Tuesday, December 04, 2012
At the center of the community: Durham Arts Council
Friend, artist, community activist, and occasional guest columnist for the Clarion Content, Catherine Howard, has undertaken to pen a series of articles about how the visual arts have impacted Durham's community on her 13/13/13 Sketchbook site. Howard is both a leader on the ground in bringing the arts to communities worldwide and also a coalition builder who helped get the ball rolling for the Durham Storefront Project.
The Clarion Content was delighted that Ms. Howard selected our publisher, Aaron Mandel, and the co-founder/director of The Carrack, Laura Richie, as the subjects of her first pieces. Ms. Howard has generously agreed to co-publish this series on the Clarion Content. Her third piece is about an important Durham institution.
Creative Leaders of Durham: Margaret DeMott and Lindsay Gordon of the Durham Arts Council
by: Catherine Howard
One cannot discuss the development of "arts" in Durham without giving a hearty nod to the Durham Arts Council, one of the oldest arts councils in the United States. The Durham Arts Council, whose mission statement is to promote excellence in and access to the creation, experience and active support of the arts for all the people of the Durham community, combines arts education with exhibitions, performances, and community events, such as CenterFest* and Art Walk.
During a lunch at Toast, Margaret DeMott and Lindsay Gordon from the Durham Arts Council expanded on five factors that promote flourishing arts communities:
1. Public space where you can find the art. The Durham Arts Council is a physical place where things can happen - meetings, art can be hung, shows can be put on, people can find it. Although lots of arts councils don't have a permanent space, whenever they want to hold an event, their first challenge is finding a space. With an understood showcase, people know events will be happening. Town squares used to provide those spaces, and now those spaces often need to be run by groups to insure stability for cultural programming.
2. An educated adult audience. Even if expensive visual art is not being bought, an audience that is educated (either through school or person-to-person outreach from the artistic community) will support the arts by giving their time to attend events. Universities attract people with talent, curiosity and creativity, and in Durham, there are two large universities (Duke University and NCCU) which have launched and funded many arts organizations. In communities without universities, such as Sarasota, the arts can still flourish if wealthy individuals are eager financial supporters.
3. An educated child audience. Arts education has proven to promote critical thinking and social skills, which helps children to succeed in any career path they choose. Exposure to the arts from a young age, in school or in arts camps, also encourages children to grow into adults who understand and support the arts. As Lindsay put it, "If you catch them when they're young, you'll keep them."
4. Supportive government. If a community desires to encourage artistic engagement in the community and promote the reciprocal communal respect of the arts, government leaders can use the arts to denote respect and honor. For example, leaders can commission concerts or paintings to celebrate an official's service, rather than giving them a watch or plaque. The City of Durham has made a substantial investment over the years in public cultural spaces such as the Carolina Theater, Hayti Heritage Center, and Durham Arts Council building.
5. Recognizable leader. Even if there is not an arts institution in a community, there still must be a single recognizable leader who leads the charge on coordinating events. People will get excited about an idea, but unless there is someone to keep moving the ball forward, to keep sending the next email, to keep cajoling everyone, events just won't happen.
Artists displaying their wares in the Armory during Art Walk
According to one of those leaders, Margaret DeMott, "Artists are the "research and development department" of a community, and the arts non-profit sector helps the artists to do their work. When artists move into the commercial arena, their problem-solving skills can be applied to many different areas, making the community, as a whole, better."
A big "THANK YOU" to Margaret and Lindsay for meeting with me and to the entire DAC staff for their daily dedication to promoting the arts in Durham. Be sure to stop by their building at 120 Morris Street to see the current exhibitions by David Baker, Matthew Litteken, and Nuno Gomes. Join the mailing list to keep track of upcoming events or follow their Twitter here!
Notes
*This year was the launch of a revitalized CenterFest. The Clarion Content tracked the community input sessions and wrote a series of articles on the process of reinvigorating a community tradition.
The Clarion Content was delighted that Ms. Howard selected our publisher, Aaron Mandel, and the co-founder/director of The Carrack, Laura Richie, as the subjects of her first pieces. Ms. Howard has generously agreed to co-publish this series on the Clarion Content. Her third piece is about an important Durham institution.
Creative Leaders of Durham: Margaret DeMott and Lindsay Gordon of the Durham Arts Council
by: Catherine Howard
One cannot discuss the development of "arts" in Durham without giving a hearty nod to the Durham Arts Council, one of the oldest arts councils in the United States. The Durham Arts Council, whose mission statement is to promote excellence in and access to the creation, experience and active support of the arts for all the people of the Durham community, combines arts education with exhibitions, performances, and community events, such as CenterFest* and Art Walk.
During a lunch at Toast, Margaret DeMott and Lindsay Gordon from the Durham Arts Council expanded on five factors that promote flourishing arts communities:
1. Public space where you can find the art. The Durham Arts Council is a physical place where things can happen - meetings, art can be hung, shows can be put on, people can find it. Although lots of arts councils don't have a permanent space, whenever they want to hold an event, their first challenge is finding a space. With an understood showcase, people know events will be happening. Town squares used to provide those spaces, and now those spaces often need to be run by groups to insure stability for cultural programming.
2. An educated adult audience. Even if expensive visual art is not being bought, an audience that is educated (either through school or person-to-person outreach from the artistic community) will support the arts by giving their time to attend events. Universities attract people with talent, curiosity and creativity, and in Durham, there are two large universities (Duke University and NCCU) which have launched and funded many arts organizations. In communities without universities, such as Sarasota, the arts can still flourish if wealthy individuals are eager financial supporters.
3. An educated child audience. Arts education has proven to promote critical thinking and social skills, which helps children to succeed in any career path they choose. Exposure to the arts from a young age, in school or in arts camps, also encourages children to grow into adults who understand and support the arts. As Lindsay put it, "If you catch them when they're young, you'll keep them."
4. Supportive government. If a community desires to encourage artistic engagement in the community and promote the reciprocal communal respect of the arts, government leaders can use the arts to denote respect and honor. For example, leaders can commission concerts or paintings to celebrate an official's service, rather than giving them a watch or plaque. The City of Durham has made a substantial investment over the years in public cultural spaces such as the Carolina Theater, Hayti Heritage Center, and Durham Arts Council building.
5. Recognizable leader. Even if there is not an arts institution in a community, there still must be a single recognizable leader who leads the charge on coordinating events. People will get excited about an idea, but unless there is someone to keep moving the ball forward, to keep sending the next email, to keep cajoling everyone, events just won't happen.
Artists displaying their wares in the Armory during Art Walk
According to one of those leaders, Margaret DeMott, "Artists are the "research and development department" of a community, and the arts non-profit sector helps the artists to do their work. When artists move into the commercial arena, their problem-solving skills can be applied to many different areas, making the community, as a whole, better."
A big "THANK YOU" to Margaret and Lindsay for meeting with me and to the entire DAC staff for their daily dedication to promoting the arts in Durham. Be sure to stop by their building at 120 Morris Street to see the current exhibitions by David Baker, Matthew Litteken, and Nuno Gomes. Join the mailing list to keep track of upcoming events or follow their Twitter here!
Notes
*This year was the launch of a revitalized CenterFest. The Clarion Content tracked the community input sessions and wrote a series of articles on the process of reinvigorating a community tradition.
Labels: Art, Catherine Howard columns, Durham, Economy
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
There are those it makes awful mad to hear the Clarion Content excoriate Barak Obama1 for the lack of change we have seen in the last four years. This video clip is a reminder, that it is not so much President Obama as it is the institutional barriers, blockades and outright resistance from The Establishment2 that makes real change so difficult.3
Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Representative Alan Grayson of Florida and the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve, on where your tax dollars have gone.
Notes
1Fortunately, Representative Akin is out there in Missouri to remind our editors, no matter how tempting some of their minimalist vision of government might be, their social mores haven’t changed since the Inquisition. Romney’s V.P. nominee, Paul Ryan, co-sponsored a bill with Akin last year, that would have banned abortion except in cases of forcible rape, incest or the mother’s life was in-danger. Making the all important Evangelical Republican distinction between rapes where the victim invited it and “true” rapes. Unclear on where that slippery slope leads? Watch “The Accused,” starring Jodie Foster.
2The Man, the lifers in unelected positions of power, the holders and controllers of great and institutional wealth. Not that their secretive or unresponsive, but on Federal Reserve dot gov, one notes they have not revised the section headed "Purposes and Functions" since 2005, since ya know, like nothing of note has happened since then.
3Incidentally, The Man was who the Fed bailed out while the rest of us sucked on the carbon-monoxide filled tail pipe of The Great Recession. The bankers sure are taking it hard.
Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Representative Alan Grayson of Florida and the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve, on where your tax dollars have gone.
Notes
1Fortunately, Representative Akin is out there in Missouri to remind our editors, no matter how tempting some of their minimalist vision of government might be, their social mores haven’t changed since the Inquisition. Romney’s V.P. nominee, Paul Ryan, co-sponsored a bill with Akin last year, that would have banned abortion except in cases of forcible rape, incest or the mother’s life was in-danger. Making the all important Evangelical Republican distinction between rapes where the victim invited it and “true” rapes. Unclear on where that slippery slope leads? Watch “The Accused,” starring Jodie Foster.
2The Man, the lifers in unelected positions of power, the holders and controllers of great and institutional wealth. Not that their secretive or unresponsive, but on Federal Reserve dot gov, one notes they have not revised the section headed "Purposes and Functions" since 2005, since ya know, like nothing of note has happened since then.
3Incidentally, The Man was who the Fed bailed out while the rest of us sucked on the carbon-monoxide filled tail pipe of The Great Recession. The bankers sure are taking it hard.
Labels: economics, Economy, Ethically questionable, political quips-n-quotes, Politics
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Base Election
Does this guy bring enough of...
this to the table for Romney to win?
The Clarion Content agrees with the Washington Post that the 2012 Presidential Election winner will be the candidate that does a better job turning out the party base. It is ironic because President Obama's win in 2008 was carried by first time voters and folks who have not always voted in the past.
