Jefe's House

A Job-Killing Plan for Art and Culture?
by Christopher Knight, LA Times

If you gave me a buck, and next year I returned $18.75 to you, would you think that was a good deal?

I would. With savings accounts, money markets and even stocks yielding just a few percentage points on investments these days, a return in excess of 1800% is pretty staggering.

Yet, that’s what happens with federal support for arts and culture. It pays for itself 18 times over.

Federal support includes partial matches to state arts agencies, underwriting the National Gallery of Art and the Kennedy Center in Washington, the nationwide programs of the endowments for the arts and humanities and much more. My colleague Mike Boehm reports that, all together, federal arts and culture spending currently totals about $1.6 billion a year, not counting construction budgets.

Meanwhile, revenues to federal, state and local coffers related to that spending totals $30 billion annually — more than 18 times the outlay. The income derives from taxes paid by the 5.7 million workers in the nation’s culture industry, many of whose jobs are sustained by federal support.

Pretty good deal — especially when stacked up against agribusiness subsidies, military expenditures and other corporate financing from Washington.

Nonetheless, congressional Republicans are once again proposing job-killing cuts to the federal arts budget. They aim to slash it, even zeroing out tiny agencies such as the NEA and NEH, as a report last week from the Republican Study Committee proposed. In these scary, economically strapped times, what passes for an argument is their claim that “we can’t afford it.” But the numbers show the argument is just fear-mongering bunk.  FULL STORY AT LATIMES.COM>>

Alright. I will blow my own psychic trumpet – if I can reach it.  Here goes…

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Paris Hilton will become increasingly orange, and will be found dead from a cocaine-heroin cocktail overdose in the Malibu home of a close friend.

Martin Scorsese will make a new movie stereotyping Italians.

Robert DeNiro will phone in another comedy performance to keep the bills paid.

Woody Allen will make one more movie whining about the fact that his life is meaningless and his ego too fragile to take it just in case we haven’t been paying attention.  To prove his point, he’ll pull the negationist stunt of divorcing Soon-Yi and marrying one of his other children.

Charlie Sheen’s antics will continue to be hilarious. Oh, his TV show will also stay pretty funny.

Broadway will remain racially segregated, with investors maintaining that Separate But Equal works really well in theatre, so why tinker with it? Tourists will agree with them wholeheartedly.

Off Broadway will continue rolling out redundant domestic dramas about the trials and tribulations of white families, some of whom are struggling exploitatively with their homosexuality, some exploitatively with their children’s homosexuality, others with prescription drug addiction, still others with a general suburban ennui.  Hasn’t the gay community been stereotyped enough?

Off Off Broadway will remain the last bastion of truly cutting edge professional, noncommercially-driven theatre, which unfortunately most tourists either won’t learn about or will be too afraid to take their kids downtown or to Brooklyn  to see, or will continue in their mistaken belief that Off Off is synonymous with amateur.  To combat this, the tired phrase “Off Off Broadway theatre” will finally be dropped by the media and replaced with “independent theatre,” making it appropriately analagous to independent film.

BOOKS
Memoirs by overprivileged yet sheltered white ladies who traveled alone abroad for the first time, and had unlifechanging experiences which they contend were sublime, will finally stop being published.

SPORTS
NFL and SPCA legend Michael Vick, the OJ Simpson of animal abuse, will get caught in another imbroglio involving violent cruelty to a living thing weaker than himself, and it will involve illegal gambling. To help boost his reputation, Vick will open a Vick’s Pet Care pet-sitting service in Philadelphia.

JOURNALISM
“Aks” will become standard English for the proper way to spell “ask.”

The nonsensical “for all intensive purposes” will become an increasingly acceptable idiom, replacing the more traditional and more logical “for all intents and purposes,” which just sounds too old-fashioned even though it actually makes sense.

“Repel” and “repeal” will continue to gain acceptance as synonyms.

The nonexistent word “insiduous” will replace “insidious.”

No one will help us out of this mess, and schools will only reinforce these absurd grammatical changes.

AMERICA’S OBESITY CRISIS
The discredited 1970s’ 4-4-3-2 nutrition plan will be resurrected by the US Department of Agriculture as a normal, healthy diet given that most Americans adhere to it anyway. Did you know that pizza with everything is a healthy meal, containing items from the milk group, meat group, fruits & vegetables group, and breads & cereals group?  So is a Whopper.

WORLD
There will be continued violence in the Middle East. There will be continued violence in Africa. The sky will continue to be blue, the trees green.

