#but for now I put the transit card for my city in Canada

[g0nta-g0kuhara]

So I went to Ikebukuro again. Peace and love on planet earth

[bexterbex]

A Soul to Mend His Own | Ch. 2

A Kylo Ren x Modern! Reader in a soulmate au with some canon divergence. —————————————SLOWBURN————————————–

He is already the Supreme leader, searching the universe to find you, his Empress. Your name on his wrist has been the only constant in his life, while you have doubts about his existence and his acceptance of you. He isn’t in the database and why did the name Kylo Ren cover Ben Solo?

Originally posted on my Ao3 Crystallclover. If you missed Chapter 1, Click Here

Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Chapter 2: An Arrival to be Remembered

UFO has been sited entering the Earth’s atmosphere

Unknown armed and masked being exit ship heading towards the White House, is the President in danger?

Aliens spotted in D.C.

You woke up to the sound of your alarm, and got out of bed. You have been in the habit lately to start your day without checking your phone first. Mostly to avoid early morning emails from your boss before you have even had coffee.

You head to the bathroom relieve yourself, wash your face, and brush your hair. Exiting the bathroom you head to the kitchen and make yourself some breakfast and coffee. You enjoy the sunrise through the large windows in your apartment. Finishing eating you immediately wash your few dishes and get ready for work. You pick out your work ‘uniform’ of a black blouse and black trousers. You head to the bathroom to brush your teeth, put on a little makeup and get changed.

Heading back to the kitchen you prepare a to-go cup of coffee and pull out your lunch for work. Finally, you check your phone.

First, you see an email from your boss reminding you for the 10th time about the morning meeting that you have every Thursday. It isn’t like you to forget something you do every single week for the past year. Never once have you been late, in fact, he was always the one to forget. You wonder if these emails were meant more for him and less for you. But he was always the micromanager.

Next, you check your texts. Your usual morning photo from one of your siblings about one of your nieces/nephews. Another one from Hayden asking if you were still on for tomorrow night’s weekly bar trip. You answered ‘Yes 😀 .’ Another from Carter asking what you think of the news headlines this morning. Odd, although this isn’t the first time you two had discussed something like this it was odd to receive a text like this from them first thing in the morning.

You open Twitter to see #alieninvasiondc trending. You scroll through the news tag. Every major news site around the world is talking about the shuttlecraft that landed on the White House lawn last night, and the armed and armored soldiers that departed from the craft. All of the soldiers wore white armor, except one in silver. There was one who was in all black and a red-haired human-looking man among the group. Not much is known other than they haven’t been seen leaving the White House.

You text Carter back ‘Just looked now, either this is a hoax or the world as we know it is coming to an end. I’ll see you at work.’

You packed your work bag, grabbed your car keys and set off to work. You park in the ramp attached to your building and walk to the elevator. You wave at the security attendant to the opposing skywalk like you do every morning. You arrive at your floor and buzz-in. You say hi to Nancy in reception and head to your desk.

Strangely all of the televisions in the office were muted and tuned into CBC News, normally the one in the break room and the ones in reception were on, the others only really got used during Hockey Games or events like the Olympics. Your boss was in the walkway with his attention turned to his phone.

You set down your things at your desk and boot up your work computer while setting up your laptop on its stand. You did your usual check through work emails until the 9:00 AM weekly meeting. Your boss hasn’t moved from his position in the walkway.

8:55 AM hits and you grab what you need and head to the conference room. The tv was on in here as well. The others in the Marketing department filled in after you. Your boss, Scott, had yet to move from his place in the walkway. 9:00 AM hits and you continue small talk with your co-workers, most of the conversation is directed at the events in D.C.

9:05 AM your co-worker Ally sends a Slack message to your boss. He looks up from his phone to the clock on the wall and runs into his office. After a few minutes, he rushes out and into the conference room.

“Sorry, I am late everyone the Wife is just paranoid over this Alien Invasion thing. I can’t get her to stop texting me,” he chuckles.

Ironically this isn’t the first time he has been ‘late’ to a meeting after being on the phone with his wife an hour after work already started.

Suddenly you all get an Emergency Alert System notification on all of your phones.

‘International Emergency: Please tune in to your local news broadcasting station to receive an Emergency Report.’

Scott asks, “where is the damn remote?”

Ally hands it to him, he unmutes the tv.

The headline reads: ‘President of the United States has an Important International Government Update’

Live from Washington D.C.

On the screen, it shows the President of the United States, with the silver soldier, one in all black and the red-haired man from the video of the invasion last night.

“I have an important announcement. Earth has been contacted by people from space who call themselves the First Order. The First Order has informed me that they would like to peacefully work with Earth. As long as we fully cooperate as an entire planet no harm will come to any of us. Currently, our galaxy is at war, and the First Order seeks our help, in return of offering Earth protection from a group of people called the New Republic.

They have explained to me and the U.N. as a whole that the New Republic is not to be trusted along with their mercenary army called the Resistance. It is through my decision and the decision of the U.N. that we will cooperate and join forces with the First Order to be under their protection.

All citizens of Earth in the next 7 days must register with the First Order. You will be given a citizen number, some citizens may be reassigned to work directly with the First Order. All military personal will be reassigned to be under the First Order. You should not worry as most citizens will be unaffected, life will go on as normal. As long as citizens follow these orders and any orders to come, we shall be safe,” said the President. The President moved out of the way for the man in all black and with a black mask to move to the podium.

“I am the Supreme Leader of the First Order. I promise no harm will come to those who cooperate with us. We seek to peacefully transition your planet, as you know it Earth, to a primary First Order Planet. We value honesty and loyalty, along with hard work. We strive to rebuild the Empire and to maintain order in the galaxy. That is all,” The man's voice was distorted through the mask he was wear, it sounded mechanical or digital but it had a deep sound.

The broadcast cut back to the news anchor. “Currently all citizens of earth are to report to their a local city government building or town hall within the next 7 days for First Order registration and possible reassignment. All citizens must remain calm and do as the government has directed. Any questions or concerns will be answered by local government officials and First Order personnel. All foreign citizens to Canada will follow the same protocol as citizens. All citizens are asked to bring various forms of identification, such as a Passport, driver's license, birth certificate, social insurance number card, any immunization forms, military I.D. and more. You can find a full list of required documents at the CBC website or at canada.ca. As a reminder, all citizens are urged to stay calm and to follow all orders regarding and following First Order registration. Citizens are also advised to stay tuned to local news sources for any updates.”

The conference room sat stunned at the announcement.

“Well were f*****,” said Scott. “We are all surely f*****. Who are these people to think they can just take over like that? Do they think we are just going to sit by and let them brainwash us? Let them take everything from us?”

“I don’t think we have a choice, you heard the U.S. President, the U.N. is in agreement. This is for our own safety. If you are going to go against them and get yourself killed keep us out of it,” said Daniel one of your marketing co-workers.

“I’ll talk to Henry, and see if we can all take the week off, who knows this may be the last time we even get to see our families,” and with that statement, Scott left the conference room.

You sat there not really moving, processing what you just witnessed on the tv and the confrontation between Scott and Daniel. So did the rest of your co-workers. You could tell they were all in shock, the world as you knew it was about to change, the future had shifted.

All of your phones went off again. This time it was an email from Jonathan the CEO.

‘All employees will take today, tomorrow and next week off, in order to give proper attention to the government mandate. Please be safe and I hope to see you all come -Henry G. Wells’

Everyone in the conference room got up and went to their desks. The office was silent, except for the sounds of items being put away and people gathering their things. You were almost done getting ready to go when Carter appeared next to you.

They didn’t speak, for fear of being the first one to break the ominous silence. Carter just looked at you expectantly. You finished packing up and walked with them out of the office. The elevator was packed but silent. Everyone got off and walked to their cars. Carter followed you to yours.

Keeping their voice down, almost to a whisper, they asked, “I know I texted you this morning about all this but what do you think now? Do you want to go back to your place or mine?”

You thought about it for a moment before responding, “let’s go back to mine. We can discuss it from there.”

Carter accepted your response and went to their car to leave. You followed suit. Today was not what you expected.

Tags: @sheadre 

[ultrahamilham]

1,9,29,42

Okay quick warning here. There are mentions of rape, suicide and slight blood and wounds. please be warned before you click and read. Also I overshare in here a lot, so be warned about that too!

1. Any scars?

Yep! I have a lot, actually lmao I will go over the ones I can remember right now.

I have one between my thumb and forefinger on my left hand. I was on a swing and my friend twisted me around on it, and my hand got caught in the chains. Crushed my hand open. They couldn’t stitch it because of the location so they had to glue it back together and keep it immobile for almost a week until it healed enough for a bandage. It was hell!

On the same hand on my palm is another swing accident! There is a V-shaped scar on the bottom right area on the palm of my left hand. I jumped off of a swing and sliced my hand open on a sharp branch. I needed stitches but my mom just bandaged it up and said I was fine. She didn’t want to go to the hospital.

I have an oval shaped burn on my right forearm just under my wrist. Back at my old job, we had gravy and no one kept the water level up properly so it was hotter than it should have been. We were really busy so when I dropped gravy on it and burned myself, I didn’t have time to clean it off and treat it. I was the supervisor so I was running the show. I showed my co worker who was the other supervisor later and he got really mad at me and dragged me to the sink lmao It’s slowly fading but it will always be there.

I have a small one on my knee that healed smaller than I thought it would. I split my knee open as a child and fainted when I saw my kneecap. I now have a vitiligo dot there.

I have one on my left foot on my ankle area. I stepped on glass one Christmas and when I brought my right foot up to get it out, I sliced my ankle open on my left foot. I apparently hate the left side of my body because I fell off a scooter and skinned my left elbow when I was a kid and my mom put FUCKING DRY GAUZE ON THE FUCKING THING then when she was changing it, she pulled out a chunk of skin and flesh so now I have a scar there. My mom is bad at first aid, let me tell you that.

There are more, but I can’t think of any aside from my obvious top surgery scars.

9. What’s your dream job?

When I was younger, it was marine biology, specifically based on sharks. Now, it’s an emergency telecommunicator (911 here in Canada and down in the states), specifically in the fire field. I went to school for it, and now I’m just applying all around, hoping to get in!

29. Worst mistake?

I’ve made quite a few mistakes, but I think my worst one was going back to my ex after he raped me, and trusting him. He was super abusive, so I thought that I could help him. I had called the cops before (pre transition by the way) and they asked me what I was wearing. Long story short, nothing came of that call because they didn’t believe me (Barrie police are barely police, that’s what we like to say in my city. We have one of the most corrupt police forces in all of Ontario, or so I’ve been told). I went back to him when he convinced me to after threatening suicide and then he got me into way more debt than I could manage by stealing my credit cards.

I ended up turning to alcohol to feel better and I was a serious alcoholic. I got better though! So yeah, that dude was my worst mistake. Even his name makes me feel sick.

42. Are you okay?

At this second? Yeah. Mostly? Not really. I still have issues with suicide and self worth, but I’m working on it. My cousin dating and having a baby with my rapist really bothered me, but I’m moving on. They stalk me to this day, but they avoid me because I have a good group of friends and co workers who are helping me.

I’m a little worried about work because I have been told we might be shutting down for a while, or permanently. So I’m going to have to find new income if that happens. I have EI for a few months, but that’s it. So here’s to hoping!

[tiger-in-the-flightdeck]

A little help needed

I’ve been going through the process of appealing my disability denial, and one thing I need to get is some paperwork and a letter from my family doctor. Now, I love Canada’s healthcare system. Without it, I probably wouldn’t be here. However, one of the few things that aren’t covered are these types of forms, and doctors can charge whatever fees they need to to keep their clinics open. My family doctor runs the entire clinic on his own, so I understand why he needs to charge for certain things. It’s just not something I can afford on my own. My legal aid is helping to cover part of it, but it will need to be reimbursed, and won’t cover all the costs. Which puts me in a bind because my social assistance only covers housing and food.

I need at least 150$ to pay for all the paperwork, files, and letters, as well as repay the legal aid office their loan. Any extra will go towards my transit card, because my meetings about this take place all over the city.

I have a Ko-Fi link, which includes a message function, so if you donate 12$ or more, I can either write you a short ficlet, or draw you a small sketch of your prompting. https://ko-fi.com/tigerintheflightdeck

I also have paypal.me/tigerintheflightdeck set up, if you can’t donate in 3$ increments.

Any little bit helps, even just reblogging this to signal boost it. Thanks so much!

[burnouts3s3]

Let’s Talk About: Eric Forman

(Disclaimer: The following is a non-profit unprofessional blog post written by an unprofessional blog poster. All purported facts and statement are little more than the subjective, biased opinion of said blog poster. In other words, don’t take anything I say too seriously.

"Let's Talk About" is a series of articles focused on individual character or characters and their development and commentary throughout the work in question. THIS IS NOT A REVIEW OF THE WORK, but rather what the character says about the world around them.  If you wish to read a strict review, please click on the link to read it. My reviews focus more on the purely technical aspects of the work. There are bad characters with good messages. There are good characters with bad messages and so on and so forth. Thank you.)

Let’s Talk About: Eric Forman

When writing about That 70’s show, I kept going back and found myself charmed with how much the characters and the drama drew me in. While the show’s humor was its main selling point, it became apparent there was much more going on and that the serious moments kept me watching.

Eric Forman was the show’s main character, a high school boy living with his Korean War veteran father, Red, and his smothering mother, Kitty, while having to battle with his slut sister, Laurie, when she visited from College. Eric was a skinny, pale introvert save for a close group of six friends who often hung out at Eric’s basement, where they would smoke marijuana and grouse about their daily lives. The show took place during the late 1970’s in Point Place, Wisconsin, a suburb just modern enough without feeling like a city but far away from cities to be considered intimate.

In some ways, Eric was the perfect protagonist, at least for That 70’s show. As a character, Eric’s not really that interesting. He’s a whiny, neurotic, paranoid person who overreacts to non-important and petty situations but deep down does care, even if he’s a bit too obsessed with things like girls, high school, GI Joe and most of all, Star Wars, to notice it at first. It makes him the perfect character to bounce off the wacky personalities for the other cast members such as Stephen Hyde, the conspiracy theorist and delinquent, Michael Kelso, the dumb friend who’s ready to physically injure himself and sex seeker, Fez, a Foreign Exchange Student unfamiliar with American customs, Jackie Burkhart, a shallow rich girl and Donna, tomboy and love interest.

Eric is essentially the audience avatar; too much of a weakling to do anything against a backdrop of characters. But as the show went on, Eric’s character grow, developed and changed as we saw his transition from boy to boy who lives with his parents to man.  I would argue that Eric, while not that different from sitcom stereotypes, defied expectations and eventually became the show’s emotional core and his plight was compelling (even if said plight was from the perspective of a white working class male with a mother and father figure).

The first 4 seasons of the show were basic high school antics. It depicted Eric living day by day through the late 70’s dealing with high school, his growing on and off relationship with Donna, his butting heads between his need for independence and his role as a son in his family and other mundane topics. This wasn’t exactly compelling stuff but it did hit a note. Eric was essentially us, a child living with his parents and not sure where to go in life but getting through things like a post-Vietnam world with his friends.

What really sold the show was the chemistry between the characters. Getting a group of character actors like Kurtwood Smith, Danny Masterson, Wilmer Valderama and discoveries of genuine talents such as Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis solidified the show as a syndication mainstay. But it was really Topher Grace that brought the show together. To be fair, Topher Grace is not a very diverse actor with a big range. But he had a toned down sardonic wit that made him relatable enough to laugh at but humble enough to bond with.

Then Season 5 came to a close. The gang had graduated from High School. Eric and Donna were ready to leave for College. And everyone else was ready to move on with their lives.

But, there came a complication. After being arrested, Fez realizes that his student Visa expires when he graduates and he will be deported. (Fans of the show have pointed out the continuity error that during his trip to Canada, Fez has a green card thus making him legal to stay). But, just before the gang leaves, Laurie makes an announcement: She’ll be marrying Fez so he can stay in the country.

This causes Red to have a heart attack. Red survives but cannot work and in need of special care. With Red unable to work, Kitty has to take double shifts at the hospital to make ends meet. All the while, Eric realizes that his dream of going to college gets further and further away.

Again, this was an obvious stunt by the showrunners. They wanted the gang to graduate high school but they also wanted them to stay at the Forman’s basement since they wouldn’t have to build another set.

Then comes the most emotional moment of Season 6.

“I have to go!” Eric cries, desperate to convince Donna and himself. Then after a moment of silence, Eric says “I have to stay”.

It’s a big moment. Obviously, the show producers want to keep Topher Grace, Eric’s actor, around for another season. But here, it’s made into a big moment. What was the American Idea, a child leaving his adolescent home to pursue higher education is focused through the lens of economic strife and reality. With Eric, the idea of being stuck under his parent’s roof and having to live there is almost a nightmare to him. But he chooses to stay to help his family in this time of crisis, during a time when Laurie is having a sham marriage with Fez while partying like she’s still in college without him. (Behind the scenes, Laurie had to be written out. Her original actress, Lisa Robin Kelly, was dealing with drug abuse and was kicked off the show and replaced with a different actress. The fans of the show didn’t care for the new actress so Laurie eventually disappeared without a trace. The last reference is when Kitty asks “Has anybody seen Laurie?” during the series finale. Lisa Robin Kelly would tragically pass away from her drug addiction).

And thus, it’s the crux of his character: Eric wants to leave not only his childhood home but Point Place, the very place where he grew up.

As such, the show’s conflict also became a meta statement: How long can the characters, and by proxy the actors, keep doing this? How long can they keep meeting up in the Formans’ basement? How long can Kelso keep being an immature man-child with no thought other than having sex with the next girl he meets? And how long can Eric still be a child under his parents? And how long can Topher Grace, Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis and the other actors keep in the comfortable work that is a sitcom without advancing their careers?

Season 6 continued. Eric got a job as a dog food coupon dispenser, before Bob and Joanne broke up. Eric then became waiter at a restaurant to help out at the house. Donna decided to stay as well, putting off college for a year to support Eric.

Eric and Donna even planned to get married during Season 6. However, at the last moment, just when we’re finally ready to see these 2 characters we’ve been following for 6 seasons tie the knot, Eric gets cold feet and doesn’t show up to the wedding. He comes back to Donna’s room while she’s sleeping. Donna wakes up, hits him but just tells him to stay.

This is also a commentary on Eric’s character and the nature of the series. Eric says he ‘wants’ to change but can’t commit to it. Much like the familiarity of a sitcom needing to stay the same, Eric needs the familiarity of not being married to Donna but still having a relationship to her. It’s a sign of immaturity. Eric isn’t doing anything with his life, whether it’d be financially, socially and even romantically. He, like the series, was running in place.

Season 7 came around and Eric is completely lost in his direction in life. When he started Season 6, Eric was planning to leave for college. But after refusing to marry his one true love, Eric has eventually regressed into a state of adolescence and decides to take ‘a year off’. This was done out of uncertainty from the producer’s part. The show had lasted for longer than they had anticipated and no one was sure who was going to come back next season.

Both Eric and Red were locked in nostalgia, though for different generations. Red Forman’s nostalgia was for an ideal 1950’s America with white picket fences, a nuclear family, with him bringing home the money from his manufacturing job and his wife is a homemaker and his daughter is sweet and pure and his son is a football player so good he can get a sports scholarship for college. Eric’s nostalgia is his high school years continuing on forever, where he could just hang out in his parent’s basement, his friends would always be there and he would have a carefree sex-ready relationship with Donna without any consequences.

It wasn’t until Eric met a man named Stu, another adult male concerned with little more than reading comic books and lounging around without a care in the world. Eric, enchanted by this idea, befriends Stu and wants to become him. It’s not until Eric visits Stu’s home that he realizes that Stu still lives with his mother and has done nothing with his life. When Stu’s mother coddles him and offers Eric a cookie in the shape of an X-Wing, Eric realizes he will become Stu if Eric doesn’t change right now.

