Ryan Singer's Mutton Stew, right, references the pop art of Andy Warhol (Warhol did his first Cambell Soup art in 1962). Singer's Navajo soup image on an apron, purchased from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, hangs in our kitchen cupboard.

Native American continues the trend of blending American omnipresent cultural images in the context of Indian traditional art. Andy Warhol took pop art forms and remixed them and created iconic art. Indian art remixes speak of cultural remixing, too, but in a way that speaks to our future where we may be headed where image trumps text and meaning is only found in the referencing.

Cochiti artist Diego Rivera spoke about his work at the Museum of Indian Art and Culture two years ago and I've written about his work before.

Culturally, the Indians understand this text-free image referencing because, unlike artists like Warhol who came from a textually literate context, their ideas were shared orally and graphically. I've gone into this idea more deeply elsewhere.

Santa Clara Pueblo artist Jason  Garcia, who, as the Heard Museum writes, "paints popular cultural themes derived both from mainstream art and from Native art...At times, he speaks to the cultural conflicts of traditional societal events functioning within a larger contemporary world. At other times, his work references culture clash." Garcia's Spiderman pot is pictured at left.

The Pop Art exhibit opened in April at The Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ and will feature both Romero and Garcia. It has been a long time since I've visited Phoenix and this museum. Perhaps this is the year I get there. This exhibit might be the beckoning moment.

Sometimes it takes literally years and years and years to understand or even know what has been significant.  Time must pass to understand the larger meaning of a thing, to put perspective on life, to see how beginnings actually end.

That has certainly been the case with the inspiring and true story of 12 Mighty Orphans. 

I'm in Dallas/Fort Worth working on the story which might have died with the characters had it not been turned into a book, now in its 20th printing, by Jim Dent.

It is truly a wonderful story for our times or for all time.  I hope it is made into a movie so it can touch the hearts and minds of others.

Strength to Love.  That is the book he authored (a collection of his sermons) that was in Martin Luther King's briefcase, right, open as he packed it, in his hotel the day he was shot.  These never before released photos from the day he died by Henry Groskinsky for Life magazine.

Earlier this month I saw Dan Budnik's photographs of, Marching the Dream: American Civil Rights Photography which included many photos of Martin Luther King in an exhibit at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe. 

I'm headed to my hometown, Oklahoma City, and will just miss the Harlem Renaissance exhibit at the Oklahoma Museum of Art. Darn.  But oh well.  It is the week of the Arts Festival, which is a great event in that town.

African American Art is a hot genre, as I covered earlier.

This mash up of the classic song Stand By Me puts together a new  new version with musicians from all over the world-- pretty interesting. 

After spending a day in Dallas with a daughter, old friends and a cousin, getting around a city I moved from in 1981 and found GPS navigation a real help all these years later, I was reminded once again how important it is to keep our ties, and to stand by those we love -- even if separated, as these musicians are, by many miles.

  Two artists stood out at yesterday's opening day of the Fort Worth, Texas Main Street Arts Festival. 

Probably the loudest commentary from passersby was that heard around the booth of Artist Michael Brown.  People would pass by, stop, back up and take a second, third and fourth look and then go to all the works on exhibit by Brown.  Brown, a photographer, has used an old technique in a new way to make a photo reflect two seasons from different angles.  His website has an example of this work, at right, showing winter and spring.

Brown takes a photo using a tripod from the exact position a second time, in a different season.

Another artist worth mentioning is Katherine Allen Coleman who has a studio in Georgia. She takes the dresses of children, or ladies' gloves from yesteryears and using an acrylic method, layers them onto canvases. Sometimes she uses old patterns or buttons, but her works combine a sense of fashion and dimension as well as paint. Women of all ages seemed drawn to her booth.

She sure looks small and tiny, doesn't she -- she being the Queen of England.  I never thought of her before as being bitty. 

Stately stature. 

You have to be of a certain age to know what this is.  To know that the Indian in full headdress at the top and this pattern came on when programming was off-air.  Those hours when most everyone should be sleeping. 

Adjusting the vertical and horizontal buttons to make the picture perfect. The "ant fights" of the static dead time.

Media.  The old days.

