Hurrah Thank Goodness

Franken is seated!! Now we can go about making sure that necessary things...like arts funding...get passed!!! HURRAH

Obama Disappoints Me

One of the things I HATED most about the Bush Administration was their use of signing statements.  If you have an issue with a law, take it up with the courts - the Judicial branch is supposed to decide debates of precedent between the Executive and Legislative branches.  So when I saw this, that Obama has issued a signing statement, I was horrified.

I don't care how good your reasons are.  Signing statements are one of the foremost ways to create a corrupt executive.  Obama should be ashamed.

The Atlantic

I picked up a copy of the Atlantic Weekly - they had this "fifteen ways to fix the world" article. My favorite? You guessed it - pay stimulus money to artists!

Money Quote:

If the Obama administration is serious about stimulating the economy and creating as many new jobs as possible, one choice is clear: it should announce a massive increase in federal arts funding. Artists are among the very poorest citizens. When they get cash, they spend it both quickly and carefully. That’s not what most recipients of federal largesse do, but it happens to be exactly what economists look for in any stimulus package. Arts spending is fantastic at creating employment: for every $30,000 or so spent on the arts, one more person gets a job, compared with about $1 million if you’re building a road or hospital.

The Subtle Poison of same-gender discrimination

So, there's this fascinating article in the NYT about the problem with female-written plays being produced so much less often than plays written by men.

The catch?? Female artistic directors are responsible for the lower-than-proportional representation of women's work on stage. And the research is fascinating:

Ms. Sands sent identical scripts to artistic directors and literary managers around the country. The only difference was that half named a man as the writer (for example, Michael Walker), while half named a woman (i.e., Mary Walker). It turned out that Mary’s scripts received significantly worse ratings in terms of quality, economic prospects and audience response than Michael’s. The biggest surprise? “These results are driven exclusively by the responses of female artistic directors and literary managers,” Ms. Sands said.

Amid the gasps from the audience, an incredulous voice called out, “Say that again?”

Ms. Sands put it another way: “Men rate men and women playwrights exactly the same.”

Arts Policy Tsunami

So, in the arts world you can go weeks without finding something to talk about (other than a play review) - and then suddenly be swamped with really important news.

First things first:  the NEA just released a report on a study of theater audiences.  Playgoer has an important summary of what everything means.  But the important part (to my mind) is this: 

But breaking the numbers down more specifically reveals at least one more surprising (and disturbing) trend: a real decline over the years in theatre attendance by the entire "college educated" demographic as a whole. (Including advanced degrees.) In other words: our core demographic, supposedly.

Conclusion? Well here's a radical one: maybe we shouldn't consider upper-class highly-educated our core audience anymore? Problem is, though, they're who tickets are priced for. At the current ticket values, they're the only ones who can afford theatre. And they not coming as much anymore. So...who's got a new business model?

So, my first idea: have your friends attend plays.  Plays can be really really fun to watch, and musicals even more so.  Also, look around for options.  I found some great news on the NYT for all the people who can't afford tickets to the theater - LOTS OF FREE THEATER!  If you're in NY, I heartily recommend that you attend.

Of course, free theater brings up another issue: How theater artists survive if they aren't getting money from tickets - especially in an age when film and the internet in particular are making it easy to market your work.  So, please go read this post at Createquity - it talks about the near-unlivable costs of being a theater artist, and the incredible competition that greater equity fosters.  All the hullabaloo about "free theater" is great - but it is still really important to remember that artists are people as well, people who need food and shelter.

And just for kicks, a shout-out to the city I live in for being amazing re. new plays and new theater work.  

Locating Lysistrata

Please read this blog post - I'd be interested to know what readers think of Lysistrata and its message and how to express that message to soldiers.

Anonymity goes down the drain

I'm Cara Arcuni.  I see no reason why this blog should be anonymous.  Now I can put it on my Facebook.

Why the Wall Street Journal needs to get its nose out of the Arts

So, while browsing the internet, I found this truly offensive article.  It uses language that honestly makes me furious.  I post a few quotes:

Messrs. Leach and Landesman are probably not the choices initially expected from a president who was being lobbied just a couple of months ago to do something as bold as create a cabinet-level department of arts and culture. These are the choices, rather, of a president who doesn't want this to be a political fight. With these nominations it's also clear that Mr. Obama is not making a statement that great change is needed at either agency. This is not to disparage these choices -- both of which, in addition to being rather surprising, are quite good, at least in the eyes of those who think both endowments are already following a wise course. In fact, given the constituencies that rallied most vociferously behind Mr. Obama in the campaign, his choice of these two men ought to elicit a sigh of relief from conservatives.

