© C. Ford.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
© C. Ford.
Ville. Still cute. Much trouble.
Maroon 5 will not be spending “One More Night” in North Carolina anytime soon, making an announcement today that may have fans in the Tar Heel state in “Misery.”
The Grammy-winning pop-rock group cancelled two shows in the state in response to anti-LGBT House Bill 2.
“This was a difficult decision for us to make as a band,” the group wrote in a statement on their website. The band wrote that they don’t want to “penalize our fans in North Carolina by not performing for them, but in the end it comes down to what we feel is morally right.” Full Story Here.
And, Target is standing firm with their commitment to diversity.
Target CEO Brian Cornell told Fortune magazine on Wednesday that the retail chain’s decision to allow transgender customers and staff to use the bathroom that most closely corresponds with their gender identity hasn’t hurt sales.
“To date we have not seen a material or measurable impact on our business,” Cornell said. “Just a handful of stores across the country have seen some activity and have been impacted.”
[…]
In a May 11 interview with Kelly Evans of CNBC’s Squawk Box, the CEO stated, “We’re going to continue to embrace our belief in diversity and inclusion, just how important that is to our company. … We want to make sure we provide a welcoming environment for all of our guests, one that’s safe [and] one that’s comfortable.”
Adobo.
Housing site Abodo has put together a study analyzing tweets to figure out the most- and least-hate-filled places in the country. Between June 2014 to December 2015, they geolocated 154 keywords among 12 million tweets. The keywords included slurs and other prejudiced language against black people, Hispanic/Latino people, women, gays and lesbians, transgender people, people with disabilities, and the overweight.
Here are the results for most hate-filled states:
And the overall least hate-filled states:
There are also breakdowns of Anti-Black tweets by city, Anti-Hispanic by city, Anti-Woman by city, Anti-Gay by city, and Anti-transgender by city. Full Story Here.
Credit: Ben & Jerry’s.
Ben & Jerry’s unveiled a new social justice campaign — and a punny ice cream flavor to go with it — alongside the NAACP at a North Carolina rally on Tuesday.
The new flavor, Empower Mint, is a peppermint base with fudge brownies and swirls. The new campaign, “Democracy is in Your Hands,” is aimed squarely at the fallout from two Supreme Court cases: Citizen’s United and the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
“We believe that these two things — the money in our political system and the attempt to disenfranchise certain segments of our voting population — are profoundly corrosive to our democratic system. And it is creating policies that are promoting deep inequities in our society,” Chris Miller, Ben & Jerry’s Social Media Activism Manager, told ThinkProgress by phone from the flavor’s premiere in North Carolina.
Breanna Koski and Joanna Duka of Brush & Nib.
“Artistic Freedom!” The new battle cry of religious people who do not want their lives or businesses tainted by anyone in that queer camp. Phoenix, Arizona has a non-discrimination law which has been working just fine. Now, a conservative law firm has found a business willing to be the poster child for an effort to knock down a law protecting LGBT people from discrimination with claims of artistic expression and “religious freedom.”
Joanna Duka and Breanna Koski own a calligraphy studio in Phoenix, Arizona called Brush & Nib Studio. They make all kinds of custom art, including wedding invitations and other items marrying couples might use. They’re also evangelical Christians who refuse to serve same-sex couples. Even though they haven’t yet been asked by such a couple, they’re partnering with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to file a legal complaint in Arizona state court attempting to overturn Phoenix’s nondiscrimination ordinance.
This pre-enforcement challenge is based on the idea that if they refused to sell the same services to same-sex couples that they already sell to opposite-sex couples, they would be penalized under the law. And the law, they argue, infringes on their right to freely express their religious beliefs.
Basically, they just don’t want to have to follow that law. Not only do they not want to have to serve marrying same-sex couples, but they also want to be able advertise their beliefs on their website so that same-sex couples don’t even bother asking for their services. Most importantly, they don’t want anybody else to have to follow it either. They’ve filed a facial complaint, asking for the entire law to be thrown out and made unenforceable.
