Holy wow. Arabella nails it on the head. This should be required reading for people who want to start a gallery… or, for that matter, any artsy small business. Among the gems:
If you are one of these so-called “underground” art galleries, then what is the point if you don’t sell anything, no one writes about it, and no one comes except to drink your beer? That ain’t a gallery, that’s my living room.
Have a visible sign, a flag, anything! People aren’t looking for a rave, they’re looking for your gallery, stop trying to be cute with the incognito crap.
All I can say to that is: “yeah!”
Also, because I am a Delicate and Polite Young Lady, I will not repeat what I said about a certain Cleveland-based artist at Arabella’s birthday party.
Oh, what the hell. Sure I will.
“[Reference to said artist]” Me: “Who?” “You know, the babydoll one.” Me: “That stupid motherfucker and his dumbassed babydolls wrapped in plastic on deli trays Jesus Christ what does he think this is, 1991? or the cover of a Marilyn Manson album? God, I HATE THAT SHIT.”
Mind you, that’s the shortened, paraphrased, 30-second Art Critic Drinking version. We’ll probably have more of those tomorrow night, as the art brigade has been invited over…hurrah!
My boyfriend is so awesome it hurts. El Gorgo issue #1 is done! Mike (the writer, aka “Uncle Mike” in our house) has a boatload of comments at that link — his LJ — about how great it is. So good, it actually made someone late to work this morning.
I can remember when I first read the script for issue #1. Wow. Just, wow. I laughed and laughed and laughed. When Tamas first started drawing it, I thought — ok, it’s going to be pretty awesome. Then it just kept getting better by leaps and bounds. Believe me. I’ve seen it at all stages over the past year. Even I can’t believe how amazing and brilliant it is. My boyfriend is a genius. Mike is an astonishing writer and El Gorgo is beyond cool.
I am in awe.
The end.
Pretty much proving the point of this article, while watching a rebroadcast of the first-ever Saturday Night Live aired last night to honor the late George Carlin, I got all Wikipedia with it and Googled “Janis Ian” (who sang her song “At Seventeen” on the show). Funny. SNL is only a few months younger than I am, and I don’t think I’d ever read much about Ian, let alone this article of hers. It’s even better than my previous favorite article on the topic, Courtney Love Does the Math, which was written in 2000 and is equally true today:
Let’s not call the major labels “labels.” Let’s call them by their real names: They are the distributors. They’re the only distributors and they exist because of scarcity. Artists pay 95 percent of whatever we make to gatekeepers because we used to need gatekeepers to get our music heard. Because they have a system, and when they decide to spend enough money — all of it recoupable, all of it owed by me — they can occasionally shove things through this system, depending on a lot of arbitrary factors.
Here we are eight years later, and fortunately, the internet has done an awful lot to break the stranglehold of big record companies — see the last post, for example. You can reach out directly to consumers and to the blogs they read, and release a single on MySpace and get a record deal so fast it causes visa problems getting in to the country for your first sold-out tour because you haven’t been a “real” band long enough… but it’s not enough. I recently started a direct-to-yarn-stores distro for independent pattern designers. We took a decent amount of orders at our first big trade show, but what was more heartening was the number of people who took me and the other coop members aside to say “good! we are so proud of you, keep it up! we’d rather buy directly from the designers anyway…”
I get random emails from various band promoters sometimes, probably because of past reviews written for Blogcritics, etc. Sometimes this is a very good thing. (I’m often too polite to say when it’s not). In this case, I’ve come across a cool all-girl band called Sick of Sarah. (See also here, but the first link is to their label’s page and you can order CDs/vinyl/download from iTunes, etc.
Here’s a sample MP3 of their song “Not Listening”.
Admittedly, when I read the influences, I got a little worried. John Fogerty? Seriously? And then the inevitable Breeders/Sleater-Kinney/Babes in Toyland comparisons, ’cause they’ve got girl parts and they rock out. But personally, I was hearing a little more of that Palomar-y power pop-rock on first listen to the first track, “Daisies”… which is a good thing, I do love Palomar. The rest of the album falls under “Juliana Hatfield without the early-90s twee.”
(Admittedly, I haven’t listened to any new Juliana Hatfield in forever, and speaking of early 90s music… Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, the album that pretty much got me through my first two years of college, alongside My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, has just been re-released, with new bonus tracks).
Anyhoo. “Daisies” is poppy. The rest of the album is more introspective and Jewel-y and “I’m-a-gonna-lock-myself-in-my-room-with-my-diary-and-guitar.” Which is not to say that it’s bad, just that I think you’d probably have to be in that kind of mood to really appreciate it. I would actually like to hear more of the upbeat stuff, because they do it very well. Even looking at their named influences, like Sleater-Kinney — well, I don’t listen to Sleater-Kinney when I want to get all contemplative with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, I listen to them when I want to ROCK OUT! Still, Sick of Sarah’s got a solid album, so if you like girl bands who can actually play, check them out.
Loving: Arabella’s Vampirella painting.
Convinced: this would be perfect on a baby onesie.
Thinking: a Nelsonville Star Brick image would be pretty cool as a tattoo (see also)
Also, this week (and pardon, this is cross-posted from my knitting site), I started teaching my fashion/fiber program at ArtWorks. Things learned by the Master Teaching Artist, or MTA (that’d be me): present day teenagers are fascinated with the 1980s, I am old, and also, I am old. Witness this exchange:
Apprentice: “I love Cyndi Lauper.”
Me: “I think one of my very first cassettes was Cyndi Lauper.”
