From the World’s Greatest Living Editorial Cartoonist, via Clowncrack:
Here at esnl, we’re very partial to cartoons which play on famous works of art, and Fish’s creation is a timely and topical take of The Raft of the Medusa, a massive 1819 creation by French artist Théodore Géricault.
Completed when the artist was 27, the work has become an icon of French Romanticism. At 491 by 716 cm (16 ft 1 in by 23 ft 6 in), it is an over-life-size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today’s Mauritania on 2 July 1816. On 5 July 1816, at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practiced cannibalism (the custom of the sea). The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain.
Fish’s take is simply brilliant, capturing the sheer horror of today’s headlines and placing it in historical context [note Hitler, who also invaded Ukraine, Burger King Trump, Putin’s foremost American facilitator, and the grinning visage of Mao Tse Tung, the founder of modern China, the nation emerging as the one clear winner of the Ukrainian invasion.
It is. perhaps, the best single summation of what historians see as the long 20th Century, which began with the horrors of World War I and culminated in Trump’s election.
You’ve seen the image countless times, the image of a resolute woman flexing her muscles.
Asked to give her name, you’d no doubt respond, “That’s Rosie the Riveter.”
And you’d be wrong.
She’s Naomi Parker Fraley, and she wasn’t even a riveter, but a lather operator at an aircraft plant at Alameda Naval Air Station on San Francisco Bay in California, and the image was painted for commission by plant operator Westinghouse Electric by Howard J. Miller from a color photo published in the Oakland Post Enquirer on March 25th 1942. That’s a Westinghouse badge she’s wearing on her collar.
Norman Rockwell’s Rosie
Had you asked anyone during World War II what Rosie looked like, the image they’d have invoked would’ve been this, created by Norman Rockwell for the cover of the 29 May 1943 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, one of the nation’s most popular magazines:
Mary Louise Doyle, Rockwell’s Rosie was a telephone operator, rather than an arms worker, and lived near Rockwell’s home and studio in Arlington, Vermont, where she posed for the painting, in a pose inspired by Michelangelo’s depiction of the prophet Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, The artist added the muscles, ham sandwich, and the copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on which he feet repose:
Michelangelo’s Isaiah.
She of the radiant muscular self-confidence was inspired by a song immensely popular amongst a nation of fearful folk engaged in war of absolutes against two highly motivated authoritarian empires.
But with many prime working age men volunteering for or drafted into the military, armaments manufacturers were forced to turn to women to fill jobs in their rapidly expanding production plants. And that challenged traditional views of the “proper place” for women in labor force.
Instead of or in additional to filling their roles as “housewives” and service workers [i.e. maids, receptionists, telephone operators, waitresses, and department store staff], women were taking high-paying industrial work, a traditionally all-male domain.
An editorial cartoon inspired by Rockwell’s Rosie [note the unruly coiffure and the riveting gun in her pocket] reveals the angst in America’s heartland:
Dashed expectations
And while women in war production plants loved their jobs, and fully 86 percent of women in industrial plants survey by the U.S. Department of Labor in 1944 said they planned to keep their jobs after war’s end, expectations that for, for most, would be dashed to dust after the war’s end:
While societal pressure drove many women from their lucrative and unionized jobs, another factor was the Selective Service and Training Act of 1940, which mandated employers to give rehire returning service members.
Combined with the post-war economic slowdown and the closing of many defense plants, working women found themselves either back in the home or taking lower-paying service jobs, mostly non-union.
While women had comprised 37 percent of the U.S. workforce in 1945, as History.com notes:
By 1948, the percentage of women in the U.S. workforce dipped to 32.7 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, this despite a poll taken in the last few years of the war that suggested between 61 to 85 percent of women wanted to remain in their jobs when the war was over. The men may have prevailed at the time, but there was no turning back to a world before the war. In the ensuing decades, women took up ideological arms to battle for their rights, including equality of pay, opportunity, and treatment in the workplace.
