For the Oct. 15, 2018, TIME cover on the impact of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony and the significance of her voice, we used Ford’s words to create her portrait.
As Haley Sweetland Edwards writes in the accompanying story, “the moment Dr. Christine Blasey Ford walked into the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth, it was clear to millions of Americans that something momentous was about to unfold.”
Using words and phrases from Ford’s testimony, San Francisco-based artist John Mavroudis recreated her likeness by drawing each letter by hand.
“This particular process is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, but with an infinite number of possibilities,” says Mavroudis.
“I started with an image of Ford and then drew the words in where they might be appropriate.”
“The memory quotes would be attached to her forehead area, and the quotes about wanting to help I placed on her hand. The hand could be seen as welcoming, but also deflecting,” Mavroudis said.
“It’s a fascinating process to watch the face take shape, while hoping that you’ve captured the essence.”
Time magazine’s cover illustrates Trump’s White House transforming into a Kremlin-like building
Almost a prediction in May of the events transpiring now in the current month of July 2018 …. after the Helsinki ‘Treason Summit‘ between Drumpf and Putrid.
Time magazine Thursday published a stunning illustration on its cover for the May 29th issue, depicting the White House mutating into a Kremlin-like building, featuring the distinctive onion domes and red brick of Russia’s Saint Basil’s Cathedral.
In October 2018, in the course of claiming credit for a successful response, Drumpf decided to favorably compare the official death toll in Puerto Rico, which was then 16, to the death toll after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, which was 1,833.
DRUMPF: We’ve saved a lot of lives. If you look at the – every death is a horror. But if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous – hundred and hundred and hundreds of people that died. And you look at what happened here with really a storm that was totally overpowering. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this. And what is your death count at this point, 17?
PUERTO RICO GOV. RICARDO ROSSELLÓ: Sixteen, certified.
DRUMPF: Sixteen people, certified – 16 people versus in the thousands. You can be very proud of all of your people, all of our people working together.
“Sixteen versus literally thousands of people.”
The count now, according to Harvard, is 4,645 vs. 1,833.
More than twice as many people died because of Maria than Katrina, per the Harvard study.
Puerto Rico governor welcomes “real number” of Hurricane María deaths after shocking report
A new Harvard University study says the death toll from Hurricane María last year is dramatically larger than reported. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, estimates more than 4,600 people died on the island.
The official government death toll is just 64.
Researchers randomly knocked on doors and asked if anyone died there. There were more questions – but that’s how it started.
It took six weeks and $50,000 from Harvard to come up with a number that is stunning, reports CBS News’ David Begnaud.
“The negligence that allowed those lives to be lost, needs to be accounted for,” San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz said.
Cruz has blasted Drumpf for being tone deaf and slow to respond. When asked to evaluate her own response she said,
“I know I didn’t get to everyone. We did the best we could, but that wasn’t’ good enough. That wasn’t good enough.”
Why this story is more than just a shocking number?
For every death that is certified by a government official to be related to Hurricane María, family members are eligible to have the federal government help pay for funeral expenses.
These medical struggles in Puerto Rico help explain a startling death toll estimate
~Published on May 29, 2018~
The death toll from Hurricane María in Puerto Rico last year was far larger than known, according to a new study.
At least 4,645 people on the island are estimated to have died as a result of the storm and devastation that followed, far exceeding the official number of 64. Judy Woodruff talks with Sarah Varney of Kaiser Health News.
PBS NewsHour
~~Study: Puerto Rico hurricane death toll near 5,000~~
~~Published on May 29, 2018~~
A new study finds that the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane María stands close to 4,600, more than 70 times the government’s original estimate.
I missed watching the royal wedding in real time. I managed to watch parts of it. I saw the Queen arrive, I saw Meghan and Doria arrive. I saw the ceremony, the choir (Stand By Me), the viola player.
My personal tradition has been to get up early and watch every bit of it.
I must confess that I have been in a funk since the elections of
November 8, 2016. I have experienced a gamut of emotions ranging from anger, disbelief, desperation, bafflement and so much more.
I saw no way out until the Parkland students in Florida began their movement.
I am rooting for them.
I’m rooting for the young people of this country.
They will be the ones to effect change. It’s their time. The old dinosaurs in government will see the effect of the young on them.
April 19th, 2018
America’s response to mass shootings has long followed a predictable pattern. We mourn. Offer thoughts and prayers. Speculate about the motives. And then – even as no developed country endures a homicide rate like ours, a difference explained largely by pervasive accessibility to guns; even as the majority of gun owners support common sense reforms – the political debate spirals into acrimony and paralysis.
This time, something different is happening.
This time, our children are calling us to account.
The Parkland, Florida, students don’t have the kind of lobbyists or big budgets for attack ads that their opponents do. Most of them can’t even vote yet.
These young activists rock!!
#NationalSchoolWalkout
‘Surviving is easy, it’s learning to live again that’s hard’.
