Sophianotloren

On June 1, 1906, copper miners in the city of Cananea, Sonora, a few miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border, went on strike against the American companies dominating the mines and Porfirian Mexico. Widely seen as one of the most important events influencing the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the Cananea strike is also one of the most important events in Mexican labor history.

In the early twentieth century, the U.S.-Mexico border was quite fluid for both workers and capital. Mining companies like Phelps-Dodge had major investments on both sides of the border. The government of Porfirio Díaz committed itself to bringing in foreign capital as part of its modernization plans that included reshaping everything about Mexico to look as European as possible. In the north, this meant granting enormous economic concessions to American mineral and cattle companies.

On the U.S. side of the border, mining operations required Mexican labor. The Southwest was lightly populated and while some Italian and Greek immigrants made it all the way to Arizona and Colorado to work in the mines, for the most part, the mine operators recruited Mexican labor. On both sides of the border, the mines operated with American capital and Mexican workers. As was typical of mine labor throughout the United States and especially mine labor that was not white, the conditions and pay for Mexican workers were very bad. Mexican miners engaged in a tough 1903 strike against Phelps-Dodge at the Clifton-Morenci mines in southern Arizona and that strike was well known throughout the region, helping to create an atmosphere of general resistance to the racist treatment by the mining companies.

After 1900, overall resistance to the Diaz regime grew. Many dissidents moved to the United States, usually just over the border. This allowed them to influence the border workers. The most influential group was the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) headed by the anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón. Magón, along with his brother Enrique, were dissidents who had served time in Díaz’s prisons. They moved to San Antonio and then St. Louis, where they sent followers back to the border. Clifton and the nearby town of Douglas was the center of this agitation and the PLM began to influence workers on both sides of the border.

Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón

This was certainly true in Cananea, about 25 miles south of the border. The town and everything for ten square miles around was owned by Bill Greene and his Consolidated Copper. There was a lot of racial tension on the border early that year, with significant anti-American sentiment and a race riot at a baseball game where four Mexicans were killed. Greene has received enormous concessions from Diaz, including 350,000 acres of timber, 37,000 acres of mineral lands, and thirty miles of railroad. The Cananea Mine employed 5360 Mexicans and 2300 foreigners, primarily American managers and executives. On May 31, two foremen at one mine told workers they would start having to work on piecework rather than salary.

The next morning, June 1, 1906, the miners in Cananea walked off the job. They demanded the 8-hour day, a minimum wage of five pesos per day, a merit system to eliminate hiring discrimination, and the promotion of Mexicans into some management positions. Green armed his American workers. The strikers marched to the copper mine’s lumberyard where two Americans fired on them. This enraged the workers, who burned the lumberyard and killed both their attackers and another American. The governor of Sonora then invited the U.S. Army to come into Sonora. The Mexican army arrived about the same time, arrested about 100 miners, and sent dozens to prison. The strike was completely suppressed within two days.

The Cananea strikers

This event was a loss for the workers, but it had long-standing reverberations. It was the first moment that a widespread rebellion against American domination of the region took place and it showed that workers were ready to take direct action against the American corporate domination of their lives. The PLM had hoped this strike would be the first step in a revolutionary movement against Díaz and while it wasn’t quite that, it was very important. The PLM and other radicals built on this event and workers themselves clearly moved to the left, which may have had something to do with the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World, which was always active in mining and had relative success organizing workers on the border. The use of U.S. troops also rankled in Mexico. The Flores Magón brothers began working with the IWW and bringing the organization’s syndicalist ideology to Mexican workers. Over the next four years, repeated actions along the border, with Mexican workers increasingly involved in both labor and revolutionary groups and angry over the systematic racism and despoliation of their nation by Americans, which by no means improved after 1906, laid the groundwork for the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican and American governments worked together on both sides of the border to repress these movements, including American agents harassing Mexican political refugees when the Diaz government brought them to American attention. By by 1910, the Mexican workers of the north were ready to play an important role in what would become the Mexican Revolution. Cananea strike leaders Manuel Dieguez and Esteban Baca Calderón became revolutionary leaders as well.

During the strike, with burning buildings in background.

As the Revolution wound down, the new government produced the Mexican Constitution in 1917. That document reflected the concerns of Mexican workers, especially those of El Norte. Specifically, Article 27 makes it illegal for foreign citizens to own land within 100 miles of the nation’s borders, albeit with plenty of caveats. This specifically reflected how corporations like Phelps-Dodge and Consolidated Copper had made northern Mexico their personal fiefdoms and how workers demanded this never happen again. The Mexican government would eventually turn its back on the need to help the nation’s poor, but in its early decades, the PRI’s actions did reflect the influence of the Mexican working class on the revolution.

Ricardo Flores Magón never returned to Mexico. He was caught up in the Wilson administration’s World War I repression of radicals. He died in Leavenworth prison, probably of untreated diabetes, in 1922.

