Alloting

You bought your domain and hosting , have your website up. It looks good, or at least you think it does. You are ready to show it to the world, but you don’t know how to get it out there. You’ve probably heard of both SEO and PPC among other three letter acronyms. However to you they sound like they just sort of generally fit into other lists of three letter acronyms like TLA, UAE, FSB, CFO, SBM, CHF and many more. It’s ok because these two can be explained and as you find out what they are you can decide what is the best way for you to proceed with advertising your website to the world.

PPC
PPC stands for Pay Per Click. This means that you will pay someone else to show an advertisement on their site and you only pay if someone clicks your ad. This is usually good in the beginning when you want to get new users into the website looking at all the interesting things that you have. One of the most common ways to go about this is to pay the major search engines like Google and Yahoo to put up your link either next to search results or on other people’s pages with related keywords. Google tries to ensure that the content makes some sense for the advertisement that is on the website with the hopes that this will get more people to click through and that they will be the right type of people for your website.

SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This means optimizing your website so that the search engines rank it higher in their results pages. This can include changing the website in some way, or by trying to get better incoming links which most search engines look at these days. The effects of this are lasting unless somehow your links get taken away which happens sometimes. There are other things that most SEO companies will use, but for the most part these are secrets that are closely guarded. Some companies will have an SEO tool that you can use to help you monitor your results or even suggest improvements, but the cost of these varies. This should be used when you are looking to improve your results when people search for specific words in search engines.

In your travels to Florida, don’t overlook Miami’s only publicly owned and operated National Historic Landmark, the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.  This is not just another home tour of an historic mansion.  The elegant 1916 winter home of the vice president of International Harvest, James Deering, created a mansion meant to resemble a centuries old Italian Renaissance villa, making it one of the best places in Florida to enjoy art, music, and film, as well as other cultural events which take place three hundred and sixty-four days a year.  Set on Biscayne Bay, the home offers amazing gardens and historic buildings as well as a view.

As one of the cultural offerings, just recently, there was a showing of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, which starred Lillian Gish.  In her time, she showed up regularly to Vizcaya as a house guest.  Next week, on February 29th, you can go out for an afternoon of music listening to something few people get a chance to hear anymore: a 1917 23-rank Welte-Mignon pipe organ.  There’s very few friends and neighbors who can lay claim to having heard an historic musical instrument, especially a pipe organ.  There will be visiting organists at the console and the host, Michael Barone, will talk about the meaning of pipe organs in homes in the early part of last century.  The show is titled, “Pipedreams.”

But perhaps, best of all, is the Moonlight Garden Tour of Vizcaya.  They begin at six thirty at night and cost fifteen dollars (but ten dollars if you’re a student or a senior).  The Moonlight Garden Tours don’t happen every night, so you’ll need to plan ahead and arrange for one of the hotels on the Florida beach.  Spend the days at the beach, and then head out to the Deering estate of Vizcaya and take in a tour under the stars on March 3rd, 30th, 31st, and April 27th and 28th

Fort Wayne is an idyllic city in the heartland of the U.S.  It has an ongoing love-hate relationship with its own reputation as being one of the places where the 1950s idea of the American Dream still exists.  The city itself is really lovely, and there are many different nooks and crannies where you certainly have the sense that the nuclear family is alive and kicking it old school style.  You can imagine sleds going down the hills in the winter, ice skating in the park, and a song in every heart.  Those things certainly do exist here, but there is much more to it than that.

Staying at a Fort Wayne hotel is a lovely experience that can offer a sense of what the city is like.  There is an almost old-fashioned sense of hospitality and grace, and yet there are also all of the contemporary conveniences that suggest that the world does come through here.  It also enters into the world, with artists like Bruce Nauman, drawing on expectations only in order to disrupt them.  Nauman was born here in 1941, and he left to study art in Madison, Wisconsin, and then at UC Davis, before embarking on what everyone would consider to be a remarkable career.

His themes are rather large, and even daunting.  He uses language to comment on language, to undermine how we make meaning.  The influence from Beckett here is very clear, but his work speaks in different frequencies.  He also works in multiple media, and seems to be quite adept at all of it.  Working on that difficult dividing line between art and life he sometimes seems to have overcome the distinction altogether by joining them to each other.  There is a lot of Fort Wayne in him, and the work demonstrates to the world that things are never what they seem on the surface.