Anne Montagne, founder of Thanks! Plain and Simple, an organization associated with the American Rosie Movement, laid out the dilemma to the Washington Post: “You know, they said about the men, ‘How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’ What I say about the women is, ‘How ya gonna keep ’em knitting with yarn after they’ve seen Lockheed?’”
Rosie had become an anachronism, recalled occasionally when the radio played the 1943 song that had inspired Rockwell’s painting:
Rosie’s resurgence
It was Second Wave Feminism that brought Miller’s poster back into public consciousness, as Sarah Myers, Assistant Professor of History at Saint Francis University and G. Kurt Piehler, Associate Professor of History at Florida State University write in a report for The Conversation, an open source academic journal written in conversational English:
[B]y the early 1980s, feminists were looking for images from the past that they could reclaim as a symbol of female empowerment. They may have considered the Rockwell painting. But unlike Rockwell’s work, the less-famous Westinghouse poster wasn’t under copyright. It also didn’t contain a veiled reference to the war: “Mein Kampf.”
In the post-Vietnam era, feminists wanted an image of a woman that was visually appealing but not necessarily pro-war. In addition, compared with Rockwell’s painting, the woman in Miller’s poster is not as overtly working-class and could easily be manipulated to support a wide range of activist causes.
In the end, the message feminists wanted to send with the image wasn’t the original message of the poster. Miller’s poster, like most of the Rosie propaganda, was supposed to be a call for men and women to work together for the duration of the war out of patriotic duty.
But because they were still grappling with widespread job and wage discrimination, feminists simply wanted to use Rosie to show that women could perform the jobs traditionally held by men just as well, if not better. The slogan “We Can Do It!” was originally about winning the war. But it’s now meant to suggest women can do anything they put their minds to.
The red bandana-wearing Rosie was feminine-looking and attractive, bold but not too confrontational. In other words, the image was a safe, malleable advocate, one that continues to be deployed today.
We suspect the choice of Rosie’s had an implicit class bias as well.
Rockwell’s Rosie was exuberantly working class, with her wild mane and dirty face, hands, and arms, that very masculine wristwatch, and all those buttons, revealing an intense and immediate engagement with her work, while Miller’s Rosie is distinctly middle class, as were many of the Second Wave feminism’s most media savvy “leaders,” the one’s most often quoted in the news.
As for that copy of Mein Kampf, a quick trim can eliminate it, just as the Norman Rockwell Museum has done on their own website.
Miller’s Rosie, unlike Rockwell’s, is carefully made up, with bright lipstick fastidiously clean hands, and eyelashes brushed with makeup. And with her hair gleaming and immaculately coiffed, without the bandana, she could easily have staffed a makeup counter at Macy’s.
While Rockwell’s image was widely circulated during they war, Miller’s image lasted a mere two weeks at a few Westinghouse plants.
Form the Independent, Dave Brown reimagines a classic:
The “after Gustave Doré” acknowledgement refers to Dante and Virgil in the Ninth Circle of Hellan 1861 work by the Parisian master inspired by Dante’s Inferno, and features the blue-robed Dante being given a tour of the Ninth Circle of Hell by the Roman poet Virgil:
Hogmanay is the Scottish word for last day of the year, and it’s huge deal for fans of kilts, cabers, and haggis.
The celebrations are sometimes notorious [the Scots do, after all, love their single-malts], but they’re always dramatic.
And the last day of 2020 brought a new touch to Hogmanay in Edinburgh, lighted drones creating remarkable, evanescent visual displays. And because of COVID, mass celebrations went by the way sp the whole show was livestreamed.
The display was divided into three parts, and here they are.
Part 1: Fare Well
Program notes:
Fare Well is a new poem by Jackie Kay that bids farewell to 2020 and wishes a better year for 2021.
Narrated by David Tennant and others, Fare Well underscores the UK’s largest swarm drone display, recorded in the Scottish Highlands and cut to spectacular views above Edinburgh.