I consulted Rodolfo F. Acuña, Corridors of Migration: The Odyssey of Mexican Laborers, 1600-1933 in the writing of this post.

This is the 145th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

BEAUVAIS, FRANCE — This spring the Musée de l’Oise (MUDO) in Beauvais has helped an artist make his way toward the light, only after eight decades of dark oblivion. Such is the melancholy circumstance of artist Amédée de La Patellière (1890–1932), an unknown inter-war independent painter, who died young at age 42, and who is only now gaining a retrospective. Born into a family of gentry at Nantes, La Patellière had a full, if short, life, first going to law school before moving to Paris. It was there that he first encountered modern art and the work of Pablo Picasso, his strongest influence. But La Patellière is not considered part of any modern movement and that’s why he has been called an independent painter of Jeune Peinture française (literally “Young French Painting”), much like the artists André Dunoyer de Segonzac and Charles Dufresne.

Using simplified modern visual motifs to paint the forest, farms, landscape, cows, and farmers (with some predisposition for allegory), La Patellière’s work usually makes use of a limited and somber palette that looks rather current in its simplicity. Particularly this is so with the late ‘20s, glum interior in “La conversation dans l’atelier” (1927), with its sense of cool detachment and unspoken connections among a group of seated women.

Much like Otto Dix, Fernand Léger, and George Braque, La Patellière belonged to the “lost generation,” as it was dubbed by Gertrude Stein: the generation of those who grew up in the muddy trenches of World War I. But La Patellière is unique in that he spent nearly eight years serving in the French army between 1911 and 1919, from ages 21 to 29. Wounded twice, he was commended twice for acts of bravery and received the Military Cross of honor. He saw fighting and fatality close-up and personal. But he bore witness to this catastrophic war not by depicting the fighting directly, but rather the resulting wounded foliage, for example in his more than capable watercolor “Grand arbre la tête brisée par un obus” (1917). It’s interesting that he never straightforwardly represented his battles, only their grim ruins.

La Patellière sketched these images of disfigured nature while fighting at the front and then finished the work when convalescing from his wounds or on leave of duty. At the Musée de l’Oise, the gallery displaying numerous such watercolors is painted a somehow appropriate baby blue. This collection of visual pain cooling in that azure setting is undeniably poignant and full of spiritual fulfillment.

When he returned to civilian life after the war, he was driven by a fervent yearning to make art, making an estimated 900 paintings from 1921 until his death, by natural causes, in 1932. Much of this work, as influenced by Gustave Courbet, deals with peasant themes. But La Patellière gives them an unusual sweet softness and peculiar peace, even when mixing genres by combining country folk themes with mythological tales.

During this early productive period La Patellière split his time between Paris and Bois-Benoit, where the countryside was a persistent source of inspiration. His first mature paintings on canvas, like “Le Repas des paysans à Vallet” (1923), are obviously influenced by Cubism. Though Picasso’s non-Cubist “Sleeping Peasants” (1919) appears to have offered up thematic material for La Patellière’s “Le repos des paysans” (1925), where there are also traces of the rounded monumental figures of Picasso’s neo-Classical period of the early 1920s, such as Picasso’s breathtaking “Two Women Running on the Beach” (1922). This style of work is generally considered a reaction against the pre-war radicalism of Cubism, and seen as a popular desire in art for order. But I found that one of the very best paintings in the show from that time was an attractive, small, expressionist-tinged canvas of a brown female nude called “Nu brun” (1925) that owes nothing to Picasso.

Yet La Patellière soon moved towards a less modern but moodier, dim chiaroscuro style evidenced in “Le Repos des Moissonneurs” (1926) and “Le Philosophe à la bouteille” (1926), where the wine cellar perched owl, a symbol of death and philosophy, explains the title of the work. An even darker, otherworldly, blocky style gives La Patellière’s “L’Enlèvement d’Europe au coquillage” (1927) a fresh twist to folk art as he plays on the power of volume within multiple variations of chiaroscuro.

From 1928 on, La Patellière put aside the black, such as in the unexpected, monumental “Baigneuses à Bandol” (1928), a genuinely pleasurable work of robust figures frolicking in the waves as a storm gathers in the distance. The artist here takes on the theme of Mediterranean bathers, so dear to Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, with a much more vivid color palette than usual. Yet by painting the sky as obscured by shades of black, he retained an ominous touch that in retrospect can be seen as a prevision of the next war to come. The successive waves seem heavy and frozen, trapping the chunky bathers between them. Only a tiny radius of sun seems to clear a free path on the left, but time has stopped in this scene. The fun is almost over.

