An Overview of Homeowner’s Insurance
By Matt R. Hale, Attorney-at-Law
There is no question that homeowner’s insurance rates are rising across the country, leading some to wonder if they really need it. The purpose of this article i…
Food for the Soul: The Art of Gold and the Gold in Art
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Unique, beautifully designed and crafted, and visually arresting, gold objects are always stars of any museum display, regardless of the symbolism or cultural context that may have been lost over time. From the earliest civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, through ancient Egypt, and in all African and South…
Food for the Soul – Streaming on Vacation 2024
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout As the end of hot summer days approaches, it is the perfect time to binge a little on some shows, perhaps during a lazy weekend by the water. Lolling about on a hot afternoon does not mean we have to give up on intellectual prowess, however, so I…
Food for the Soul: “Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider” Exhibition
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout When we think of German Expressionism, the images that most readily come to mind are often the black and white lithographs of Berlin artists like Käthe Kollwitz or Erich Heckel, but in fact this art movement also encompassed paintings brimming with color brighter than anything that German art…
Food for the Soul: “Sargent and Fashion” Exhibition
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout After John Singer Sargent died in 1925, his formal paintings of English and American socialites went out of fashion. Throughout the 20th century, the art world was giddy about other things—abstracts, installation art, pop—visual ideas very much removed from the realistic portraiture that was Sargent’s specialty. In that…
Food for the Soul: London Exhibition “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920”
Ethel Walker. Decoration The Excursion of Nausicaa, 1920. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo: Courtesy of Tate
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout
This summer, the Tate Gallery in London …
Food for the Soul: London Exhibition “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920”
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout This summer, the Tate Gallery in London is presenting an exhibition entitled “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920,” showcasing 400 years of women creating art in Great Britain. Some of them, like Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelika Kauffmann, came from other countries in search of clients…
Looking at Rivers
“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”~ A.A. Milne, Winnie The Pooh By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout A.A. Milne was talking about an experience most of us…
Food for the Soul: “Impressionists 1874” – How It All Began
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout No matter how much or how little we know about fine art, we can all spot the difference between paintings by old masters and the art that was launched by post-Classical artists—Impressionists, Modernists, and representatives of all subsequent movements, from Surrealism to Abstractionism. There are various reasons for…
Nina’s Blog: Italian Spring with Art – Part 2
By Nina Heyn- Your Culture Scout The Venice Biennale is an international art show that alternates between architecture and fine art every other year. 2024 is the year for artworks, and Venice, the city already crowded with thousands of tourists, is now also home to artists, critics, and viewers who have been flocking to the…
Nina’s Blog: Italian Spring with Art-Part 1
Florence’s Uffizi Galleries—which contain the most famous Renaissance art on the planet—are, unfortunately, best avoided this spring. The size of the crowds is staggering, including huge field-trip groups of high-schoolers and tour groups with guides who block the view of every painting in sight. Right now, those elegant Uffizi halls could be the set for…
Food for the Soul: Stories of Women at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Philadelphia’s main art museum was established in 1876 as part of the centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence. Since then, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (we’ll call it PMA for short) has been expanding its catalog to its current grand total of almost a quarter of a…
Food for the Soul: A Year of the Dragon
By Nina Heyn- Your Culture Scout In Asia, being born in a Year of the Dragon means to arrive in an auspicious year; dragons, in Chinese astrology, are symbols of power, good luck, and success. Western culture—the modern take from Game of Thrones notwithstanding—treats dragons as monsters to be vanquished. These two radically different views…
Food for the Soul: Dune: Part Two
Canadian director Denis Villeneuve has always made interesting films. After his intriguing sci-fi tale Arrival, he was brave and talented enough to make Blade Runner 2049, which is a sequel to the iconic Ridley Scott’s dark vision of an AI-populated future. If you have not seen Dune: Part One directed by Villeneuve in 2021, it…
Food for the Soul: Fashioning San Francisco
The theme of the rarefied world of New York socialites in the 1970s is being explored in the second season of the ongoing TV series Feud. This season’s story, Capote vs. The Swans, portrays the rise and fall of a gossipy relationship between Truman Capote and some of Manhattan’s most prominent rich and famous, who…
Food for the Soul: Pink
For its Color of the Year 2024, Pantone elected the color named “peach fuzz”—a pink color moderated by some orange or yellow to achieve a shade that in clothing can indeed be called “peach,” while in art it is often used to render skin tones, the light at dusk, or morning clouds in southern latitudes….