Privately funded art need not steer clear of controversy, but publicly funded art should. In addition to hurting the endowments' standing in Congress, controversy undermines in the public eye the idea that the arts and humanities are important to civic life and are worthy of public funds.

Both endowments have power to do good things within the broader American culture. If there's no change in direction for the agencies, it still bodes well for the arts and humanities in the country. Particularly if their budgets can increase, the endowments can continue to evangelize for the arts and humanities in a culture that sadly seems to value them less than business, science and professional education.

There are so many problems with this article's thought processes that I don't even know where to start.  The idea that funding individual artists' works is somehow not advocating for the public interest is heinous.  Of all the projects the NEA has funded over the years, individual artistic efforts are some of the most outstanding. I list:

Prairie Home Companion, created in 1974 through an NEA grant.

The American Ballet Theater, saved in the first year of the Endowment by a grant from the Federal government.

Driving Miss Daisy - that play, then movie? Created through an NEA grant in 1986-7.

And other programs have equally stimulated further funding for the arts: The Challenge Grant program, where federal dollars are matched by donation, was tremendously successful: Twenty years after it was founded, statistics came back where one dollar donated by the Federal Government for the arts stimulated roughly eight dollars.

And the idea that federal dollars should help education not the creation of the arts is absolutely inconsistent with the overall vision for the endowment: Reagan, convenient conservative poster boy, said in 1983 that “We support the work of the National Endowment for the Arts to stimulate excellence and make art more available to more of our people.” Reagan himself acknowledged that part of the work of the endowment is to stimulate excellence.  That means grants to individual artists.  

I have this belief - that the arts, especially creative arts, are somewhat like entrepreneurs in business. When starting a business, it takes a lot of courage, a lot of daring, and a LOT of initial capital.  So, young entrepreneurs in the business world come up with an idea, a good business plan, then take it to the venture capital investors.  They choose the most promising, and fund it.  But there's no official organization like that for the arts.  Because the arts don't (and to large part shouldn't) find their primary motivation in money, investment capital like that is hard to come by.  In my mind, that's where the federal government should step in.  Take a look at the business plans.  Decide which ones to fund.  Then step back and see if your risk (and it is a big one) takes off.

Oh - and my little argument for when conservatives balk at funding art they don't agree with - 

"I'm a pacifist - Quaker, if you must know.  I don't believe in war, I don't agree with the wars that we're involved in.  But my tax dollars go to the war effort anyways - I don't have a choice.  You claim that your tax dollars shouldn't go to experimental art in the same way that I think my tax dollars shouldn't go to funding war.  What makes the arts different than the military in terms of justified funding?"

Hopefully that argument makes as much sense to you as it does to me :D.

NEA and NEH Budgets

It's official - at the subcommittee level - the NEH and NEA are getting $170mil each: the House Appropriations Subcommittee of the Interior voted on Wednesday.  I may be a little behind the times (sorry), but it's happening!

Just as a point of note, these funding levels are STILL below the levels in 1992, when the NEA and NEH were funded at $176mil.  Annoyingly, the little, teeny increments are because of Republicans, the people who understand the arts least - “I’ve been trying 

to take this back up but to do it in increments that were sustainable with our Republican friends,” said Representative Norm Dicks, Democrat of Washington, who is chairman of the House subcommittee.

Sometimes I wonder if the reason why reality TV took over SO overwhelmingly was because there was no new real art coming through the pipeline because of a lack of funds.  It's a theory, at least.

HIV and the Adult Performance Industry

So, I need not detail (I hope) the long and storied relationship between performers and prostitution.  Or how extensively art is correlated to an interest (intellectual or otherwise ;) ) in sexuality. 

So, now the most recent hullabaloo as regards the Adult Entertainment Industry.  For a long long while now the industry has been decrying the need to use condoms when filming.  The industry insists that condoms would harm the "fantasy" that the films hope to create.  

ABC News reported on the issue:

Jules Jordan of Jules Jordan Video has worked his way from being a porn store clerk to having his own studio and he has a strict no-condom policy.