Finally a colorful lyricism blossoms in his late decorative paintings. In December 1928, Paul Baudouin, La Patellière’s friend and patron, commissioned him to do a large, pleasing-to-the-eye composition for his dining room that became known as “Le Concert Champêtre” (1929). The central playful motif is of a woman with a violin, bordered by a bevy of additional women and serene animals that lounge about. La Patellière devoted a good part of 1929 to it, but the bombastic work is something of an overreach that does nothing to enhance his reputation.

In 1930, architect Auguste Perret commissioned a ceiling project from La Patellière representing the signs of the zodiac. That work was never completed. The grander theme and scheme of La Patellière’s existence, his extended fight in the war and his following artistic flourish, were played out. Those twelve signs, so associated with horoscopic astrology used to analyze birth charts, had nothing left to tell him. He had passed away.

Amédée de La Patellière: Les Éclats de l’Ombre continues at the Musée de l’Oise (1 Rue du Musée, 60006 Beauvais, France) through June 15. 

China represents a huge marketplace for any product, and book publishers have finally caught on. More than 10,000 Chinese books were available at the Book Expo America. But as publishers race to embrace the Chinese market and bring Chinese authors to the West, censorship by the world’s largest authoritarian state represents a real challenge. NPR takes a look at the issue:

Western writers who publish in China are also subject to censorship and sometimes they don’t even know how their work has been altered. In his novel Sunset Park, Paul Auster included a mention of the imprisoned Chinese poet Liu Xiaobo. His Chinese publisher indicated some changes might be necessary but Auster says it wasn’t until he got a copy of the Chinese translation of his book that he understood that all mention of the dissident poet had been eliminated.

Related Posts:

• Stories That Must Be Told
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hamlet
• Do Writers Also Have to Be Protesters?
• The Journalist and the Censor
• The World’s Oldest Book on Tea

by Miliann Kang. Originally posted at Contexts (here). The piece is cross-posted with permission.

How can we address labor rights violations in nail salons without making immigrant workers more vulnerable, painting all nail salon owners with a single brush, and fueling anti-immigrant sentiment? What can sociology bring to this conversation?

Sarah Maslin Nir’s recent two-part series in the New York Times, “The Price of Nice Nails” and “Perfect Nails, Poisoned Workers” brings in-depth investigation and much needed attention to labor rights violations, toxic exposures and occupational health issues in New York City nail salons.

This is a story that needs telling, but how we tell stories is as important as that we tell them. I applaud and agree with much of Nir’s reporting. But some of her language and arguments run the risk of blaming immigrant small business owners for conditions they alone did not create and cannot fix by themselves. At the same time, it lets others, especially customers, mostly off the hook.

In this post, I apply various sociological concepts to fill in some gaps in the NYT coverage of problems in the nail industry.

Nir addresses many factors that contribute to exploitative working conditions in nail salons, but she asserts most strongly that a “rigid racial and ethnic caste system reigns in modern-day New York City, dictating not only pay but also how workers are treated.” She then describes how Korean workers are the highest paid, next Chinese, then Hispanics and non-Asians. Racial and ethnic hierarchies without a doubt exist within the salons, but are they the main force dictating how workers are paid and how they are treated?

We sociologists call this the problem of determining salience. How strong of a factor is this racial and ethnic wage gap in shaping the sub-standard pay and working conditions in the salons? In my own research, I found similar practices in which Korean workers are paid more than other workers, but being the highest paid workers in an industry whose entire wage structure is suppressed is hardly winning the lottery. It does not result in some workers being winners and other losers, but in some workers scraping by with a few more dollars in their pockets.

The conditions in these salons—as in many other workplaces–emerge through a complex chain of customer demand for cheap, quick services, lack of regulation, lax enforcement of existing laws, globalized labor migration flows, and ultimately, the bottom line of profit-driven, winner-take-all markets and mentalities. In some places, Nir’s article recognizes this. But in others, it veers into stories of Mercedes and Cadillac-driving Korean owners with undocumented workers crammed into their basements.

How are these two story lines connected? Sociologists refer to this as making micro-macro linkages. Korean immigrants, and all small business owners, make choices about how to run their businesses, but to paraphrase Marx, not in circumstances of their own choosing. Nail salon owners must be held responsible for violating labor laws. But they cannot be held solely responsible for causing and fixing deep-rooted social problems and inequalities.

This brings us to the problem of generalizability. Nir conducted extensive interviews, over a hundred. This is formidable and committed reporting. But does it take into account that people who are willing to tell their stories often have the most horrific stories to tell? This in no way invalidates their stories, but it asks how representative they are. Are her respondents what we refer to as outliers, people on the extreme side of an industry with a great deal of variation?

Like Nir, I have also interviewed over a hundred people connected to the nail industry, and I conducted field work in over a dozen salons over the course of over a decade. I have seen many changes in the industry, and even significant changes in a single salon, as owners, workers and customers turn over rapidly. I have seen labor conditions similar to those described by Nir, but I have also seen thousands of mundane interactions in which workers perform manicures for relatively decent wages in mostly decent working conditions, although potentially toxic exposures are always looming in the air. These interactions also need to be part of the story.