Parkland school massacre survivors bravely pose for the cover of Time magazine declaring ‘enough is enough’ ahead of worldwide march for gun reform.
‘Imagine A Country That Allows Its Children To Be Slaughtered’
~~Published on Apr 19, 2018~~
Five Parkland school shooting survivors who are leading the #NeverAgain movement to end gun violence in schools speak to TIME’s Charlotte Alter about their historic March on Washington, and what comes next.
Google on Friday, June 2, used its latest Doodle to celebrate American artist and gay rights activist Gilbert Baker, creator of the rainbow flag that has become a symbol of pride for LGBTQ individuals around the world.
Baker made his way from Kansas to San Francisco with the U.S. Army.
After leaving the military, Baker taught himself to sew and volunteered his skills to make protest banners for the city’s gay community.
~~GRAPHICS SOURCE~~
Google Images
DISCLAIMER
I do not own these images.
No intention of taking credit.
If anyone knows the owner of any, please advise and it will be corrected immediately.
In 1978, influential gay leader Harvey Milk challenged Baker to create a new symbol for activists to rally around. The most widely used icon at the time was the pink triangle, reclaimed from the symbol used during World War II to identify gay prisoners being held in Nazi concentration camps.
While it may have been a potent symbol of common suffering and struggle, Baker wanted to create something more positive and celebratory to bind the growing LGBT movement together.
The first rainbow flag Baker put together with volunteers in the attic of the Gay Community Center included eight differently colored horizontal stripes with their own meaning. After Milk’s assassination later that year, demand for the flag exploded and the limited availability of some fabric meant reducing the number of stripes to today’s six.
The Search Engine Google is showing this Animated Doodle in few countries for the Gilbert Baker’s 66th Birthday Gilbert Baker was an American artist and gay rights activist who designed the rainbow flag in 1978 Baker served in the United States Army from 1970 to 1972. He was stationed in San Francisco at the beginning of the gay rights movement. After his honorable discharge from the military, he taught himself to sew.
Time’s new cover is going to royally piss off Drumpf
When Drumpf was named Time Magazine’s ‘person of the year’, he used it as an opportunity to gloat.
The irony, of course, was that being ‘person of the year’ is not necessarily a compliment, and upon further inspection, even the cover photo held clues that Drumpf’s impending presidency was doomed.
Well, there’s no way Drumpf can spin Time’s latest cover as anything except what it is:
a mirror held up to his disastrous first month as leader of the country.
I must confess that, at minimum, this distressed me. I’d seen the others candidates who were under consideration. Like the election results, I, again, never thought this would be the pick.
The short words, included below, about “The Choice” is the short version.
The mailmanbrings this magazine to my house.
I won’t renew the subscription.
However, I found an article which explains a major meaning behind the details of the picture itself.
These observations helped me breathe better.
It’s not what I thought.
It’s even better.
I know, there’s a lot of reading but, if the choice boggled your mind, it’s worth the read.
I strongly believe that the selected choice has no idea that he could have been played except for Trump being upset Time named him ‘Person of the Year‘ instead of ‘Man of the Year‘.
This is the 90th time we have named the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year.
So which is it this year: Better or worse?
The challenge for Donald Trump is how profoundly the country disagrees about the answer.
It’s hard to measure the scale of his disruption. This real estate baron and casino owner turned reality-TV star and provocateur – never a day spent in public office, never a debt owed to any interest besides his own – now surveys the smoking ruin of a vast political edifice that once housed parties, pundits, donors, pollsters, all those who did not see him coming or take him seriously.
Out of this reckoning, Trump is poised to preside, for better or worse.
For reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s, Donald Trump is TIME’s 2016 Person of the Year.
The 2016 Person of the Year is Donald Trump, the President-elect of the divided states of America.
Person of the Year is one of the best-known and most-followed franchises in journalism. TIME selects the person who for good or ill has done the most to influence the events of the year.
~Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art~
By: Jake Romm
December 8, 2016Time Magazine’s annual “Person of the Year” announcement is, year after year, grossly misunderstood.
Time Magazine is clear on its sole criterion – “the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year” – yet, do a simple search on Twitter and you will find countless people who seem to think that the “Person of the Year” selection is tantamount to an endorsement.
Previous winners have included Joseph Stalin (1939, 1942), Ayatollah Khomeini (1979), Adolf Hitler (1938), and other figures who I think it is safe to assume the Time staff does not endorse.
Photo was shot by Jewish photographer Nadav Kander.
For clues as to how Time feels about that question — is it “for better or worse?” — we can look to the image chosen for the cover of the issue. The decisions that Time made regarding how to photograph Trump reveal a layered, nuanced field of references that place the image among, in this viewer’s opinion, the magazine’s greatest covers.
In order to deconstruct the image, let’s focus on three key elements (leaving aside the placement of the ‘M’ in ‘Time’ that makes it look like Trump has red horns): the color, the pose, and the chair.
