LOVE is a MOVEMENT!! Street artist ESPO (aka Steve Powers) is using street art & words of love to revitalize Philadelphia. He is painting murals over the run down parts of the city with messages like “I Love You” and “Hold Tight” to inspire & brighten the down. Plus, he’s offering free signs for local businesses & training for young people in the area.

It began with a startling, inexplicable explosion of anger over a seat on a D train. And then the passenger who had resisted giving up his seat was bleeding from stab wounds, staggering through the car, collapsing, dying.

The other passengers on the train at 2 a.m. Saturday — among them four photography students on their way home from burgers and beer in a Midtown restaurant — had just become witnesses to a murder. One of the students, Paola Nuñez Solorio, 30, chronicled the aftermath of the stabbing, ending her day as she had begun it, watching the world through her camera.

In the morning she had zoomed in on apartment-building courtyards for a school project. Now she was photographing frightened passengers, a wounded man tottering through the train, a killer standing at the end of the car.

She took 120 photographs in the mayhem that followed the stabbing, some out of focus, some a blur of passengers scrambling to get out of harm’s way, some showing the victim’s blood on the floor, some showing the victim’s body sprawled across the two seats he collapsed on.

New York City and its subways are far safer than they once were, but violence can still erupt, seemingly out of nowhere, and Ms. Nuñez’s photographs captured the harrowing moments in all their unfiltered, unvarnished reality.

Ms. Nuñez and her friends had been standing in the first car of the uptown D train after they boarded at 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas. There were scattered empty seats, not enough for them to sit together, so they stood, talking about nothing in particular.

The train stopped at Rockefeller Center, and moments after it pulled out of the station, they realized something was wrong at the other end of their car.

“Everyone started running toward us,” Ms. Nuñez said. “We thought there was a fight. Then we saw this guy with blood coming out of his mouth, and the killer right behind him, putting this thing away. I didn’t know what it was.”

It was a knife, other passengers said.

Instinctively, Ms. Nuñez reached for her camera, a digital single-lens reflex model that did not need a flash to function in the fluorescent light of the car.

She and her friends had not noticed the suspect, identified by the police as Geraldo Sanchez, 37, an exterminator from the Bronx, when he boarded at Rockefeller Center. Nor had they realized that he had gone on a rampage at the other end of the car, spilling food and demanding that a passenger, Dwight Johnson, 36, vacate a seat beside one of the doors.

Mr. Johnson said there were other seats.

Mr. Sanchez said he wanted that seat. Soon he pulled out a knife and slashed Mr. Johnson’s hands and neck, witnesses said. Ms. Nuñez said Mr. Johnson staggered through the car, bleeding, with Mr. Sanchez right behind him.

“We didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Nuñez said, and she and her friends realized they might be in danger: “We were stuck with the killer.”

The fear behind that thought deepened when someone pulled the emergency brake cord, freezing the train between Rockefeller Center and the Seventh Avenue station. The passengers were trapped in the car with the suspect and the dying victim longer than if the train had gone on to the station and had been met by the police.

As the train sat in the tunnel, the terrified passengers huddled together. Mr. Sanchez walked by and began trying to open the locked door leading to the next car. “We didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Nuñez said. “A guy standing with us said, ‘Don’t move.’ ”

Another passenger, a woman, fainted. The man with her tried to revive her, Ms. Nuñez said.

After several long minutes, the train started moving again. It pulled into the next station, at Seventh Avenue, but the doors remained closed.

One of Ms. Nuñez’s friends said it appeared that the two officers on the platform were waiting for backups to arrive. That left the passengers in the car feeling vulnerable anew. “People were looking at us like we were in the zoo,” said the friend, who asked not to be identified because she had not told her father that she had been at the scene.

Once the doors opened and the police stepped in, “We told them, ‘That’s the guy who killed him,’ ” the woman recalled. “They said, ‘Step aside.’ ”

She said Mr. Sanchez tried to blend in with the other passengers as police officers swarmed into the car. “The killer tried to be a part of us,” she said. She remembered hearing him say, “I didn’t do anything.”

Mr. Johnson was pronounced dead at the scene, the police said. Mr. Sanchez was charged with second-degree murder and weapons possession.

[via: Tutorial9]

Strangely, airlines and airplanes and air travel continue to still look pretty much the same, no matter which airline you fly. In fact, most of us would say that the in-flight experience is getting worse each day. Premium-class prices warrant a slightly more tolerable experience, but it is still tough to really tell one experience from the other.

An airplane is of course transportation, and not a hotel, spa or restaurant, but we have been waiting for a long time for the first airline that is willing to embark on true differentiation. Taking cues from cool architecture, leading-edge design and the vibes we see ahead of, and outside of, trends, The Coolhunter is now working on creating truly cool airline experiences, giving premium-class passengers a real reason to select one airline over another.

Absolutely everything— from the on-board entertainment, furnishings and decor, to exclusive on-board shopping — will be curated by TCH. Rather than being mundane, boring and almost same as all other airlines, the TCH-curated in-flight experience will be really something worth talking about. Each flight will be different, each experience more surprising and exquisite. Airlines who want to ad value to their inflight experience, can contact catherine@thecoolhunter.net or bill@thecoolhunter.net

Virgin Atlantic exterior designed by Andy Gilmore for TCH Design Studio

In today’s society, Crop Circles are highly debatable topic when it comes down to who we believe the creators are. While we all have our own opinions, this post isn’t to debate or ponder who the creators are but to enjoy the art they bring.

Minjae Lee is a young South Korean artist whose work expresses a semi-disturbing inner tension that is tough to ignore, even if you feel that you’d like to. It draws you in with its powerful colors, halting imagery and clever juxtaposition of beauty, innocence and fragility with brash, loud and aggressive.

The 19-year old artist is mainly self-taught and uses old-fashioned tools — such as markers, pens, crayons, acrylics — to create his illustrations. He has yet to break into commercial success, but as his style is developing and improving each time new images appear, we will likely see a lot of him in the future.

What characterizes his work overall is drama. The ethereal females that populate most of his work exude a dark, organic tension, and it seems that even the brightest marker colors do not quite manage to save them from some sort of looming peril. Or are we, the viewers, in fact, the ones who are in danger? Whatever the case, we are drawn in, interacting on an emotional level, surprised, looking for something.

Minjae Lee’s penchant for dramatic expression is clear also in the work of those he admires. His favorite photographer is the 55-year-old Japanese Hiroshi Nonami, whose women are equally capable of telling a dramatic, dark story. Not surprisingly, Lee’s favorite fashion designer is the king of runway drama, the Gibraltar-born, 49-year-old John Galliano. – Tuija Seipell