“Joanna and Breanna must live authentic, holistic Christian lives,” the complaint reads. “They must seek to honor God in all aspects of their lives, including all aspects of their work, and must seek to serve God and their neighbors through their vocation. As a result, Joanna and Breanna cannot do anything in their business that violates their religious beliefs or dishonors God.”
The suit outlines just what the pair believes in detail:
Zack Ford has the full story here.
Artistic expression my arse. It’s outrageous for religious bigots to use this an excuse to legislate bigotry. There’s nothing stopping these people from painting “RELIGIOUS calligraphy” all over their storefront. There’s nothing stopping them from branding themselves as “Christian Brush & Nib”. Christian bookstores do this all over the place, and gosh, most of their clients are Christian. Who would have thought? Most people who aren’t bigoted assholes will choose to employ non-bigoted services. This is nothing more than a barely veiled attempt to turn over a non-discrimination law which is working well.
The Oklahoma State Capitol. (KOKH/Keaton Fox)
Oklahoma has joined the party by declaring a state of emergency to block Obama’s directive.
Lawmakers have done so by introducing two pieces of legislation, which will be considered by May 27. First, Senate Bill 1619 would allow students to only use bathrooms based upon their gender at birth. This would render Obama’s directive powerless and also includes the following language:
“It being immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health and safety, an emergency is hereby declared to exist, by reason whereof this act shall take effect and be in full force from and after its passage and approval.”
The law would allow parents to sue school districts who don’t comply, based upon a request for a religious accommodation. Then legislators introduce Senate Concurrent Resolution 43, which actually calls for articles of impeachment against President Obama over the bathroom directive. One of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. John Bennett, explains the rationale:
“This directive to schools is not only unlawful, but the breadth of overreach in this instance by the Obama Administration is shocking. We are working on legislation that would protect our citizens by not requiring our kids and women to share a facility with anyone who ‘identifies’ as a gender that they were not born. We are going to do everything we can to protect our women and children.”
Via Uproxx, Ktul, and Raw Story.
This comes after Oklahoma’s stunning disregard for, well, everything, by passing a bill making performing an abortion a felony. I think this graphic should be up everywhere Oklahoma is being discussed:
Via Politicususa.
Punk Portraits in Pink, by Scott Scheidly, are simply fabulous. Many of them made me laugh in delight. I’m only going to include two here, be sure to go see the rest.
While most people find PINK funny, “I have been told to kill myself because of the Spock piece (you know how Trekkies are), the Russians said that there are people coming to get me for my Putin pieces, and one lady lost her mind in a gallery over the Pope John Paul piece.
Whhhyyyyyy? I *love* Emo Spock. Nimoy would have loved Emo Spock, it would have made him laugh. I’d buy it in a second if it weren’t sold. And Care Bear Putin? Adorable. Reagan keeps making me laugh. Only time he’s ever done that.
Reagan Hates Me
Emo Spock
Toshiba 1400 FL Typewriter, 1940
Today every tweet is archived, every Facebook selfie stashed and cached, every arts/tech/culture blog mirrored, and the idea of the permanence of data is taken for granted. But things like physical objects aren’t permanent. They break down, melt, or are tossed in the trash, and could potentially disappear from public consciousness forever, leaving behind but a foggy memory. Thngs, a digital database for the preservation of physical objects, wants to change that. Billing itself as “A place for everything,” this new system allows users to interact with objects old and new, whether they be a bust of Emperor Vitellius from the 1800s, or the Spice Girls-branded Polaroid Spice Cam from 1997.
Thngs co-founder Dima Dewinn comes from a background in social design and architecture, but quickly became interested in the preservation of physical items. Calling in from Moscow, Dewinn explains, “We were learning for a long time about the philosophy of the preservation of an entity. About all the things that we are surrounding ourselves with. All the things that we adore, we don’t know much about them because there’s no such thing as a Wikipedia of things.” So Dewinn set out “to make a tool that would preserve and structurize data of the material world. And we wanted to make it sexy.”
It’s an interestin’ place, have a look around. You can add to it, too.
Rep. Bill Flores
Seventy-three House Republicans are reportedly challenging the Obama administration’s authority to issue schools guidance on the restroom use of their trans student population.
