MotherPie

Tar Baby...

It is just a tar baby. There isn't a way to get involved without becoming stuck in a not-healthy way.  It is sort of agonizing to go there, knowing what will happen.

That is how I described a situation to my mid-20s daughter.  She didn't understand the term.  Huh?

I had to stop and explain it.  How if you touch something, you can sometimes never get unstuck and you become tied down, unable to freely carry on. The entanglement, bound up as tar will cling and not let go (ever sat on a tar-blotched beach? I did, in Corpus Christi -- ruined the beach towels). It is a nasty thing... to go there.

Tar Baby.  It was not used in any pejorative, racial or other manner.  Just a way to describe that any engagement with a situation leads to an unpleasant obliged relationship of a no-win set-up. The tar baby image I conjure is a black bush-like blob, nothing like the image I tracked down, which might make it seem racist and with a personification of the tar baby.  My thoughts take me back to the idea of Brer Rabbit.

Some things are better left well-enough alone.  That's the idea.  Gee.  Do I date myself that much?

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.

Junk Mail: Enough.

The mail box can't hold it all.  I'm tired of these 15 years or so of my mail weighing more than a new born baby, junk junk junk. The 19 billion catalogues mailed to Americans every year consume 53 million trees and who knows how many tons of paper.  I hate it.

With a four month sack full of junk mail, I sat and registered more on Green Dimes, sent off signed notes to data base managers (Green Dimes provided the verbage) and have respectfully said ENOUGH.

Have a child get married and gifts delivered and wham, you are getting every catalogue imaginable.

I'm tired of supporting the U.S. Postal Service by passively accepting junk mail and wasting time with junk I don't care to see.  With the help of Green Dimes, I'm saying no. Enough.  No more.

Palin: The Political Elle Woods?

Videos from Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin are being taken down as fast as they are coming up.  Sarah Palin's church videos showing her in front of the congregation being prayed over have been removed from YouTube as well as Palin's swimsuit videos from the 1984 Miss Alaska contest.  Palin is an issue on all sorts of cultural, political and social levels as well as one of controlling your image and information and how your entire life is up for exposure (ladies, think even down to the cellulite level). 

Newsweek's article says she speaks gibberish when she gets off her talking points.  Is she Dan Quayle in lipstick or Forest Gumping her way to the White House or like a filly standing on shaky legs until she grows into this challenge?  Or like all of us, just trying to do our best wherever we may find ourselves, and knowing we are all imperfect?  Or scared after she has leapt of the high diving board into the pool of big-time politics? But why, as women, do we reach for perfection? 

Palin is the political iteration of Elle Woods, the character in the Legally Blonde movies, as Judith Warner muses in her NYTimes Domestic Disturbances blog post, Poor Sarah, and she writes, "You don’t have to be perennially pretty in pink — and ditsy and cutesy and kinda maybe stupid — to have an inner Elle Woods. Many women do. I think of Elle every time I dress up my insecurities in a nice suit. ... Chick lit — think of Bridget Jones, always fumbling, never quite who she should be — and in particular the newer subgenre of mom lit are filled with this kind of sentiment."  The Imposter Syndrome, is what Warner terms it, something that is relevant to both sexes.

Tina Fey's SNL sketch last night was a take off of Palin's bumbling interview with Katie Couric. Warner gave a shout-out to comedian Sara Benincasa who does parodies of Palin so I had to go find that woman, who wonders when "the vapors" gave way to "panic attacks". Funny, she, so here you go:

Governor Sarah Palin Vlog #1

Mother would say: Fake it 'Till You Make It on this, I figure. 

Hottest Powerful Political Art for the Presidential Campaign...(Obama is Selling Like Soap)

Hot, Hot, Hot: Limited editions of The Obama Poster go up for sale today.  These will be worth so so so much more than the measly $30 sales price.  If you can get one.  Good luck.

My buy: The August Cover of Vanity Fair featuring the McCains that follows, is in reference to, plays off of and balances out (and also further adding to the power of political art this campaign season) the very controversial July issue of The New Yorker featuring the Obamas. 

