intellectual properties

Beyond Aesthetics: Occupy Art (post #12)

following up on my last #occupy post……

the Muppets have taught us so many things since 1976. and this week, they’ve taught us just how well popular Art can be used to call bullshit:

Watch: The Muppets Diss Fox News:

 Miss Piggy was more combative and political; the puppet added that the charge was “almost as laughable as accusing Fox News of being news.”

(this is a response to this)

have the Muppets always been so intense?

anyway, i love it, and this is a great segue for me to post some of that which i recently wrote for my art school application on the subject of the current state and intersection of art vs. politics in America. this is definitively the longest post i’ve ever published, but if you’re interested, read on….

Continue reading »

my Wells Fargo story (every day is bank transfer day)

i closed my large corporate bank accounts and switched banks in November to the New Resource Bank in SF, but hadn’t closed my Wells Fargo acct because I had to resolve some autopay links, etc. The balance has been below $100 since November. Then WF started charging me $12/month to keep the account open. So today I went to the bank to ask them to stop charging me the fee, without mentioning my NRB switch or any threat to close my acct (not antagonistic is my point). And, long story short, they said they couldn’t stop charging me the fees. There was $32 in that account today. And on Feb 10th they are going to take almost 1/3 of that out in fees if the account stays open. I have another bank account, but they don’t know that. What about the single mom, or poor old lady, who really only has $32? WTF Wells Fargo.

It wasn’t that the Rep didn’t try to help me. Because he said he could do nothing about the fees, he tried to open me a new account – a STUDENT account, since it only has $3 monthly fees. But that’s what’s messed up, is that the employee felt the new bank rules were so strict that he had to go that route, that i would have to cancel the account i’ve had since 1998 and open a totally new one instead of just STOP CHARGING ME THE FEES.

Anyway, I’ll be closing my account with them now. And if you still haven’t switched yours, think about it. EVERY DAY IS BANK TRANSFER DAY.

5.6 Million Americans Have Switched Their Banks In The Last 90 Days
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/02/417054/americans-moving-banks-90-days/?mobile=nc

occupy everything. (post #11)

last night at the salon, a nice older woman sitting next to me asked, “so what happened with the Occupy? why did it all go so bad? it makes me so sad, i watch the news and i want to cry. i wanted good things to happen.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/the-first-casualty-of-fairness-is-the-truth/2012/01/30/gIQA2VYneQ_blog.html

“You know what you don’t see much of these days? Those moist-eyed bloggers’ odes to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Gosh, remember the columns telling us these people had a noble political agenda? Seems like just yesterday the lefty bloggers were picking through polls, telling us the American people embraced the OWS gang. But then protest turned to filth, and high-mindedness turned out to be just plain-old stench.

To write such loving tributes to OWS took extraordinary discipline, I suppose. Not to actually look (or smell) and determine who the real Occupiers (as opposed to the Occupiers refashioned for the readers of the New York Times and the Nation) were must have taken real will-power, especially since the encampments in major cities (as in the District) were only a few blocks from the journalists’ offices. Had they taken a peek or inhaled on the way to work they would have discovered the real Occupy movement.

Zack Munson reports: “There are lots of bearded folks (male and female), lots of dirty tents, some college students, the unemployed, the career homeless, some white people dancing out of rhythm to rock music played over a loudspeaker. The ‘movement’ itself is still a jumble of anti-capitalist/police/government rhetoric and pointless noise and pungent smells.” Oh, well, who wants to write about that?”

it’s true.  i haven’t wrttien about OWS/OccupyOakland in over a month, but it is not because i think the shine wore off to reveal a bunch of dirty hippies.  in fact, the opposite is true. i think once the new smell and initial popculture interest wore off, who was left was a bunch of super invested people who have since then been heads-down entrenched in making things happen, not out there in the camps but in smaller working groups, in meetings, behind closed doors. see: the Alternative Banking Working Group, for example.

and despite all the negatives, the movement has been effective — causing democratic change on issues local and global, from healthcare to home evictions to school funding, not only in the higher-profile cities like New York  and D.C. but also in small towns across the U.S. …. not to mentioned having kicked the door open for a lot of other progressive non-Occupy NGOs and social and cultural groups to take a stand. The Media, of course, chooses to only focus on the the bad apples.  this is true for nearly every single aspect of society, not just OWS, and everybody knows it. so why don’t people question what they see on the news more often?

i told the woman at the salon to try to look up other places to read about Occupy, and that while i am not actively involved much  personally, i know many amazing, hardworking people who are and i know, without any question or doubt, that they are doing good things with the right intentions.

