IL Hiatus

I've taken busy times like the end of semesters, and lazy times like the summer for hiatus. I'm not even sure if anyone reads this blog. But I will continue to post things here and there when I find something I desperately need to share.

Formerly I think I linked to a podcast of Al Letson's radio program, State of the Re:Union. Here's the one I was waiting for, his episode on Jacksonville. Jacksonville is my home town. I didn't move there when young enough to adopt it as mine--I was born there. The actual building I was born in is now gone, and is now a Starbucks, Papa Johns, Chinese take out restaurant, and of course, a parking lot for Publix. This is typical of Jacksonville. It's the largest city in the mainland USA by landmass, but it's also relatively empty. There is a blockage in this town, that many people, like that little plant up there, try to break through. I aspire to help make changes here, because that's what this city is good for--it has so much potential, and it wants to change. It just needs the people that want change to hold on tenaciously.

This astounds me. Bill Strickland made change, indeed. Imagine if this happened in every major metropolitan area. This seems like a modern-day Hull House. Sometimes I have daydreams about this kind of effort happening in my hometown. And in addition to societal change, we need environmental change. So when I stumbled across this newly-posted TED talk about Life in Biosphere 2, I was very curious about this idea. And about their oxygen crisis. It seemed that they had enough food to feed 8 people for 2 years in their limited biosphere. Now, imagine how much space we'd need to feed 1,000,000 people. That's how much space Jacksonville isn't using to farm.

So in addition to needing more growing edible, and useful things, we need more plants to filter our poor air. This talk has some ideas for improving air quality. I'm going to look into house plants for zone 8b and for zone 4b, the two zones I split my time in. Jacksonville pretty much has poor everything quality, according to our 2008 Quality of Life report. Instead of letting crab grass take over the medians, why shouldn't we plant filtering broadleafs and trees?

I can't be sure when the next Interesting Listening will come, but there will be more interesting things out there to find.

IL3&4

Yes, I know I let IL3 pass and am nearly letting IL4 slip away as well. I didn't exactly plan that. But I've been listening to a few things recently. Really scattered things. I'm going to try and find 6 things that relate to each other for this combined episode.

I recently started poking around at Bad at Sports, and to my delight it's based in Chicago. The Southern Graphics Council Conference is a big printmaking event, for which Columbia College is this year's host. I thought these interviews offered a new and interesting look at what printmaking is, and what it means to be a maker of multiples. I haven't listened to it yet, but I plan to later tonight--an interview with a fellow Floridian and my professor last semester, Oli Watt. In which he'll probably talk about his most recent show--at which I sampled a (mystery non-meat) hot dog. I still don't understand the type of condiment-shunning Chicago pulls off--anything tastes better with ketchup.

While at Bad at Sports, I looked around a little more, to see if I couldn't find some more stuff about my school. I found a great interview with the head of the Fibers & Material Studies department, Anne Wilson, a bona-fide BAMF if I may say so.

And then I found this. Carol Becker, the outgoing head of, er, everything at SAIC, talks about the school and her involvement over the years in getting it to where it is, introducing new "majors", what direction she is taking (and hey, she's working on a new book! Or maybe it's already out? I don't know.)

And in the spontaneous education theme, here's the recording Marian Wright Edelman's visit to the Jane Addams Hull House. This was a pre-Yes We Did talk, so the tone of the talk is a pretty concerned one. I think I saw this as a post-YWD recording on fora.tv, and that tone was a bit more hopeful. But she remains someone I'd like to know more about, and as this was my introduction to her life, I pass it on to you as yours.

Stopping off to be super again, here's Dave Eggers, talking about Once Upon a School. Now, I don't remember ever being as fired up about something as the first time I saw this. Ever. I think I e-mailed everyone I knew about doing our own DIY art school in Jacksonville. Almost a year later, I'm still pretty pumped on this. The idea has expanded to include not just art, but science, and craft (where, I think, art and science meet quite well). And who knows, maybe it will expand more.

Especially when we have people like William Kakwamba as inspiration. As a young teenager, what, 14?, he had to drop out of school because his family couldn't afford it any longer. So he spent his time at home reading two science books that he borrowed through the school. And he built his family a windmill. Out of bike parts, some PVC, and wood. And it powered four lights and two radios. As another speaker at TED said, "Nike should hire this kid--Just Do It, you know?"