My hope is that the NYT coverage will open rather than foreclose more in-depth conversations focused on cooperative, sustained, and multi-pronged approaches to reforming the nail industry. And that sociologists, journalists, policy makers, advocates, owners, workers and customers can work together for industry-wide changes, without vilifying immigrants or making them more vulnerable.

Recommended resources

Roelofs, Cora and Tuan Do. 2012. “Exposure assessment in nail salons: an indoor air approach.” International Scholarly Research Notices Public Health.

National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. “The Nail Salon Industry and the Impact of Cosmetic Toxins on API Women’s Reproductive Health.” February 2008.

National Healthy Nail and Beauty Salon Alliance. | link

Miliann Kang is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies and affiliated faculty in Sociology and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Managed Hand: Race, Gender and the Body in Beauty Service Work. Professor Kang also wrote “The Managed Hand:The Commercialization of Bodies and Emotions in Korean Immigrant–Owned Nail Salons” is published in the December 2003 issue of Gender & Society.

 

Filed under: Body & Embodiment, Consumption, Economy, Gender & Class

The Obama administration is really going out with a bang when it comes to the American working class. First there’s the Trans-Pacific Partnership and now the administration is seeking to reduce worker compensation benefits for some federal workers. Specifically, Obama is looking to reduce benefits paid out through the Federal Employees Compensation Act to 70 percent of their normal salaries. Right now, employees with dependents, about 2/3 of them, receive 75 percent.

Like the Obama administration, Rep. Tim Walberg (Mich.), the Republican chairman of a House Education and the Workforce subcommittee, cited “concerns” that workers’ comp benefits “are too generous and can discourage an employee’s return to work.”

The changes proposed by the Labor Department would save Uncle Sam money, but at the cost of cutting future payments to most workers injured on the job. But nowhere in the department’s recent statement to the House workforce-protections subcommittee did the agency provide evidence to back the administration’s concern about “disincentives” for the return to work.

“I am disappointed that the Department of Labor would come forward for the third time in the past five years with a proposal to cut benefits for injured workers that is not evidence-based, and whose justification has been completely debunked by the Government Accountability Office,” said Rep. Robert “Bobby” Scott (Va.), the top Democrat on the full committee. He finds it “incomprehensible that we are now considering” hits to feds “who have suffered a disabling work-related injury while doing their jobs in service to the American people.”

The idea that working people are a bunch of lazy slackers who really want to get out of work is a right-wing myth that goes back to the first proposals for workers compensation. Companies have always concern trolled the American working class by wondering what generous benefits like making a percentage of your former wage when your arm is cut off by a machine would do to the national work ethic. I expect such lies from Republicans and corporations, but it’s quite disconcerting to see the Obama administration accept some of these arguments.

There is only one appropriate figure for workers compensation benefits and that’s 100 percent of the workers’ former wages until that worker is cleared by a doctor to return. The idea of workers trying to game the system and stay at home insults them because it completely ignores that people take pride in work and for the most part don’t want to live on government benefits. Yes, some people would try to stay at home, but the large majority would want to return to work. Only with a 100 percent benefit do employers have the necessary incentive to make work safe. The reason the focus is on slacking workers instead of lazy employers is power–companies and the government has it, workers don’t. But there’s no evidence that workers are more likely to abuse the system than employers.

The Obama administration needs to reverse this position immediately.

00syd:

bustermylove:

The correct (and practical) way to make out, presented by C. Greenwood, DDS and B. Keaton, DTF

Yeah you would need to be an acrobat to make out with Buster

Perfect

[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Fixtures & Interiors. ]

Employing natural processes to illuminate and warm interior spaces, this series of algae-based furnishings combines beautiful glass vessels and organic matter to create lovely yet functional home objects. Each fixture generates light, heat and oxygen using methods similar to those seen in bio-adaptive architectural facades.

Designed by Jacob Douenias and Ethan Frier (photos by Tom Little Photography LLC.), objects in the Spirulina series utilize cyanobacteria, “chosen for its rich green hue, light absorbency, and culinary qualities,” set in alkaline water and housed in shapely glass vessels. Found all over the world, this versatile algae can survive and thrive in all kinds of environments and is already widely used in other forms of biotechnology.

In this commissioned series, a set of spaces show off the various ways these organic home furnishings can be deployed in living and dining areas, popping up from tables, sprouting from walls, sitting on the floor or hanging from the ceiling. The various units are linked by a half mile of hidden plumbing and wiring and controlled via a concealed computer system that both analyzes results and controls each appendage.

Living Things is now installed at the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania until March 27, 2016. While these experimental installations remain artistic prototypes for now, they and other similar endeavors continue to explore the range of near-future applications for organic matter in everyday domestic settings and built environments.