Food for the Soul: European Art Exhibitions in 2024
January being a good month to look forward to events in the coming year, here is a list of selected art exhibitions in Europe. If you are planning any travel there, it’s good to keep these “coming attractions” in mind. I hope to report on some of them in my Euro blog. Paris: Fondation Louis…
Food for the Soul: Mystery Shows for Winter Nights
Long dark evenings are perfect for cozying up with a hot mug in front of a screen, so in winter I went on the lookout for some intelligent mystery and action tales. After trawling through dozens of TV series on half a dozen platforms, I found a few that are a bit more challenging than…
What We Are Up Against by Dr. Toby Rogers
CAF Note: This is a must-read for anyone managing personal and financial assets and any financial planner or asset manager helping them.
By Dr. Toby Rogers
Western allopathic medicine has bec…
Unmasking Farmington: FTX, Fluent Finance and the Coming Digital Dollar
by Mark Goodwin and Whitney Webb:
CAF Note: Highly recommend Whitney Webb’s new blockbuster on the effort to build a digital control system.
One of the oddest and most mysterious relationships…
Food for the Soul: Napoleon’s Loot
Ridley Scott, the man who over half a century has given us Gladiator, Alien, Blade Runner, and The Martian, has not stopped making big movies. His latest is Napoleon—you do not get any grander than that in terms of subject matter. It is an ambitious biography of the emperor’s rise to power, his many battles,…
De-Brief from Halloween Cash is King:
[CAF Note: A wonderful Solari Circle leader played King Cash for Halloween. She gave out 160 dollar bills to the trick-or-treators. Quite a response!]
– I told all the kids to ‘remember to p…
The “Wave Genome” in NEXUS Magazine
Ulrike’s article about the Wave Genome has been published in the October/November issue of NEXUS Magazine. The same paper was previously published in German a year ago.
We encourage you to r…
Food for the Soul: A Taste of Klimt in Vienna
Artworks by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), the most popular representative of Viennese Art Nouveau, grace collections all over the world. After a protracted restitution battle, one of the most famous of his gold paintings, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, is now in New York; galleries in cities like Tokyo, London, Tel Aviv, Venice, and many others…
Food for the Soul: Vermeer’s The Art of Painting in Vienna
We conclude “The Year of Vermeer” at Food for the Soul with a visit to The Art of Painting , which can be found at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Vermeer painted it around 1666, at the height of his artistic power, and the title assigned to this canvas by historians seems to reflect the…
Nina’s Blog: London Exhibitions, Fall 2023
Daily life in London is a bit harder than before Brexit. Stores run out of eggs and fresh bread by lunchtime, metro trains sometimes shorten their runs due to lack of staff, and the prices of food are staggering. Culture, however, is not hurting. Any day in London, you can check out dozens of art…
Food for the Soul: London – Vermeer’s Music Lessons
It so happens that all four Vermeers that can be found in collections in London are about making music. The most elaborate of them is actually called The Music Lesson, acquired by King George III in 1762. This canvas spent about a hundred years misattributed to other Flemish artists (either Frans or Willem van Mieris),…
Food for the Soul: The Rossettis – an Exhibition at Tate Britain
There are so many artworks in London museums that you can always find a substantial exhibition taking place, no matter when you visit. Such is the case now at Tate Britain—part of the national galleries of British art. The Rossettis is a show devoted principally to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and his family, fellow artists, and…
Nina’s Euro Blog: Wandering around Prague
I went to Prague to look at paintings in museums, but I found out that the best art there is not necessarily on the walls inside but on the ones outside. In other words, there is so much architectural beauty to be found in the city’s buildings, streets, and views that it surpasses the art…
Food for the Soul: Oppenheimer
Within one month of its global release, the movie Oppenheimer has grossed $700M in cumulative worldwide box office, making it more successful than Interstellar, the 2014 space movie by the same director, Christopher Nolan. The movie benefited from the social media trend of viewing both Oppenheimer and Barbie on the same day, and word of…
Food for the Soul: From Barbie to Oppenheimer and Back Again
It used to be called counter-programming. Studios would, for example, plan to release a comedy skewed to female audiences on a Super Bowl weekend, reasoning that women who would not want to watch football games all day might want to go with their girlfriends to the movies. No longer. Oppenheimer and Barbie were scheduled to…
Food for the Soul: Hollywood’s Impossible Mission and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout If you, like me, are heading to movie theaters to cool off and to check out the latest blockbusters, you may want to keep in mind that next summer, big-budget movies might be hard to find. On July 13, SAG-AFTRA, the guild of Hollywood actors, announced a strike….
