Sunday, June 27, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
The Moral of this story...
"He was out chasin' cream and the American dream
Tryin' to pretend the ends justify the means
This ain't funny so don't you dare laugh
It's just what comes to pass when you sell your a**
Life is more than what your hands can grasp"
-Mos Def
Tryin' to pretend the ends justify the means
This ain't funny so don't you dare laugh
It's just what comes to pass when you sell your a**
Life is more than what your hands can grasp"
-Mos Def
i'm no expert on art...but
Format: Street art is often seen by authority figures as vandalism. Is there anything that you think street artists can do to change that perception?
Shepard Fairey: The perception of street art as vandalism has already, by someone like Banksy, been called into question because Banksy’s work has gone up in value so tremendously that some of the councils are actually protecting his work now and I think that he has forced a lot of people – not just local government – but a lot of people in general, to reassess the role of art in public spaces. Once the art world has validated the art to where it’s worth thousands of pounds or dollars, people go “Well, here it is for free on the side of this building, it’s an outdoor museum, we should protect this.” Art is subjective; some people think a tag looks beautiful and some people think it looks like crap. The way that I’ve tried to change the mentality about street art with the powers that be or the general population is by being willing to explain what I’m doing as a street artist because I think people fear what they don’t understand.
If you’re willing to be articulate and explain what you’re doing, that removes the ‘fear’ factor and that helps and additionally, where I put my art – I try to put it in places that are inoffensive as possible – if I find a boarded up building or a wall that’s already covered in graffiti or decaying in some way – unkept – that’s an appropriate place for street art. To go and put something on a pristine building that’s obviously gonna piss off the building owner, I don’t think that’s constructive. I think a lot of what street artists need to do is be a little more thoughtful about where they’re placing the art. I mean, I can be open about who I am as a street artist because I feel I can defend any of my decisions about where I’ve put my work and if everyone approached street art with that same idea, that they’re gonna be held accountable for it then there wouldn’t be as many problems. It’s like a lot of laws in general exist because people don’t use common sense. So street art – like anything else, if you use common sense, it’s easy to defend and it just makes the people that react against it look like narrow minded assholes.
--
Much like street art today, modern art was questioned in its value, especially in the early 20th century. Consider Wassily Kandinsky, whose works were confiscated by the Nazis and displayed in a "Degenerate Art" exhibition, the Nazi's overarching term for modern art. But maybe you don't like Kandisky, you don't like these lines and circles, and it all looks like scribbles...
Picasso and Dali's works were included too.
Is value dependent on how much we like the piece?
Shepard Fairey: The perception of street art as vandalism has already, by someone like Banksy, been called into question because Banksy’s work has gone up in value so tremendously that some of the councils are actually protecting his work now and I think that he has forced a lot of people – not just local government – but a lot of people in general, to reassess the role of art in public spaces. Once the art world has validated the art to where it’s worth thousands of pounds or dollars, people go “Well, here it is for free on the side of this building, it’s an outdoor museum, we should protect this.” Art is subjective; some people think a tag looks beautiful and some people think it looks like crap. The way that I’ve tried to change the mentality about street art with the powers that be or the general population is by being willing to explain what I’m doing as a street artist because I think people fear what they don’t understand.
If you’re willing to be articulate and explain what you’re doing, that removes the ‘fear’ factor and that helps and additionally, where I put my art – I try to put it in places that are inoffensive as possible – if I find a boarded up building or a wall that’s already covered in graffiti or decaying in some way – unkept – that’s an appropriate place for street art. To go and put something on a pristine building that’s obviously gonna piss off the building owner, I don’t think that’s constructive. I think a lot of what street artists need to do is be a little more thoughtful about where they’re placing the art. I mean, I can be open about who I am as a street artist because I feel I can defend any of my decisions about where I’ve put my work and if everyone approached street art with that same idea, that they’re gonna be held accountable for it then there wouldn’t be as many problems. It’s like a lot of laws in general exist because people don’t use common sense. So street art – like anything else, if you use common sense, it’s easy to defend and it just makes the people that react against it look like narrow minded assholes.
--
Much like street art today, modern art was questioned in its value, especially in the early 20th century. Consider Wassily Kandinsky, whose works were confiscated by the Nazis and displayed in a "Degenerate Art" exhibition, the Nazi's overarching term for modern art. But maybe you don't like Kandisky, you don't like these lines and circles, and it all looks like scribbles...
Picasso and Dali's works were included too.
Is value dependent on how much we like the piece?
Chemical Hair Straightening Politics
Before I cut my hair and created an afro, people thought my Arabic was perfect and that I had resided here in the Occupied Territories all my life. But when I embraced my curls and the nest that rests upon my head, I suddenly became a foreigner. It just does not make sense in my mind, how it can be that when I do accept my natural hair, my natural being in my natural homeland, my new conceptual being creates me into a foreigner. This place is just full of paradoxes.
