nevver:

Mondrian and Rothko, Modern Art Desserts

And that article says bystanders. With an s. Can you imagine? Being terrified, tackled and restrained by multiple people who were seriously convinced you had just bombed the place, insisting on your innocence to no avail, and then being turned over to police simply for being brown and in the vicinity of an attack? Fuck.

Saudi man has no connection to bombing in boston

talkinboutstuffseoul:

hanguknamja:

He was injured in the blast and was running away like everyone else. But a bystander thought that was suspicious and tackled him. Police grilled him and ransacked his apartment. The new York post calls him a suspect immediately. Drudgereport links it under a screaming headline. World media pick it up. Everyone thinks he’s behind it. But. It’s. Just. Not. True.

I like how an innocent, injured, and scared man was tackled by bystanders, taken into custody, and defamed in the international media just for his skin color and his audacity to run from a fucking bombing and this warrants one tiny paragraph in an article about how “vigilant” they’re being in their investigation.

#post-racial society #white privilege isn’t real #islamophobia isn’t racialized

Not sure how to feel about the first peek at photos from the professionals… (photo on the right is mine). As a photographer, I can appreciate trying to create a bright/cheery glow in an image, but there’s a fine line between atmosphere and whitewashing. It’s not like they don’t do this to other photos, but it takes on a different meaning in this context. idk

"I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity. I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial."

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Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, Gitmo is killing me

The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day.

… The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.

And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.

I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.

(via theamericanbear)

owlcitee:

In Urdu you don’t say “I love you” you say “aap ke shakal dekh ke ulti aathi hain” which roughly translates to “you are my world, my heart, my life”.

Absolutely beautiful.

"The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying."

-The Couple Overfloweth, Mediators, Negotiations 1972-1990, Gilles Deleuze; p 129  (via goleyaas)

(Source: sunrec)

ridingwithstrangers:

Architectural Density in Hong Kong

With seven million people, Hong Kong is the 4th most densely populated places in the world. However, plain numbers never tell the full story. In his ‘Architecture of Density’ photo series, German photographer Michael Wolf explores the jaw-dropping urban landscapes of Hong Kong. He rids his photographs of any context, removing any sky or horizon line from the frame and flattening the space until it becomes a relentless abstraction of urban expansion, with no escape for the viewer’s eye. Infinite and haunting.

Editor’s Note: Co-signed.

why does my brother in law look better in a shalwar kameez than i do :(

“No Pakistanis”: The racial satire the Beatles don’t want you to hear

jayaprada:

This was the situation that the Beatles faced in 1969, when they first concocted the song that would become “Get Back.” Better known as a playful take on counterculture, starring the gender-bending Sweet Loretta Martin and the grass-smoking Jo-Jo, the song originally dealt with South Asian immigration to the United Kingdom. The strange story of “Get Back,” its politics, and its bootlegs tells us much about the limits of what musicians, even hugely popular and politically engaged ones, can say in popular music — and what’s at stake in the battle over file-sharing and free culture today.

An early version of the song, known to bootleggers as “No Pakistanis,” began with Paul McCartney muttering, “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs.” Many Americans have heard similar complaints, having listened to the anti-immigrant invective of Joe Arpaio and Tom Tancredo for years. Brits are also familiar with such rhetoric, seeing the British Nationalist Party ride their slogan of “British jobs for British workers” to prominence in the last decade.

Many who hear the song today are startled to hear this sort of cranky posturing from the Beatles, the lovable moptops who told us that “All You Need Is Love.” Bootleg versions of “No Pakistanis” have even won the hearts of neo-Nazi groups like Stormfront, who believe that the Beatles were really on the side of the white man’s cause all along. (The white supremacist band Battlecry even recorded its own clueless version of the tune.) If released today, a similar song would likely ignite controversy, regardless of the songwriter’s intentions.

[…..] In a recording known as “Back to the Commonwealth” or “The Commonwealth Song,” the band blasts the politician by name. “Dirty Enoch Powell said to the immigrants, immigrants you better get back to your commonwealth homes,” McCartney warbles over a skittering beat. Soon enough, however, we learn that “Heath said to Enoch Powell you better get out, or heads are gonna roll.” As the song slides into a rollicking boogie, McCartney recounts his travels around the old British empire, from the West Indies to India and Pakistan, as Lennon chimes in occasionally, in the voice of a prim old English woman, “The Commonwealth is much too common for me.”

“Getting back” was a major theme of these recording sessions. Powell tells the immigrants to get back to Britain’s former colonies, and the party leader tells Powell to get back in line. The Beatles, for their part, intended the new album to be a back-to-basics affair, trading the experimentalism of “Sgt. Pepper” and the “White Album” for the simpler rock they abandoned in the mid-1960s.

The politics of race and immigration, however, played on their minds too. “Get Back” itself went through several distinct iterations before it became the commentary on counterculture that the public heard in 1969. One mumbled verse mentions a “Puerto Rican living in the USA,” and appears to rhyme “Rican” with “Mohican.” Another version, closer in style and tempo to the final recording, refers to people “living in a council flat” – the British equivalent of public housing – where “the candidate for Labour tells them what the plan is, then he tells them where it’s at.”