I'm not sure if Barry Blitt did the cover of Vanity Fair but it is mimicking his style.  I will frame these side-by-side and have already torn off The New Yorker cover by Blitt (as I have with other covers of his that are so culturally political).

The cultural commentary and power of campaign visual graphics is something I've followed and to have Vanity Fair cover this and move from photos of celebrities is a big statement and testament to this trend.

The Shephard Fairey poster of Obama might be the most famous art to come out of this political season.  Created by the artist as a street poster distributed to activists to plaster the streets for the California primaries, the image went viral and even though Fairey stipulated that private use was prohibited, the consumer demand keeps escalating.  When one was found being auctioned on e-bay for $60,000 last week, Fairey was very disappointed has responded that he will put out posters for sale on his site with all proceeds going back into the Obama campaign. He says he is also vigorously monitoring e-bay and trying to contain the viral desire to meet this huge consumer demand.   Yeah, right.  Good luck you talented guy.

The Obama Hope Poster will be produced in limited release (only 600) as numbered offsets,  24×36, signed and numbered.  Prints can be purchased HERE. This offset prints will be $30, 1 per customer/household. He said these go on sale on his site today at a random time.  My prediction: passionate fans will overwhelm the server and he won't be able to contain the image.

I predicted the graphic of Obama he created would become the most impactful one of this campaign and questioned if Fairey would be able to contain the use of his work once released.  He now recognizes he will have to be more careful in how he conducts his business. This digital age in the new media environment makes this difficult. (see my post on The Obama Poster: Political Art and the Power of Visual Images).

Obama's graphics have been powerful.  His campaign orchestrated the word CHANGE and it stuck to the candidate.  HOPE became attatched, too. 

Now it is Obama for America. One more new slogan has notched the branding of the candidate up to a new level. Smart political campaign communication strategy as the marketing and selling of the candidate evolves. No wonder influential and powerful others are noting Obama as "The One".  The Obama for America tag popped up on a podium before Obama at a gathering last week of Democratic governors.

The same tagline was used as the distribution moniker for posters (at left) printed and distributed in Germany on Obama's World Tour.  In German it says: distributed by Obama for America.  Obama is now launched on the world stage with his new marketing motto.

Let's see.  Change. Hope. Obama for America.  The momentum is there for the selling of the candidate with the branding so far.  Of course, something like Tainted Tylenol or Salmonella Tomatoes (Black Swan events) cause unplanned disruptions and changes in product preferences. But for now, Obama is winning by graphics and branding.  Consumers don't dig deep for the most part. They buy what they (simply) know.

Wouldn't you love to own Warhol's graphic of Nixon?  Now that is probably worth tons. I wrote Political Art: Powerful Tools in the Icon Age (it has Warhol's Nixon pictured) and if you think of it, Warhol knew pop mass culture.  Nixon was the first candidate to be sold with Madison Avenue techniques (read The Selling of the President by Joe _____).

Obama? He's selling like soap.  He's the Coke of the moment.

update: A Washington Post article on a study reinforces the idea that voter's use shortcuts to arrive at decisions (which reinforces my point that techniques of sales and branding are so powerful). The academics' question: How much has the American voter changed over the past 50 years? Their conclusion: voters are still dismally ill-informed creatures and...a lot of people just don't care about politics".

Related:
Obama Winning by Graphic Iterations
The Art of Words: Campaign Visuals
Presidential Campaign Visuals
Word Art: Talking Points
Semi-related and just listed as a read for the Professional Writing  Course at the University of South Florida: Rhetoric From Aristotle to Obama (Yes We Can)...

Political Communication and Design posts:
Rhetoric, from Aristotle to Obama
The Obama Poster
Presidential Campaign Logos
Political Art: Powerful Tools in the Icon Age

latest:
The O for All: A New World Logo
Hottest Political Art for the Presidential Campaign
Obamanos! Obama Logos

Great Words...

