Big Blow To Sheffield's Cultural Offering?...

One of the major attractions to the city of Sheffield as a place to live in was the amount of potential the city itself has. For me, the amount of creative talent here, and the ideas and plans for the city seemed ever more exciting. Will this soon be in decline with 'Museums Sheffield' inevitability closing?

Museums Sheffield's application for £1.4m per year for the next three years has been refused. Museums Sheffield must now manage a devastating 30% reduction in its budget from 1 April 2012. “This is a huge disappointment for the city and Museums Sheffield. We know Sheffield had a very strong bid and should have been recognised for its cultural offer....”Julie Dore, Leader of Sheffield City Council.

This decrease in funding will have a big impact on Museums Sheffield, bearing in mind, Museums Sheffield controls Millennium Gallery, Graves Gallery, and Weston Park Museum. Its thought that just because the funding has been reduced there are no plans for the museums or galleries in the city to close, but isn't this inevitable if the funding is decreasing over the next 3 years? It's set for 45 jobs to be cut, meaning a large scale staff redundancy. As well as that, there will be major reductions in exhibition programmes, and less learning trips provided for schools.

The next exhibition that will take place, is believed to be it's last. Bearing this in mind, as well as the cut of the city's major cultural offering, I decided to ask the thoughts of passer bys, if and how they will be affected...

“I often spend my lunchtime wondering around and sitting in the cafe. I love to see the new inspirational pieces of work and the things in the gift shop. I want to buy everything there!” Lola 28yrs, Sheffield.

“Hearing that the next exhibition will be the last is really upsetting. I would have hoped the work remains the standard as it is now, but not such hope anymore... Activities and workshops will no longer exist? That is so disappointing. I always thought the idea of school visits was a good opportunity for children to have a fun day out yet learn quite a lot.” Mary 53yrs, Rotherham.

Museums Sheffield is a big part of the city, bringing and providing the culture it has. I believe people won't notice what they've lost until its gone. Especially with the Millennium Gallery, so many people walk through just as a gateway, a quick way, to get somewhere. Maybe once this has gone, people will realise it wasn't just there for a easier way to get somewhere else.

Museums Sheffield, following the decline of there application for the next 3 years, have now become in negotiation with the Arts Council to provide a short term funding scheme to ease a transition of cuts.

To add to that, with the amount of disappointment caused by the refusal of the application for Museums Sheffield, there is a plan to protest against the Art’s Councils decision on Sunday 12th February. A sit in picnic will be held at the Millennium Galleries in Sheffield from 12pm until 3pm. It is encouraged that everyone who is unhappy with the decision, joins the protest with a picnic basket and a pen, as Shefftopia will be holding a big drawing demonstration at the event.

This Sunday! 12-3pm! Millennium Gallery! Fingers crossed it isn't the end yet.

#FF: CLUB LADUREE

If you have never heard of Club Ladurée, and what it entails, you are missing out, on what I believe, is a way of life.
Ladurée is an elegant Parisian Patisserie. It all began in 1862, when Louis Ernest Ladurée, created a bakery at 16 rue Royale in Paris. The decoration of the pastry shop was created by Jules Cherett, who found inspiration from the painting techniques used for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the Garnier Opera. Soon, cafes developed and became more and more luxurious. They attracted Parisian high society. Along with the chic restaurants, they became the showcases of the capital.

Ernest Ladurée’s wife, had the idea of mixing styles, creating the first tea salon in town. The “salon de thé” had a definite advantage over the cafés.
This introduced a refined atmosphere and change within history. In September 1997, Ladurée, being both a restaurant and tea room, opened on the Champs-Elysées. Ladurée became a tea salon, pastry shop, restaurant, chocolate shop and an ice cream parlour. Ladurée intends to introduce this century-old name in the main capitals of the world and develop new business opportunities.

Ladurée is most famous for it's creation of the Macaron. Once cooked and filled, the macarons are put to one side for 2 days before going on sale, this being the time it takes to achieve a 'perfect balance between texture and flavour'. With each new season, Ladurée creates a new flavour macaron.
I adore them. They fascinate me.



I first was introduced to Ladurée, Christmas in 2010. I was stuck at Charles De Gaulle Airport, and after having found the stall of Macarons, I made sure I spent my time there well. Ladurée is simply beautiful and perfection. Everything created is so beautifully prepared and presented. If you are going to buy macarons then Ladurée is the very best place to buy them.