~THE COLOR~
Notice how the colors appear slightly washed out, slightly muted, soft. The palette creates what we might call a vintage effect. The image’s sharpness and detail reveal the contemporaneity of the picture, but the color suggests an older type of film, namely, Kodachrome. Kodachrome, the recently discontinued film produced by Kodak, was designed to create accurate color reproduction in the early 1900’s.
This visual-temporal shift in a sense mirrors a lot of the drives that fueled Trump’s rise.
Trump ran a campaign based on regressive policies and attitudes – anti-environmental protection, anti-abortion, pro-coal, etc. This election was not just about regressive policy choices, but also about traditional values (defined primarily by the Christian right), about nostalgia for American greatness and security, about nostalgia for a pre-globalized world.
~THE POSE~
Trump’s pose can be read as a subversive play on a traditional power-portrait pose.
Trump’s turn towards the camera renders the tone conspiratorial rather than judgmental. There are two images at play here – the imagined power-image taken from the front, and the actual image, in which Trump seems to offer the viewer a conniving wink, as if to say, look at how we hoodwinked those suckers in the front (both Trump and the viewer are looking down on those in front).
By subverting the typical power dynamic, Time, in a sense, implicates the viewer in Trump’s election, in his being on the cover in the first place.
By choosing not to shoot Trump head on, the Time cover almost offers us a “behind the scenes” glimpse of the man who has spent so much of his time in front of the camera – heightening the conspiratorial tone and complicity of the viewer. The highly posed and processed nature of the photograph offers yet another level of irony.
Finally, we must note the ominous shadow lurking on the backdrop.
It’s a small, but important and clever detail.
Just as this image provides us with two theoretical points of view, it also provides us with two Trumps – Trump the president-elect, and the specter of Trump the president, haunting in the wings, waiting to take form.
~THE CHAIR~
The masterstroke, the single detail that completes the entire image, is the chair.
Trump is seated in what looks to be a vintage “Louis XV” chair (so named because it was designed in France under the reign of King Louis XV in the mid 18th century).
It’s a gaudy symbol of wealth and status, but if you look at the top right corner, you can see a rip in the upholstery, signifying Trump’s own cracked image. Behind the bluster, behind the glowing displays of wealth, behind the glittering promises, we have the debt, the tastelessness, the demagoguery, the racism, the lack of government experience or knowledge (all of which we unfortunately know too well already).
Once we notice the rip, the splotches on the wood come into focus, the cracks in Trump’s makeup, the thinness of his hair, the stain on the bottom left corner of the seat – the entire illusion of grandeur begins to collapse.
The cover is less an image of a man in power than the freeze frame of a leader, and his country, in a state of decay. The ghostly shadow works overtime here – suggesting a splendor that has already passed, if it ever existed at all.
Taken together, these elements add up to a profound portrayal of anxiety for the coming years. We have the implicit placement of Trump in the mid 1900’s. We have a suggestion of the scheming, sordid underside of power.
We have the crumbling facade of wealth, which, like “The Picture of Dorian Gray” suggests more than just a physical deterioration.
As a photograph, it’s a rare achievement.
As a cover, it’s a statement.
These are only excerpts.
There’s more to it.
Again, I encourage you to read TIME’s complete article.
Hillary Clinton Features Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’ in Campaign Ad
Hillary Clinton has set her closing campaign ad to Katy Perry’s song “Roar,” airing the spot in key states in the final days of the presidential race.
The minute-long spot features scenes of Clinton throughout her career and on the campaign trail, as well as images of everyday Americans with descriptions of what they’re voting for, including equality, respect and higher wages.
Perry has made herself a well-known Clinton supporter throughout the presidential race, performing at the Democratic National Convention, campaigning to get out the vote and dressing up as the Democratic nominee for Halloween.
The pop star appeared at a Clinton rally in Philadelphia on Saturday, November 5.
“As it appears in … full credit”
Time Magazine
(online)
~~GRAPHICS SOURCE~~
Google Images
I do not own these images.
No intention of taking credit.
If anyone knows the owner of any, please advise and it will be corrected immediately.
Naked Donald Trump Statues Populate American Cities
Nate Hopper
An anarchist collective distributed the life-size likenesses in very public locations
In New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Cleveland, life-size statues of Donald Trump in the nude stand in public. They were placed there by the anarchist collective Indecline, which among other projects has also glued the names of black men killed by police officers onto blank stars in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The Trump project is titled after a genital omission each statue shares, “The Emperor Has No Balls.” It’s an escalation of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 parable about a ruler so overconfident that he believes he’s wearing the world’s finest clothes, even when parading in the nude through his realm, beneath “his splendid canopy” — until a child breaks his delusion.
The artist who constructed the statues goes by the name Ginger and is a regular keynote speaker at haunted house conventions.
He told the Washington Post,
“When the Indecline organization approached me, it was all because of my monster-making abilities.”
According to the Post, he spent 25 hours weekly since receiving the commission in April, and worked through 300 pounds of clay and silicone, to construct the statues.
BARACK OBAMA
It Is What It Is 