Nina’s Blog: Rome – Art Discoveries for Wandering Tourists
Rome is so full of Art with capital “A,” from frescoes at the Vatican to sculptures at the Capitoline museums, that it is easy to miss some other art treasures that are tucked away and not on the typical tourist itineraries. I was trying to check out the collection of the Palazzo Barberini, but thanks…
Summer 2023 Travels: Experiencing the U.S. Through a Solari Prism
By a Solari team member
My husband and I recently drove through eight northeastern U.S. states to take a bona fide vacation—our first recreational trip since 2019. Traveling by car offered uniqu…
Food for the Soul: Animal Hunt at Art Institute of Chicago
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Comprehensive and large-scope art museums tend to be those created in centuries past, such as the Louvre in the 18th century and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the “Met”) in the 19th century. Their function was to provide the inhabitants of big cities with collections that were educational,…
Food for the Soul: The Diplomat
I do not know about you, but I prefer spy and political shows to typical crime shows because they are a little more mentally challenging. A case in point is the first season of the latest, very popular Netflix show The Diplomat (the second season is in production). If you have not had a chance…
Nina’s Blog 2023: Stones of Florence
Like all of Italy, except a bit more so, Florence is all about stone. Green and white marble bricks cover the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (popularly called the Duomo) to breathtaking effect. Carved lions guard steps of palazzos and gardens, statues of saints decorate outside walls of churches, and stone lintels, bricks, and…
Nina’s Euro Blog 2023: Chasing Art in Paris
Paris is not very user-friendly this spring because ongoing strikes are affecting daily life to a great degree. I was planning to see Vermeer’s The Astronomer—a painting that was not included in the loan exhibition at the Rijksmuseum—which is often described as a “companion” to The Geographer, featuring the same model and a similar scientific…
Food for the Soul: Lessons from Vermeer
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The new and wonderful loan exhibition of Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is an occasion to reflect on how the life and works of this 17th-century artist can be relevant to us today. Here are half a dozen “lessons” that I draw from the story of his…
Food for the Soul: “Rembrandt & His Contemporaries” Exhibition in Amsterdam
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout While many art fans might not be able to get tickets to the sold-out Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum, there is another exhibition of exquisite Dutch Baroque art in Amsterdam that is ongoing at the same time at the nearby museum called Hermitage Amsterdam. The star of this…
Food for the Soul: Women Alone – Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout The sold-out, long-touted, once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is in full swing—crowds of lucky ticket-holders are thronging through a few small rooms. But perhaps this is the right space to exhibit these intimate, delicate pictures that hung forgotten for 200 years until they became the…
Food for the Soul: Pearls
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout Probably one of the most celebrated paintings that features pearls is one where these jewels are the least visible. It is the painting called Woman with a Pearl Necklace, and it was painted around 1663 by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). Over two years, he painted five pictures that featured…
Food for the Soul: Peeking into the Artist’s Mind — An Interview with Henryk Waniek
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout Even though most of the artists I admire are from the 20th century—from David Hockney to Leonora Carrington, and from Gerhard Richter to Francis Bacon—I’m usually not able to post about them here because images of their art are still under copyright. It is, therefore, a rare treat…
Painting Together
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Unless you are writing a script for a TV show, writing is a decidedly solitary occupation (you can hardly write a novel “together”). Painting is a bit more conducive to communal activity and many artist communities sprung up throughout the 19th century. Once some artists discovered a particularly…
National Security Exemptions and SEC Rule 10b-5
Table of Contents I. Introduction II. What Is SEC Rule 10b-5? III. The Elements of a Rule 10b-5 Claim a. Is the Government a “Person” Falling Under the Scope of 10b-5? b. Material Misrepresentations c. Scienter or Intent d. Reliance IV. How Does 10b-5 Apply to Reporting and Accounting Exemptions? a. Government Securities Exemptions b….