Who McCartney was actually referring to is difficult to determine from the recording, but the Beatle later insisted that any pejorative racial tone was not intentional. “There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats – you know, living 16 to a room or whatever,” McCartney said in 1986, one of the rare times he talked about the songs. “If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. I mean, all our favorite people were always black.”

Then there is the matter of “White Power.” In this recording, Lennon and McCartney free-associated names of popular figures over a blues jam, drifting from Malcolm X and Cassius Clay to the likes of Judy Garland and British pop pianist Russ Conway. The juxtapositions are intriguing: Mary Whitehouse, a British crusader for morals and decency, comes up, as does Dusty Springfield, the legendary soul imitator. The Beatles were up to something when they coupled Richard Nixon and Malcolm X with the incessant refrains of “white power” and “can you dig it?” but it was not something they intended to share with the public. The recording has never seen release. A somewhat similar song, “Dig It,” made it onto the “Let It Be” album, but the racial dimension was missing. Instead, Lennon rambled about the BBC, B.B. King and soccer player Matt Busby.

“Get Back,” for its part, also shed its racial implications on the way to wide release. Instead of a Puerto Rican and a Pakistani, the official version deals with Jo-Jo, who “left his home in Tucson, Arizona, for some California grass,” and a cross-dresser named Sweet Loretta Martin. McCartney advises Jo-Jo to get back to his roots, while warning that Martin will “get it” some day if she keeps up her transgressive ways. The Beatles evidently felt more comfortable addressing counterculture and sexual liberation in the song, rather than risk releasing a recording whose satirical intent could be misconstrued as an anthem of racial backlash.
[…]

In fact, the Beatles’ controversial “Get Back” recordings were among the first to find release when rock bootlegging exploded in 1969. The movement was touched off by the release of Bob Dylan’s so-called basement tapes, which emerged in Los Angeles and soon spread throughout the country, with various compilations appearing under names like The Great White Wonder, Troubled Troubadour, and Stealin’. Soon, a Beatles album called Kum Back appeared on the streets of San Francisco, and live bootlegs of Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix and numerous others followed. The profusion of new and unauthorized music helped the record industry push through its long-desired goal – a 1971 law that provided federal copyright for sound recordings for the first time.

Despite the new ban on piracy, “No Pakistanis,” “White Power” and the other songs of the “Get Back” sessions continued to circulate. Collections like Sweet Apple Trax and T’anks for the Mammaries moved through the underground throughout the 1970s, and mp3s of “Back to the Commonwealth” can be found through file-sharing networks today. Bootlegging provided an alternative channel for subversive and potentially controversial music to reach the public, albeit in a limited way. Those who sought it out could hear “No Pakistanis” and evaluate it for themselves, without the song providing a soundtrack for racism or fodder for public debate. Without bootlegging, we would only know the version of the Beatles that John, Paul, George, Ringo and Yoko wanted us to know: the canonical hits and pseudo-bootlegs of the Anthology series.

“To JK Rowling, from Cho Chang” by Rachel Rostad

(Source: penguinsledding)

Today in unspeakably awful ideas involving Trayvon Martin, particularly in the state of Florida:

shortformblog:

A Port Canaveral police sergeant was fired Friday after an internal investigation showed he offered other officers a target resembling Trayvon Martin to use for shooting practice.

Sgt. Ron King, a two-year veteran of the force of about 35 sworn officers, offered the target of a hoodie-wearing Trayvon at the range near Cocoa on April 4, Rosalind Harvey, a port spokeswoman, said Saturday.

The other officers, who were on duty, refused.

Much credit to the cops who turned down the officer’s offer. Also, WTF?

"First, while a decision that upholds the University’s program would be relatively good, it would ultimately mean that affirmative action as it is presently construed and the jurisprudence underlying it would remain unchanged. Powell’s troubling opinion, which notably manipulated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to protect whites from racial discrimination at the expense of minority rights, would once again be reinforced. Such a decision would fortify the status quo and encourage the continued neglect of racial justice. Second, a ruling that the University’s program is not narrowly tailored would conceivably require – despite Grutter’s unequivocal statements to the contrary – the exhaustion of race-neutral alternatives and relegate racially conscious programs as a last resort. This would only bolster the delusion of colorblindness, aggravating the idiocy of trying to address racism by pretending that racism doesn’t exist. Finally, the Court could decide to overrule Bakke and Grutter, reject diversity as a compelling state interest, and completely foreclose the constitutionality of taking race into account. This final outcome’s implications are so alarming that it could provoke a breakaway from the stifling confines of the prevailing affirmative action debate. Or it could just render legal recourse to racial justice impossible."

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Fisher v. UT Austin: The End of Affirmative Action as We Know I

(via jayaprada)

baboushkat:

*forgets to talk to friends for 4 weeks*

(Source: ringroads)