Part One of Fare Well looks at the year gone by – the funerals and weddings cancelled, the griefs and despairs which have been collective, with a feeling that the world has become a village.
Fare Well: Part 2
Program notes:
Read by – David Tennant, Siobhan Redmond, Lorne MacFadyen
Whilst part one of Fare Well looked at the year that’s gone by, the second phase turns to look at us today and to give thanks for the many acts of community and kindness displayed by so many across the country. Jackie Kay’s narrative takes an optimistic tone, reflecting on the good of the human spirit and the sense of togetherness that has emerged from 2020.
Part two of Fare Well includes images of “WE” in the skies above Edinburgh – a message from Scotland of universality and commonality – with “WE” translated into many languages including French, Gaelic, Arabic, Greek, Korean, Mandarin and Thai.
Fare Well: Part 3
Program notes:
The final installment of Fare Well and a message of hope for 2021!
Whilst part one and two of Fare Well looked at the year gone by, the finale turns from the celebration of Hogmanay, the end of the year, and looks with optimism to the future. Taking inspiration from a poem by Robert Burns (Sketch New Year’s Day), Scots Makar Jackie Kay echoes Burns’ question about the night of Hogmanay and asks what did ‘yesternight deliver’ and like Burns, finds that there is hope, and that it is found in nature. Burns finds hope in looking up at the skies and says that something in us never dies.
And that poem by Robert Burns:
Sketch — New Year’s Day, 1790
THIS day, Time winds th’ exhausted chain; To run the twelvemonth’s length again: I see, the old bald-pated fellow, With ardent eyes, complexion sallow, Adjust the unimpair’d machine, To wheel the equal, dull routine.
The absent lover, minor heir, In vain assail him with their prayer; Deaf as my friend, he sees them press, Nor makes the hour one moment less, Will you (the Major’s with the hounds, The happy tenants share his rounds; Coila’s fair Rachel’s care to-day, And blooming Keith’s engaged with Gray) From housewife cares a minute borrow, (That grandchild’s cap will do to-morrow,) And join with me a-moralizing; This day’s propitious to be wise in.
First, what did yesternight deliver? “Another year has gone for ever.” And what is this day’s strong suggestion? “The passing moment’s all we rest on!” Rest on—for what? what do we here? Or why regard the passing year? Will Time, amus’d with proverb’d lore, Add to our date one minute more? A few days may—a few years must— Repose us in the silent dust. Then, is it wise to damp our bliss? Yes—all such reasonings are amiss! The voice of Nature loudly cries, And many a message from the skies, That something in us never dies: That on his frail, uncertain state, Hang matters of eternal weight: That future life in worlds unknown Must take its hue from this alone; Whether as heavenly glory bright, Or dark as Misery’s woeful night.
Since then, my honour’d first of friends, On this poor being all depends, Let us th’ important now employ, And live as those who never die. Tho’ you, with days and honours crown’d, Witness that filial circle round, (A sight life’s sorrows to repulse, A sight pale Envy to convulse), Others now claim your chief regard; Yourself, you wait your bright reward.
Without prompt federal action, the Biden administration could be faced with a wave of evictions unprecedented in the nation’s history, with as many as 40 million Americans, impoverished by the coronavirus pandemic, thrown out of their homes.
Millions [are] on the verge of being evicted with the federal eviction moratorium set to expire at the end of January, unleashing what advocates say could be a housing catastrophe of historic proportions: Without federal intervention, they fear, as many as 40 million people could be displaced amid an ongoing and still worsening pandemic.
“We’re facing potentially the worst housing and homelessness crisis in our country’s history,” said Diane Yentel, CEO and president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington, D.C.
The eviction moratorium approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was originally set to end Dec. 31. It was expected to be extended through January by Congress under a $900 billion COVID-19 relief package that also includes offering $25 billion in emergency rental assistance – the figure requested by the National Low Income Housing Coalition in a letter submitted last week to the CDC and co-signed by 1,500 housing advocacy organizations.
