Voralog

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In Millenium Park the Crown Fountain starts filling at 7 am. At 7:10 it is not quite full and you see this reflection of the buildings.

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My Tribute

My tribute

It has been 6 months that I am back from Antarctica. I was looking at images and I had epipheny.

I knew why I looked at these images so wistfully, longingly.

Whether one is religious or not the visit brought me closer to nature or God almighty more than ever. There was nothing between you and God, just beautiful creation.

I remembered Late great Ustaad Nusrat Fateh Ali.

He was a Sufi worshipper. His music was Sufiyana or ‘pure as god’.

He used metaphors of woman’s beauty or alcohol to describe the powers and beauty of God.

His music that is played in this video is Afreen which means ‘Unique Beauty’, Touché!

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Punjabi: نصرت فتح علی خان  (October 13, 1948 – August 16, 1997), a world-renowned Pakistani musician, was primarily a singer of Qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis (a mystical tradition within Islam). Considered one of the greatest singers ever recorded, he possessed a six-octave vocal range and could perform at a high level of intensity for several hours. Extending the 600-year old Qawwali tradition of his family, Khan is widely credited with introducing Sufi music to international audiences.[2] He was popularly known as “Shahenshah-e-Qawwali”, meaning “The King of Kings of Qawwali”.

Born in Faisalabad, Pakistan, Khan had his first public performance at age of 16, at his father’s chelum. He officially became the head of the family qawwali party in 1971, and was signed by Oriental Star Agencies (OSA), Birmingham, U.K., in the early 1980s. In subsequent years, Khan released movie scores and albums for various labels in Pakistan, Europe, Japan and the U.S. He engaged in collaborations and experiments with Western artists, becoming a well-known world music artist in the process. He toured extensively, performing in over 40 countries.Khan was taken ill with kidney and liver failure on August 11, 1997 in London, England, while on the way to Los Angeles in order to receive a kidney transplant. He died of a sudden cardiac arrest at Cromwell Hospital, London, on Saturday, August 16, 1997, aged 48.[11] His body was returned to Faisalabad, Pakistan, and his funeral was attended by the public.

 

 

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Buckingham Fountain is a Chicago landmark in the center of Grant Park. Dedicated in 1927, it is one of the largest fountains in the world. Built in a rococo wedding cake style and inspired by the Latona Fountain at the Palace of Versailles, it is meant to allegorically represent Lake Michigan. It operates from April to October, with regular water shows and evening color-light shows. During the winter, the fountain is decorated with festival lights.

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Waterfall garden at Chicago Botanical Gardens

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Cloud Gate — referred to by locals as “The Bean”, for obvious reasons — is a public sculpture by talented British artist Anish Kapoor. Cloud Gate weighs in at over 110-tons, and is 66 feet long and 33 feet high. “The Bean” was created using a huge number of individual stainless steel plates — Cloud Gate’s seamless surface is the result of thousands of hours of polishing.The sculpture has the appearance of a giant drop of liquid mercury, and the mirrored surface offers an amazing reflection of the city skyline, even more breathtaking on a bright, clear day. Visitors can walk underneath the Cloud Gate, which is surprisingly concave. Kids especially enjoy the fun house mirror effect that this creates.

Cloud Gate is quickly becoming one of the more popular photo opportunities in the city. In 2005, the City of Chicago tried an ill-fated attempt at requiring permits to photograph the sculpture — a move that was soon rescinded to the delight of shutterbugs everywhere.

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English Walled Garden

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Designed by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park is a major addition to the city’s world-renowned public art collection. The fountain consists of two 50-foot glass block towers at each end of a shallow reflecting pool. The towers project video images from a broad social spectrum of Chicago citizens, a reference to the traditional use of gargoyles in fountains, where faces of mythological beings were sculpted with open mouths to allow water, a symbol of life, to flow out. 

Plensa adapted this practice by having faces of Chicago citizens projected on LED screens and having water flow through an outlet in the screen to give the illusion of water spouting from their mouths. The collection of faces, Plensa’s tribute to Chicagoans, was taken from a cross-section of 1,000 residents. The fountain’s water features operate during the year between mid-spring and mid-fall, while the images remain on view year-round.

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The James R. Thompson Center (JRTC) is located at 100 W. Randolph Street in the Loop, Chicago,Illinois and houses offices of the State of Illinois. The building opened in May 1985 as the State of Illinois Center. It was renamed in 1993 to honor former Illinois Governor James R. Thompson. The property takes up the entire block bound by Randolph, Lake, Clark and LaSalle Streets, one of the 35 full-size city blocks within Chicago’s Loop. In front of the Thompson Center is a sculpture, Monument With Standing Beast, by Jean Dubuffet. The JRTC is sometimes referred to as the State Building.

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