Rufino Tomayo and Roualt

Roualt, Clowns

Rufino Tomayo, Animals

The tradition here at Americana is that every centennial post, starting with the last one, is dedicated to spotlighting an artist or two whose work I enjoy. This is post 800 (801, actually) and a couple of painters who I like.

Hard Times Settling In

“Some people like to camouflage this by calling it a nutrition program, but it’s really not different from cash welfare,” said Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, whose views have a following among conservatives on Capitol Hill. “Food stamps is quasi money.”

Arguing that aid discourages work and marriage, Mr. Rector said food stamps should contain work requirements as strict as those placed on cash assistance. “The food stamp program is a fossil that repeats all the errors of the war on poverty,” he said.

Across U.S., food stamp use soars and stigma fades
New York Times, November 29, 2009

You have the right to food money
Providing of course you
Don't mind a little
Investigation, humiliation
And if you cross your fingers
Rehabilitation

Know Your Rights
The Clash

Rector's organization has published several tracts on attaching strings to public assistance, such as "House Executive Pay Legislation Puts Pay Czar's Boot in the Door", "Why Government Control of Bank Salaries Will Hurt, Not Help, the Economy", but of course for the rich there should be no strings attached and the poor must be stigmatized and subject to a little investigation. To be fair to Rector, understand that the Heritage Foundation is not a monolithic institution and it is perhaps roughly like criticizing a university professor for the work of another in their department. Rector's reasoning is horrifying enough on its own, without a thorough investigation and work requirements on those who are hungry and out of work, and a lack of work and rising unemployment are the clear causal factors of the increase in food stamp assistance, civilization will fall as people no long want to get married (???!) or ... work. It's a Kafkaesque arrangement.

Another telling pull quote is this from a Republican,

“As soon as people figure out they can vote representatives in to give them benefits, that’s the end of democracy,” Mr. Young said. “More and more people will be taking, and fewer will be producing.”

The conflation of capitalism and democracy, to be sure a legacy of the victory of business over organized labor in the public relations field over several decades, has taken hold of the nation's collective consciousness.

Then there is this,

He has noticed crowds of midnight shoppers once a month when benefits get renewed. While policy analysts, spotting similar crowds nationwide, have called them a sign of increased hunger, he sees idleness. “Generally, if you’re up at that hour and not working, what are you into?” he said.

My guess is that you are into eating some food.

Eyes on the Prize

Days after President Obama outlines his new war strategy in a speech Tuesday, as many as 9,000 Marines will begin deploying to southern Afghanistan to renew an assault on a Taliban stronghold that stalled earlier this year amid a troop shortage and political pressure from the Afghan government, senior U.S. officials said.

The extra Marines will be the first to move into the country as part of Obama's escalation of the eight-year-old war. They will double the size of the U.S. force in the southern province of Helmand and will provide a critical test for Afghan President Hamid Karzai's struggling government and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy.

Newly Deployed Marines to Target Taliban Bastion
Washington Post, November 29, 2009

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. "It's a big part of their income," one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts--hundreds of millions of dollars--consists of payments to insurgents.

How the U.S. Funds the Taliban
The Nation, November 11, 2009

What is there to say? I remain convinced the Peace Prize was a sardonic comment on the state of world peace. I wrote about a month ago that there was no doubt that one problem in Afghanistan the U.S. is funding the very people it is fighting. Sowing the seeds of future conflict in our role as the world's largest arms dealer, helping nations get nuclear weapons like India, Iraq occupation, the legacy of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and so on, is a recurring theme here. This goes beyond that, in Afghanistan we are quite literally putting protection money in the hands of the people we are fighting so they won't attack us one day, ensuring they have funds to attack us the next. And the vague illusion of 'victory', continues to lead us further into the marsh like the legendary Will 'O the Wisp. We are America, you see, and failure is not an option, because in America to need to do something, anything, is basically the same as having the capacity and ability to do something. Any ghetto kid who needed a jump shot and the hops to dunk to make it in the NBA could argue otherwise, but who gives a shit about what they know.

