Weblogic

I love cities. Big cities. I go to them and rediscover as always my passion for signs. Denver has great freaking signs. The Satire Lounge. The Mayan. The Gothic. The Ogden. As I drove around in my sadly fruitless quest after dark last Thursday to go hear Bettye Lavette at Soiled Dove Underground, anyone know where that is?, I got caught up in what I was seeing, a sort of wow wow that first travelers West a century or so ago must have felt. Jack Kerouac. The Greyhound station.

I also discovered somewhat to my chagrin that the  front door at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (David Adjaye's public museum in the US) is not working. That's  a small thing but you really don't want your front door to be busted if you're a museum. And, speaking of bust (not a bust), Conrad videotaped the Friday night performance in Santa Fe by FolkyTonk, the last of SITE's summer gallery gigs and, as Juliet Myers said in her intro, proof that when this gang of musicians and puppeteeers and scene maker musicians takes to the road, there'll be an international sen-sation. Great to go away. Good to come back home again. 

It is always my habit to go early on Saturday to Indian Market and look closely. When I arrived this year I saw that I had left my camera battery at home and somehow that was okay. I would have to write about it instead. How the tall woman wearing the black coat with the silver brads down the front (think Miss Mary Mack inverted), was engaged in conversation about past judgments in a certain court of appeals, with a young man showing her silver jewelry. I heard a few phrases and realized that such interesting reconnections are made at Indian market. Conrad heard a woman say she's eagle clan and has traveled widely to find other eagle clan members. Another man nearby heard her and told the woman he was eagle clan too.  "We are cousins," she said. In addition to seeing gorgeous objects you hear languages you probably never hear spoken anywhere else. I saw my object this year a long ways away and later, as I unwrapped it to show my friend who was dispensing peaches on the Plaza, and told him how I felt like I had seen a mudhead, and been explained to that he is a guard who accompanies the mudheads into the dance. He, my friend, looked at me funny like the Hopi woman had. Clair voyance just means clear sight, and the freedom in a sense to make choices that allow you to see better still. It is a season of such clear light here and ecstasy of late smmer that perhaps vision is only the rent of the veil. Spirit inhabits objects. We inhabit the complex earth together. When you have lived many years in New Mexico intrigued by the beauty of it all, it is clear that we have riches and splendors that are not available anywhere else. Indian Market is one such. A richness beyond measure.  More to come in reporting on the webzine about shows at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts by postcommodity collective, what could be a better name?, but in the short term I am heading up the road to Colorado later this week and so more writing will probably have to wait. What do you call this, as my own ancestors would say, chopped liver?

 

I was watching MSNBC the other night as the giant clanking military machinery rolled out of Iraq and over the Kuwait border. It was all faintly surreal and described on television both as exclusive and evidence (rolling) that the troop withdrawal the President had promised would end in two weeks was actually being completed then, just then. In Iraq time it was close on 4 in the morning but here it was not yet 7 the previous evening. I can recall watching other media moments to do with war: Life magazine's report on My Lai.  The helicopters on the embassy roof in Saigon. And memories of my father's habit of watching World at War which featured a gruesome graphic of a fire and a swastika behind which burned bodies and books. I have no idea what it all adds up to. We watch. Sebastian Junger got close in for Restrepo. I just read about The Tillman Story here and perhaps you saw reporting on it elsewhere. It is hard to know if direct action and mediation really share the same world. For the media practice in real time is acknowledgment of our fleeting ephemeral physicalities. Meaning I live here and can see more than Engle, the war reporter for MSNBC who appears to be standing right there, point at the phalanx of humongous tanks.

The Magazine Publishers of America have launched a big ad campaign to say magazines aren't dead. They aren't, But neither is digital media, we've only seen the edge of the edge of the beginning and never assume the sight of a gate closing means you can be sure which side you've gotten stuck on.

In July I took, as they say, too much on. I met my last July deadline for other things this morning around 4. I am relieved to have it be August. Last weekend we got to spend an entire Saturday with a gang of friend by what must be the most sublime lake in New Mexico, name of Isabel. It was Richard's 50th and the day lasted late into the glorious evening in a setting that makes you remember you can easily die for beauty in New Mexico. But why die now? There's far too much to do.

