HEAVEN

NO TRAFFIC, HEAVEN TOO.

HELLO, MY NAME IS GOOGLE. I KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU. I PLAN TO KEEP IT THAT WAY. SO, GO AHEAD. DO A SEARCH FOR SOMETHING THAT INTERESTS YOU. I'M HERE TO HELP. I'LL BE WAITING...AND MOST IMPORTANTLY. I WILL BE WATCHING YOU.

Mark Bradford is an artist who incorporates ephemera from urban environments into mixed-media works on canvas that are rich in texture and visual complexity. Though he has experimented throughout his career with many different artistic media, including public art, installations, and video, his signature and best-known work takes the form of massively scaled, abstract collages that he assembles out of signage and other materials collected, most frequently, from his own neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Bradford’s aesthetic language makes use of such elements as bits of billboards, handmade advertisements, foil, string, and permanent wave end-papers from beauty shops, which he arranges, layers, singes, sands, and bleaches into brilliantly hued, painterly structures that appear to sprawl and swirl. Loosely gridded and often cartographic in character, these pieces both reflect his interest in the formal traditions of modernist abstraction and reference the communities from which he culls his materials.

Glimpses of partially legible text and imagery within his map-like works evoke a multitude of metaphors and suggest intricate systems in a constant state of flux. In the multilayered tableau Los Moscos (2004), bursts of bright yellows and reds radiate through a predominance of darker fragments, calling to mind clusters of pulsing city lights viewed from a collapsed and distanced perspective. With this piece and numerous others in his increasingly ambitious body of work, Bradford is developing a visually arresting means of representing in two dimensions the dynamism and depth of the sites and streets he excavates.

Mark Bradford received a B.F.A. (1995) and an M.F.A. (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts. His work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

A LITTLE KATY PERRY

"I like experimenting and I’m totally OK with ending up in the ‘worst dressed.’ It’s happened many, many times, but I’m proud of those outfits. I don’t follow trends. I’m just not into what everyone else is wearing."

WOWZERS

BITCHIN' WITCHIN'

Gotta <3 It.

New York is a lot of work. is an edition of 1,000 real dollar bills emblazoned with a maxim, “New York is a lot of work.” The text is hand-imprinted with a high-gloss foil stamp.”

The above is the simple description of Reed Seifer’s presentation at The Armory Show. Seifer, known for massive scale public art initiatives, also handled all graphic art for The Armory Show itself.

Via:Curatedmag.com

NEW YORK IS EXPENSIVE. PERIOD.

COKE.

As if this is really news. Mr. Sheen says in new interview with Life & Style magazine that indeed he is losing his mind. I guess having being fired, losing his kids and all types of chaos.

Charlie is the first case of social media millionaire addicts that has had an ability to control his press in a way that we have never seen before. Very very sad. Pray for this guy.

I made the change from a common thief
To up close and personal with Robin Leach
And I'm far from cheap, I smoke skunk with my peeps all day
Spread love, it's the Brooklyn way
The Moet and Alize keep me pissy
Girls used to diss me
Now they write letters 'cause they miss me
I never thought it could happen, this rappin' stuff
I was too used to packin' gats and stuff
Now honies play me close like butter played toast
From the Mississippi down to the east coast
Condos in Queens, indo for weeks
Sold out seats to hear Biggie Smalls speak
Livin' life without fear

REST IN PEACE - BIGGIE SMALLS

May 21, 1972 – March 9, 1997

Poet and political scientist Tamim al-Barghouti could not be in his home country during the Egyptian protests that brought the government to its knees. He's currently in exile, teaching at Georgetown University. When the protests began, however, al-Barghouti's voice played a large roll in the protests.

After the government shut down internet in the country, al-Barghouti faxed a new poem to the Egyptian newspaper where he wrote as a columnist. "When they published it," al-Barghouti told PRI's Studio 360, "it was being photocopied and distributed in the square."

Eventually people erected two huge, makeshift screens in Tahrir Square, where the protests were being held, and managed to project Al Jazeera broadcasts onto the screens. "I was called," al-Barghouti recounts, "and I was asked to read the poem like almost every two hours."

That moment, he says, "made me feel a little bit less immersed in guilt that I am not there and that I'm unable to be there at this moment."

Poetry has always been at the forefront of opposing Tyranny, according to al-Barghouti, "throughout the Arab world, not just in Egypt." In fact, he says that most Egyptian poets were imprisoned, either by Mubarak or his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. For al-Barghouti, however, his punishment was exile from Egypt after protesting against the war in Iraq. "My story is very trivial," he says, "others have suffered much more."

Now, al-Barghouti believes things are changing. "This is one of the very rare moments where our hopes and our expectations are not so far apart," he says. Islamists, nationalists, communists, liberals, independents, the left and the right are all working together to remove Mubarak. "This revolution is so unique that everyone wants something new out of it," he says. "Because it is new, and everyone expects something new -- democratic and free."

http://www.pri.org/

DEMOCRATIC & FREE