The History and Organization of the Federal Reserve: The What and Why of the United States’ Most Powerful Banking Organization
““Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”-James A. Garfield, 20th President of the United States Table of Contents I. IntroductionII. History and Creation of the Federal ReserveIII. Structure of the Federal Reserve System A. The Fed’s Chain of CommandIV. Federal Open Market CommitteeV. Federal Reserve…
FASAB Statement 56: Understanding New Government Financial Accounting Loopholes
Table of Contents I. IntroductionII. History of the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB)III. FASAB and Standard 56A. What Does Standard 56 Do?B. Reporting Entities Within the Scope of Standard 56C. Changes to Disclosure Standards Under Standard 56D. Modifications to Avoid Disclosure of Classified InformationE. Reporting on Consolidation EntitiesF. Interpretations Modifying Reporting Standards in…
Food for the Soul: Global Trade Part V – Europe
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Even before Roman soldiers started building and then marching on the roads of the empire, expanding the imperial trade across all the outposts, there were well-worn trading paths that led to Rome. Etruscans, who preceded the Romans on the Italian peninsula, had been trading extensively with northern lands….
Food for the Soul: Oscar Contenders 2023 — Part 2
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout A few weeks ago, we highlighted a few early and interesting contenders for the Best Picture crown at the upcoming Academy Awards. Here we present the remaining candidates following the announcement of the nominations on Jan. 24. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE This movie is an outlier in…
Food for the Soul: I Spy … for America
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout A few weeks ago, we introduced some new international espionage shows. Two new American spy shows recently got dropped at the streamers, so it’s worth taking a look at those as well. TOM CLANCY’S JACK RYAN, SEASON 3 (Amazon, 2018-) Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan has just premiered its…
Food for the Soul: A Year of Vermeer
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout We celebrated the year 2019 as “The Year of da Vinci,” reporting all year long from the groundbreaking exhibition at the Louvre as well as anniversary exhibitions in Italy, Poland, and the Netherlands. We would like to celebrate 2023 as “The Year of Vermeer,” inspired by the upcoming,…
Food for the Soul: Beautiful Banknotes
Józef Mehoffer. Allegory of Saving (1933). Stained glass window, KOMK Bank, Kraków. Photo: Zygmunt Put/Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout “All these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver…and indeed everybody takes them readily, for wheresoever a person may…
Food for the Soul – The Lust for Travel
James Tissot. Ball on Shipboard (1874). Tate Britain. Photo: Wikimedia Commons “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” ~ St. Augustine By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout While we may be upset by the various pandemic travel restrictions the world is now experiencing, it is worth…
Food for the Soul: Law, Justice, and Art
Wu Youru. Regaining the Provincial Capital of Ruizhou (1886). Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The conventional wisdom that “law” and “justice” are not the same thing can be illustrated by works of art from any historical period. The painting above represents a battle between the Chinese Imperial army…
Feast for the Eyes
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout No one has ever rendered fruits more juicy or seafood more fresh than 17th-century painters in the Low Countries. Starting with late-Renaissance artists such as Pieter Aertsen and continuing for a century and half afterwards in the works of Dutch painters from Frans Snyders to Vermeer, this decorative tradition…
Food for the Soul Oscar Contenders: Awards Season 2022–2023
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout This year, there are hardly any choices of theatrical films to qualify for Best Picture nominations. Current leading contenders in this year’s Oscar race are All Quiet on the Western Front, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as well as Top Gun: Maverick. The last one, already predicted to win,…
Food for the Soul — I Spy…
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout For a cerebrally inclined viewer, spy shows have advantages over regular crime series. There is less gore (all those chopped-up bodies and morgue scenes get tiresome after a while), and there are more smart ideas. In celebration of the second season of one of the best spy shows…
Food for the Soul – Rediscovering Artists
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout HILMA (2022; dir. Lasse Hallström) Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was a Swedish abstractionist painter who was largely ignored and certainly misunderstood by her contemporaries—family, art critics, friends, the public. It took decades after her death in 1944 for her paintings to be rediscovered in an attic by her…
Food for the Soul – Documentaries: How Artists Think
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Full-length documentaries require what our consumption of entertainment media totally lacks these days—lots of time and patience. We watch short videos on social media and episodes of TV shows, or we check out news videos on our phones. A long, slow art documentary requires an investment of both…
