marshallastor.com

I guess it’s movie day. Thanks for not leaving us high and dry GYWO folks!

Technorati Tags: David Rees, GYWO, 23/6, Obama, politics, animation, Get Your War On

That’s all folks, vote your asses off on Tuesday.

Technorati Tags: David Rees, Get Your War On, Politics, 23/6

I’m always shocked to anything resembling arts coverage in the mainstream news. In the United States, we seem to have collectively decided that the arts are not important, and the above video editorial by CNN’s Campbell Brown shows it. In the above video, Brown disses the taxpayer costs associated with presidential portraits, which range from $7500 to $50000 per portrait for this administration. While I think that a better tribute to many of the Bush administration’s players would be better burned as straw effigies, official portraiture is one of the few areas where the arts and our government actually intersect.

Brown plays the economy card (which is already being used by arts organizations to explain programming cuts, and also by funders as an excuse not to support - it’s the get out of jail free card of 2008), suggesting that a photo would do instead. But what Brown doesn’t know (and why should any major news personality know anything about the art economy, anyways) is just how expensive photo portraits are. You’re not paying for the materials here, you’re paying for the pedigree and talent of the portraitist. Last time I saw a number tossed around a Cathy Opie portrait would go for $30,000, and I can’t imagine how much it would cost to rent Annie Leibowitz or David LaChappele to shoot the Bush cabinet. So what we’re talking about isn’t really “wow, these paintings are such a ripoff. Come on, I just bought this Nagel of a hot chick at the Salvation Army for $5, why is this portrait so damn expensive?” What we’re talking about is whether the government’s resources should be spent on the direct commission of arts in these amounts.

I don’t see arts people telling folks to “fix their own plumbing” just because the economy is bad. No one is saying that Joe the Plumber (who’s a shady, lying shit as far as I’m concerned) should go without work because people can just take a DIY attitude to home plumbing until the current recession ends. No, instead everyone is up in arms that the poor guy might have to pay more taxes if his fictional business made him a pile of money each year.

Why is it that arts workers and their jobs are perceived as disposable and non-essential whenever things get rough, but other professions aren’t? Imagine being a professional portraitist, spending years and tens of thousands of dollars to get that precious, precious MFA, building a business, buying or renting a studio, investing in the tools and materials of your trade, only to be told - we don’t need you anymore, we’ll just replace your skilled, American labour with a snapshot by our in house photographer. What this kind of thinking amounts to is job cuts when people desperately need work to maintain their businesses until the economy gets less harsh. What Brown is really advocating here is an attack on some of America’s hardest working small businesspeople.

When I was a young, yarmulke wearing Hebrew school student, our art teacher was a portraitist who painted one of the official Clinton portraits for the Congress. It was a major commission, that kept her working for most of a year and which certainly made up a great deal of her income. That was her job. I’m sure that the portraitists that I know in LA are hurting in the current economic climate, that they’re afraid that the declining fortunes of their clients will cause a slowdown that will impact their ability to support themselves and their families. Portraitists have every right to employment and income, even during a poor economy.

Even in a failing economy, we have to maintain our cultural traditions and pride. If we’re still buying multi-million dollar jet aircraft equipped with missile shooting lasers of dubious use, then we certainly have the funds in our federal budget to maintain the tiny portion that actually goes to the commissioning and creation of art.

Technorati Tags: Campbell Brown, CNN, art, portraiture, official portraits, painting

If you live in the City of LA, you should be aware that the Department of Cultural Affairs is a struggling organization that’s had it’s budget slashed time and time again and whose mission seems unattainable with the resources it has. I watched the department spin its wheels under Margie Reese’s too-long “leadership”, and since Olga Garay came on the scene as the new department head, I’ve been sitting with crossed fingers, hoping to see someone turn the lights back on in the department. Olga seems to have really returned a positive energy to the department, and to those of us who work with it, or observe it from the outside, we are all hoping that she has the tools and the staff to undertake a transformation of the department, and the City.

The most important action the department has undertaken since her arrival is the process to give the department, and the City as a whole, a direction, via a new DCA Cultural Master Plan. So if you live in any of the City’s 15 districts, or make use of the City cultural services that take place in any of them, the City needs your input. The first thing you can do is go here and take this two-page survey (I promise, no endless fields of radio buttons, asking this or that, it’s easy), it’s the least you can do, and it’s at the very least a momentary distraction from surfing the E-waves, looking for the latest crypto-fascist thing to come out of Sarah Palin’s mouth.

But if you’re like me, and you want to make sure they hear your whiny, little voice speak, there is a series of public meetings scheduled, one per district. As a resident of CD 15, I’m slightly miffed that the first notice I received of the meetings was this weekend, via mail, when the sole meeting in my district, CD 15, is being held this coming Thursday, October 23 @ Banning’s Landing at 6PM. So in other words, if you live in Pedro, Wilmington, Harbor City or Watts, this Thursday night is the one and only chance you may have to comment on this process.

As someone who lives in a Council District with a large number of DCA facilities (CD 15 has 5 of the 17 DCA facilities), all of which seem under/misused to me, I can’t begin to state how important it is for anyone in Los Angeles to get involved in this process, even if it’s only as a survey-filler-outer.

Technorati Tags: DCA, City of Los Angeles, Community Meetings, Los Angeles, Cultural Master PlanHere is the schedule of community meetings, which are taking place at the tail end of the project, prior to the draft report. This may be your last chance to give your advice, council, complaint or guidance to a project that’s going to hopefully turn this City’s failing cultural efforts around.

David Rhees is a genius.

Technorati Tags: David Rhees, Get Your War On, cartoon, animation, politics, 23/6, White Man’s Burden

Click through for full size action!

Well, we all know that she wanted to keep Wasalia’s library free of pesky ideas, and I think it’s pretty plain that she doesn’t read the newspaper and that she slept through years of American history classes in school. What does she read? Well according to the photo supplied by her family to the AP, above, she reads American Opinion, the official magazine of the John Birch Society. You go girl!  Show those true colours!

Original story from BAGnewsNotes. The Society has it’s own post up on the photo. Apparently it’s also the 50th anniversary of those wacky paranoid folks at the JBS. Congratulations on a half century of ultraconservative activism! Thanks for keeping things interesting.

Technorati Tags: apocalypse, your moment of apocalypse, sign of the end times, Sarah Palin, John Birch Society, American Opinion

More Get Your War On from David Rees and 23/6.

Technorati Tags: Get Your War On, Rape Kits, Sarah Palin, Rape, politics, cartoon, video, David Rees, 23/6

Technorati Tags: Sarah Palin, 23/6, Moose Meat, Get Your War On, David Rhees

Thanks Phill for pointing out this excellent mash-up. Obama’s going to turn salt to pepper and pepper to salt, you know.

Technorati Tags: The Warriors, Barak Obama, speech, mashup