Don't worry, you don't have to go all the way to Paris to find these lovely creations, Ladurée can be found in three London locations; in Harrods, in the Burlington Arcade and in Covent Garden.

http://www.laduree.fr/

The Ladurée Dream from Kluk Jeanovej on Vimeo.

it's safe to say...

For the third year, the Golden Globes had Ricky Gervais as a host.
The first time Gervais did the Golden Globes, his jokes were clever and witty. It was funny. It was fresh.
Then in 2011 they asked for him back. This causing quite a stir and uproar for being too harsh. It was again expected yet the intensity of the jokes weren't expected. So was there too much hype for 2012? Or was it generally just the same old boring stuff being delivered?
I believe it started well, but the anticipation and hype was all too much for what actually was delivered.
Granted, he did include celebrity jabs, but they were clearly approved and pre-approved by the the team behind the targeted celebrity and network. Another thing noted that practically no celebrity in the room was the subject of his insults, another big disappointment.
He was mildly amusing, but not outstandingly funny like last year. Many of us hoped he'd top last year, so when measured to that expectation, it seemed a let down. Some people believed it was like he wasn't even trying, but I think it was the case that he was trying too hard if anything.

I guess it's 'show business'... Gervais has been good for ratings for the network, and the network has been good to Gervais, no matter how maligned it may be.

I like Gervais, and continue to do so, I just wish the hype hadn't ruined it for him. I would have thought he'd have known better.

'Celebrity' Big Brother? Really?.. No really? 'Celebrity'?

Big Brother is the British version of the Dutch Big Brother television format, which takes its name from the character in George Orwell's 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. After a decade on air, Big Brother moved to Channel 5 in 2011, after the channel signed a 2-year contract. We have a year left...
Celebrity Big Brother 2012 is the ninth series of the British reality television series, that began on 5 January 2012. One question...How are Channel 5 getting away with calling the new series, 'Celebrity' Big Brother? The likes of Frankie Cocozza to Natasha Giggs? They even lost Lee Ryan in the line-up. Now that's bad. Apparently, Lee was all set to go but then he demanded to be paid more than £175,000. Yes, he was getting paid £175,000. How does that make sense to anyone? There's even the huge factor being that even Lee Ryan would have been one of five, who you could actually not struggle to say was famous for having a talent worthy of being famous.
11 years ago, Celebrity Big Brother began, the concept of actual celebrities going into the house in aid of Comic Relief. Celebrities being: Anthea Turner; an English television presenter, Chris Eubank; a boxer, Claire Sweeney; an actress and television presenter, Jack Dee; an English comedian, Keith Duffy an Irish singer, and Vanessa Feltz; a journalist and broadcaster. The term 'celebrity' can be used in this case, where these people actually have a claim to fame, for having a successful talent that got themselves appearing on television, the word 'successful' playing a major part in that sentence.
Big Brother is possibly the best way to illustrate just how our society is seemingly decaying. The fact being that if another Celebrity Big Brother is on it's way, it will consist of solely people who have appeared on the non-celebrity version of Big Brother, now being worthy of the 'Celebrity' status. Surely that should be the point where Channel 5 take a step back and have a look? Course they won't, everybody wants to know how Justine Sellman is doing and getting on, don't they?

N.B. Justine Sellman (Big Brother 4, 2003) is now married and working as an IT consultant.

Decay Of Our Society?..

Cultural values and society is indeed in decline. To illustrate this, if you took two newspapers, one being from 1959, and the other from 2012 present, I guarantee that the more recent newspaper will reveal a significantly lower cultural level in all respects, except the quality and quantity of photographs. There is a social and moral decay within our society. It's a fact that if you read The Sun newspaper then The Times newspaper, there's a difference in cultural interest significantly. Nobody realises it yet, but probably in the near future, the only news we will have will be; photographs of celebrities getting fat, and then showbiz gossip of who lost the most weight using their own fitness DVD's. If you seem to ask someone what's the biggest social issue of this week, it'll be Katy Perry and Russell Brand splitting up, or 'Jedward' on Alan Carr's Chatty Man, without a shadow of a doubt. This is the idea that celebrities take priority to somewhat general major issues of pollution or global warming, etc. Society has become so obsessed with this idea of a celebrity world to the extent that it has strayed away from the real issues at hand. People spend so many hours reading magazines, listening to radio shows, and even watching television shows revolved around celebrity gossip. What about the news? Or politics? What about the things affecting us personally or the things that will eventually affect us all? It's a question that must be asked in our celebrity culture: why do we care? What possesses us to keep up on our celebrity news? It comes as no surprise that our society is obsessed and mesmerised with fame. This is our decay of society on a culture level.