Have you ever been to Florida? Well, I have. I’ve been all through it and I’m here to tell you that it’s really an incredible state. My husband and I decided to take an extensive road trip for our summer vacation last year and in doing so we thought it would be really cool to just drive all across Florida and stay wherever we wanted for as long as we wanted. The first day we started out very early in the morning and by noon I had begun to be afraid that we had made a mistake. However, after we stopped and had a great lunch in a little road side café I relaxed into the ride a bit. I mean, after all, I had two weeks of that ahead of me and I thought I should make the most of it. But soon I remembered that we could do exactly what we wanted to that meant we could go ahead and spend our entire trip on the Miami beach because by late afternoon we had already reached Miami.

Of course we didn’t do that and only spend the following day in Miami. We did go to the beach and had a great time overall but it suddenly became exciting to get back in the car and explore more of the state. That night we stayed in an out of the way Florida hotel and resort and it was really fun to be just out there in the middle of nowhere without a care in the world.

The next day we toured the Coral Castle of Ed Leedskalnin. This was such an amazing place and though I had read about it and even studied some of the electromagnetic theories that are associated with how he did all this, there really is just no way of understanding how incredible awesome those sculptures are without seeing it live and in person. Both my husband and I had our mouths dropped open in wonder through most of our visit there. It’s funny because we were always catching each other in mouth agape poses and we even have a couple pictures of each of us looking like that. It was absolutely amazing and I still think about that place constantly and like everyone else who reads about it or visits it I’m determined to crack the code that’s supposed to be in A Book in Every Home and discover how he was able to do all of that.

In New York, in never takes very long for trends to get here.  It’s also one of the few places in the world where a trend is over before it begins.  There are more hip people per square inch in these boroughs than any other place in the world, including places in Europe, where they are so hip they don’t even have inches.  Although to be fair, if there is any kind of rivalry here, New York would win for being the most self-obsessed, because the center of the world doesn’t ever have consider anything like centimeters, or even learn why.  But there are some things that are beyond hipness here, and even beyond irony.  Bike safety is among these, because everyone knows someone who’s been involved in a bicycle accident.

Bicycle couriers here are sort of like luxury hotels.  New York City is a place where lodging is extremely efficient, and enormously hospitable, and the couriers are highly skilled.  People who ride bikes for a living here, and in Los Angeles, know how to negotiate extreme conditions, and deal with extremely stupid behavior from motorists.  It’s still dangerous, for even the best riders.  There are many different campaigns around bike safety and awareness, but not has been so poignant and inspired as Jo Slota’s Ghostbike project.  This San Francisco artist started painting bicycles white at places where riders were injured or killed, as a kind of urban roadside altar.

They’re reminiscent of some of the indigenous Mexican traditions for marking the places where the spirit has left the body, and recall many other traditions of passing as well.  The work has become more complex and interesting as time has gone by, and it’s eerie but very welcome to see that these works have transplanted well from that coast to this one.  The Sunset Park ghost bike is both harmonious and startling, and calls up an attitude of aesthetic awareness along with memory in the viewer, reminding us that we are the streets as well as the buildings in our city.

Phoenix is a city that’s got the right name.  The mystical bird comes, logically, from Phoenician Mythology, and is said to live for 500 to 1,000 years, then to engulf itself entirely in flames.  While it’s burning, it gives birth to another bird, who rises from the ashes to live again for another 500 to 1,000 years.  It’s a great story, and it is what Phoenix seems to do regularly.  Phoenix luxury hotels might be the best place in the world to contemplate the fable, surrounded by all the riches of the city, as well as some of the most exquisite hospitality this side of the Rio Grande.  From this vantage point of total luxury, you can look over the Valley of the Sun and consider all the generations that have passed through this desert.