I spent my morning so far getting the August calendar up and going. Between the this-Friday opening of a documentary by Lucy Walker, one of two she's produced this year, up at CCA Santa Fe, a weekend of art fundraisers in Aspen, a rockin out music tour in Denver,  and as always so much art you just can't believe it, I'm actually looking for some new contributors to help capture it all. If you are one, if you know somebody, send me an e to: eberk at earthlink dot net.I always try to remind myself in this blog that the site really speaks out. But I feel slightly traitorous I confess for letting it be known that Mabel's river house is for sale. If I had a cool $500k I might buy it. But then again I have always wanted a small ranch. Ha! Not bloody likely. But luckily my friends invite me and it is always unforgettable. Thanks to you know who you are.

 

The Wikileaks. Mad Men season 4. Angelina Jolie’s biography. Swell, the surf show, that has New York flipping over surfboards in Chelsea. I make it my Monday morning ritual to take a deep look at 8-10 websites from the New York Times and the LA Times, to Slate, Salon, ArtInfo, Art Fag City, Huff Po and Daily Beasts arts sections. And what is striking is they all are reporting precisely the same news, in different orders, but same new same new.
Save one small post on Huff Po about Madame Butterfly at SFO, and another thing on Culture Monster about the making of La Vida Es Sueno (Life is A Dream), which also will premiere at SFO this year, there is no but no coverage that deals in the arts we all live and breathe or in the creative economies that run like electric rail lines in our states, at the national dailies. If you email the editors at these places and try to tell them this you periodically get someplace, as we have at Saatchi, or at ArtsJournal. But as a rule, there appears to be no plan afoot in any major metro-national daily in North America to decide to extend the map. The map of “news coverage” and “events coverage” becomes the map of what your nearest competitor is doing instead of a map that actually, well, aims to diversity the geography. Sigh. I see why people claim overwhelm from over-Web-sameness but this is precisely what our site continually seeks to redress. You can’t do anything editorially by being what you’re not, by deciding to add two grains more sugar to the same coffee everybody else is drinking. Which is why my working Sunday this week was so Eureka  good timing in that, after the news broke last Tuesday about Abq Studios’s Chapter 11 foreclosure, it happened that David had just interviewed film rebate-arians on the upsurge of Prague as competitor to Abq.  In Denver, Leanne’s interview with ceramic artist Brendan Tang reflects that art-craft line continually being broken; brilliant handwork that delivers small gifts is also the subject of shows in Santa Fe by Erika Wanenmacher and Alexander Calder, and Groovey, what a great writer, delivers his diary from Rockstar Mayhem in a way that might make you say why didn’t I also just follow my bliss.
So. In this era where everything wants a footnote to the big boys -- no, that was Deutschland where all the people got trampled; yes, that was Colorado where the supersonic jet turbulence forced a landing -- we are here along the spine of the Rockies with headline, not footnote, a week-to-week view of culture local, regional, national, and very important, 60 weeks now straight.

I got a message in my inbox last week from the editor of Ode magazine, about a new book called The Rational Optimist. Meanwhile today Artsjournal dot com, forward slash artists, convenes a bunch of  bloggers for five days to toss back and forth what is needed for arts activism to step out of the closet and fire some friendly salvos into an arts-oblivious public. The opening note is struck by a guy (Tim Quirk, great name for an art writer) who says that air traffic controllers benefit from music, hence "music-related optimism." Another blogger a bit lower down on the page offers that we need better rhetoric with which to remind everybody that arts aren't just an abstraction that offers marketing and promotional opportunities for American business, but the real grit and mortar that held the world together during the first Great Depression. We've been at making this webzine for more than 15 months now since March 09. The real site launched June 1 2009. I am optimistic that in the last month our readership numbers have steadily risen again. People seem to be getting oh, yes, the contemporary arts webzine for Santa Fe. And Denver. And Albuquerque. And El Paso. If you go to Huff Po arts pages you'll see they're still aggregating. What does that mean? It means that Visual Arts Source is giving them reviews they are re-running as written and streamed across VAS before. Everybody is in the blockbuster business. And I can say that with our two inbound links from Huffington POst in the last month we've seen periodic upticks in traffic measuring some 150 people at a time. But we get 3 times that many people per day anyway. The trouble, to go back (still optimistically) to what the arts journal dot com forward slash artists, are writing about, is that 150 or 450 people per day is still a small ish number compared to the numbers that view the front page of the NY Times for news of yes, business and sports and the economy. But I am bullish about arts involvement based on my experience with this webzine. What we need in the West is more arts media in new media such as we provide. I am barely keeping up with the need to keep covering the flood of new contents out there. This week on my To Do list or To Assign list the group includes the border monument photographs by David Taylor, a bunch of new books out including Lucy Lippard and Edward Ranney's collaboration, LAND/Arts, and the aforementioned David Taylor book. Leanne is cooking up the coverage up in Denver. David D'Arcy is back in New York reporting on similaries between Prague and Albuquerque in trying to incentivize film production. And Groovey has just come off the Mayhem tour and is going to position to try to talk to Lyle Lovett as he plays what had been being billed as the Paolo Soleri's last concert in late July. But now the Paolo even seems to be getting (maybe, fingers crossed) a reprieve. Stay tuned. Stay optimistic. Here's that Ode link.