Food for the Soul: Streaming … European Daily Life
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Colder autumn evenings are a perfect excuse for sitting in front of a smaller screen. There are hundreds of choices, from huge fantasy series like House of the Dragon (viewership for each episode numbers in the millions) to popular sci-fi or crime shows on major streaming services. Here…
Food for the Soul: Charles I – The Royal Connoisseur of Art
“Ars longa, vita brevis.” ~ Hippocrates, Aphorismi By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout As the world witnesses a historic change in Great Britain, which welcomes Charles III as the new king (the coronation ceremony has been scheduled for May 6, 2023), it is perhaps worth remembering the first English monarch of this name—Charles I…
Happy and Unhappy Families
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.“~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1898 By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout Most really good artists would not paint a family—theirs or somebody else’s—just as a record of people’s faces. They would use the theme to say something important about their…
Food for the Soul: Cozy Entertainement
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout During WWII, Hollywood turned away from hard-hitting dramas toward lighter fare—mysteries, comedies, and musicals—resulting in such classics as The Philadelphia Story, The Maltese Falcon, Meet Me in St. Louis, and His Girl Friday. Perhaps the pandemic offers a similar explanation for the current revival of a genre that…
Food for the Soul: Global Trade in Art, Part 4: The Americas
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout “The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.” ~ Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of…
Food for the Soul: Guo Pei Exhibition — San Francisco
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout Art museums sometimes showcase outstanding fashion designs, often presenting historical collections of artists who long ago earned their place in the pantheon of couture. Over the last few years, I have seen Chanel, Galliano, and Yves St. Laurent retrospectives in Paris, an Alexander McQueen show that is currently…
Food for the Soul: Global Trade in Art Part 3- Middle East
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Even if Venice itself is not in the Middle East, until the early 1500s the Venetian empire, built on trade with Asia and the Levant, extended far beyond the city walls, incorporating such lands as Dalmatia and Istria, and reaching practically up to Constantinople. Venice was the gateway…
Food for the Soul: Women Art Exhibitions—Venice and Paris
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout In recent years, exhibitions of women’s art have gained so much popularity that almost every week there is a local exhibition somewhere in the world. Predictably, the most ambitious shows tend to be hosted in the global art centers of Paris and Venice. Two important exhibitions focused on…
Food for the Soul: Faces of Tuscany
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout In Florentine museums and churches, there is an endless parade of Madonnas and altar compositions of the Holy Family, which have somewhat lost their religious impact after so many centuries of changing spiritual views. When they are displayed en masse in art galleries, what makes the most immediate…
Nina’s Euro Blog
Polish Palaces and Art in Naples This post is inspired by the location of a very romantic wedding I recently attended in the center of Poland. Both the wedding ceremony and the party afterwards were held in the old palace and gardens of Bronice (near Nałęczów, a picturesque town famous for its natural springs and…
Food for the Soul: Women Who Gave Us van Gogh – Women & Art Series 16
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout Paris at the end of the 19th century was packed with sophisticated men who loved art. They were making it, discussing it, and selling it. There were those who created new styles—like Monet, Gauguin, or Cézanne. Others excelled as art dealers, like marchand Paul Durand-Ruel, who handled sales…
Food for the Soul: Lviv National Gallery of Art
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The world is watching bad—and then worse—news coming out of Ukraine every day. Millions of people, even those who last month were not sure where Ukraine actually is, now follow the tragedy of people losing their lives, homes, livelihoods, and a homeland. There is one more thing that…
Food for the Soul: Comets – Looking Skyward for Inspiration
The Comet of 1680 over Rotterdam. Lieve Verschuier (1680). Rotterdam Historic Museum. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain “As above, so below.” ~ Hermes Trismegistus (6th century AD) By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout A sudden appearance in the night sky of an exotic shape of a ball and a shiny tail would be hard…
Food for the Soul: Gideon’s River Test
Gideon. Sketch for a fresco. Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1796). Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Photo: Wikimediart.org By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout There is a longstanding intellectual debate about whether an individual can change history. Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great, and Adolf Hitler come to mind in support of this argument, with countless…
Food for the Soul: How Do You Show Freedom?
