Source: Shutterstock

From Hello Beautiful

A few months ago I asked, “Why Do Mediocre Men Have Such High Standards?” I was somewhat reminded of this as I caught the second episode of “Tiny Tonight” on VH1. An audience member asked Claudia Jordan and Trina what an ideal first date would be. More interested in cool conversation and a good time, Claudia responded, “I’m pretty much a simple girl. Like, I don’t need all the extravagant things. I kind of want to get to know the person, so a lot of talking. I like going to dinner. I’d even cook dinner for the man; I think that’s kind of fun. We can go bowling. I can see how you react when you lose or when you win. Are you a good sport? And I just like to keep it light and fun, especially for the first date. You don’t really want a lot of pressure.”

Claudia’s co-hostess and rapper Trina, on the other hand, wasn’t as modest with her demands: “I’m more of like a sweep me off my feet type of girl. I just feel like, put me on a private jet; fly me away for a little while. Let’s have dinner, let’s have romantic one-on-one time on a little island, a beach, some sand never hurt anybody. I’m spoiled, like rotten, so I need all of the attention—not some of it.”

Read the rest of this post on HelloBeautiful.com.

via Contemporary Arts Museum Houston , Martin Yaptangco

Add this to your list of watch party options. Tonight, some museums across the country are hosting Election Night viewings in connection with the exhibit “Your Land/My Land: Election ‘12”—inviting impassioned online debate across all 50 states.

Conceived by New York-based artist Jonathan Horowitz, the installation simultaneously on view in seven museums around the nation features blue and red carpets divided into opposing zones to reflect the Democrat-GOP divide. Monitors suspended above the carpets simulcast a live feed from liberal leaning news network MSNBC on one side and a live feed from conservative-friendly outlet Fox News on the other.

President Obama’s portrait hangs on an adjacent wall while a photograph of Governor Romney waits on the floor, only to replace Obama’s hanging position if he wins.

Horowitz told Madame Noire he designed the installation as “a location for people to gather, watch coverage of, and talk about the presidential election.” He added, “Aesthetically, it depicts an electorate and media that have become polarized like never before.”

Polarization is safe in the museum setting says Bill Arning, director of Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, one of the museums exhibiting “Your Land.”

“We don’t have the type of social spaces we used to,” Arning explains, citing the shortage of public forums where people can physically congregate for the express purpose of deep civil debate. “[These days] the only place we’re used to seeing 40 people at once is a shopping mall,” he quips. “The social role of museums as being the safe place to discuss dangerous ideas is getting more and more important.”

But you don’t have to share your personal political views with strangers to share the “Your Land” experience. Allison Agsten curator of public engagement at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum says visitors have already been flocking just to watch the debates with a group. “For the final presidential debate, when the rest of the museum was closed,” she says, “nearly forty visitors came.”

Turnout could be even higher on Election Day, if not after says Agsten which is the exhibit will remain on view for two weeks after the polls close. “We all know that MSNBC and Fox won’t stop churning out the coverage!“ With pretty much every poll predicting a statistical dead heat between the candidates, and Hurricane Sandy damage potentially impacting voter turnout on the East Coast, a nail biter of hanging chad proportions could be in store.

Flashbacks from 2004 aside, Dominic Molon, curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis where “Your Land” greets visitors in the lobby, says the exhibit ironically offers voters a detox from election fever. “Jonathan’s work is very much about this kind of intersection of the mass media, popular culture, and politics,” he observes, “[and] the way that they kind of cancel one another out.”

Molon adds, “Like [the] viral video of the little girl crying about ‘if I hear about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney anymore…’ I think we’re almost all kind of at that point right now.”

Tell us how you feel on YourLandMyLand.us and #YLML. “Your Land/My Land: Election ’12” is currently on view at the museums listed below.

Contemporary Art Museum St Louis – on view till November 11, 2012

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston – on view till November 11, 2012

Telfair Museum (Savannah) – on view till November 11, 2012

Contemporary Art Museum (Raleigh) – on view till November 12, 2012

Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) – on view till November 18, 2012

New Museum (New York) – on view till November 18, 2012

Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City) – on view till November 24, 2012

I continue to be amazed at how PETA wants to trample all over humans’ rights and feelings in order to protect the well-being of animals.

Everyone knows O.J. Simpson’s Florida home is facing foreclosure and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals want first dibs on the property so they can turn it into a “Meat is Murder” Museum.

According to NY Magazine, the organization wrote a letter to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon asking if the bank would be willing to donate the home or allow PETA to purchase it for a “nominal sum” once they foreclose on the property. Explaining what the organization would do with the home, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk wrote this:

“Our museum will remind visitors that violence may not always be preventable but that it sometimes can be prevented and that nonviolence begins on our plates.”

Insensitive much? Unfortunately Ingrid didn’t stop there with her crass remarks, adding:

“For instance, many wonderful flesh-and-blood individuals—who feel pain and fear as acutely as humans do and who value their lives in much the same way—are knifed to death every day for nothing more than a fleeting taste of flesh.”

It’s clear PETA’s leadership thinks it’s somehow OK to make light of the death of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman for which O.J. stood trial for murdering. Only one word comes to mind when I read those words: tasteless.

If the bank does in fact allow PETA to assume ownership of the home, they’ve  already got their house of horrors planned out with “exhibits that give visitors a sense of the terror that animals used for food experience.”

The museum will “highlight interesting facts about the animals who are so casually converted into sandwich fillings, that pigs rank higher on cognition tests than 3-year-old human children, and that chickens recognize one another by facial features, and that fish form friendships.” They’ve even supposedly designed a free meat-free menu with riblets, veggie burgers, and faux chicken.

These people are truly special.

What do you think about PETA’s Meat is Murder museum idea?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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(Washington Post) — Retired Lt. Col. Leo R. Gray, one of the Tuskegee Airmen, stands next to “The Spirit of Tuskegee,” a World War II-era plane at end of a cross-country flight to its new home at the Smithsonian, at Andrews Air Force Base. The PT-13 Stearman open-cockpit biplane was used as a trainer plane for the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. Decommissioned in 1946, used for decades as a crop duster and damaged in a crash, it was purchased at public auction and restored over the course of three years by Capt. Matthew Quy, a former B-52 bomber pilot who deploys to Afghanistan later this month, and his wife, Tina. It is one of the few surviving planes with ties to Moton Field and Tuskegee Institute, a segregated facility in Tuskegee, Ala., where nearly 1,000 black pilots were trained to fly escort for bombing missions over North Africa and Italy.

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(Wall Street Journal) The organizers of the embryonic National Museum of Hip-Hop want to honor one of the most vibrant American art forms to emerge since jazz. But at a coming-out fundraiser last month, they found themselves the targets of a boycott announced by legendary rapper and New York native KRS-One—the project’s most important adviser—who said key hip-hop “pioneers” had declared the museum “illegitimate.” “They said it wasn’t kosher,” said KRS-One’s fellow hip-hop groundbreaker, rapper Chuck D. of Public Enemy, adding that he heeded phone calls from some of his predecessors about not supporting the museum’s April gala at Manhattan’s Pink Elephant nightclub. The rapper had initially agreed to co-host the museum event with KRS-One, but says he left the party early. “This is like the O.K. Corral,” he said.

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