Don’t make people pay for music, says Amanda Palmer. Let them. In a passionate talk that begins in her days as a street performer (drop a dollar in the hat for the Eight-Foot Bride!), she examines the new relationship between artist and fan.
Located in the fertile agricultural region of Argentina’s ‘Pampas’ is a guitar shaped forest made up of over 7,000 cypress and eucalyptus trees. At over a kilometer in length (2/3 of a mile) the guitar shaped forest is quite visible for passing planes and satellites above. While it’s sheer size and scale is impressive as a piece of land art, the story of how it came to be is even more touching.
The guitar forest was planted by a farmer named Pedro Martin Ureta. Now 71-years old, it was him and his four kids that planted every individual tree decades ago. The inspiration came from Pedro’s wife, Graciela Yraizoz, who was flying in a plane over Pampa one day and noticed a farm, that through a fluke of topography, looked a bit like a milking pail.
Graciela proclaimed that they should do one better and make a giant guitar on their farm, as she always loved the instrument.
Then one day in 1977 she suddenly collapsed. She had suffered from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm and died shortly thereafter, carrying what would have been the family’s fifth child.
A couple years later, Pedro decided to honour his late wife’s wishes and create the guitar shaped forest she had always dreamed of. With the help of his children, they planted and nurtured roughly 7,000 trees. The figure-eight shaped body and star-shaped sound hole are made up of cypress trees, while the beautiful blue eucalyptus trees are used to represent the six strings.
Graciela Yraizoz
The statue of Maitreya Buddha in Leshan is one of the tallest statues of Buddha on Earth, for more than a millennium, the highest sculptural work in the world. It is carved out of a cliff face that lies at the confluence of the Minjiang, Dadu and Qingyi rivers in the southern part of Sichuan, province in China, near the city of Leshan.