(Two apprentices, whispering to each other): “What’s a cassette?”
Sigh.
“I have often written that to compare sexism and racism is utterly without intellectual honesty.”
Says this guy. Classy. And last I checked, Jill had been speaking up about racism in the campaign, most recently the Obama sock monkey fiasco, and even the double-edged sword Michelle Obama is facing. When did Russo say a word against the Hillary nutcracker or other monkeyish equivalents? Oh, right. He was too busy linking to a video called “Get away from hope, you bitch” which appears to have been uploaded by none other than…himself.
Actively promoting a video like this, yet complaining another blogger isn’t writing about racism (when in fact she has been), and on top of it, saying “there simply is no comparison” between sexism and racism? My head’s spinning just trying to sort all that out. Why is it acceptable to refer to Clinton as a bitch, for one? Someone fill me in on that, please. I think Obama’s selection of a Wal-Mart apologist for an economic advisor is awfully stupid, but you don’t see me calling him an equivalent slur. If I did, there’d be hell to pay from all sides. You can call Clinton a bitch, though, and it’s all well and good. Talk about hypocrisy.
My new favorite Freezepop video. The fact that it’s in Guitar Hero II almost makes me want to run out and buy a video game, heaven help me.
Massachusetts: still more civilized than Ohio. The governor’s daughter came out. Governor? No freakout. Boston Globe? No freakout. Majority of Massachusetts residents? Again, no freakout. For more, here’s the discussion over at Pam Spaulding’s site.
I am moving to Scotland. Oh yeah. I miss proper Berliner Döners and curry fries… this has pretty much everything awesome in ONE BOX.
In case you were wondering why I was blogging in German yesterday, your answer can be found here. The English version of my post is located here.
From the Blogging in Tongues Against Ohio HB 477 site:
Ohio House Bill 477 seeks to make English the official language of Ohio. You can find legislative information about HB 477 here.
Blogging in Tongues opposes HB 477 for the reasons noted in our posts (here in English and at our home blogs in foreign languages).
The bill has passed the House but the State Senate committee involved is not scheduled to meet before the Senate schedule indicates summer recess will start. Here is a list of the Senate committee members to contact about your feelings on the bill.
The participating blogs have a combined readership of well-over 10,000 unique visitors daily.
Which blogs? Here are links to all of them, and the languages they were blogging in for the project.
- American Pink Collar (French)
- Bad American (Polish)
- bitter-girl :: musings (German)
- Blogesque (Korean)
- Blue Bexley (Dutch)
- Blue Ohioan (Korean)
- Bring Ohio Home (Czech)
- Bring Ohio Home (German)
- Buckeye State Blog (Italian)
- Glass City Jungle (Hungarian)
- Gloria Ferris (Spanish)
- Ohio Daily Blog (Croatian)
- Pho’s Akron Pages (Vietnamese)
- Plunderbund (Redneck)
- Rowsey Blog (Spanish)
- The Chief Source (Spanish) at The Point
- The Daily Bellwether (French)
- Tim Ferris (French)
- Writes Like She Talks (Portuguese)
As someone who trained to go into the foreign service, interned for the State Department in Germany, held an ultra-competitive Defense Department-funded strategic languages fellowship in the Czech Republic and who isn’t — in my own opinion, anyway — a complete ass, I know full well the benefits of multilingualism. My first real job out of college at a software company didn’t come knocking at my door because of my mad computer skillz, it came because I spoke multiple foreign languages well enough to help support the European clients who were using our product. In fact, I took the phone call from my dorm in Prague and had the job in hand before I even landed back in the USA!
The reason I ended up on the Berlin Wall (literally) New Year’s Eve 1999 and rang in the new millennium with bottles of champagne there instead of in South Euclid, Ohio? Because the firm for which I was consulting needed to get a mission-critical piece of Y2K-fixing hardware through customs at Frankfurt airport and figured that, speaking German, I’d have a much easier time talking my way out of a jam if one happened.
My language abilities have been nothing but a help, a CV-booster and an opportunity to have a different perspective on the world. I find the English-only movement to be incredibly xenophobic, short-sighted and — let’s be brutally honest — astonishingly stupid given Ohio’s declining economy. When I read that a German solar power firm was considering Cleveland for major investment, the first thing I thought is “wow, interesting job, I should see if they’re hiring for anything good.” You know what? I can pretty much guarantee that firm would be 100% more likely to hire me than someone who only speaks English.
It’s time to face reality. We live in a global economy. Hell, if I had the time and money right now, I’d be lining up somewhere to learn Mandarin Chinese. I look at a show like Firefly or the movie version, Serenity and I think “yup, that’s probably on its way soon enough, start studying now.” (Everyone is English/Chinese bilingual in the future Joss Whedon envisioned, from the highest level of society on down). Embrace the future, don’t cling to exclusionary behavior. It’s not helping us become more competitive, that’s for sure. I think about a conversation I had with my future mother-in-law recently. She’s Hungarian, so’s her husband, and my boyfriend is fully bilingual. She stops mid-sentence and says, very seriously, that she has one request if we have children…
(that we raise them Catholic? yeah, she brought that up, too…let’s not go there)
What gave her Serious Face as she said it? “You’ll let them learn Hungarian, right?”
“Let”? Hell, I’m the one who’s been lecturing Tamas about the value of teaching them Hungarian AND the other languages I speak / possibly sending them to the German-language school on the west side, etc etc. When my kids are taking the jobs from yours someday, think back on this.
Also: YEAH.
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