“The least the federal government can do during a once-in-a-century pandemic is assure each of us that we’re not going to lose our homes in the middle of it,” Yentel said. The $25 billion, she said, was not nearly enough to meet the actual need, but it was a step in the right direction.
Among the likely victims: Entertainers
Among the occupations where unemployment is pandemic, it’s the folks who’ve kept us entertained during the viral siege who have clocked up unprecedented levels of joblessness, reports the New York Times:
During the quarter ending in September, when the overall unemployment rate averaged 8.5 percent, 52 percent of actors, 55 percent of dancers and 27 percent of musicians were out of work, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. By comparison, the jobless rate was 27 percent for waiters; 19 percent for cooks; and about 13 percent for retail salespeople over the same period.
In many areas, arts venues — theaters, clubs, performance spaces, concert halls, festivals — were the first businesses to close, and they are likely to be among the last to reopen.
“My fear is we’re not just losing jobs, we’re losing careers,” said Adam Krauthamer, president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians in New York. He said 95 percent of the local’s 7,000 members are not working on a regular basis because of the mandated shutdown. “It will create a great cultural depression,” he said.
The new $15 billion worth of stimulus aid for performance venues and cultural institutions that Congress approved this week — which was thrown into limbo after President Trump criticized the bill — will not end the mass unemployment for performers anytime soon. And it only extends federal unemployment aid through mid-March.
The irony, is, of course that folks like Jeff Bezos, people who’ve reaped vast rewards since the pandemic emerged, also make lots of their wealth on the backs of entertainers [think Amazon Prime video].
Why not simply add a pandemic profiteering surchagre to his his income taxe forms this year?
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday making classical architecture the preferred style for federal buildings in Washington, a White House official said Monday.
The presidential action stops short of mandating that all new federal buildings are built in a classical style, saying merely that they must be “beautiful.”
Under the order, a “Council for Improving Federal Civic Architecture” will be formed to recommenced updates to the General Services Administration’s architectural guidelines.
The administration has been writing the executive order for months, and an early draft that would have banned modernist design prompted condemnation from the American Institute of Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
“Architecture should be designed for the specific communities that it serves, reflecting our rich nation’s diverse places, thought, culture and climates,” the AIA said in a statement. “Architects are committed to honoring our past as well as reflecting our future progress, protecting the freedom of thought and expression that are essential to democracy.”
The Trump New Architectural Order has a fan
One person watching Trump’s architectural ambitions from the start was Pharos, the pseudonynmous author of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer [named after Der Stürmer the vision rag put out by Hitler’s top antisemitic scribe, Julius Streicher. After praising the effort to bring back the neoclassical, he ventures to explain why the style iis so popular among his ilk:
White Southerners are like the Italians living among the ruins of the Roman Empire. These monuments are reminders that we used to be a great people and can be so again. In the 19th century, the Southern people were a race of masters, explorers, settlers, statesmen, military leaders and orators. We see neoclassical Greco-Roman architecture and Greek and Roman place names all over the South because that’s who our classically educated ancestors admired and wanted to be like.
Also noticing the connection between totalitarianism and buildings with columns was The Architect’s Newspaper, which reported on a disturbing trend two years ago:
British magazine New Statesman recently published an article on the troubling links that tie Twitter accounts that cover traditional architecture to racist and xenophobic figures from across the web. As the article describes, some social media accounts that at first seem to simply celebrate historic structures have a tendency to veer into rhetoric that praises European culture over others and aggressively denies the impact of non-white or non-Christian people on Western design. One of the accounts profiled in the piece follows many ethnocentrist figures and has a followership that sharply denounces any attempts to include or even acknowledge global influences.