We agree with the Post that so much of the country already has their mind made up, be it, for or against Obama, that this means there are very few undecided voters for either campaign to win. The nation has been polarized since the middle of the Clinton presidency; and if anything it has been getting increasing polarized.
It is for precisely this reason that Mitt Romney's selection of Wisconsin Representative, Paul Ryan, as his Vice-Presidential nominee was so worrying.1 Romney is a pantywaist who will say and do anything to win an election. He has been on both sides of the abortion debate, both sides of the gay marriage debate, both sides of the bank bailout, and enacted the law that Obama-care is based on, that he is now campaigning against.2
Ryan, on the other hand, is a red meat eater, who makes no bones about his intention to gut the government like a fish.3 While he isn't a Tea Partier, the budget he wrote reads like one. He is running the Barry Goldwater playbook that dictates the easiest way to decrease the size of the government is to starve it of funding.
Ryan may energize a conservative Republican base that has been, at best lukewarm, and at worst ready for insurrection, over the Romney nomination. Earlier in the campaign season, leading conservative voice,4 Bill Kristol, compared the Romney campaign to the trainwrecks led by Michael Dukakis in 1988, and John Kerry in 2004.
Can Ryan get the train back on the tracks?5
Notes
1We did find it interesting that Ryan, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, is also still running for his Wisconsin seat.
2We would never endorse such a soulless strawman. One reason we opposed King George the II from before he is first day in office, was he was far too vacuous to have any idea what policies he supported. The Clarion Content fears the strawman and the pawn far more than the true ideologue. The true ideologue can be opposed on policy and shown to be what he or she is. The shapeshifter, the moving target, or the puppet run by his handlers can be harder to fight. Note, all this is in reference to after the president is elected.
3Ironically, if he had the balls and the intellectual consistency to oppose the bloated military industrial complex the government is handing our tax dollars over to, the Clarion Content agrees with him in other places. For example, America must gradually raise the age requirements for Social Security. Medicare must be reformed. Government waste is massive and maddening (and greatest in the DOD). However, his opposition to Pell Grants and Food Stamps could be described as somewhere between short-sighted and cruel (especially, while supporting continued tax breaks for the very richest Americans).
4Kristol is far less influential with the average conservative voter than say Rush Limbaugh, but he is major power broker at 31337 level. He had the Dick's ear throughout the reign of King George the II.
5Our view has been unchanged for several months; while it might be close-ish in the popular vote, President Obama will win the electoral college comfortably. Of course, a European bank run, an act of terror or $4/gallon gasoline could change the equation. The coming shock to food prices won't kick in until Obama's second term.
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, Politics
Friday, August 10, 2012
1st great Creative Generation contest
Friends of the Clarion Content Envision with Me and The Creative Populist, are sponsoring a fantastic contest for young entrepreneurs ages fourteen to thirty.
The idea is to send in a video about how entrepreneurship fuels your creative passion. Give them your personal Creative Manifesto. The Clarion Content knows a lot of hot young Durham entrepreneurs who qualify on the basis of that description.
$1000 in cash prizes are available.
A longer article on the Creative Populist, and founder, Duke professor, Carl Nordgren, coming soon in these pages.
Enter the contest here. Official rules here.
The idea is to send in a video about how entrepreneurship fuels your creative passion. Give them your personal Creative Manifesto. The Clarion Content knows a lot of hot young Durham entrepreneurs who qualify on the basis of that description.
$1000 in cash prizes are available.
A longer article on the Creative Populist, and founder, Duke professor, Carl Nordgren, coming soon in these pages.
Enter the contest here. Official rules here.
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
It is heating up
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported on Wednesday that July was the hottest month on record since the United States began keeping temperature records in 1895. This hot July also closed out the warmest twelve month period ever recorded in the United States.
Wondering about the practical impact of all this hot weather?
Climatologists at the NOAA noted that by the end of the month, about 63% of the country was experiencing drought conditions. Not surprisingly, corn prices1 have surged up by over 60% in response according to Bloomberg News. And even if the drought eases in America, it may be too little too late after the blazing hot Summer here, and globally dry weather limiting agricultural output in India, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine.
It is worth remembering that a global spike in food prices was part of the catalyst of the Arab Spring.2
Notes
1Corn, thanks to a very effective lobby, goes into everything, even gasoline, and equally critically animal feed, threatening food security for millions in the less-developed regions of our world.
2Like so many the Clarion Content had tremendous hopes for the Arab Spring revolutions when they began in Tunisia. Sadly the Obama Administration squandered the opportunity. In Egypt, they treated the Muslim Brotherhood backed President as if Dick Cheney were still running the White House. The direct blowback from that failure, notably under Hillary Clinton's watch as Secretary of State, has pushed Egypt into Iran's arms.
It would not be hard to argue too, that the Obama administration's failure to give decisive early backing to Syrian rebels has contributed to thousands of deaths there. The dithering will produce a new administration which will hate Americans no matter which side wins their civil war.
At least, we are still effectively killing civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere with the Obama administration's favorite technology, (f*ck high speed trains) the pilotless drone.
Wondering about the practical impact of all this hot weather?
Climatologists at the NOAA noted that by the end of the month, about 63% of the country was experiencing drought conditions. Not surprisingly, corn prices1 have surged up by over 60% in response according to Bloomberg News. And even if the drought eases in America, it may be too little too late after the blazing hot Summer here, and globally dry weather limiting agricultural output in India, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine.
It is worth remembering that a global spike in food prices was part of the catalyst of the Arab Spring.2
Notes
1Corn, thanks to a very effective lobby, goes into everything, even gasoline, and equally critically animal feed, threatening food security for millions in the less-developed regions of our world.
2Like so many the Clarion Content had tremendous hopes for the Arab Spring revolutions when they began in Tunisia. Sadly the Obama Administration squandered the opportunity. In Egypt, they treated the Muslim Brotherhood backed President as if Dick Cheney were still running the White House. The direct blowback from that failure, notably under Hillary Clinton's watch as Secretary of State, has pushed Egypt into Iran's arms.
It would not be hard to argue too, that the Obama administration's failure to give decisive early backing to Syrian rebels has contributed to thousands of deaths there. The dithering will produce a new administration which will hate Americans no matter which side wins their civil war.
At least, we are still effectively killing civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere with the Obama administration's favorite technology, (f*ck high speed trains) the pilotless drone.
Labels: ecology, Economy, Politics, weather
What's going on II
As our friend and political analyst Storey Clayton noted in these pages last month, "[our] society is manufacturing anger and despair at an incredible rate."
The pervading sense of helplessness among American youth, having been jaded by four years of more of the same pre-packaged as "change," is as great as it has ever been.
The centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth are going faster in America than they ever have previously. American youth can feel that lack of control.
Perhaps a few visual aids...
More on the illusion of choice and reality of the centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth...
That's nine companies controlling every brand shown in the diagram.
More on the illusion of choice and reality of the centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth...
"The four most complex U.S. financial holding companies -- JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America -- each contain more than 2,000 subsidiaries, with two of those controlling more than 3,000 subsidiaries, according to a research paper published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Citigroup has 1,645. In 1991, just one firm exceeded 500 subsidiaries..."---source: Bloomberg News
The pervading sense of helplessness among American youth, having been jaded by four years of more of the same pre-packaged as "change," is as great as it has ever been.
The centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth are going faster in America than they ever have previously. American youth can feel that lack of control.
Perhaps a few visual aids...
More on the illusion of choice and reality of the centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth...
That's nine companies controlling every brand shown in the diagram.
More on the illusion of choice and reality of the centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth...
"The four most complex U.S. financial holding companies -- JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America -- each contain more than 2,000 subsidiaries, with two of those controlling more than 3,000 subsidiaries, according to a research paper published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Citigroup has 1,645. In 1991, just one firm exceeded 500 subsidiaries..."---source: Bloomberg News
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, George Carlin, Politics, public protest, thought, war
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Object Lesson
Resident New Bruinswick philosopher, Storey Clayton, last seen in this space writing about the Occupy Movement faces the harsh realities of his reaction to the Colorado movie theater shooting. In a piece that challenges, provokes and doesn't apologize, he makes you think about modern society.
It is long, but well worth it. All links in the body inserted by author.---Ed.
Read more of Storey Clayton's work here at the Blue Pyramid. Check out the insights of his famous cartoon Duck and Cover, here on the Clarion Content. See and take the Blue Pyramid's legendary Book Poll here.
**************************************************
Object Lesson
by:Storey Clayton
I have learned a lot about myself in the past week. This is good. Learning is fun!
One of the things I have learned, or relearned perhaps, is how little I am surprised by things. Most people like surprises. I kind of miss them, I guess. Which is not intended as a way of tempting the fates. But if anything, I think I'm surprised that there aren't more mass-shootings in America. About one a day is probably what I'd expect. Maybe we'll get there soon. This is not a desire or a hope. It would be nice to have no mass-shootings in a year. But there would have to be a lot of changes to make that happen.
No, not increased security measures.
I wrote at length about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon last October, how I saw it as a harbinger not of a revolutionary protest movement in our society, but as a reflection of how many people were left with nothing to do in our society. It would be nice if it were a revolutionary protest movement that was burgeoning in our society. Unfortunately, we have all seen too many revolutionary protest movements. We are watching several of them now! Look at Libya, Egypt, Syria. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. A bunch of people get themselves killed and do some killing and you end up with a society that looks a lot like it did before. But the leaders are slightly different and maybe this race or religion or sect has the advantages to lord over the prior victors. There is much to deter a young revolutionary in society today.
To believe in revolution, you have to believe in the future. You have to believe that there is a future worth fighting for. We are getting little stark illustrations all over the place that this is a foolish perspective. There will be a future, surely, in the sense of days that follow this one. No matter how much caves in or how much I lose, that is inevitably clear. But the idea that the right people can be in control, nay, that there even are right people, seems unlikely. And the more people who were raised and brought up to believe in an American dream and a future that was better than their parents' and the mass accumulation of growth and so on and awaken to find the piles of debt and futurelessness waiting for them, the more people they are likely to go out and shoot.
