Galya Kovalyova Photo Exhibit at Doron Braunshtein Gallery

Doron Braunshtein Gallery is yet another
manifestation of a hip and colorful clothing boutique
Apollo Braun on Orchard St., Lower East Side. "Every
talented artist should be given an immediate chance
for exposure, without pretensiousness or difficulty,"
Apollo Braun himself, the owner of the store said, "we
will do the same when we are in Chelsea!" Here, bold
and bright, yet intimate atmosphere provides a natural
home to funny, moody and extravagant artwork, clothing
and people.

The Gallery's fifth hosted artist, photographer Galya
Kovalyova, was welcomed during the opening yesterday
night, on Thursday, July 19th. Her series "Dreaming a
City," a surreal moody exploration into the intimate
magic of night-time urbanism, matches the faintly lit
unpredictable evenings of Lower East Side. Galya is a
Russian-American and the photos exhibited travel
across Europe, New York and China, and yet the images
of steamy restaurant windows, half-decipherable neon
signs, reflections and distortions of backlit
architecture form a universal picture of mystery in a
city at night, recognizable across the modern world.
These are images from our dreams of A City, romantic
and full of secrets.

The visitors browsed the store, drinking and laughing,
finding the photos on the colorful, magazine-cutout
walls and leaving their immediate associations on the
white paper wall space around the artwork, as
suggested by a friend of the photographer. This
continued and transformed the common reflections on
the topic. Thus a visitor wrote "A Forrest" under a
photograph of a piece of meat peaking through a green
curtain of a butcher shop in Beijing. The chunk of
meat transformed into an animal and the imagined city
started living its own life.

The exhibition will be up through next Thursday, July
27th. Please come and leave your associations. For
more information about the photography and the
gallery, please visit www.galyaphoto.com and www.apollobraun.com

All writings here are copyrighted by Antonio Goicochea and Galya Kovalyova. You may not use them without written permission but you may link to the posts or give out a link to the posts.

All Photographs here are copyrighted by Galya Kovalyova. You may not use them without written permission but you may link to the posts or give out a link to the posts.

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The Man Who Rocked My World

My FAVORITE british guitarist Nick McCabe has come back from the dead!!!

Or out hiding into the sun light some would say as he now has a myspace page!

For those of you who don't know who he is, he is the ethereal genius guitarist of a little known band called the Verve.

The Verve became very famous and popular in Europe throughout the 1990's, however their American following remained puzzling small.

Nonetheless he was the principal songwriter behind the songs off the band's first two albums, A Northern Soul, and the widely acclaimed A Storm In Heaven, the album that was the most important and influential album to come out of England in the 1990's.

His genius ranks up there with the dazzling brilliance among the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and other notables. And fortunately, this genius has been blessed with a longevity that surpasses the "Club of 27" life span.

Check out his myspace page and listen to the some of the spell-binding sonic soundscapes he has available for preview up there.

Tell him Vega from Vegalifestyle sent you.

P.S. You can buy the Verve's albums on Amazon or any record store near you.
P.P.S. The Verve disbanded shortly after the release of their Urban Hymns album which was more of Richard Ashcroft's album than it was Nick's and also debuted the hit single Bittersweet Symphony. The Verve have since reunited in the past few months and are going to go play a few shows later this November in the UK.

Are Robots taking over the Earth?

I was recently an intense discussion with a Wall Streeter about job security. This gentleman graduated from the prestigious Wharton School of Business with both undergraduate and graduate degree's in finance and worked for years on Wall Street.

After having had the luxury of working overseas in finance he came back to the states only to be faced with stunning difficulty in obtaining employment from many of the big firms despite a highly successful track record on the Street and abroad. He quietly explained to me that many of the Wall Street firms were hiring younger and younger and paying less and less in an effort to maximize profits. He also tried to explain to me that the idea of job security was pretty much dead.

In a previous post, which I pulled from this blog, I talked about who had the best job security.

I thought about it long and hard and also had discussed this with another friend in finance.

Jobs that are the most secure are ones that can NOT be replaced by robots or outsourced to foreign nations such as India or China.

This leaves us several categories of jobs all of which can be summarized in as such that it needs human intelligence to execute or run.

•People who build or run businesses
•Specialists or people who are self employed such as doctors, accountants, and •lawyers
•Salesmen
•Artists
•Technical Artisans . . .
•etc, etc

There is a field where where a specialist and an artist intersect which is that of the technical artisan.

These are individuals who operate sophisticated pieces of software, which may or may not be coupled with other equipment.

The workers in these fields are safe so long as there is a high cost of entry.

For example, type setters started losing their jobs once word processors came out.
The demand for professional audio engineers started dwindling at a tremendous rate once affordable good quality portable recording software, such as ProTools, exploded into the marketplace.
Apple greatly undercut Avid's market share by offering a video editing platform (Final Cut Pro) at a huge fraction of the cost with comparable editing power.

We will see this happening soon with Apple's release of the Color application which is meant to mimic $100,000+ color correction systems such as the DaVinci 2k.

And if you think being a surgeon is a safe bet in terms of job security, you might be wrong. The U.S. military has developed a machine with ultra fine motor movements that can be remotely operated by a surgeon from over a thousand miles away. The military developed this technology so that it afforded them the ability to contract the best surgeons to operate on wounded soldiers in distant or remote locations. Of course one could speculate that surgeons might be outsourced. However this is mere speculation.

We also know that innovation destroys jobs. Advances in machinery, intelligent robots, better preventative health measures, etc, etc.

If you're looking to a job for high pay, that also may change in the future depending on the field you are pursuing.

For example, surgeons and doctors were doing very well financially until health insurance companies began to dictate what they would pay doctors. (Plastic surgeons still make rockstar levels of cash since they rarely have to deal with health insurance).

Rumor has it these highly paid self employed specialists may begin to unionize. Which I ultimately hope is not the case as we have seen ill-effect from this happening particularly in reference to some of the automobile manufacturers in Detroit.

My suggestion? Learn more about money and how it works. I don't mean study finance, or business, although I wish I had majored in business instead of minoring in it. Today I am shocked at how little many people know about money. I know people who have more than DOUBLED their salaries and crossed the 6 figure threshold only to complain about having less money than ever before.

And then we all know about the success stories of many individuals who started off with nothing, in many instances no college education, who have amassed empires. And then there are also some individuals who have amassed a great deal of wealth through wise investments, and choose to work a job part time.

Best of luck to you.