Jack White teams with Wanda Jackson

At long last it looks like rock’s first lady, Wanda Jackson, is finally getting her due. Yes, it helps that the 72-year-old was just inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but the news that Jack White will be producing her next album makes an authentic comeback seem imminent.

When White produced Loretta Lynn’s 2004 album Van Lear Rose, the country singer went from “forgotten superstar” status to ubiquitous year-end list-topper. His indie cred brought her talent back into public consciousness, not to mention widespread acclaim: Van Lear Rose is still tied for the highest-rated album on metacritic.com.

Music Mix

The tracks are already in the can, according to a more recent statement from White. Should be interesting. Here is my favorite track from his collaboration with Loretta Lynn.

Atmosphere III

Atmosphere III
oil on canvas, 30"x35"

Update: Bugboy left a very flattering, complimentary comment. I am blown away that he appreciated this one as much as he did and I appreciate it very much. His comment is a big boost for my confidence. The past year I have felt like the work I am putting up here is all extremely flawed with some undertones of promise and sometimes I wonder if I am ever going to put it together. To know that at least one other person sees the undertones of promise, someone who has no emotional or personal attachment to me, is heartening.

Anyway, here are some under developed ideas from my sketch book. I have switched to using black markers to draw as a way to find the line right away without the benefit of erasers.

Where it never stops

I am not going to discuss now whether we did the right thing by going there. But it is a fact that we went there absolutely not knowing the psychology of the people, or the real situation in the country. Andeverything that we were and are doing in Afghanistan is inconsistent with the moral face of our country

via Jonathan Schwhartz

I hope that someone, somewhere is doing a research project comparing how the Soviet and U.S. propaganda systems handled our conflicts in Afghanistan. It does not surprise me that a lot of people believe the BS they spew. In Daniel Ellsburg’s memoirs covering his role leaking the Pentagon Papers, he pointed out that very few people he encountered told deliberate lies in the sense that they revealed what they were publicly saying was not what they believed - with the exceptions of McNamara and – if memory serves correctly – General Westmoreland. The Bush Administration has largely fallen back on the same defense in Iraq, they were not knowingly lying and truly believed what they were saying, no matter how dubious or cooked their evidence appeared was at the time (For the record, I believe them to a degree and they probably believed they were framing a guilty man, but still count their tall tales as lies.)

Back to the main point, if anyone knows of a book or study comparing the Soviet and American government and media’s handling of their respective invasions of Afghanistan, please let me know in comments.

Avedon Exhibit at SFMOMA

I must confess that I do not quite get photography. I understand it, but I don’t get it in the gut, I don’t feel it. That said, I went to see the Avedon exhibit on its last weekend with a friend who does amateur photography. (Quick side note: I recently sat down and had dinner with a WWII vet who is also a lifelong photographer and was at Iwo Jima when Jay Rosenthal took his iconic photograph. Rosenthal also appeared in a book I read about the depression era California in a section about the striking dock workers in San Francisco. He said the bullet he almost cut and generally mayhem scared him more than his time on Iwo Jima. In other words, I am a sucker for synergistic threads like this.)

The Avedon exhibit followed his career arc, beginning with fashion photography, to celebrity portraiture, to art house photography, and finally common folk portraits.

Avedon was a cutting edge artist in his field; incorporating motion in his pieces and helping start the ubiquitous white paper back drop so common today.

My co-worker enjoyed how Avedon framed many subjects, intentionally and literally pushing the boundaries of conventional photography with his vertical and horizontal cropping, motion blur, and caught off-guard poses from many subjects.

One section of the exhibit featured many politicians from the 20th century, immediately adjunct to this room were counter cultural figures, from Malcolm X to the Beatles. It was an interesting juxtaposition. One portrait of Andy Warhol cropped only on Andy chest, one arm lifting his shirt to reveal the extensive scarring and staple marks, legacies of his attempted assassination, was particularly haunting.