I probably shouldn't put in print that I understand that frustration and powerlessness of mass-shooters. I am a pacifist, of course, and abhor violence of all kinds, and am in no way trying to justify or vindicate the actions of James Holmes or anyone like him. But I get the idea of the world being so backwards and upside-down that only an absurdist and horrific reaction seems fair or justified. I have felt this way in my life sometimes and am very grateful to my pacifism for keeping me from stockpiling weapons. I know that some of you are probably surprised (there it is again!) to see me writing this, but I think you are not necessarily checking in with yourself sufficiently if so. Look inward, my friend. Have you never felt that kind of anger and despair?
This society is manufacturing anger and despair at an incredible rate right now. We've been over why, this worship of the magical "Economy", and we've even been over how it manifests when people only turn the proverbial gun on themselves, most recently. As my friend and debater Kurt Falk often tells me, I should be the entertainment at children's birthday parties. His idea for fixing all this is in his most recent post, where he joins Kurt Vonnegut (in Palm Sunday, just finished today, certainly influencing the style of this post) in advocating that we have new rites of passage for American youth, bar mitzvahs or quinceañeras for a culture unmoored. It's a good idea. It used to be that graduating from high school was our culture's adulthood commemoration ceremony. But now there is no real adulthood to be reached. In the sense of independence, of self-sufficiency, of freedom to make informed decisions, our newly minted adults are as bankrupt as someone with six figures of student loan debt. And just like those folks, they can't file it and start over.
So they shoot people, don't they? I guess that's a little oversimplified, but that looks to be the size of it. Apparently Mr. Holmes is walking down the corridors pretending to be the Joker or some other masked movie villain (get it?), but I'm sure he was perfectly sane when he spent meticulous hours buying guns on the Internet or laying tripwires across his apartment. He did the math. He was good at it. He realized that he had no future, that the people of America who were being distracted to death had no future, and he tried to illustrate that. All the way down to the six-month-old and the six-year-old who were apparently watching one of the most violent franchises in movie history after midnight.
I am not trying to glorify this scumbag or turn him into some sort of dark anti-hero (I'll leave that to Hollywood). But I am trying to dissent from the media chorus singing about the senseless unpredictable shock of all this. It's perfectly predictable and it has a kind of logic. Michael Moore did much the same treatment of Columbine in his masterpiece movie Bowling for Columbine, which we should all probably go rewatch. Part of his thesis was that kids growing up in the shadow of defense contracting, preached to about how the country they're supposed to love solves all its problems through violence, will occasionally take this environment seriously. And respond in kind. People are all agog about what's wrong with Colorado when Michael Moore already told you. To be fair, Holmes did hail from San Diego, one of the biggest military cities in the country aside from those found in Colorado. When we have a society filled with people who play a little video game attached to real drones that blow up real people, how shocked can we be that disgruntled broke teens or twenty-somethings from the new Lost Generation walk into a movie and emulate the solutions found on-screen and in real life?
What no one seems to realize is that you need to do something with these people. I don't mean to sound pejorative when I say "these people" - many of them are my closest friends and confidants. I coach them, I talk with them, I worry about the very concept of a future around them. They need things to do. They have active minds and have been raised on poisonous dreams about growth and accumulation. They need to put their mind to something other than disappointment, despair, and the soulless thresher we call "The Economy".
Many would suggest a war. I have no doubt that's one plan being hatched in the corporations funding the Obama/Romney campaign. A nice big war to sweep everyone into the old employer of last resort. You wouldn't even need a draft, you'd just have it de facto. I'm sure a land invasion of Iran or North Korea would keep many hundred-thousands of a Lost Generation occupied and out of the way. The legend is that this is what saved America from the Depression, what saved the Baby Boomers from totally overwhelming the system in the sixties. There's little doubt that part of the lack of enthusiasm to really make jobs and work for the youth of our society has to do with making the incredibly unappealing military look a little more enticing.
I, of course, would never suggest a war, any more than I would advocate you going down to your local movie theater and shooting up six-year-olds. They are the same thing. Only in a war, more six-year-olds die. Usually more horribly, more painfully.
I would suggest make-work programs. We certainly have things that need fixing. Let's build a free wireless Internet network for the whole nation. Yes, even rural North Dakota and Alaska. That would require some people, wouldn't it? Give them room and board and a college-like camaraderie, a little spending cash (so they can - gulp - see a movie), maybe access to a shared fleet of cars on weekends. Let's build some high-speed rails so we can take all these dangerous overpriced gas-guzzling trucks off the road. Let's build some solar and wind plants. I know, I know, it would require a total resignation from the very concept of The Economy. It would mean government was actively putting corporations out of work, and some of their employees too, and treating the youth of America with dignity and respect and like they're people who can do things. Heaven forbid.
But what are your alternatives? These people are going to be on the dole one way or the other. There aren't jobs, there aren't opportunities, and everyone in The Economy is doing their damnedest to make sure there are fewer jobs and fewer opportunities to come. I guess you can repeal minimum wage and make everyone punch each other in the nose for a scrap of bread you throw from the tower at midnight, but these people are increasingly going to leverage their debt and take matters into their own hands. And they'd have to believe in a future to make a revolution. If all they believe in is despair, then you get Aurora or Columbine or Virginia Tech. You get little dark knights everywhere, believing they are extolling some kind of neo-nihilism with every bullet, not realizing governments cornered that market with wars centuries ago.
I envisioned this post a long time before there was a movie theater shooting, and it was going to be about another kind of object lesson, back to the theme of learning about myself. It was about the fact that I bought a new coffee maker I didn't need a few months ago and haven't had the heart to set it up and replace the old one.
The old one looks like this:
I won it at the Yale tournament in the spring of 2002. They gave out useful or fun objects like rice cookers and Gameboys and coffee makers with the budget they would have spent on shiny trophies. I actually initially took the rice cooker at Emily's behest, but quickly swapped it for a more practical (for me) coffee maker with Steph Tatham, who'd won some lower award. The thing has worked perfectly for a decade. It's a relic of an American era of making machines that lasted, even though it didn't come from that era at all. I've probably had six-thousand or so cups of coffee out of this thing. It still worked perfectly this morning.
My intent was to replace it with this model that I got at Target for like twenty bucks:
It shouldn't take much imagination to see why I picked this out. The color is like the font of this page, the color I would pick for nearly all objects out of a pantheon of a thousand hues. It has a timer so that it will brew the coffee for me and have it ready when I blearily awaken at six in the morning to go to a tournament or fulfill some other wakeful task of existence. It is in every way perfect. Whereas the old one is dingy, off-white, wearing the stains of thousands of brews, incredibly simple in its design. It doesn't even have digital numbers! In an era where you can't dry your hands in public without interfacing with a motion-sensor, holding on to this thing is as old-fashioned as not having a cell-phone (I'm coming up on two years with a cell-phone!).
And yet I can't seem to make the transition, to get rid of the old thing. It was free. It has served me so loyally for so long. It still works.
I am such a bad capitalist.
Or maybe, to borrow a phrase, I'm just committed to commitment.
Maybe we just need to take everyone in the Lost Generation and have them paint our coffee makers. Have them fan out in the neighborhoods, house by house, and ask what everyone would like updated or changed or painted or retooled so that life feels new and fresh again. So that it feels like there's a future that's not just austerity and decline. So that people can feel like a rich person without actually being decadent or aspiring to buy and sell people.
That kind of house-by-house work sure beats the hell out of what that phrase is being used for in Afghanistan right now.
It is long, but well worth it. All links in the body inserted by author.---Ed.
Read more of Storey Clayton's work here at the Blue Pyramid. Check out the insights of his famous cartoon Duck and Cover, here on the Clarion Content. See and take the Blue Pyramid's legendary Book Poll here.
**************************************************
Object Lesson
by:Storey Clayton
I have learned a lot about myself in the past week. This is good. Learning is fun!
One of the things I have learned, or relearned perhaps, is how little I am surprised by things. Most people like surprises. I kind of miss them, I guess. Which is not intended as a way of tempting the fates. But if anything, I think I'm surprised that there aren't more mass-shootings in America. About one a day is probably what I'd expect. Maybe we'll get there soon. This is not a desire or a hope. It would be nice to have no mass-shootings in a year. But there would have to be a lot of changes to make that happen.
No, not increased security measures.
I wrote at length about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon last October, how I saw it as a harbinger not of a revolutionary protest movement in our society, but as a reflection of how many people were left with nothing to do in our society. It would be nice if it were a revolutionary protest movement that was burgeoning in our society. Unfortunately, we have all seen too many revolutionary protest movements. We are watching several of them now! Look at Libya, Egypt, Syria. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. A bunch of people get themselves killed and do some killing and you end up with a society that looks a lot like it did before. But the leaders are slightly different and maybe this race or religion or sect has the advantages to lord over the prior victors. There is much to deter a young revolutionary in society today.
To believe in revolution, you have to believe in the future. You have to believe that there is a future worth fighting for. We are getting little stark illustrations all over the place that this is a foolish perspective. There will be a future, surely, in the sense of days that follow this one. No matter how much caves in or how much I lose, that is inevitably clear. But the idea that the right people can be in control, nay, that there even are right people, seems unlikely. And the more people who were raised and brought up to believe in an American dream and a future that was better than their parents' and the mass accumulation of growth and so on and awaken to find the piles of debt and futurelessness waiting for them, the more people they are likely to go out and shoot.
I probably shouldn't put in print that I understand that frustration and powerlessness of mass-shooters. I am a pacifist, of course, and abhor violence of all kinds, and am in no way trying to justify or vindicate the actions of James Holmes or anyone like him. But I get the idea of the world being so backwards and upside-down that only an absurdist and horrific reaction seems fair or justified. I have felt this way in my life sometimes and am very grateful to my pacifism for keeping me from stockpiling weapons. I know that some of you are probably surprised (there it is again!) to see me writing this, but I think you are not necessarily checking in with yourself sufficiently if so. Look inward, my friend. Have you never felt that kind of anger and despair?