This is not the first time that neo-traditionalist architects have been tied to fascists. The accounts frequently post drawings from Leon Krier, the traditionalist architect who studies the work Albert Speer, the chief architect of the Nazi Regime. Philip Johnson was famously a Nazi sympathizer, despite being openly gay, something that would have gotten him sent to a concentration camp in Hitler’s Germany. Even Le Corbusier, that icon of modernism, apparently did not see much wrong with fascist regimes—they may have appealed to his desire for an authoritarian, top-down remake of society.
Hitler move the classical too
Albert Speer’s vast model of a redesigned Berlin, to be known as Germania and to be completed after a Nazi victory in World War II.
The link between classical architecture and fascism was made clear by Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and perhaps the closest thing the Nazi boss had to a friend, in an interview with Peter Foges, cited in Lapham’s Quarterly:
Thirty years later the Führer ordered the rebuilding of thirty German cities, and Speer’s particular mission was to reshape Berlin. “My architecture was essentially political, a display of power,” said Speer without a hint of apology. “Some clever English critic recently called it ‘total’ architecture. The Romans understood this. When they built the new marbled Rome, the Emperors Augustus and Hadrian set out to intimidate, to create awe. My Berlin was designed to do the same. It was modeled on Roman lines. A new imperial Roman city would be laid out with the main avenue being a north-south cardo maximus. This bisected a decumanus maximus running east-west, in the city center, and there, where they crossed, was the forum, where the great public buildings were positioned. Berlin was going to have that. At our intersection we were going to create a huge public forum with massive monuments and state buildings on display—the so-called opera publica. That was where the almost unbelievably massive Volkshalle was going to be. Hitler wanted it to be a copy of the Pantheon in Rome—but twenty times larger.” At this point Speer took out a drawing folded into one of the books he had fetched and spread it on the stone terrace floor. It must have measured three feet by six. “There,” he said. It was the plan, rendered in faded shades of brown and green on a scale of 1: 4,000. At the top of the by-now deeply creased architect’s sheet, it simply said: “A new plan for Berlin, based on an idea of the Führer’s, and worked out in detail by A. Speer.” “Hitler was of course a megalomaniac,” said the former Nazi Inspector General of Buildings for the Renovation of the Federal Capital, matter-of-factly.
And on a lighter note. . .
We’ll close with a graphic comment from the the editorial cartoonist of the Sacramento Bee:
The reference in the lower right corner is to Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son, a depiction of a Greek Titan who is moved to cannibalism by a prophecy that he was will slain by one of his offspring:
To his signature Brown adds a credit, “After Goya.”
Brown refers to Francisco de Goya’s Sopla, or Blow:
Sopla is plate 69 in a remarkable album withdrawn from sale by the artist, who was feeling the hot, rancid breath of the Inquisition breaking down his neck.
From Wikipedia:
Los caprichos are a set of 80 prints in aquatint and etching created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797 and 1798, and published as an album in 1799. The prints were an artistic experiment: a medium for Goya’s condemnation of the universal follies and foolishness in the Spanish society in which he lived. The criticisms are far-ranging and acidic; he speaks against the predominance of superstition, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, pedagogical short-comings, marital mistakes and the decline of rationality. Some of the prints have anticlerical themes. Goya described the series as depicting “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual.”
During an appearance on the “Up Front In The Prophetic” YouTube program last Wednesday, QAnon conspiracy theorist and so-called “firefighter prophet” Mark Taylor declared that any Christian who voted for Joe Biden in the presidential election has cursed their family for generations to come.
After repeating his assertion that many of President Donald Trump’s critics are so thoroughly possessed by demons that they “aren’t human” any longer, Taylor attacked Christians who dared to vote against Trump.
“Let me tell you something,” Taylor fumed. “Every Christian, every pastor out there that voted for Joe Biden last night, you have brought a curse upon yourself and your family, your children, and your children’s children down to the third and fourth generation, and you need to repent.”