I agree. Just do it. Do it yourself. Because in the end, you are the person you can most rely on.

So I'll end this with some quotes I adore:

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." -- Teddy Roosevelt

and

"We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing." -- Mother Teresa

These words help me keep moving. Keep working, making, doing. And that, I think, is key.

Interesting Listening, vol. 2

I'm wondering if I should centralize the themes of these posts, or to just let this process be organic, posting what occurs to me to be the most important at the moment of writing. But, on with the show, here are some things I've been listening to that really caught my attention.

The first is Willie Smit's TED talk, a recent video from the 2009 conference. What this man has done for Borneo needs to be done all around the world. Akin to Wangari Maathai's tree-planting mission, Smit shares his experience regrowing the rainforest of his region in Borneo--how he creates a healthier ecosystem, creates economic opportunity for the people who make the island their home. It's really inspiring, this talk. He starts out talking about how, at first, his mission was to save the orangutans, but had to turn to the source of it all--the environment--to get anywhere. He combats the wildfires that overtook the island by planting a 100-meter-dense wall of sugar palms (which the locals use for extracting various products) all around the site. The rain returns, the animals return, happiness returns. His talk goes to show that with a lot of care and a large community of people, we can mend this earth.

And on that note, why not take you over to the people of Xtreme Waste in Raglan, New Zealand? Their quality of life began to decline after pollution from recent years began to be evidenced by the waterways around them. A leading Maori woman told these folks to close the landfill they had been making, and to recycle everything. So they did. We in Jacksonville have a landfill problem. The highest elevation points in our city are landfills. We have such a problem, that even selling one raises a stink. On our 2008 Quality of Life Report, water quality got a Red Flag. Oh, I wonder why? Well, if we made like the people of Raglan, we'd probably see the improvement they did that swimming in the St. John's wouldn't be a death wish.

It's all well and good to make blogs about the issues, but all that energy is just going to waste if you don't get people together to talk and take action. Every Tuesday, I go to this event, where free soup is served--soup that is organic, locally-grown, and made specifically for the topic each speaker will lecture on. It's hosted at the historic Jane Addams Hull House, and the program is called Re-Thinking Soup. We have the Clara White Mission, we have community gardens and swiftly disappearing farms in or around Jacksonville, we could do this too. This kind of event is a great way to bring likeminded people out to discuss the most important topics they can think of.

So those were the most important topics I could think of. Look out for IL3 March 25th, where I'll have more to share.

On the Kindness of Strangers

I am a pink popsicle right now, my computer planted on my frost-bitten thighs as I sit here typing with my stiff hands, rouged from the snow. This morning I woke up to that--snow. Lots of it, coming in horizontally from the south. I had been imagining that people were hollering on the streets, and had already gone down once and asked friends (smoking in the 20-degree weather) if there was anything going on. No, there wasn't. I went back inside, up 6 flights to my room, and sat at my desk for another 40 minutes or so when I notice something. There's definitely something going on.



The signs say "Value Good Work" in Spanish, English, and Polish. They were with SEIU, the Service Employees International Union. The police were escorting the protestors on their march. I had only grabbed my coat when I ran down the stairs, knowing I had to get this on camera. The last time anything happened like this, it was another frigid day, but the event was a LGBT rights march, just before Prop 8 was passed. (I voted no on amendment 2 in Florida.)



Right now, I'm clutching my coat closer to me, and readjusting the computer so the heat reaches more of my body, which is beginning to painfully come back to life. I shiver, even indoors. I take out of my pockets the remains of my random act of kindness--42 random acts of kindness, actually. It's two yellow Ricola bags. When I joined the LGBT rights march, we had all been yelling ourselves raw, slogans like "What do we want? EQUAL RIGHTS! When do we want 'em? NOW!" and, my personal favorite, "Obama, Obama, let mama marry mama!" And there he was, an angel, standing with his arm out to us, holding a bag of Halls Defense. My friend and I gratefully grabbed one for ourselves.

I have, and still have, a lot of homework to be doing. But I had a feeling that if I could do something, some small thing for these people, I would feel better about myself. I walked, silent and gloveless, holding out my little yellow bag of cough drops to anyone I saw yelling "Sí se peude!" or encouraging their Polish peers through a megaphone. Many refused, and I hope it wasn't because I looked like one of those Strangers With Candy. I walked with them to Dearborn and hooked a right, headed straight for 7 Eleven and came right back, alternating between taking pictures (not just to document this but to share with the Douglas Anderson Amnesty International Club) and handing out Ricola.