“The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas.  The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”

The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation — “occupy the river” — in little ones below.” – Compassion Is Our New Currency

last weekend in Oakland  there was another Occupy vs. OPD clash when Occupy tried to take over an empty building.  before you keep reading,  WATCH THIS VIDEO.

the press and City Hall reported that the Occupiers were breaking into buildings and harrassing police and that, 6 months into the movement, all this is is a temper tantrum on the part of entitled youth and rabblerousers who should find better uses for their time and stop being a public nuisance.  but here is the perspective from Occupy:

http://occupywallst.org/article/regime-change-oakland/

“In Oakland, thousands of active community members chose to engage in true democracy by supporting the real and pressing needs of the people. The state, which supposedly represents these people, exercised extreme police brutality and violence to protect the 1%’s vacant assets. The explicit goal of the action was to build community—to open a desperately needed community center with a library, medical care, free education and emergency housing in a city that has suffered massive budget cuts, high unemployment rates and ravaged public schools. In response, the city government poured hundreds of thousands of dollars, bullets and canisters of tear gas into declaring open war on these parents, students, workers, artists, teachers, children and veterans. These people’s only offense was to believe so deeply in the American tradition of democracy, self-sufficiency, and sacrifice for the next generation that they were willing to put their bodies on the line to make this nation the empowering democracy that we know it can be.”

And here is a journalist’s first hand account of the situation, and being unlawfully arrested: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/journalists-arrested-occupy-oakland

so yeah, there are obvious issues with people taking over public buildings and setting up DIY healthcare units etc.  not up to code, health violations, blah blah blah.  but what i don’t understand is why the City can’t just,……let them try? see what happens?  wouldn’t that cost FEWER CITY DOLLARS AND RESOURCES than hiring an outside army of police to shoot rubber bullets at citizens, people trying to create for their communities what the government has neglected to protect or provide?

which leads me back to reiterate that the main success of this movement has been to get people to WAKE UP.  maybe they’re waking up to an American Dream Turned Nightmare, but if that’s the case then if Occupy stands for anything it’s this: STAND UP AND FIGHT. OCCUPY EVERYTHING that matters to you.

The Ultimate Culture Jam

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/100/spiritual-insurrection.html

“We awoke one morning to the dark realization that humanity is being dragged into a black hole of ecological, financial and spiritual catastrophe … that our democracy has been seized by a corporatocracy … that every day two hundred species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become forever extinct … that a deluge of advertising is sleepwalking our civilization to the brink of insanity … and that unless we fight back in the most visceral and creative way possible all will be lost.

And yet, what sets our struggle apart in 2012 is that we are not fighting to save a distant future. We are not trying to prevent some terrible event that is still to come. This is not about our unborn grandchildren. Instead, many of us sense that the threshold has already been crossed; the tipping point has already happened and what we are fighting for is our present. We are living in that tragic moment of eerie stillness where the fatal damage has been done, widening cracks can be seen, yet the edifice still stands and business as usual continues … but for how much longer?

Our days may be shadowed by this dark realization, but there is reason to be deeply optimistic for “where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Never before has the tantalizing possibility of a Global Spring, a worldwide people’s insurgency for democracy, seemed as close. For perhaps the first time in human history, we just might be on the edge of an everywhere-at-once revolution against the financial fraudsters, corporate lackeys and the ideology of consumerism that has brought the Earth to the precipice of collapse.

In this, the era of the total and transcendent indignato swarm, we look to each other, not to the masters above, to find out what it will take to pull off the ultimate culture jam: spiritual insurrection.”

this post is to be continued, in the vein of CULTURAL TRANSFIGURATION: OCCUPY ART.

carpe amor

everybody wants to know “the secret”.

but i don’t believe in unconditional anything and really all i can say is that if there is a secret on my part it’s that i don’t believe in tomorrow.

happy 14th anniversary to the one who puts up with this.  <3

water dragon so far

1.  it was cold and foggy today at 9:00am, and so few people out. my bike commute is so familiar to me now i have to remind myself to watch where i am going. ah, yes, more bicycle analogies for life.

2. today, i finished the kind-of-secret thing that has been consuming me. at the last minute, due to technical difficulties, it was printed and sealed and addressed and packaged and dropped in the box for overnight delivery. it’s due tomorrow. so i think? i can come out of my intellectual hole now. if i’ve somehow flaked on any of you…sorry. lmk. we’ll catch up.

so yes!  the biggest deadline i’ve faced in years has come and gone. i did what i could. i will try not to stress now over the next month+ until i hear back.

3. we got burning man tix in the lottery!