The last room and end of his career had Avedon taking portraits of carnies, drifters, apiarists, farmers and common laborers. I am a sucker for stories about common folk and the unsung people of any civilization, so it is no surprise that this room captivated me more than the others.

I still don’t feel like I get photography; the only photography that resonates is documentary photography from everyday life. If you have a passing interest at all in portraiture, however, I would suggest looking up Avedon’s stuff and analyzing about some of the off-beat choices he made with respect to cropping, timing and poses. One aspect of photographical portraiture that intrigues me is the personal connection between photographer and subject. Avedon’s subjects appear guarded, yet in many you get a sense of their personality. The most impersonal portraits, where it is not clear if there was any connection at all between the two, are the politicians. For almost all his other subjects (a Marylin Monroe shot comes to mind), the poses and expressions revealed their histories and personalities.

Former Beauty Queens Stalking the Land

A friend sent me this link to a Palin book signing. Off I go commenting on the topic that I promised myself I wouldn't touch on the blog, but the subject at hand leads me of a more interesting observation of our civilization-humanity so I'll half-heartedly step through a post on this Palin phenomenon.

If you watch the video, you see a people who feel vaguely persecuted, angry and resentful for a world that went wrong somewhere down the line, even though they don't appear to be able to articulate, or know, where or how. They have adopted a certain lingo or jargon, freedom, democracy, etc., as a set of behavioral guidelines. When questioned on specifics or asked to expand on these points, they are lost. The smarter among them might have another set of preprogrammed answers for a follow-up question, but would get lost on a third, and so on. They are like a half-assed automated phone system to nowhere - "Press 1 for freedom, Press 2 for breath of fresh air". For a time in my early 20s, I studied layman's physics and can relate. I understood some basic concepts and points the author's made, but could not apply their insights and knowledge to expand on a distantly related topic.

I do not mean to pile on the Palinites. My point is that their behavior is not surprising at all. We all follow a path of understanding how to communicate and think in any context; struggling to understand the concepts and penetrate jargon (learning the language), retracing the steps of basic application of those concepts (learning how to read sentences), applying those concepts to new problems (forming original sentences), questioning the original concepts (deeper understanding and creating new concepts), and making our own judgement on other's work independent of what the conventional wisdom or how you feel your critique will be received (applying expertise to evaluate peers.)

We also have a need to feel ethical, moral or justified in our behavior. Some of us are more comfortable with a manual or rule book (like religion), others are actualized and evaluate the morality and ethics of their own actions independent of what the rule book says.

The staunchest Palinites, and at this juncture I'd like to expand this to any following of a leader, from Jim Jones to Barack Obama, need an ethical manual and are somewhere down the latter of understanding politics. Which is to say that if 'change we can believe in' resonated with you, then you are not so far from the dunderhead Palinites as you might believe yourself to be. I don't mean this to be a pox on all houses comment, I laid out a loose framework above for development and there are distinctions. The Palinites in this video appear to be about at level one in the context of political thought, the hope and changers are probably about a step or a step and half ahead of them.

A fountainhead like Palin is easy to mock for her apparent lack of knowledge about the world, but as with her immediate cultural forbearer, George W. Bush, it is not clear how much of her folksy moron act is an act and reality, but it is clear that she has a striking knack for cashing in. She has parlayed her position into a multi-million dollar payday. That other prop from last election, Joe the Plumber, appears to be a legitimate meat head down to his toes; he never figured out how to cash in and ended up under fire in a literal war zone lobbing goofy, softball questions to Israeli soldiers.

What we fight for...

This article hit me. The opinions of the people who are in favor of prolonging the conflict in Afghanistan are incoherent. Fight them there so we don't fight them here? Is that canard still used in an earnest manner? How does this still make sense? The world will fall apart if we don't fight there? Pakistan is going to give Al Qaeda a nuclear bomb, which they would use to bomb Israel? The support for this rotten war cannot be hinging upon such flimsy rationale, cannit?

Atmoshere II

Atmosphere II, oil on canvas

30"x35"