MotherPie

Bringing Cattle to Market Long Ago...

The stockyards, dominated by Armour &  Company, were a fixture of cities that shipped meat back east, starting in the 1800s in Fort Worth, Texas.  Armour & Company in Fort Worth, began operating in 1903. Cattle in the 1800s were herded up the Chisolm Trail, through Indian Territory, to places like Dodge City, Kansas, where the railroad had reached.  This photo is from 1913 Fort Worth and the stockyards are still existing there.  Once Oklahoma City was formed, after the Land Run in 1907, Armour and Company established an outlet there.  

Now, if you go to the stockyards in each of those cities, Fort Worth has remained rooted in the past and still has a vital area thriving around The Stockyards, even though Armour abandoned the area long ago. Oklahoma City, on the other hand, has let its area dwindle down to nothing, focusing their self image on new areas of development along the Canadian River, plans which Fort Worth is also doing along the Trinity River.

My grandfather grew up on the upside - the better neighbhorhood -- upwind from the stench and when he finished college in the early Depression years, he went to work at Armour & Company.  When he married my grandmother, the announcement in her hometown newspaper had the headline "Local Girl Weds Employed Man". 

Such were the jobs and the industry out west, then, when cows were raised in a healthy manner before they started the route to market.

Panics of The Great Depression...

The Financial Crisis of  hasn't yet become Depression 2.0 yet (that is a term from Paul Krugman), but references to The Great Depression are growing, beginning at the first of 2009. We are fearful of that term, fearful of what happened then, fearful of what may be in the future.  Some are avoiding the D-word all together, using euphemisms like banana. The Great Banana? so typical of Americans who don't even like to talk about death). The Good Life stopped at the end of The Roaring Twenties, the Gilded Age.  What will our era of the several decades of this bubble be called?

 This photo shows a 1920s bank panic at Guaranty State Bank in downtown Fort Worth. A large mob of panicky depositors crowds around the Main Street entrance of the bank building. 

Maybe people aren't rushing the banks as they did then, but I'm seeing signs of panic and grave, grave concern.  Elderly people have lost their retirement savings, businesses are closing, jobs are hard to find and most everywhere I go people are talking about what they are noticing. 

When the Mayor of Santa Fe held an open discussion meeting about the state of the economy here in Santa Fe, the venue had to be changed to the Convention Center downtown.

photo:  From the Jack White Collection of Historic Fort Worth Photos, UTA

Sunday Soapbox: Unhealthy Livestock Practices...

Things like the factory farming of animals upset me and it should upset you, too.

With 70 percent of of antibiotics sales used in agricultural (massive livestock agribusiness that creates such unnatural and crowded environments in meat producing operations) and major medical associations became concerned enough that the FDA banned them only to have the FDA quietly revoke the ban to "more fully consider the many substantive comments it received" ... well, go read the story that flew under the radar and I quote from it: "The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Infectious Disease Society of America, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Pew Commission have all indicted livestock antibiotics for creeping human antibiotic resistance -- including last-chance antibiotics."

Toxic Beef
I think of Damien Hirst's art work, a cow suspended in a large case of formaldehyde -- dead food which is what we are exposed to now. When the Turner Prize winning artist's cow work encountered all sorts of toxic problems (not only do countries ban British beef, but the problem with the formaldehyde used to pickle the cow made it all surreal).  When I thought his works were irrelevant and signs of the height of the irrational times we live in, where spending and attention is focused on things that I deem unimportant.

Nostalgic About our Pastoral Cows
In Santa Fe (known for it's art environment), paintings of cows are selling like hotcakes.  Cows in fields, cows in groups, cows solo.  Big cow paintings.  They seem to be everywhere I look.  I think this is our way of communicating our concern that cows grazing lazily in pastures of fresh green grass are no longer things we see everyday when animal farming is no longer the business of small and mid-size farms. 

We are in a big unhealthy pickle with the way we raise our livestock.
This isn't right. .. The human health impact is huge. Until the 1950s cows were kept in pastures until slaughter.  Now, 80% or so of the 35 million cows are processed for slaughter in feedlots and this unnatural process of factory beef is harming our health.

The Semiotics of Cultural Ownership and Treasures...

Obama images are everywhere, the most popular icon of the 21st century. Obama's image is out of control, everywhere. Can copyrights of his image be enforced when they are remixed?  Like Warhol's use of pop icons (images of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Mao), references to existing art and icons is our method of digital literacy, signs of meaning, ideas that everyone wants to own and refer to. These Shepard Fairey Commemorative Plates can be purchased individually for $89, or as a set of two (one of each color) for $178, from The Future Perfect. 

The desire to personally possess, to interact, the make meaning, to create is innate.  I think we are born with a need to create, to find meaning and to interact with others in artistic ways. Who can own the idea of a thing?  This is continuing from my earlier post Stolen Art and Copyright.

LEGO Art...

I would call this art piece Empty Your Heart Out... but it is titled "Yellow" by  New York Artist Nathan Sawaya, The Brick Artist. His incredible art is not done with paint or bronze but with LEGO building blocks.  His works are on tour in North American museums in a show titled, The Art of the Brick. He has one show in Alberta in 2009 and more planned for 2010.  There are other LEGO artists such as Andrew Lipson.  Legoland California did a seven-city search back in 2007 to find a new master model builder. 

My oldest daughter traveled after graduation to Germany where she was most intrigued by the Legoland there.  Her pictures were fascinating and I knew of no such thing.