And at the core of season 7 was the message: change. For Eric’s desire and stubbornness for everything to stay the same, it simply can’t. Social Movements like Civil Rights and Feminism make an appearance. More and more persons of color are being introduced into the group. Eric wants the show to stay 1979 forever, but it just can’t. Time marches on. Childhood doesn’t last forever. People change. Life changes. And Eric, as hesitant and painful it is to take the first step, must change as well.

Eric’s plan to take a year off turns out to have huge ramifications, even going so far as quitting his job. (This was probably intentional on the producers’ part as they probably didn’t want to have the restaurant as a set anymore). His friends all end up getting jobs and getting on with their lives. Hyde, the rebellious conspiracy nut, becomes part of the corporate machine he so much despises, Jackie becomes a newscaster and Fez becomes a shampoo boy at a local salon. Even Kelso, the moron of the group, finds a career in law enforcement as well as a daughter he had out of wedlock.

In some ways, Eric Forman is the evolution of stay at home children, such as Bud Bundy from Married with Children. But whereas Bud’s situation was often played for laughs and satire, Eric’s is played up more for dramatic purposes. And it some ways, it reflects the situation of arrested development. Obviously, this was unintentional on the producers’ part; they had no idea that their sitcom would run for 8 seasons and thus set the first episode in 1976 (such as to get the Star Wars reference in). But, just as the back end of the Vista Cruiser never went beyond 1979, so did Eric.

Then came an opportunity. Eric, after an awkward talk with his guidance counselor, finds a path. If Eric goes to Africa to help out, he can get payment for college. Obviously, Kitty and Donna do not take this news well. Donna is furious with Eric, stating how selfish he is for asking her to put on life on hold for him. Eric and Donna make up and Eric prepares himself to leave Point

In the background, Topher Grace and Ashton Kutcher decided to go on with their careers. Ashton, having gained fame from his reality show Punk’d, decided to make a go at Hollywood along with Topher Grace left the show to pursue a movie career, starting with playing Eddie Brock in Spider-man 3. (Yeah… Didn’t work out so well, though he has found other parts in other movies).

And after 7 seasons, with Bob’s Polka band playing him off, Eric rides his Vista Cruiser to the airport finally saying “So Long, Point Place!”.

In Eric’s absence, the show didn’t really have a thematic crux. They just had their biggest turning moment and dramatic finish to the series. Originally, this was the series finale only for the show to still be popular and incur another season to make.

Say whatever you will about Topher Grace’s range (or lack there of) as an actor, his character, Eric, played a vital balance to the cast of wacky characters. Without him as the Straight Man, Hyde’s cynicism, Fez’s innocence, Jackie’s shallowness, Red’s anger and Kitty’s smothering had nowhere to essentially go. It’s not that the actors couldn’t bounce off each other but without an Eric character to balance all the chaos, the show became sort of a mess.

To replace Eric, the producers introduced Charlie, a son of Red’s War buddy, back in Season 7. Charlie is also a meek, unsure waif and honestly, I feel like he would’ve made a fine addition to the show. But, there was a complication. The real life actor who played Charlie was contacted by Fox to star in his own live action sitcom and couldn’t return. So at the start of Season 8, Charlie is killed off by falling off the water tower. Instead, the show picked Randy, an old friend of Donna’s to be in the group.

Randy sucks. Or rather, the idea of Randy sucks. He was an obvious attempt by the producers to replace Eric and Kelso by combining them into essentially one person. But, it didn’t work. Fans of the show hated him and it felt like a betrayal. Plus, it didn’t help that Randy had no chemistry with the rest of the cast. Or, maybe that’s just a symptom. Watching these 6 friends interact for 7 seasons only to lose 2 of them and replace them with this guy feels really cynical and cold in terms of marketing.

Just as well, the departure of both Kelso and Eric made the ratings tank and forced the show to end. (There’s an ongoing fan theory that the producers ‘sabotaged’ the show so they could finish production and didn’t force it to go on). Ratings got so bad, the show forced an endless amount of guest stars and even got Ashton Kutcher to come back.

The series finale was on New Year’s Day and Donna is worried Eric won’t come back from Africa. But, in those final moments, Eric returns to Pont Place, confesses his love for Donna, has one last circle with the gang and proceeds to go upstairs, leaving the basement empty. And finally, after 8 seasons and 200 episodes, that 70’s show ended, the sticker of the Vista Cruiser showing a 80’s stick, signaling the show to turn into 1980.

That 70’s show was a show that was a lot smarter than people took it credit for. What started as a blatant attempt to get ad space and another live action sitcom for the Fox Network transformed into a running commentary about family, friendship and high times.  And in the center of the show was Eric, the boy who grew up during this period.

And as much as the characters wanted things to stay the same, much like Red feeling uneasy to depressed to ready to change after losing his manufacturing jobs, finding a new job to finding a place to support his family alongside his wife, so did the rest of the cast.

Thank you, Eric Forman. Thank you for everything.

[blackkudos]

Ernie Barnes

Ernest Eugene Barnes, Jr. (July 15, 1938 – April 27, 2009) was an African-American painter, well known for his unique style of elongation and movement. He was also a professional football player, actor and author.

Early life

Childhood

Ernest Barnes, Jr. was born during Jim Crow in "the bottom" community of Durham, North Carolina, near the Hayti District of the city. His father, Ernest E. Barnes, Sr. (1899–1966) worked as a shipping clerk for Liggett Myers Tobacco Company in Durham. His mother, Fannie Mae Geer (1905–2004) oversaw the household staff for prominent Durham attorney and local Board of Education member Frank L. Fuller, Jr.

On days when Fannie allowed "June" (Barnes' nickname to family and childhood friends) to accompany her to the Fuller home, Barnes had the opportunity to peruse the art books and listen to classical music. The young Ernest was intrigued and captivated by the works of master artists. By the time Barnes entered the first grade, he was familiar with the works of such masters as Toulouse-Lautrec, Delacroix, Velasquez, Rubens, and Michelangelo. When he entered junior high, he could appreciate, as well as decode, many of the cherished masterpieces within the walls of mainstream museums – although it would be a half dozen more years before he was allowed entrance because of his race.

A self-described chubby and unathletic child, Barnes was taunted and bullied by classmates. He continually sought refuge in his sketchbooks, hiding in the less-traveled parts of campus away from other students. One day in a quiet area, Ernest was found drawing in a notebook by the masonry teacher, Tommy Tucker, who was also the weightlifting coach and a former athlete. Tucker was intrigued with Barnes' drawings so he asked the aspiring artist about his grades and goals. Tucker shared his own experience of how bodybuilding improved his strength and outlook on life. That one encounter would begin Barnes' discipline and dedication that would permeate his life. In his senior year at Hillside High School, Barnes became the captain of the football team and state champion in the shot put.

Education

In 1956 Barnes graduated from Hillside High School with 26 athletic scholarship offers. Segregation prevented him from attending nearby Duke or the University of North Carolina. His mother promised him a car if he lived at home, so he chose North Carolina College at Durham (formerly North Carolina College for Negroes, now North Carolina Central University). He majored in art on a full athletic scholarship. His college track coach was the famed Dr. Leroy T. Walker. Barnes played the football positions of tackle and center at NCC at Durham.

At age 18, on a college art class field trip to the newly desegregated North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Barnes inquired where he could find "paintings by Negro artists." The docent responded, "Your people don't express themselves that way." Poetic justice prevailed 23 years later in 1979 when Barnes returned to the museum for a solo exhibition, hosted by North Carolina Governor James Hunt.

In 1990 Barnes was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by North Carolina Central University.

In 1993 Barnes was selected to the "Black College Football 100th Year All-Time Team" by the Sheridan Broadcasting Network.

In 1999 Barnes was bestowed "The University Award", the highest honor by The University of North Carolina Board of Governors.

Professional football

Baltimore Colts (1959-60)

In December 1959 Barnes was drafted in the 10th round by the then-World Champion Baltimore Colts. He was originally selected in the 8th-round by the Washington Redskins, who renounced the pick minutes after discovering he was a Negro.

Shortly after his 22nd birthday, while at the Colts training camp, Barnes was interviewed by N.P. Clark, sportswriter for the Baltimore News-Post newspaper. Until then Barnes was always known by his birth name, Ernest Barnes. But when Clark's article appeared on July 20, 1960, it referred to him as "Ernie Barnes," which changed his name and life forever.

Titans of New York (1960)

Barnes was the last cut of the Colts' training camp. After Baltimore released Barnes, the newly formed Titans of New York immediately signed him because the team had first option on any player released within the league.

Barnes loathed being on the Titans. He said, "(New York) was a circus of ineptitude. The equipment was poor, the coaches not as knowledgeable as the ones in Baltimore. We were like a group of guys in the neighborhood who said let's pretend we're pros."

After a 27-21 loss to the Oilers on October 9, 1960 at Jeppesen Stadium, his teammate Howard Glenn died. Barnes asked for his release two days later. Glenn had sustained a broken neck in the first half of the game and it was reported that injury caused his death. However, Barnes and other teammates have long attributed it to heatstroke. In a later interview, Barnes said, "They never really said what he died of. (Coach) Sammy Baugh said he'd broken his neck in a game the Sunday before. But how could that be? How could he have hit in practice all week with a broken neck? What he died of, I think, was more like heat exhaustion. I told them I didn't want to play on a team like this."

San Diego Chargers (1960-62)

Barnes then accepted a previous offer from Coach Al Davis at the Los Angeles Chargers. Barnes joined their team at mid-season as a member of their taxi squad. The following season in 1961 the team moved to San Diego. It was there Barnes met their quarterback and future congressman Jack Kemp. The two men would share a lifelong close friendship.

During the off-seasons with the Chargers, Barnes was program director at San Diego's Southeast YMCA working with parolees from the California Youth Authority. He also worked as the Sports Editor for The Voice, a local San Diego newspaper, writing a weekly column called "A Matter of Sports."

Barnes also illustrated several articles for San Diego Magazine during the off-seasons in 1962 and 1963.

Barnes' first television interview as a professional football player and artist was in 1962 on The Regis Philbin Show on KGTV in San Diego. It was Philbin's first talk show.

Denver Broncos (1963-64)

After a series of injuries, Barnes was cut midway through his second season with the Chargers. He then signed with the Denver Broncos.

Barnes was called "Big Rembrandt" by his Denver teammates. Coincidentally, Barnes and Rembrandt share the same birthday.

Barnes was often fined by Denver Coach Jack Faulkner when caught sketching during team meetings. One of the sketches that he was fined $100 for sold years later for $1000.

During the Broncos games, Barnes would run off the field and onto the sideline to give his offensive line coach Red Miller the scraps of paper of his sketches and notes.

"During a timeout you've got nothing to do – you're not talking – you're just trying to breathe, mostly. Nothing to take out that little pencil and write down what you saw. The shape of the linemen. The body language a defensive lineman would occupy... his posture... What I see when you pull. The reaction of the defense to your movement. The awareness of the lines within the movement, the pattern within the lines, the rhythm of movement. A couple of notes to me would denote an action... an image that I could instantly recreate in my mind. Some of those notes have been made into paintings. Quite a few, really."

On Barnes' 1964 Denver Broncos Topps football card he is shown wearing jersey #55 although he never played in that number. His jersey was #62.

Canadian Football League

In 1965, after his second season with the Broncos, Barnes signed with the Saskatchewan Roughriders in Canada. In the final quarter of their last exhibition game, Barnes fractured his right foot, effectively ending his professional football career.

Retirement

Shortly after his final football game, Barnes went to the 1965 NFL owners meeting in Houston in hopes of becoming the league's official artist. There he was introduced to New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin, who was intrigued by Barnes and his art. He paid for Barnes to bring his paintings to New York City. Later they met at a gallery and unbeknownst to Barnes, three art critics were there to evaluate his paintings. They told Werblin that Barnes was "the most expressive painter of sports since George Bellows."

In what was undoubtedly one of the most unusual personnel transactions in the history of the NFL, Werblin retained Barnes as a salaried player, but positioned him in front of the canvas, rather than on the football field. Werblin told Barnes "You have more value to the country as an artist than as a football player"

Barnes' November 1966 debut solo exhibition, hosted by Werblin at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City was critically acclaimed and all the paintings sold.

In 1971 Barnes wrote a series of essays (illustrated with his own drawings) in the Gridiron newspaper titled "I Hate the Game I Love" (with Neil Amdur). These articles became the beginning manuscript of his autobiography, later-published in 1995 titled From Pads to Palette which chronicles his transition from professional football to his art career.

In October 2007, the National Football League and Time Warner hosted a tribute to Ernie Barnes in New York City.

Work

Barnes credits his college art instructor Ed Wilson for laying the foundation for his development as an artist. Wilson was a sculptor who instructed Barnes to paint from his own life experiences. "He made me conscious of the fact that the artist who is useful to America is one who studies his own life and records it through the medium of art, manners and customs of his own experiences."

All his life, Barnes was ambivalent about his football experience. In interviews and in personal appearances, Barnes said he hated the violence and the physical torment of the sport. However, his years as an athlete gave him unique, in-depth observations. "(Wilson) told me to pay attention to what my body felt like in movement. Within that elongation, there's a feeling. And attitude and expression. I hate to think had I not played sports what my work would look like."

Barnes' first painting sale was in 1959 for $90 to Boston Celtic Sam Jones for a painting called Slow Dance. It was subsequently lost in a fire at Jones' home.

Critics have defined Barnes' work as neo-mannerist. Based on his signature use of serpentine lines, elongation of the human figure, clarity of line, unusual spatial relationships, painted frames, and distinctive color palettes, art critic Frank Getlein credited Barnes as the founder of the neo-Mannerism movement - because of the similarity of technique and composition prevalent during the 16th century, as practiced by such masters as Michelangelo and Raphael.

Numerous artists have been influenced by Barnes' art and unique style. Accordingly, several copyright infringement lawsuits have been settled and are currently pending.

Framing

Ernie Barnes framed his paintings with distressed wood in homage to his father. In his 1995 autobiography, artist Ernie Barnes wrote of his father: “... with so little education, he had worked so hard for us. His legacy to me was his effort, and that was plenty. He knew absolutely nothing about art.”

Weeks before Ernie Barnes’ first solo art exhibition in 1966, he was at the family home in Durham, North Carolina as his father lay in the hospital after suffering a stroke. He noticed the usually well-maintained white picketed fence had gone untended since his father’s illness. Days later, Ernest E. Barnes, Sr. died. “I placed a painting against the fence and stood away and had a look. I was startled at the marriage between the old wood fence and the painting. It was perfect. In tribute, Daddy’s fence would hug all my paintings in a prestigious New York gallery. That would have made him smile.”

Eyes closed

A consistent and distinct feature in Barnes' work is the closed eyes of his subjects. "It was in 1971 when I conceived the idea of The Beauty of the Ghetto as an exhibition. And I exposed it to some people who were black to get a reaction. And from one (person) it was very negative. And when I began to express my points of view (to this) professional man, he resisted the notion. And as a result of his comments and his attitude I began to see, observe, how blind we are to one another's humanity. Blinded by a lot of things that have, perhaps, initiated feelings in that light. We don't see into the depths of our interconnection. The gifts, the strength and potential within other human beings. We stop at color quite often. So one of the things we have to be aware of is who we are in order to have the capacity to like others. But when you cannot visualize the offerings of another human being you're obviously not looking at the human being with open eyes." "We look upon each other and decide immediately: This person is black, so he must be... This person lives in poverty, so he must be..."

Sports art

The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee named Barnes "Sports Artist of the 1984 Olympic Games". LAOOC President Peter V. Ueberroth said Barnes and his art "captured the essence of the Olympics" and "portray the city's ethnic diversity, the power and emotion of sports competition, the singleness of purpose and hopes that go into the making of athletes the world over." Barnes was commissioned to create five Olympic-themed paintings and serve as an official Olympic spokesman to encourage inner city youth.

In 1985 Barnes was named the first "Sports Artist of the Year" by the United States Sports Academy.

In 1987 Barnes created Fastbreak, a commissioned painting of the World Champion Los Angeles Lakers basketball team that included Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis and Michael Cooper.

Carolina Panthers football team owners Rosalind and Jerry Richardson (Barnes' former Colts teammate) commissioned Barnes to create the large painting Victory in Overtime (approximately 7 ft. x 14 ft.). It was unveiled before the team's 1996 inaugural season and hangs permanently in the owner's suite at the stadium.

To commemorate their 50th anniversary in 1996, the National Basketball Association commissioned Barnes to create a painting with the theme, "Where we were, where we are, and where we are going." The painting, The Dream Unfolds hangs in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. A limited edition of lithographs were made, with the first 50 prints going to each of the NBA's 50th Anniversary All-Time Team.

In 2004 Barnes was named "America's Best Painter of Sports" by the American Sport Art Museum & Archives.

Other notable sports commissions include paintings for the New Orleans Saints, Oakland Raiders and Boston Patriots football team owners.

"The Bench" painting

Shortly after Barnes was drafted by the Baltimore Colts in 1959, Barnes was invited to see their Colts' NFL Championship Game vs. the New York Giants at Memorial Stadium in Maryland. The Colts won 31-16 and Barnes was filled with layers of emotion after watching the game from behind the Colts' bench. He had just signed his football contract and met his new teammates Johnny Unitas, Jim Parker, Lenny Moore, Art Donovan, Gino Marchetti, Alan Ameche and "Big Daddy" Lipscomb.

Barnes later wrote that after he returned home, he "placed a stretched canvas on the easel. Without making any preliminary sketches, I started painting in quick, direct movements hoping to capture the vision in my mind before it evaporated." He created The Bench in less than an hour. Throughout his life, The Bench remained in Barnes' possession, even taking it with him to all his football training camps and hiding it under his bed. It would be the only painting Barnes would never sell, despite many substantial offers, including a $25,000 bid at his first show in 1966.

On June 18, 2014 The Bench was formally presented to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio for their permanent collection by his wife Bernie Barnes.

"The Sugar Shack" painting

Barnes created the painting The Sugar Shack in the 1970s. It gained international exposure when it was used on the Good Times television series and on the 1976 Marvin Gaye album I Want You.

According to Barnes, he created the original version of The Sugar Shack after reflecting upon his childhood, during which he was not "able to go to a dance." In a 2008 interview, Barnes said, "The Sugar Shack is a recall of a childhood experience. It was the first time my innocence met with the sins of dance. The painting transmits rhythm so the experience is re-created in the person viewing it. To show that African-Americans utilize rhythm as a way of resolving physical tension." The Sugar Shack has been known to art critics for embodying the style of art composition known as "Black Romantic," which, according to Natalie Hopkinson of The Washington Post, is the "visual-art equivalent of the Chitlin' circuit." When Barnes first created The Sugar Shack, he included his hometown radio station WSRC (Durham, NC) on a banner. He incorrectly listed the frequency at 620. It was actually 1410. Barnes confused what he used to hear WSRC's on-air personality Norfley Whitted saying "620 on your dial" when Whitted was at his former station WDNC in the early 1950s.

After Marvin Gaye asked him for permission to use the painting as an album cover, Barnes then augmented the painting by adding references that allude to Gaye's album, including banners hanging from the ceiling to promote the album's singles.

During the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever anniversary television special on March 25, 1983, tribute was paid to The Sugar Shack with a dance interpretation of the painting.

The original piece is currently owned by actor Eddie Murphy.

