I'm no farmer; but I've been listening to a lot of soy farmers being interviewed by NPR about their predicament due to Donnie's tariffs on China, their largest consumer. Let's face it, a lot of them voted for him; and when asked about him, they ham and haw because they have choices to make that they don't like.

The Chinese system is horrible, their social practices are despicable, their trading practices really do disadvantage us, their political repression is well known, their labor camps continue, so.... fuck 'em. That said, I would like the "fuck 'em" to come in a different form than Donnie's way....

Soooo, here we are: stuck with Donnie's way, and a climate change that Donnie dismisses and that has dumped too much water on the "soy land", making it impossible to get a good crop of the stuff this year anyway. In addition, despite government bailouts and subsidies (because, like every other nation, we do subsidize our farmers, even though the Republicans hate to admit it- and by "farmers”, I mean Big Farma...) the suicide rate for farmers is increasing....

Again, I'm no farmer, I can barely keep up with my garden; but what if, given these political and real changes, we changed farming practices in this country and actually supported that change? What if, instead of giving out Band-Aids to big monoculture farms, we looked for better ways of working the land? It has to be better than current practices for the new world that is coming our way. What if farmers were incentivized to find out what the land can sustain? What if they diversified their production and were supported for doing so? ....Of course, Conagra and ADM etc would balk at lining politician pockets with such an interruption in their profit stream...

And one more again, I'm not a farmer...

In the kitchen

me: putain do caralho!

Curt: He was a French general.

me: who? Putain?

Curt: Yeah

me: and Caralho was a Brazilian one.

😊

The last time I saw Notre Dame was in the summer of the year we elected Donald Trump for President. @curtisjsimon and I were on our way to see Dan Tepfer play in a, I would say hole in the wall, but it is more like a really cool hole in the ground in the Halles neighborhood.  We must have taken a lazy roundabout way of getting there because we ended up at La Cité and, surprised, I happily pointed to the cathedral and said, “Look, it’s Notre Dame!”  We were approaching it from the non-iconic side.  

The thing that always surprises me about Notre Dame is how much of a neighborhood church it feels to be.  It’s this monster cathedral, but it does not feel that way; maybe because the spires were never added to the front towers. There was a mass, complete with priest and enormous choir, in progress when we ventured inside; and when we came out, the bells started ringing and I took this awful video.

In Part, The Role of an Artist is to Offend

Palm Sunday, and at the risk of offending the majority of peoples on the planet, as well as, finding out who my most bad-ass followers are, I posted the above pictures on social media, no captions.  

Truth be told, as offensive, or maybe as embarrassing, as my post might be, this graphic, Sergio Leone-like representation of Christ with its lenticular lens came to me totally sanctioned by The Church.  It was bought in a place of worship (I don’t remember which exact one) in Ravenna, yes Italy, lest there be one or two such towns in the USA.  …Though it might have been purchased at the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, but I think it was some historic church in Ravenna…  

It was bought and carried back to the U.S. by a cherished and much respected student of mine when he was travelling in Europe between his senior and junior years in the mid to late 1980’s (the abstraction of time is a real thing for me, so I am never exact on that).  It has traveled with me ever since.

Truth be told (one more again), I was always a little scared of this thing and kept it wrapped in a flat file for years.  One day, a few years back, while cleaning the studio, I decided to free it from its newsprint constraints and let it oversea my work space.  As Shane knew I would, I do love it, precisely because of all its contradictions.  I decided to post pictures of it this year because it represents the single defining event which republicans running the show right now point to as the excuse for their greedy, egregious, and most unchristian-like behavior.

I agree with Steve Earl that art is empathy; and in so being, it can't help but speak to truth.  In revealing truth, Art also can’t help but be, at times, offensive.  Not that my pictures are in any way art, but my training is one in which art was supposed to reveal things beyond the veil of the everyday; so sometimes, even with my mundane posts, that’s what I do (whether or not, and probably usually, it bites me in the ass (-;).