They marched to the Chicago Federal Center, where there's a piece by Calder called Flamingo. It's a great red beacon in the black, grey, and white Loop. This was the first piece commissioned by the General Services Administration for their Percent for Art program. These people were showing their colors in the freezing cold, and had come to the plaza to listen to people speak, tell their stories, and send a great call from deep within their bones to the new president. In the context of a space highlighted by its public art, these folks give me more fuel for the fire. Social activism and art can go hand in and hand, and not by coincidence alone. I left once the speaking began, because I really was starting to lose feeling everywhere, but I left knowing that there's something to be done, and artists are not to be left out of it.

The snow still comes in horizontally from the south. My legs have still not recovered. But out there, I know there are people trying hard to get people to understand what's right, what's wrong, where we aren't walking our talk, and how things can be better. Yes we can, sí se peude, tak, możemy!

Interesting Listening

So I'm starting this bi-weekly, if not weekly, update of the things I've been listening to. Now, I'm not a music junkie--I'm a podcast/video junkie. And I have a lot of work at school that leaves my ears free, so that means I'm searching, ever searching, for something to bounce around my head for a little while.

Let's get the favorites out of the way, post haste, shall we?

State of the Re:Union, a program by local performer/poet/magic maker Al Letson, here's episode two, Motor City Rebound. I will listen to this over and over, not just because it's a beautiful piece of radio, but because Letson has found some of the of most active folks in Detroit. People who don't give up. People who dream of the past but work hard toward the future, and not without making something of the present. These are people I would hope to know if I lived in MoTown.

But I don't. I live in Jacksonville and Chicago while I'm at school. I do, however, happen to know this woman. Nance Klehm. Here's a radio adventure from when she was in California, broadcast by American Public Media, a piece called Foraging for Lunch on the Streets of L.A.. They follow Nance as she finds plenty of things growing in public places on L.A.'s outrageously busy streets to eat. This woman knows what's up. If there were some kind of catastrophe, like, I dunno, a global recession and historic drought in all of the largest food-producing nations, this is the woman I would flock to. She's that knowledgeable.

I'll stop at three, purely arbitrarily. Here's a good one, a video (but I'm sure there isn't any eye candy other than the speaker himself, so you don't have to be glued to the screen) of a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson, and he's asking, Do Schools Kill Creativity?. Now, speaking as an alumna of both LaVilla School of the Arts (2004) and Douglas Anderson School of the Arts (2008), I'd say my schools did not. But they are hardly comparable to most public schools. Relative to my other options, these schools were sent from God (pluralize and feminize at will). I can confidently say that I probably would have done incredibly rash, unspeakably harmful things if I didn't have a creative outlet each day. I probably would have dissociated. So, listen to Sir Robinson. Maybe he'll explain it a little better. The point I'm getting at: schools NEED their arts programs. Judging from how many dancers, actors, technicians, and vocalists we had at Douglas Anderson, the list does not stop at art and music.

Time, time again

The long-awaited video. I've put this almost everywhere but here. Might as well.

Updates, Updates.

This seems to be easier. I love flickr.

15 images from making a cyanotype of the knitting. It's in the neighborhood of 25 feet by 3 feet.

Some pictures from a collaborative piece centered around the St. Johns River.

Oh, art. Tonight at MOCA, Mrs. Hogue jokingly said, "So I hear a rumor you're making art again, is this true?" Hilarious. And I may or may not have been offered a job as an assistant to our artist in residence, Linda Broadfoot. I'm hoping I was offered that job, because that would be so cool. I would do it for free, seriously.

Tangerine Fest is tomorrow. I'll be taking photos. Hopefully the weather is like it was today. I mean, we made a huge cyanotype today--chamber of commerce indeed. I need to take a million tangerines, of course. And a thousand decongestants. I think I'm developing a tolerance to these Mucinex. Note to self: Don't get a sinus infection. Or, find the Astelin fast. I need to wake up early (for a Saturday) to get there by the time the JaxCAL folks agreed upon, but Beetlejuice is on TV, and I'm fighting a strong desire to watch it the whole way through. But sleep wins, again.