Music album covers

Barnes' work appears on the following album covers:

The Sugar Shack on Marvin Gaye's 1976 I Want You

The Disco on self-titled 1978 Faith, Hope & Charity

Donald Byrd and 125th Street, NYC on self-titled 1979 album

Late Night DJ on Curtis Mayfield's 1980 Something to Believe In

The Maestro on The Crusaders' 1984 Ghetto Blaster

Head Over Heels on The Crusaders' 1986 The Good and Bad Times

In Rapture on B.B. King's 2000 Making Love is Good For You

Other notable art and exhibitions

In response to the 1960s "Black is beautiful" cultural movement and James Brown's 1968 Say it loud: I'm Black and I'm Proud song, Barnes created The Beauty of the Ghetto exhibition of 35 paintings that toured major American cities from 1972 to 1979 hosted by dignitaries, professional athletes and celebrities.

Of his The Beauty of the Ghetto exhibition, Barnes said, "I am providing a pictorial background for an understanding into the aesthetics of black America. It is not a plea to people to continue to live there (in the ghetto) but for those who feel trapped, it is...a challenge of how beautiful life can be." When The Beauty of the Ghetto was on view in 1974 at the Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, Rep. John Conyers stressed the important positive message of the exhibit in the Congressional Record.

In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Mayor Tom Bradley used Barnes' painting Growth Through Limits as an inspirational billboard in the inner-city. Barnes contributed $1000 to the winner of a slogan contest among the city's junior high school students that best represented the painting.

Barnes' work was included in the 1995 traveling group exhibition 20th Century Masterworks of African-American Artists II.

Barnes' painting The Advocate was donated to the North Carolina Central University School of Law in 1998 by a private collector. Barnes felt compelled to create the painting from his "concern with the just application of the law... the integrity of the legal process for all people, but especially those without resource or influence."

While watching the tragic events of 9/11, Barnes created the painting In Remembrance. It was formally unveiled at the Seattle Art Museum. It was later acquired on behalf of the City of Philadelphia and donated to its African American Museum. A limited number of giclée prints were sold with 100% of the proceeds going to the Hero Scholarship Fund, which provides college tuition and expenses to children of Pennsylvania police and fire personnel killed in the line of duty.

Three of Barnes' original paintings were exhibited at the London, England Whitechapel Gallery in the 2005 Back to Black: Art, Cinema & Racial Imaginary art exhibition.

In 2005 rapper producer Kanye West commissioned Barnes to create a painting to depict his life-changing experience following his near-fatal car crash. A Life Restored measures 9 ft. x 10 ft. and hangs on West's dining room ceiling. In the center of the painting is a large angel reaching out to a much smaller figure of West. It was inaccurately reported in several media outlets that the image of the angel in the painting is of West.

Barnes' final public exhibition was in October 2007 when the NFL and Time Warner sponsored A Tribute to Artist and NFL Alumni Ernie Barnes in New York City. It was hosted by Donna Brazile, Susan L. Taylor, Brig Owens and his former teammate, the Hon. Jack Kemp (who died five days after Barnes in 2009).

At the time of his death, Barnes had been working on an exhibition titled Liberating Humanity From Within which featured a majority of paintings he created in the last few years of his life. Plans will continue. The exhibition will travel throughout the country and abroad.

Television and movies

Barnes appeared on a 1967 episode of the game show To Tell The Truth The panelists correctly guessed Barnes was the professional football player-turned-artist.

Barnes played Deke Coleman in the 1969 motion picture Number One with Charlton Heston and Jessica Walter.

In 1971 Barnes, along with Mike Henry, created the Super Comedy Bowl, a CBS television variety special which showcased pro athletes with celebrities such as John Wayne, Frank Gifford, Alex Karras, Joe Namath, Jack Lemmon, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett and Tony Curtis. A second special aired in 1972.

Barnes played Dr. Penfield in the 1971 movie Doctors' Wives, which starred Dyan Cannon, Richard Crenna, Gene Hackman and Carroll O'Connor.

Throughout the Good Times television series (1974–79) most of the paintings by the character J.J. are works by Ernie Barnes. However a few images, including "Black Jesus" in the first season (1974), were not painted by Barnes. The Sugar Shack made its debut on the show's fourth season (1976–77) during the opening and closing credits. In the fifth season (1977–78) The Sugar Shack was only used in the closing credits for five early episodes during that season. In the sixth season (1978–79), The Sugar Shack was only used in opening credits for the first eight episodes and in the closing credits for five early episodes during that season. In the fifth and sixth seasons (1977–79), The Sugar Shack appears in the background of the Evans family apartment.

Barnes had a bit part on two episodes of Good Times: The Houseguest (February 18, 1975) and Sweet Daddy Williams (January 20, 1976).

The artwork of Ernie Barnes was also used on television shows Columbo, The White Shadow, Dream On, The Hughleys, The Wayans Bros, Wife Swap, Soul Food and the movies Drumline and Boyz n The Hood.

In 1981 Barnes played the famed baseball catcher Josh Gibson of the Negro league in the television movie Don't Look Back: The Story of Leroy ‘Satchel' Paige with Lou Gossett, Jr., who played Paige.

The 2016 film Southside With You about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date features the artwork of Ernie Barnes.

Personal

In addition to his parents, Barnes was preceded in death by his half-brother Benjamin B. Rogers, Jr. (1920–1970). His brother James (b. 1942) resides in Durham, North Carolina. Barnes has five children: Deidre (b. 1957) and Michael (b. 1961) with first wife Andrea Burnett (1957–1965); and Sean (b. 1965), Erin (b. 1969) and Paige (b. 1972) with second wife Janet Thaleen Norton (1965–1983). He was also married to Bernadine "Bernie" Gradney (1984 - to death).

Barnes died on April 27, 2009 at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California from blood cancer. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Durham, North Carolina near the site of where his family home once stood, and at the beach in Carmel, California, one of his favorite cities.

Quotations

"An artist paints his own reality."

"The artist uses creative visualization and the athlete uses the same thing... It's the muscle of the mind, that's the main muscle."

"I am bound by the strongest ties with the organic life of all people. And being an artist has created in me the desire to continually affirm beauty."

"The five years I lived in (the Fairfax district) a Los Angeles Jewish community led me to learn of their unyielding spiritual strength and internal sense of grandeur. I met people who had survived a hard school of struggle."

"My early paintings have all the rawness and passion of the (football) game."

"I was angry. I wanted to show and tell people what I had seen and felt. I wanted to show the dehumanization that is professional football. My only expression is through art. I painted until I had exhausted the hate. I had so many ideas that I couldn't put a canvas up quick enough."

"One day on the playing field, I looked up and the sun was breaking through the clouds, hitting the unmuddied areas on the uniforms, and I said, ‘that's beautiful!' I knew then that it was all over being a player. I was more interested in art. So I traded my cleats for canvas, my bruises for brushes, and put all the violence and power I had felt on the field into my paintings."

"Throughout my five seasons in the NFL, I remained at the deepest level of my being...an artist."

Wikipedia

[nsw4133]

Hi! I’m NSW4133, the one-person show behind this blog page! So first of all, thank you for reading this, thank you for checking out the stuff on my page, and thank you for liking/reblogging/following my stuff! Thank you so much for spending time on me when really everything in 2018 is all about grabbing your precious attention and phone time. Long story ahead, so if you don’t like reading, please skip :)

Why NSW4133

For a good while, I was going to go for Not Safe For Work, but then it became Not Safe for the World. The numbers was really because in the sea of IDs, you need numbers to distinguish your email accounts. I will retain the pseudonym NSW4133 for stuff I put in here, unless life changed course and suddenly I think it’s cool for me to have my real name associated with this page. Because to be honest, there are so many things I would like to explore artistically that I simply can’t do it IRL, with my actual legal name. Not necessarily sexual themes, but also, if the art direction calls for sexual/genital/minor fetish stuff, I don’t ever want to feel like I’m holding back either. The only thing I hope to do with it is to make it tasteful, not trashy. Disclosure: I was raised in a Christian home. I can’t call myself a Christian. A lot of people in my home community cannot accept me if I ever tell them that, er… I am queer and I do a shit ton of tarot art. So while I do mention a lot of Christian stuff or biblical themes in my work, please don’t feel offended. I’m not here to make fun of anyone, or convert anyone, or threaten anyone of going to hell with my work. I’m a living contradiction, all these religious experiences are still part of my personal history, and I find it important to allow it to come out if the card triggers something in me. It’s not the most pleasant existence, and I allow that to show through in my work. The only good thing is that right now I’m not kicked out of the house just yet. This is my tiny oasis out in the vast internet space, but it is a growing place, so perhaps by next year I will say something totally different instead.

Why I draw tarot

I graduated in 2017 with an art degree and the scariest thing they talk about in college is not about how terrible the assignments were, but everything that happens after college. Will I be a starving artist? Will I even be doing art? Will I survive my day job?

This year has been challenging in the sense that I am discovering a new side of myself, post grad. I have no idea how/when I create stuff. Or what I even like to draw when the pressures of homework are removed. And how to balance that with my whittling paycheck and my unstable job situation. And the fact that I’m transitioning between countries. All I know is that I do not want to be like this super bitter professor who barks at us to get better at design by drawing more, but he himself can’t draw to save his life. I hated him, but I hated how pitiful he must have looked compared to everyone that graduated the same time as him. My school is not a big school and it is stuck in a rural(read: Pokemon town sized) part of Missouri. Yeah, not a good look. But I recognised that this could have easily been me. I too, could be like this jerk, if I’m not careful. So that’s why I’m scrambling to find a way to make sure I’m at least doing something artistically, even if I don’t earn the big money. Enter tarot.

There was this one time I attended an Adobe Creative Jam and there was this speaker who was talking about her journey in tarot designs, but really she spent the first half convincing the audience that tarot is not occultic lol. But that sure got me thinking that hey, maybe this is a really good practice on my art and not many people can claim that they completed a full deck, so why not right? My mind was envisioning tarot to be the creative equivalent of the Boston marathon and lenormand to be the creative 5k. All these ideas came while I was in a position ready for change. And I went for it. And this page happened. What really struck me about tarot is that it has a certain structure, yet it can also hold infinite permutations, which is great for artists like me who obviously needed guidance but acted like they know better.

So when will I sell my decks?

I like the idea of money, but ugh, I’m not ready for everything that goes into social media promotion, making sure I print the decks out, and ship them to good people like you. But also another part of me is wanting to keep it as accessible as possible to broke ass college kids, cos I was one too. It sucks to only see only parts of the deck being posted online. I wanted to let people be able to enjoy the deck freely, and only buy them if and when they are ready. Because the whole point about this page is NOT TO MAKE MONEY, but to keep me away from the bigger demon that is creative death. So eventually I will open up some paypal/ko-fi so y’all kind hearted souls can send me some tips if you are feeling it, but even as of right now I am not in a stable postal code. This isn’t like going from one city to another. This is moving to a different country, and not in the sexy way. Don’t ask me why, but this has a lot to do with the Malaysian (some Malaysians, not all) fixation on migration. Americans may have been talking about moving to Canada or Mexico when Trump gets elected, but bruh, this is exactly what Malaysians have been doing for the past few decades and this migration thing is not as great or easy as you think. My own family is quite invested in this idea, but as a result, my personal life have been in a halt. I can’t plan what kind of jobs I can take because I think of maybe I need to be ready to move out, I can’t take freelance jobs as easily because it requires a permanent address for Paypal and I don’t have that, and I can’t form relationships (not even romantic ones!) properly because I’m just temporary. I’m just a fresh grad. As much as I struggle though, at least no one is dying in this story. All I can say is that please send some good thoughts/vibes/spells my way so I can finally not have to struggle with moving.

PS: Originally I wanted to make this into something more of like an artist statement, because that is what artists do, but then I realised that I will change, even on an every-3-months basis. Then I wanted to make this into more of an about me page, but all the other examples I see online are so corporate-y, and I don’t think I would fit in either. But it’s weed day (happy 4/20, folks) and I don’t ever want to operate this page as a super capitalistic venture, so I decided that this is going to be somewhat like an about me page, but also like a yearly check-in on why I draw. Really, why the heck do I draw when I don’t earn good money out of it?

[tournesoldansunjardin]

(C) Clr’18. Inspired by the jazz playing in the cafe

Dear Emma, May 30th Vancouver day trip

I decided to go into Vancouver since it was the only place I could purchased the CBD cream for my knee. Well, what I am saying? If CBD is good for aches and pains, my goodness it should do wonders for all my aches due to Fibromyalgia. I will just get it and slather it all over the sore areas…which are plenty.

My host was kind enough to drive me to the bus stop, which saved me a good 30 minutes. I had loaded extra $ on my Compass card, so was not too worried of transfers and getting to the Waterfront in Vancouver. What I had not anticipated was the bus did NOT drive into the city as a few locals had told me last night. The bus stopped at Bridgeport SkyTrain station and I saw everyone get off. I walked up to the front and asked the driver if this was the end of the line…yuppers!

I remembered Waterfront line since it is close to our Vancouver office and chose that line to get in town.

I had the address of the Cannabis Lounge where I was hoping to get my cream. In BC you don’t need a prescription to get it but in Montreal we do. I have my request put in for that when I get back from vacation but I wanted to try it now since my knees were so painful as well as neck and shoulders, so what had I to lose? My intention was to buy it, try it and then mail it to me in Quebec because there was no way I was flying with that or going through customs with it. There is barely any THC in it and it does not affect the brain/mood but it is supposed to be healing and soothing for inflammation…so they say!

(C)Clr’18 Vancouver, GasTown, Hastings Street

I got in town and started walking in circles…yes, that is me. I look at Google Map on my phone and argue with it thinking I know better well, that means I go in circles and get so fed up, I give in to Google and voilà I found the place

  I was a bit apprehensive since it is on Hastings Street and there is a section that is quite sketchy but this place was not that far East…phew! As I walked in, there were three clerks at the centre of the shop on a raised platform surrounded by a counter. There were so many smoking paraphernalia and most I have never seen…well, maybe in a movie! As I walked in, one clerk was lighting up a joint and then gave it to his colleague and calmly [they sure ARE calm!] asked if he could help me.

I started, “I come from very far…” and explained that I heard the MJ Pain cream was very good for joint pain. One of the clerks said he uses it regularly on his wrist and it works…I doubt it was just the cream…[wink wink]

The small jar was $45 and the larger one $100…so I took the small one. I left and looked around for a comfortable café where I could put the cream on my knees, neck and shoulder and sit and relax with an Americano and wait for the magic. I found a Starbucks on an nice corner with a terrace, so I stood in line for the washroom first. After a good fifteen minutes, I entered and put the cream on, and placed the jar on the toilet paper shelf. As I put it there, I told myself, “I had better not forget it now!.” Why the hell did I not put it in my bag straight away? I wanted to wash my hands first.

I ordered my double shot Americano and sat comfortably in an armchair and relaxed…I felt a tingling in my neck but still pain. My knees had not budged…I mean the pain did not subside even a little. My shoulders were the same but my upper arm seemed painless. Hmmm, well, maybe I need to slather this on a few times before seeing any difference.

After an hour of reading and writing on my iPad, I messaged a colleague who now works in the Vancouver office and asked if I could take her out for dinner on her hour break later. I am so glad I did. She brought me to this funky bar called The Taco Shop actually just across the street from The Cannabis Lounge…another coincidence?  I was thrilled hearing the jazz music as I walked In.   I was so delighted. Of course I ordered seafood burritos with guacamole and chips to start. My friend chose the local beer for me as she had a good idea on what I preferred. It was great!!

We could only eat half so we doggy bagged the rest (which I will be eating as my bedtime snack tonight) and I went to join her at the office. I wanted to show her my jar of magic potion. I looked in every section of my backpack…then she looked for me and then an image flashed before my eyes ‘Brown jar marked MJ Cream’ on the shelf above the toilet paper’. I slapped my forehead with the palm of my hand out of sheer frustration! Darn!!! I forgot it there.

Then I remember the woman going into the washroom after me, I warned her that there was no more toilet paper (for which I was pleased I had carried Wet ones in my bag). I saw her later and she looked at me weird…NOW, I know why. She was probably waiting for me to ask the clerk if anyone had found a jar of cream. But I had not realized it at that time. Well, my coffee ended up costing me $55.00 (including Americano and a danish).

I was kicking shelf but then I finally let it go and figured if anyone who more pain and fell upon it, then I’m happy someone can benefit it. I know I will not order it online, having tried it, I need something stronger which I noticed they have another blend for arthritic pain. In any event, I shall discuss it with my rheumatologist before I try that again, since I am sure he has referred many of his patients to alternative pain relievers.

Walking back home away from home slowly and stopping often to take in the v

Getting back home on the sky train was fine (I double checked with a local to make sure I was taking the correct line since it was getting late and late transit is not so great outside of the city). I got at the bus stop at 10:30pm and looked on my app Transit to check the stops to make sure I got the right transfer. When I got at the stop at 11:15pm, there was no one waiting for a bus, so I asked another local and the lady was going to call the transit company not trusting my phone app. Just then the 321 transfer bus arrived, so we checked and the driver said this was the right line. The bus was a fifteen minute ride and the driver told me to just keep walking straight ahead and the road will become the street I needed to get to. WELL HE WAS WRONG!!!!

(c) Clr’18 When I crossed this overpass, I knew I was lost!

I walked onto a highway crossing and realized I could not be going in the right direction. Thank goodness the moon was so full and bright but boy was I getting frustrated, tired and after 30 minutes of turning in circles, I was getting scared. I did not meet ONE person on the streets where I was walking. This is so different than back home. My phone was losing juice quickly at 7% and often it closes down at 5%…I didn’t want to call the host of my AirBnB as I knew she turns in early (compared to me) and I wished for once that Uber existed in B C. If I would call them (like I did once in a similar situation when it got too dark in San Diego to retrace my steps) I called Lyft (similar to Uber) and they catch us on their GPS and pick us up straight away. I have to say we should have that service at least outside of major cities where transit is scarce. I could not have called a taxi, since they don’t have the GPS system Uber has. My last resort if I could no longer find the house was to call the police.

There was 1% left on my phone and it stayed on by pure miracle …yes, I said a few prayers too! And I finally got home at 12:30. I had walked 12km that day but 5km just getting home since it was supposed to be 2km!

Oh well, at least it gave me something to write to you about, Emma. Right? I took a nice hot shower when I got it to soothe every aching muscle and slept like a baby.

May 31st,

Today I woke up at 8 am but my body wouldn’t budge. I picked up my phone and finished reading an e-book, then I snoozed a bit off and on and did not get out of bed until noon. It took me a while to get moving but I took my time. And now here I am at a café

  (c) Clr’18 White Coffee and Ice Cream

  I started with a cappuccino and called my uncle in Ontario to wish him happy 90th birthday and then treated myself to a double scoop (did not realize they were so BIG) of rainbow chocolate…YUM!!

I sat inside to savour the ice cream and the music turned to Jazz which seemed to attract my muse and voilà, I just finished another post!

It is such a treat to by typing my post in front of the ocean…time to leave and sit on the shore now…one last time. Then walk the 4km back.

I picked up s few souvenirs at Whitby’, a place recommended by a grienf who used to live here in White Rock  I wanted so much there but the owner said I could order online too.

I sat on the beach taking in all I could , meditating and trying to be st one with my surroundings.  After half an hour I decided to walk back home slowly hopefully my to find a spot tovrst closer to my lodgings.

Unfortunately, I did not find a restaurant or fish and chip place open after nine. Boy!!! it’s a bit like Toronto was like in the early 1990’s. Ih well I guess ti each its own.

There were some other places further away from my lodgings, so I thought about the half seafood burrito I saved from last night.  Phew!  I also brought some good aged cheddar from Montreal. I am all set for my last night in BC.

Unpredictable Whimsical and enchanting Like Mother Nature

Unpredictable The weather In Canada

Whimsical and enchanting Getting to know A new lover

Like Mother Nature Humans influenced by the moon And the stars

(C)Tournesol’18-05-31

Daily Moments – unpredictability- May 31-18 (troibun)

Dear Emma -III – May 30-31 Vancouver (GasTown) (C) Clr’18. Inspired by the jazz playing in the cafe Dear Emma, May 30th Vancouver day trip…

[lisarichardsonbylines]

Closing the Gap

THE PROBLEM SOLVERS

» UNICEF: CLOSING THE GAP

UNICEFCLOSING THE GAP

Arc'teryx lends their understanding of insulation and extreme conditions to a global collaborative effort in Mongolia.