But how does it work? “The 3D printed nylon knobs embedded in the surface of this workstation actuate eighteen valves which allow for the harvesting of Spirulina when the culture becomes dense enough, and the supply of fresh liquid media to each vessel. Inside the cabinet the pumps, tubing, manifolds, LED drivers, air pumps, heater connections and filters which comprise the heart of the life support system”

More from its creators: “The morphologies of hand-blown glass vessels function both as lighting and heating elements for the human occupants, and high functioning photobioreactors which provide heat, light, agitation, air supply, nutrient and waste control to the living algae inside.”

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[ By WebUrbanist in Design & Fixtures & Interiors. ]

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First, Brandon Hicks finds the essence of military conflict in his comic, “War.”

Then, Arielle Bernstein talks to self-proclaimed “anti-racist feminist” Tamara Winfrey-Harris in the Saturday Interview. Winfrey-Harris’s blog, What Tami Said, provides some of the material for an essay collection due out this July. Racism and sexism are big problems in society, but Winfrey-Harris says: “We may not be able to change what everyone else thinks, but damn it, we can refuse to embrace those things ourselves!”

Meanwhile, in the Sunday Interview, Karen Halvorsen Schrek talks to novelist and memoirist Jillian Lauren. Lauren discusses her writing process, her surreal experience as a teenage concubine for the Prince of Brunei, and her role as a mother. One of the best things about parenting, she suggests, is that:

“We get to re-parent ourselves… [it] teaches me every day how to be compassionate—and how to be a parent, not just to [my son], but to myself.”

Related Posts:

• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jillian Lauren
• The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Tamara Winfrey-Harris
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup

Originally posted 2015-06-01 12:35:48. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

sarah vandella throated source: droolingfemme.

An impressive roster of 60 museums directors, curators, editors, and other leading art world figures have written a letter to the art institutions and development organizations involved with Saadiyat Island, where franchises of the Louvre and Guggenheim Museums will open in the coming years. The directors of some of the world’s most important art institutions, including Tate’s Nicholas Serota and the Museum of Modern Art’s Glenn Lowry, have added their names to a letter asserting that “artists and academics should be allowed free passage to conduct research and work that is done in a peaceful and productive manner.”

The letter, which was released today, comes on the heels of news that a third member of Gulf Labor, artist Walid Raad, was denied entry last month to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as he tried to attend the second part of the Sharjah Art Foundation‘s March Meetings. The artists participating in the 2015 Sharjah Biennial, which is organized by the Sharjah Art Foundation, subsequently released a letter of their own urging UAE authorities “to lift entry restrictions for Ashok Sukumaran, Walid Raad, and Andrew Ross” (who was denied entry in March) and maintain “transparency and dialog.”

Signatories of the letter released today, the first of its kind to address the UAE and its burgeoning art scene, include the directors of many global art institutions, including the Queens Museum and Creative Time in the United States, Kadist Art Foundation and Le Consortium in France, Witte de With and Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, SALT in Turkey, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore, Tensta Konsthall in Sweden, MACBA in Catalonia (Spain), M+ in Hong Kong, and the Beirut Art Center in Lebanon.

The letter comes on the heels of a statement last week from the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) condemning the entry ban UAE authorities have imposed on Gulf Labor-affiliated artists Walid Raad and Ashok Sukumaran. The letter calls on UAE-based art institutions, including in particular the Guggenheim Museum, to convey their disapproval to UAE authorities and vocally dissociate themselves from the action.

Gulf Labor is an international coalition of artists working to ensure that migrant worker rights are protected during the construction of museums and other institutions on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi.

The following is the letter in full:

June 1, 2015

To:
Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Tourism Development & Investment Company, Abu Dhabi, UAE
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York, NY, USA
New York University, New York, USA
New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Agence France-Muséums, Paris, France
Musée du Louvre, Paris, France
Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE

Recently, artists Ashok Sukumaran and Walid Raad were denied entry to the UAE on grounds of “security”. This comes after NYU professor Andrew Ross was similarly barred from flying to Abu Dhabi in March. Sukumaran and Raad have a long history of vital and sustained engagement with the UAE, often on the invitation of your institutions. Ross is a professor of standing in New York’s academic community. It appears that the reason these three members of our global arts and academic community were denied entry to the UAE is their involvement with the Gulf Labour Coalition.

As you know, Gulf Labour is an artist-initiated group that has been active since 2010, asking museums and institutions being built on Saadiyat Island to create better conditions for their workers.These conditions of the creation of a cultural world should be of concern to us all, and the proposals of artists in this regard should be seen as a matter of debate, not of “security”. We assert that artists and academics should be allowed free passage to conduct research and work that is done in a peaceful and productive manner.