Typepad won't load my picture, but I've put up big news today on the future of the news but it is on flickr.  Go there for the in-depth. You might think the big media news is the start-up announcement of Fox Nation, but it isn't.  It is the announcement by Arianna Huffington that investigative news will be privately funded by a non-profit and the the first subject to be tackled will be The Economy. 

From HuffPo's announcement:

Huffington Post Launches Investigative Journalism Venture
 it will bankroll a group of investigative journalists, directing them at first to look at stories about the nation's economy.
The popular Web site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million. That should be enough for 10 staff journalists who will primarily coordinate stories with freelancers, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. ...Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said. The Huffington Post venture is reminiscent of ProPublica, a nonprofit independent newsroom funded by The Sandler Foundation and headed by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. ProPublica works with a $10 million budget.

Another way the news is shifting: Slate launched "Shoot the Recession," a project in which readers have been asked to help document the economic crisis in photographs via submitting images to the group page Slate set up on the photo-sharing site Flickr. I've added some of my shots.

This was the front page from February 10, 2009 for the Santa Fe New Mexican.  I liked the headline and took a digital shot for my study of the economic crisis and media.  Newspapers are dying and there is not a reason for me to buy this daily paper except to get the inside special edition Pasatiempo published on Friday. And I do like the ads for that special issue.

The newspaper business is dying fast with death throes and rattles and I'm bored even trying to report the dire bad news of the news. I knew when I could easily do desk top publishing way back when in the early 90s that the gatekeeper mode was breaking and anyone could publish to anyone at a much reduced cost.  Whenever we pick up a newspaper here in Santa Fe we lament that it is already news we've seen online.  But over the weekend we had three papers delivered to our driveway and we'd not subscribed at all.  How do you get rid of papers you don't want, besides using them to start pinyon fires?

Naomi had commented on my post earlier about NYU professor Jay Rosen's article, Flying Seminar In The Future of News, which I had read. Go read it.  It is a great March 2009 wrap up of links for mindcasting on the crashing of the newspaper industry and imagining a new news system.

The latest data from the Newspaper Association of America shows that the current economic climate has only exacerbated the already dire state of the American newspaper industry. Specifically, total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6% in 2008. Classifieds advertising, which is under a lot of pressure from online ventures like Craigslist, fell almost 30%, and real estate classifieds fell 38%.

Seven inches of fresh snow fell overnight, making an odd spring image looking over the vase of daffodils on the desk outside the window. Just like looking from here to there, inside to outside, seasons juxtaposed, let's look at our present, much changed, from our times past.  Things are now linked beyond what we could have ever thought possible.

March 2009 marks 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee first proposed a project that would become the World Wide Web. It took until 1993 before the public became aware of the creation and the general public didn't really come online until the mid-1990s with the commercialization of the AOL and Netscape browsers made navigation of the web easy.

Google officially launched in September 1998 and Facebook launched in 2004. Facebook has about 180 million users Facebook has 275 million users (57 million in the U.S.), as of the end of February, while Twitter only has about 10 million and is just three years old. The number of Facebook users over 35 has nearly doubled in the last 60 days.

Good things the internet has ruined forever? Well, newspapers are dying but we still debate if that is a good thing or not.  Our economy is in a disruptive state, so are we.  Ah.... the Ideas of March.

It is just a tar baby. There isn't a way to get involved without becoming stuck in a not-healthy way.  It is sort of agonizing to go there, knowing what will happen.

That is how I described a situation to my mid-20s daughter.  She didn't understand the term.  Huh?

I had to stop and explain it.  How if you touch something, you can sometimes never get unstuck and you become tied down, unable to freely carry on. The entanglement, bound up as tar will cling and not let go (ever sat on a tar-blotched beach? I did, in Corpus Christi -- ruined the beach towels). It is a nasty thing... to go there.

Tar Baby.  It was not used in any pejorative, racial or other manner.  Just a way to describe that any engagement with a situation leads to an unpleasant obliged relationship of a no-win set-up. The tar baby image I conjure is a black bush-like blob, nothing like the image I tracked down, which might make it seem racist and with a personification of the tar baby.  My thoughts take me back to the idea of Brer Rabbit.

Some things are better left well-enough alone.  That's the idea.  Gee.  Do I date myself that much?