4. it’s also not dark at 5:00 anymore. much better. like.

so—end of January! yay!

happy year of the WATER DRAGON!  i’m a fire dragon, and so if you believe in chinese astrology, this should not be one of my luckiest years, as fire is opposite water. but i don’t really believe in astrology, and so far? i’d say yes. lucky.

generally regarded as safe

i was at the Target human ant farm (TM) the other day and walking by the laundry soap/fabric softener aisle the smell was overwhelming.

how many chemicals do we cover ourselves in every day?

those automatic plug-in air fresheners are completely horrendous to me. constantly spraying chemicals into your breathing air? are you insane?

this would be funny except the scary thing is that acid from strangers is probably more reliable and less toxic than millions of things you might buy boxed, shelved, or frozen and sold as food or found in the cosmetics/bath/cleaning product aisles that you cover yourself, your home and your family with every day (at least 515?!).

who is more ridiculous? the hippie girl above, or the parents dosing their kids’ baths, food and clothing with unknown GMOs, chemicals, and petroleum byproducts?

this monday morning mantra

skinny bashing and the body acceptance movement

part of me wants to do a longer post about the resurgence of what i’ll call the “marilyn vs skinny girls” debate i’ve seen this week on the web/facebook, wherein what should be a positive message (love all types of bodies!) is still framed as negative, pitting one kind of body against another, discussed here as “The Problem With Skinny Bashing” , (and reflected with a feminist bent here in Why The Sexy Equinox Yoga Video Pissed Me Off (ftr i personally think that yoga video is INSPIRING)) and how entirely self-conscious these things makes me feel about my own body issues and some of the things i do, and how making the other side feel bad because you feel bad is NOT THE POINT OF THE BODY ACCEPTANCE MOVEMENT, people – please stop comparing.

but that’s an enormous pandora’s box of judgments and feelings and so i’ll leave it at that.

stand up democracy and good use of internet

you may or may not have noticed, depending on how you read this blog, that this site was blacked out on Wednesday in protest to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) . there has been much debate about intellectual property rights and copyright infringement and what constitutes fair use and what is piracy. it’s a complex subject. but most people i know thought that it was the wrong tool trying to fix the wrong problem, and ill-defined at that.  and if there’s one thing americans love as much as TV it’s the Internet! and so there was a digital uprising as well as a flood of phone calls to Congress, enough to overload their systems.  and hey, look at that: it worked!

i’m not going to go on and out about it but to say YES! WIN! and that if you are angry, feel disenfranchised, don’t like the way something is going, DO SOMETHING.  a movement is only people moving.

semi-sequitur:  There is a great docu about music and the internet you should watch: PausePressPlay.

You know her life was saved by rock and roll

things have been….interesting.

here is my bitch list:

–rainy season has begun. as a bike commuter, this makes my days way less fun.

–it took 9 days to get my smartphone replaced after NYE (long boring customer service story) and the new one keeps doing all kinds of weird things that i hate

–my fitbit broke. again. there is a warranty but i might as well upgrade.  so far fitbit is costing me $99/a year in replacement costs, but i’m addicted to it so i still recommend it.

–work things i can’t talk about publicly are at maximum stress

–life thing with a deadline i haven’t finished is suffering major procrastination and mind-blankage and ∴ stress

–stress is causing unfavorable physical conditions

–blahblahblah whole foods parking lot

don’t get me wrong. my life is wonderful and full of wonderful things, like redwood hikes and purring cats and good wine and yoga and amazing love.  that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. but yeah, #1stworldproblems and i do try to keep perspective but i can’t even tell what news isn’t real any more so it’s pretty hard.

ANYWAY, i was driving to work this morning cuz it’s raining and it’s friday and at home i’d been listening to this great DJ The Count on KALX who reminds me a lot of my friend Finnius and plays David Bowie but whatever he was playing when i first got in the car  was a bit too something for the rainy I-80 east moment and so i switched it over to  107.7, as um….7 times out of 10? they are playing some some rock and roll i really like. (I HATE VAN HALEN, ALL FORMS.) i didn’t know the song playing but it jammed on for 2 or 3 minutes (of my 7 minute drive) and i got really into it, and started thinking about how much better i suddenly felt.  like, rock and roll in the morning really does make me feel so much better. A LOT. AURAL MEDICINE.  and then i was like this is GOOD and seems like something i should know.  what song is this? and then the vocals kicked in and i realized it was Working Man (Rush, 1974, definitive). (i used to hate Rush almost as much as Van Halen but i’ve come around.) do they play that every Friday morning? because they should.