My youngest daughter drew my attention to another interesting LEGO artist this month. Christopher Neimann's approach to LEGO art is featured in his art/article in the NYTimes, Abstract City, I LEGO N.Y.

(photo credit: The Art of the Brick) (via CNET)

Stolen Art: Ownership and Copyright

Shepard Fairey pre-emptively filed a lawsuit last week asking a federal judge to rule that he is protected from copyright infringement claims when he appropriated the AP's image of Obama as a base for his reiteration in the Obama Poster.  I wrote about the controversy over Fairey's Obama Poster art appropriation and the AP photo issue earlier.

When an image is appropriated, transformed and altered and a different artwork is created, this is a remix which is a murky area now that digital images can so easily be captured and worked with.  The lawsuit scuffle over ownership of art and copyright and appropriation and re-use is a murky one and with the popularity of the Obama Poster image, the issue has attracted more national attention than with other artwork remix examples.  What will probably help Fairey win, at least in this case, is that the AP photographer that took the case, (Manny?) Garcia, claims that his contract with AP gives him the copyright ownership.

Stolen Tangible Art
You can take the idea of art, ideas and ownership back to the idea of stolen artworks (think of the Elgin Marbles, taken from Greece by Lord Elgin and now in the British Museum), which is in the hot area of the ownership of artworks and repatriation.  For example, it struck me that the same week Fairey fought the issue of ownership of artwork, a court ruled in favor of ownership of art stolen in the Holocaust.

Digital Art and Remixes
Artworks can be copied and reworked so easily, digitally.   Fairey's poster has generated dozens of knock-offs and spoofs, such as those above.  These are just more examples of iconic images, art, appropriation, remixes and digital copyright enforcement difficulties.  Shepard Fairey and another appropriation artist Rick Klotz are remix entrepreneurs, building off of the ideas of others. A Dark Knight fan mashed Heath Ledger's Joker into Fairey's Obama Poster and called the new image "The Audacity of Joke", which is the top left in the series of Obama Poster imitations above.

Charis Tsevis, a visual designer living and working at Athens, Greece, has used copyrighted photos from Norwegian photo agencies to create his own mosaic of Britney Spears (click here for the large version and note how he has established his creative commons copyright on top of the work of others, allowing people to use his new remix for non commercial purposes). He has also  taken various photos of Obama supporters and turned them into his own art mosaic, but in that case he is not using copyrighted photos.

Tangible Art Versus Intangible Art...

The Elgin marbles, like Greek vases and other antiquities, can be physically returned to owners or countries that can prove provenance.  But the copying of artworks has been going on forever, whether they are copied or forged, or the ideas incorporated in altered versions.  But unless you can prove ownership of the original negative, proving ownership of work in the area of digital remixes is a murky, murky area.

To be continued: I have more to say on this on the 19th in a post called The Semiotics of Cultural Ownership and Treasures.

Eye Tracking: The Golden Triangle...

How we absorb data is the golden triangle, if you think about where your eyes go.   I studied eye tracking in my advertising days. It makes a difference where copy, headlines and the most important information is placed -- in an ad, in a newslettter, on a newspaper's front page, on a blog.  You bet Google is using eyetracking studies to know where to place the most important (montetizable) information
How the eyes move across the screen: a study by Google on how we track data.

How do we read, when we are textually literate to read left to right?  Watch how our eyes follow the data:

Happy Valentines...

The line between forgetfulness and ingratitude is fuzzy.  I'm amused by the ads that seem to be aimed at men, especially the ones that seem to offer an answer to the guy who panics because he forgets that Valentine's Day is upon him. Cognitive Daily has an interesting study on men, women and Valentine gifts.

Hold me, hang on tight.

State Capitols: Austin and Santa Fe...

When visiting Austin in early February, I was reminded of the western way of setting up cities on a grid system (compared to Altanta, where it was all built on pig paths and horsetrails, or Santa Fe that came together at the junction of old trade routes hundreds of years ago). This 1873 map, at left, was developed just months after Austin was designated as the state capitol.   This is looking from the southeast to the northwest.  It is still easy to navigate. 

The Texas State Capitol building is impressive. Maybe it was the bustle of the opening of the session, or knowing a few of the people working, or the intensity of the business in a times such as these.  This week I was in the New Mexico State Capitol building (which is called The Roundhouse -- like the round way of leadership in this state of Kivas, I wonder?) to support a new piece of legislation. In both places I saw cowboy boots with suit pants.  Texas, unlike New Mexico, continues to meet every other year because, our law student tour guide said, these guys have other jobs and legislative service doesn't pay that much. It made me think about some of the things I'm reading about the corrupt nature of politics in New Mexico. There isn't that much business here. I'll post photos from both state houses on my Flickr site (link is on the blog sidebar).

This year Santa Fe is celebrating its 400th anniversary and it remains the oldest capitol city in the United States.  My friend Mary, sitting at breakfast in Austin's Driskill Hotel bakery cafe, established in 1886, thought that you'd never have the experience in eating in such an old place in Oklahoma. 

Education or Attitude? Recession Effects and Women...

Recently I came across the fact that men are losing jobs at a higher rate than women, partly because there are more women in the job market today and those areas typically held by women are less prone to layoffs (teaching, nursing) and more men than women work in manufacturing and construction.  Women's happiness is more recession proof than men -- men value money while women value relationships.

Over time women have been gaining an edge in education, starting in 1977 when women began to outnumber men obtaining associate degrees -- right when I was finishing  my sophomore year of college, heading into my junior year.  I've watched my son and daughters grow up in this environment of girls succeeding academically and women now hold the edge on men in gaining academic credentials.