“You cannot call yourself a Christian and call yourself a [Democrat] and vote for Biden,” he continued. “You are implementing the dark agenda. Satan’s agenda. The kingdom of darkness. You are not supporting the kingdom of God. And if you cannot see that, if you do not repent, judgment will fall upon you, I believe, and your family and your children’s children down the third and fourth generation.”
Goya had it right.
And if you need further confirmation, consider this from CNN:
An Arkansas police chief who posted calls for violence against Democrats on social media resigned from his job on Saturday.
Lang Holland, who was police chief of the roughly 1,300-person city of Marshall, Arkansas, drew outrage from both local residents and people around the country after making ominous comments online in recent days.
In addition to repeatedly saying Democrats should be killed, he shared memes from conspiracy theory QAnon and claimed that the election was being stolen. “Death to all Marxist Democrats,” Holland posted on Parler, a new social media site popular with conservatives and used as an alternative to Twitter. “Take no prisoners leave no survivors!!”
One image he shared depicted a group of Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, wearing prison jumpsuits. Under the image he wrote: “I pray all those in that picture hang on the gallows and are drawn and quartered!!!! Anything less is not acceptable.”
Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett gets an untitled ichthyological ideation for a Chris Hedges column of the judge and the emerging stands of a new Christian fascism at Scheerpost:
Hedges singles out the Trump nominee for “her abject subservience to corporate power, her hostility to workers, civil liberties, unions and environmental regulations.”
But what we noticed was the striking and surely non-coincidental resemblance to another piece of work associated with fascism, Der Bannerträger [The Standard Bearer], a 1935 work by Austrian painter Hubert Lanzinger:
We begin with a cartoon from the Baton Rouge Advocate, depicting the imminent removal of Robert E. Lee from his towering six-story marble pedestal in the heart of the Crescent City:
Walt Handelsman: Monumental change
Eviction of the military commanders who fought for slavery has been a long time coming.
The Confederate Flag has become the unofficial banner of the GOP, sported brazenly at so many Trump rallies.
As just as Robert E. Lee and his brothers in arms fought for the right of plantation owners to keep humans in chains, so the modern bearers of the Confederate battle flag are all about keep black folks down in today’s America, save for the occasional token like Ben Carson.
Lee Adelson of the Advocatereports on the removal of the last obstacle to the landmark [literally] move:
Confederate heroes Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard will soon be decamping from their prominent pedestals in New Orleans, more than a year after the City Council declared their statues to be public nuisances that should be taken down.
A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously cleared the way Monday evening for the monuments to be removed, issuing an opinion that criticized groups seeking to keep the statues in place for arguments that “wholly lack legal viability or support.”
With what is likely the last legal hurdle the city faces removed, the statues are expected to come down quickly. Tyronne Walker, a spokesman for Mayor Mitch Landrieu, said the city will start seeking bids Tuesday to remove the statues, and a contract will be awarded 25 days later.
The opinion by Judges Patrick Higginbotham, Jennifer Walker Elrod and Stephen Higginson lifted a temporary order they issued last year that had prevented the city from moving to take down the statues that have stood for many decades at Lee Circle, Jefferson Davis Parkway and the entrance to City Park.
Robert B. Ekelund, Eminent Scholar and Professor of Economics Emeritus at Auburn University, is both a classically trained pianist as well as a passionate collector of art.
He’s also a world-renowned economist.
In an analysis for The Conversation, an open source academic journal written in conversational English, Ekelund tackles an item up for the chop in Donald Trump’s first budget, abolition of the National Endowment for the Arts [NEA].
The NEA is one of three cultural institutions proposed for elimination, the others being the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
While Trump says he wants to build up infrastructure, the only improvements he wants are those related to commerce, including the roads, tunnels, and bridges we used to commute to and from those corporate jobs.
So what does it all mean for folks like us?
From The Conversation:
Some politicians have never made a secret of their desire to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as its companion agency the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
Each of these agencies have traditionally been regarded as bastions of “liberalism,” making them prime targets for conservatives in the culture wars.
