I'm on RNC duty for the Minnesota Independent now through Thursday, so please drop by and check out our coverage. Given the past day's flurry of police raids on protest groups, it's hard to imagine it'll be the placid affair we Twin Citizens were hoping for.
Visitors flying into the Twin Cities for the Republican National Convention were, up until last Friday, to be greeted by the gigantic face of a U.S. soldier as they departed the airport. New York–based artist Suzanne Opton photographed active-duty military personnel and arranged to have their faces appear on five billboards in Minneapolis and St. Paul. One, a 48-footer on Highway 5, was to be positioned at the intersection of Post Road just outside the international airport. But CBS Outdoor cancelled the contract, citing that they feared drivers might misinterpret their message.
I'm seeing a bump in Warholesque political street art on Flickr in recent days. One is a new two-part mural: The Ron English/Popaganda side shows English's Obama/Lincoln figure, while the other, by Mr. Brainwash, shows a Warhol/Marilyn morph. Meanwhile, someone's appropriated the famous Basquiat/Warhol boxing poster casting Obama and Hillary Clinton as pugilists. 
For The Daily Show, which is recording a few shows in Minneapolis-St. Paul during the Republican National Convention. Via East-Lake.
Barry Hoggard of Culture Pundits tweets that the founder of Graffiti Research Lab (GRL) was detained in Beijing for his plans to use GRL's projectors to cast the phrase "Free Tibet" on city walls. An American artist who planned to use laser beams to flash "free Tibet" on buildings in downtown Beijing was detained Tuesday, according to a colleague and a pro-Tibet group.Gothamist has more and the site's cofounder, Jake Dobkin, offers a Free Powderly graphic, via Hrag.)
James Powderly, co-founder of Graffiti Research Lab in New York, was detained before dawn as he prepared to use a handheld green laser to project messages on prominent structures in Beijing, according to Students for a Free Tibet.
Mr. Powderly's colleague, Nathan Dorjee, said in New York that he received a text message from the artist which said he had been detained around 3 a.m. by police.
Officials at Beijing's Municipal Publicity Security Bureau did not answer phone calls Tuesday night. His whereabouts remained unknown, the group said.
“He was going to project a message that said, ‘Free Tibet,’ and some other messages that would have been three-stories high in different locations in Beijing,'' Mr. Dorjee said....
Two weeks in front of the Republican National Convention, graffiti playing with the acronym G.O.P. is beginning to appear in the Twin Cities. The first showed up on the back of the iconic Grain Belt bottle-cap sign on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, but others are cropping up elsewhere. "Greed Over People" in huge block letters appeared at a grain processing facility along Hiawatha Avenue, while the same message as the Grain Belt sign -- "Get Out Phascists" -- showed up elsewhere.. KSTP puts clean-up of the above piece at around $3,000.
D'oh (er, Dough!):...Jose Martinez was counting the cash in his till in the city of Aviles, northern Spain, when he came across the coin where Homer [Simpson]'s bald head, big eyes and big nose had replaced the serious features of King Juan Carlos."The coin must have been done by a professional, the work is impressive," he told Reuters.
The comical carver had not taken his tools to the other side of the coin displaying the map of Europe. So far, no other coins of the hapless, beer-swilling oaf have been found in circulation.
"I've been offered 20 euros for it," said Martinez.
My cohort Chris reports on the first big anti-RNC graffito he's seen in Minneapolis-St.Paul: on the back of our iconic Grain Belt Beer sign on the Hennepin Avenue bridge, there's a new tag that reads, "Get Out Phascists."
BEIJING -- The blocking of human rights websites in China leading up to the Olympics is part of an information control and surveillance network awaiting visitors that will include monitoring devices in hotels and taxis and snoops almost everywhere.Story continues...
Government agents or their proxies are suspected of stepping up cyber-attacks on overseas Tibetan, human rights and press freedom groups and the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement in recent weeks. And China is spending huge sums on sophisticated surveillance systems that incorporate face recognition technology, biometrics and massive databases to help control the population.
China has installed about 300,000 cameras in Beijing under an estimated $6.5-billion, seven-year program dubbed the Grand Beijing Safeguard Sphere. Although face recognition software still can't process rapidly moving images, China hopes that it can soon electronically identify faces out of a vast crowd.
"China is trying to project a picture and a narrative about the Olympics," said Nicholas Bequelin, Hong Kong-based researcher with Human Rights Watch. "By limiting journalists, shutting down the Internet, arresting activists, it's hoping to control the message."
Apparently in an attempt to silence a critic, China has revoked the visa of Olympic gold-medal-winning American speedskater Joey Cheek just hours before he was to board a flight to the Summer Games in Beijing. The co-founder of the awareness-raising organization Team Darfur, Cheek has been outspoken about China's relationship with Sudan, where the Beijing government has many oil-related interests (China is Sudan's largest trading partner). And one of his aims, the AP reports, was in urging the international community to pressure Sudan -- where some 200,000 people have been killed in a conflict between tribesmembers and government-backed janjaweed militants -- to observe a traditional truce during the Beijing Games.
