Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/144/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
Crossposted from my new blog, which I share with Rick Wolff. Tiger Woods’ scripted apology for cheating on his wife has been a riveting topic for the US media. On the newsstands on February 20, 2010, every US newspaper carried stories of Tiger Woods’ confession. It was a bold full-page headline in the Post, and Daily News. It appeared on the cover of The Wall Street Journal that carried three stories and front-page photos.
During a recent inventory count in the bar where I work, I was surprised to see my boss taking sips from various juice bottles in order to determine their contents. He later revealed to me that he is colorblind. This revelation that someone I interact closely with every day literally does not see the world the same way I do made me question some things, the least of which concerned who should count bar juices from now on. I realized that in my role as someone who writes about art I have taken for granted that my experience of color is the same, or nearly the same as everyone else’s. I wonder now in what other ways people experience art differently than I do.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Karl Marx Growing with two parents who escaped the Holocaust, from Germany and from Austria, there was no ambiguity in my mind about Adolph Hitler or the Holocaust. He was evil, to an extent beyond any other person, and the Holocaust was an event, sui generis, beyond any other event. For years my dreams were inhabited by desperate attempts to escape jackbooted storm troopers who were searching for me, or trying to survive after having been captured by them. I was horrified at other evils, but this lay beyond them, as the far marker of human cruelty In political debate that made me very wary of cheap comparisons to the Nazis or Hitler.
I asked Eli Zaretsky the other day if he could post something about where he finds his inspiration, how he keeps up the struggle. I don’t always agree with Eli about his opinions, and I am concerned that he mirrors the all too usual approach on the Left of saying what we are against, without attending enough to how we keep going. But at the same time I see a man who has kept going, and I want to know the sources of his inspiration. This week Alana Price and I visited a strongly left organization, AlterNet, and I asked the same kinds of questions of Don Hazen, the executive editor. I reported our conversation yesterday and said I took Don’s jaded or cynical style with a pinch of salt. We talked about nourishment, what keeps us going in the struggle, where we find hope.
I have always thought my best writing happened when I didn’t think about the audience, but instead got taken over by the words I was shaping. When I became so involved with the passion of what needed to be said, so entranced by how best to birth it into the world that I lost my sense of self and there was only the process of trying to shape the words on the page so that they embody the idea that lay just the other side of perception. The audience didn’t enter into it at all. Perhaps on a later draft, I’d look at the piece and recognize a reference that was so obscure that no reader would get it, and so it had to go. But for the most part, the dance was between the words and my ideas, and the audience were wallflowers, watching perhaps but obscured by shadows.
I guess I would have missed it altogether. I never watch the Super Bowl. I never watch TV. I don’t subject myself to its violence and idiocy. I get my information by reading, whether on the internet (more and more) or through print media.
Ultimately I would love to be able to produce art which helps people respect and connect with the natural world in a more realistic way. To make them aware of their dependence on it and the way their choices and actions affect it. It’s not something to fear, or to control, or to endure while we wait for some Great Hereafter – it’s the only home we’ll ever know, and we’re doing our best to wreck it for our kids.–David Bygott
Did you realize the giraffe antelope has the ability to stand upright on its hind legs? Did you know there was any such thing as a giraffe antelope? Chances are you didn’t.
“I wanted to speak to the lie that we can all wear the right thing or buy the right thing and then we can be American. They said, ‘This is what an American eats and this is what an American looks like.’ I wanted to insert stories about people who don’t fit in or can’t fit in.” — Beverly Naidus to Tikkun Daily, September 2009
Today, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision to end limits on corporate campaign spending, we check back in with Beverly Naidus, a culture-jamming artist we profiled in September 2009. Beverly’s work commandeers the imagery of corporate marketing campaigns, adding provocative text and altering the imagery in an effort to compel viewers to address the ways they are manipulated by advertising.
[Editor’s Note: We are delighted to welcome Mark LeVine, Tikkun’s longest serving contributing editor, to Tikkun Daily. Mark wears at least two hats and another one apart from musician is political prof and Middle East expert. His latest post at tikkun.org is “No Hope for Haiti” Without Justice.”]
If the end of 2009 is any indication, 2010 is going to be a difficult year. Whether it’s the economy, foreign policy or just political and cultural pulse of America more broadly, a host of problems confronts our society from the political leadership to the average citizen that hardly anyone knows how or even wants to deal with honestly. We need inspiration, and few things inspire people to action better than music.
“If there is one place that never sleeps, it’s the dump. Being the final output of society, it constantly has to keep up with our waste.” — Erik Otto
Just south of America’s littlest big city, across the highway from where the 49ers play, a raucous city of refuse rages 24 hours a day, fed by a never-ending river of San Francisco’s garbage. This is Recology, also known as the San Francisco dump. Recology is on the front line of an effort by the city of San Francisco to achieve a state of garbage transcendentalism known as “Waste Zero” (nothing wasted, nothing buried, nothing burned).