This society is manufacturing anger and despair at an incredible rate right now. We've been over why, this worship of the magical "Economy", and we've even been over how it manifests when people only turn the proverbial gun on themselves, most recently. As my friend and debater Kurt Falk often tells me, I should be the entertainment at children's birthday parties. His idea for fixing all this is in his most recent post, where he joins Kurt Vonnegut (in Palm Sunday, just finished today, certainly influencing the style of this post) in advocating that we have new rites of passage for American youth, bar mitzvahs or quinceañeras for a culture unmoored. It's a good idea. It used to be that graduating from high school was our culture's adulthood commemoration ceremony. But now there is no real adulthood to be reached. In the sense of independence, of self-sufficiency, of freedom to make informed decisions, our newly minted adults are as bankrupt as someone with six figures of student loan debt. And just like those folks, they can't file it and start over.
So they shoot people, don't they? I guess that's a little oversimplified, but that looks to be the size of it. Apparently Mr. Holmes is walking down the corridors pretending to be the Joker or some other masked movie villain (get it?), but I'm sure he was perfectly sane when he spent meticulous hours buying guns on the Internet or laying tripwires across his apartment. He did the math. He was good at it. He realized that he had no future, that the people of America who were being distracted to death had no future, and he tried to illustrate that. All the way down to the six-month-old and the six-year-old who were apparently watching one of the most violent franchises in movie history after midnight.
I am not trying to glorify this scumbag or turn him into some sort of dark anti-hero (I'll leave that to Hollywood). But I am trying to dissent from the media chorus singing about the senseless unpredictable shock of all this. It's perfectly predictable and it has a kind of logic. Michael Moore did much the same treatment of Columbine in his masterpiece movie Bowling for Columbine, which we should all probably go rewatch. Part of his thesis was that kids growing up in the shadow of defense contracting, preached to about how the country they're supposed to love solves all its problems through violence, will occasionally take this environment seriously. And respond in kind. People are all agog about what's wrong with Colorado when Michael Moore already told you. To be fair, Holmes did hail from San Diego, one of the biggest military cities in the country aside from those found in Colorado. When we have a society filled with people who play a little video game attached to real drones that blow up real people, how shocked can we be that disgruntled broke teens or twenty-somethings from the new Lost Generation walk into a movie and emulate the solutions found on-screen and in real life?
What no one seems to realize is that you need to do something with these people. I don't mean to sound pejorative when I say "these people" - many of them are my closest friends and confidants. I coach them, I talk with them, I worry about the very concept of a future around them. They need things to do. They have active minds and have been raised on poisonous dreams about growth and accumulation. They need to put their mind to something other than disappointment, despair, and the soulless thresher we call "The Economy".
Many would suggest a war. I have no doubt that's one plan being hatched in the corporations funding the Obama/Romney campaign. A nice big war to sweep everyone into the old employer of last resort. You wouldn't even need a draft, you'd just have it de facto. I'm sure a land invasion of Iran or North Korea would keep many hundred-thousands of a Lost Generation occupied and out of the way. The legend is that this is what saved America from the Depression, what saved the Baby Boomers from totally overwhelming the system in the sixties. There's little doubt that part of the lack of enthusiasm to really make jobs and work for the youth of our society has to do with making the incredibly unappealing military look a little more enticing.
I, of course, would never suggest a war, any more than I would advocate you going down to your local movie theater and shooting up six-year-olds. They are the same thing. Only in a war, more six-year-olds die. Usually more horribly, more painfully.
I would suggest make-work programs. We certainly have things that need fixing. Let's build a free wireless Internet network for the whole nation. Yes, even rural North Dakota and Alaska. That would require some people, wouldn't it? Give them room and board and a college-like camaraderie, a little spending cash (so they can - gulp - see a movie), maybe access to a shared fleet of cars on weekends. Let's build some high-speed rails so we can take all these dangerous overpriced gas-guzzling trucks off the road. Let's build some solar and wind plants. I know, I know, it would require a total resignation from the very concept of The Economy. It would mean government was actively putting corporations out of work, and some of their employees too, and treating the youth of America with dignity and respect and like they're people who can do things. Heaven forbid.
But what are your alternatives? These people are going to be on the dole one way or the other. There aren't jobs, there aren't opportunities, and everyone in The Economy is doing their damnedest to make sure there are fewer jobs and fewer opportunities to come. I guess you can repeal minimum wage and make everyone punch each other in the nose for a scrap of bread you throw from the tower at midnight, but these people are increasingly going to leverage their debt and take matters into their own hands. And they'd have to believe in a future to make a revolution. If all they believe in is despair, then you get Aurora or Columbine or Virginia Tech. You get little dark knights everywhere, believing they are extolling some kind of neo-nihilism with every bullet, not realizing governments cornered that market with wars centuries ago.
I envisioned this post a long time before there was a movie theater shooting, and it was going to be about another kind of object lesson, back to the theme of learning about myself. It was about the fact that I bought a new coffee maker I didn't need a few months ago and haven't had the heart to set it up and replace the old one.
The old one looks like this:
I won it at the Yale tournament in the spring of 2002. They gave out useful or fun objects like rice cookers and Gameboys and coffee makers with the budget they would have spent on shiny trophies. I actually initially took the rice cooker at Emily's behest, but quickly swapped it for a more practical (for me) coffee maker with Steph Tatham, who'd won some lower award. The thing has worked perfectly for a decade. It's a relic of an American era of making machines that lasted, even though it didn't come from that era at all. I've probably had six-thousand or so cups of coffee out of this thing. It still worked perfectly this morning.
My intent was to replace it with this model that I got at Target for like twenty bucks:
It shouldn't take much imagination to see why I picked this out. The color is like the font of this page, the color I would pick for nearly all objects out of a pantheon of a thousand hues. It has a timer so that it will brew the coffee for me and have it ready when I blearily awaken at six in the morning to go to a tournament or fulfill some other wakeful task of existence. It is in every way perfect. Whereas the old one is dingy, off-white, wearing the stains of thousands of brews, incredibly simple in its design. It doesn't even have digital numbers! In an era where you can't dry your hands in public without interfacing with a motion-sensor, holding on to this thing is as old-fashioned as not having a cell-phone (I'm coming up on two years with a cell-phone!).
And yet I can't seem to make the transition, to get rid of the old thing. It was free. It has served me so loyally for so long. It still works.
I am such a bad capitalist.
Or maybe, to borrow a phrase, I'm just committed to commitment.
Maybe we just need to take everyone in the Lost Generation and have them paint our coffee makers. Have them fan out in the neighborhoods, house by house, and ask what everyone would like updated or changed or painted or retooled so that life feels new and fresh again. So that it feels like there's a future that's not just austerity and decline. So that people can feel like a rich person without actually being decadent or aspiring to buy and sell people.
That kind of house-by-house work sure beats the hell out of what that phrase is being used for in Afghanistan right now.
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, Guest columns, Politics, public protest, thought
Monday, May 28, 2012
America's broke cities
The Great Recession is raising a generation on austerity. While there are no breadlines, the cost of gasoline alone has made young people more fiscally aware. There has also been great hue and cry about the decrease in state and local services as budgets are pinched. Schools from elementaries to universities have suffered the impact of these cuts. Budgets have been pared and pared again as the nation grapples with choice to buy missiles and bombs, instead of books and computers, to build Iraqis and Afghanis schools and roads before we build our own.1
Amidst this slump, cities and municipalities have been forced to get extremely creative about how they can save money. We read this weekend about two new outside the box maneuvers. The city of Detroit is going to eliminate about half of its streetlights. The city admits that 40% of its 88,000 streetlights are broken and it can't afford to fix them.2 To reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000 and contract out maintenance would save Detroit about $10 million a year by its own estimates. Of course, it would mean the city would discontinue fixing lights along with services such as street and sidewalk repairs in “distressed” areas, defined as those neighborhoods with a high degree of blight and little or no commercial activity.
Sorry, your neighborhood. We don't work there any more. What, you are a taxpayer? Well, you had better move along.
The reality is Detroit's 139 square miles contain 60% fewer residents than in 1950. Bloomberg news notes, street lighting is an important civic issue, quoting the experts, "It touches kids going to school in the dark. It touches midnight Mass at a church. It touches businesses that want to stay open past 9 pm... Delivering services to a thinly spread population is expensive. Some 20 neighborhoods, each a square mile or more, are only 10 to 15% occupied... the city can’t force residents to move, and it’s almost impossible under Michigan law for the city to seize properties for development... there are tremendous political, administrative, financial and, to some degree, legal obstacles. Unless you phase out a neighborhood altogether, you still need lighting, and waste pickup and police and fire protection."
Meanwhile halfway across the country in Vallejo, California, it is the cops instead of the lights who are being replaced. First the city declared bankruptcy, disposing with massive salary and benefits guarantees in the process. Then under fiscal pressure, the police went high-tech and invested $500,000 in cameras, allowing cops to be stationary and monitor a larger area than they could before rolling around on patrol. Their department deputized citizens to participate in law enforcement by sharing tips on Facebook and Twitter. The number of neighborhood watch groups jumped from 15 to 350.
We would like to be happy for the civic engagement, especially the fellow citizenry replacing the cops, but when the technological Big Brother is so intimately intertwined, our libertarian nerves twitch.3
The real fascination to the Clarion Content is simply that so many innovative measures are being thrust upon America. These are tough financial times. Can America come out the other side leaner without being meaner?
The jury is still out.
Notes
1Brought to you by King George the II and his loyal vassal, the Dick Cheney.
2Wait this is an American city, right? Not the third world??
3Also snitching culture always feels awfully Soviet to us.