"Testing's a must for everyone in the industry and that is how I can back up my stance on no condoms.  I don't think the fans want to see condoms on film, because the fans are coming to see fantasy and condoms are not usually part of fantasy," Jordan said.

And the modern special effects that would be able to get rid of the condoms on screen are outside the budgets that the movies usually have.   But the industry claims that it's in a good place for the prevention of a major outbreak.  After an outbreak in 2004, the industry changed its policies and briefly instituted an all-condom policy - now, the quick test that can detect HIV 2 weeks after contraction is supposedly responsible for stopping "all spread of HIV in the adult entertainment industry in the last four years."

But a new outbreak has the industry suddenly nervous:

An actress who works in Southern California's pornography industry has tested positive for HIV, renewing county and state health officials' concerns that the adult entertainment industry lacks sufficient safety measures to prevent the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases...

Los Angeles County has been receiving reports from the clinic of 60 to 80 new cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea a month among adult performers, Fielding said.

That rate of chlamydia and gonnorhea is terrifying.

That creation of fantasy is nothing new - and it is nothing new for people to put up barriers to whatever methods people wish to take to create that fantastic world.  But AIDS is more than a prudish restriction for the protection of public morals - like the restriction of women in the Elizabethan Theater.   And I wonder if the adult entertainment industry counts itself as being art.  I, at least, don't consider it art - but there could be some that do.

Modern modeling skirts very close to that sneaky barrier between sexualized art and sex.  A documentary about the modern modeling industry tries to display that secretive world for the first time - unlike the adult entertainment industry, which does have some regulation, the modeling industry has much, much less. 

A 16-year-old model is on a photo shoot in Paris. She has very little experience of modelling and is unaccompanied by her agency or parents. She leaves the studio to go to the bathroom and meets the photographer - "a very, very famous photographer, probably one of the world's top names", according to Ziff - in the hallway. He starts fiddling with her clothes. "But you're used to this," says Ziff. "People touch you all the time. Your collar, or your breasts. It's not strange to be handled like that." Then suddenly he puts his hands between her legs and sexually assaults her. "She has no experience of boys, she hasn't even been kissed," says Ziff. "She was so shocked she just stood there and didn't say anything. He just looked at her and walked away and they did the rest of the shoot. And she never told anyone."  

The documentary is unique - they did a lot of sneaking video cameras into modeling shows, and were sometimes emphatically shown the door.  The documentary, called Picture Me, exposes an industry that desperately needs some regulation - but art - Art if you prefer to make it fancy, uses the artistic privilege to create an alternate universe. Where the line is drawn is really, really important.

Also on my to-post list

- NEA Awesomeness (i.e. ask your congresspeople for more funding)

- Obama and Support for the Arts - putting your money where your mouth is

- War (i.e. that quote I posted and never got around to talking about)

- The New Deal and the Arts (i.e. I finally do my research on the WPA  and what it meant for American Art)

i'm taking suggestions.

Jim Leach and the National Endowment for the Humanities

So, I've been meaning to post on the recent appointment of Jim Leach, former moderate Republican congressman from Iowa, to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Please know that, before starting to write this blog, I knew that there was an NEH and and NEA, but I had no clue how they were different or what the heck the NEH did that was different from the NEA.  (By the way - whoever writes the Wiki entry for the NEA really needs to get their act together and put together something more informative - it's really awful.)

So, to organize my thoughts and hopefully educate the rest of y'all as well, here goes.  The NEA and NEH were both created in 1965 by the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act.  This act covers three branches, essentially: the NEA, the NEH, and the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities (essentially a federal committee).  There's no real overarching bureaucracy or identity greater than each of its components.  The NEA started off with 2.5 million dollars and 12 employees, its goal to fund creative endeavors in the arts - literature, dance, theater, and the visual arts.  I'm actually going to write another post on how many amazing things the NEA has facilitated over the years - I could easily get sidetracked, it's so cool.  The NEH has a different goal - the facilitation of cultural access.  So the NEH funds museums, educational programs, scholarly work, research.  These are mostly history-related.  The NEH's site betrays a very authoritarian hand in what it deems worthy of funding - "Because democracy demands wisdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities serves and strengthens our Republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans."  (Note that - what it deems strengthens the Republic.  yay.)  The NEH gave you, among other things, that cool documentary about Tutankhamun, the endless Civil War documentary you watched in eighth grade history class, and fifteen Pulitzer Prize-winning books.