It has a long history of human habitation.  Some of the Native populations have been in the area for literally hundreds of generations. There are always new arrivals, too, making it one of the fastest growing cities in the country.  Like the Phoenix, it’s constantly reinventing itself, making a new story out of the ashes of the previous one, sometimes in memory of it, and sometimes in a state of amnesia.   It’s up to the local artists, sometimes, to carry the memory for the rest of the culture, and in Phoenix this happens all the time, but it also happens that the population forgets again, when the next summer sun comes around and makes new heat on the desert floor.  Leandro Soto lived in Arizona between 2002-2009, and left an interesting legacy that will be tough to follow.

Soto left his native Cuba in the mid-80s, and his birth city of Cienfuegos plays a prominent role in his visual art.  The map and the ground itself is a form and texture that you can find in his magnificent paintings.  He has lived in a number of places, and speaks French, English, Spanish, and a smattering of other languages, and he uses the themes of speech and silence in his performance work.  Sometimes he’ll play the part of a Santero card reader, telling the future, but not speaking a word – except when he has to take a call on his cell phone, when he breaks into perfect English.  His work in Phoenix carried traces of earlier performances and paintings from other places, and it will be interesting to see what he carries from Phoenix to the next place, but one thing that’s certain is that Phoenix is richer for his footprints on its soil.

When Henry and Steve decided to take a trip to South Africa, they were extremely interested in seeing African art as it was being made and even possibly to make some purchases. They always had a tremendous respect for African cultural, performance, music and the visual arts and neither one of them had been to the country before. So, when they decided to go, it was much more than a simple vacation, it was actually related to passions they both had and wanted to explore further.

The visit started off an a great foot and they really enjoyed the accommodations provided one of the South Africa five star hotels in which they stayed. In addition the staff was all extremely friendly and helpful in directing them to some of the local arts and crafts displays and open markets. Henry was primarily interested in masks, and loved some of the symbolism behind them. Most often the masks are representative of the regional or tribal heritage from which they originate. The expressions seen on them are also indicative of certain social attitudes and responsibilities. Henry was happy to find three new masks that he was able to buy and thought would go great with his collection.

Steve loves the bold use of colors that are often used in African paintings. He was primarily looking to find something by a local artist that would be significant to both his trip and also the region around Cape Town. However, what he ended up finding, and this was almost by accident, were some incredible depictions of animals by the Tanzanian artist Said Tinga Tinga. He was so captivated by two paintings, both of them had elephants as their subjects that he went ahead and purchased them. In addition, they were so intrigued by some of the local musicians that were out playing, they thought they would look into getting some drums on their next trip.

Bangkok is one of the truly great cities in the world.  Its vast population is comprised of people who come from all over, and it’s been known as one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Asia, if not the world.  Cultures, languages, and traditions all meet in the streets here, and when you’re planning a stay here, you’re on your way to joining the great human comedy that plays out here every day.  It’s a very heady city, that’s always offering food for all the senses, and the pace can be low-key or absolutely exciting, depending on where you are.  But you can be sure that if you’ve booked a 5 star hotel, Bangkok will offer blissful days and exciting nights.  Our hotels offer a level of hospitality that wll restore and replenish your energy, so you can see more of this fantastic place.

The local restaurants offer enormous and splendid variations on traditional and contemporary Thai cooking, as well as international specialties that will please every palate, and our chefs are well-studied in all these forms, and ready to create a fantastic meal for you.  After a little rest, it’s time to check out the city, and see what the buzz is all about. Bangkok is a center for artists and intellectuals, and has some of the most exciting new works of art in the modern world.  It’s no surprise that Bangkok would have so many exquisite artists, being one of the largest cities, but it’s been difficult to see a lot of the new work, largely because cultural differences place Thailand at a distance.  To change this tendency would benefit the modern world tremendously and give artists like Anurak Chatanan the exposure they deserve.  For now, though, it’s an auspicion thing to be here and see the work first-hand.

He’s been quite active in the art scene since his school days in the 80s and 90s, and the work of Anurak Chatanan is fascinating, simultaneously fragile and monumental in one breath.  He works in installation and sculpture, among other forms, infusing structures with myth, menace, and often a delicate sense of humor.  He’s also been very active in social issues, working with children, and participating in projects to promote AIDS awareness, as well as being a part of a network of artists for Tibet.  It will be fascinating to watch his career in the next decade, and fortunate to see it right here.