Amidst this slump, cities and municipalities have been forced to get extremely creative about how they can save money. We read this weekend about two new outside the box maneuvers. The city of Detroit is going to eliminate about half of its streetlights. The city admits that 40% of its 88,000 streetlights are broken and it can't afford to fix them.2 To reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000 and contract out maintenance would save Detroit about $10 million a year by its own estimates. Of course, it would mean the city would discontinue fixing lights along with services such as street and sidewalk repairs in “distressed” areas, defined as those neighborhoods with a high degree of blight and little or no commercial activity.
Sorry, your neighborhood. We don't work there any more. What, you are a taxpayer? Well, you had better move along.
The reality is Detroit's 139 square miles contain 60% fewer residents than in 1950. Bloomberg news notes, street lighting is an important civic issue, quoting the experts, "It touches kids going to school in the dark. It touches midnight Mass at a church. It touches businesses that want to stay open past 9 pm... Delivering services to a thinly spread population is expensive. Some 20 neighborhoods, each a square mile or more, are only 10 to 15% occupied... the city can’t force residents to move, and it’s almost impossible under Michigan law for the city to seize properties for development... there are tremendous political, administrative, financial and, to some degree, legal obstacles. Unless you phase out a neighborhood altogether, you still need lighting, and waste pickup and police and fire protection."
Meanwhile halfway across the country in Vallejo, California, it is the cops instead of the lights who are being replaced. First the city declared bankruptcy, disposing with massive salary and benefits guarantees in the process. Then under fiscal pressure, the police went high-tech and invested $500,000 in cameras, allowing cops to be stationary and monitor a larger area than they could before rolling around on patrol. Their department deputized citizens to participate in law enforcement by sharing tips on Facebook and Twitter. The number of neighborhood watch groups jumped from 15 to 350.
We would like to be happy for the civic engagement, especially the fellow citizenry replacing the cops, but when the technological Big Brother is so intimately intertwined, our libertarian nerves twitch.3
The real fascination to the Clarion Content is simply that so many innovative measures are being thrust upon America. These are tough financial times. Can America come out the other side leaner without being meaner?
The jury is still out.
Notes
1Brought to you by King George the II and his loyal vassal, the Dick Cheney.
2Wait this is an American city, right? Not the third world??
3Also snitching culture always feels awfully Soviet to us.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Urban gardening runs amok
SEEDS garden at #706 Gilbert Street
Friend of the Clarion Content and fellow blogger, Durham Profiles, is a great place to read stories about fellow Durhamanians. We loved their profile of Durham musician, Steven Coffman, a couple of months back.
Durham Profiles and founder Ruth Eckles most recent article follows the story of urban farming in Durham through Homegrown City Farms. Local food is a cause near and dear to the Clarion Content's heart.
A brief excerpt from the latest pearl on Durham Profiles...
"There’s so much wasted land in a lawn," laments Collier Reeves of Homegrown City Farms in a recent interview. Her words remain on my mind as I drive to work, passing the broad expanse of lawns that surround office buildings, pedestrian malls, hotels, grocery stores and highway medians.Ms. Eckles teases out that uniquely Durham story, that vibe that makes our town a place where people find a way to say "Yes", rather than "No." Homegrown City Farms is clearly built on and sustained by a cooperative community effort.
"We live in an agriculturally rich area here in the Piedmont, but there is a lot of underused land, especially in urban areas," Maryah Smith-Overman, the other half of Homegrown City Farms, adds.
Since moving from Asheville to Durham last year to launch the project, the two have steadily transformed a borrowed quarter-acre plot in East Durham into a small farm overflowing with sugar snap peas, chard, beets, radishes, spinach, arugula, carrots, and broccoli raab. On June 1st, they will begin distributing the vegetables through CSA shares. Homegrown City Farms grew out of Reeves and Smith-Overmans’ mutual desire to promote community, food sovereignty, and sustainable land stewardship practices...Both artists and musicians, Reeves and Smith-Overman are attracted to Durham’s overlapping social justice, farm-to-fork, music and art scenes.
They employ a process called a "Crop Mob" when they need extra help. A spin-off of the meme of the flash mob, crop mobbing is a way to harness the collective effort of the community. It is a natural pairing with urban farming because in the past when activities like planting, harvesting, processing, and barnraising almost always required local collective effort, the rural community was there. In the modern parlance, crop mobbers work together, share a meal, play, talk, make music and revel in life. No money is exchanged.
The Clarion Content knows we are not alone in Durham in our support for urban gardens, local farms and locally grown food. Just yesterday, we heard bon vivants, Jennifer and Dain Phelan, proprietors of a favorite Clarion Content watering hole and eatery Dain's, held a fundraiser to support SEEDS. SEEDS, a long time Durham institution, is a non-profit educational community garden that uses gardening and growing food to teach respect for life, for the earth and for each other. SEEDS young urban gardeners sell their wares at their own Produce & Craft Market Wednesday's from 4pm to 6pm at #706 Gilbert Street, in Durham and also Saturdays at the Durham Farmer's Market.
Read Ruth Eckles and Durham Profiles whole article here. Read more about Crop Mobbing here.
Labels: Durham, ecology, Economy, food
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Fracking the Big Picture
The Clarion Content has been following the fracking debate through our Durham lens. However, as we told you in our last article, fracking has a writ large context as well. It is a key player in the national debate about energy policy and energy production.
Image found here.
Witness an article in last week's USA Today, under the banner headline, "U.S. energy independence is no longer just a pipe dream" Their writer, Tim Mullaney, used the quaint home of the Little League Baseball World Series, Williamsport as his vehicle. Pennsylvania is a state where the fracking debate is manifest. Jobs and energy production meet local environmental and ecological concerns head on.
USA Today as is their want drifts through the highlights like daytime television: [footnotes we added]
The general gist of it all is selling the amazing possibilities, and though USA Today is quoting Citigroup's report and analyst, is their readership nuanced enough to pick up on that? One wonders.
It becomes especially relevant in the next paragraph when the writer transitions fromparroting citing Citigroup to this beauty, "A dozen years after Texas wildcatter George Mitchell commercialized a new gas-drilling technology called hydraulic fracking, the new energy boom is taking off..."
He then proceeds to tell the happy little tale, Wikipedia meets Johnny Appleseed style, of how fracking has spread its largesse from from Pennsylvania to Alaska to North Dakota back to Williamsport where, "Shell has announced plans to build a cracking plant, which will make chemicals from natural gas, outside Pittsburgh. The expected payoff includes 10,000 construction jobs..."
USA Today does caution its readership that this analysis assumes continued strong conservation trends, along with federal mandates for improved vehicle fuel standards. It also notes that this still won't lead to $2/gallon gasoline.
But what the Clarion Content finds most interesting, most relevant both in Durham and the proverbial Main Streets where the presidential election will be played out, is that never once does the author mention the environmental3 and ecological4 concerns that accompany fracking. Whether accidental or not, the Clarion Content finds it metaphorical for how we anticipate the soundbite politics of the presidential debate will approach fracking. The bitter irony is that here at home in Durham, across the fences and the backyards, concerns about health and the local ecology dominate. We don't want our families, friends and neighbors to get sick, we don't want our area polluted.5
Stay tuned.6
Notes
1Be nice to Canadians, on top of their wealth of natural resources, the Northwest passage is about to open, too.
2Seems like it would be in America's interest to quit destabilizing Mexico with an unsuccessful drug policy.
3 Environmental concerns in this case being human health concerns, pollution that harms ground water supplies or creates new cancer clusters.
4Ecological concerns in this case referring to environmental impacts to the local habitat affecting everything from farming and animal husbandry to wild species die-off.
5The energy industry PR machine has a swell label for that stance, it makes you a nimby. As in "Those damn nimby's, first it was power plants, then it was mountain topping, now its fracking." Let it be said to the Clarion Content whole-heartedly agrees that a realistic national conversation about consumption and conservation has to occur. Dick Cheney be damned.
6The record is not over yet. This will (or should) come up hundreds of times in the presidential campaign.
Image found here.
Witness an article in last week's USA Today, under the banner headline, "U.S. energy independence is no longer just a pipe dream" Their writer, Tim Mullaney, used the quaint home of the Little League Baseball World Series, Williamsport as his vehicle. Pennsylvania is a state where the fracking debate is manifest. Jobs and energy production meet local environmental and ecological concerns head on.
USA Today as is their want drifts through the highlights like daytime television: [footnotes we added]
"about 100 companies have moved to town..." and "Citigroup argues that the U.S., or at least North America, can achieve energy independence by 2020..." more citing Citigroup, "Counting the output from Canada1 and Mexico2, North America is 'the new Middle East'..." "It could help manufacturers and chemical businesses that use lots of energy or make products from natural gas. It might give the U.S. a structural advantage on trade partners in energy costs, helping to offset the edge that cheaper labor gives nations such as China.."
The general gist of it all is selling the amazing possibilities, and though USA Today is quoting Citigroup's report and analyst, is their readership nuanced enough to pick up on that? One wonders.
It becomes especially relevant in the next paragraph when the writer transitions from
He then proceeds to tell the happy little tale, Wikipedia meets Johnny Appleseed style, of how fracking has spread its largesse from from Pennsylvania to Alaska to North Dakota back to Williamsport where, "Shell has announced plans to build a cracking plant, which will make chemicals from natural gas, outside Pittsburgh. The expected payoff includes 10,000 construction jobs..."
USA Today does caution its readership that this analysis assumes continued strong conservation trends, along with federal mandates for improved vehicle fuel standards. It also notes that this still won't lead to $2/gallon gasoline.
But what the Clarion Content finds most interesting, most relevant both in Durham and the proverbial Main Streets where the presidential election will be played out, is that never once does the author mention the environmental3 and ecological4 concerns that accompany fracking. Whether accidental or not, the Clarion Content finds it metaphorical for how we anticipate the soundbite politics of the presidential debate will approach fracking. The bitter irony is that here at home in Durham, across the fences and the backyards, concerns about health and the local ecology dominate. We don't want our families, friends and neighbors to get sick, we don't want our area polluted.5
Stay tuned.6
Notes
1Be nice to Canadians, on top of their wealth of natural resources, the Northwest passage is about to open, too.
