Charlie Brianna releases her first Spring/Summer collection "California Rose", made especially for women. Though the current fashion trends are that of a futuristic sensation, this collection manifests timeless artistry to remind fashion enthusiasts that simplicity speaks LOUD. California Rose has a mixture of flowers, pearls, chain, swarovski stones, iridescent beads, and vintage frames.
http://vimeo.com/21627062
Photographer.Milan Carter
Models.Rica Wade, Suanny Serpas
MUA.Rebekah Aladdin
Hair Stylist.Natasha Buitrago
Videographer.Whitney Smith
Creative Director B. Thomas
Stylist.Charlie Brianna
Agent Icon Showroom
Mink Pink
American Apparel
and Darrin Butler!
Are you kidding me?!
Redevelopment agencies in California illegally shortchanged schools by at least $40 million last year, forcing the state to make up the money, according to findings released Monday morning by State Controller John Chiang.
The review of redevelopment agencies comes as the Legislature is poised to vote on Gov. Jerrry Brown's proposal to eliminate municipal redevelopment agencies as part of his budget plan. One city, Palm Desert, spent public money meant for improving slums and blight on a luxury golf course.
Times' Data Desk: How is your redevelopment agency spending money?
"The lack of accountability and transparency is a breeding ground for waste, abuse, and impropriety," Chiang said in a statement. "In whatever form local redevelopment takes in the future, the level of oversight and openness must be consistent with the amount of public dollars entrusted to their care."
The report comes as many redevelopment advocates fear that the Legislature is leaning toward abolishing the agencies, which run on $5 billion a year in property taxes. Brown wants to send the money to schools and counties instead, and take $1.7 billion this year to balance the budget. Proponents of the redevelopment agencies, including the mayors of many of California cities, are outraged, arguing that the program generates jobs and builds thousands of homes for poor and working people. Critics say the money could be better used for other services, and that it is often misspent.
Jessica Garrison
Chiang dispatched auditors around the state in January, saying he wanted to provide "factual, empirical information about how these agencies perform and what they bring to the communities they serve." In the past, his office has declined to scrutinize redevelopment.
The review also found that the agencies' outside auditors often did a poor job and that the agencies had used affordable housing money in improper ways.
None of the 18 agencies met all filing requirements for financial reports, the review found. Some filed reports in pieces; some did not file at all. Two agencies -- in Pittsburg and Calexico -- also made questionable loans to their cities' general funds. Pittsburg lent $16.6 million last fiscal year without interest. Most of the money was unspent, which allowed the city to earn interest on those funds.
The review of redevelopment agencies comes as the Legislature is poised to vote on Gov. Jerrry Brown's proposal to eliminate municipal redevelopment agencies as part of his budget plan. One city, Palm Desert, spent public money meant for improving slums and blight on a luxury golf course.
Times' Data Desk: How is your redevelopment agency spending money?
"The lack of accountability and transparency is a breeding ground for waste, abuse, and impropriety," Chiang said in a statement. "In whatever form local redevelopment takes in the future, the level of oversight and openness must be consistent with the amount of public dollars entrusted to their care."
The report comes as many redevelopment advocates fear that the Legislature is leaning toward abolishing the agencies, which run on $5 billion a year in property taxes. Brown wants to send the money to schools and counties instead, and take $1.7 billion this year to balance the budget. Proponents of the redevelopment agencies, including the mayors of many of California cities, are outraged, arguing that the program generates jobs and builds thousands of homes for poor and working people. Critics say the money could be better used for other services, and that it is often misspent.
Jessica Garrison
Chiang dispatched auditors around the state in January, saying he wanted to provide "factual, empirical information about how these agencies perform and what they bring to the communities they serve." In the past, his office has declined to scrutinize redevelopment.
The review also found that the agencies' outside auditors often did a poor job and that the agencies had used affordable housing money in improper ways.
None of the 18 agencies met all filing requirements for financial reports, the review found. Some filed reports in pieces; some did not file at all. Two agencies -- in Pittsburg and Calexico -- also made questionable loans to their cities' general funds. Pittsburg lent $16.6 million last fiscal year without interest. Most of the money was unspent, which allowed the city to earn interest on those funds.