While I would dispute that characterization, opponents’ ostensible reason for killing off the NEA in particular is equally flimsy: cost savings. Costing taxpayers US$148 million in fiscal year 2016, the NEA made up a minuscule fraction of the $3.9 trillion the U.S. government spent. (If you add in the other two agencies on the chopping block, the total was still just $741 million.)
At the same time, NEA opponents tell those who worry their local communities will see arts funding dry up, don’t worry, private sources will emerge to make up for the difference. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth.
That’s because it’s the government funding itself that often drives the donations in the first place by energizing private philanthropy. And since privatization of arts funding is one of the supposed reasons for killing off the NEA, the argument begins to fall apart.
If we focus on the allocations to museums in particular, my particular focus, the proposed cuts could lead to a reduced financial health of all museums, especially smaller museums in the middle of the country.
Where the money goes
The NEA’s budget of $148 million is divided up among 19 different categories, including arts education, dance, music and opera. (The NEH gets a similar allocation of $148 million, while the CPB – which funds National Public Radio and PBS – gets $445 million.)
The loss of funds to each arts category would be unfortunate, but I would argue the museum funding cuts would be especially damaging. A closer look at the impact on museums is also illustrative of the deleterious effect of eliminating the NEA for American arts more generally, which generated $704 billion in economic activity in 2013. Another study showed that each dollar of investment in nonprofit cultural institutions creates $1.20 to $1.90 in per capita income.
Thursday was a family day as esnl [behind the lens], daughter Jackie [left] her spouse Krys [right[, his mom, and granddaughter Sadie Rose [melting our heart with s a smile] hit the bricks for a day on the town, starting with a visit to the Broad Museum:
Panasonic DMC-ZS19, 17 February 2017, ISO 1250, 4.3 mm, 1/250 sec, f3.3
Right across the street from the Broad is downtown LA’s most striking architectural feature, architect Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.
We were fortunate in that all traffic to the area had been blocked off because high school students were enjoying a day with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, giving us the rare opportunity to shoot with any traffic:
Panasonic DMC-ZS19, 17 February 2017, ISO 160, 4.4 mm, 1/640 sec, f4
Another shot, taken from the entrance of the Broad looking across Second Street:
Panasonic DMC-ZS19, 17 February 2017, ISO 100, 4.3 mm, 1/2000 sec, f4
Inside the Broad, we toured Creature, an exhibit of the monstrous captured by artists in both it florid and it’s more mundane forms. Sadie Rose found herself smitten with an Andy Warhol take on Bella Lugosi’s Dracula [she’s in her “I love monsters” phase].
We were drawn to a couple of Jeff Koons sculptures. the first, a delightful rendition of America’s greatest comedian of silent screen era, Buster Keaton:
Panasonic DMC-ZS19, 17 February 2017, ISO 250, 4.3 mm, 1/60 sec, f3.3
And there’s this rendition of the ambiguous Michael Jackson and his pet chimp, Bubbles:
Panasonic DMC-ZS19, 17 February 2017, ISO 320, 4.3 mm, 1/125 sec, f3.3
After lunch we took a stroll, giving us the opportunity of shooting two murals adorning walls adjacent to downtown parking lots.
First, a work entitled Who Will Guard the Guards Themselves?, a translation of that famous line from the Roman poet Juvenal, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”:
Panasonic DMC-ZS19, 17 February 2017, ISO 100, 4.3 mm, 1/200 sec, f4
Another mural offers a more optimistic perspective:
Panasonic DMC-ZS19, 17 February 2017, ISO 100, 4.3 mm, 1/500 sec, f4
For our last two shots, we with to black and white, a perspective that allows us to capture the basic form of architectural features, as in this image of architecture detail atop a seven-story building:
Panasonic DMC-ZS19, 17 February 2017, ISO 100, 11.7 mm, 1/500 sec, f4.9
Trump Budget Hit List Has Programs Long in G.O.P. Sights
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, AmeriCorps and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities could all be eliminated under President Trump.