2Seems like it would be in America's interest to quit destabilizing Mexico with an unsuccessful drug policy.
3 Environmental concerns in this case being human health concerns, pollution that harms ground water supplies or creates new cancer clusters.
4Ecological concerns in this case referring to environmental impacts to the local habitat affecting everything from farming and animal husbandry to wild species die-off.
5The energy industry PR machine has a swell label for that stance, it makes you a nimby. As in "Those damn nimby's, first it was power plants, then it was mountain topping, now its fracking." Let it be said to the Clarion Content whole-heartedly agrees that a realistic national conversation about consumption and conservation has to occur. Dick Cheney be damned.
6The record is not over yet. This will (or should) come up hundreds of times in the presidential campaign.
Labels: Durham, ecology, Economy, energy policy, Politics, Pop Culture
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Budget battle
If you haven't heard about the budget battle looming between the Republicans and their House Leader, Paul Ryan,1 and the Democrats and the President, Barack Obama, get ready to.2
With the Great Recession drifting along, the economy sputtering, stagflation a reality and deflation a specter still looming, the Presidential race will be almost exclusively about the economy. And there is no starker way to delineate the contrasts between the Republicans and the Democrats than the priorities and concerns their respective budgets demonstrate.3
As Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, so eloquently puts it, "Budgets are statements of values. They tell us what our leaders think is important for the country." Thompson argues effectively that Representative Ryan's Republican budget is designed to cut the Federal government back in a manner that would have made Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater proud. Ryan's budget is lowers taxes on the rich and big corporations, while attempting recoup some of that revenue by reducing the complexity of the tax code. Further saving are found in repealing Obamacare and cutting Medicaid, along with shrinking non-defense discretionary spending.4
The Obama budget protects the President's massive health care program, along with Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Unfortunately, certain elements read like pure fantasy, as Thompson puts it, "It pays for new infrastructure projects with 'savings from the Iraq war,' which... is a clever bit of parallel-universe budgeting, like me paying for a new suit with 'savings from not going to Atlantic City tomorrow'."
The President's budget also protects the 99%. Well at least 98% of them anyway, by excluding them from tax hikes specifically targeting the rich. Of course, as veteran observers of Washington and the tax code know, the uber-rich have armies of attorneys to help them minimize and evade their tax obligations.5,6
Like most, the Clarion Content finds it far easier to complain about both these budget proposals, than to offer real tangible solutions. Here's to hoping the politicians can do better than they have been these last fifteen years.
Notes
1If the Republicans somehow end up with a brokered convention, this is the man most likely to come off the back benches and grab the nomination.
2Older readers, you will likely be as sick of this budget debate as you once were the phrase "Social Security lockbox" during the Bush II vs. Gore debacle of 2000.
3It is relevant to note this is, in part, because Barack Obamas's foreign policy has essentially been a continuation of the Bush II-Cheney regime's American exceptionalism justifies American overreach.
4Still waiting for the Air Force's first Bomber bake sale.
5Unless you believe the Caymans and the Bahamas are legitimate modern nation-states, not extra-judicial tax havens that would be far easier to invade and conquer than Iraq or Afghanistan.
6Plenty of evidence suggests increased tax code complexity actually makes it easier for the rich to avoid paying their tax obligations.
With the Great Recession drifting along, the economy sputtering, stagflation a reality and deflation a specter still looming, the Presidential race will be almost exclusively about the economy. And there is no starker way to delineate the contrasts between the Republicans and the Democrats than the priorities and concerns their respective budgets demonstrate.3
As Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, so eloquently puts it, "Budgets are statements of values. They tell us what our leaders think is important for the country." Thompson argues effectively that Representative Ryan's Republican budget is designed to cut the Federal government back in a manner that would have made Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater proud. Ryan's budget is lowers taxes on the rich and big corporations, while attempting recoup some of that revenue by reducing the complexity of the tax code. Further saving are found in repealing Obamacare and cutting Medicaid, along with shrinking non-defense discretionary spending.4
The Obama budget protects the President's massive health care program, along with Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Unfortunately, certain elements read like pure fantasy, as Thompson puts it, "It pays for new infrastructure projects with 'savings from the Iraq war,' which... is a clever bit of parallel-universe budgeting, like me paying for a new suit with 'savings from not going to Atlantic City tomorrow'."
The President's budget also protects the 99%. Well at least 98% of them anyway, by excluding them from tax hikes specifically targeting the rich. Of course, as veteran observers of Washington and the tax code know, the uber-rich have armies of attorneys to help them minimize and evade their tax obligations.5,6
Like most, the Clarion Content finds it far easier to complain about both these budget proposals, than to offer real tangible solutions. Here's to hoping the politicians can do better than they have been these last fifteen years.
Notes
1If the Republicans somehow end up with a brokered convention, this is the man most likely to come off the back benches and grab the nomination.
2Older readers, you will likely be as sick of this budget debate as you once were the phrase "Social Security lockbox" during the Bush II vs. Gore debacle of 2000.
3It is relevant to note this is, in part, because Barack Obamas's foreign policy has essentially been a continuation of the Bush II-Cheney regime's American exceptionalism justifies American overreach.
4Still waiting for the Air Force's first Bomber bake sale.
5Unless you believe the Caymans and the Bahamas are legitimate modern nation-states, not extra-judicial tax havens that would be far easier to invade and conquer than Iraq or Afghanistan.
6Plenty of evidence suggests increased tax code complexity actually makes it easier for the rich to avoid paying their tax obligations.
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, Politics
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Banksy on Advertising
The famous British street artist, Banksy, offers an insightful take on advertising below, rated R for strong language.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They but into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.---Banksy
Saw this on the Tumblr of one of our Pennsylvania readers.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They but into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.---Banksy
Saw this on the Tumblr of one of our Pennsylvania readers.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
State of the State
Wait a minute! Is the Clarion Content mistaken or did Obama just start down a path to lose an un-loseable election?
Is he really running the Al Gore 2000 populism playbook?1 Against a Republican field that makes former scion, George Bush II, look like a thoughtful, articulate candidate? Against a a Republican field that Senator Bob Dole could have beaten with one arm tied behind his back?
What gives, Mr. President?
Has no one told you that the only way you can run against the Man in this country is with less regulation, not more. The Reagan narrative, "Get the Man out of lives and off of our back" is alive and well, in the Tea Party freshman of Congress and the Ron Paul zeitgeist."2
But the populist left, Mr. President? This country has been tarring and feathering the populist left as lily-livered commies since before Senator Joe McCarthy was a teenager. The last Democrat to win the Presidency with a true people's mandate from the left was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
And there was a depression. Now, while there is economic malaise, and there are worrying signs of deflation in the United States economy, there is no depression.
Absent times that bad, campaigning from the populist left is a surefire recipe for defeat, Mr. President.
Notes
1 None of this should imply that there are not dangerously high levels of income inequality in America. It is just that a Democrat can't win a national election crowing about it.
2Note that in both these canons the Man is far more likely to refer to the government than big corporations.
Is he really running the Al Gore 2000 populism playbook?1 Against a Republican field that makes former scion, George Bush II, look like a thoughtful, articulate candidate? Against a a Republican field that Senator Bob Dole could have beaten with one arm tied behind his back?
What gives, Mr. President?
Has no one told you that the only way you can run against the Man in this country is with less regulation, not more. The Reagan narrative, "Get the Man out of lives and off of our back" is alive and well, in the Tea Party freshman of Congress and the Ron Paul zeitgeist."2
But the populist left, Mr. President? This country has been tarring and feathering the populist left as lily-livered commies since before Senator Joe McCarthy was a teenager. The last Democrat to win the Presidency with a true people's mandate from the left was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
And there was a depression. Now, while there is economic malaise, and there are worrying signs of deflation in the United States economy, there is no depression.
Absent times that bad, campaigning from the populist left is a surefire recipe for defeat, Mr. President.
Notes
1 None of this should imply that there are not dangerously high levels of income inequality in America. It is just that a Democrat can't win a national election crowing about it.
2Note that in both these canons the Man is far more likely to refer to the government than big corporations.
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, Politics, Predictions, public protest
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Foreclosure victims
Dear readers, are you asking yourself, if the current economic tumble is as bad as the Occupy folks say it is, "Where are the breadlines?"
Are the foreclosure crisis and the current economic collapse victimless events?
Dateline Colleyville, Texas... At the Clarion Content, we wonder in response how many of these kind of tragedies are allegedly in no way connected to the economy.
Are the foreclosure crisis and the current economic collapse victimless events?
Dateline Colleyville, Texas... At the Clarion Content, we wonder in response how many of these kind of tragedies are allegedly in no way connected to the economy.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Human Rights Asserted
All photos courtesy of Scenes from my Lunch Hour
This past Saturday was International Human Rights Day. Durham marked the occasion with a march organized by the “Historic Thousands on Jones Street,” an umbrella community organization that assembled a variety of traditional and newer groups to raise their voices on behalf of the 99%.
All photos courtesy of Scenes from my Lunch Hour
The marchers met at the CCB/People’s Plaza, home of the bull statue downtown. The very dichotomy of the name spoke to the protesters cries and the omnipresence of the debate.
Is the area around the bull, in an Occupy inspired renaming, the People’s plaza? Or is it named after a bank, the CCB plaza? The dominant paradigm inveighed a long time ago. The Occupiers implicitly weighed-in on that issue, too, with flyers referring to meetings and meet-ups at the People's Plaza. The physical terrain represented the meta-debate: Corporations vs. Government vs. the People.
Marchers chanted, “How do we stop the deficit? Stop the wars and tax the rich!” as they walked down Main Street to First Presbyterian Church. There the marchers broke into small groups to talk about issues within the specific framework of human rights. Group leaders facilitated a discussion about how human rights issues have implications that are global, regional and local.
