My Facebook profile image has become a digital canvas of sorts. My profile pictures are almost always doctored in photoshop. At times it’s just a traditional self portrait. In some instances I created a digital montage instead of the traditional self portrait.
Cindy Sherman and Lucas Samaras come to mind while looking at these portraits. They both utilized their own visage in their work. Cindy’s work was more of a cultural critique concerning women’s role in society and Lucas was more of an introspective artist, looking inside himself to explain existence in a sense.
I have a history of drawing and painting portraiture so this comes naturally to me. Below is a selected few of my ‘Facebook Profile Portraits’.
The following semi-doctored and color corrected screenshots are of the World Cup finals that took place yesterday in South Africa (07.11.2010) between the Netherlands & España.
The selected images were carefully chosen to tell my narrative of the match; the side that believes that the Dutch played borderline aggressive/dirty the entire match and were lucky they weren’t given more red cards (disqualifications) throughout play.
This continues my blog series entitled ‘Postmodern: I Take Pictures of Pictures‘. This time i chose the world cup finals match using ESPN’s highlight video footage.
This time it’s Fiona Apple’s old school video for the song Limp. I find her so captivating because of her physical beauty combined with her musical and lyrical talents. It’s too bad that she dropped out of the music world for whatever reason(s). Maybe her ‘James Dean syndrome’* got in the way.
* James Dean syndrome is how I personally describe this state of mind that generally afflicts adolescent folks that is characterized by a brooding, pseudo depressing, and an anti authoritarian sensibility.
Some grow out of it after they go to college while others seem to be stuck in it for life. Maybe Fiona fits the latter but I really did not research her story and why she dropped out of the music world.
The following doctored, color corrected, and manipulated screen-shots are from her video for the song Limp. Afterwards I will also provide the link for this pretty decent and off-course pseudo angry tune.
I never understood why ‘ma and pa’ cafes had free Wi-Fi and Starbucks never did. They forced their customers to pay for this service. Starbucks is a huge, powerful, and ubiquitous corporation (especially in the U.S.) and making ‘us’ pay for Wi-Fi surely had no effect on their profit margin.
So why did Starbucks wait this long to change their policy regarding the Internet??
Prior to their July 1st, 2010 free Wi-Fi policy change they forced their customers to go through this complicated procces to get “FREE” Internet:
Purchase a starbucks card
Fill it up with at least $5.00
Scratch off a card specific number on the back
Sign up on the AT & T (Wi-Fi) website using that
number and input personal information
Select a Username & Password
Sign up on Starbucks website with that Username & Password
Fre Wi-Fi is attained
This complicated and time consuming process seemed to disourage some non-techie folks from even trying to figure out this convoluted roadmap. As a UX Designer I was always asking the question why? Why a multi-billion dollar corporation did not hire a UX designer to make this Internet signing up process simpler? Maybe they hired a UX Designer to make this process purposefully complicated?!?
The question always led me to the same answer: that Starbucks (previously) did not want to make this process easy. For whatever reason[s] (people camping in their stores solely for Internet use and not for buying their products) getting Internet at Starbucks was harder then rocket science.
As of today (07.01.10) the Internet at Starbucks is FREE. This time it’s really free with no * next to the word FREE leading to a fine print explanation. Off-course there is the ‘I agree to the Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy‘ which if checked obviously means that the customer is selling their soul to Starbucks; but that’s OK as long as the Internet is free.
EVENT HELD @: Congregation Ansche Chesed Co-sponsored by Congregation Ansche Chesed and J Street NYC
I found out about the New Israel Fund (NIF) via an old college friend,
(Hillit Zwick, Associate Director - NIF).
I am on their mailing list and I have been getting invitations to interesting events that promote communication and understanding. I like their overall peaceful message that stresses coexistence with the ‘Other‘. Off-course, the ‘Other‘ is the archetypal other tribe, other ethnicity, other color, other religion, the other person that is not like me.
On their website’s About Page, the first paragraph reads:
The New Israel Fund (NIF) is the leading organization committed to democratic change within Israel. Since 1979, NIF has fought for social justice and equality for all Israelis. We believe that Israel can live up to its founders’ vision of a state that ensures complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, without regard to religion, race or gender.
I like that message a lot and I truly hope that it’s for real and not just empty rhetoric. Whether the above applies to non-Israelis & non-Jews as well is an entirely different issue that I will not address here. I still love the fact that this organization is progressive and supports a two state solution.
I also understand that inside Israel there is a class system and a social hierarchy amongst Jews that needs to be addressed as much as the Palestinian question. You see, there are a number of ethnic divisions amongst Israeli Jews. Some of these ethnicities are:
There are many sects, subsets, and permutations of the jewish peoples living today in Israel. Within these ethnic divisions there exists this tribal mentality of Us Vs. Them and a social class hierarchy that cannot be ignored. I believe that the NIF’s main message is to work on these seeming inequalities, within the Israeli society, and not only the Palestinian issue.
Next time you hear the wordsIsraeli Jew ask yourself which ethnicity are they referring to. Israel is such a complicated country occupied by a melting pot of different ethnicities situated in an even more complicated area of competing religions. No wonder, I feel, that we will probably never see peace in Palestine any time soon.
