Oh gods. An actual president, an intelligent, mindful person, with wit and a sense of humour. He can also speak in full sentences, and can handle the big words. *Sobs*
Via Raw Story.
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Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Oh gods. An actual president, an intelligent, mindful person, with wit and a sense of humour. He can also speak in full sentences, and can handle the big words. *Sobs*
Via Raw Story.
Oh, this is something I wish I could see in person. If you have the chance, take it, because the building is slated to be destroyed in the beginning of June.
Base23 uses 3D installations in his room at THE HAUS. Image courtesy of Million Motions and the artist.
What happens when 165 street artists take over a single building in Berlin? The result is a five-floor urban art labyrinth boasting the work of creators from over 70 countries. There’s not a single canvas in sight. Filled with low-lights, sound effects, 3D casts, growing things, unnerving portraiture, tape, stickers, and smells, it feels as far from a traditional gallery as you can get.
This building was once an abandoned bank on the famous avenue Kurfürstendamm (colloquially “Ku’damm”). Now overflowing with indoor street art, it’s set to be demolished in June to make way for apartment buildings. But that’s part of the fun of it, according to the artists. And until then, anyone willing to brave the two-hour line outside is welcome inside, free of charge.
THE HAUS (tag-lined “Berlin Art Bang”) is a project kicked off by Kimo, Bolle and Jörni (all aliases), a trio of creators on the Berlin urban art scene for more than 20 years. While they operate Xi-Design, a hand-painted advertisements company, it’s their never-for-profit crew Die Dixons that built THE HAUS. After inviting their expansive network of artists to participate, they created the packed-out platform to put street art in the spotlight, offering a temporary, no-fee experience much like street art itself. “We have a huge network,” Kimo tells Creators, “and we’re very organized, but all this really came from the heart and from people’s willingness to do it.”
[…]
Artists range from Berlin natives to international activists, established crews to newbie collaborators, and individuals to nonprofit giants. Solo artist Urzula Amen constructed a fake grocery store-like room with graphic health-hazard labels in the style of cigarette warnings. Only rooms away, International Justice Mission created a room to look like an Indian brothel, complete with VR goggles to visualize the plight of a modern-day prostitute.
As for the no-phone zone, it’s there for audiences to “get back to the roots,” as Kimo puts it. “Use your eyes and feelings and emotions, standing in the rooms. Step back, look again, touch it. Stop looking at things through your phone, or on the internet. Experience it for yourself, and focus on the moment.”
[…]
Die Dixons are currently exploring new places to build another Haus. “We’re getting inquiries from Belgium, The Netherlands, and several other countries,” says Kimo. “They’re all saying ‘we have a building for you!’ This will not be the last Haus.”
Rotkäppchen Goliath is an agency for urban communication that was founded in 2014 in Vienna. Image courtesy of Million Motions and the artist.
THE HAUS will be destroyed at the beginning of June. For a floor plan and extensive artist overview, check out THE HAUS website. Follow them on Instagram @thehausberlin.
You can see more at The Creators Project.
Rick Steves gets a hug.
Ricks Steves, author, and well known television travel guru, has his own idea of investing, and that investment hasn’t just grown over the years, it’s helped a tremendous amount of people.
Travel guide guru Rick Steves just gave a $4 million apartment complex to homeless women and kids who need housing.
Steves realized, early on, the importance of affordable housing, during his travel adventures (how else?) as a young man in Europe.
[…]
Twenty years ago, he devised a scheme where he could put my retirement savings not into a bank to get interest, but into cheap apartments that could house struggling neighbors.
“I would retain my capital, my equity would grow as the apartment complex appreciated,” Steves explained on his travel blog. “Rather than collecting rent, my “income” would be the joy of housing otherwise desperate people. I found this a creative, compassionate and more enlightened way to “invest” while retaining my long-term security.”
The 24-unit apartment complex became began housing single moms who were recovering from drug addiction and were now ready to get custody of their children back.
“Imagine the joy of knowing that I could provide a simple two-bedroom apartment for a mom and her kids as she fought to get her life back on track.”
There’s a nice little glow. Steves has now given the complex over to the Y.
Via Raw Story.
Via Think Progress.
Click on over to see all the winners and what’s new in clothing innovation! Global Change Award. You can read a bit more here.
A ballet about the plight of refugees, commissioned for the Royal Opera House, has been showered with five star reviews and described with words like potent and sombre. It’s the work of the Canadian Crystal Pite who has built a reputation as one of the most respected choreographers of her generation – and who is the first woman to have created a new work for the Royal Ballet in almost two decades. It’s titled ‘Flight Pattern’ and Kirsty Wark went to speak to her about using dance to engage in a difficult harrowing subject.
Beautiful and so very poignant. I wish I could see this in person.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo says in New York we have rejected the politics of division.
New York will be the first state in the country to cover four-year college tuition for residents after the program was included in the budget package approved Sunday night.
The state’s Excelsior Scholarship program will be rolled out in tiers over the next three years, starting with full coverage of four-year college tuition this fall for students whose families make less than $100,000.
The income cap will increase to $110,000 in 2018 and $125,000 in 2019.
“With this budget, New York has the nation’s first accessible college program. It’s a different model,” said Governor Andrew Cuomo Saturday in a statement. “Today, college is what high school was—it should always be an option even if you can’t afford it.”