The topics broached ranged from jobs and transportation, to voter registration and schools. The groups represented mirrored the array of themes. The head of the Durham, NAACP, Fred Foster was in attendance, vociferously spreading the message, “Social justice begins with the word ‘We’.” There were also folks from “Occupy Durham,” “The Durham Local People’s Assembly,” as well as the “Mental Health Workers Campaign,” the “Durham Coalition for Urban Justice” and “Health Care for all of NC,” among others.
The questions and challenges raised were as myriad the groups. The underlying feeling across the board was that now is the time. “If you don’t act, you will be acted upon,” was a common thread woven through the conversations. The turnout was not large, just over 100 by our estimates, but the enthusiasm was intense. It was mirrored by the public, numerous cars honked and waved in support as they drove by the march.
Speakers and citizens merged without hierarchy. The spirit of collaboration was evident. Many in attendance contrasted it with the bureaucratic instinct to suppress dissent. Attendees raised multifarious examples of tacit and active government suppression. They ranged from suppression of the right to freely assemble, one protester had been arrested peacefully sitting in her chair in a public park in Raleigh the week previous, to impediments placed in the way of the right to exercise one’s vote1, to arbitrary limits on public comment at public hearings, School Board meetings and similar nodes of interaction between the public and their sometimes elected, sometimes selected representatives.2
The government, of course, was only one of the villains protesters raised their voices against. The other common ogre was big corporations. Numerous members of the assembly expressed frustration with a frequent Clarion Content theme: the absurdity of corporate personhood, a fiction that allows faceless entities to fiat onomatopoeia their existence onto the human playing field.
The all-encompassing irony of the complexity and pervasiveness of the systemic issues in play was made clear by one organizer, who under his breath wistfully sighed, that many if not all of these signs were made possible by, “adhesive tape, brought to you by 3M and their friends.”
All photos courtesy of Scenes from my Lunch Hour
All photos courtesy of Scenes from my Lunch Hour
1The Reverend Curtis Gatewood spoke passionately and eloquently about this topic.
2The Clarion Content noticed this very phenomenon when we attended the Durham Cultural Forum and board members spoke for so long that after four or five public comments the facilities people were flashing the lights to empty the auditorium.
Labels: 2012 presidential election, Durham, Economy, Politics, public protest
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Occupied
The mainstream media's interest may have waned, but the Occupy movement is not over and done. The fundamentals that brought people to the streets have not changed. It is our perception that a great cauldron of systemic frustration is still burbling and only a little bit of steam has been released.
Read here a Chomskian perspective from Naomi Wolf in the British newspaper The Guardian. In her view, there is most definitely a coordinated effort underway to supress the Occupy protests.
Read here a Chomskian perspective from Naomi Wolf in the British newspaper The Guardian. In her view, there is most definitely a coordinated effort underway to supress the Occupy protests.
Labels: constitutional issues, cop stories, Economy, Politics, public protest
Friday, November 18, 2011
Duham Cultural Forum
Your Clarion Content’s correspondent attended the Durham Cultural Advisory Board’s meeting last Monday, November 7th. This meeting, at the Nasher Museum on Duke's campus, was a fascinating coming together or perhaps collision would be more accurate, between Durham City government, the non-profit world, and the public. The Durham Cultural Advisory Board is the successor to the Durham Cultural Master Plan.
The event brought the City Council appointed chairman of the Cultural Advisory Board, along with representatives from Durham City government, most notably, Councilman Mike Woodard, and E’vonne Coleman Cook of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau, together with the leadership of the biggest arts non-profit in Durham, the Durham Arts Council (DAC) and its Executive Director, Sherry DeVries. The public was also invited to attend.1
Michael Schoenfeld, Vice-President for Public Affairs and Government Relations at Duke University, and the Chairman of Durham Cultural Advisory Board, was invited to speak first. In a data heavy presentation, Mr. Schoenfeld briefed those in attendance on what the Cultural Master Plan had been and what might be up next. As he rolled through slide after slide dutifully narrating his Powerpoint presentation, Mr. Schoenfeld, who noted he had only moved to the Durham area three years earlier, laid out a lot of facts and figures.
He broke down the $222k budget of the Cultural Master Plan. The two biggest numbers were $60k for "Festivals" and $43.5k for "Arts Education." And on the face of it, it is hard for Durham art supporters to begrudge either of those numbers. Of course, there are always devils in the details. How, and on what, is that money spent? Later, when we got to the public forum portion of the evening, we realized we weren’t the only ones worried about those kind of questions.
The other number that the Clarion Content found oddly noteworthy in the line item budget Mr. Schoenfeld rapidly recited was $13 grand for a Business Committee. This was more than the Durham Cultural Master plan spent for our dear city on either public art or planning for the Durham Historical Museum. Mr. Schoenfeld, who moved to Duke and the Bull City from Vanderbilt and Nashville, Tennessee, noted: we in Durham are part of the largest city in North Carolina without a dedicated historical museum.
We hope that the committee was up to some important business.
Mr. Schoenfeld didn’t say. He did say something about a sixty-three member steering committee having been assembled to form a committee that wrote the Durham Cultural Master Plan. It is a wonder under the momentum crushing weight of all of that bureaucracy that anything happened at all.
But happen it did, as Ms. Sherry DeVries, the Executive Director of the Durham Arts Council, who was up next, demonstrated. She had all the facts and figures about Durham’s renaissance at her fingertips. Despite the national trend, recession and economic stagnation, Durham saw 10% job growth in the creative industries.2 DeVries also noted Durham exceeds the national average for jobs classified as creative by 75% and the North Carolina state average by 218%, with more than 6,600 jobs classified as high creative generating an estimated economic impact of $103 million.
Taking the podium from Ms. DeVries, Ms. E’vonne Coleman Cook of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau, who spoke smoothly and without notes, briefed the assembly on some of the work done at www.Durhamculture.com This is a website, the Clarion Content admittedly, had not accessed previously. Now that we have, what a resource! It is worth the time and visit for the events calendar alone. Ms. Coleman Cook also told the group that it was easy to register, and then, one would be able to update the collective calendar personally. This openness is a double-edged sword because it does not lend itself to specificity. The calendar is jam-packed with information and the list format is somewhat unwieldy. But, these are petty complaints for what the site offers.
Ms. Cook disseminated her valuable information succinctly and handed off to Mark Lee, a local radio host and the emcee of the Durham Blues Festival to moderate public discussion. Mr. Lee, a man with the sweetly resonant voice of an on-air personality, spoke only briefly, the coterie who proceeded him having gone on for nearly an hour and fifteen minutes of the forum's allotted hour and thirty minutes. He spoke about his personal experiences with Durham residents who had gone on to greater artistic success. He mentioned, though didn’t elaborate on, an encounter he had with the Raging Grannies and their singing number at Occupy Durham. And then turned it over to the public for questions.
This was both the briefest and most fascinating part of the evening. There was a passionate crowd. There were questions about how to best make contact with students and young people. There were concerns raised about reaching youth who might not be able to afford transportation to and classes at the Durham Arts Council.3
What did the numbers reflect about arts spending and the arts economy in Durham beyond the building of facilities? The public wanted to know.
There were real concerns amongst the arts supporters in the audience about reaching young people effectively. One Durham teacher noted that an amazing opportunity to learn to make documentary films on the public schools-arts nickel had been taken up only by four students. Not for lack of interest, she suspected, but rather because of the struggle to communicate the opportunity available to students and their parents.
The Clarion Content, among many others in the audience, chanced to bemoan the lack of effective use of social media by many of these organizations, including, and perhaps especially, Durham Public Schools (33,000 students, an estimated 57,000 parents and 238 Twitter followers? Really??) and the Durham Arts Council too (1279 followers, two tweets since August.)
More questions were raised about how to face these and other challenges in the light of shrinking state and local school and arts budgets, especially by Ms. Coleman Cook, but by that time the Nasher security personnel were flashing the lights in the auditorium and attempting to shoo people out of the room and into the lobby for catered snacks.
The unanswered questions echoed loudly as the audience began to filter out of the room. It could not fairly have been directed at Mr. Lee, he was only charged as the moderator. Ms. Coleman Cook posed the questions. Mr. Schoenfeld moved here in just 2008. Ms. DeVries shuffled her notes. Councilman Woodward, the only councilman who had been in attendance to hear a City Council appointed board talk about spending the public's money, had already left the building.
What is to become of the arts in Durham? Obviously, authority does not have an easier answer. The reality is that it is up to each of us.
1De-emphasis of the public is deliberate in this context.
2Albeit with backward looking data from 2006-08. But there are two ways to look at that older data, because, although it mostly predates the Bush II recession, it also does not include Durham Performing Arts Center, which most certainly created jobs in Durham.
3Here an opportunity was missed to mention the amazing work being done by KidZNotes with at-risk families and their children. The Walltown Children's Theater could have also been cited as reaching out into the community answering the claim that all the arts programs are based at the center of town as the questioner, incidentally a Wake County resident, stated.
The event brought the City Council appointed chairman of the Cultural Advisory Board, along with representatives from Durham City government, most notably, Councilman Mike Woodard, and E’vonne Coleman Cook of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau, together with the leadership of the biggest arts non-profit in Durham, the Durham Arts Council (DAC) and its Executive Director, Sherry DeVries. The public was also invited to attend.1
Michael Schoenfeld, Vice-President for Public Affairs and Government Relations at Duke University, and the Chairman of Durham Cultural Advisory Board, was invited to speak first. In a data heavy presentation, Mr. Schoenfeld briefed those in attendance on what the Cultural Master Plan had been and what might be up next. As he rolled through slide after slide dutifully narrating his Powerpoint presentation, Mr. Schoenfeld, who noted he had only moved to the Durham area three years earlier, laid out a lot of facts and figures.
He broke down the $222k budget of the Cultural Master Plan. The two biggest numbers were $60k for "Festivals" and $43.5k for "Arts Education." And on the face of it, it is hard for Durham art supporters to begrudge either of those numbers. Of course, there are always devils in the details. How, and on what, is that money spent? Later, when we got to the public forum portion of the evening, we realized we weren’t the only ones worried about those kind of questions.