HOLLYWOOD WHITE OUT!
CRAMMED into this year’s field of 10 best picture Oscar nominees are British aristocrats, Volvo-driving Los Angeles lesbians, a flock of swans, a gaggle of Harvard computer geeks, clans of Massachusetts fighters and Missouri meth dealers, as well as 19th-century bounty hunters, dream detectives and animated toys. It’s a fairly diverse selection in terms of genre, topic, sensibility, style and ambition. But it’s also more racially homogenous — more white — than the 10 films that were up for best picture in 1940, when Hattie McDaniel became the first black American to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind.” In view of recent history the whiteness of the 2011 Academy Awards is a little blinding.
Nine years ago, when Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won his and her Oscars — he was only the second African-American man to win best actor, and she was the first African-American woman to win best actress — each took a moment to look back at the performers from earlier generations who had struggled against prejudice and fought to claim the recognition too often denied them.
“This moment is so much bigger than me,” Ms. Berry said, before convulsing with sobs. “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll.” When Mr. Washington took the stage, he praised God and then recognized another higher power, Sidney Poitier, who received an honorary Academy Award earlier that evening for helping to dismantle the color line in film.” “I’ll always be chasing you, Sidney,” Mr. Washington said, holding his Oscar toward Mr. Poitier, who had won his own best actor prize in 1964 for “The Lilies of the Field.” “I’ll always be following in your footsteps.”
Real change seemed to have come to movies or at least the Academy, which had given statuettes to a total of seven black actors in the previous 73 years. After Mr. Washington and Ms. Berry, there would be Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker (both best actors); Morgan Freeman (best supporting actor); Jennifer Hudson and Mo’Nique (best supporting actresses). The consolidation of a black presence in the movies and television did not signal the arrival of a postracial Hollywood any more than the election of Barack Obama in 2008 spelled the end of America’s 400-year-old racial drama. But it was possible, over much of the past decade, to believe that a few of the old demons of suspicion and exclusion might finally be laid to rest.
Are the coming Oscars an anomaly, or an unsettling sign of the times? The Academy, in any case, does not work in a vacuum. A look back at the American films of 2010 reveals fewer of the kinds of movies — biographies like “Ray” and urban dramas like “Training Day” — that have propelled black actors, screenwriters and directors into contention in the recent past. With a few exceptions, like the romance “Just Wright” and the ghetto farce “Lottery Ticket,” it was perhaps the whitest year for Hollywood since the post-Richard Pryor, pre-Spike Lee 1980s. The superhero, fantasy and action genres were drained of color. The urban dramas were set in Irish-American New England neighborhoods. Even the male-male buddy picture, a staple of interracial bonding since 1958, when Mr. Poitier and Tony Curtis were chained together in “The Defiant Ones,” has become a largely white-on-white affair.
The possibility that a new black independent film movement — or even a genuinely crossover cinema — would emerge in the wake of “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” now seems as remote as it did before this art-house phenomenon made its way, assisted by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, from the Sundance Film Festival to the Oscars. But while Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Perry, as executive producers, brought attention to this story of an abused black teenage girl, “Precious” now looks more like a one-off than a harbinger of change, much like another of last year’s nominees, “The Princess and the Frog,” the first Disney movie with a black princess. (The latest Disney princess, Rapunzel in “Tangled,” is as blond as Sleeping Beauty back in 1959.)
What happened? Is 2010 an exception to a general rule of growing diversity? Or has Hollywood, a supposed bastion of liberalism so eager in 2008 to help Mr. Obama make it to the White House, slid back into its old, timid ways? Can it be that the president’s status as the most visible and powerful African-American man in the world has inaugurated a new era of racial confusion — or perhaps a crisis in representation? Mr. Obama’s complex, seemingly contradictory identity as both a man (black, white, mixed) and a politician (right, left, center) have inspired puzzlement among his supporters who want him to be one thing and detractors who fear that he might be something else.