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout “For we fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honors, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.” ~ Declaration of Arbroath, 1320. National Museum of Scotland. We are used to seeing ideologically engaged works in modern art museums. Twenty-first-century artists often…
Food for the Soul: Global Trade Part 2 – Out of Africa
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout For 15th-century Europeans, sub-Saharan Africa was to a great extent terra incognita until Portuguese explorers started venturing further and further south along the continent’s western coast. These expeditions culminated in 1497 with Vasco da Gama’s voyage all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope and on…
Food for the Soul: Global Trade in Art – Part 1
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout There are bigger world problems than this, but you may have noticed that your favorite sheets are not in stock at Ikea—it is the global trade disruption, compliments of the pandemic. As “out of stock” notices affect our ability to obtain our favorite snacks, shoes, a sofa or…
PDF Now Available for Corey Lynn’s Global Landscape on Vaccine ID Passports
By Corey Lynn
Globalists are using vaccine ID passports as part of a coordinated push to implement digital identities and a global social credit system that would control every aspect of peopl…
Notice of Liability
[Note from CAF: Stopping this approval will only delay this approval unless we stop the control grid. Once the control grid is successfully implemented this and thousands of other approvals can…
Food for the Soul: Oscar movie season
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The Oscar season in Hollywood is like the Baltic sea after a storm, when crumbs of precious amber are churned up to the surface. Various movies that would perhaps go unnoticed at any other time are being re-released and submitted by their producers. That’s how you can discover…
Food for the Soul: Art and Cautionary Tales
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Art serves many social purposes, such as creating a magic ritual, preserving memories, announcing praise or condemnation, revising history, and (obviously) providing esthetic enjoyment. It’s no wonder, then, that art has also been used to warn people of the potential consequences of their actions. The British Museum houses…
Food for the Soul: Good Versus Evil in Art
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” ~ Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911) By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The struggle between the forces of good and evil lies at the root of all religions. In India, one of the most…
Food for the Soul: The Neglected Art of Pastels – Rosalba Carriera – Women & Art Series 15
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout There are some languages, like German, Polish, and Latin, that have many grammatical cases (so-called declensions) and three genders. You must know exactly what you are going to say before you say your sentence, or it will never come out right. You cannot change your mind halfway. Painting…
Protest in Art
Poster for the Suffragette movement. Mary Lowndes (1909). Published by Brighton and Hove Women’s Franchise. Artists’ Suffrage League. Photo: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout If an individual stands up to bullies or resists violence, it is called personal courage. When a group does it, it is often called a…
Food for the Soul: Isabella Stewart Gardner – Women & Art Series 14
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout March 18, 1990 was the St. Patrick’s Day holiday in Boston. The streets were full of revelers, and the police had their hands full with traffic control. Two mustachioed policemen who knocked on the doors of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Fenway Street were readily admitted by…
Food for the Soul: Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
Aerial shot of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. ©Academy Museum Foundation By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout It took years of false starts, changes of leadership, delayed construction, and other birthing pains, but it is finally here—a museum devoted to the craft, art, and history of moviemaking. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures…
Food for the Soul: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney – Women & Art Series 13
Robert Henri. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916. Oil on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout In a press release issued in 1930, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney announced that she was launching a museum of American art because “…not only can the visiting foreigner find no adequate presentation…
Food for the Soul: Dune
