June 2012 - The Arts 

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Film: "My Perestroika"

From IMDB: "Tells the story of five people from the last generation of Soviet children who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain. Just coming of age when the USSR collapsed, they witnessed the world of their childhood crumble and change beyond recognition. Through the lives of these former schoolmates, this intimate film reveals how they have adjusted to their post-Soviet reality in today's Moscow. "

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Recycling newsprint into Mayan-style artwork

On Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, a Caribbean island off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, Emilio Sosa Medina recycles ten times his annual paper allotment. A self-taught artist, he transforms yesterday’s newspapers into paper maché sea monsters, lizards, dragons, and masks based on Mayan iconography.

Read more: The End of Print? Not So at This One-Man Recycling Studio 

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Toll of Mexican Crime Wave, Written in Faces on the Wall

From the New York Times: " When residents of this poor industrial city look to the hills, they now see the faces of crime victims staring back at them. Enormous photographic portraits cover concrete homes as part of a community art project that captures what has become a Mexican obsession: visualizing victimhood or, more broadly, turning cold, mind-numbing data back into real people."

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Pakistani stand-up comics develop devoted following

Image: Flickr/ David Martyn Hunt

Pakistan has a very small but devoted community of stand-up comics. It may be no larger than three men, but they've got a niche audience and are looking to propel their relative success in Pakistan's urban area to international attention as well.

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