We the undersigned oppose the barring of Ashok Sukumaran, Walid Raad and Andrew Ross from the UAE. We state that denying artists visas, stopping and deporting them after years of their work in the region, creates a chilling precedent and makes it difficult for arts and academic institutions in the UAE, and those working with the UAE to claim regional dialogue and artistic freedom. We urge your institutions to work with the concerned authorities to lift these bars on their travel.

Sincerely,

Nancy Adajania, Cultural theorist and independent curator, Mumbai
Negar Azimi, Senior Editor, Bidoun, New York
Mai Abu El Dahab, Director, Young Arab Theatre Fund, Brussels
Defne Ayas, Director, Witte de With – Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam
Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi
Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore
Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern, London
Sabine Breitwieser, Director, Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Doryun Chong, Chief Curator, M+ Hong Kong
Iftikhar Dadi, Professor, Department of History of Art, Cornell University, New York
Sebastien Delot, former Modern and Contemporary Art Curator of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Head of the Collection of The Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain Saint Etienne
Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, Vice-President, Arab Image Foundation, Beirut
Rana El Nemr, Board member, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo
Charles Esche, Director, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Patricia Falguieres, Professeur à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Solange Farkas, Director/Curator, Associação Cultural Videobrasil, Sao Paulo
Kate Fowle, Director-at-Large, Independent Curators International, New York
Anselm Franke, Head of Visual Art and Film, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Franck Gautherot, Co-director Le Consortium, Dijon
Charles Guarino, Publisher, Artforum Magazine, New York
Kathy Halbreich, Deputy Director, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Ranjit Hoskote, Cultural theorist and independent curator, Mumbai
Claire Hsu, Founder-Director, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong
Jitish Kallat, Artist and Curator, 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennial
Geeta Kapur, Critic and Curator, New Delhi
Mami Kataoka , Chief Curator, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Sunjung, Kim, Artistic Director, Asia Culture Information Agency of Asian Culture Complex, Gwangju
Seungduk Kim, Co-director Le Consortium, Dijon
Koyo Kouoh, Artistic Director RAW Material Company, Dakar
Vasıf Kortun, Director of Research & Programs, SALT, Istanbul and Ankara
Carin Kuoni, Director, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York
Marta Kuzma, Rector, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
Dennis Lim, Director of Programming, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York
Maria Lind, Director, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm
Andrea Lissoni, Senior Curator International Art (Film), Tate Modern, London
Glenn Lowry, Director, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Maha Maamoun, Board member, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo
Bartomeu Marí, Director MACBA, Barcelona
Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, Managing Trustee & Honorary Director, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Mumbai
Marie Muracciole, Curator, Director of Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon
Hammad Nasar, Head of Research & Programmes, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong
Lars Nittve, Executive Director, M+ Hong Kong
Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director, Creative Time, New York
Hila Peleg, Curator, Documenta 14, Kassel and Athens
Sharmini Pereira, Director, Raking Leaves, Sri Lanka
Natasa Petresin-Bachelez, independent curator, editor of L’Internationale Online, Paris
Jenelle Porter, Mannion Family Senior Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Laura Raicovich, Director, Queens Museum, New York
Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Sukhdev Sandhu, Film critic and Writer, New York University, New York
Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate, London
Sumesh Sharma and Zasha Colah, Clark House Initiative, Mumbai
Pooja Sood, Director, Khoj International Artists Association, New Delhi
Andrea Thal, Artistic Director, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo
Nato Thompson, Chief Curator, Creative Time, New York
Fawwaz Traboulsi, Writer and Historian, American University of Beirut, Beirut
Emilie Villez, Director, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris
Christine Van Assche, Chief Curator-at-Large, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Anton Vidokle, founder, e-flux, New York
Sheena Wagstaff, Chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum, New York

labrys2:

theniftyfifties:

1950s advertisement for trash cans.  

me sitting with my friends

omgs:

refreshes:

im so dead

BUT REALLY

splantamello:

beeswarm17:

karkat-san:

karkat-san:

Why was Oedipus against profanity?

Because he kisses his mother with that mouth.

I’m getting really tired of these motherfucking jokes.

wait

mrs-potiphar:

From Sir Terry Pratchett’s Facebook page:

“This September Penguin Random House will be publishing THE SHEPHERD’S CROWN, the final Discworld novel by Sir Terry Pratchett.

Terry completed THE SHEPHERD’S CROWN in the summer of 2014. It will be published in hardback, ebook and audio formats on September 10th 2015, and is now available for preorder. A collector’s edition will also be available.”