Today I visited the apartheid wall, and I realized my identity was not the drawings painted on the cement slabs. It was not the landscape that was separated by the barrier, the hills, and valleys, and villages. My identity was the space between each slab, inches deep in the massive barrier. It did not bleed, but hid between massive entities, people who spoke on my behalf, made decisions, drew boundaries. It was that tiny space that society left for me. I could speak, but it would be between two worlds. My hair would be indigenous yet at the same time alien. When the wall does come apart, and there is no space, no cement, no guns, and just freedom, when there is room for my giant hair, what would Palestine be?
Today I visited the apartheid wall, and I realized my identity was not the drawings painted on the cement slabs. It was not the landscape that was separated by the barrier, the hills, and valleys, and villages. My identity was the space between each slab, inches deep in the massive barrier. It did not bleed, but hid between massive entities, people who spoke on my behalf, made decisions, drew boundaries. It was that tiny space that society left for me. I could speak, but it would be between two worlds. My hair would be indigenous yet at the same time alien. When the wall does come apart, and there is no space, no cement, no guns, and just freedom, when there is room for my giant hair, what would Palestine be?
what He said
from Amina:
"Had We sent down this Quran on a mountain, you would certainly have seen it falling down, splitting asunder because of the fear of Allah, and We set forth these parables to men that they may reflect. He is Allah, besides Whom there is no god. He is the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. He is Allah, besides Whom there is no god; the King, the Holy, the Giver of peace, the Granter of security, Guardian over all, the All Mighty, the All Supreme, the Possessor of every greatness. Glory be to Allah! (High is He) above all that they associate as partners with Him. He is Allah, the Creator, the Inventor of all things, the Bestower of forms. His are the most excellent names; whatever is in the heavens and the earth declares His glory. And He is the All-Mighty, the All-Wise."
(59: 21-24)
"Had We sent down this Quran on a mountain, you would certainly have seen it falling down, splitting asunder because of the fear of Allah, and We set forth these parables to men that they may reflect. He is Allah, besides Whom there is no god. He is the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. He is Allah, besides Whom there is no god; the King, the Holy, the Giver of peace, the Granter of security, Guardian over all, the All Mighty, the All Supreme, the Possessor of every greatness. Glory be to Allah! (High is He) above all that they associate as partners with Him. He is Allah, the Creator, the Inventor of all things, the Bestower of forms. His are the most excellent names; whatever is in the heavens and the earth declares His glory. And He is the All-Mighty, the All-Wise."
(59: 21-24)
Friday, June 25, 2010
the complexities of human nature?
". . . And then he realized why he was thinking like this.
It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."
TERRY PRACHETT
Jingo
A. was telling us yesterday about a documentary on Obama she had watched recently. It portrayed him as a family man, wholly human, chivalric and compassionate, overcoming odds. . . someone whom you could respect and admire, maybe even love. But wasn't Bush, for all his war-mongering, an old fashioned, Texan family man too? And yet . . . it's so difficult for me to imagine -- if only for a moment -- for someone like him, someone whom I revile with all of my heart, to be capable of appreciating familial warmth, of being able to exhibit any kind of compassion...
It's so easy for us to vilify those inhumane, callous Israeli "bastards," those who exemplify "evil," as it were, who would perpetrate such catastrophic violence, inflict such acute suffering upon innocent people . . . We dehumanize them, in effect, and as such, it is almost impossible for us to imagine them in the most tender of situations -- singing a lullaby to their children before putting them to bed at night, for example, taking care of their aging mothers...
1994 in Rwanda, you had neighbors, deeply-cherished family friends -- ordinary people -- pick up machetes, break bonds, turn against each other and hack people to death. A rather unnerving paradox, which causes your heart to recoil into its depths in disbelief...
And then this lends itself to the "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" question. The idea that the "evil" leaders of the world don't necessarily see themselves as perpetrating evil -- they see themselves as being in the right. What is base and morally corrupt, is such a malleable social construct. One of the things I hated the most about Bush's rhetoric, is how arrogantly/ignorantly he would pontificate about "us" vs. "them," "good" vs. "evil"; how easy it was for him to simplify such complicated, amorphous concepts. . . & Yet, I find myself doing the same when I judge people who are of different political leanings than I am.
It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."
TERRY PRACHETT
Jingo
A. was telling us yesterday about a documentary on Obama she had watched recently. It portrayed him as a family man, wholly human, chivalric and compassionate, overcoming odds. . . someone whom you could respect and admire, maybe even love. But wasn't Bush, for all his war-mongering, an old fashioned, Texan family man too? And yet . . . it's so difficult for me to imagine -- if only for a moment -- for someone like him, someone whom I revile with all of my heart, to be capable of appreciating familial warmth, of being able to exhibit any kind of compassion...
It's so easy for us to vilify those inhumane, callous Israeli "bastards," those who exemplify "evil," as it were, who would perpetrate such catastrophic violence, inflict such acute suffering upon innocent people . . . We dehumanize them, in effect, and as such, it is almost impossible for us to imagine them in the most tender of situations -- singing a lullaby to their children before putting them to bed at night, for example, taking care of their aging mothers...