This is amazing and wonderful news. NYS has become a great model in these dark times, and it would be fantastic to see other states pick up this model as well, as our current regime would never do anything so positive and *gasp* socialist.
Via NBC and NY Daily News.
Los Angeles Times.
Part IV of the LA Times’ The Problem With Trump is up: Trump’s War on Journalism.
…This may seem like bizarre behavior from a man who consumes the news in print and on television so voraciously and who is in many ways a product of the media. He comes from reality TV, from talk radio with Howard Stern, from the gossip pages of the New York City tabloids, for whose columnists he was both a regular subject and a regular source.
But Trump’s strategy is pretty clear: By branding reporters as liars, he apparently hopes to discredit, disrupt or bully into silence anyone who challenges his version of reality. By undermining trust in news organizations and delegitimizing journalism and muddling the facts so that Americans no longer know who to believe, he can deny and distract and help push his administration’s far-fetched storyline.
It’s a cynical strategy, with some creepy overtones. For instance, when he calls journalists “enemies of the people,” Trump (whether he knows it or not) echoes Josef Stalin and other despots.
Click on over for the full article. A Must Read.
DFL House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman (screen grab).
When is ‘telling it like it is’ not acceptable? When the telling is done by a woman, aiming a pointed remark at white men. Uh oh.
According to The Uptake, the incident happened on Monday while the Minnesota House was debating a bill that would increase penalties for protesters who block roads, a tactic successfully used by Black Lives Matters.
DFL House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman noticed that many members had not been on the floor to hear Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (DFL) speech comparing modern day protesters to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. So Hortman used a procedure known as “call of the House” to force lawmakers to return to the chamber.
“I hate to break up the 100 percent white male card game in the retiring room, but I think this is an important debate,” she said, exposing the activity of absent lawmakers.
Republican state Rep. Bob Dettmer objected: “I’m a white male. I respect everybody. But I really believe that the comments made by the Minority Leader were really not appropriate.”
“I have no intention of apologizing,” Hortman replied, adding that she was “really tired of watching women of color in particular being ignored. So I’m not sorry.”
[…]
However, Rep. Greg Davids (R-Preston) did think the statement was racist. Heather Carlson of the Rochester Post Bulletin reports that Davids thinks Hortman should resign over the comment. “I was greatly offended by minority leader Hortman’s racist statement about white males,” said Davids according to Carlson.
Mr. Davids has now gone the mortally offended route, and thinks Ms. Hortman should resign for saying something white men don’t like. He’s also claiming it’s racist. Idiotic Privilege, thy name is Davids.
Full story here.
#ArtAgainstHate PLEASE SHARE by reposting, or volunteer if you would like to partake in this project. Help build a community with us by raising awareness of the bullying this administration is enabling. Find empowerment in the words they call you. In these chaotic times it’s easy to lose grasp of hope for this troubled country. Yet if we open our hearts and our minds to the lush array of souls and energy that surround us every day we can find common ground. And if we advocate others to try their best to learn just one positive thing about that person who may seem so alien on the surface, perhaps we all will discover that beneath the mask we hide behind are actually more similarities than differences. And one by one, may we shed these words of hate that are spawned by fear of the unknown.
Los Angeles Times.
The LA Times has a searing series on all the ways the Tiny Tyrant is problematic. Part I is Our Dishonest President. * Part II is Why Trump Lies. * Part III is Trump’s Authoritarian Vision. Part IV will be published on Wednesday.
These are a must read. Clear, concise, and chilling with condemnatory truth.
In a matter of weeks, President Trump has taken dozens of real-life steps that, if they are not reversed, will rip families apart, foul rivers and pollute the air, intensify the calamitous effects of climate change and profoundly weaken the system of American public education for all.
His attempt to de-insure millions of people who had finally received healthcare coverage and, along the way, enact a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been put on hold for the moment. But he is proceeding with his efforts to defang the government’s regulatory agencies and bloat the Pentagon’s budget even as he supposedly retreats from the global stage.
These are immensely dangerous developments which threaten to weaken this country’s moral standing in the world, imperil the planet and reverse years of slow but steady gains by marginalized or impoverished Americans. But, chilling as they are, these radically wrongheaded policy choices are not, in fact, the most frightening aspect of the Trump presidency.
What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself. He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.
Highly Recommended, go read!
Image: Melania Trump in June, 2016 (a katz / Shutterstock.com).
It seems New Yorkers have had enough of Ms. Trump and the kid refusing to move into the white house. They aren’t terribly interested in shouldering the staggering cost of her presence anymore, and who could blame them?
Nearly 50,000 people had signed a Change.org petition by Tuesday morning demanding First Lady Melania Trump move in with President Donald Trump in their new White House presidential pad in an effort to reduce the costly taxpayer expense of protecting the first family as they live in separate states.
New York City has been footing a daily bill from $127,000 to $146,000 so the first lady can continue living in her $100 million Trump Towers penthouse, according to New York Police Commissioner James O’Neil. The cost surges to more than $300,000 to secure the 58-story building each day the president visits his family.
New Yorkers and activists have begun speaking out against the added cost of living, ordering Melania Trump to move in with her husband or start paying for her family’s security in the Big Apple herself.
“The U.S. taxpayer is paying an exorbitant amount of money to protect the first lady in Trump Tower,” a statement accompanying the online petition Tuesday said. “As to help relieve the national debt, this expense yields no positive results for the nation and should be cut from being funded.”
Via Raw Story.