Frankfurts Natural History Museum is the Best in All of Germany
Frankfurt am Main, is host to the Natural History Museum in Senckenberg , which has earned a national reputation for being one of Germany’s best museums. Every year, over 400,000 people visit the museum, which has a comprehensive collection of dinosaur bones and exhibitions on the history of the Earth and its evolution. In 2003, the Natural History Museums building, built in 1907, was lavishly renovated and modernized. The Museum has one of the most important natural history collections in all of Europe, with a majority of the thousands of unique exhibits display an array of extremely rare objects.
Visitors are treated to sensational exhibits like the anaconda that is devouring a wild boar, or the most renowned and reverent skeleton cast of ‘Lucy’, who lived more than 3 million years ago in whats known as Ethiopia in today’s world. The best attraction at the Museum include the ‘Dinos’, which strike awe and wonderment in all who cast their eyes upon the skeletons of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, raptors, beaked dragons and so much more. Messel pit fossils are expertly displayed by the Senckenberg Research Institute , which oversee the efforts of the UNESCO world natural heritage site, which also helps supports organisations that contribute to the Museums collections. Currently, the special exhibition ‘Under Our Feet’, explores the creatures that move underground, like worms, snails, fungi, insects and small mammals; all of which form a fantastic, complicated network of intricate relationships as they go about their daily life. Visitors are treated to 3-dimensional models of soil organisms in 10 to 1000 times magnification, plus they get to view specimens and films that illustrate the beauty and diversity of the life happening underneath their very feet.
If you’re planning a visit to the museum, many of the hotels in Frankfurt guest service may offer discount tickets to the Natural History Museum, located at Senckenderganlage 25. Check for guided tours and special lectures from people in the field of biology, geology and palaeontology. The Museum has impressively succeeded in vividly capturing the fascination or both young and old visitors with its history of planet Earth.
Tearjerker Music in Amsterdam
In cultures and countercultures, there are images that sometimes float freely back and forth, gaining traction in each geography, and sometimes for very simple reasons. In the case of certain kinds of music, it can get a little bit more complex, because there are elements that speak to deep sentiments that are not always visible on a surface, and some take many years to penetrate any kind of surface. In Amsterdam, there are a hundred things to consider at any given moment, when the culture starts to work its way in, and it can be challenging to negotiate one’s way around the cultures that exist here.
There are circles and concentric circles, and they each have ways of affecting each other that are not necessarily visible to outsiders, or even to travelers who have been here for awhile and think they know their way around. It’s certainly the case with smartlap music. Smartlap, or smartlappen , translates roughly as “tearjerk” or “tearjerker,” and there are many places where it can be heard. It’s a kind of folk music of Holland, and has a wide appeal, and like country music, there are places where it’s more welcome than others.
Frans Bauer, one of the country’s great folk artists, has won many awards of distinction, as well as others of not so great distinction, such as the most irritating song contest, for his ” Heb je even voor mij .” It’s not pure smartlap music, but it’s getting into the arena of what the music sounds like. Most of the city’s great hotels won’t have it playing in the elevators, but it’s actually well worth looking for.
Country, bluegrass, and other folk music styles make their way into counter cultures, usually through some kind of ironic back door, where the young people begin by making fun of it, until they realize that the cultures share many of the same sentiments. This is where it gets complex, because in sentiment, the real nostalgia of the songs start to live and come to life, and suddenly everyone is listening to the same thing, and feeling the same emotion, and the power of the music becomes inscribed in time despite time.
San Francisco Hybrids and Mix-Ups
San Francisco’s reputation as a city on the forefront of culture is one that’s still very much in good standing. Thanks to the radical creativity of the local artists who can recognize what it has to offer, there are still plenty of places where ideas push against each other. Sometimes these give way to some splendid new experiments, and sometimes they lock, pushing against each other in new and exciting ways.
The best work probably does a little bit of both, provoking and conceding, only to provoke again. That’s how a good conversation flows, and art is always a conversation. There are many visitors to the city who come looking for a chance to explore an unusual place with the most unusual weather patterns, and then there are those who come for the food, or those who want to see what the west coast hotels are like. All of these usually have an eye for art as well.
Anyone who happens to be looking a little carefully will come across the work of John Leanos at some point. This young artist, whose work has been moving gracefully and confidently out of the emerging category lately, is working in a variety of challenging forms, and in this case the form and function are both remarkably interconnected.
He’s got a teaching history that’s as impressive as his artwork, and he’s now on the faculty at UC Santa Cruz , where he teaches Social Documentation. He also teaches a variety of other classes, most reflecting his own art practices, with subjects that range from new media theory, critical theory, and public art in the realm of social practice. The work is uniquely situated at many crossroads of culture, and is also very specifically located in San Francisco, in many instances. It’s also very large in scope, encompassing critical artistic questions that take on national and international concerns, reflecting an artistic mind that is very much ahead of its time, and well-suited to a place that’s ahead of its time.