The other number that the Clarion Content found oddly noteworthy in the line item budget Mr. Schoenfeld rapidly recited was $13 grand for a Business Committee. This was more than the Durham Cultural Master plan spent for our dear city on either public art or planning for the Durham Historical Museum. Mr. Schoenfeld, who moved to Duke and the Bull City from Vanderbilt and Nashville, Tennessee, noted: we in Durham are part of the largest city in North Carolina without a dedicated historical museum.
We hope that the committee was up to some important business.
Mr. Schoenfeld didn’t say. He did say something about a sixty-three member steering committee having been assembled to form a committee that wrote the Durham Cultural Master Plan. It is a wonder under the momentum crushing weight of all of that bureaucracy that anything happened at all.
But happen it did, as Ms. Sherry DeVries, the Executive Director of the Durham Arts Council, who was up next, demonstrated. She had all the facts and figures about Durham’s renaissance at her fingertips. Despite the national trend, recession and economic stagnation, Durham saw 10% job growth in the creative industries.2 DeVries also noted Durham exceeds the national average for jobs classified as creative by 75% and the North Carolina state average by 218%, with more than 6,600 jobs classified as high creative generating an estimated economic impact of $103 million.
Taking the podium from Ms. DeVries, Ms. E’vonne Coleman Cook of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau, who spoke smoothly and without notes, briefed the assembly on some of the work done at www.Durhamculture.com This is a website, the Clarion Content admittedly, had not accessed previously. Now that we have, what a resource! It is worth the time and visit for the events calendar alone. Ms. Coleman Cook also told the group that it was easy to register, and then, one would be able to update the collective calendar personally. This openness is a double-edged sword because it does not lend itself to specificity. The calendar is jam-packed with information and the list format is somewhat unwieldy. But, these are petty complaints for what the site offers.
Ms. Cook disseminated her valuable information succinctly and handed off to Mark Lee, a local radio host and the emcee of the Durham Blues Festival to moderate public discussion. Mr. Lee, a man with the sweetly resonant voice of an on-air personality, spoke only briefly, the coterie who proceeded him having gone on for nearly an hour and fifteen minutes of the forum's allotted hour and thirty minutes. He spoke about his personal experiences with Durham residents who had gone on to greater artistic success. He mentioned, though didn’t elaborate on, an encounter he had with the Raging Grannies and their singing number at Occupy Durham. And then turned it over to the public for questions.
This was both the briefest and most fascinating part of the evening. There was a passionate crowd. There were questions about how to best make contact with students and young people. There were concerns raised about reaching youth who might not be able to afford transportation to and classes at the Durham Arts Council.3
What did the numbers reflect about arts spending and the arts economy in Durham beyond the building of facilities? The public wanted to know.
There were real concerns amongst the arts supporters in the audience about reaching young people effectively. One Durham teacher noted that an amazing opportunity to learn to make documentary films on the public schools-arts nickel had been taken up only by four students. Not for lack of interest, she suspected, but rather because of the struggle to communicate the opportunity available to students and their parents.
The Clarion Content, among many others in the audience, chanced to bemoan the lack of effective use of social media by many of these organizations, including, and perhaps especially, Durham Public Schools (33,000 students, an estimated 57,000 parents and 238 Twitter followers? Really??) and the Durham Arts Council too (1279 followers, two tweets since August.)
More questions were raised about how to face these and other challenges in the light of shrinking state and local school and arts budgets, especially by Ms. Coleman Cook, but by that time the Nasher security personnel were flashing the lights in the auditorium and attempting to shoo people out of the room and into the lobby for catered snacks.
The unanswered questions echoed loudly as the audience began to filter out of the room. It could not fairly have been directed at Mr. Lee, he was only charged as the moderator. Ms. Coleman Cook posed the questions. Mr. Schoenfeld moved here in just 2008. Ms. DeVries shuffled her notes. Councilman Woodward, the only councilman who had been in attendance to hear a City Council appointed board talk about spending the public's money, had already left the building.
What is to become of the arts in Durham? Obviously, authority does not have an easier answer. The reality is that it is up to each of us.
1De-emphasis of the public is deliberate in this context.
2Albeit with backward looking data from 2006-08. But there are two ways to look at that older data, because, although it mostly predates the Bush II recession, it also does not include Durham Performing Arts Center, which most certainly created jobs in Durham.
3Here an opportunity was missed to mention the amazing work being done by KidZNotes with at-risk families and their children. The Walltown Children's Theater could have also been cited as reaching out into the community answering the claim that all the arts programs are based at the center of town as the questioner, incidentally a Wake County resident, stated.
Labels: Art, Duke, Durham, Economy, Politics, Pop Culture
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Obama notes
Built in the 1960's, the Brent-Spence bridge over the Ohio River
The Clarion Content has to admit, for as hard as we have been on President Obama, we have seen some glimmers of late. For reference, on our colossal disappointment with the Obama Presidency see these debates. We still think a disastrous miscalculation was made when the President attempted to overhaul health care policy first. We see no way in which the system he passed, through the meat grinder of Congress, ends up sticking around for long. It will either be ruled unconstitutional or repealed by Congress.
The President wasted nearly two years during which he could have been focused on the economy, foreign policy, or immigration. His health care debacle cost him Congress. Only now, in recent months, has he sidestepped Congress to make some policy progress. Though we worry about the veracity of his pledge, the President has said that there will only be 5,000 United States troops in Iraq by year's end. He has by executive fiat slowed the deportations of illegal immigrants who are not convicted violent criminals. The Clarion Content applauds both of these moves, though we would have liked to have seen them made three years ago.
Further, there are elements of the President's jobs bill that excite the Clarion Content. Loyal readers know, that we are big proponents of infrastructure spending by government. It is government's job to maintain the roads, bridges and railways. The arteries of the State. In the face of historic job losses, this is where Obama should have begun his presidency, with a New Deal II.
Today he is speaking in Ohio at one of the countries busiest bridges. It is in chronic disrepair. Will the President be able to do anything? Did he blow all of his political capital? Can he get re-elected during a period of economic hardship not seen since the Great Depression? And in that way, get new political capital, even though he will then shortly be a lame duck?
Republicans in Congress demonstrated yesterday just how recalcitrant they intend to be when they banded together with some peeved Dems, who were coddling the auto industry, and torpedoed a bill that would have provided emergency funding to FEMA to deal with Hurricane Irene, the Virginia earthquake and the Texas wildfires. Even disaster victims are not immune from Republican austerity prescriptions. Will the President be able to make anything happen in this climate? Or will the Obama hope fires flameout like a damp squib.
Labels: 2008's President, Economy, Politics
Thursday, September 15, 2011
New Posts in the Sections
New Posts in the Clarion Content sections
Politics and Policy section---click here
Gaming the system...
Good Samaritans ...
Jon Huntsman...why him?
Funny political joke...
Sports section---click here
Our annual...NFL preview
The NFL...has good guys too
Can the Rays...catch the Red Sox
Pop Culture section---click here
Durham freestylers...
Funny ha-ha...photo
Bittersweet...but funny video
Durham...is dank
Politics and Policy section---click here
Gaming the system...
If you are one of those who think that America's tax system is designed to be gamed by the large at the expense of the small, here is one more example...
Good Samaritans ...
For those of you losing faith in America and/or your neighbors...
Jon Huntsman...why him?
Seen an interesting question posed in more than one place lately. Why is Jon Huntsman getting so much coverage for a candidate who receiving only one percent in the polls? It does not appear to mimic what has happened in the past for one percent, so-called fringe candidates...
Funny political joke...
From one of our Allentown, Pennsylvania readers...
Sports section---click here
Our annual...NFL preview
The Clarion Content is a dangerous source for predictions...
The NFL...has good guys too
The Clarion Content and many other media outlets are found of dragging the NFL and other sports leagues through the mud when one of their players does something ethically questionable. In the effort toward some kind of proportion...
Can the Rays...catch the Red Sox
We must beware the powerful Clarion Content jinx. We are noted for our ability to make the diametric opposite of what we predict come true. Thus it is always dangerous for the sports editor to predict things we wish will happen...
Pop Culture section---click here
Durham freestylers...
From a session filmed on Clarendon Street...
Funny ha-ha...photo
as first seen on Twitter...
Bittersweet...but funny video
We saw this one on the Bill Simmons vehicle, Grantland, and had to repost it here on the Clarion Content...
Durham...is dank
Any fair-minded Durhamanian has to say that is, in part, because Duke is dank...
Labels: baseball, Economy, humor, Politics, Pop Culture, sports
Monday, August 08, 2011
Duck and Cover debuts!!!
We have spent years reading Duck & Cover at the Blue Pyramid, where it is still published by Storey Clayton, creator of The Blue Pyramid and its sophisticated, fascinating personality quizzes (e.g. The Book Quiz---a must click, don't miss out.) The Clarion Content is proud to be the first syndicator of this hilarious and insightful meta-political strip.
We are please to introduce Duck (a duck) and Cover (a turtle) and their friends Rabbit and Dolphin (three guesses what they are). Laugh and weep as they discuss politics, economics, and the state of our State while making far too many obstreperous puns. Duck and Cover started in 2005 and has over 1,400 archived strips. Check out the last weeks' worth here in the Clarion Content's Politics section or read them all here at the Blue Pyramid.
If for any reason the text is too small for you to read. Hit "ctrl" and "+" to expand it.
We are please to introduce Duck (a duck) and Cover (a turtle) and their friends Rabbit and Dolphin (three guesses what they are). Laugh and weep as they discuss politics, economics, and the state of our State while making far too many obstreperous puns. Duck and Cover started in 2005 and has over 1,400 archived strips. Check out the last weeks' worth here in the Clarion Content's Politics section or read them all here at the Blue Pyramid.
If for any reason the text is too small for you to read. Hit "ctrl" and "+" to expand it.
Labels: Duck and Cover, Economy, humor