So, what does Obama's appointment of Jim Leach mean for the NEH?  I really don't want to talk about Obama's snagging of "yet another" moderate Republican.  But I do want to share some cool stuff I learned about just how much Leach practices what he preaches, arts-wise.  Leach is an unstinting advocate for the arts.  

In 2006, Leach received the Congressional Arts Leadership Award conferred annually by the Americans for the Arts advocacy group and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. They cited him as an advocate for increased arts and humanities funding and as a co-sponsor of legislation — still not passed — that would allow artists to take larger tax deductions for works they donate to museums and charities. Current law allows artists to deduct the cost of the materials they use to create a work; Leach proposed allowing them to deduct a donated piece’s fair market value.

Also, when he was appointed, Leach commented:  

Asked whether he would push to increase funding for what by federal standards is a minuscule agency, Leach said he “will be supporting the administration” in its budgeting decisions. But he said “the arts and humanities are fundamental to our society, particularly in difficult times. In the Great Depression ... we spent far more on the arts and humanities, relative to [national economic output] than we do today. Nothing is more important to understanding what’s happening in society, particularly in a fast-changing world.”

This talk is really good to hear - when Leach was still in office, there was no possible political benefit to attempting to pass the law about donated art.  Artists are few, and often don't have the monetary muscle to donate to a campaign.  But he did it anyways.  In my searching, I've heard nothing but good about him.

My only wish is that Obama would fund the two organizations at the same level - right now he's trying to fund the NEH at 10 million higher than the NEA *pout*.

Fetish Gone Wrong

BANGKOK (AP) — The body of American actor David Carradine, best known for the 1970s TV series "Kung Fu," was found in a hotel room closet with a rope tied to his neck and genitals, and his death may have been accidental suffocation, Thai police said Friday.

The 72-year-old actor's body was discovered Thursday in his luxury suite at Bangkok's Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel. Police initially said they suspected suicide, though Carradine's associates had questioned that theory.

Police Lt. Gen. Worapong Chewprecha told reporters that Carradine was found with a rope "tied around his penis and another rope around his neck."

"The two ropes were tied together," he said. "It is unclear whether he committed suicide or not or he died of suffocation or heart failure due to an orgasm."

Advice to those contemplating complicated hanging fetish activity - make sure you're doing it safely.  HAHAHA - it's sad he died, but seriously, dying from an orgasm in Bangkok? Priceless.

Being PC

I'm a liberal, not so much because I doubt the free market, not so much because I believe in universal health care, not so much because of the enviornment, but  because of politicial correctness. As awkward as it may be, it at least demonstrates an attempt to see the world through another lense. This is a daunting task, and failing at it is so much more honorable than not even trying. Maybe you never quite get there, but it holds out a hope for your children, that unreflective, false symetry does not. Conservatives got away with this game for years. The luxury of being the majority in a democracy is the right to act like other people don't exist. But the world is changing around them and Birnam Wood is on the march.

This quote by Ta-Nehesi Coates captures part of why I prefer being a liberal to being a conservative.  I can never deny that at times I exhibit not-so-PC or stereotypical remarks.  I'm certainly not perfect.  But I hope that when I do, people will call me on my remarks and help me to become a better person.

A personal experience: I have been looking for housing recently, and I've discovered that Philadelphia is hugely segregated - both by class and by race - the two are more often connected than not.  So I'm living in a very liminal area of Philly, and a relative was around recently.  She stayed in a hotel on Rittenhouse, and she said that she wasn't happy with where I am now - but that she wanted me near Rittenhouse...it was so much more beautiful, so much more white.

I was made exceedingly uncomfortable by this comment, and I can only hope that she doesn't fully believe the comment - I know she respects and is friends with people of color - this connection facilitated by their similarity in class.  But I hope that I will never be so unaware of how to speak respectfully of people that I will let a comment like that out of my mouth without thought.

Back after an absence

So, I haven't been posting much, but with good reason.  Now my bio is factually correct, instead just an expression of hope. :D

I saw this article - it describes the modern life of a boy not much older than myself who was raised in a monastery away from real life.  It's important to remember that as much as the Tibetans deserve to be treated well and self-govern, in every culture there are wrongs done to people.  This boy may discover as he gets older that he leans back towards his original culture; he may permanently desert Buddhism.  However, the fact that his parents deserted him as a young child is awful - he must have felt so abandoned.