'Teenage Representation' sample

Media today is very useful to portray the way we live. Representation is 'the process whereby the media construct versions of peoples, places, and events in images or sound transmissions through media texts to an audience'.
All events are mediated by the texts that represent them. It takes forms and various techniques involved which are used to position the audience, so they take a particular view and feeling. ‘Every image is constructed and every opinion and feeling is manipulating’. We increasingly, are living in a ‘mediated’ society, in which that there is a process by the media that represents ideas, issues and events to us as the audience. There are techniques used for representation, particularly one being anchorage. This is ‘the fixing or limiting of a particular set of meanings to an image’. Anchorage gives a preferred reading, one most common example is where the anchorage text is underneath a photograph. The try to frame an image to get the audience thinking in a particular way, determining their feeling.
Media texts are usually known to rather than representing people as individuals, sections of the media use a 'shorthand' in the way in which they group people, known as stereotyping. This gives a negative and devaluing view on the people usually and most often, as it includes whole groups of people in society. Representation is usually to be found within the areas of class, age, gender, and ethnicity. It often shows how these 'identities' are represented as well as constructed.
Documentary film making is an opportunity to seek to document 'real' life. Documentaries such as 3 minute wonder on Channel 4 are commissioned as a series of shots by a director who wants to show primarily documentaries that generally highlight a current issue that is not public yet, or even to make a particular issue known.
It is well known that youth tend to suffer from a rather negative representation in the media. This is seen through looking at documentaries about teens and youth myself, and reading about it too. Teenagers are categorized mostly as from one scale to the other and never in-between, or 'normal' perhaps as would the public would say. Dick Hebdige is a British media theorist most commonly associated with the study of subculture. He wrote a book 'Hiding in the light: Youth surveillance as a display'. In it, he argues that young people fall into two distinct yet mutually dependent areas of representation. These are 'youth-as-trouble', and 'youth-as-fun'. He says that usually the category of 'youth-as-trouble' is presented in documentaries most often. For him, 'youth-as-fun' is presented later, mostly formed within advertisement, etc. Tabloids often sensationalise incidents of teen crime or issues present. Is it done just to keep things interesting for the audience? Of course it is. Often we are seeing someone else’s version of ‘reality’, as the ‘reality’ presented by the text is always going to have been constructed. People need to remember that!

01/01/2012

URBAN DICTIONARY: New Year's Resolutions - The things you promise yourself you will do over the year, but quit after the first 2 weeks.

“Bob's New Years Resolution was to lose 30 pounds...Yet Bob says a lot of things.”



...Bearing that in mind, here is my top ten NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS:
1. Manage my time and make time
2. Motivate myself to work harder on my studies of French and Journalism
3. To use my summer wisely
4. Get fit
5. Start going to gigs again
6. Take more photos/start working on more photography
7. Reduce, reuse, recycle
8. Volunteer
9. Sort my Grammar out
10. Explore Sheffield and its surrounding areas

"A New Year's resolution is a commitment that a person makes to one or more lasting personal goals, projects, or the reforming of a habit. This goal must be reached by the Next New Year. Keep in mind that this is a goal, not a wish and should be something that you as a person could strive for."

40 to 45% of American adults make one or more resolutions each year.
According to a survey carried out, 75% of people pass the first week, 2 weeks- 71%, one month- 64%, and 46% after 6 months.
While a lot of people who make new years resolutions do break them, making these resolutions, I believe, is very useful.

Giving up smoking and losing weight are the favourites, and each year, the number of fitness DVD sales and Nicotine patches sold increases. Another popular promise made is to deal with better money management and debt reduction.
A tip? Don't set the bar too high, if you want to achieve it, make it realistic.