European anarchist groups will continue to work together with increasingly sophisticated coordination, destroying the economic system, plunging us into their much hoped for post-apocalyptic, feudalistic society.  They will declare the date to be Year Zero. Farms will be seized and “collectivized,” after which mass starvation and gang violence will rule the day. Frazzled anarchist leaders will then call upon the police and military to restore order, and then they will request loans from multinational banks to rebuild all the roads, trains and hospitals they destroyed in order to liberate all of us.

POLITICS
Millions of working Americans will begin to feel and appreciate the benefits of Obama’s healthcare plan but will continue to complain that socialist Obama has screwed up the country.  Obama, unfazed, will prepare for a 2012 landslide reelection.  I also predict that I will be one of those voting for him again.

A major world leader will announce not only a cutesy belief in the possibility of extraterrestrials, but will insist with all seriousness during a press conference that he has seen ETs himself. The Vatican will immediately back him up. This will all be part of preparing us for 2012 when things are really gonna get all alieny up in here.

SCIENCE
Bigfoot sightings will become increasingly fashionable. A theoretical link between Bigfoots and the newly announced ETs (see above) will gain ground among top scientists.

Happy New Year, everybody. God bless us, every one.

[image via psychic-junkie.com]

If you can’t beat ‘em, harvest their organs. I was already appalled that Bill Clinton decided in 1999 to have the US serve as Osama Bin Laden’s air force and support the Kosovo Liberation Army (AP/USA Today, 1999), a terrorist organization which funded its arms and training through the heroin smuggling trade (FAIR, 1999) and which forcibly recruited  some of  Kosovo’s young men (The Independent, UK, 1999) to take up arms and join them in their war of secession from Yugoslavia,  and I was appalled that Clinton had used as his pretext for bombing Europe for the first time since WW II the KLA-faked “mass grave” at Racak (Toronto Sun/Centre for Peace in the Balkans, 2001) . I was equally appalled by the US media’s one-sided coverage of the Kosovo conflict because it suited our own geopolitical plans in Europe. With the USSR gone, Yugoslavia was the last of the Eastern Bloc, and communism in Europe simply had to go.

On the other hand one can hardly blame any Albanian or Bosnian Muslim or Croatian Catholic for wanting to break free of  violent Serbian Orthodox Christian ultra-nationalism under gangsters like Milosevic and his immediate predecessors, but I didn’t know just how ugly the fundraising had been within the KLA’s so-called liberation movement.  Often in war it’s hard to choose the “good” side and justify in your heart which innocent civilians are the most expendable, eh? (see Tesla’s Letters).

But that’s what the media’s for, to get us all whipped up and cheering for “our” team like the whole thing’s a big football game, and to keep us from examining matters too closely. Even now the US and its Western European allies are bent on suppressing some dirty little truths about the Kosovo conflict, and once again the mainstream media has gone missing, aside from the Washington Post so far.   To bad Julian Assange wasn’t around in ’99.  And now here’s the story from Julia Goren at the Huffington Post…

Coverup on Serbian-Organ Harvesting: ‘Pro-American’ Kosovo Prime Minister Thaci Oversaw the Scheme

by Julia Goren, huffingtonpost.com

Switzerland has gagged one its Ambassadors from promoting a controversial [2008] book about war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Carla Del Ponte, who prosecuted crimes at The Hague [and authored the 2009 book Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity], claims some current Kosovo leaders once sold vital organs from Serb prisoners…

The Hunt by Carla Del Ponte

The book, The Hunt: Me and War Criminals, was due to be launched in Milan. It details atrocities committed by Albanians against Kosovo Serbs in the late 1990s and says that some of those currently in power in Kosovo made money selling Serb organs.

…Del Ponte’s book tells, in particular, about the obstructions she had to surmount “in her attempts to prosecute people guilty of the war crimes, committed during the armed conflicts in the Balkans in the nineties”… “Carla Del Ponte’s book on her work as Chief Prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal contains statements which are impermissible for a representative of the government of Switzerland,” Spokesman for the Swiss Foreign Department Jean-Philippe Jeannerat stated…

Kosovo's Prime Minister/alleged organ harvesting entrepreneur Thaci

The Kosovo Liberation Army’s veteran leader, Hashim Thaci, now Kosovo’s prime minister, in the mid-1990s spent time in Switzerland, a centre for radical Albanian emigre circles, where he mysteriously acquired funds for the KLA.

Serbian press reported the organ scheme worth about four million euros was (continue reading…)

If you’re all about the Gilded Age (hey, some of us are), please enjoy my latest book review in the Brooklyn Rail‘s 10th anniversary issue.