Words By: Lisa Richardson

Closing the Gap

Inspired by problem-solvers in our midst and beyond, Arc’teryx designers accept an invitation from UNICEF’s Office of Innovation to head to Mongolia, to the coldest capital city in the world, to lend their understanding of insulation and extreme conditions to a global collaborative effort to make the ger, a type of shelter utilized by half a million urban residents, more thermally efficient. The problem: tackling the child health crisis caused by coal-fired air pollution from a terrific number of heat-leaking gers. The solution? Close the gaps that let good ideas fall by the wayside and let the cold air in.

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the coldest capital city in the world is powered entirely by coal, which means it is now, despite only having a population of 1.5 million people, also the most polluted capital city in the world.

It was just an email, like any other email that comes into the machine shop at Arc’teryx where the tinkering team of Pat, Bill and Chris wizard up solutions, customize tools and make whatever needs to be made for Arc’teryx designers to do their work. Pat Fitzsimmons happened to be sitting in the “Open Emails” chair that day when he fielded a request from senior design developer Nathalie Marchand to help make a door.

The Land of the Blue Sky shifts to charcoal grey at the onset of winter when coal-fired stoves begin to churn out fine particulate matter in toxic quantities.

Fitzsimmons is a hands-on problem-solver. You need a door? He’ll run down to RONA, pick up a door, cut it in half, MacGyver it to the specs you need. And that’s what he thought he was saying yes to when he added “door for Nathalie” to his action list that day. He had no idea he was about to step onto a global team tackling child health 8,186 km away in the most polluted capital city in the world.

Mid-winter in Ulaanbaatar, temperatures plunge to -40°C, and in response, the 1.5 million residents burn coal by the ton to keep warm.

The air in Ulaanbaatar was not always like this. But when Mongolia transitioned from Soviet control to a free market democracy in 1990, massive waves of urban migration began, tripling the size of the city; 8,000 new households are still arriving each year. As the new population pitch their yurts, the traditional round felt tent dwelling the Mongolians call ger, haphazardly up and down the hillsides of the city’s outskirts, their collective cooking and heating with unrefined coal stoves ramps up the city’s air pollution to shocking levels.

Click and hold52% of the pollution in Ulaanbaatar is attributable to coal burning in the ger district.

The amount of carcinogenic fine particulate matter (PM2.5, meaning particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less) has gone off-the-charts, and with it, acute respiratory infections (bronchitis, asthma, and pneumonia), preterm births, and spontaneous abortions. This 2.5 particulate matter in the air is small enough not only to enter the bloodstream but also cross the blood-brain barrier, and has reached concentration levels (millionths of a gram per cubic metre) more than 12 times higher than World Health Organization (WHO) standards.

In short: Breathing toxic air is damaging brain tissue and impairing cognitive development in babies and children. When it’s not killing them.

IN 2015, 435 CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF FIVE IN ULAANBAATAR DIED FROM PNEUMONIA.The mountains surrounding Ulaanbaatar's river valley trap smog like soup in a pan. By January, even the stars disappear.

In February 2018, UNICEF and the National Centre for Public Health sounded the alarm with a report, Mongolia’s Air Pollution Crisis: A Call to Action to Protect Children’s Health. Because, while everyone knew about the pollution, no one had connected the dots to child and maternal health. The issue of the day was suddenly a sleeping time-bomb – the hidden financial costs and lasting health and neurological impacts on children was going to cost Mongolia its future.

A morning prayer offered to the sky, across the sacred Tuul river from the city's power plants.

It’s a massive problem with no easy solution, and that’s just the kind of challenge that Tanya Accone rolls up her sleeves for.

“I’m an almost irrational optimist,” says Tanya Accone, Senior Advisor on Innovation for UNICEF’s Office of Innovation.

She has to be. Her role means confronting, daily, in detail, the world’s most intractable problems.

Trucks and vendors hawk coal from the four-lane main street to families in the ger district. Coal is available by the dump load or by the bag. No other source of heat is available.

The Office of Innovation is a recent branch of the 70 year United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) – an agile collaboration that applies start-up thinking and technology and leverages UNICEF’s deep web of connections and relationships on the ground in 243 countries to generate innovative and scalable solutions for children.

“We need to become disruptive and try things that are radically different,” says Accone, and in Mongolia, that meant trying to literally change the atmosphere.

While Ulaanbattar’s pollution has been attributed to the city’s 4 coal power plants, 3200 low pressure steam boilers, and 505,000 cars and buses, at least half is caused by the inefficient attempts of the continually growing number of households in the ger district to stay warm through the winter.

UNICEF’s plan was to task a global team of experts to “redesign” the ger to make it more thermally efficient – something they could roll out, not just in Ulaanbaatar, but across Mongolia and beyond, to Kazahkstan and Tajikistan - other places where urbanization and air pollution were spreading.

But first, Accone had to pull together a team of problem-solvers.

And that’s how Arc’teryx got a call from UNICEF Canada. “We are beginning a design project involving insulation in a hostile environment. We’re hoping you can help.”

Walls of lattice and felt echo a three thousand year old tradition of self-sufficiency and attunement with the land. How could the design be adapted for 21st century realities?

When Senior Design Developer Nathalie Marchand sat down in the room in Ulaanbaatar in March 2018, alongside colleague Romy Paterson, Material Developer, as the Arc’teryx dream team on the “21stCentury Ger” project, she was so intimidated she could hardly speak.

The global think-tank that the Office of Innovation had pulled together included genius-types from Stanford University, the architecture firm Kieran Timberlake, the Center for Environmental Building and Design at the University of Pennsylvania, GerHub and a host of UNICEF representatives.

Marchand went to fashion design school, before joining the circus at 21, where she worked for ten years as head of wardrobe for Canada’s legendary Cirque de Soleil. At Arc’teryx, she’s a guru. But when she walked into that gathering, she was a long way out of her comfort zone and completely without armour – no sewing machine, no track record, no PhD. “I felt extremely dumb,” says the tri-lingual Marchand. “They were all academics. I was super intimidated.”

She’d had three weeks to do the most basic youtube research before landing in Ulaanbaatar. “I have been camping in a tent before. That’s about as much as I knew about the ger.”

While tiny homes take North America by storm, Mongolians looking to get a toehold in an exploding city real estate market turn to dwelling of their nomadic ancestors, the light-weight and affordable ger.

Marchand’s don’t-know mind is her superpower, though. “My main strength in my job is just to ask the questions: what do you need, what you do want, what’s working, what’s not working. There were a lot of PhDs in that room who knew quite a bit. But what we thought we knew about Mongolia, and the real Mongolia, are quite different. We were sitting in a meeting talking about what is comfortable and suddenly we realized we have no idea what is comfortable in a ger. We think 20 degrees is a comfortable temperature inside in the winter. When I actually visited a ger, I could have been sitting in my bathing suit. It was so hot.”

As she asked questions, it became apparent that her and Paterson’s fabric knowledge wasn’t going to help. Gore-tex is not available or affordable to Mongolians. Felt is. It’s a perfectly adapted insulation for the conditions. As the think-tank members divided up the different aspects of the ger that might be re-engineered according to their expertise, the door remained.

“I went there knowing nothing and I left knowing only that I wanted to work on the project. I wanted to help people who might not have the resources we do. I had the chance to use my knowledge to change someone’s life.”

MARCHAND PUT HER HAND UP TO TAKE HOME THE DOOR.The data bank. Six test gers measure the effectiveness of a host of measures designed to retain heat.

There was no chance Canada Customs was going to let her ship a wood door home. So Marchand spent an extra week in Mongolia, using personal vacation time to journey out onto the steppe with a local guide, staying with families in their gers, playing cards, drinking vodka, and eating more dumplings than she hopes to ever again. She took dozens of photos of the gaps that formed between the doors and the sill plates, the gaps around the edges of the felt tent - all the leaky openings that formed with daily wear and tear that allow the bitterness of winter to finger its way in.

She needed to conceive a way to close the air gap. With the average salary in Mongolia at 966,000 tugruk, roughly $CAD520, it had to be cheap, easy to install, and easy to make.

Humility meets collaboration. Nathalie Marchand and Patrick Fitzsimmons prove the power of approaching a problem with a don't-know-mind and a great partner-in-crime.

Marchand had a flash of insight, remembering her five-year-old self visiting her grandmother in Quebec, where the winter temperatures hover around -20°C. She remembered the “snake” that her grandmother would kick along the door jamb, a long fabric tube filled with sand to block the draft.

After she returned to the Arc’teryx North Vancouver design headquarters, Pat Fitzsimmons answered her call for help, injecting something else to the project, something she hadn’t realized she needed: enthusiasm, a voice to counter the one in her head that said this solution is too simple; this problem is too big; this process is too unwieldy; how can you be sure that the Mongolians will accept this; who do you think you are?

To help, Nathalie Marchand had to first battle her own inner critic: who am I to offer help to Mongolia?

“When you work alone on a project and only have yourself to talk to, you get to a point where you feel like you’ve gone around so many times. When Pat came along, he went from 0 to 100 in a minute, he was so excited. It was amazing.”

Fitzsimmons reassured her that the simplicity of the snake was just right. Then he built her a door that she set between her cutting table and her sewing machine. Fitzsimmons didn’t think of it as a door. “It was a portal. You walk from 2019 into three thousand years ago, into this tiny enclave of beliefs, this building that reflects spiritually who the Mongolians are, as a people and as a nation.”

Marchand then also designed an insulated curtain, made from accordioned cardboard and covered with reflective fabric, that could be pulled across the door at night like a shower curtain, to add an extra layer of insulation.

“It had to be quiet, because everyone sleeps in the same room so if you wake up in middle of the night and have to go outside, you want it to be silent. You want to be able to use it with only one hand.” Every time she moved from her table to her sewing machine, she had to open the door and slide wide the curtain - testing the friction of operating it fifty times a day.

The refined specs of her door insulation package were emailed to UNICEF’s Mongolian office to be reproduced by a team from local materials. Eleven gers were going to be tested through the winter of 2018-19 – six uninhabited gers at a test site out of the city would be outfitted with all the different interventions, so each variable could be measured and monitored. Five family gers in the ger district would also be part of the testing.

On paper, it looked as if Marchand had solved the door insulation gap. Now someone just had to translate it into real life.

8,186 KILOMETRES AWAY IN ULAANBAATAR, IN OCTOBER, MUNKH-ORGIL (“MO”) LKHAGVA WENT LOOKING FOR A SEAMSTRESS.Arc'teryx could generate design solutions, but they had to translate on the ground.

An adaptable and personable 38 year old, Lkhagva had taught himself English from a good dictionary and had been hired by UNICEF’s local partner, Gerhub, to turn piles of drawings into the six test gers, ready for data-collecting to start in November.

It was an ambitious timeline, that didn’t exactly accommodate the realities of life - or the heinous traffic - in Mongolia. “I’ve never sewn anything in my life,” said Lkhagva. “I’m just able to understand English.” He posted ads on the Mongolian equivalent of craigslist, and visited a local sewing school, before the professor, a tiny fierce woman told him pointedly that none of her students would have the skills to do what he needed, but that she could probably help. He visited her tiny studio, a poorly ventilated room with peeling linoleum, bedecked with old fashion magazine cut-outs showcasing Soviet flair, an ancient sewing machine as the centrepiece. He showed her the drawings. She seemed to understand.

Naran Tuul, the Black Market in Ulaanbaatar, provides everything you need to build a ger.Testing the first prototype on the ground, only to discover that some things got lost in translation.

As far as Marchand could tell, it was working. “Mo was fantastic. He took pictures of everything that was available. If we said we needed a hook, next day he would go to their equivalent of Home Depot and take pictures of all the available hooks and say this is what’s out there.”

No one could know that the seamstress had got it wrong, until Marchand and Fitzsimmons arrived back in Ulaanbaatar in January for the second think-tank gathering and to check on the installation of their door insulation package. It seemed less an issue of the designs not having made sense to her, as that there was a Canadian at the other end of it. What could a Canadian possibly know about a Mongolian institution?

They gathered up the useless pieces and went looking for another sewing machine.

The air quality index read 963 parts per million (ppm) in January 2019. It had been 15 ppm in North Vancouver when Fitzsimmons left home. (Anything above 100 ppm is considered dangerous.) “Until you're standing in the middle of it,” Fitzsimmons said of the problem he’d just spent six months obsessing about, “you can’t understand how atrocious it is.”

He wanted to hate it. “Everywhere you go, it smells like burnt stuff. The smoke is terrible. There are so many problems. I wanted to be full of darkness towards the whole pollution thing -- you have to be angry to fix something. But my God! The country! The people! The beautiful sky!” He fell in rhapsodic love.

They’d come up with the best start they could conceive. All they needed now was a workshop to actually build their snakes and curtains. Happily, one of the think-tank invitees, an inventor, yurt-builder and Dutch emigrant, Froit Vanderharst took them under his wing. They ducked out of the formal sessions and raced to the open air market in Ulaanbaatar for supplies, time slipping away.

Sweating and exhilarated at having found such a like-minded fellow problem-solver. Stripped down to shirt sleeves despite sub-zero temperatures, they banged out prototypes, Marchand labouring over the sewing machine. They couldn’t wait for the prototypes to be installed, to show them to locals, hear what people thought.

"Everywhere you go, it smells like burnt stuff. I wanted to be full of darkness towards the pollution, but my God! The people!" Pat Fitzsimmons trades anger for love as his motivating force.

By early June 2019, the University of Pennsylvania had made headway with the thousands of data points they’d collected over the winter.

The comprehensive package of better insulation, including the door’s curtain and snake, resulted in a 55% reduction in energy consumption.

Tanya Accone, UNICEF Mongolia Deputy Representative Speciose Hakizimana and their team, were unequivocal about the results: “That is a game-changer.”

SUDDENLY, CLEAN AIR IS WITHIN GRASP.An air of optimism landed when the project team read the results. Clean air is within grasp.Adapting to massive issues requires a combination of technology, collaboration and respect for traditional ways.

“The magnitude of the problem and its impact on children and pregnant women is huge. But in combination with electric heating and cooking, the data suggests it should be possible to completely phase out the use of coal heating gers,” wrote Hakizimana on behalf of the UNICEF Mongolia team in late June, 2019. Expectations are as high as the stakes, and with more partners coming on board, including the Swiss government, the Dutch government, the Manitoba Council for International Cooperation, and the Mongolian University of Science and Technology, the pressure on everyone involved is immense. But there’s an air of optimism around the expanding office.

"A problem is only a problem if you see it as that. It could be a different pathway, a different route, an opportunity. It's only a problem if you let it be."

This winter, the project relocates to the second-most polluted city in Mongolia, Bayankhongor, 640km east of Ulaanbaatar, where the governor is extremely motivated to make a dent on air pollution in his urbanizing city, and is collaborating with UNICEF to meet a target of clean air by 2022. By rolling out energy-saving prototypes in many of the 7000 ger and brick houses (baishin) of this smaller city of just 9600 households, the team will be able to really prove their case of what works and what doesn’t.

Open the door to possibility. On the other side: history. And hope.

“We brought together industry experts in design, technology, outdoor, architecture, and academics,” reflected Hakizamana. “All the partners contributed immensely in building prototypes, data monitoring, and creating energy and structure solutions. We’re seeing the benefits of this great collaboration already. Now we will combine these with local knowledge and solutions, and help move households from coal to clean energy solutions.”

“Everywhere I look, here at Arc’teryx, I’m building on other people’s work,” mused Fitzsimmons. “We’ve had some incredible people through here that have done amazing things and I get to work with the results of their work, but I don’t know their names. Imagine if the legacy of this project is a population of people who are healthier, free of this thing they’re struggling with, with a real good shot at a fine future, and that comes about through something that my friend Nathalie and I had a part in creating? A chance to make a difference in history for all those people? Holy crap. It just doesn’t get better than that.”

https://arcteryx.com/us/en/explore/problem-solvers/unicef/

[coreytravelogue]

Vancouver, BC - August 23, 2020 (Part 1)

Over the last two months more than ever I have found myself missing travel and the stories I have accumulated through that time. In my paranoia of someday losing all these positive memories I have accumulated especially in the last 6 years of my life but even more so the positive (and negative) memories of my life. I have begun a project as if I needed anymore projects to begin with to write a secondary journal that would explain certain things in a way that they could understand my choices. More so my playlists, my playlists have always been an important thing to me as it always told the story of my life more than I could in words. I realized this last week when I was listened to some previous years from to back and the songs brought me back to what I was thinking and feeling during those times. I made similar mixes for my trips however with that said this blog offers something those playlists couldn’t; perspective. Whether it be perspective of when it happened an hour ago, day ago, year ago to many years ago. For as long ad Tumblr lets me keep it here this blog is a document of my life story in terms of my travels.

This blog isn’t going to go through the the playlists as they are a separate thing but I felt like the best way to describe this journal entry and why I often look back at in the past is to refer to them.

This blog entry is sort of a follow up to the previous one though not about Vancouver but I think about all of the other bits of travel I have done in the last now 6 years for the most part.

Look I have done my 2014 European trip to death, everyone knows it and everyone has heard it and will probably hear it from me for the rest of the time they know me and whenever you read this blog. This is about all of the travel I have done since and my reflection of them. As much as I much rather fill this travelogue with new content the pandemic makes it difficult and rather dangerous in order to do so, even as it stands right even going to Newfoundland to see my parents is likely not going to happen. So what else can I write about? Either way I was planning on doing this but this sort of pushes me forward in it. I need to do this for my own mental health, I am thankful that I got to travel so much in the last few years because given how things are right now international's travel isn’t going to be the same for awhile.

After returning from Europe in 2014 I was exhausted from travel I definitely needed to come back home as by the time I got to Paris and London I was burned out. However the burn out lasted......24 hours haha.

It didn't take me long to remind me why I left and how important that trip was for me even though it didn’t entirely sink in till later.

A weekend later I went to Edmonton which wound up being a mistake in of itself I won’t go into followed by what would wind up being the longest Christmas I would spend in Newfoundland before and since. I am torn as whether I should’ve stayed in Europe till it came time to go to Newfoundland or just stayed in Newfoundland longer. If I really thought about it staying in Newfoundland was probably a better idea. I can’t imagine spending an extra two weeks in Europe would have been any better but who am I kidding though I would have done it. What would I have done? Where would i have gone?

I might have explored London some more because even though I spent 4 days there 4 days is not enough time to get the gist of London. I may have went back to Cardiff as I know I would have been welcome to go back there and I know that that place wouldn’t be the worst place to go to.

Thinking about where I would’ve went I probably would have explored England a bit more and possibly Scotland but I didn’t I went to Edmonton and then Newfoundland. I am not going to talk about those two places, I won’t even talk about Victoria as those places I got to many times and did go to many times that I have nothing new to really give you about those outside of perspectives but maybe I will keep those for December or later on as I will surely need something to write as this pandemic goes on.

From 2015-17 I really didn’t do any traveling outside of going to Edmonton, Newfoundland and Victoria. I knew I wouldn’t because that was when I was back in school trying to rebuild my life and get a new career out of it. In 2015 I made a three year plan for myself or a definite 2 year plan.