Harvey Pekar on Letterman sounds almost quaint now. The comic book writer who was friends with R. Crumb died in Cleveland Heights age 70, according to The Plain Dealer, replayed in NYT today. His American Splendor, satire with the intense cold sweat angst of the age,flayed himself open. I am going to put the link to the obit at the end of this blog post. In Santa Fe the weekend of the international Folk Art Festival found throngs ogling the ikat and drapo vodou. Vodou flag maker Georges Valris was there and that my visiting girl friends very happy indeed so I got eye-dazzled over the weekend. Huge numbers of great openings happened in town, John Iversen, Jay De Feo, Ruth Duckworth, Rex Ray, and I went Saturday night to see Madame Butterfly at SFO. An incredible perf by Kelly Kaduce a tiny thing, with a great opening set and first procession in which Ciao ciao san comes to meet the cad Pinkerton.  Do as much as you can if you dig culture. We continue our coverage of music like Big Head Todd in Colorado and the coming appearance of Hawthorne Heights in Abq. David's on film in the Czech Republic where he also broke news on the Portrait of Wally settlement. Leanne's almost back from Denver and I am going to keep writing on Santa Fe as we also proudly point this week to important reporting on the violence in Juarez, and how graphic artists are dealing with it in El Paso.

Here's that link to the Pekar obit.

 

Is a song lyric, but sometimes living in Santa Fe, or even traveling the Rocky Mountain West by car or Airstream, one can be forgiven for wishing there were 1000 simply to get through the everything and then some that seems to get packed into the month. Please see and use our event calendar for more on the sum of everything. And because being in media and new media is indeed political, I am using this blog today to get the word out to academics who might be reading, who have academic affiliations (necessary to participate), on something of key import to the democracy, called the Cry Wolf request for proposals:
Colleagues:

        We are looking for faculty and graduate students (in history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy) interested in writing short (2000 word) policy briefs for which we can pay $1,000.  For specifics, read on...

      We are writing to ask for your help in an important project in the battle with conservative ideas. Today, as in the past, the fight to transform American politics and policy takes place on a battlefield in which ideas, narratives, and the construction of a politically driven conventional wisdom constitutes a set of highly potent weapons. Too often conservatives in the Congress and the media have captured the rhetorical high ground by asserting that virtually any substantial, progressive change in public policy, especially that involving taxes on the wealthy or regulation of business, will kill jobs, generate a stifling government bureaucracy, or curtail economic growth.

           But history shows that in almost every instance the opponents of needed social and economic change are “crying wolf.”  We therefore need to construct a counter narrative that demonstrates the falsity or exaggeration of such claims so that the first reaction of millions of people, as well as opinion leaders, will be “There they go again!” Such a refrain will undermine the credibility and arguments of the organizations and individuals who use such dire social and economic prognostications to thwart progressive reform.

           To give substance and scholarly integrity to this “crying wolf” argument, we are calling upon historians and social scientists, in training or well established, to use their research skills to identify instances, in recent years as well as in the more distant pass, in which the “crying wolf” scare was put forward by industry executives, conservative politicians, and right-wing pundits before the passage of legislation or the promulgation of regulations that have become hallmarks of popular and progressive statecraft. On each issue we seek to document three things: First, historical examples and quotes drawn from speeches, legislative testimony, newspaper and other media opinion pieces, think-tank reports, or political platforms which claim that a proposed policy or regulation would generate a set of negative consequences; second, a discussion of how these crying-wolf claims impacted the new laws or regulations as they were passed into law; and third, a well-documented analysis of the extent to which conservative and special interest fears were or were not realized during the years and decades after the new laws or regulations went into effect.