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Frank Herbert’s novel Dune was published in 1965, and ever since, entire generations of people all over the world have read the book even if they were not ardent sci-fi fans. Some of them may have even seen the deeply flawed 1984 film adaptation directed by David Lynch…
Food for the Soul: “The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art” exhibition in Paris
Valentin Serov. Portrait of the Collector of Modern Russian and French Paintings, Ivan Abramovich Morozov (1910). The State Tretiakov National Gallery, Moscow. © Tretiakov National Gallery, Moscow By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Paris is still the art center of the world. This notion was reinforced this year by a unique and massive exhibition…
Food for the Soul – Georgia O’Keeffe: Women & Art Series 12
Georgia O’Keeffe. Pelvis with the distance, 1943. Oil on canvas. Indianapolis Museum of Art, Newfields, IN. © Indianapolis Museum of Art/Gift of Anne Marmon Greenleaf in memory of Caroline M. Fesler. Photo: Bridgeman Images © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Adagp, Paris, 2021, courtesy of Centre Pompidou “I’ll paint what I see – what the flower is to…
Food for the Soul: A Postcard from Paris
Damian Hirst. The Triumph of Death Blossom (2018). Private collection© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2021. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates. Photo: Courtesy Fondation Cartier By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout September saw Parisians mostly spending their weekends out in the streets. Some of them (an estimated 17,000) were attending…
Food for the Soul – Discreet Charm of Kitchen Gardens
Gardeners (Les Jardiniers). Gustave Caillebotte. 1875-1877. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Until about the end of WWII, if you lived in a house or at least in a ground-floor apartment, chances were that you had some sort of kitchen garden space. If you were lucky enough…
Food for the Soul – Discreet Charm of Kitchen Gardens
Gardeners (Les Jardiniers). Gustave Caillebotte. 1875-1877. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain.
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout
Until about the end of WWII, if you li…
Food for the Soul: Artists and the Moneychangers
Christ Driving Moneylenders from the Temple. Church of St. Aignan (1899). Chartres, France. Photo: Reinhardhauke Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout If you need to impart important messages to people who cannot read, then your choices include talking to them directly or showing them pictures—preferably images rendered in long-lasting materials such as…
Food for the Soul: Cerca Trova in Florence
Florence cathedral. Photo: Nina Heyn By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout In 1504, when Leonardo da Vinci was mostly done with living in Florence, he accepted an important commission to decorate Palazzo Vecchio (which served as the meeting hall for the Florentine Grand Council) with a fresco depicting the historic Battle of Anghiari fought…
Food for the Soul: Magdalena Abakanowicz – Women & Art Series 11
Magdalena Abakanowicz. Abakan Orange, 1971. Sisal. Jankilevitsch Collection. Photo: Marcin Koniak/Desa Unicum, Courtesy of National Museum Poznań By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout “Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.” ~ Magdalena Abakanowicz In 1962, a young woman…
Food for the Soul: Kraków, the City of Art
Rembrandt. Landscape with the Good Samaritan (1638). The Princes Czartoryski Collection, National Museum, Kraków. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Europe has many places that are a perfect combination of art and history. One city that possesses this ideal combination in spades, but is less visited than it deserves, is Kraków…
Food for the Soul: Rosa Bonheur – Women & Art Series 10
Edouard Louis Dubufe. Portrait of Rosa Bonheur (the bull was painted by Bonheur), 1857. Oil on canvas. Versailles Palace. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout There is a reason why the traditionally dressed Victorian lady in the portrait above is resting her hand on a bull instead of a chair or…
Food for the Soul – New York Big Five – MoMA
Marc Chagall. I and the Village (1911). MoMA. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the world’s largest contemporary and modern art assemblage, has been in the avant-garde of modern art collecting for almost a century. Founded in 1929 by three enterprising society…
Food for the Soul: New York Big Five – The Frick
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres – Portrait de Comtesse D’Haussonville (1845). The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: ©The Frick Collection, Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout So many people love the experience of visiting New York. I don’t. I’m overwhelmed by the stone jungle of office towers and the incessant noise of construction, police sirens,…
#CashEveryDay
By the Solari Team
As the saying goes, “money makes the world go around,” but today’s battle of digital currencies, inflation, and paper currency has humanity at a tip…