1994 in Rwanda, you had neighbors, deeply-cherished family friends -- ordinary people -- pick up machetes, break bonds, turn against each other and hack people to death. A rather unnerving paradox, which causes your heart to recoil into its depths in disbelief...
And then this lends itself to the "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" question. The idea that the "evil" leaders of the world don't necessarily see themselves as perpetrating evil -- they see themselves as being in the right. What is base and morally corrupt, is such a malleable social construct. One of the things I hated the most about Bush's rhetoric, is how arrogantly/ignorantly he would pontificate about "us" vs. "them," "good" vs. "evil"; how easy it was for him to simplify such complicated, amorphous concepts. . . & Yet, I find myself doing the same when I judge people who are of different political leanings than I am.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
elephants
"Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool."
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant (1936)
This documentary, called To Shoot an Elephant gets its name from that Orwell's short story. It an eye-witness account from Gaza...
I'm going to download it (available on the site) and watch it sometime.
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant (1936)
This documentary, called To Shoot an Elephant gets its name from that Orwell's short story. It an eye-witness account from Gaza...
I'm going to download it (available on the site) and watch it sometime.
eavesdropping
Person A to Person B: "So...do you capitalize heaven?"*
*from a conversation overheard at Bruin Cafe
*from a conversation overheard at Bruin Cafe
the only dream worth having . . .
". . . is to dream that you will live while you are alive and die only when you are dead.
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
ARUNDHATI ROYI once wrote an essay on peer pressure in high school that equated succumbing to the whims of others as being dead while one is alive, and vice versa. That's how I interpreted it as at the time, anyway.
Do not be afraid of what's to come...
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Motivation
"Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do." - John Steinbeck
I sometimes catch myself doing good deeds for people just to keep myself relevant. I have to remind myself that we should help one another not for the gratitude or for the recognition, but simply because it's the right thing to do.
I sometimes catch myself doing good deeds for people just to keep myself relevant. I have to remind myself that we should help one another not for the gratitude or for the recognition, but simply because it's the right thing to do.
china, anyone? (holler at IDS)
From Sanobar:
So this morning I was listening to the news radio (with no particular political slant...at least not a overt one). There was an interesting piece on talks about appreciating the Chinese Yuan to reduce their comparative advantage and make it easier for the Europeans and Americans to compete. I thought this was super interesting cuz we know that China is gaining both political and economic power on the world stage. But this also would imply that the U.S. and Europe are looking to beef-up their manufacturing and services sections of their economies. Why else would they want Chinese products to become more expensive??? Your thoughts please... let's have a conversation.
Interview with Fred Bergsten this past Friday on Chinese-American trading relations
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june10/chinacurrency_06-18.html
Fred's Bio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Bergsten
http://www.iie.com/staff/author_bio.cfm?author_id=33
So this morning I was listening to the news radio (with no particular political slant...at least not a overt one). There was an interesting piece on talks about appreciating the Chinese Yuan to reduce their comparative advantage and make it easier for the Europeans and Americans to compete. I thought this was super interesting cuz we know that China is gaining both political and economic power on the world stage. But this also would imply that the U.S. and Europe are looking to beef-up their manufacturing and services sections of their economies. Why else would they want Chinese products to become more expensive??? Your thoughts please... let's have a conversation.
Interview with Fred Bergsten this past Friday on Chinese-American trading relations
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june10/chinacurrency_06-18.html
Fred's Bio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Bergsten
http://www.iie.com/staff/author_bio.cfm?author_id=33
Wizard of Oz, 1939
Glinda
Well, I'm a little muddled. The Munchkins called me because a new witch has just dropped a house on the Wicked Witch of the East.
And there's the house, and here you are, and that's all that's left of the Wicked Witch of the East.
And so, what the Munchkins want to know is - are you a good witch or a bad witch?
Dorothy:
But I've already told you, I'm not a witch at all. Witches are old and ugly. What was that?
Glinda:
The Munchkins. They're laughing because I am a witch. I'm Glinda, the Witch of the North.
Dorothy:
You are! I beg your pardon! But I've never heard of a beautiful witch before.
Glinda:
Only bad witches are ugly.
Well, I'm a little muddled. The Munchkins called me because a new witch has just dropped a house on the Wicked Witch of the East.
And there's the house, and here you are, and that's all that's left of the Wicked Witch of the East.
And so, what the Munchkins want to know is - are you a good witch or a bad witch?
Dorothy:
But I've already told you, I'm not a witch at all. Witches are old and ugly. What was that?
Glinda:
The Munchkins. They're laughing because I am a witch. I'm Glinda, the Witch of the North.
Dorothy:
You are! I beg your pardon! But I've never heard of a beautiful witch before.
Glinda:
Only bad witches are ugly.
Monday, June 21, 2010
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