2015 was going to be all about saving money then going to school full time, 2015 was exactly that for me. 2016 was going to be all about school and if there was a way to make some money then I would take it but it would be about school. 2016 wound up being exactly that though I was lucky enough to find summer work that paid more than any other job I had before and quickly lead into the career path I have been on since.

it was 2017 that was the wild card though it did quickly turn into a year where was another year of school and then once graduated I went back to work at the place that gave me the summer job the year prior but this time for the full year. 2017 despite working so much was looking back probably one of the best years of my life up to this point. Though I wasn’t traveling I had job stability at least till March 2018 when my contract was up but I was fine with that as I was planning on travel after. I had a girlfriend now who crossed the ocean to see me, it was a good year for movies and an even better year for music for me. When I thought of my plan 2017 was going to be when I graduated then I was going to go back to Europe and get that out of my system (like that would ever happen though) then go find a job but instead having a job scratched that but I was fine with that, it meant I could make make money and I could go in 2018.

2018 quickly became the wild card year, at least 3 times I was wondering whether I would still be employed but I didn’t want to let it stop me this time.

I feel like I should talk about Toronto first even though I got to go to Edmonton and more importantly Seattle beforehand. Why because I wound up being stranded in Toronto for a night which wound up inspiring me to visit Toronto 3 months later.

Long story short a weather bomb hit Newfoundland and it forced me to get into Toronto late and miss my flight from Toronto back to Vancouver. WestJet was basically forced to take care of me for the night. In hindsight I should have booked a flight later in the day because when I woke up in the 4 star hotel they put me in I only had 2 or 3 hours to really enjoy Toronto which wasn’t enough. It was only enough time for me to walk around the empty streets of Toronto and get a taste. It was here where I came to realize that I should maybe start taking advantage of my flex long weekends especially the ones where I would get 4 days off and take quick tricks to particularly places. My goal was clear, see as much of Canada as I could or at least places that one could say that is the place to go in a particular province or territory. 

I would return to Toronto twice; 3 months later in April and another time in August 2019. My trip in April was the longer one where the other one was really just two nights.

My April trip didn’t entirely turn out the way I wanted to. The weather was shitty for the most part and to tell you the truth outside of the Hockey Hall of Fame the city itself didn’t impress me much in the way I wanted it to but it didn’t stop me from trying my best to enjoy the city. What I remember most about going to Toronto was going to the Hockey Hall of Fame, seeing the Sky Dome for the first time while watching a boring ass ball game but all things considered baseball is not a sport I cared for. I did get to go to the Air Canada centre and watched my very first lacrosse game which I fell in love with. If I had more disposable money I would probably watch more lacrosse here in Vancouver if I could.

I also remember being caught in the rain and stranded in a part of Toronto when I couldn't figure out Toronto’s transit system. To say the least their transit system is very confusing to someone who has come to one that was so straight forward. Once you know it is more straight forward but that didn’t help me when I had no idea where I was going, I had little juice left in my phone and it was raining....cold rain. I was actually quite shocked that there wasn’t much snow around there, I expected a lot of snow but to tell you the truth I am happy it wasn’t cold enough because I was completely unprepared for my trip to Toronto, it was evident that I had some rust on me when it came to doing my homework on trips like this.

Toronto does have lots of statues to Jayne hat though, I remember spending a pleas tone full day Jayne hatting downtown Toronto and the thing is just when I thought I had covered all of the statues in downtown Toronto I found others I could have hatted in my second trip.

My second trip was relatively uneventful, I think it was my job saying thank you to me for working so hard that they gave me this trip to Toronto when it was nearly obvious that I didn’t need to go, I definitely appreciated it. By the end of the summer of 2018 they already got the gist that I was big on traveling but to be honest 2018 was a year I did a lot of crazy travel to begin with. I felt like I had to make up for 2015-17.

Looking back at Toronto again to tell you the truth I would give it another shot but the thing is the best time for me to go there would not be a good time for me to see the things I would see this time. I would go to Wonderland and maybe Marineland as well however I doubt either of them are open during April, maybe they are but I can’t imagine either being as fun in April given the weather. I would spend a whole lot more time Jayne hatting and would take up more museums this time. I know I wouldn’t drink the beer though as I wasn’t impressed with their beer at all.

When my girlfriend came back during the winter of 2018 I felt like I needed to show her more than what I did with what little time we would have this time around. I took her to Edmonton because a Vancouver winter is not a true winter though she did get to experience snow in Vancouver. Edmonton did not wind up being as great of a trip as I had hoped but I would like to think our first trip to Seattle wound up being much better but we didn’t have much time to enjoy it. Just enough time to see the Museum of Pop Culture which we both enjoyed, eat at the 13 Coins which neither of us enjoyed this time and see the Fish Market.

We did return however in 2019 of October when I used my Thanksgiving long weekend to take her to a concert she wanted to go to. Outside of the concert I feel as though I got more out of this trip than she did. We did go to the Museum of Pop Culture again as well as a free art gallery but much of this trip was mainly me walking around exploring.

The things I remember the most about Seattle was the Museum of Pop Culture which is quite possibly the best museum I have been to on the western hemisphere of this planet. The other weirdly enough has been the food and beer.

I don’t know why those are the things that comes up for me. When I think of Seattle I think of having the free breakfast not far from the Inn at the Queen Anne. The Inn itself was cozy though there was mold in places. I remember the breakfast being far better than I expected a free breakfast being mainly for the what I thought was cinnamon bun bread but it could have been marble I do not know. I then remember the 13 Coins, I have been to the 13 Coins four or five times.

When I first went to Seattle back in 2012 to see Fiona Apple. My friend at the time told me to try their hazelnut cappelletti and I absolutely adored it and I would have it again before I left. When I returned with my girlfriend in 2018 neither of us really enjoyed what we ordered (I ordered he same dish). It left a sour taste in my mouth that such a good place wasn't making it good. When we returned in 2019 while my girlfriend was sleeping I had to give them one last chance and I am glad I did because it blew me away the same way it did the first time. I would have again I think the next day. My faith was restored in the 13 Coins. 

Other memories I have were eating crackers at the Inn at the Queen Anne or sandwiches at the hostel we were staying. Probably the most lasting memory i have right now was stumbling on a German bar where I got to have German beer again knowing at least now I know where I can go to get my German beer fix either at the German beer or the German style beer they sell in grocery stores.

Despite the three times I have been to Seattle (twice with my girlfriend) I still don’t feel like I got to see everything Seattle has to offer. Their downtown sector is often entertaining enough for one to spend a weekend to begin with. If I went back I would go back tot he same places as I did before easily which would be one day right there not leaving much for other thing unless one really planned out other places. Regardless though Seattle is a place I would definitely go to again if there is a chance to. 

I am definitely going back to Whitehorse someday, mainly because I forgot to bring my Jayne hat with me during this trip that had so many statues I could have hatted. I was disappointed with Toronto because it was too big for me and for a place of it’s size there wasn’t as much that appealed to me. Whitehorse however was far more smaller, smaller than you would think it was but for someone visiting for a long weekend in May it was hard to be bored there.

Not going to lie their airport may just be one of my favourite airports, not because of how good it was but how it looked as it looked like it came straight out of the 80s.

I went on my very first brewery tour there, went to all of the museums there and got hella drunk many times over the span of this long weekend.

The two biggest memories i have of my time there was when I naively thought that I could easily walk around their airport grounds in no time. Instead it took three hours, lets just say I started the walk a little drunk but ended it sober but completely bored out. So much so I had to go to a sports bar to get food into me. While waiting for food and for my phone to charge I literally passed out, I am pretty sure the people there thought I was a homeless person or some bum and were ready to kick me out before they knew I could pay for what I ordered. When I paid for everything they were completely fine with me but it was definitely embarrassing fo me.

The other memory I had was my last day there which was entertaining and annoying all at once. I checked out of my airbnb knowing I had lots of time and decided to take up the two museums that were next door to the airport. Right after that I went to the bar and restaurant that purposely looked like a wood cabin where I had another meal and proceeded to then go to the airport to go home only to find out they pushed the flight back 4 hours. So I went right back to that restaurant to eat, drink and wait for the next four hours. Even the flight was painful as they flew us to Kelowna where we waiting in the plane there for about as long as the fight was supposed to be to begin with.

I even remember dumped out a few bombers of beer in the woods. Why? because the airline wouldn’t let me bring it with me and to tell you the truth I am sort of glad I didn’t bring them because they were all terrible, I wound up pouring them out in the woods and was done with them.

As I said before I would go back to Whitehorse again, more than likely during the same time as I did last time, everything is still open and I could have particular places to myself at the same time. Jayne hat everything I missed out on and maybe take in the night life more this time now that I know how to get around the city this time. I dont know if I could live there but I do think it is a city that is worth spending a long weekend in I assure you.

My next stop on my tour in 2018 was my hometown of Fort McMurray only a few weeks later. Up to that point I hadn’t been back there since 2007 which was about 11 years but at the time it felt much longer. Much had changed yet certain things didn’t, I can’t help but we torn about what I think of Fort McMurray but I can’t help but always be dragged back there. I think a lot of it has to do with he fact that this city was once my home, a place I spent half of my live living and developing into the person I came to be. It is probably all nostalgia because the city itself always winds up bringing hostility in me in some form or fashion.

I knew i had to go here again 2 years prior during the fires that came within a hairline of decimating the city. It wasn’t a good feeling watching the city you grow up in no matter how much you hate it or love it burn like hellfire.

Forests and green that solidified your love for trees and the woods as a child going up in flames to probably never be coming back again.

Returning to Fort McMurray the first thing i notice was the airport, it went form being the worst looking airport I had ever been to probably the most beautiful, of course all of it is with oil money.

Walking from Waterways to my neighbourhood felt so sobering yet in a way embarrassing. Well just one bit embarrassing as I went into my old elementary school hoping they would let me walk through the halls of the elementary school I spend grades 5-8 in, it was only 3 years but for a child it felt like a decade in of themselves. Time just seemed so long for me as a kid come to think of it compared to now where I feel as though each year just gets faster and faster as I near closer to death.

Anyways I asked if I was allowed to walk around and they looked at me like a creep or a pedo. I can’t say I can blame them, I was a stranger with no reason to be here no way they were going to let me in a building full of children even though I told them I have no problem being escorted but they were having no part of it. I was bummed out especially since my I couldn't get into my high school either as it was being rebuilt but I doubt they would let me in there either.  I felt like a stranger in a city that i grew up. I came to realize that outside of my old bosses at McMurray TV and my cousin Angela whom I didn’t go see no one probably recognized me, i mean even my bosses needed to give a second look to me.

However it didn’t take me long to remind me why I left in the first. Right after looking at how much the Safeway Gas Bar had aged since I was there (I was one of the first employees who worked there) I decided to take a short cut between Superstore and the bottle depot which was once the old city swimming pool to nearly get in a fight with a stranger.

As I was walking through I noticed a guy sitting under a tree suddenly attacked by another guy with two other guys watching over him. One of which noticing that I was noticing walked over me and told me to keep walking and threatened me. Me as dumb as I am at that moment was having no part in being threatened myself and told him I will walk but that I wasn’t afraid of him. Part of me just wanted to fight him but I was carrying my stuff for my trip and he looked like the kind of guy who would loot me and never be seen again so I knew it wasn’t worth it. However it took 90 minutes of being in Fort Mac again to be angry again, well I was angry already when I was in Calgary when someone was giving me grief for accidentally not locking the bathroom stall. Suffice to say I love Alberta the place but the people irritate the fuck out of me, the Alberta anger every fucking time I get irritated just by thinking of it again.

After that altercation to tell you the truth the rest of the trip went smoothly though at many times heartbreaking for me.

Heartbreaking seeing the damage the fires took on the city for one. There is only 1 road in and out of Fort McMurray and that road takes you through Gregoire and down into the valley. It was always my favourite view in the city being at the top of Gregoire hill driving down, it always gave me a sense of relief because drives to and from Edmonton are long....5 hours long. Driving to Edmonton always felt like the shorter trip while driving back to Fort McMurray always felt twice as long that by the time you go to that hill and oversaw downtown Fort Mac you or I felt nothing but relief that I was finally home and that I would soon be back in my house and in my own bed.

Going down the hill you were surrounded by trees on either side, always beautiful and green. Now all of it was burn down and i could now finally see past where those trees once covered. The only green left was the trees growing from the ashes. It reminded me of fat me having a hard time going up this hill once or twice but in defence of child Corey when I went up it again as someone who is in pretty decent shape it wasn’t an easy walk up for even me. I was heartbroken to see all the trees gone but I also wanted to see just how close the fire got to downtown because even though there are areas of the city bigger than downtown it is still the heart of the city, if downtown went the city was done. I noticed that the fire got right down to the highway road with the only thing separating it was the bridge that connected Beacon Hill with downtown itself. A bridge I took so many times as a child going to Beacon Hill where my cousin Amie lived, a neighbourhood I stayed in so many times as a small child on the weekends sleeping over with her as she was my best friend. I didn’t get to see that neighbourhood now but I heard it was pretty much decimated by the fires.

Keyano College was still the same right down to the purple building. After being disappointed in not going back tot he schools I spent 8 of the 20 years of my life there I was reintroduced in to other elements of the city both new and old. They were finally renovating the hospital which was due for renovations even back when I was a child but were never done because of.....politics. 

Look I dont want to re run my entire trip here as I feel I am and you can just read my journal entry on it but the biggest heartbreak was seeing my old house and knowing I could not go into it. I mean I might have but after being shut down going to my old schools I felt like this wasn’t worth doing. Maybe next time I should just take a chance on it, if I do not believe me I could easily describe the house for them. I do know I passed by the house multiple times to the point where I am sure the neighbours were looking through the window at me wondering who I was. Funny enough from what I have been told our next door neighbours are still there. Their daughter has long since married and had children but they are still there. It made me feel like time had certainly passed, I remembered when my mom we drive me and her to school every day from grade 1 right up until grade 8.

I spend an entire day riding a bus that started downtown and went through all of Westwood and Timberlea. The bus driver definitely looked at me weird wondering why I was there for the entire round trip but I also remembered a teenager walking in with his face bashed in. Nothing entirely new for this city honestly. I was lucky to have lived in a great neighbourhood but even my neighbourhood wasn’t without its assholes. 

One thing that thankfully didn’t change was the Jomas Pizza which is still so fucking good and probably my favourite pizza period.

I am definitely going back to Fort Mac someday I just dont know when. Maybe in October I could go maybe for my birthday but I doubt it though October seems more likely. That being said I feel like it is dangerous even before the pandemic traveling there. I remember being there even my host asked me about the pipeline thing as while he was more understanding of my opinion I know Fort McMurray lives and dies off of the oil industry and any bad word sad on it would be dangerous unless you lived there and bitched about it and even then its sketchy. Someday I will be back I just dont know when.

When I do I will go to Beacon Hill and go to the Oil Propaganda...I mean the Oil Interpretive Centre.

After my girlfriend coming to see me twice it was now only fair that I went to see her this time for two weeks no knowing if I was coming back to a job or not. If I didn’t then I would have easily spent more time in Australia being it is a continent in of itself but I only got to see Adelaide, Melbourne and Roxby Downs/Adamooka. 2 weeks is not enough time to see Australia and the time I spent in each place wasn’t enough time to begin with outside of Roxby Downs & Adamooka.

I loved Adamooka and I only really spent a day in Roxby Downs, it was a settlement that I think we spent the second most time in in our own little cabin which was nice of Pippa’s family to provide. I enjoyed the remoteness of the area playing boardgames and watching movies though we didn’t have much choice of either. The stars were neat to see and going to the Take Box there was also cool. I would go back there in a heart beat but only for the same amount of time, I could see myself getting bored rather quick there.

Melbourne was a bit of a disappointment but I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that we only had 2 or 3 nights there and I had a sore throat during that time. 2 or 3 days is not enough time to see that city and we barely scratched the surface of the downtown area. This city was also just too big and fast for me and my girlfriend. If I was sick and we had more time I would like to do more things in general there than we did but I am not in a hurry to go back there when there are so many other places to go.

Most of the time I spent in Australia was in Adelaide which it sees always gets a bum wrap from those who have never even been there. However I would gladly defend the city it is definitely a place worth checking out for the free museums, chill atmosphere and arts centre that I am sure would have been fun to take part in if I was there when it was going on.

The memories however that come up the most however was the extended time i got to spend with my girlfriend and her family either enjoying Australian food at the park, going to the fair, drinking true German Hefeweizen beers for the first time since being in Germany in Hahndorf and watching movies and TV with her in her apartment. 

Australia was a great time for me, we were supposed to go back there this year if not for the pandemic. Whether I go back anytime soon depends entirely on the pandemic but I would definitely go back. When I do go back I will spend more time in Adelaida, Adamooka and put Tazmania and Perth on the list this time.

So by the end of September 2018 I had been to 2 provinces, 1 state, 1 territory and one new country. Normally that enough travel for most people and to tell you the truth I was starting to be tired to but I had already made plans for one more trip for myself before Newfoundland in December and that was Montreal. I spent my Thanksgiving long weekend there and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Even though it was chilly at times being October Montreal is truly a cool place to be reeking of culture and history in ways that Toronto could only wish it had. Better beer, better culture, better record stores, better transit and better food. My entire time there was basically eating poutine and drinking French Canadien beer and having a ball though during the second last day of my trip my stomach hurt like hell from amount of beer i had the night before. 

My biggest memories from Montreal basically involved just that; French beer, poutine and eating smoked meat sandwiches. Despite still being in Canada Montreal, Quebec felt like being in a completely different country. However I wasn’t able to do much else there but what I just spoke of which probably explains why tickets to fly there during this time was so cheap because nothing was going on during that weekend at least from what I could find.

Outside of those things I spoke of the thing I also remember was not being able to Jayne hat the legends of the Montreal Canadiens. One because the security as too tight and because their heads and bodies were too fucking big. I have a feeling they moved them all together due to the construction in the area but still it sucked. i would have loved to have seen something at the Bell Centre but I didn’t because nothing was going on that weekend. I will be back to Montreal someday and I would add Quebec City next time.

So I have been working on this for the last 5 hours and I am getting a bit tired though I am only half way through all of this. With that I think I am going to leave it here for now as we have basically concluded my travel in 2018 which was sizeable enough as it is. 2019′s travel was a beast in of itself as you already know as it was last year. Next weekend will come close enough to mark the 1 year anniversary of the last time I went to Europe but as you already know that wasn't the only trip I took.

So to be continued next week, stay safe everyone. Shazbot nanu nanu

[restarkd]

Real Estate Marketing in a Luxury Market

Because real estate market in the U. S. slowly continues to regain the footing, many agents are looking at this time as a chance to redefine their market. With so many agents abandoning-or at least tremendously cutting back-their marketing systems to save money, others will be jumping in to take advantage of the marketing void. In other words, they are bringing an offensive approach in order to put themselves in primary position when the market starts to upswing. In most regions of Canada, on the other hand, the market continues to stay hot and products are looking for the best way to grow their business. They are looking to develop the reach of their marketing and maximize income chances. Whether it be in the U. S. or Canada, a number of realtors we are talking to believe that now is the time to make the transition towards the ultra high-end market. Traditionally, luxury real estate is one of the undesirable market segments to try and break into. Why? There are a few widespread reasons. It might be the presence of a dominant agent previously ensconced in the community or the fact that everyone already has a peer in the real estate business. It may be because the agents themselves do not own the patience to work in a generally slower-paced market (less transactions to go around, tougher competition and slower revenues process). It could be that they are simply not prepared for the unique worries a high-end market poses. In my experience, it's usually with the multitude of these reasons that prevents most agents from staying successful in luxury real estate. There are many things you need to know prior to make the quantum leap into the next price range. We put together a list of five factors that will help you decide if a move to luxury real estate is right for you. #1. Know What You may be Getting Into Agents often make a blind leap into deluxe real estate because they think that's "where the money is. " Of course, it's simple math. If you get the same break, it pays to list homes with higher prices. In theory, you can make more money by doing fewer transactions. Similarly, that's true, but if you go into luxury real estate using this mentality, you are probably destined to fail. Yes, your wages per transaction goes up significantly. That's great, but there may be often a new set of challenges introduced when working an important high-end market: the competitive stakes are much higher, friendly circles are much more closed, politics are different, and there are a lot other factors which I will detail throughout this article. Additionally , marketing and servicing costs are generally more when going through luxury homes and clients. Both buyers and owners expect more and demand more and the properties his or her self need even more attention (marketing, staging, photography, etc . ) to appeal to a more sophisticated crowd. Carol Barkin regarding Toronto, Ontario has been a successful Sales Representative for 19 years, but it took her some time to build her business on her high-end markets (both in the city and from a lakefront recreational market about an hour outside Toronto). "For me, the biggest challenge was making that first network, " she says. "They already have tight social relationships and know how to get what they want, so building interactions is a matter of trust. It's important to relate to clients as being a friend and a helpful peer, not just present yourself to provide a service provider. " #2. Patience, Patience, Patience It's apparent that high-end real estate is a different animal than normal residential markets. It tends to move much slower. Mostly, there are fewer homes on the market at any given time and there are less buyers out there with the means to purchase such expensive real estate. The stakes are higher for everyone involved. So on common, it takes significantly longer to sell one of these homes. In addition , there is also a lot of competition out there for a limited number of properties, then it often requires more patience to break into the marketplace and build a strong client base. This is truly a case from where the end usually justifies the means if you have the right becoming familiar with and commitment going in. Though listings are harder in to the future by and it takes longer for them to sell, the substantial check at the end of the transaction is worthwhile. But not most of agents have the stomach to wait longer in between commission cheques. Oftentimes, this is the hurdle that stops them in their paths. "In my experience in high-end real estate, six months that can be found is nothing. On average, it's more like nine for a list of to sell, " says Robin. "Also, if they are not genuinely motivated to sell, you will waste a lot of time and money in marketing. In some cases, I will adjust my commission rate so the marketing costs are covered by the seller. It helps to counteract the time it takes to sell. You also shouldn't go into luxury properties without money in the bank. It's a long-term process to build your organization and if you are not prepared, it can break you quickly. inch #3. Know It. Live It. Keep It Confidential. Another reason that some agents struggle to find his or her footing in an ultra high-end market is that they cannot really relate to the clients or communicate effectively. You're managing a much savvier and usually more demanding audience who know what they want and are used to getting what they really want. Now, you don't necessarily have to live in the luxury community you happen to be targeting, but you have to present yourself like you do. Fascination with this occupation dress, your ability to network within their circles, the way you reassure these sophisticated individuals, the quality of your marketing materials-you should be able to make a personal connection and develop a strong pro image. If they don't buy into you as a expensive home expert who's tapped into their community, they might not be as likely to do business with you. Jack Jeffcoat III is usually an agent who is in the process of transitioning his market target from high-end golf communities in Central Florida to make sure you ultra high-end waterfront properties along Florida's Space Shore. From his marketing presence to his personal business presentation to his servicing strategies, everything he does will be to support his image as a luxury real estate specialist. They've often bold and unwavering in his approach for the reason that he never wants to lose credibility. Think of it including any high-end product that is in demand because of its scarcity and even exclusivity. So as a real estate agent specializing in high-end properties, you, an individual's marketing image, and the service experience itself need to magnify the utmost quality. If you look and act like the best professional around, people will aspire to work with you. "When When i take a listing presentation, I conduct an interview using the seller to make sure they are willing to follow my recommendations, inches Jack says. "At every opportunity, I want to remind these products why they are hiring me. They know I am extra real estate expert that only works with an exclusive group of individuals. From the beginning, they are instilled with the belief that if they want to have a very good successful sale, they need to follow my lead. It presents me the upper hand and keeps me positioned because market specialist. " Also, keep in mind that high-end real estate isn't necessarily going to be the same from region to region. The waterfront community in Florida will have a different set of obstacles than a mountain resort community in Colorado or a down-town high-rise in Toronto. In some places, "high-end" may be $400, 000 and up. In others, prices could be in the multi-millions. When it comes to your personal presentation and the way you promote yourself, be sure to properly present your niche and look spectacular. "Always look bigger than you are, " says Robin Milonakis. "You have to have exceptional marketing materials. They have to make people today feel good about hiring you. It feeds the ego knowing they are working with the best. " #4. Picture is Everything, Especially in Marketing When it comes to your online marketing materials, quality is key. You can't position yourself in the form of high-end agent if your materials look unsophisticated. A first-rate personal brochure and dynamic website are absolutely essential. Your own brochure should take the place of your business card whenever you meet the potential client. It needs to look sharp and feel remarkable at the very first glance (exceptional photography, nice glossy paper, advanced writing, clean design). It needs to reflect your individuality, but also relate to the luxury market you are targeting. In a way, you may be a representative of this lifestyle and your marketing should put across that. It shows your unique expertise and highlights the actual service/knowledge benefits that make you a specialist in this distinctive industry. It's very important that you don't skimp here or it will reveal. You simply can't fake high-end quality. You must be devoted to investing the money to do the marketing right or individuals will see through it. Put simply, the brochure and all your other marketing materials need to be of the utmost quality. This includes your own home advertising. You should at least have a tabloid-size glossy flyer/brochure that you choose to use to promote each property. The staging must be amazing. The photography must be very professional. Of course, you should maintain ones property marketing pieces branded clearly with your personal image (logo, colors, fonts, etc . ) so you don't lose the identity. "My brochure is quality and people associate any piece with its sender, " Carol Barkin says. "I send it out prior to meeting someone to warm individuals up. It gives me more credibilty and demonstrates my knowledge of the market they are concerned about. " The same is particularly true when it comes to your website. It needs to reflect the quality of any brochure and other print materials. It needs to look sharp not to mention feel representative of your luxury market. Two of the providers I spoke with-Jack Jeffcoat and Robin Milonakis-are equally actually in the process of revamping their compaigns to better goal their high-end clientele. Even though both of them have been greatly successful with their current campaigns, they know it's worthwhile the investment to take their marketing to the next level to build up an exclusive luxury niche. One bold strategy Jack purposes is to feature only properties above a certain price regarding his website. Does he take listings at smaller prices? Yes, when the situation calls for it. But the image is that of a luxury real estate expert and also his website is one more way to show that. "If one of my high-end prospects goes to my website plus sees a bunch of low-priced listings, then it's not really supporting my cause, " Jack says. "Like a doctor, gurus make more money and earn more credibility, so I want to be often called a high-end listing specialist in every aspect of my selling. " When it comes to online marketing, you also need to make sure you are very productive on your web site. You cannot just put up a site-no make any difference how nice it looks-and expect it to generate enterprise over the long run. You have to actively post information-links, articles, information sites, calendar events, community information etc . - to make the software a resource that people want to return to on a regular basis. Your busy engagement on the site will enable you to better communicate with your target audience. And of course, it also boosts your SEO (search engine optimization) to help you generate more leads through all the major yahoo and google. #5. Be Prepared to Back It Up In addition to making sure your current marketing campaign and personal presentation are representative of your market place, you must also make sure you are fully in-tune with the advertise itself. If you don't know everything that's happening around one, you will never be able to establish yourself as a luxury specialist. It is one area where you will not be able to fake your way through a transaction with minimal knowledge or experience. Clients will probably expect more and demand more from you, this means you have to be able to back up your claims as an expert-in words and phrases of both your knowledge and your service experience. "Expectations from clients are different and, in general, they are more hard. They want you to be available to provide answers and information, " Carol Barkin says when referring to the clients the woman works with. "In the end, they need to make their own decisions. There're gathering advice and professional recommendations from me to enable them to come to their own conclusions. " That said, never underestimate the particular clients' need for up-to-date information. Be proactive in giving them regular updates (at least one call per week) on market activity. Always stay current with exactly what is happening in the market. Word travels fast in luxury realty, so make sure you know what's going on-what listings experience sold, for how much, how long they were on the market, and so on. For anybody who is not all over the market, your clients will be all over a person. How and what you communicate will make them feel more effective about the experience "No matter what, I personally call each of my clients on Monday with a detailed market post to, " Jack Jeffcoat says. "I make it a point to normally know what's going on in the market. If any home sells, I have to be aware of it and discuss it with each patron so they know what's happening. " Then, make sure the service experience reflects your marketing image. You have to be qualified to deliver on your claims by making the client feel exceptional throughout the process. Think of it as the difference between the Ritz-Carlton and the Marriott. It's a completely different experience from the moment you step through the doors of either hotel, and it's why you will pay substantially more to stay at the Ritz. Imagine your own real estate service as a luxury experience. That will make you a beneficial commodity in the market. Is the Luxury Market Right for You? At some point, that's for you to decide. You must be prepared for the unique challenges as well as tough competition found in the world of high-end real estate. You will have to make sure you are patient enough to handle a slow-moving markets. You need to be willing to invest the time and money it takes will not only brand yourself as a luxury specialist, but for you to back it up with higher standards of services and expertise. If you are ready for what the high-end market has in store, it can be a very lucrative place to conduct business over the long-run. And whether you are in a slow current market or a hot market, right now may be the time to take typically the big leap!

[dailykhaleej]

Stuck in paradise: Stranded for months in Bali, UAE residents now find their jobs at risk

Lana Shevchenko in Bali Picture Credit score: Provided

Dubai: What was meant to be a tropical vacation has become a nightmare for a number of UAE residents who’re presently stranded in Bali owing to journey restrictions necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic. Residents of assorted nationalities reached out to DailyKhaleej narrating their struggles of getting to pay for their home lease, utility, cellphone and Web connection in absentia in the UAE whereas additionally having to concurrently pay for their lodging and meals bills in Bali, Indonesia.

Though a lot of these stranded are managing to work remotely, they’re frightened for their jobs if this uncertainty persists. Small enterprise homeowners are struggling, with no work being commissioned, but having to pay lease for their home and workplace area. Others have even been laid off from their jobs whereas in Bali.

Obtained the pink slip in Bali

Lana Shevchenko, an Ukrainian who has been a UAE resident for a yr, visited Bali on March 15 for a two-week enterprise journey. Nevertheless, the occasions trade skilled acquired the pink slip from her firm as quickly as she arrived in Bali.

A tranquil scene from Bali, Indonesia, however for UAE residents paradise is misplaced Picture Credit score: Provided

With Ukraine additionally closing its territory for residents, Shevchenko’s solely possibility was to spend time in Bali till borders reopen and fly to Dubai the place she rents an residence for which she nonetheless pays lease, has her private belongings and mates.

“I planned to stay here only for two weeks, so I’m running out of money and using my credit card now. I’m still waiting for my last salary. To save money, I initially stayed in a cheap hostel, but now I’m sharing a villa. I’m cooking at home and buying fruits and vegetables from local people instead of shops,” she advised DailyKhaleej.

Shevchenko is aware of it is going to be not simple to find a job throughout a world disaster. However she is utilizing her time in Bali to be taught portray and assist a charity. She is actively wanting for jobs and has already attended an interview.

“I tried registering with Twajudi as soon as it was announced, but several times it showed errors in my application. Finally, I have managed to register successfully and currently the status is shown as under process,” she stated.

Double whammy

Natalya Afanasyeva, an expat from Kazakhstan who works in Dubai with Chalhoub Group as a industrial government, has been caught in Bali since March 11. A 10-day trip has now prolonged into a number of months with no readability on when it is going to finish.

Natalya Afanasyeva Picture Credit score: Provided

“I am still paying my house rent, car loan, DEWA bill, phone and internet bills back in Dubai plus all my expenses in Bali. Although we are not living in Dubai and using these services, we are still receiving bills to pay. I cannot stay in Bali anymore since I don’t have enough money to pay for my second accommodation and food expenses,” she advised DailyKhaleej.

Within the first month in Bali, Afanasyeva and her pal rented a house for $1,300 (Dh4,774) a month and paid $650 for meals (Dh2,400). She modified homes on a weekly foundation in the primary month hoping the state of affairs would change and he or she might fly again. In April, she paid greater than $1,000 (Dh3,672) for a rented home in Bali whereas in Could, she is paying $650 (Dh2,400). She additionally must put aside Dh3,000 for her month-to-month home lease in Dubai.

The Kazakhi expat who has been residing in Dubai for 12 years stated her employer has been paying her the absolutely wage with none deduction thus far. “My employer is doing everything to support me but if the situation deteriorates further, I might have to face unpaid leave or a salary cut,” Afanasyeva added.

Ready for Twajudi approval for weeks

Though Afanasyeva has tried filling up the Twajudi type on the UAE’s Ministry of International Affairs and Worldwide Cooperation web site a number of occasions, there was no response and he or she is ready to get an approval earlier than reserving a ticket on Etihad’s flight from Jakarta to the UAE on Could 29. “A one-way air ticket from Jakarta to Abu Dhabi costs almost Dh4,000,” she identified.

A number of stranded expats declare that the UAE authorities is prioritising solely lecturers, medical employees, youngsters separated from dad and mom and faculty college students who’ve been ousted from college lodging to return to the UAE.

Caught in transit

C.M., an American analyst, travelled to Bali alone on March 17 since her UAE residence visa had expired and he or she wished to re-enter the nation on a vacationer visa. Nevertheless, with the nation closing its borders on March 19, she has been stranded in the Indonesian resort city. She has attended a number of digital interviews and was on the verge of signing a brand new job supply. Nevertheless, the employer just isn’t open to her beginning work remotely.

“The experience has been extremely stressful. I left the UAE with the intention to return in seven days. My apartment, belongings and bank accounts are all in Dubai. I am being forced to cancel my apartment, give up my DEWA account and close my phone since the expenses add up. I have to support myself in another country without knowing how long this will go on for. I don’t appreciate my life being put on hold and my career being interrupted,” C.M. advised DailyKhaleej.

The American expat is pissed off with the shortage of transparency in how Twajudi approvals are being given. She has acquired no responses from the UAE Embassy in Jakarta or the Amer providers. She has additionally contacted the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi, the American Consulate in Dubai, the American Consulate in Bali and the American Embassy in Jakarta. “Not having information in terms of what to do and how long I may be stuck here is unnerving. The American Embassy has offered to fly me back home to the US at my own expense. The number of coronavirus cases are rising in the US. I don’t feel safe returning there and I don’t have health insurance in the US. My parents are old and are considered a high-risk group. So, I don’t want to travel across the world and put them at risk. I might as well stay where I am,” she defined.

The expat, who has lived in the UAE for three-and-a-half years, has some cash saved to fulfill these unexpected bills. She additionally secured some freelance work with a Dubai firm.

With the Bali tourism trade in limbo, a whole lot of companies are providing discounted lodging and scooter leases. Nevertheless, stranded vacationers are renting a home and transportation solely on a two-week foundation. “They can negotiate a much better price for a month as opposed to two weeks. But because we have no foresight of when we might return, we are spending more money than necessary. There should be a systemised approach to repatriating residents stranded abroad,” C.M. defined.

Honeymoon prolonged

Shervan Shivesh Soogrim and Chenelle Diane Chattergoon, each residents of Trinidad and Tobago, arrived in Bali for their honeymoon on March 14 and are now stranded for two months. Shervan has been a UAE resident for 4 years and works in the well being and security division of a maritime firm in Dubai.

Shervan Shivesh Soogrim and Chanelle Dian Chattergoon Picture Credit score: Provided

“I am able to work remotely and get my salary. Thankfully, I bought my personal laptop during the holiday. I am not guaranteed any job security. While most of my managers are supportive of my situation, some are not as understanding of how it is to get work done around here,” Shivesh Soogrim stated.

Lodging is the household’s largest expense in Bali. The couple paid Dh7,500 for their lodging in April and Dh3,500 on meals and groceries. In Could, the couple moved to a different place for Dh3,800 and paid Dh2,000 on meals bills.

“I am using my basic salary to cover food, transport and accommodation costs in Bali. There is no saving,” Shivesh Soogrim advised DailyKhaleej.

The unique plan was for Chenelle to fly again to Dubai after the honeymoon on a 90-day vacationer visa. Nevertheless, in the present state of affairs, even when the UAE opens borders for residents, Shivesh Soogrim’s spouse can not fly again with him. “Trinidad borders are also closed and all flights stand cancelled,” he added.

Stuck in Turkey

Ryan Pyle, a Canadian nationwide, is a movie and tv host in Dubai with an workplace in Jumeirah Lakes Towers. A UAE resident since 2018, Pyle has been caught in Istanbul, Turkey, for eight weeks now.

Ryan Perle Picture Credit score: Provided

He was filming for a TV sequence in Ethiopia when the UAE closed its borders on March 19. “I could have gone back to Canada, but wanted to stay in the Middle East where I could keep working in the same time zone as my main partners. I landed in Turkey because it was one of the few places I could travel to,” Pyle defined.

He’s not at risk of dropping his job however admits to his firm being in horrible monetary form. “The experience has been expensive. I was in a hotel in Istanbul for the first six weeks. Now, I have rented an apartment because this is looking like it will last much longer. The UAE has still not offered low interest or zero interest loans through financial institutions to small businesses like mine. I am still paying rent for my office in JLT. I have not received a rent holiday from my landlord,” he identified.

Pyle stated that small companies had been getting crushed in the lockdown. Nobody is commissioning new movie and tv work, he added.

“I am not interested in a repatriation flight. I will come back when Dubai and Emirates get back to work properly. I am not missing any work in Dubai, there is no work anywhere,” he added.

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[gayearthcandies]

In case y'all are wondering who is running for Prime Minister in the NDP group, his name is Jagmeet Singh.

He

-supports a progressive tax system

-supports eliminating several tax deductions available to the highest-income earners and redirect the money to low-income seniors, workers and disabled Canadians

-supports a $15/hour minimum wage

-supports a universal pharmacare system (our free healthcare is being challenged right now in ontario under doug ford who wants to create premium healthcare for the rich)

-is a strong advocate for equality amongst poc and lgbt groups

-wants to put a federal ban on carding as it is a systematic form of racism

-wants to ban handguns in individual cities should a crisis occur (yes they are legal here)

-believes the RCMP should complete LGBTQI2S+ competency training" to ensure interactions with law enforcement are not stigmatizing or traumatizing.

-supports more inclusive shelter and transitional housing spaces for lgbt kids

-advocates for Health Canada conducting research on the health care needs and experiences of LGBTQ patients and advocates for policy changes allowing people to self-declare their gender.

-supports immediately repealing the de facto BAN ON BLOOD, TISSUE AND ORGAN DONATION by men who have sex with men and trans women who have sex with men.

-wants to reduce the carbon emissions levels of Canada to 30% of 2005 levels by 2025

-supports creating more accountability in climate change policy by creating an independent officer of parliament mandated to report on interim progress on emission reductions

-supports decriminalizing possession of all drugs and treating drug use as a medical issue rather than a criminal issue

-advocates for free contraceptives for women

-FIRED a man in his party who was charged with sexual assault allegations after he would not complete a rehabilitation program in sensitivity training

And there is SO MUCH MORE

Listen y'all I don't love getting political on here but honest to god vote in your riding for your NDP candidate. People are scared to vote for them because of the cuts in work hours they instituted last time they were in office but that was FIFTEEN years ago under a different leader.

If a conservative leader is voted in that gives so much power to federal leaders like premier doug ford who mind you

-cut funds to OSAP a grant and loan system based in ontario to help university students of low income families pay for their education (last year I received enough money to almost pay my full tuition, this year I am receiving loans that dont even cover half of my school year. He has also erased the 6 month grace period to pay them back

-He has allowed graphic anti abortion billboards to be posted in Toronto (I will not be posting a picture but if you are curious there are pictures circulating. It has severely affected many women particularly those who have suffered from miscarrages)

-he has eliminated an ontario arts council which was established under the Indigenous Culture fund

-proposed ending the transition child benefit which helps low income families on welfare feed and clothe their kids

-CUT 70% OF PROVINCIAL FUNDING TO THE ANISHINABEK FISHERIES RESOURCE CENTER

-cut annual funding on stem cell research

-Cut: An unclear amount of funding from violence against women shelter services

-increased class sizes of elementary, middle and high schools (up to 40 kids I believe) and is making high school kids retain ONLINE credits OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL HOURS ON TOP OF HOMEWORK AND BANNING ELECTRONICS IN SCHOOLS

and that's just the tip of the iceberg I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of information

To find out who the NDP candidate is in your riding (because yes if you're not Canadian or have not voted before Canadian's vote for the MP candidate in their area not for the Prime Minister themselves and whichever group has the most people voted in from a.certain group dictates who the Prime Minster will be) you can go to this website

https://www.ndp.ca/your-riding

and learn more about the MP in your area.

Please my fellow Canadians our election is held this year on OCTOBER 21ST YET NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT IT. Not voting will not solve our problems. VOTE and please consider voting for you NDP candidate.

Indigenous people in Attawapiskat cannot drink their water or bathe themselves, and haven’t been able to for weeks. They called a state of emergency.

What is Justin Trudeau’s response?

1 litre per day of water for kids under 2 years old. 1.5 litres per elder. The Tribal council must pay for this water in advance before they can be reimbursed next month.

This is shameful.

https://twitter.com/CharlieAngusNDP/status/1152558561496616961

Tagging: @abpoli @politicsofcanada @onpoli @torontopoli @ontarionewsnow

[okfine0104graphicnotes]

D&AD: initial idea, research

After many brief and dissccusion for D&AD, after thinking and researching, I chose monotype for my final decision, due to the reason that I don’t think I am good at promoting brand’s value or those kind of stuff. And monotype’s brief is more like discovering the story behind communities.

Notes from briefing

The important part is to find a community that has its value and context that has a point to be presented and celebrated with type. In the begining I wasn’t sure which kind of community they want. But I found a few stuff that I was interest in.  

In the first tutorial, I have 2 very initial ideas,  the first one is ＃This is 18, which is a project that runs by the New York Times. They asked girls to share what their communities look like all over the world.  They asked young female photographers to take photos of the girls in each place and asked them about what they like and what they up to recently or giving advice to other young women.

 I like the concept of linking every young female together and it is interesting to see what other young girls life is in completely different places as myself and found out even though they are in another country that is far away, they still have the same kind of issue when I was 18. And I also found their visual design of the website really interesting. It looks like online zine, using collage style to make gifs and there is even a spotify playlist that they collected the young girls the songs are listening to, and put them together.

website link:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/11/style/this-is-18.html

“Marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, 18 means you can finally vote, sign a lease on an apartment, obtain a credit card and buy cigarettes in the United States. In the UK, China and parts of Canada, 18 grants you entrance to a pub, while for most Israelis, it means a mandatory draft into the military. By 18, one in five women across the globe will be married. Millions will enter college or university.

The young photographers were asked to document girls in their communities – taking the photos and conducting interviews themselves, with each photographer paired with a professional mentor to guide them through the process.

Featuring 21 girls from across 12 time zones, and 15 languages, the end result is a celebration of ‘girlhood’ across oceans and cultures, through girls’ eyes – from Mexico to Mississippi, Ramallah to Russia, Bangladesh to the Bronx.” （https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/this-is-18-the-new-york-times-celebrates-girlhood-with-though-provoking-project-/）

The second idea is a facebook group that created for Asian people who living abroad posting memes and stuff that happened to them or funny things happened to their immigrant family. It entertains my life a lot since I join this group and it feels like you are not alone because there are so many people out there had similar experience and sometimes sees this negative stuff from a funny perspective. It change my way of thinking when I met something that is ignorant of culture or race. 

Subtle Asian Traits  is a Facebook group dedicated to Internet memes, jokes, and discussion surrounding the Asian experience in the West. Though the posts on the page cover a large range of topics, they mainly focus on Asian culture as experienced by the children of migrants. The group has over 1 million members and has been featured in a variety of mainstream news sources for its insights into the Asian diaspora. (wiki)

memes from Subtle asian traits

But after discussing with David and people in our group,  the first idea is off brief, it doesn’t fit with the ideal of the communities monotype are seeking for.  And the asian trait is at the edge of the off brief, but if I find a smart aspect of it, it could be potential but I feel like it is too board and I decided to research more for other ideas. I went back to read the brief again, and I did a bit brainstorm. I decided to focus on the communities in Taiwan, which people don’t really know about.  

Until now, in most of the Asian countries, same-sex marriage is still illegal. Even though society is more open to different sexual orientations than before, there are still many narrow-minded people. In 2017 the Taiwanese top court decided that not protecting same-sex marriage is against the law, which will make Taiwan the first country that legalized same-sex marriage in Asia.

A panel of judges at Taiwan's top court are hearing a case that could make the island the first place in Asia to introduce gay marriage.

The case has been brought by a gay activist as well as municipal authorities from the capital, Taipei.

Taiwan's parliament has also been debating whether to pass laws that would allow same-sex marriage.

The movement has split society and prompted a conservative backlash, with vocal protests in recent months.

A panel of 14 justices are hearing arguments and will debate whether a line in Taiwan's civil code, which states that marriage is between a man and a woman, is unconstitutional.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39376423

But it also brings a huge conflict between a group of people who are homophobic and call themselves Family Guardian Coalition. They are trying to stop Legislative Yuan, which is one of the five branches of government stipulated by the Constitution of Taiwan, from changing the original law to all gender. Instead, they are hoping to make another special law for same-sex marriage which is not truly equal, because that would be creating a separation once again. Their ideals cause even more people who already don’ t understand LGBTQ have wrong impressions of them and may even go against them. They used fake news and spread it out in group chats and also sign petition to referendum against. It is an act that against human right. And the group that support Marriage equality also sign a pettition to against the Family Guardian Coalition to make another referendum to hope to remain the truly equal law. But unfortunately, they win result of referendum. It broke many LGBTQ people’s and my heart, they tore the society apart, and even cause many LGBTQ people suicide. 

The power of ignorant and fake news is terrifying and more extreme than people’s imagine. And because the Family guardian group has a certain style of making fake news, the marriage equality group people starting to make similar style of how they make fake news, instead they try to make right information on those photos so people could sent to their parents who do not quite understand LGBTQ communities and marriage quality. 

Marriage quality group information adverts(left)/ Family guardiangroup infromation adverts(right)

Marriage quality group information memes mimic family guardian group memes. 

So I present this idea to David and he suggested me to find a specific or iconic traditional Taiwanese or Chinese symbol to use it as a starting point to communicate the idea.  

I had another research which is about indigenous people’ languages in Taiwan. There are 16 main groups of indigenous people, and the problem is they do not have written characters that they couldn’t record their history on papers. They tell their story though founding member in each tribe and the main speaking languages in school is mandarin so more and more indigenous young people couldn’t speak their own language anymore, they also moved out from their villages to big cities to seek better jobs opportunities. And history and culture are dying quickly more than people’s imagine, and the government isn’t doing anything to protect their culture, because the main people in politics are Han- Chinese people. Doing anything for indigenous people does not benefit them. They keep taking more and more of their lands and limited more of the tradtional territories.

 Background: 

The original population of the island of Taiwan and its associated islands, i.e. not including Kinmen and the Matsu Islands, consisted of Taiwanese aborigines, speaking Austronesian languages and sharing mitochondrial DNA contribution with island peoples of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Immigration of Han Chinese to the Penghu islands started as early as the 13th century, while settlement of the main island occurred from the 16th century, stimulated by the import of workers from Fujian by the Dutch in the 17th century. According to governmental statistics, over 95% of the Republic of China's population is of Han Chinese ethnicity, while 2.3% are Taiwanese aborigines of Malayo-Polynesian ethnicity.  Half the population are followers of one or a mixture of 25 recognized religions. Around 93% of the religious population are followers of a mixture of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, while a minority 4.5% are followers of Christianity (include Catholics and Protestants). 

The official national language is Standard Chinese, although around 70% also speak Taiwanese Hokkien and 10% speak Hakka. Japanese speakers are becoming rare as the elderly generation who lived under Japanese rule are dying out but many young Taiwanese use English or Japanese as second language. Aboriginal languages are gradually becoming extinct as the aborigines have become acculturated despite a program by the ROC government to preserve the languages. (wiki)

Where the indigenous groups mainly live. (mostly in mountain area)

I am aware of this issue because of many young indigenous people are trying to help to protect their lands and culture, and are shown on social media. But I never research that deep into this topic. After researching I felt like I need to do this project to bring more awareness to this topic. Even though I am just a nobody, but someone has to do something to start changing situation.    

I found out that president Tsai had only officially apologized to indigenous people for the first time in history and admit that before not protecting indigenous culture and lands is a mistake. She made an indigenous history justice committee to hope that they could improve the laws which to protect their rights.

President Tsai Apologized video

https://indigenous-justice.president.gov.tw/EN

But I don’t want to be too political on doing this project because it says on the brief that they don’t want anything too political.  The more I research I got more confuse and lost. 

So I try to focus on the point that they don’t have their written characters, but now they are using English letters (Latin letters) to spell and write their languages. It could trace back to  the past, when Dutch people came to colonized in Taiwan, they started to use Latin letters to spell their languages, and use to o preach Christian and wrote the first bible in one of indigeous language:  

The Sinckan language, spoken by the Siraya people who lived in what is now Tainan, was employed by Dutch missionaries to facilitate both missionary and government affairs during the reign of Dutch East India Company in Taiwan. They also created a romanized script, compiled a dictionary of the language, and taught the natives how to write their own language with these romanized characters. 

And they indigenes people just keep this way of recording until now. Although, when they once try to use Japanese characters and Chinese letters to spell out their languages through the colonized history. But it won’t match with how they actually pronounce it so they went back to use Latin letters instead.  That also causes a huge problem, because the main language Taiwanese use is traditional Chinese letters. People aren’t familiar with Latin or English letters. The government used to refuse them to spell their original name in their languages. The government forced them to have a Chinese name and only until recently they could use Latin letters to register their name in the official document.

There are so much could be done to protect their culture and languages, they are the owner of this island and sadly, no one is respecting them. Their culture is so beautiful which are sustainable and loving the motherland, which is the stuff we need now due to climate change and capitalism. who are we to force them to fit in the “modern society” which took away their identity. 

Sinckan manscirpt ( right)of a land selling contract with chinese letters(left).

Bunun symbol for their calender which recorded when to hunt or when to harvest.

Paiwan snakes pattern.

16 tribes logo pattern design 

Kavalan’s textile pattern.

Atayal knit their characters in textile which represent number.

Atayal illustration.

Taiwanese indigenous groups are famous for their unique patterns, every tribe has its own special patterns of textile or symbol to present their spirit.

So I try to research more about indigenous people’s pattern to try to find insight and common to build an idea into my design. But I found out that it is so difficult, there is no website that recorded officially or clearly. There are also various meaning and story behind each group and their patterns. The lack of information made it more difficult and I spent too much time to research, now I don’t really have time to work on it. All of their languages are almost completely different. My first idea is to present 26 Latin characters with their 16pattern but the number isn’t right. It doesn’t make sense and I don’t want to be inappropriate to use their pattern or symbols.

I message one of the facebook pages which runs by the indigenous people that how can I design and find a common point to make my project happen. They just told me to talk to the tribe which is kind of impossible because I can’t go back to Taiwan now.

And I think of an idea is, their common is they have their own patterns and symbol in each group, so what I could think of is making an example of how they could create stamps in their patterns and those patterns could make it into both Latin letters and Chinese letters.

Caculating using 16 tribes as main point and create 26 latin character. (idea 1)

Linocut idea sketch.(idea2)

[spicynbachili1]

Arab refugees in Bangkok long for home amid immigration crackdown | Refugees

Bangkok – Six years in the past, a number of days after taking his highschool exams, Ibrahim and his household fled Syria to Lebanon the place they boarded a flight to Bangkok.

Arriving within the Thai capital on vacationer visas, they skilled freedom away from the horrors of battle in Syria. 

However since their visas expired, they’ve been dwelling as undocumented migrants.

“We considered Thailand as a transit level,” Ibrahim advised Al Jazeera, “and that we might keep one or two years. But after six years, our lives are caught in limbo.”

In Thailand, Ibrahim’s household utilized for resettlement within the US solely to attend for 2 years with no progress.

They then requested resettlement in Canada, restarting your complete course of.

In Bangkok, it takes a mean of three to 4 years to finish the resettlement course of, leaving many refugees weak and pissed off. 

“We might like to reside right here, it is just like the Center East. Persons are pleasant and can speak to you, in contrast to folks in Europe who will not say hiya,” stated Ibrahim. “We not dream of peace, solely of a passport.”

Thailand just isn’t a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Conference and the Thai Immigration Act of 1979 views anybody overstaying their visa as an unlawful immigrant, together with asylum seekers and refugees.

Refugees and asylum seekers are caught up in a police raid and transported to an immigration detention centre [Al Jazeera]

The UNHCR advised Al Jazeera that Thailand is residence to 103,000 refugees with an estimated 6,000 city refugees from nations together with Pakistan, Somalia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, and Syria.

Thailand was among the many final nations to keep up a consulate in Damascus, making it an obtainable visa at a time when doorways have been shutting to these fleeing Syria.

Mirvat got here to Thailand in 2012 quickly after graduating from Damascus College. 

Six years later, she stays in Bangkok the place she has had 4 youngsters however has not been capable of pursue her profession. 

“Probably the most troublesome factor is that our children cannot attend faculty and don’t have anything to do,” she advised Al Jazeera. 

The best concern going through Bangkok’s city refugees is arrest and in consequence, many keep inside their houses for lengthy stretches of time.

“I can not go to the market and am scared to go to the hospital. We really feel scared by every little thing,” stated Mivrat.

Syrian-Palestinian refugees promote conventional meals each Friday on the Islamic Middle in Bangko [Panithan Kitsakul]

Refugees’ fears have lately been heightened by a significant police operation that started in October with the appointment of Surachet Hakparn, the brand new immigration bureau commissioner of the Royal Thai Police. 

“Operation X-Ray Outlaw Foreigner” goals to spherical up and detain undocumented migrants, with asylum seekers and refugees caught up within the clampdown.

Police raids have led to lots of of refugees and asylum seekers being held at immigration detention centres.

Final month, the immigration bureau additionally revoked bail for undocumented migrants who might have beforehand been launched on 50,000 baht ($1,500).

An estimated 200 refugees from Syria have been amongst these summoned again into detention.

The recurrent fable that refugees are a safety menace and a drain on society is just not true. Palestinians and Syrians are extremely productive and resourceful.

Evan Jones, Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Community

Refugees beforehand granted bail are actually topic to elevated harassment and arrest, stated migrants and rights teams.

“The immigration detention centre just isn’t designed for long-term keep, however lots of of detainees keep for multiple yr,” Puttanee Kangkun of Fortify Rights advised Al Jazeera.

Most are overcrowded with greater than 300 detainees held in a cell designed for 70 inmates. 

In violation of kids’s rights beneath worldwide legislation, youngsters are separated from mother and father and siblings whereas unaccompanied boys beneath the age of 12 are held alongside grownup males.

Formally, Thai authorities declare that some refugees have pretend UNHCR playing cards and that the operation will verify their paperwork, and re-release real asylum seekers on bail.

Nonetheless, native refugee rights teams advised Al Jazeera on situation of anonymity that they have been sceptical, noting that the Thai authorities works intently with UNHCR and might simply verify its database. 

“Beside the UNHCR card, which has virtually no that means beneath home authorized provisions, [refugees] don’t have any different authorized safety,” stated Puttanee Kangkun.

‘We don’t ask for cash, solely to be resettled’

The hostile surroundings has made a nasty scenario worse for refugees. Over the previous yr, Thai immigration police have focused African immigrants in Bangkok in what has been criticised as racial profiling. 

In comparison with Somali, Nigerian and different African nationalities, Arabs have had moments the place they have been capable of evade authorities extra simply and luxuriate in a point of higher freedom.

Ibrahim and his mom used to complement their remittances by promoting Arab road meals together with shawarma, hummus, and bread at neighborhood occasions and close to native mosques. However the latest clampdown on immigration has put a cease to this.

Basil, a 20-year outdated Palestinian refugee from Syria, defined: “For a very long time, I might exit, eat, get together and have a life right here. However that has all modified now.”

“Soi Arab”, the Center Japanese quarter within the coronary heart of Bangkok’s vacationer district of Nana, is residence to eating places the place younger Syrian and Palestinian refugees work with out documentation. 

“I used to be paid 250 baht ($7.50) a day for a 12-hour shift washing dishes and the proprietor gave leftover meals for me and my household,” stated Basil. 

But lately, fearing police raids, house owners are asking refugee staff to remain residence. 

“No person is working now,” stated Basil.

Regardless of the latest immigration raids, refugees Al Jazeera spoke to weren’t vital of the Thai authorities. 

“We really feel deserted by the United Nations,” stated Mivrat. “We don’t ask for cash, solely to be resettled.”

‘Soi Arab’ in Nana district is fashionable with Center Japanese vacationers and a few refugees have discovered work there [Kittipot Promprakai/Al Jazeera]

Sources advised Al Jazeera that round 20 % of the refugees from Syria in Thailand have been resettled, which is excessive in comparison with the lower than 1 % international common for third nation resettlement. 

The bulk have been Syrian passport holders, with solely round 50 people left in Thailand.

These caught in Bangkok are primarily Palestinian refugees whose choices are extra restricted. 

No Palestinian refugees have been resettled in 2018, whereas resettlement to the US has floor to a halt for the reason that election of President Trump. 

“For a lot of Syrian and Palestinian refugees, the unhappy actuality is that they could by no means be thought-about for resettlement in a 3rd nation,” Evan Jones of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Community advised Al Jazeera.

“With international resettlement numbers dropping, these people could also be caught on the fringes of Thai society for years and even a long time forward, unable to entry a few of their most simple human rights.”

If given a alternative, many Palestinian refugees from Syria would settle in Thailand. The bulk interviewed for this story have college levels and had established careers earlier than fleeing the battle.

However inside some sections of Thai society, Arab refugees are perceived as posing a safety menace.

“The Thai authorities ought to settle for the fact that not each refugee might resettle in third nations, so the idea of native integration must be considered in steadiness with nationwide safety considerations for a sustainable resolution,” stated Puttanee Kangkun of Fortify Rights.

Jones added: “The recurrent fable that refugees are a safety menace and a drain on society is just not true. Palestinians and Syrians are extremely productive and resourceful and produce a variety of expertise and information that would assist profit Thai society.”

Even when the Syrian battle ends, Palestinian refugees who travelled to Thailand on now-expired emergency paperwork have misplaced the best to return to Palestine. Renewing their journey paperwork has additionally change into rather more troublesome for the reason that Syrian consulate in Bangkok closed in 2017. 

Refugees that Al Jazeera spoke with estimate that there are 400 Palestinian refugees from Syria remaining in Bangkok, with one other 201 from Iraq and 15 from Gaza. 

For a few of them, resettlement shall be to a fourth fairly than a 3rd nation. 

Asma was born in Haifa in 1940 and as a younger lady fled Palestine for Iraq. She was displaced once more by Iraq’s descent into violence after 2003, dwelling for 3 years in a refugee camp in Cyprus earlier than arriving in Thailand. 

“I requested the UN to ship me residence to Haifa,” she stated. “I simply wish to be in my nation.”

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Ernie Barnes

Ernest Eugene Barnes Jr. (July 15, 1938 – April 27, 2009) was an American artist, well known for his unique style of elongation and movement. He was also a professional football player, actor and author.

Early life

Childhood

Ernest Barnes Jr. was born during the Jim Crow in "the bottom" community of Durham, North Carolina, near the Hayti District of the city. He had a younger brother, James (b. 1942), as well as a half-brother, Benjamin B. Rogers Jr. (1920–1970). Ernest Jr. was nicknamed "June". His father, Ernest E. Barnes Sr. (–1966), worked as a shipping clerk for Liggett Myers Tobacco Company. His mother, Fannie Mae Geer (1905–2004), oversaw the household staff for a prominent Durham attorney and local Board of Education member, Frank L. Fuller Jr.

On days when Fannie allowed "June" (Barnes' nickname to family and childhood friends) to accompany her to work, Mr. Fuller encouraged him to peruse the art books and listen to classical music. The young Ernest was intrigued and captivated by the works of master artists. By the time Barnes entered the first grade, he was familiar with the works of such masters as Toulouse-Lautrec, Delacroix, Rubens and Michelangelo. When he entered junior high school, he could appreciate, as well as decode, many of the cherished masterpieces within the walls of mainstream museums – although it would be many more years before he was allowed entrance because of segregation.

A self-described chubby and unathletic child, Barnes was taunted and bullied by classmates. He continually sought refuge in his sketchbooks, finding the less-traveled parts of campus away from other students. One day Ernest was drawing in his notebook in a quiet area of the school. He was discovered hiding there by the masonry teacher, Tommy Tucker, who was also the weightlifting coach and a former athlete. He was intrigued with Barnes' drawings, so he asked the aspiring artist about his grades and goals. Tucker shared his own experience of how bodybuilding improved his strength and outlook on life. That one encounter would begin Barnes' discipline and dedication that would permeate his life. In his senior year at Hillside High School, Barnes became the captain of the football team and state champion in the shot put.

College education

Barnes attended racially segregated schools. In 1956 he graduated from Hillside High School with 26 athletic scholarship offers. Segregation prevented him from attending nearby Duke University or the University of North Carolina. His mother promised him a car if he lived at home so he attended the all-Black North Carolina College at Durham (formerly North Carolina College for Negroes, now North Carolina Central University). At North Carolina College he majored in art on a full athletic scholarship. His track coach was Dr. Leroy T. Walker. Barnes played the football positions of tackle and center at NCC.

At age 18, on a college art class field trip to the newly desegregated North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Barnes inquired where he could find "paintings by Negro artists". The docent responded, "Your people don't express themselves that way". 23 years later, in 1979, when Barnes returned to the museum for a solo exhibition, North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt attended.

In 1990 Barnes was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by North Carolina Central University.

In 1999 Barnes was bestowed "The University Award", the highest honor by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors.

Professional football

Baltimore Colts (1959–60)

In December 1959 Barnes was drafted in the 10th round by the then-World Champion Baltimore Colts. He was originally selected in the 8th-round by the Washington Redskins, who renounced the pick minutes after discovering he was a Negro.

Shortly after his 22nd birthday, while at the Colts training camp, Barnes was interviewed by N.P. Clark, sportswriter for the Baltimore News-Post newspaper. Until then Barnes was always known by his birth name, Ernest Barnes. But when Clark's article appeared on July 20, 1960, it referred to him as "Ernie Barnes," which changed his name and life forever.

Titans of New York (1960)

Barnes was the last cut of the Colts' training camp. After Baltimore released Barnes, the newly formed Titans of New York immediately signed him because the team had first option on any player released within the league.

Barnes loathed being on the Titans. He said, "(New York team organization) was a circus of ineptitude. The equipment was poor, the coaches not as knowledgeable as the ones in Baltimore. We were like a group of guys in the neighborhood who said let's pretend we're pros."

After their seventh game on October 9, 1960 at Jeppesen Stadium, his teammate Howard Glenn died. Barnes asked for his release two days later. The cause of Glenn's death was reported as a broken neck. However, Barnes and other teammates have long attributed it to heatstroke. In a later interview, Barnes said, "They never really said what he died of. (Coach) Sammy Baugh said he'd broken his neck in a game the Sunday before. But how could that be? How could he have hit in practice all week with a broken neck? What he died of, I think, was more like heat exhaustion. I told them I didn't want to play on a team like this."

San Diego Chargers (1960–62)

Barnes decided to accept a previous offer from Coach Al Davis at the Los Angeles Chargers. Barnes joined their team at mid-season as a member of their taxi squad. The following season in 1961 the team moved to San Diego. It was there Barnes met teammate Jack Kemp, and the two men would share a very close lifelong friendship.

During the off-seasons with the Chargers, Barnes was program director at San Diego's Southeast YMCA working with parolees from the California Youth Authority. He also worked as the Sports Editor for The Voice, a local San Diego newspaper, writing a weekly column called "A Matter of Sports."

Barnes also illustrated several articles for San Diego Magazine during the off-seasons in 1962 and 1963.

Barnes' first television interview as a professional football player and artist was in 1962 on The Regis Philbin Show on KGTV in San Diego. It was Philbin's first talk show. They would see each other again 45 years later when Philbin attended the tribute to Barnes in New York City.

Denver Broncos (1963–64)

Midway through Barnes' second season with the Chargers, he was cut after a series of injuries. He was then signed to the Denver Broncos.

Barnes was often fined by Denver Coach Jack Faulkner when caught sketching during team meetings. One of the sketches that he was fined $100 for sold years later for $1000.

Many times during breaks, Barnes would run off the field onto the sideline to give his offensive line coach Red Miller the scraps of paper of his sketches and notes.

"During a timeout you've got nothing to do – you're not talking – you're just trying to breathe, mostly. Nothing to take out that little pencil and write down what you saw. The shape of the linemen. The body language a defensive lineman would occupy... his posture... What I see when you pull. The reaction of the defense to your movement. The awareness of the lines within the movement, the pattern within the lines, the rhythm of movement. A couple of notes to me would denote an action... an image that I could instantly recreate in my mind. Some of those notes have been made into paintings. Quite a few, really."

On Barnes' 1964 Denver Broncos Topps football card he is shown wearing jersey #55 although he never played in that number. His jersey was #62.

Barnes was called "Big Rembrandt" by his Denver teammates. Coincidentally, Barnes and Rembrandt share the same birthday.

Canadian Football League

In 1965, after his second season with the Broncos, Barnes signed with the Saskatchewan Roughriders in Canada. In the final quarter of their last exhibition game, Barnes fractured his right foot, effectively ending his professional football career.

Retirement

Shortly after his final football game, Barnes went to the 1965 NFL owners meeting in Houston in hopes of becoming the league's official artist. There he was introduced to New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin, who was intrigued by Barnes and his art. He paid for Barnes to bring his paintings to New York City. Later they met at a gallery and unbeknownst to Barnes, three art critics were there to evaluate his paintings. They told Werblin that Barnes was "the most expressive painter of sports since George Bellows."

In what was one of the most unusual posts in the history of the NFL, Werblin retained Barnes as a salaried player, but positioned him in front of the canvas, rather than on the football field. Werblin told Barnes, "You have more value to the country as an artist than as a football player."

Barnes' November 1966 debut solo exhibition, hosted by Werblin at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City was critically acclaimed and all the paintings sold.

In 1971 Barnes wrote a series of essays (illustrated with his own drawings) in the Gridiron newspaper titled "I Hate the Game I Love" (with Neil Amdur). These articles became the beginning manuscript of his autobiography, later-published in 1995 titled From Pads to Palette which chronicles his transition from professional football to his art career.

In 1993 Barnes was selected to the "Black College Football 100th Year All-Time Team" by the Sheridan Broadcasting Network.

Artwork

Barnes credits his college art instructor Ed Wilson for laying the foundation for his development as an artist. Wilson was a sculptor who instructed Barnes to paint from his own life experiences. "He made me conscious of the fact that the artist who is useful to America is one who studies his own life and records it through the medium of art, manners and customs of his own experiences."

All his life, Barnes was ambivalent about his football experience. In interviews and in personal appearances, Barnes said he hated the violence and the physical torment of the sport. However, his years as an athlete gave him unique, in-depth observations. "(Wilson) told me to pay attention to what my body felt like in movement. Within that elongation, there's a feeling. And attitude and expression. I hate to think had I not played sports what my work would look like."

Barnes sold his first painting "Slow Dance" at age 21 in 1959 for $90 to Boston Celtic Sam Jones. It was subsequently lost in a fire at Jones' home.

Numerous artists have been influenced by Barnes' art and unique style. Accordingly, several copyright infringement lawsuits have been settled and are currently pending.

Framing

Ernie Barnes framed his paintings with distressed wood in homage to his father. In his 1995 autobiography, Barnes wrote of his father: “... with so little education, he had worked so hard for us. His legacy to me was his effort, and that was plenty. He knew absolutely nothing about art.”

Weeks before Ernie Barnes’ first solo art exhibition in 1966, he was at the family home in Durham as his father lay in the hospital after suffering a stroke. He noticed the usually well-maintained white picketed fence had gone untended since his father’s illness. Days later, Ernest E. Barnes Sr. died. “I placed a painting against the fence and stood away and had a look. I was startled at the marriage between the old wood fence and the painting. It was perfect. In tribute, Daddy’s fence would hug all my paintings in a prestigious New York gallery. That would have made him smile.”

Eyes closed

A consistent and distinct feature in Barnes' work is the closed eyes of his subjects. "It was in 1971 when I conceived the idea of The Beauty of the Ghetto as an exhibition. And I showed it to some people who were Black to get a reaction. And from one (person) it was very negative. And when I began to express my points of view (to this) professional man, he resisted the notion. And as a result of his comments and his attitude I began to see, observe, how blind we are to one another's humanity. Blinded by a lot of things that have, perhaps, initiated feelings in that light. We don't see into the depths of our interconnection. The gifts, the strength and potential within other human beings. We stop at color quite often. So one of the things we have to be aware of is who we are in order to have the capacity to like others. But when you cannot visualize the offerings of another human being you're obviously not looking at the human being with open eyes." "We look upon each other and decide immediately: This person is black, so he must be... This person lives in poverty, so he must be..."

Jewish community influence

Moving to an all-Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles known as the Fairfax District in 1971 was a major turning point in Barnes' life and art.

"Fairfax enlivened me to everyday life themes," he said, "and forced me to look at my life – the way I had grown up, the customs within my community versus the customs in the Jewish community. Their customs were documented, ours were not. Because we were so clueless that our own culture had value and because of the phrase 'Black is Beautiful' had just come into fashion, Black people were just starting to appreciate themselves as a people. But when it was said, 'I'm Black and I'm Proud,' I said, 'proud of what?' And that question of 'proud of what' led to a series of paintings that became “The Beauty of the Ghetto.'"

"The Beauty of the Ghetto" exhibition

In response to the 1960s "Black is beautiful" cultural movement and James Brown's 1968 "Say it Loud: I'm Black and I'm Proud" song, Barnes created The Beauty of the Ghetto exhibition of 35 paintings that toured major American cities from 1972 to 1979 hosted by dignitaries, professional athletes and celebrities.

Of this exhibition, Barnes said, "I am providing a pictorial background for an understanding into the aesthetics of black America. It is not a plea to people to continue to live there (in the ghetto) but for those who feel trapped, it is...a challenge of how beautiful life can be."

When the exhibition was on view in 1974 at the Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, Rep. John Conyers stressed the important positive message of the exhibit in the Congressional Record.

Sports art

The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee named Barnes "Sports Artist of the 1984 Olympic Games". LAOOC President Peter V. Ueberroth said Barnes and his art "captured the essence of the Olympics" and "portray the city's ethnic diversity, the power and emotion of sports competition, the singleness of purpose and hopes that go into the making of athletes the world over." Barnes was commissioned to create five Olympic-themed paintings and serve as an official Olympic spokesman to encourage inner city youth.

1985: Barnes was named the first "Sports Artist of the Year" by the United States Sports Academy.

1987: Barnes created Fastbreak, a commissioned painting of the World Champion Los Angeles Lakers basketball team that included Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis and Michael Cooper.

1996: Carolina Panthers football team owners Rosalind and Jerry Richardson (Barnes' former Colts teammate) commissioned Barnes to create the large painting Victory in Overtime (approximately 7 ft. x 14 ft.). It was unveiled before the team's 1996 inaugural season and hangs permanently in the owner's suite at the stadium. Richardson and Barnes were Baltimore Colts teammates briefly in 1960.

1996: To commemorate their 50th anniversary in 1996, the National Basketball Association commissioned Barnes to create a painting with the theme, "Where we were, where we are, and where we are going." The painting, The Dream Unfolds hangs in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. A limited edition of lithographs were made, with the first 50 prints going to each of the NBA's 50th Anniversary All-Time Team.

2004: Barnes was named "America's Best Painter of Sports" by the American Sport Art Museum & Archives.

Other notable sports commissions include paintings for the New Orleans Saints, Oakland Raiders and Boston Patriots football team owners.

"The Bench" painting

Shortly after Barnes was drafted by the Baltimore Colts, Barnes was invited to see their Colts' NFL Championship Game vs. the New York Giants at Memorial Stadium in Maryland on December 27, 1959. The Colts won 31–16 and Barnes was filled with layers of emotion after watching the game from the Colts' bench. At age 21, he had just signed his football contract and met his new teammates Johnny Unitas, Jim Parker, Lenny Moore, Art Donovan, Gino Marchetti, Alan Ameche and "Big Daddy" Lipscomb.

After he returned home, without making any preliminary sketches, he went directly to a blank canvas to record his point of view. Using a palette knife, "painting in quick, direct movements hoping to capture the vision...before it evaporated," Barnes said, he created "The Bench" in less than an hour. Throughout his life, The Bench remained in Barnes' possession, even taking it with him to all his football training camps and hiding it under his bed. It would be the only painting Barnes would never sell, despite many substantial offers, including a $25,000 bid at his first show in 1966.

In 2014, Barnes' wife Bernie presented The Bench painting to the Pro Football Hall of Fame for their permanent collection in Canton, Ohio.

"The Sugar Shack" painting

Barnes created the painting The Sugar Shack in 1971. It gained international exposure when it was used on the Good Times television series and on the 1976 Marvin Gaye album I Want You.

According to Barnes, he created the original version of The Sugar Shack after reflecting upon his childhood, during which he was not "able to go to a dance." In a 2008 interview, Barnes said, "The Sugar Shack is a recall of a childhood experience. It was the first time my innocence met with the sins of dance. The painting transmits rhythm so the experience is re-created in the person viewing it. To show that African-Americans utilize rhythm as a way of resolving physical tension."

The Sugar Shack has been known to art critics for embodying the style of art composition known as "Black Romantic," which, according to Natalie Hopkinson of The Washington Post, is the "visual-art equivalent of the Chitlin' circuit."

When Barnes first created The Sugar Shack, he included his hometown radio station WSRC on a banner. (He incorrectly listed the frequency as 620, though it was actually 1410. Barnes confused what he used to hear WSRC's on-air personality Norfley Whitted saying "620 on your dial" when Whitted was at his former station WDNC in the early 1950s.)

After Marvin Gaye asked him for permission to use the painting as an album cover, Barnes then augmented the painting by adding references that allude to Gaye's album, including banners hanging from the ceiling to promote the album's singles.

During the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever anniversary television special on March 25, 1983, tribute was paid to The Sugar Shack with a dance interpretation of the painting. It was also during this telecast that Michael Jackson introduced his famous "moonwalk" dance.

The original piece is currently owned by Jim and Jeannine Epstein, and is on display at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. A duplicate created by Barnes was created in 1976 on display at the California African American Museum (CAAM).

Music album covers

Barnes' work appears on the following album covers:

The Sugar Shack painting on Marvin Gaye's 1976 I Want You

The Disco painting on self-titled 1978 Faith, Hope & Charity

Donald Byrd and 125th Street, NYC painting on self-titled 1979 album

Late Night DJ painting on Curtis Mayfield's 1980 Something to Believe In

The Maestro painting on The Crusaders' 1984 Ghetto Blaster

Head Over Heels painting on The Crusaders' 1986 The Good and Bad Times

In Rapture painting on B.B. King's 2000 Making Love is Good For You

Other notable art and exhibitions

1992: In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Mayor Tom Bradley used Barnes' painting Growth Through Limits as an inspirational billboard in the inner-city. Barnes contributed $1,000 to the winner of a slogan contest among the city's junior high school students that best represented the painting.

1995: Barnes' work was included in the traveling group exhibition 20th Century Masterworks of African-American Artists II.

1998: Barnes' painting The Advocate was donated to the North Carolina Central University School of Law by a private collector. Barnes felt compelled to create the painting from his "concern with the just application of the law... the integrity of the legal process for all people, but especially those without resource or influence."

2001: While watching the tragic events of 9/11, Barnes created the painting In Remembrance. It was formally unveiled at the Seattle Art Museum. It was later acquired on behalf of the City of Philadelphia and donated to its African American Museum. A limited number of giclée prints were sold with 100% of the proceeds going to the Hero Scholarship Fund, which provides college tuition and expenses to children of Pennsylvania police and fire personnel killed in the line of duty.

2005: Three of Barnes' original paintings were exhibited at London's Whitechapel Gallery in the 2005 Back to Black: Art, Cinema & Racial Imaginary art exhibition.

2005: Kanye West commissioned Barnes to create a painting to depict his life-changing experience following his near-fatal car crash. A Life Restored measures 9 ft. x 10 ft. In the center of the painting is a large angel reaching out to a much smaller figure of West.

October 2007: Barnes' final public exhibition. The National Football League and Time Warner sponsored A Tribute to Artist and NFL Alumni Ernie Barnes in New York City.

At the time of his passing, Barnes had been working on an exhibition Liberating Humanity From Within which featured a majority of paintings he created in the last few years of his life. Plans are under way for the exhibition to travel throughout the country and abroad.

Television and movies

Barnes appeared on a 1967 episode of the game show To Tell the Truth. The panelists correctly guessed Barnes was the professional football player-turned-artist.

Barnes played Deke Coleman in the 1969 motion picture Number One, which stars Charlton Heston and Jessica Walter. Barnes played Dr. Penfield in the 1971 movie Doctors' Wives, which starred Dyan Cannon, Richard Crenna, Gene Hackman and Carroll O'Connor.

In 1971 Barnes, along with Mike Henry, created the Super Comedy Bowl, a variety show CBS television special which showcased pro athletes with celebrities such as John Wayne, Frank Gifford, Alex Karras, Joe Namath, Jack Lemmon, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett and Tony Curtis. A second special aired in 1972.

Throughout the Good Times television series (1974–79) most of the paintings by the character J.J. are works by Ernie Barnes. However a few images, including "Black Jesus" in the first season (1974), were not painted by Barnes. The Sugar Shack made its debut on the show's fourth season (1976–77) during the opening and closing credits. In the fifth season (1977–78) The Sugar Shack was only used in the closing credits for five early episodes during that season. In the sixth season (1978–79), The Sugar Shack was only used in opening credits for the first eight episodes and in the closing credits for five early episodes during that season. In the fifth and sixth seasons (1977–79), The Sugar Shack appears in the background of the Evans family apartment. Barnes had a bit part on two episodes of Good Times: The Houseguest (February 18, 1975) and Sweet Daddy Williams (January 20, 1976).

Barnes' artwork was also used on many television series, including Columbo, The White Shadow, Dream On, The Hughleys, The Wayans Bros., Wife Swap, and Soul Food, and in the movies Drumline and Boyz n the Hood.

In 1981 Barnes played baseball catcher Josh Gibson of the Negro League in the television movie Don't Look Back: The Story of Leroy ‘Satchel' Paige with Lou Gossett Jr. playing Paige.

The 2016 film Southside with You (about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date) prominently features Barnes' work in an early scene where the two characters visit an art exhibition.

Death

Barnes passed away on Monday evening, April 27, 2009 at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California from myeloid leukemia. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in two places: at his hometown Durham, North Carolina, near the site of where his family home once stood, and at the beach in Carmel, California, one of his favorite cities.