In their modest way American movies helped pave the way for the Obama presidency by popularizing and normalizing positive images of black masculinity. Actors like Mr. Poitier and Harry Belafonte made the leap, allowing black men to move beyond porters and pimps to play detectives, judges, the guy next door, the God upstairs and the decider in the Oval Office. At the same time, while the variety of roles increased, the commercially circumscribed representational conservatism of American cinema — with its genre prerogatives and appetite for uplift, its insistence on archetypes and stereotypes, villains and heroes — meant that these images tended to fit rather than break or bend the mold. Certainly this isn’t a cinema that jibes with what, in his 2007 memoir “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama called “the fluid state of identity.”
The recognition of that fluidity, and the exploitation of it for creative and commercial ends, has, from the swing era through hip-hop, been much more the province of America’s popular music than its movies. Partly because movies remain a top-down, capital-intensive art form, they have been more cautious and apt to cater to rather than to subvert the perceived prejudices of the audience. In Hollywood race has often been a social problem to be earnestly addressed (and then set aside), or a marketing challenge. In the 1960s the studios congratulated themselves for making sober, correct-thinking dramas that often starred Mr. Poitier in films like “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” both released in 1967 and which together reaped 17 Oscar nominations.
A few years later, when a new generation of actors and filmmakers emerged from the rubble of the old studio system, Mr. Poitier was no longer alone as African-Americans began to appear on screen and behind the camera to an unprecedented extent. Faces and voices that had once been found only in “race movies” or art-house films by the likes of Shirley Clarke (“The Cool World”) filtered into the mainstream. There were blaxploitation hits like “Shaft,” as well as crossover dramas (“Sounder”) and popular comedies, including the trilogy “Uptown Saturday Night,” “Let’s Do It Again” and “A Piece of the Action,” directed by Mr. Poitier and starring him and Bill Cosby. The independent world saw the emergence of off-Hollywood directors like Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry and Julie Dash.
Race in American cinema has rarely been a matter of simple step-by-step progress. It has more often proceeded in fits and starts, with backlashes coming on the heels of breakthroughs, and periods of intense argument followed by uncomfortable silence. To that end, the 1980s were, with a few exceptions — or maybe just the exception of Eddie Murphy in “48 Hours,” Trading Places” and “Beverly Hills Cop” — marked as much by racial retrenchment as by the consolidation of the blockbuster mentality. More hopefully, the end of that decade ushered in a new generation of do-it-yourself black filmmakers, most famously and outspokenly Spike Lee, who tried to beat the system and then joined it.
Mr. Murphy, Mr. Lee and the African-American stars who ascended in the 1990s and the decade that followed — notably Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Jamie Foxx and of course Mr. Washington — often had to shoulder the burden of representing their race even as they pursued their individual ambitions. For the most part, these stars rode to the top of the box office in stories that did not engage or address race, while the films that did take the subject on more directly — like “Ali” and “Dreamgirls” — often did so at a historical safe distance. It was almost as if, with the ascendancy of individual black movie stars, Hollywood no longer felt the need to tell stories about black people as a group.
This retreat from race by the big studios partly explains the emergence of a newly separate black cinema with its own stars (Morris Chestnut, Vivica A. Fox), auteurs (Ice Cube, Tyler Perry) and genres (including tales of buppie courtship like “Two Can Play That Game” and of neighborhood striving like the “Barbershop” franchise). Emerging from outside the mainstream and indie world, the prolific Mr. Perry has become one of the most successful directors and producers of any color. Last year he directed a much-maligned adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Some complained that Mr. Perry had bowdlerized that’s famous feminist work, but he had made it his own, complete with melodramatic flourishes and divas like Janet Jackson.
Mr. Lee has been among Mr. Perry’s critics. “We’ve got a black president, and we’re going back,” Mr. Lee said in 2009. “The image is troubling, and it harkens back to Amos ’n’ Andy.” The philosopher Cornel West has been more charitable (“Brother Tyler can mature”) and last year he put a larger frame around the issue of race and the movies in America, noting that with “all the richness in black life right now,” that “the only thing Hollywood gives us is black pathology. Look at the Oscars. Even ‘Precious,’ with my dear sister Mo’Nique, what is it? Rape, violation, the marginalized. Or else you get white missionary attitudes toward black folk. ‘The Blind Side?’ Oh my God! In 2010? I respect Sandra Bullock’s work, but that is not art.”