Charles W. Calhoun
From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age
(Hill and Wang, 2010)

The phrase “Gilded Age” started as a satirical term co-coined by Mark Twain and co-opted from Shakespeare in 1873. It was an apt description of the post-Civil War United States. The increase in industry and modernization, the ostentatiousness of high profile wealth, and extremely high voter turnout made our culture look as good as gold on the outside even while it festered on the inside. Greed and rampant get-rich-quick schemes were the norms of the day. Political partisanship and sectionalism were at their egg-throwing worst. Bloody injustices were perpetrated almost daily against newly freed slaves in the South, and increasingly against striking factory workers in the North. Three presidents were assassinated.

For the serious student of U.S. history or political science, Charles W. MY FULL REVIEW CONT’D AT THE BROOKLYN RAIL>>

[image via historybookclub.com]

Despite my deep passion for theatre I’ve often quoted the cynical aphorism, Theatre changes nothing, but at least it changes that, and I have believed it to be true.

I stand corrected thanks to the new book, Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre by Jonathan Shailor (Kingsley Press, 2010) about 14 prison theater programs.  The chapter ”Drama in the Big House” was penned by my good friend Brent Buell, a director, actor and writer who has volunteered for more than a decade for Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a division of Prison Communities International, directing plays and teaching acting classes to inmates.  Brent’s locus in the New York State prison system is the original Big House, Sing Sing state penitentiary in Ossining, NY.

I first met Brent in 2004 through our mutual friend David Gaynes and took my first trip via Metro-North train from Manhattan,  zooming along the Hudson to the Big House to see the inmates’ production of Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, a farce written and directed by Brent (a photo from that production adorns the book’s cover).    I returned the next year to see the bold satire The N Trial, a meditation on the uses of the dreaded “N-word” in our society, including within prison walls, written by inmate Philip Hall, who was wrapping up a 20 year sentence.

Such productions of a full-length play performed for the general public have become an annual event at Sing Sing.  The cast and crew are primarily inmates, co-mingled with professional actors and crew who volunteer their time (continue reading…)

Sorry, Target. You had me at cheap shorts but I didn’t realize you were anti-American.  I mean anti-gay marriage.  Same thing.  I will no longer buy your inexpensive sweatshop threads.  Best Buy, I already hated you so no surprise there.  Go, guerrilla theatre. And Target, keep your cross-hairs out of our bedrooms, ‘k?

Shareholders weigh in on Target and Best Buy’s political giving

Slow men at work near Fenway Park.

Unless one wants to see Jersey Boys the theatre scene seems to be on hiatus in Boston during late July and early August but that’s okay, there’s plenty of street theatre everywhere one looks.

I’ve spent the past few days in Beantown, my first time here in at least ten years, and have enjoyed seeking out alternatives to the usual sights like the “Glory monument,” Beacon Hill, the Old South Church, the Old North Church, and Faneuil Hall. If you’ve never seen these nation-making locales (and reminders of our genocide about which residents of this so-called bastion of liberalism still live in a deep, dark denial) then  make them your first order of business when you come to Boston.

Bosch.

If you’ve seen them, then consider something off the tourist trolley line like the Museum of Fine Arts and its extensive collection of mummies and 15th century Flemish religious paintings, the kind that, with their vibrant colors and expressive faces, look like they were painted yesterday for a graphic novel.

There’s also the Mapparium at Christian Scientist headquarters, a 3-story stained glass globe built in 1935 that one enters through a gangplank and explores from the inside.

Okay, I confess I did buy a ticket for one of the trolley tours. They’re an easy way to get around the city and take in a few sights at the same time.  While waiting in line to board I heard the dad of a Red Sox apparel-clad family say “…blah blah blah Roanoke blah blah blah.”  I asked if he was from Roanoke, Virginia, my hometown, and he said yes.  I reminisced with him and his wife about the world’s largest man-made star and the world’s smallest Graceland before they departed with their kids at the first stop, Fenway Park.

I rode the whole loop but by 3/4s through the ride the trolley had become completely empty except for me. It was rush hour and we were crawling so the driver-guide asked if I’d mind our skipping the last three historic site stops so he could take me straight back to the final stop and knock off for the day. I told him no prob, and as a result I got my own private trolley tour of sites not on their usual  itinerary, like the location of the 1950 Brinks armored car robbery, the 1919 molasses flood and the Crispus Attucks monument on Boston Common.

I also recommend the Back Bay Fens which I (continue reading…)

“Hi Gangters of Plein Sud Guess What!! We are not moving from this spot.”

I stumbled upon some real-life street theatre in Tribeca this summer and wrote about it for the New York Press, “New York’s Bellicose Weekly Newspaper.” It’s this week’s cover story, To Kebab and  Conquer, about a street fight between a scrappy halal cart vendor and a highbrow restaurateur.

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 Here’s the online version.  Enjoy.

