Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end. (This is a followup from yesterday’s ‘Because We Want It’ post)
New York Times Special Edition Video News Release – Nov. 12, 2008 from H Schweppes on Vimeo.
A “massive power shifting exercise” intervention/flash mob/activist art event scheduled for tomorrow in NYC. Organized by…well, I’m not supposed to say. Sign up at Because We Want It.
“We are the Web…We are teaching the machine…The machine is us…We’ll need to rethink a few things: copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves.” — Michael Wesch, Cultural Anthropologist @ Kansas State. Watch his highly informative and entertaining 5-minute video for the whole deal.
Leaving the 4D Brane, 2007; 12” x 36”; ink, acrylic, paintpen, inkjet collage on paper, mounted on wood
Three of my paintings are in the current group show at Mark Woolley gallery called Small Wonders. Preview last night, public opening tonight. The show is up through November 29th.
Obama supporters outside the white house
“Obama’s national margin in the popular vote will approach ten million. He has won by the largest margin for a non-incumbent candidate for president since Eisenhower in 1952.
First and foremost, the election outcome is a massive repudiation of the Bush presidency, the Republican Party and nearly three decades of right-wing domination of American politics. It is a watershed election, one which reflects, in the electoral framework, the massive demographic, socio-economic and cultural shifts over the past quarter-century.
All of the right-wing nostrums reiterated by the media and political establishment of both parties in recent years—that America is a “right” or “center-right” nation with a majority of “red states” unshakably loyal to the Republicans, that religion and cultural “values” are the decisive political issues—have been shattered.”
Read the complete article at wsws.org
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“I truly believe that the example of how Obama has lived his life, what he has learned, his many years of grass roots activism to improve the lives of people, how he has coped with racism and being the “outsider” ….these things connect to the countless layers of American society. Obama speaks to them because he has lived it; and the living-of-it gives him the right to talk about inclusiveness. He personifies hope for a better future for our fractured and hurting country.”
– Sylvia Alf, 68, Obama volunteer in Florida, as cited on Five Thirty Eight.com
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Australian Greens leader Senator Bob Brown said in Auckland today: “President-elect Barack Obama raises the hopes of the world for a fairer, securer more ecologically sound future.
“The world’s richest nation is set to enter a new era. Hope for George W. Bush’s replacement will return a greater decency and dignity to the White House. The world faces a rapid countdown to climate change, over consumption and misuse of catastrophic weaponry. Obama’s election is a breath of fresh air after perhaps the most important presidency in a century. His biggest challenge will be to end the undemocratic power wielded by an army of lobbyists and vested interests which is camped in Washington,” Senator Brown said.
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“The country regarded loftily by many Europeans as hopelessly racist and irredeemably right wing has voted to be ruled by a black man, at the head of a party committed to economic redistribution and a foreign policy rooted in peaceful diplomatic engagement.”
Read the complete article on the UK’s Times Online
There’s a lot to process. In the meantime, the folks at The Real News Network made this nice video, and fast, too.
Sunset over east coast USA, 11/04/04
Four years ago today I flew over this county. Bush had won again. I looked down on the land passing below me in bitter shock. For some dumb reason I thought reason would prevail in the 2004 election. I thought Americans would look at all the things that had gone wrong, all the impeachables, all the destruction, and go nope, you can’t fool us again. The sun set during my flight, and I watched the darkening land and wondered where the hell I was living. In a bubble, apparently. The liberal, educated bubble of Portland, Oregon. (Or, as dubbed by Bush senior after a particularly unwelcome visit, ‘Little Beirut‘.)
Fall 2004 was one of the busiest times of my life. I was teaching at PNCA, while also trying to work out a way to live life differently from the highly-stressed and underpaid existence of a 4/5ths-time college professor. I was on my way to Baltimore, to present a paper on the Efficacy of Political Art at a conference at MICA. My head was full of those clever anti-Bush videos, ironic Photoshop collages, and witty propaganda posters that were flying round the Internet at the time. We’ll never be able to measure their effect, of course, whether they contributed in some way to a shift in attitude — or maybe they reflected a change in attitude that was waiting in the wings. But they did keep some of us from going insane during those dark days.
Four years later I am looking back on the second anniversary of launching into full self-employment, the first anniversary of running a successful web design studio with collaborator Jimmy Thomas, and a likely Obama landslide. (Which, with my new status as an American, I helped along a little.) I am now a business owner during a shaky economy. Blue Mouse Monkey had grown exponentially the year before, and this year with the slowing economy and word of layoffs all around, I am grateful our work remains steady.
Hey, it’s never going to be perfect, but it’s going to be better.
Oregon voter ballot
This post is more for the benefit of my international readers ;-) (I.e. rellies in New Zealand.)