“The Blind Side” might not have been art, but along with three other best picture nominees — “Precious,” “District 9” and “Avatar” — it did take on questions of black and white relations. At the center of “The Hurt Locker,” which won best picture, was the volatile friendship between two soldiers, a hot-headed white bomb-disposal specialist played by Jeremy Renner and his cautious black sergeant, played by Anthony Mackie. Race in that movie was not a theme or a problem to be solved, but rather a subtle, complex fact of life. These nominees suggested a range of approaches to a volatile subject, from allegory to melodrama to various kinds of realism.
Did filmmakers somehow exhaust the subject? Or has the cultural ground shifted and, with the economic crisis, made other kinds of stories feel more urgent? While it might be a stretch to yoke together the differently privileged milieus of “The King’s Speech,” “The Kids Are All Right” and “The Social Network,” it is hard to escape the impression that class made something of a comeback in 2010. “The Fighter” relates the story of working-class, boxing brothers from a former Massachusetts mill town. Set in the Ozarks, “Winter’s Bone” involves the violent, clannish world of crystal meth producers whose grandfathers likely ran moonshine. “The Town,” which brought Mr. Renner his second nomination in two years, depicts a similar milieu, but with Boston bank robbers.
So is class the new race? It may be tempting to think so, given the state of the economy and the political discourse, but the two have never really stood apart in American life. And the racial complexity of American life seems, at least at the moment, to have stymied the collective imagination of the movie industry. Perhaps this next year will bring more change we can believe in. For now, though, looking down the roster of the most popular movies released in 2010, only one seems capable of acknowledging, and making a story of the perfectly ordinary reality of a black man with a blue-collar job. That was Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable,” starring none other than Denzel Washington. The rest of Hollywood, it seems, will always be chasing him.
By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT
Nine years ago, when Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won his and her Oscars — he was only the second African-American man to win best actor, and she was the first African-American woman to win best actress — each took a moment to look back at the performers from earlier generations who had struggled against prejudice and fought to claim the recognition too often denied them.
“This moment is so much bigger than me,” Ms. Berry said, before convulsing with sobs. “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll.” When Mr. Washington took the stage, he praised God and then recognized another higher power, Sidney Poitier, who received an honorary Academy Award earlier that evening for helping to dismantle the color line in film.” “I’ll always be chasing you, Sidney,” Mr. Washington said, holding his Oscar toward Mr. Poitier, who had won his own best actor prize in 1964 for “The Lilies of the Field.” “I’ll always be following in your footsteps.”
Real change seemed to have come to movies or at least the Academy, which had given statuettes to a total of seven black actors in the previous 73 years. After Mr. Washington and Ms. Berry, there would be Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker (both best actors); Morgan Freeman (best supporting actor); Jennifer Hudson and Mo’Nique (best supporting actresses). The consolidation of a black presence in the movies and television did not signal the arrival of a postracial Hollywood any more than the election of Barack Obama in 2008 spelled the end of America’s 400-year-old racial drama. But it was possible, over much of the past decade, to believe that a few of the old demons of suspicion and exclusion might finally be laid to rest.
Are the coming Oscars an anomaly, or an unsettling sign of the times? The Academy, in any case, does not work in a vacuum. A look back at the American films of 2010 reveals fewer of the kinds of movies — biographies like “Ray” and urban dramas like “Training Day” — that have propelled black actors, screenwriters and directors into contention in the recent past. With a few exceptions, like the romance “Just Wright” and the ghetto farce “Lottery Ticket,” it was perhaps the whitest year for Hollywood since the post-Richard Pryor, pre-Spike Lee 1980s. The superhero, fantasy and action genres were drained of color. The urban dramas were set in Irish-American New England neighborhoods. Even the male-male buddy picture, a staple of interracial bonding since 1958, when Mr. Poitier and Tony Curtis were chained together in “The Defiant Ones,” has become a largely white-on-white affair.
The possibility that a new black independent film movement — or even a genuinely crossover cinema — would emerge in the wake of “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” now seems as remote as it did before this art-house phenomenon made its way, assisted by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, from the Sundance Film Festival to the Oscars. But while Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Perry, as executive producers, brought attention to this story of an abused black teenage girl, “Precious” now looks more like a one-off than a harbinger of change, much like another of last year’s nominees, “The Princess and the Frog,” the first Disney movie with a black princess. (The latest Disney princess, Rapunzel in “Tangled,” is as blond as Sleeping Beauty back in 1959.)