Google's doodle for Dr. Seuss' birthday.

Reading the books and learning to think
Would be totally different, and gone in a blink

If those cats in the hats and thing one and thing two
Hadn't made one wonder what non-people do

They are very strange things, and some might say subversive
With teens, teaching Star Bellies was rather recursive

The lessons, like Grinch, stay with you and linger
You might say that the 60's were surely a harbinger

Because Dick and Jane and See spot Run was NO FUN
So that 50s bit, so sedate, under Seuss came undone

But Seuss made me think so thinking I did
and I hated the Care Bear books for my kids

If you do it, just do it, like Green Eggs and Ham,
You'll like them as I did and ol' Sam I am.

And, like the bad mom who left her kids with the cat
Get out of the box to know where boundaries are at.

No longer do we learn language with such rhythm and rhyming
but with videos and games and keyboards and .... (sighing)...

Suess... on the loose would be welcome once more
when grandchildren come make me play on the floor.

Students from the College of Santa Fe, the oldest college in the state of New Mexico, rallied this week to try to save their private liberal arts school which is headed for bankruptcy without state funding or other miraculous intervention to solve its $35 million indebtedness.  It is not known if the school can even make it to the end of the semester. The bill to save the school died in the Senate Finance Committee without a hearing. This was the legislature's last week. 

This is for my husband, who has just finished reading the new John Lennon biography and urges me to read it but...gee... it is just so heavy. What? 800-something pages?  Maybe better read as a Kindle book.  Anyway, once we were in Toronto staying at the same hotel where Lennon sat in bed for a spell and where this recording now embellished with art, was originally made by a 14 year-old. As first an artist, Lennon would appreciate the creative way the recording is presented in remixed form, using yet another medium - youTube, for his message.

So while I'm home alone getting physical therapy while the two college kids are off with Dad, I'm putting this up for him as I pick up that heavy Lennon tome.  If you've been reading my posts this week, this is a progression of Lennon from music, then spoken words, to cloud, remixed with additive art worth. Not Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, but Lennon in the clouds...

So, after writing yesterday about how our brain can change and therefore knowing we are in a state of flux from one state to another due to technology, and thinking further about how we obtain information and interact with it is fascinating.  We are in a state of social and cultural change, let alone cognitive change. That is the part of understanding the context for the death of newspapers but these things need a long-view perspective. This week the Seattle Intelligencer (did I spell that right?) went to online only. Have you looked lately at how thin the printed editions of Time and Newsweek have become? The end of the printed newspaper is being hastened by the economic situation. 

Clay Shirkey's talk at SXSW Interactive in Austin this past weekend has generated a ton of attention. His Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable is worth reading and I'll pull out my favorite part:

The death of newspapers is an example of social disruption. 

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Tim O'Reilly also spoke and he "began by saying that we're in a bubble - but not an investment one, a reality bubble. The financial crisis was top of his list, but he also referred to health, climate and so on... O'Reilly then spoke about 'the long now', which he said has been a big influence in his life and business. He explained that we should look at the long view, not just the 'right now'." 

So, think of the Word of God, just to put this in a long view.  Only a few held it in their hands but that changed with the advent of the printing press and moveable type.  In the beginning there was the word. But it wasn't printed.  I'm really going off on a long-view tangent, but think, the Westward movement was a religious/political cultural thing (Greek to Roman, to Catholic, to the Protestant Revolution) so I use this as an example in understanding our societal underpinnings in the U.S. Which are being extremely disrupted. Some say civilization would never have been possible without writing.  Text is becoming intangible.

So what is the long view? How will this revolution and extreme disruption play out? Well, the word is moving away from print, moving to cloud form with the growth of cloud computing and consolidation in server capacity/ownership - "on a scale unimaginable before. At the same time, of course, the computing power at the edges, ie, in the devices that we all use, is also growing rapidly," Nicholas Carr writes.  So if you think about the internet being just 40 years old, and we're moving into a huge second stage... then...

Carr (who wrote last summer Is Google Making Us Stupid) more recently says in The Sun: "We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization."  He's now enjoying a one-up on his ideas that the new technology is changing our cognition, since when he first expressed his ideas, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt belittled the idea that Google was making us stupid. He quotes Schmidt on a recent Charlie Rose interview (Carr's blog article also has the link to the Rose interview):

“I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
 And I worry that we’re losing that.” 

