Keith Haring Birthday

Keith Haring was born on May 4, 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and was raised in nearby Kutztown, Pennsylvania. He developed a love for drawing at a very early age, learning basic cartooning skills from his father and from the popular culture around him, such as Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney.

Upon graduation from high school in 1976, Haring enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, a commercial arts school. He soon realized that he had little interest in becoming a commercial graphic artist and, after two semesters, dropped out. While in Pittsburgh, Haring continued to study and work on his own and in 1978 had a solo exhibition of his work at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center.
Later that same year, Haring moved to New York City and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts (SVA). In New York, Haring found a thriving alternative art community that was developing outside the gallery and museum system, in the downtown streets, the subways and spaces in clubs and former dance halls. Here he became friends with fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as the musicians, performance artists and graffiti writers that comprised the burgeoning art community. Haring was swept up in the energy and spirit of this scene and began to organize and participate in exhibitions and performances at Club 57 and other alternative venues.

In addition to being impressed by the innovation and energy of his contemporaries, Haring was also inspired by the work of Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Robert Henri’s manifesto The Art Spirit, which asserted the fundamental independence of the artist. With these influences Haring was able to push his own youthful impulses toward a singular kind of graphic expression based on the primacy of the line. Also drawn to the public and participatory nature of Christo’s work, in particular Running Fence, and by Andy Warhol’s unique fusion of art and life, Haring was determined to devote his career to creating a truly public art.

As a student at SVA, Haring experimented with performance, video, installation and collage, while always maintaining a strong commitment to drawing. In 1980, Haring found a highly effective medium that allowed him to communicate with the wider audience he desired, when he noticed the unused advertising panels covered with matte black paper in a subway station. He began to create drawings in white chalk upon these blank paper panels throughout the subway system. Between 1980 and 1985, Haring produced hundreds of these public drawings in rapid rhythmic lines, sometimes creating as many as forty “subway drawings” in one day. This seamless flow of images became familiar to New York commuters, who often would stop to engage the artist when they encountered him at work. The subway became, as Haring said, a “laboratory” for working out his ideas and experimenting with his simple lines.

Between 1980 and 1989, Haring achieved international recognition and participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His first solo exhibition in New York.was held at the Westbeth Painters Space in 1981. In 1982, he made his Soho gallery debut with an immensely popular and highly acclaimed one-man exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. During this period, he also participated in renowned international survey exhibitions such as Documenta 7 in Kassel; the São Paulo Biennial; and the Whitney Biennial. Haring completed numerous public projects in the first half of the 80’s as well, ranging from an animation for the Spectacolor billboard in Times Square, designing sets and backdrops for theaters and clubs, developing watch designs for Swatch and an advertising campaign for Absolut vodka; and creating murals worldwide.
In April 1986, Haring opened the Pop Shop, a retail store in Soho selling T-shirts, toys, posters, buttons and magnets bearing his images. Haring considered the shop to be an extension of his work and painted the entire interior of the store in an abstract black on white mural, creating a striking and unique retail environment. The shop was intended to allow people greater access to his work, which was now readily available on products at a low cost. The shop received criticism from many in the art world, however Haring remained committed to his desire to make his artwork available to as wide an audience as possible, and received strong support for his project from friends, fans and mentors including Andy Warhol.

Throughout his career, Haring devoted much of his time to public works, which often carried social messages. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, in dozens of cities around the world, many of which were created for charities, hospitals, children’s day care centers and orphanages. The now famous Crack is Wack mural of 1986 has become a landmark along New York’s FDR Drive. Other projects include; a mural created for the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, on which Haring worked with 900 children; a mural on the exterior of Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris, France in 1987; and a mural painted on the western side of the Berlin Wall three years before its fall. Haring also held drawing workshops for children in schools and museums in New York, Amsterdam, London, Tokyo and Bordeaux, and produced imagery for many literacy programs and other public service campaigns.

Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation, its mandate being to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and children’s programs, and to expand the audience for Haring’s work through exhibitions, publications and the licensing of his images. Haring enlisted his imagery during the last years of his life to speak about his own illness and generate activism and awareness about AIDS. unsecured loans

During a brief but intense career that spanned the 1980s, Haring’s work was featured in over 100 solo and group exhibitions. In 1986 alone, he was the subject of more than 40 newspaper and magazine articles. He was highly sought after to participate in collaborative projects ,and worked with artists and performers as diverse as Madonna, Grace Jones, Bill T. Jones, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Jenny Holzer, Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol. By expressing universal concepts of birth, death, love, sex and war, using a primacy of line and directness of message, Haring was able to attract a wide audience and assure the accessibility and staying power of his imagery, which has become a universally recognized visual language of the 20th century.