What happened? Is 2010 an exception to a general rule of growing diversity? Or has Hollywood, a supposed bastion of liberalism so eager in 2008 to help Mr. Obama make it to the White House, slid back into its old, timid ways? Can it be that the president’s status as the most visible and powerful African-American man in the world has inaugurated a new era of racial confusion — or perhaps a crisis in representation? Mr. Obama’s complex, seemingly contradictory identity as both a man (black, white, mixed) and a politician (right, left, center) have inspired puzzlement among his supporters who want him to be one thing and detractors who fear that he might be something else.
In their modest way American movies helped pave the way for the Obama presidency by popularizing and normalizing positive images of black masculinity. Actors like Mr. Poitier and Harry Belafonte made the leap, allowing black men to move beyond porters and pimps to play detectives, judges, the guy next door, the God upstairs and the decider in the Oval Office. At the same time, while the variety of roles increased, the commercially circumscribed representational conservatism of American cinema — with its genre prerogatives and appetite for uplift, its insistence on archetypes and stereotypes, villains and heroes — meant that these images tended to fit rather than break or bend the mold. Certainly this isn’t a cinema that jibes with what, in his 2007 memoir “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama called “the fluid state of identity.”
The recognition of that fluidity, and the exploitation of it for creative and commercial ends, has, from the swing era through hip-hop, been much more the province of America’s popular music than its movies. Partly because movies remain a top-down, capital-intensive art form, they have been more cautious and apt to cater to rather than to subvert the perceived prejudices of the audience. In Hollywood race has often been a social problem to be earnestly addressed (and then set aside), or a marketing challenge. In the 1960s the studios congratulated themselves for making sober, correct-thinking dramas that often starred Mr. Poitier in films like “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” both released in 1967 and which together reaped 17 Oscar nominations.
A few years later, when a new generation of actors and filmmakers emerged from the rubble of the old studio system, Mr. Poitier was no longer alone as African-Americans began to appear on screen and behind the camera to an unprecedented extent. Faces and voices that had once been found only in “race movies” or art-house films by the likes of Shirley Clarke (“The Cool World”) filtered into the mainstream. There were blaxploitation hits like “Shaft,” as well as crossover dramas (“Sounder”) and popular comedies, including the trilogy “Uptown Saturday Night,” “Let’s Do It Again” and “A Piece of the Action,” directed by Mr. Poitier and starring him and Bill Cosby. The independent world saw the emergence of off-Hollywood directors like Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry and Julie Dash.
Race in American cinema has rarely been a matter of simple step-by-step progress. It has more often proceeded in fits and starts, with backlashes coming on the heels of breakthroughs, and periods of intense argument followed by uncomfortable silence. To that end, the 1980s were, with a few exceptions — or maybe just the exception of Eddie Murphy in “48 Hours,” Trading Places” and “Beverly Hills Cop” — marked as much by racial retrenchment as by the consolidation of the blockbuster mentality. More hopefully, the end of that decade ushered in a new generation of do-it-yourself black filmmakers, most famously and outspokenly Spike Lee, who tried to beat the system and then joined it.
Mr. Murphy, Mr. Lee and the African-American stars who ascended in the 1990s and the decade that followed — notably Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Jamie Foxx and of course Mr. Washington — often had to shoulder the burden of representing their race even as they pursued their individual ambitions. For the most part, these stars rode to the top of the box office in stories that did not engage or address race, while the films that did take the subject on more directly — like “Ali” and “Dreamgirls” — often did so at a historical safe distance. It was almost as if, with the ascendancy of individual black movie stars, Hollywood no longer felt the need to tell stories about black people as a group.
This retreat from race by the big studios partly explains the emergence of a newly separate black cinema with its own stars (Morris Chestnut, Vivica A. Fox), auteurs (Ice Cube, Tyler Perry) and genres (including tales of buppie courtship like “Two Can Play That Game” and of neighborhood striving like the “Barbershop” franchise). Emerging from outside the mainstream and indie world, the prolific Mr. Perry has become one of the most successful directors and producers of any color. Last year he directed a much-maligned adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Some complained that Mr. Perry had bowdlerized that’s famous feminist work, but he had made it his own, complete with melodramatic flourishes and divas like Janet Jackson.