*sniffle*

Wikipedia has a gender problem. The site has an overwhelmingly male authorship, meaning that the contents of the encyclopedia meant to document all of human knowledge is skewed toward men. The New Statesman takes a look at what this means:

The gender disparity has skewed the encyclopaedia’s content – not only which pages are created but also which ones are worked on and improved so that they reach a high standard. Take its “List of Pornographic Actresses”; it is meticulously referenced, with clear sections according to decade. The page is organised, clean and easy to use. Compare it to the “List of Female Poets”: a sprawling dumping ground, organised by name rather than date, unreferenced and of little use to anyone unless they want to know whose name might come after Sylvia Plath in an enormous alphabetical list. The list of poets has been edited 600 times, by nearly 300 editors. The list of female porn stars is a newer page but over 1,000 editors have edited it more than 2,500 times.

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A new report from Big Brother Watch shows how just often police in the United Kingdom request access to the personal metadata of someone in their district. The answer is, a lot.

The report, which is based on responses to several Freedom of Information Act requests, claims that 733,237 requests were made between 2012 and 2014. That means roughly every two minutes, a request was made for data pertaining to “the who, where and when” of a text, email, phone call or web search.” And this is likely an underestimate — one police district didn’t even bother to respond to Big Brother Watch’s inquiry.

Big Brother Watch claims that around 93 percent of the request were approved. And the requests aren’t slowing down in most of the UK: the number of data requests peaked in 2014 with 250,000 requests in total, and most of the police districts requested data more frequently as the years passed.

The Guardian notes that the release of this report comes after the so-called “Snooper’s Charter” was re-introduced during the Queen’s Speech in May. Big Brother Watch is effectively sharing how much data police already gather to illustrate how troublesome it would be if their surveillance powers expanded.

Perhaps the most troubling thing for Americans is  that most of us don’t know how often our police departments collect our data. Most departments can’t tell us how often they gather information even if they want to, thanks to non-disclosure agreements signed in exchange for access to surveillance tools:

A non-disclosure agreement that police departments around the country have been signing for years with the maker of a cell-phone spy tool explicitly prohibits the law enforcement agencies from telling anyone, including other government bodies, about their use of the secretive equipment, according to one of the agreements obtained by an Arizona journalist.

Police in the UK, on the other hand, are gathering information with the knowledge that those figures might (and now have) become public. And considering the frequency of these requests, How often might police officers in the United States have collected similar information when they know they’ll never have to fess up to it?

[illustration by Brad Jonas]

The Supreme Court handed down a ruling based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act today. The (prospective) employee won, against the appalling Abercrombie & Fitch. Guess who wrote the opinion for the Court?

Instead, the intentional discrimination provision prohibits certain motives, regardless of the state of the actor’s knowledge. Motive and knowledge are separate concepts. An employer who has actual knowledge of the need for an accommodation does not violate Title VII by refusing to hire an applicant if avoiding that accommodation is not his motive. Conversely, an employer who acts with the motive of avoiding accommodation may violate Title VII even if he has no more than an unsubstantiated suspicion that accommodation would be needed.

…

…

…

That’s right, Antonin Scalia.

Admittedly, this becomes more explicable when you find out that it was a religious discrimination claim, rather than a claim based on racial or sex discrimination. Only Thomas — revisiting his days as EEOC chair — dissented from the judgment. But, still, congrats to A&F for engaging in practices even Antonin Scalia can’t defend under the Civil Rights Act.

…Irin Carmon has more.

via http://fucktum.tumblr.com/post/118697616994

So what if some mechanical cheetah can hop curbs in stride? The ATRIAS bipedal robot from Oregon State University can now step over obstacles without even looking. For this experiment, the ATRIAS was not outfitted with an imaging or navigation system...

After months of worry and rumors about Joni Mitchell’s condition after her late-March hospitalization, it has been revealed that the singer is being treated for a brain aneurism. Although Joni Mitchell is being released to a rehab facility, she is still in serious condition, sources say. Watch a young Joni perform and a more experienced (and animated) Joni talk about craft and fame after the jump. If you feel about her like we do, maybe send her some love, or at least a good thought or two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDu36PgFwWs&feature=youtu.be

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Saturday Soirée
#silhouette #reebs #party #Marrakesh #birthdays #celebration #fun

Today in yes the drought is really that bad.

Important news: seeing awesome stuff is awesome/makes you awesome.

Plants don’t like being eaten either.

A definitive guide to posthumous marriage.

Will you be replaced by a robot? (Spoiler alert: we’ll all be replaced by robots.)

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I’ve been up a little less than 6 hours now. I slept for about 10 hours before that, after finally knocking myself out with NyQuil.

