In the decades following the Second World War, European and American artists developed a wide range of strategies and approaches to abstract painting and sculpture. This summer, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Gesture, Scrape, Combine, Calculate: Postwar Abstraction from the Permanent Collection, showcasing more than a dozen large-scale yet rarely seen works that span gestural and lyrical abstraction, color-field painting, hard-edge abstraction, assemblage and other movements.

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Over the last few decades, small scale stocks called “penny stocks” have slowly won a spoil reputation. While there are hundreds of fly by night companies and shell companies that many unscrupulous business people have used to make money off of the uninitiated, there are thousands of great, small companies that qualify under the recording label “penny stocks”.

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Although having a credit card is considered convenient and easy by most people it is all too easy to accrue debt on your plastic, and in many cases – especially in the current financial and economic climate – consumers find it difficult to repay the debt. However, those that have a high outstanding balance on their credit cards need to be very careful about how much they are paying off on the balance, as failure to make a big enough repayment could result in the debt lasting for years or even decades, and this is on a relatively modest debt. It is important to remember that by making minimum repayments you will not be making a dent in your outstanding balance but will merely by keeping things on hold, leaving you in financial limbo.

There is another major downside to paying only the minimum repayment on your credit card balance each month aside from the length of time it will take to make the repayments, and this is the amount of interest that you will pay. The longer your debt drags on the more interest you will be paying to the lender, and by sticking to minimum repayments you will end up paying an astonishing amount of interest on a relatively small debt.

Of course, not everyone can afford to make huge repayments on their credit debt especially in the current climate, and this is where it may be worth considering a balance transfer credit card that offers either 0 percent interest on balance transfers or offers a low rate of interest for the life of the transferred balance. This will make it easier for those with credit card debt to repay their debt without having to pay interest, as these cards offer a generous interest free period or a really low rate of interest until the transferred balance in repaid.

For those that feel that they can pay the transferred debt off within a year or so then a 0 percent balance transfer card may be best, and there are some that now offer interest free period of well over a year. However, for those that need to be very careful with their repayments and believe that they need to have a far longer period within which to repay the transferred debt a life of balance transfer card could be the ideal option.

Why you should repay your credit card debt as soon as possible is a post from: Glitec

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Wendy Perron has a thoughtful blog post on the Dance Magazine website about young choreographers who blog about the process of making dances. She says:

There’s an annoying new trend of blogging about the process of making a dance. I am not talking about Tere O’Connor, who writes very considered contemplations about dance making, based on his decades of experience. I am talking about young choreographers, anxious to be in the public eye, who think that writing about what happened that day in the studio will somehow 1) bring them a wider audience and/or 2) make them a better choreographer.

Read the rest in Dance Magazine.

Though Perron is talking specifically about dance, she could be talking about anything creative. There’s something about the creative process that is messy and capricious, that demands disorganization. The constant rationalization and explanation of that process can undermine the kinds of associations and juxtapositions that come from chance and ambiguity. Certainly not all creative people develop in that way, I’m sure lots of people can create from a very logical and methodological place. But still, it is probably to a young artists advantage to spend less time talking about what they’re doing and more time just immersed in the doing itself.

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For decades, Texas-based artist David Bates has painted images of America’s bucolic Gulf Coast—its people and places. In 2005, Bates, like many Americans, was overwhelmed by the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. In the exhibition David Bates: The Katrina Paintings, the artist addresses Katrina, one of the most severe and inexplicable tragedies of our time, and its devastating aftermath. In this series of paintings and works on paper, Bates’ paintings remind us again why art defines our civilizations. David Bates: The Katrina Paintings is on view May 21–August 22, 2010, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Admission is free.
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In his book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill described thirty major causes of failure when you want to have financial success and accumulate wealth. Since this book has been wrote several decades ago, maybe not all those causes could be considered seriously, as « lack of control of sexual urge » that seems to [...]
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According to the High Street lender, Halifax, the quality of homes across the UK has improved over the past few decades but affordability is now lower than it was fifty years ago.

Over the past five decades house prices have risen by around 2.7 percent a year taking inflation into account, according to the lender. However, over the same period annual earnings have gone up by just 2 percent a year, so the increases on house prices have outweighed the increases in wages.

The past ten years have seen the house price increases gain momentum. The study that was carried out by the Halifax looked at house prices on UK properties between 1959 and 2009. One economist from the Halifax said that there had been some remarkable changes in the property market and with property prices over the past fifty years. The figures also showed that owner occupation soared during the 1980s, and whilst in 1961 only 43 percent of homes were owned this had increased to 68 percent by 2008.

Over the same period privately rented homes fell from 33 percent to just 14 percent, although officials claim that an increase in student numbers have seen the number increase slightly over the past twenty years. The research found that there had been four periods where major house price increases had occurred over the past five decades, and these were 1971-1973, 1977-80, 1985-89, and 1998-2007.

Greater London is said to have seen the biggest increases in house prices in the last fifty years according to the research, with the smallest increases being seen in Scotland. In real terms the average property price has increased by around 273 percent between 1959 and 2009 with a typical home costing around £43,000 in 1959 in today’s money.

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Many consumers are being lulled into a false sense of financial security by credit card lenders that are quite happy to accept very low repayments on the credit card balance, but failing to make clear to the consumer that this will lead to a lifetime of debt for many.

Officials are worried that many consumers are heading for a lifetime of debt because they are only making paltry minimum repayments on their credit card debts, which the providers are happy to accept because it means that they keep the customers in debt and make more interest off them.

A recent report also showed that some consumers were paying three times more interest than others simply because of the credit card that they were using. The report said that using the wrong card could be a very costly mistake and could make a huge difference to the amount that the cardholder pays on their debt. In fact, the report claimed that it could take sixteen years longer to repay a debt simply by using the wrong credit card.

The minimum repayments that are requested by credit card providers are supposed to cover at least the interest that is being charged and a fraction of the debt itself. However, for many who are paying rock bottom minimum repayments on their credit cards the debt could drag on for years or even decades, as the repayment that they are making does not even touch the actual debt itself.

For example, making repayments on a Lloyds TSB card at just the minimum amount requested on a £1000 debt would mean that it took over two decades to clear the balance.

David Black from Defaqto stated: ‘The differences of how long it will take you to repay debts on different cards are staggering. It is no wonder that consumers don’t fully understand the risks of making only the minimum repayment. That is good for the card companies, because they can charge you interest on your debt for longer.’

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When you look at the statistics revolving around teenage driving, it’s no surprise that they have more accidents. Teenagers are easily distracted with cell phones, text messages, and video cameras, not to mention everything that has been going on for decades. When insurance companies go to offer you teenager car insurance, they will consider them a high risk and charge more for the premium.
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November 21 to April 4, 2010
Rummel Room
Opening Reception November 21, 7 to 9pm

Every four years, the best athletes in the world match skill and endurance in a series of contests called the Olympic Winter Games. The purposes of these games are to foster the ideal of a “sound mind in a sound body” and to promote friendship among nations. Olympic athletes are the greatest ambassadors of goodwill in the world of sports.

For decades, the Bow Valley has been home to, and a training ground for, hundreds of people who have excelled at their sport and been chosen to represent Canada at the Olympic Winter Games. The athletes chosen to participate in this exhibition are only a small selection of athletes from the Bow Valley that have represented Canada. On the eve of the upcoming games in Vancouver, B.C. in February 2010, this exhibition is a tribute to all those who are the best athletes in the world.

WHYTE MUSEUM OF THE CANADIAN ROCKIES
111 Bear Street, Banff, Alberta T0L 0C0
403.752.2291 | Gallery Hours: 10am to 5pm

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