works which seem to be political critiques of his times, Neith’s larger pieces are as powerful, if not more, simply by the fact that she’s almost physically crippled as the result of a car accident which nearly killed her and that went on to aggravate an already physical deformity caused by sclirosis. Furthermore, none of these paintings seem to be about anything in particular to which a deeply dividing social issue can be compared to, again such as in Guernica, but to give the same example.

At her most minimal, smaller works such as sketches, which are usually done on anything she can paint on (even over blueprint plans,) Neith captures a suffocating reality that disrupts our sense of limits and proportion by the sheer smallness of it. It is an art whose objectivity dissolves and whose ultimate effect on us unresolved and irreconcilable, like life itself. She calls many of these lithographs her “nebulas.”

Louise Nevelson’s legacy rests on monumental, solid structures made mostly from steel sheets, metal and dark wood. These sculptures seem to be representative of life as a process of transference, not opposition. Non-representational—with only colors adding to their distinctive strangeness-- these sculptures are unsettling, but more complete, compact. The elder Nevelson wants to remind us that life can be lived to its full potential. How can it not? How did we ever miss such ancient maxim? In many ways, this is art in the service of an ideal, a Platonic belief which gives life its conceptual and moral worth, not its rudimentary, divided, and raw primitiveness.

The question remains, though, what is it? What is Neith’s art all about? Unquestionably, it is dark and disruptive. It is Nietszchean in nature, and hence brutal. She sees life at this level as harsh, forced, and raped almost. The pained simulation of colors, becomes part of a physical and psychical dissociation between, say, the individual who suffers, who questions, who spends a lifetime trying to make sense of who he or she is, and a world bereft of meaning, at worse indifferent. While the conflict becomes enlarged such as in her larger paintings, so does the gap between any reconciliation between society as a medium of salvation and nature as a force of destruction; ironically, it is this same nature, this resplendence landscape she gives birth to with such colors, that seems to hold the key to our own salvation. Seek within and you shall find, perhaps. Seek without and become one more clone of civilization, assuredly your own destruction. Surprisingly, the person herself says very little. She plays with your mind by staying in the background. What you see if your projection— if that means that what you will see is fear let it be; if you see joy, an exuberance of colors, then, why not? Either way the choice is yours.

Throughout a long and prolific career, Neith has narrowed her artistic interests to three main categories: naked women, faces and horses. In turn, each of these categories captures the essence of a common denominator: from chaos freedom, from freedom rebirth, from rebirth death.

Neith’s horses, which are also her most perfect renderings as far as forms and shapes, are often only swirls of lines over a large stretched canvas. With horses, there are no embellishments or experimentations with colors, just simplicity for simplicity’s sake. Again, though at times these horses are paired in groups, the effect is always one of serenity, union. Her naked females are almost all amorphous, with weird curvilinear shapes that seem to be refractions from under water, and their effect, nonetheless, is nothing less than astounding.

Her faces, like the naked women, have a rudimentary and unfinished lack of proportion, though unlike both the horses and the female, these faces seem trapped, disturbed (mental, physically or both). The youthfulness of these male faces makes the overall effect striking, even odd, sad, and violent all at once. At first, they seem threatening, hostile and accusatory. On closer look, there’s an almost delicacy that further compounds our sense of balance. Neith has called these male faces her ‘nebulas’, perhaps referring to unresolved emotional problems, or perhaps emphasizing the sad legacy of slavery and its continued effect on the psyche of our society.

Long ago, as specified by curator Wendy Blazier in a 1991 booklet she wrote about the artist, Neith understood that personal empowerment, (often misinterpreted to mean just ‘happiness’), begins, ends and continues to be a transformative mysterious force that evolves in a recurring pattern beyond time and space. However, representing this into something that does revolve around spiritual or abstract metaphors, this power is best expressed in the cyclical symmetry of her main interests—her horses, women and faces. Each is a pattern of the other. Each a string to be pulled before another facet of this same representation becomes embodied in the hollowed parts of a woman, or in the sad face of an unknown male, or the naïve brutality of horses in different surroundings. Larger works of the females have a fractured force to them. The cubistic impression leads to a magical dynamic refraction about to be washed away by water before transmuting into another reflection, and another, and another; hence the power of Neith’s paintings, the ability to become transformative in a reversal of cause-effect once set into motion.

In a world where there are no perfect blueprints for living are given and where our future in itself is an undisclosed territory of fear, the only mechanism for survival that a human being is given is the gift of the imagination, perhaps the only assurance that divinity does exist somewhere. This gift, talent, or whatever else you call it is of course no guarantee of greatness or even a guarantee of anything innately special unless it is harnessed and turned into something palpably beautiful, gratifying, often strange and surreal—art, like life, is always symbolic, archetypal; hence mysterious, and universal. And that’s what visceral, serious and genuine art can do to us, a generation of people living in a self- described post-modern, a world where no nook or cranny of its topography is no longer a mystery, a cosmos that shrinks and expands at the same time that we break down sub-atomic particles, but a group of people still as awed by this strange sojourn through a dark meaningless infinity because just like pharaohs realized almost six thousands years ago, this journey, though seemingly long by standards of each individual dreamer, ends just as soon as it begins—in a second. Who knows, for some of us perhaps this journey might be fun. Hopefully, it will also be a worthwhile journey for each and everyone of us.

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