My head has been absolutely THUNDERING PAIN since I woke up, and at first I figured I was probably dehydrated, and possibly a little bit hungry too. I went to get something to drink just after I was awake, but I had so  little energy that I just drank a glass of milk because I didn’t feel like pouring any more than that. I got some leftovers out and heated them, and after 3 minutes of heating I didn’t care if it was warmed through or not. Hungry. Took that back upstairs and ate a little bit, but had no appetite and finally dragged the rest back to the fridge…

Then I figured since the headache was still around, I’d take a bath. I was already feeling irritable because when I was trying to microwave my food, I didn’t have anywhere to set things as I was wrangling with the haphazard house-of-cards mess that comprises the fridge contents, because The Rabbit had left her mess of stuff all over when she went to bed (she doesn’t tend to clean up behind herself, though, which is a continual frustration for me.) So I go in to the tub with a headache and a foul mood…

…and then I spend almost 15 minutes cleaning up after her so that I could take a bath! She had left her shampoo precariously balanced on the edge of the tub the other day when she took a bath this week (she seems to only bathe weekly or less,) and that must have been the crashing noise I heard when I was using the toilet a couple days ago. I didn’t think to check, because I’m pretty much fed up with constantly cleaning up after her, with that work never acknowledged or thanked or possibly even ever noticed. Well, that shampoo bottle wasn’t in the tub anymore, but the long trail of shampoo that had poured out across the entire length of the tub down to the drain was in the tub.

That stuff makes a hell of a lather, I’ll tell you that much.

Took my bath, nice and hot the way I like it (and the heat actually lasted through the entire time filling the tub, which is unusual.) Head is still POUNDING. All the coughing I’ve been doing hasn’t helped, either. The worst of this cold was fairly short, but this fucking cough has been killing me still, almost a week after the rest of the symptoms have gone.

So I sit down to write about it the headache, and as I’m looking at the numbers, I realize that from the time I ate dinner on Monday night until the time I pecked at a tiny bit of my leftovers was over 24 hours without food. And the worse part is shrugging my shoulders at the knowledge that it’s not unusual at all for me. I don’t have very much in the way of food I can eat here, and even when I do, it’s not much help since I’m usually trying to get the fuck out of here to attempt to maintain my sanity.

I still have no idea how I’m going to find a place to live. I can’t afford the luxury of a safe roof overhead, and I can’t afford the constant sensory assault, the complete lack of time alone, and the consistent stressful interactions with the people here, living on someone else’s schedule. I don’t have enough energy to throw myself into any significant work, and all of the things I need to accomplish require help or input from other people. Even something that should be simple, like cleaning this room I’m staying in I can’t do alone; it requires The Rabbit to get her stuff cleared out more (and she’s promised and promised that she’ll make some closet space free so I can at least put my clothes away.) That doesn’t happen without her actually putting in the time and effort. And when I’m not sleeping well, or enough… and I’m not eating well, or enough… and I’m not masturbating regularly even when I’m horny… and I’m barely scraping by in far too many ways… I don’t have the energy to do more than that.

My head still hurts, so I really ought to publish this, get some more liquid in me, take some ibuprofen, and maybe throw in some cough syrup to the mix because this stupid tickle in my throat is driving me crazy.

Filed under: General Tagged: anger, coping, depression, drama, headache, hope, hopes and dreams, housing, poor pitiful me, rants, sleep, writing

If it feels like we hear a whole lot of stories about retail data breaches here in the U.S., well, that’s because we do. Americans are super duper popular targets for card hacks and fraud, and it’s for one simple reason: our credit card security is bad and should feel bad.

Quartz reports this week on a new report from British-based international megabank Barclays, and it’s bad news for consumers on this side of the Atlantic.

American credit cards represent about a quarter — 24% — of all cards in use in the world. But when it comes to fraud, American cards represent nearly half — 47% — of cards that have been subject to fraud.

The main culprit is one we’ve covered many times before: in the U.S., where magnetic stripe technology is still the dominant way payment cards are accepted, we are vulnerable to software incursions and theft. Simply put, we are low-hanging fruit. Intruding into a system like Target or Home Depot and making off with usable data for tens of millions of payment cards is easy as pie, at least as compared to other nations.

And that is, of course, because other nations have long since switched to more secure, EMV (chip-using) credit and debit cards. The EMV system doesn’t completely eliminate the potential for card fraud, but it does make it much harder to do.

Worldwide, Barclays reports, chip-card adoption sits at about 43% — but that doesn’t include the U.S. In Western Europe, most nations have long since gone through the conversion process and the adoption rate sits at almost 82%. Since starting the transition to chip-and-PIN cards in 2003, the U.K. has seen an over 70% reduction in payment card fraud.

Here in the states we are finally on our way to joining the rest of the world, but it’s a slow process happening one bank and one retailer at a time, rather than something with a firm, government-imposed deadline. MasterCard and Visa will require merchants to upgrade to having chip-enabled payment systems by October of this year, but many banks are unlikely to make it before another two years into the future*.

One only wonders how many 50 million card megabreaches American consumers will see between now and then.

*Correction: This article originally incorrectly stated that the MasterCard/Visa liability shift for merchants to upgrade to chip-enabled card readers had changed to 2017. That date is still in 2015; it may take banks until 2017 to issue the cards.

Americans are, by far, hackers’ favorite credit-card fraud targets [Quartz]