Texas state representative Bill Flores, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, is urging “members to sign on to a letter, pushing the Departments of Education and Justice to detail how, and on what authority, they plan to enforce the new guidelines,” as The Daily Signal, a conservative news site run by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, reports.
“Americans are incensed by President Obama’s blatant executive overreach,” Flores told the conservative website. “Now they are threatening school funding over an issue that should rightfully be left to the states. Their actions are politically motivated and Congress has every responsibility to challenge them.”
[…]
North Carolina state representative Mark Walker, who authored the letter, believes that the Obama directive poses a danger to schools. Walker told The Daily Caller, a conservative website, that the decision of trans bathroom access should be up to individual administrators to make, not the federal government or youth. He said it allows students to make up the rules “from one week to the next.”
“If a 17 year-old young man wants to go shower with the girls on the soccer team,” Walker argued, “he’s allowed to do that because of his will or his gender fluidity for the week [he] can tell the teacher ‘this [is] what I’m feeling, this is where I’m at’ and she has no recourse to step in.”
Fuck me, but these idiots are beyond tiresome. They are utterly ignoring gender dysphoria and transgender people in favour of this nebulous ‘gender flu[idity]’ that people are going to mysteriously come down with whenever.
Walker’s fear, however, is unfounded. In the more than 200 localities across the United States that have passed nondiscrimination laws providing equal access in public accommodations, there’s never been a reported case of a cisgender person — student or otherwise — pretending to be trans to gain access to the opposite-sex facilities.
[…]
This statement is strikingly similar to an earlier dispatch from Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia, issued by their states’ attorneys general. “The so-called ‘significant guidance’ issued by the Obama Administration raises more questions than it answers, just as it creates concerns among anyone who believes sex is a biological fact and not a personal preference,” Texas state representative Ken Paxton argued in a May 17 statement.
Oh, gender is a biological fact, it just resides in the brain, not the genitals. It would certainly be nice if these people would exercise their brains a bit. This is starting to sound suspiciously like the creationism vs evolution fight. Might be nice if they remembered they lost that one. At any rate, these are bloody guidelines, it isn’t law, it isn’t an order, it isn’t enforceable.
Photos 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Vik Muniz is an innovative artist who creates imagery within a nexus of diverse media. Working with a dizzying array of unconventional materials—including sugar, tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust, and junk—Muniz painstakingly builds tableaux before recording them with his camera. From a distance, the subject of each resulting photograph is discernible; up close, the work reveals a complex and surprising matrix through which it was assembled. That revelatory moment when one thing transforms into another is of deep interest to the artist.
Muniz’s work often quotes iconic images from popular culture and art history, drawing on our sense of collective memory while defying easy classification and mischievously engaging a viewer’s process of perception. His more recent work incorporates electron microscopes and manipulates microorganisms to explore issues of scale and to unveil both the familiar and the strange in spaces that are typically inaccessible to the human eye.
This major mid-career retrospective canvasses more than twenty-five years of Muniz’s work to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, reminding us of the power of art to surprise, delight, and transform our perceptions of the world.
The exhibit will be showing through August 21st, 2016. If you’re in Atlanta, take a look.
Vik Muniz was also the driving force of the documentary Lixo Extraordinário (Waste Land), 2010. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.
© C. Ford.
Priest with crucifix (Shutterstock www.shutterstock.com)
For the past 12 years, the church of St Frances Xavier Cabrini in Scituate, near Boston, has not been empty for a single moment.
Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, a group of parishioners has maintained a vigil inside the building to prevent its sale by the archdiocese of Boston, to help pay the Catholic church’s enormous bills relating to its long and sordid history of child sexual abuse .
Children have slept in the sacristy, meals have been eaten beneath the stained glass windows, planning meetings have been held in the pews, prayers said and candles lit.
But not for much longer. After the supreme court this week declined to hear an appeal against an earlier court ruling, the parishioners must now vacate the premises, and will hold a final farewell service on 29 May.
[…]
That does not seem likely. “This church is being stolen from us, there’s no denying that. The archdiocese sees the value of property over the value of people,” said Rogers.
Well, the church certainly didn’t value all those who were abused throughout its history on this planet, so I’m not sure why there’s any surprise about this.