New York Magazine weighs in.

775 Coffins: Bosnia Marks 1995 Srebrenica Massacre

by RADUL RADOVANOVIC

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Hoisting hundreds of coffins aloft, a line of weeping relatives stretched for at least a mile (1.6 kilometers) Sunday as they honored Srebrenica massacre victims on the 15th anniversary of the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

 A whole hillside in the eastern Bosnian town was dug out with graves, waiting for 775 coffins covered in green cloths to be laid to rest at the biggest Srebrenica funeral so far.

Still, that was less than a tenth of the total number of Muslim men and boys executed after Serb forces overran the U.N.-protected town on July 11, 1995, during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

…Serbian President Boris Tadic was the first dignitary to arrive Sunday, saying he was coming in an “act of reconciliation.” Some in the crowd yelled “Bravo, Boris!” while others asked “Where is Mladic?” — a reference to former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, who led the Serb troops into Srebrenica…Mladic and former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic were indicted with genocide for the Srebrenica massacre by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in 1995. Karadzic is now on trial at the tribunal in The Hague while Mladic is still a fugitive, presumably hiding in Serbia…CONT’D AT ABCNEWS.COM>>

[story and photo via abcnews.com]

Now that Hillary Clinton is beating the drums of war and calling on the entire world to rise to its “duty” to respond to North Korea’s supposed attack on a South Korean warship and the murder of 46 crew, a flood of frightening analogies and comparisons come to mind. The most obvious one is that this is strikingly similar to how US involvement in Vietnam began in 1964: with a false attack attributed to North Vietnam against the US warship Maddox, then exploited as a real attack by LBJ.  By the rules of our SETO treaty this “attack” gave Lyndon Johnson the legal greenlight he needed to take military action in Southeast Asia.

Is South Korea’s Cheonan to USS Maddox as North Korea’s “torpedo sub” is to North Vietnam’s nonexistent Tonkin ghost ships of ’64? Let’s hope not.

The recent events surrounding North Korea also call to mind how Bill Clinton found a way to win the world’s approval to remove mega-mobster Milosevic from power by having NATO bomb Europe (and, by the way, use depleted uranium weapons in Kosovo even after he promised not to do so — way to “help” the Kosovo Albanians) by citing the faked massacre of 45 Albanian civilians (actually KLA soldiers killed during a firefight) by Yugoslav police at Racak, Kosovo in 1999. The American public swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

Of course, neither Democrat Lyndon Johnson nor Democrat Bill Clinton have anything on Republican George W. Bush’s trickery to get us into an oil war in Iraq, ostensibly to remove Saddam from power and “help” the Iraqi civilians but at the loss of thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians’ lives.

Have Hillary and Obama learned from these masters how best to position a US — I mean South Korean (right) — bombing run into North Korea to get rid of the latest Milosevic, Kim Jong Il? We’ll soon find out. I hope I’m wrong.

Sure KJI is evil and crazy, but let’s hope our aggressive rhetoric of late won’t result in hundreds of thousands of dead North Korean civilians we’re supposedly liberating from oppression, over a relative handful of dead South Korean soldiers.

Hillary’s lustily rattling her sabre, and South Korea’s president Lee Myung-bak is cocking his rifle, and our big trade partner Red China is pretending to be on the fence but leaning heavily toward siding with the US.   The North Korean leadership is just as full of hype as the rest of these players but they’re still calling this whole mess a “wild provocation.” Are they right? If they did torpedo the ship then why be bashful about it? Something’s not right here.

I had to look elsewhere to find out some apparently objective facts beyond all the hype and rhetoric coming from the the West and its flunkies via our mainstream media. The following is culled from South Korea-based pro-democracy news organization NKnet, the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights –

Despite North Korea’s rhetoric that “all communication links between North and South Korea are severed,” and “the North-South Economic Cooperation Council Office in the Kaesong Industrial Complex is being frozen and abolished, and all South Korean workers are to be immediately deported,” … the North Korean military authorities granted entrance to the Kaesong Complex for South Korean personnel this morning. Movement into and out of the Kaesong Complex is continuing normally, while fixed line telephones connecting the Kaesong Industrial Complex and parent corporations in South Korea are operating without any problems, too. This appears to display North Korea’s underlying desire to continue operating the Kaesong Industrial Complex.”

These don’t seem like the actions of a small country eager to go to war against the US, Japan, China and South Korea.

It seems no one over in this hemisphere, in our government or in our media, is interested in reporting such hopeful signs that this will be resolved peacefully. Why is that the case?  It’s more fun, and more lucrative, to beat the drums of war.

Something’s up, y’all.

[photo via infowars.com]