The King of Cloud, Google's Schmidt, is just now realizing the huge disruptive link between tangible text and learning?

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” - Albert Einstein said. The economic changes will hasten our changes.  The cheese has moved, societally and culturally. So has the word. To the clouds.

It is all about the disclaimers and trustworthiness of those who are in authority which now is very disruptive and no one is catching something important in this brou-ha-ha. Not wanting to add to the din of the story or echo of the simple idea of it all, the deeper story was backburnered until something important needed to be said. 

There is a much bigger newsworthy story to this.  If you are interested.

First, background:
Last week Jon Stewart of the fake (but perhaps more relevant) news/comedy show took on Jim Cramer, entertaining man of his own financial show, Mad Money, for errant ways of investment leadership authority and everyone weighed in.  The NYTimes wrote about it, as did WaPo.

I've watched the full interview (via HuffPo is one way to access it) and my take was larger than the winner/loser, black/white of it.  In a longer view is Glenn Greenwald's opinion where he links the mainstream media with failing to cover things, as they did with W. Bush.  The hand-wringing and attempt to put it in perspective is agonizing at the moment, as is the effort to get the economic situation under control.

But Here's the Deal:
Not only is "battle of the talking heads" an example of the public anger of our current economic times, but it is also a cry of indictment of the current way that fake news can get to the crux of the story or validate truth and truthiness as opposed to the mainstream real news media presenting it, tied to they are with corporate ownership and sponsorship.  The news itself is something to be entertained by (and Cramer is the Lord of making boring financial information manically entertaining). This story was just one way the angst was channelled. Anger expressed. Exasperation released. We all feel better now, the way we get our news with _____vs ______.  Even if _____vs_____ is on the same side.  The last time we had a battle it was at the polls, wasn't it? Last November? Remember, we are a war society primed for anything when it is in battle form, especially when we can take it in framed as good vs evil.

After studying, since September, the media and the financial crisis story, it is amazing, isn't it, that the mainstream media just didn't dig into the economics of the disaster-in-the-making and from December until now, the cry has been why.  Who can we trust? Certainly, now, not the head of A.I.G. (Burson-Marsteller,  pr firm for AIG, you have your work cut out for you on this one with public relations. Perhaps you should encourage the changing of the name, for a new sort of branding, like you did for your client, Blackwater, who now has the new name Xe).  AIG = GAG.  Who are the bad guys? Now the story overflows into Obama as the seguey:  Can he be the good guy to solve the problem caused by the bad guys?

There are good people doing good things in the financial business -- I know, lemme tell you -- and the mud is slung on all, including the innocent. Wall Street will never be the same. The news of this was out there, going clear back to the leaders in the Clinton administration, but you had to dig for it and laws and regulation always follow technological innovations (think quants).  This sort of news was not legitimate news, it was outside the sphere of acceptable controversy.  Plus, it was complicated and hard to understand. Like global warming and climate change has been for years. We are primed for the light stuff.  Missing white girls, tots or teens. Celebrity scuttlebut. Or the simple framing of this/that.

But Here's My Real Point You Won't Find Elsewhere:
The night that the Cramer vs. Stewart interview occurred I happened to have watched Cramer's show and was totally surprised by a totally new thing: a disclaimer scrolled at the end of his show, like the way that drugs are now marketed to the older cable news audiences or in magazines. It is becoming, really, a responsibility joke, this disclaimer bit (my husband I now go off on riffs when we hear them, voicing our own creative dire warnings, like it might cause your nose to fall off, or your toes to become hammered). Now even the tv shows are getting disclaimers? 

We're sort of in a disclaimer world now.  Consumer beware.  There are titans of distrust.  Take it at your own risk. No one is responsible for anything.  Our world is too complicated. Who can control it, manage it, lead it, understand it? Believe it/take it/do it/eat it/buy it/vote for it/ at your own peril. 

(note: this blog is not an authority nor does it profess to be, on any topic whatsoever.  Reading this blog may cause you to think.  Or not. The stupid name has nothing to do with the content. Or maybe it does. Motherhood and Applepie. Does it exist anymore? And so it goes...)