Now that Tom and I are citizens of the USA (and yes, we still have our New Zealand citizenship – to answer the question that always comes up) we get to vote in this historic election. All national elections here get called historic (how, after all, could the mainstream media sell advertising during a run-of-the-mill presidential race?) but this one truly is historic. For reasons we all know about and which I need not repeat here.
Each state of this union does the voting thing their own way. Oregon has Vote by Mail. The benefit to Vote by Mail is no one has to take time off work nor stand in line to vote. It’s good, too, for the disabled. The ballot comes to your house, you fill it out, and you send it in or drop it off. Another benefit is a paper trail! No creepy, hackable electronic voting machines here thank you very much. The downside to Vote by Mail is the loss of that feeling of civic camaraderie that apparently happens when strangers stand in line together to vote. I haven’t experienced it, but Oregonians who remember a time before Vote by Mail say they miss the old way. Vote by Mail does statistically raise voter participation, though, and I’m all for that.
My international readers may be under the impression the ballot comes with two choices: McCain and Obama. Pick one and you’re done. What doesn’t make it into overseas news is that all over the country Americans are voting for thousands and thousands of other positions besides the president. Senators, congresspeople, mayors, local senators and representatives (each state has its own government – it’s not just the feds running everything from D.C.), plus city councillors, school board members, judges, and so on. And in a state like Oregon that has citizen initiated referenda (aka citizen initiatives), there are ballot measure, too.
Lucky for me Oregonians take their politics seriously, and there’s plenty of reading material prepared and distributed (er, rather a lot, actually) to help me decide. (I do like the Willamette Week’s riff on Shepard Fairey’s Obama HOPE design.)
Okay, I’m going to go vote now. Once I have read all the endorsements and ballot measure explanations that have piled up on the dining table.
Kristy Edmunds, from 12 Words One Should Never Step On
Going back to the part in the previous post about Leslie Durst commissioning 10 artists over the last decade to make 12 works each, which then get gifted — Well it turns out I am one of the recipients of this year’s gifts! I was supposed to find out at the party, but apparently in failing to see the whole exhibition (at one point Leslie came round and stressed we should see the whole thing) I missed the part revealing this year’s recipients.
A year or so ago Blue Mouse Monkey launched a web project for collector and philanthropist Leslie Durst. During the meetings we got to see (and sometimes touch) some of the many 17th – 19th C needlework samplers in her huge collection. Elaborate and precise, beautiful, innocent, celebratory, and sometimes downright scary in their choice of bible verses, these pieces were made almost exclusively by young girls. I’d never given antique needlework a second thought till I got to work with it up close. But the cool thing about it is that they are artistic historical artifacts from a demographic that is almost entirely absent from art history, or any history at all. These girls (many as young as six), lived in a world where children didn’t have voices or choices. Born into classes other than the aristocracy (and some were even in orphanages), these girls grew up, lived out their lives in towns and villages, then passed on. Their childhood needlework survived them, and is now being collected, researched, and shared by Leslie. The project now engages over a thousand members of the global needlework community.
Allium Subcaeruleus, by Jorg Jacoby
All that is a lead-up to talking about Leslie’s 60th birthday party last night, and wow, what a party! It was held at Leftbank. We began with a champagne and hors d’oeuvres reception for the exhibit The Butterfly Effect: A Visionary Gesture by Leslie B. Durst. Over the last ten years Leslie has secretly commissioned ten artists to make twelve works each – which leslie then gave as gifts to others. Wow!
Then we were seated upstairs at large tables with opportunities to meet new people and eat course after delicious course of dinner. Before dessert, a Brazilian-style street band and four dancers made a dramatic entrance into the hall, and drummed and danced so crazy loud it was hard to stay seated. Then the band led us all down and out into the street. We followed them into another space at Leftbank, this one empty but for childhood photos of Leslie projected on one wall, and tables piled high with cupcakes. And I mean high. Mountains of cupcakes on tiered platters. Plus more champagne.
After the band left my ears were ringing, but in a good way. There were speeches from her brother, PICA people, her needlework friends, and others. And Leslie spoke of her mentoring work with Vancouver kids. A video about the artists she’d commissioned played. There were toasts. Cupcakes were consumed. Needlework friends produced their surprise gifts of a set of samplers they’d sewn, in antique styles, for Leslie, and hung them one by one on the wall. And all of us who know Leslie from one facet of her life or another got to see her extended community and what great things she has done in the world. Wow!
From Under Polaris, by Cloud Eye Control
Then we went back to the dining space, which had been transformed into a theater, for the debut of the multimedia performance Under Polaris by Cloud Eye Control, – commissioned by Leslie. Wow! Then we said goodbye to Leslie, and on our way out were given a DVD catalogue of the Butterfly Effect exhibition.
A memorable evening to celebrate an extraordinary life. Leslie Durst, I’m proud to know you.