Mr. Lee has been among Mr. Perry’s critics. “We’ve got a black president, and we’re going back,” Mr. Lee said in 2009. “The image is troubling, and it harkens back to Amos ’n’ Andy.” The philosopher Cornel West has been more charitable (“Brother Tyler can mature”) and last year he put a larger frame around the issue of race and the movies in America, noting that with “all the richness in black life right now,” that “the only thing Hollywood gives us is black pathology. Look at the Oscars. Even ‘Precious,’ with my dear sister Mo’Nique, what is it? Rape, violation, the marginalized. Or else you get white missionary attitudes toward black folk. ‘The Blind Side?’ Oh my God! In 2010? I respect Sandra Bullock’s work, but that is not art.”
“The Blind Side” might not have been art, but along with three other best picture nominees — “Precious,” “District 9” and “Avatar” — it did take on questions of black and white relations. At the center of “The Hurt Locker,” which won best picture, was the volatile friendship between two soldiers, a hot-headed white bomb-disposal specialist played by Jeremy Renner and his cautious black sergeant, played by Anthony Mackie. Race in that movie was not a theme or a problem to be solved, but rather a subtle, complex fact of life. These nominees suggested a range of approaches to a volatile subject, from allegory to melodrama to various kinds of realism.
Did filmmakers somehow exhaust the subject? Or has the cultural ground shifted and, with the economic crisis, made other kinds of stories feel more urgent? While it might be a stretch to yoke together the differently privileged milieus of “The King’s Speech,” “The Kids Are All Right” and “The Social Network,” it is hard to escape the impression that class made something of a comeback in 2010. “The Fighter” relates the story of working-class, boxing brothers from a former Massachusetts mill town. Set in the Ozarks, “Winter’s Bone” involves the violent, clannish world of crystal meth producers whose grandfathers likely ran moonshine. “The Town,” which brought Mr. Renner his second nomination in two years, depicts a similar milieu, but with Boston bank robbers.
So is class the new race? It may be tempting to think so, given the state of the economy and the political discourse, but the two have never really stood apart in American life. And the racial complexity of American life seems, at least at the moment, to have stymied the collective imagination of the movie industry. Perhaps this next year will bring more change we can believe in. For now, though, looking down the roster of the most popular movies released in 2010, only one seems capable of acknowledging, and making a story of the perfectly ordinary reality of a black man with a blue-collar job. That was Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable,” starring none other than Denzel Washington. The rest of Hollywood, it seems, will always be chasing him.
By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT
Violence plagues Chicago
13 year old Robert Freedman was shot 22 times outside his house in Pullman area. Supposedly mistaken but the question is why is this tolerable? Why is it that America can gain control of another country yet lack providing proper protection for there own. No, fuck the National Guards coming in to take order or hiring another 100 police officers, how about money for education, community centers and the basic needs of survival. The things that those communities have that DON'T have gunshots outside there window every night.
More info:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2546878,pullman-shooting-teen-dies-072910.article
"Police are questioning a man after a woman was shot in the neck in a possible accidental domestic incident Sunday morning in the West Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side."
http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2555126,south-side-shooting-neck-080110.article
"Four women were shot -- two of them multiple times and left critically wounded -- outside a party in West Side Garfield Park early Sunday."
http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2555122,garfield-park-shooting-080110.article
The question can longer be why, but what role do we play in bringing about change?
The artist is in action
More info:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2546878,pullman-shooting-teen-dies-072910.article
"Police are questioning a man after a woman was shot in the neck in a possible accidental domestic incident Sunday morning in the West Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side."
http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2555126,south-side-shooting-neck-080110.article
"Four women were shot -- two of them multiple times and left critically wounded -- outside a party in West Side Garfield Park early Sunday."
http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2555122,garfield-park-shooting-080110.article
The question can longer be why, but what role do we play in bringing about change?
