End of May Reads

Ratfucking.  This is what the GOP does best:

**IMPORTANT**

The NYT reports that Trump's chief election dirty trickster, Erik Prince, has been trying to infiltrate liberal groups through a nationwide spy network. Now Trump says violence by liberal groups should give him sweeping powers. Stay alert. https://t.co/cm5LzraVDk

— Seth Abramson (@🏠) (@SethAbramson) June 1, 2020

I didn't know about it, but in my neck of the woods, Ashland, Oregon, some 1,000 people marched in response to the George Floyd murder.  No problems there.
_____

Obituary:  Somewhat eccentric environmental artist Christo, his real first name of Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, who was known for his colorful banners spreading across wide open spaces and who worked with his late wife, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, has died at the age of 84.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same day on June 13, 1935 -- Christo in Bulgaria and Jeanne-Claude in Morocco. In 1957, Christo attended one semester at Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna before eventually landing in Paris, where he met Jeanne-Claude in 1958. He had already begun wrapping objects, such as furniture and oil drums, and they began working together in 1961. For decades, the couple only used Christo's name, until 1994 when Jeanne-Claude was added retroactively to many works as his collaborator.

The artists insisted that their ambitious projects were about "joy and beauty," as Jeanne-Claude once said in 2002. However, they did not create their works in a political vacuum, and for one of their earliest collaborations they stacked oil barrels to barricade a street in Paris in protest of the Berlin Wall.

_____