Keith Haring died of AIDS related complications at the age of 31 on February 16, 1990. A memorial service was held on May 4, 1990 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, with over 1,000 people in attendance. bad credit loans

Since his death, Haring has been the subject of several international retrospectives. The work of Keith Haring can be seen today in the exhibitions and collections of major museums around the world.

Pakistan Day

Our founding fathers had resolved to carve out an independent state where democracy, constitutionalism and rule of law would reign supreme.

Asif Ali Zardari President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan

Seventy-two years ago, on this day, the Muslims of the subcontinent formally committed through a Resolution to work for achieving a separate homeland for themselves.

With the blessings of Allah and through the heroic struggle of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the founding fathers, the Muslims of the subcontinent achieved their objective on August 14, 1947, within a short span of seven years of the expression of their resolve.

Our founding fathers had resolved to carve out an independent unsecured loans state where there will be democracy and where constitutionalism and rule of law would reign supreme.

Unfortunately, successive dictators tried to stifle the democratic aspirations of the people. Constitutionalism and rule of law was trampled by dictators sometime under the doctrine of necessity and sometime under the theory of successful revolution.

The unanimous Constitution of 1973 was disfigured by successive dictators to suit their own political ambitions. But the democratic aspirations could never be killed.

On the eve of Pakistan Day this year, it is reassuring to realise that the Parliament has successfully removed the vestiges of dictatorship and restored the democratic Constitution of Pakistan.

On this day let us resolve that we will not permit any dictator to usurp the basic fundamental rights of our people nor allow them to trample on our democratic aspirations. This requires that we work in the spirit of tolerance, mutual accommodation and respect for dissent.

Let us also resolve that we will uphold the Constitution and bad credit loans never allow it to be abrogated, subverted or held in abeyance. It is also important to uphold the independence of judiciary in accordance with the Constitution.

Unless there is rule of law and everyone is equal before law and unless we all work within the constitutionally defined parameters, stability will elude us.

I hope that the Parliament, the people and all institutions of the state will work in harmony towards this end.

I pray to Almighty Allah to bless our efforts to prove ourselves worthy of the heritage bequeathed to us by the Quaid-e-Azam

Human Rights Day

Today, December 10th, the international community is observing Human Rights Day to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since its adoption at the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, the Declaration has become a universal standard for the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide. On International Human Rights Day, we pay tribute to all human rights defenders, celebrate the recent victories of the human rights community, and recognize the challenges that still lie ahead in the global struggle to advance justice, accountability and an end to impunity.

2011 has been an amazing year for human rights defenders. We have witnessed thousands of people taking to the streets to demand fundamental human rights and social justice; ordinary citizens turning into activists by using social media to mobilize protest movements that brought repressive governments to an end; and dramatic changes transpiring – like Tunisia’s first elections, or the encouraging signs of progress in Burma.

The Benetech Human Rights Program (HRP) is hard at work to ensure that technology and science best meet the needs of human rights defenders in these critical times. This past year, our HRP team helped the human rights movement achieve great things. Here’s a sample of our accomplishments:

• Martus, our secure, open-source information management software for human rights defenders continued to empower many human rights groups worldwide to secure thousands of stories of human rights violations and to use this information strategically to advance their causes. Our new and long-term Martus partners crossed a milestone and backed up to our public servers over 200,000 bulletins, each of which captures crucial, sensitive information about incidents from a victim’s story or from a field investigation.
• Our Martus team trained two new partners focused on rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people: Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays, or J-FLAG and AIDS-Free World. Both organizations work in the Caribbean, where sexual minorities face widespread violence, bigotry and marginalization. In the case of J-FLAG, Martus enables the organization to protect the identity of victims of abuse who come forward to tell their stories, to secure the information from their interviews, to report on the types of  unsecured loans crimes documented, and to aggregate evidence for future court proceedings. Our support of groups advancing LGBTI rights is opening up new opportunities for helping many more such groups around the world.
• HRP members produced scientifically sound analysis that is advancing the process of legal justice in Guatemala. In a recent blog post, I described how HRP statistician Daniel Guzmán’s expert testimony in a breakthrough legal case against two former police officers helped score a remarkable victory in the fight to end impunity in Guatemala. I invite you to read Daniel’s first-person account of his expert testimony as published in the statistical magazine Chance. The testimony prompted further investigation that led to the arrest of three former senior officials. I’m proud to report here that, at the request of the Attorney General of Guatemala, bad credit loans our team has prepared statistical analysis to inform the prosecutions of these high-profile officials. We’re honored to support the process towards justice and accountability at this critical time in Guatemala’s history.
• Our team members are creating an “accountability toolkit” – a set of innovative techniques for identifying patterns of responsibility for grave human rights crimes. To that end, we combine statistical analysis of patterns of violence with information about military and police hierarchy, communication flow and deployment patterns. The combined analysis supports scientific arguments about responsibility for mass atrocities – arguments that are successful in court cases.
• Through projects that integrated statistical analyses into multidisciplinary human rights work, we engaged in the public debate about human rights violations in Colombia. First, in partnership with Colombian NGO Corporación Punto de Vista, we assessed a methodology for studying conflict-related sexual violence in the country. We identified important opportunities for developing a substantive, quantitative-based sexual violence research agenda. This analysis is now helping to reframe how sexual violence is studied and understood by groups in Colombia and by the United Nations. Second, we strengthened the public debate about the free trade agreements that Colombia negotiates with the U.S. and the European Union. Colombia’s record of violence against trade union members has been an obstacle to finalizing the agreements. HRP’s calculated estimates of trade union member homicides – part of our work with the Colombian Commission of Jurists – brought clarity to this intense debate.
• We advanced human rights advocacy and the community more broadly by placing human rights at the forefront of academic research and by educating wide audiences about statistical best practices in the analysis of violence. HRP team members presented papers at academic conferences, published articles in academic journals, and offered many public talks. All HRP’s publications are available online.

National Steak and Blow-Job Day.

Do you have a husband or boyfriend who goes all out for Valentine’s Day, and takes good care unsecured loans of you all the year long? If you're single, perhaps you have an obliging neighbor who shovels your walk on snow days, or an ex-lover who still drives across town to fix your sink. If any of these circumstances apply consider this: on the day after Valentine’s Day, February 15th, give your deserving friend or significant other the gift of a steak and bj as a token of your heartfelt esteem...and no, I don't mean a trip to the wholesale club.

                         

For some years now I've heard men lightly lament the inequity of February 14th. Lately Saint Valentine's Day--a tradition associated with courtly love since the high middle ages--has been hijacked by commercial interests. In these days, it has become an occasion wherein, the woman will send and the man bad credit loans must spend. Indeed, it is the female who is most often on the receiving end of the traditional attentions and tributes--flowers, candy, cards, jewelry, etc. The male is charged with first procuring these articles, and then footing the bill for the evening's amusements.

So what can be done to right this grievous slight? I know just the thing; a fitting counterpart, a day to celebrate and promote the felicity of the male heart. But what pray tell would a man want if allowed to choose of his own accord? I'm guessing candy and flowers would not make his list, but there can be no doubt--the double delight of a steak and bj would do just fine.

So ladies, let us this day declare, with love and gratitude for the men in our lives: February 15th shall from now and forward be celebrated as National Steak and Blow-Job Day.

                                                      The Steak

                          

If you don't cook, don't worry. Steaks are easy. However, they are not indestructible. Should you feel the need to consult Bobby Flay or another of his kind, please do. The steak should be prepared lovingly and well.

First, you must know your man. If the lover in question is not your husband or steady, do your homework. Does he prefer the marbled, tender cut of a T-Bone or the lean sinew of a Filet? The cooking time is of the utmost importance. For instance, a perfect medium should have a hot, red center. Know his preference and do not overcook. You may finish your carne masterpiece with a crown of herbed butter for added decadence if so inclined. The side dish choice is left to your considered judgment. If steak is not his favorite guilty pleasure dish, do what you know is best.

The only rule, and this is a must, if the house is blessed with the fruits of your more conventional past lovemaking, the steak should be served after the little cherubs are well tucked into bed. The table may be set for one, or perhaps for two if you care to join him, but allow yourself leave to fetch his condiments, spirits and the like. If he prefers to eat in his favorite chair in front of the tube, so be it. You are at his service.

                                                   

                                                      The BJ

                        

After perusing several scholarly articles on the art of fellatio, and interviewing subjects of both the male and female persuasions, I set about compiling these worthy data into a comprehensive report on the practice. But alas, what began as a thoughtful explication seemed to drift into the category of erotica, a specialty for which I have no talent. So, I will leave that task to my betters and say simply this: