The King of Pop Goes to that Great Mega Concert Venue in the Sky

HEART-BREAKING SURPRISE!

Michael Jackson dies in LA hospital

LOS ANGELES - Michael Jackson's brother says it's believed that the pop star died of cardiac arrest.

This was the statement let out by Jermaine Jackson, Michael's brother, who cautioned at a hospital press conference Thursday that the cause of his death would not be known until an autopsy was performed. He said Michael Jackson's personal doctor and paramedics tried to resuscitate him at his home in Holmby Hills. A team of doctors at UCLA Medical Center also tried for more than an hour.

Los Angeles police Lt. Gregg Strenk said at a separate news conference that police robbery-homicide detectives have been ordered to investigate, which is common in a high-profile case. Strenk says the coroner's office, which will handle inquiries into the type of death, is taking possession of the body.

BREAKING NEWS! CONNECTICUT BLOGGER IS ARRESTED FOR INCITING POLITICAL VIOLENCE

This photo provided by State Capitol Police shows Harold 'Hal' Turner of North Bergen, NJ being arraigned in Hartford CT after being arrested in New Jersey and extradicted to Connecticut to face charges...

Turner of North Bergen, N.J., was charged with one count of inciting injury to persons or property for using his blog to incite readers 'to take up arms' against Connecticut lawmakers, Sen. Andrew McDonald and Rep. Michael Lawlor. He stood with his attorney Matthew Potter during arraignment this morning in Hartford Superior Court in Hartford, Conn. He could face a third-degree assault charge and possibly a hate crime, as well as crimes for inciting violence against lawmakers. He could face up to life in prison. But unlikely to get it....

To Understand AIG, You Have to know C.V. Starr

AIG is currently in a legal battle with its old CEO and perhaps greatest booster and benefactor, Maurice Greenberg, who took the company from a small maritime and cargo insurer with some clients in the Pacific market to the world's largest insurance company, and no. 7 in the world.

"Mo" or "Hank" Greenberg allegedly took or mismanaged or misappropriated $4.3 billion in trust fund assets of an AIG entity Starr International, also formerly known as C.V. Starr & Company. This company Greenberg argues is a stand-alone, independent, non-affilated company in no way owned or influenced by AIG, at least on paper no doubt anyway. And probably not in the course of conduct, another legal argument which may have legs. But by no means believe that is the truth - AIG is C.V. Starr & Co. and the reverse is even more true....as noted:

Cornelius Vander Starr
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cornelius Vander Starr (October 15, 1892 – December 20, 1968), an American businessman and Office of Strategic Services operative who founded the American International Group (AIG) insurance corporation.

(a 1910s - WWI young man, a 1920s 30-something wildcatter in China, a 1950s and 60s gray flannel suit guy. btw - did you say OSS? as in pre-CIA? probably for both wars)

Starr was born in Fort Bragg, California, where his Dutch father was a railroad engineer. He began his first business, selling ice-cream, at the age of nineteen. In 1914, he moved to San Francisco, where he sold auto insurance by day while studying for the California bar exam.

He joined the U.S. army in 1918 but was not sent overseas. Instead, he joined the Pacific Mail Steamship Company as a clerk in Yokohama, Japan. Later that year, he travelled to Shanghai where he worked for several insurance businesses.

(note the American West, the railroads, the Dutch of that time - who were racist and brutal - and his unusual but not necessarily unpredictable move to Asia. America was moving west alright, and they needed an agent on the ground there, up comes this young new recruit. what was his draw to Asia?)

In 1919 he founded AIG, then known as "American Asiatic Underwriters". AIG left China in early 1949, as Mao Zedong led the advance of the Communist People's Liberation Army on Shanghai,[1][2] and Starr moved the company headquarters to its current home in New York City.[3] AIG was once the world's largest insurance company, and the sixth-largest company in the United States according to the 2007 Forbes Global 2000 list.

(the name AAU says it all. the intent was to exploit the Asain shipping markets of that day. how was he able to start an insurance company after being there no more than a year? i dunno, but it was all good, until Mao said enuf. now i understand why...the West was destroying his country and his people, and he had had enuf.....so take the money and run. btw, they didn't even build the building. AIG was thought to be what at that time they were for sure, a 2nd rate company that couldn't even afford to build its own skyscraper palace, it had to buy one used...)

The C. V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University was named for Starr in recognition of an endowment gift by C. V. Starr Foundation in 1981. The C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley was completed and dedicated in October 2007.

(guilt breeds philanthropy. think carnegie, rockefeller, gates, ford - all monopolists, all ruthless against the competition, seen as mean-spirited. these are the people that due to their cruelty to real people they have to build mounuments of stone to show they were actually good people instead)

Starr is the uncle of lawyer and former solicitor general Kenneth Starr. (sheesh - who knew? can you spell Richard Scaife?)

So what have we learned? Well, if the company can say anything, it can say the corporate culture was driven by a philosophy one should re-examine a little closer. It's the product of a person who lurked in the dark corners of the world as a spy, whose company may well have been a front company for the American intelligence community, a smuggler of information or whatever else. Someone and something that was set up to serve the purpose of America.

SO is the largest insurer in the world a hybrid hidden office of the CIA? Could that be the pose for which this lady strikes? It would be a good cover for a vast many of its executives to come to and interact and exchange. The money's close by too, so they have access when they need it. What a perfect cover ......

We have learned that Mr. Starr was if nothing else a mysterious man of modern day America. Not a Rockefeller or Gates, whose names you know. And not seasoned icons you know by name...you know you're in good hands with Allstate, or that State Farm is there, or you're under the umbrella of Travelers, or even who that duck is - AFLAC! You know Barclays sounds like the Brits, or Generali sounds like Italia (but you may not know that they sold policies to the Jews, but never paid on them for death during and after WWII)...even Tokio Marine you know is from Japan, or at least Asia, but AIG? You just never knew, never heard of them until now (unless you were born after 1990).

Own a Piece of the Rock - Like a Good Neighbor!

So now AIG is struggling with stock prices of $1.53 share as of June 15th 2009. Very bad. And 70% of it is owned by the U.S. government - oh that's right, US! So given that, it really makes sense to learn something about what you bought. Given the gas, maintenance and care you're gonna hafta give it, you might as well know the lemon you've bought into. Enjoy!!

Caribana's Coming F'Real Folks!

Toronto Caribana festival at Exhibition Place
Originally uploaded by eastvillagepeeps

Toronto's Caribana Festival from late July through early August is only a month away, folks! Check it out if you can, it's the biggest baddest most exciting outdoor and city-wide festival in North America, 2nd only to Rio. This bad boy is DA BOMBBBBBE!!

As you can see, visibly millins stream onto this city and its party islands. The views - people, places & things - are simply scintillating. You will enjoy and come back for more and much more for many years to come.

Caribana - July 23 through August 2, Toronto ON Canada

A Quiet But Visually Effective Black Pioneer Robert Colescott

Robert Colescott, Painter Who Toyed With Race and Sex, Dies at 83


By ROBERTA SMITH
New York Times
Published: June 9, 2009

Robert Colescott, an American figurative painter whose garishly powerful canvases lampooned racial and sexual stereotypes with rakish imagery, lurid colors and tangible glee, died Thursday at his home in Tucson . He was 83.

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Ode to Joy (European Anthem),1997

His death was confirmed by his wife, Jandava Cattron, who said he had suffered for several years from Parkinsonian syndrome.




Mr. Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1997, the first African-American to do so. By then he was well known for pitting the painterly against the political to create giddily joyful, destabilized compositions that satirized — and offended — to get your attention.

People of all colors haunted Mr. Colescott’s paintings, their mottled skin tones often suggested one race seeping through another. Their tumultuous interactions evoked the volatile mixture of suspicion, desire, pain and vitality that the races in America have, that no truths could be held to be self-evident. Life is mired in slippery layers of false piety, self-interest and greed; plus lust, pleasure and irreverence.

Mr. Colescott often found new uses and meanings for the landmarks of Western painting, borrowing compositions and characters from van Eyck, Goya and Manet and peppering his scenes with the Africanized faces from Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.”

In his 1975 “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook,” he reinterpreted Emmanuel Leutze’s famous painting of George Washington during the American Revolution with Carver at the center, accompanied by black cooks, Jemimas and banjo players. His 1975 “Eat Dem Taters” substituted laughing black people for the pious Dutch peasants of van Gogh’s “Potato Eaters” to attack, in his words, “the myth of the happy darky.” No American painter of the late 20th century made such telling use of painting’s European past to lambaste the painful contradictions of the American present.

Mr. Colescott’s work anticipated the appropriation art and Neo-Expressionist painting of the 1980s. His imagery shared aspects with Pop Art, although he disdained its coolness. His improvisational approach had precedents in jazz and Abstract Expressionism. He said he wanted his surface to “squirm.”

Born in Oakland, CA on Aug. 26, 1925; His mother, a pianist, and his father, a jazz violinist and a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad. The family had moved to California from New Orleans in 1919 to improve their children’s chances for a good education.

He grew up playing the drums, but he drew and painted from childhood. The African-American sculptor Sargent Johnson, who worked with Mr. Colescott’s father on the Southern Pacific, was a family friend.

After serving with the Army in France and Germany during World War II, Mr. Colescott majored in art at the University of California , Berkeley , emerging in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in painting and a geometric abstract style. During a year in Paris he studied with the painter Fernand Léger — whose emphasis on scale, color and narration made a lasting impression — and spent a lot of time in museums, looking at 19th-century painting. He returned to Berkeley for a master’s and spent the next decade teaching in the Northwest.

In 1964 a teaching residency took him to Cairo , where Egyptian art reiterated Léger’s ideas about narrative for him, but from outside the Western canon. After another stint in Paris he returned in 1967 to the United States , which he found changed by the civil rights movement, and to the Bay Area, where artists like Roy De Forest, William T. Wiley, Joan Brown, Robert Arneson and especially Peter Saul had developed extravagant, often caustic figurative styles. By the end of the 1960s he had found his mature style.

Mr. Colescott’s first four marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Ms. Cattron; his brother, Warrington Colescott Jr., of Hollandale, Wis.; five sons from previous marriages — Alexander, of Napa, Calif.; Nicolas, of Portland, Ore.; Dennett, of San Rafael, Calif.; Daniel, of Modesto, Calif.; and Cooper, of Tucson, Az. — and one grandson.

Mr. Colescott helped set the stage for transgressive work by painters like Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, Sue Williams and Carroll Dunham and multimedia artists like Kara Walker, William Pope.L and Kalup Linzy.

A commentator who covered his artwork noted, "When asked if he didn’t feel an obligation to serve “the black community,” Mr. Colescott replied, “The way that one serves is to serve art first,” adding that “the way you serve art is by being true to yourself.”