           This work is sponsored by the San Diego-based Center on Policy Initiatives and funded by a grant from the Public Welfare Foundation.  Donald Cohen of CPI, Peter Dreier of Occidental College, and Nelson Lichtenstein of UC Santa Barbara constitute the ad hoc committee now administrating this initiative.

           Based on some of the policy areas listed below, we solicit one page proposals for the kind of short studies outlined above. If we think the proposal promising, we will then ask the applicant to develop a larger policy brief, perhaps 2,000 words in length. It should be well documented and scrupulously accurate. We will pay $1,000 for each brief that meets these standards. We hope that many of these become the basis for opinion pieces designed to run in the mainstream media, on line, on the air, or in the press.

           We will be focusing on the following policy areas.

1.       Taxes and public budgets
2.       Labor market standards
3.       Food, tobacco and drug health and safety
4.       Environmental protection: air, water, toxics, etc
5.       Workplace safety
6.       Financial regulation
7.       Consumer product safety
8.       Local issues (i.e. inclusionary housing, building code standards, etc.)

We will be looking for the following things in each case study/policy brief:

1.      Specific Laws or Regulations within the policy area
2.      Why the law or regulation was needed: citations of studies, articles that demonstrated need, etc.
3.      Principle opponent interest groups
4.      The quotes and claims: Reports, correspondence and/or public testimony of interest groups that lobbied against passage and implementation of laws and regulations. [While some quotes will certainly be included in the policy brief, we would like all quotes that are found to be included in appendices]
5.      Principle proponent groups (for research and help)
6.      Any existing retrospective qualitative and quantitative costs and benefits of laws
7.      Major books, articles, sources on the history and impact of legislation/regulation.

Proposals should be sent to Donald Cohen at dcohen@onlinecpi.org.

Please feel free to forward this RFP and/or to send ideas, references and proposals.

Sincerely,

Peter Dreier, Donald Cohen, and Nelson Lichtenstein
Cry Wolf Project Coordinators
Peter Dreier, E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, Occidental College.
Donald Cohen, Executive Director, Center on Policy Initiatives
Nelson Lichtenstein, Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara and Director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy

Project Advisory Board
Robert Kuttner, Co-founder & Co-editor, American Prospect
Gerald Markowitz, PhD, John Jay College, CUNY
David Rosner, PhD; Co-Director, Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health
Alice O’Connor, PhD, UC Santa Barbara
Janice Fine, PhD, Rutgers University
Andrea M. Hricko, MPH; Southern CA Environmental Health Sciences Center
Jennifer Klein PhD, Yale University
Meg Jacobs PhD, MIT
William Forbath JD, PhD, University of Texas Law School
Tom Sugrue PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Lizabeth Cohen PhD, Harvard University

A couple of months ago Leanne sent me an afternoon email asking had I seen Jerry Saltz's rant on Facebook. Our colleague and the New York magazine art critic who also publishes in Saatchi Online Magazine, where we sometimes publish, and on Artnet, which linked to us last week, had been inspired to a torrent after the gajillionth "friend" post lamenting low pay for art writers. Of course we all would like to be paid better, but Jerry was remarking in essence an argument that Dave Hickey has made about art and money not touching, or the lives of ideas and the lures of capital being mutually inconsistent. Well. Denver Mayor Hickenlooper talked to Leanne a couple of weeks ago in Pagosa and commented that if Denver succeeds in implementing its .10 of 1 percent for the arts that would mean large companies spending at minimum 10 to 15k a year for art. "Culture first, commerce follows," was a comment he made , and one which in the hearing led me to reflect that we sure as heck hope so, Jerry and all. Jerry Saltz gives  a lecture in Santa Fe Tuesday June 29th that will probably address becoming an art critic doing a Sister Wendy on a TV show where contestants in a sort of reality TV production are actually aspiring artists. I have not watched it. 

 

it was fun to produce audio this week. What we mean by d'dya hear the news? has changed a lot since the economy of information changed. I try to blog in quotes on this website and that's tough since it's more of a magazine. idea was that hyper local wasn't going to work here. not to paint the southwest contemporary every week. for that you need more than one place. following not just one kind of art but all. defining art so that instead a subset of entertainment meaning michael jackson's death, a year ago friday, Look for a surge of broadband this week, it came to also mean something vital to the culture. these words in english have always been problematic and still are. kultur. volk. Art is particularly well suited to taking these issues on. It is great that the video show in Santa Fe is up for six months more. Go in early and often. And, yada yada, keep looking at the site.