The artist is in action
Vogue says NO to Vogue Africa
Cameroonian photographer Mario Epanya has spent much of his free time shooting a fictional magazine. Epanya went all out in his campaign to make “Vogue Africa” a reality.
Vogue is currently published in 18 countries and one region, but Africa has never been selected to play home to the mag.
In order to get publisher Conde Nast to see the potential in the magazine – that would pay homage to African women – Epanya created fake covers, with beautiful models and styling.
But all his hard work did not pay off. Conde Nast has turned down his bid for the magazine.
He posted on his Facebook page::
“DEAR ALL. The Wait is over. Condé Nast said NO to an African license of VOGUE. So this is the last cover. Enjoy, but it’s a beginning of something,”
With all of the hard work Epanya put into creating his pitch for the magazine, I see no reason as to deny Africa the opportunity to front page and center. Of course, if you open a Vogue magazine it is evident that unless you are an established entertainer of some sort, the chances of seeing blacks in the magazine are slim to none.
And the world keep trying tell the Artist that racism don't exist, well Im telling you, Im not convinced. AT ALL!
First off, I can't think of any reasons as to why this is not a good idea! His concept for the magazine would not only begin to put Africa on a map but change the images of blacks worldwide. The images he created were far from typical and he explored the dynamics and variety of beauty that blacks all over the world share but is rarely seen in mainstream media.
But you know what, I can smell your fear Conde. I am sure you know that people would only want more of this beauty and you wouldn't be able to handle it. Or maybe its because you don't have access or the ability to create powerful issues such as Epenya pitched or the demand for more images of Africans would increase which goes against Vogue moral standing. However, I am sure Epenya time is coming because Black is Beautiful!
HIV Test Trial
Researchers plan to test about 40,000 South Africans for HIV in the biggest trial yet of a theory for halting transmission of the AIDS-causing virus.
In a five-year study set to start this year, scientists from France and South Africa will screen everyone in 30 South African regions, said Bernard Hirschel, head of the HIV-AIDS unit of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland. In half the regions, they’ll start treatment immediately for those who test positive. In the other half, they’ll wait until the patients’ immune systems deteriorate to a certain level, Hirschel said.
The experiment is designed to see whether starting treatment straight away can reduce or eliminate transmission of HIV, which infects 2.7 million people and kills 2 million every year. The World Health Organization recommends that patients not receive HIV drugs, which can have serious side effects, until their infection-fighting cells fall below a certain level. The drugs lower HIV to undetectable levels in the blood, reducing patients’ chances of transmitting the virus, studies have shown.
“If you apply this on a large scale, you could theoretically eradicate HIV by diminishing transmission,” Hirschel told reporters at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna today.
A 2008 study led by researchers at the Geneva-based WHO suggested the spread of HIV in hard-hit African nations could be cut by 95 percent in a decade if all those infected started taking medicines immediately. That so-called test-and-treat theory has been disputed in other mathematical models that say those projections are based on flawed on assumptions.
The researchers have been planning the trial for two years, Hirschel said.
By Simeon Bennett
In a five-year study set to start this year, scientists from France and South Africa will screen everyone in 30 South African regions, said Bernard Hirschel, head of the HIV-AIDS unit of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland. In half the regions, they’ll start treatment immediately for those who test positive. In the other half, they’ll wait until the patients’ immune systems deteriorate to a certain level, Hirschel said.
The experiment is designed to see whether starting treatment straight away can reduce or eliminate transmission of HIV, which infects 2.7 million people and kills 2 million every year. The World Health Organization recommends that patients not receive HIV drugs, which can have serious side effects, until their infection-fighting cells fall below a certain level. The drugs lower HIV to undetectable levels in the blood, reducing patients’ chances of transmitting the virus, studies have shown.
“If you apply this on a large scale, you could theoretically eradicate HIV by diminishing transmission,” Hirschel told reporters at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna today.
A 2008 study led by researchers at the Geneva-based WHO suggested the spread of HIV in hard-hit African nations could be cut by 95 percent in a decade if all those infected started taking medicines immediately. That so-called test-and-treat theory has been disputed in other mathematical models that say those projections are based on flawed on assumptions.
The researchers have been planning the trial for two years, Hirschel said.
By Simeon Bennett