Most of the programs cost under $500 million annually, a pittance for a government that is projected to spend about $4 trillion this year.
A bookstore in San Francisco’s famed Haight-Ashbury district is in the news because of a gift from an anonymous donor, a contribution that has some people reading and other folks coughing up money for more giveaways.
George Orwell’s “1984″ is required reading for most high school students, and in recent weeks, the classic dystopian novel has been selling out at bookstores across the nation.
On Friday night, a “mysterious benefactor” purchased 50 copies of the book to be given away free at Booksmith in Haight-Ashbury. According to store owner Christin Evans, the generous citizen lives in the neighborhood.
The free books were accompanied by a sign that said, “Read up! Fight back! A mystery benefactor has bought these copies of ‘1984′ for you if you need one.”
Copies of the novel were snatched up within a couple of hours, but another benefactor soon stepped up to purchase copies of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts” for the public.
The independent bookseller recently made headlines for refusing to stock copies of Milo Yianopoulos’s book upon customer request.
Evans called the book donation a “fruitful, constructive form of resistance,” and said that multiple other benefactors had already expressed interesting in purchasing books to give away at the store.
Were we rolling in flighty lucre, we add another to the giveaway pile, Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian, a superb satire on the darkest traits of American culture and a big, arrogant blowhard who uses his fortune to get folks to do insane things.
A compilation of Tweets from America’s acknowledged master of horror [making him perhaps the most qualified critic of all when it comes to the Bulbous Beast of Pennsylvania Avenue]:
Welcome to the age of plunder, bluster, and empty rhetoric. In other words, to the Age of Dumb. If you voted for him, you’re responsible.
Breaking News: Sean Spicer is an idiot.
Imagine a hooligan pouring sugar into the gas tank of an expensive and well-maintained car. Trump is that hooligan. America is that car.
If only Donald Trump was 5% as good at governing as he is at firing people of conscience. His presidency is a joke. Sadly, we’re the butt.
Trump’s view of fake news explained: “If it runs counter to what I believe or say, it’s fake. The facts are irrelevant.”
How about some extreme vetting of Donald Trump’s tax returns?
Publisher printing more copies of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ after spike in demand
The book publisher Penguin is printing more copies of George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984” in response to a sudden surge of demand.
On Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning the book was #1 on Amazon’s computer-generated list of best-selling books. The list reflects hourly book sales.
The 68-year-old novel appeared on the list on Monday, hovered around the #6 spot for much of the day, rose to #2 by Tuesday afternoon and then hit #1.
The reason for the sudden surge?
Perhaps this clip from north of the border adds context.
EXCLUSIVE: Rocky goes to Washington! Trump taps Sylvester Stallone for top ‘arts’ role
President-elect Trump has approached the veteran actor for a top arts-related position in his administration, DailyMail.com has learned
The Rocky star, a long-time fan of The Donald, is said to be pumped over the job
The likely position would be Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency that doles out funds to aspiring artists and creative projects
If Stallone is formally offered that job, his appointment will have to be approved by Congress
From Clowncrack, his blog of autogenous autognosis, where he writes:
I received a note this morning from a fan who reminded me of an illustration that I did almost 4 years ago. He correctly suggested that the image might have greater relevance now than when I originally posted it, which is unfortunately true. So, in the interest of forcing our collective faces back into the instructive commentary offered by the deep dark truthful mirror, I present this cartoon, not as proof of our defeat at the rope-burned hands of bigots and soulless automatons of institutionalized bigotry and hick paranoia, but rather as a battle cry calling to action the hearts and minds of better men and women poised and ready to fight peaceably for a kinder and more tolerant future.
The image itself is an homage, itself through a glass darkly, to a self-portrait by Norman Rockwell, the late master imagist of everyday America:
eats shoots 'n leaves 