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. --Stephen Jay Gould

Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning.--Marlo Thomas

(Always face facts with a question. -- MotherPie)

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.--Rene Descartes

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. --John Stuart Mill

...and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know it for the first time. --T.S. Eliot

It is what it is (and the is can change).--MotherPie

From Valentines to Spring Fertility...

Sitting atop an iron layered display thing-a-ma-bob that was filled with pine cones for the winter holidays, then sprinkled with valentines, I stuck little folk art fabric dolls - an Adam and an Eve from Latin America.  Eve is offering up the apple and I thought this was an interesting topper for a Valentine display. 

So did guys who came to visit my husband and these little dolls were found in all sorts of positions, varying from day-to-day. So I'm told.  I was in Dallas visiting my daughters.

Now I've pulled out all the Easter eggs, the fragile shells decorated over the years by my children who stopped doing this awhile ago.  How they have made it through major cross-country moves must be because that Easter grass is ultra protective.  So I've left the naked dolls with their fig-leaf protection at the top of the display wire thing.  Now we've moved to the fertility idea of the eggs and all the Oester/Easter/Spring things this means.  If my kiddos were around, the dolls wouldn't be up there.  Would you have a problem w/ this at your house?  Want me to tell you where you, too, can get these dolls? (at Pachamama in Santa Fe on Canyon Road).

Easter is March 23 this year.  The last time Easter fell on so early a date was 1913, and the next time it will do so will be in the year 2160

Part II: Privacy and The (Watching) Eyes...

Part II: Privacy & Eyes Looking In:

Starting with the eye as the definition of self, artistically and symbolically in Part I, Eyes Looking Out, I am now in Part II looking at the issue of technology and privacy and wondering how this will alter our very sense of self, our soul and our way of seeing our identities and our world. 

For our children, things will be and are dramatically, radically different, far more different than they already are, tech wise.  Profound changes are altering us in ways that are complex and scary and unfathomable. Like the kohl used for protection around eyes long ago and today (this kohl-lined eye at right is from an Egyptian sarcophagus in the Met), what firewalls or metaphorical kohl and protections will we have?   What will we give up for convenience, for safety, for security and what are the long-term implications? 

Horserace?

While picking up my repaired (but totally empty and naked) Mac laptop from the Albuquerque Apple store yesterday, I wandered over to Borders (to see if Infidel was available on CD - it wasn't) and this is all I saw on one shelf.  Two shelves below were products of Bushisms.

Establishment?  Or was it for Hillary's speech today in Duke City?  Obama was headed over to Santa Fe.

Remember the Dead: Dia de Los Muertos...

Some people would have spent the last few days making sugar skulls with the name of the dead on them to keep alive the memory of those who have died and placed them on altars at home and elsewhere.

You get to die three times: once when you take your last breath, another when you are buried, and a third time when you are forgotten by the living.

Here, in our culture, death becomes a scary thing and we spend $5 billion on the Halloween holiday to dress up and parade around with this fall festival.  Last week at the International Folk Art Museum a lecture on Day of the Dead altars in Mexico gave details on how the dead are kept alive.  A three-tiered altar is made with marigolds and their scent and an archway above are to bring the dead back.  Water to quench the thirst of the soul and other favorite foods of the deceased are placed there, along with mementos that remind the living of the loved ones who have departed this world such as a photo, a favorite comb or such. Sugar skulls made with molds (purchase via link) with the name of the dead are placed on the altar and shared with others.  I've written elsewhere about Day of thte Dead here and here.

All Saint's Day (Nov. 1) honors the children, who are considered saints anyway.  All Soul's (Nov. 2) honors all other dead.  Something that I would consider adding to my folk art collection of Day of the Dead items would be a skull by award-winning ceramicist Jose Luis Serrano from Metepec via the Day of the Dead Folk Art Gallery.  But here we do the art but not the tradition of remembering that is behind the art.

Gone, but not forgotten. I think it is a great idea to keep alive the memory of those who have gone before in a structured holiday of the celebration of lives lived and the legacy of memories. Who has time to go gather at the grave?  Our families are all scattered, our focus is on our own living selves and death is a hushed thing. Our culture of individualism makes death a one-done deal.