So here's the rub of ... I don't even know what to call it... globalization (?)- but that's not even it really, I mean, it is and it isn't, but it is:

So I went to the Walmart to get thread- Walmart 'cause this is Clemson and that's what we have, though I could have driven a more annoying drive to Michaels.  Anyway, while getting thread at the Walmart, I got some cheap t-shirts to print "nastee" on. Cheap being 6 bucks a t-shirt, which is what I think t-shirts should cost; though maybe I only think that because I am old (theme of this weekend 😅). 

The T's were "hecho in Nicaragua and Honduras", and I thought to myself, "Great, not China," which is actually a pathetic thought, but one nonetheless... And that sent me into a long string of guilt ridden thoughts:

1) k, can you imagine what the conditions are for those women (you know it's women) working in those countries and what they must be making if you are only paying 6 bucks a t-shirt?

2) Pima-cotton: can you imagine the working conditions of the people picking this horrible plant, cotton, that is used to make these t-shirts that you're paying only 6 bucks for? Not to mention the conditions they are working in to produce it (my father had textile factories in a somewhat more civilized banana republic, I know the environmental conditions).

3) But k, at least they are working and earning something, and not feeling the need to walk millions of miles to come work here under some better but still terrible conditions. Isn't that good?

4) Great cotton, but the sewing is not the best; but then, what do you want for 6 bucks. And remember the pressure those women probably are under to get their quota sewn everyday...

5) I will look into buying American made t-shirts!

So I just looked into buying an American made t-shirt.  They sell for 40 and 50 dollars... Who can afford to buy something unseen that costs that much to get ink on in the studio?

This is one more example of put all the social responsibility onto the consumer and let them choose bullshit.  And honestly, yeah, I can buy a couple 50 dollar t-shirts; but most people in that Walmart just can't afford to buy American, and they can't because the jobs they used to do, the same exact ones that South Americans are doing now, have moved to, well, South America.

I have no answers, but questions are a beginning. I know it's not my fault, but that's what 50 years of weird republican use of Chicago School of economics thinking wants me to believe.

Fuck 'em.

Older and Maybe Gentler

It might or not be a cliché that when one gets older and has a conscience (something not evident in the entire republican party and their voters) one starts evaluating one’s life. Cliché or not, I find myself doing that sometimes.

Being an introvert who starts sweating every time I have to pick up a phone to call someone lest I disturb them, I don’t ask to follow anyone on social media; but if people I know ask to follow me, I follow back. That’s how I have come to follow some of the amazing students that have crossed my path; and sometimes, getting these mediated snippets of their lives triggers sessions of “life evaluation”.

Thinking back, I must say that I was totally unqualified to teach at the high school level for the eleven years that I did. I was fully qualified to teach art, but because of the (clusterfuck) way the school was structured, one did not need an education degree or certification with which one might have learned something about teaching young minds. … Though as it turns out, the one visual art teacher that had such a degree turned out to be a predator; but I digress (and here I go, opening my big mouth that always gets me in trouble- hahah- bring it on trouble, I am used to you)…

Anyway, when I look back at those eleven years, eight of which seemed idyllic (though I now know to have had deep structural flaws), and from whence so many great kids came out, I know I made mistakes I wish I hadn’t, most of them having to do with my temper and my expectations. I wish I had been more gentle and that I had understood the fragility of young minds. But, my god, when I look at “my kids” (the ones I know about), I am so amazed and so very happy to find out what they all have accomplished in all kinds of different ways. For all of them, I hope for a gentle future.

Well, there - back to trouble and cats …

I've tried; but I just don't like Halloween

The worse thing about Halloween, other than being held hostage by kids duped by crappy candy conglomerates into disrupting your evening and eliciting from you the automatic response (because it is the easiest way to react to being held hostage) of giving them the crappy candy you bought from an industry known to use child labor to harvest the crap the crappy candy is made of, the display of expensive cheap Chinese decorations made of materials that will clog waterways and kill wildlife for millennia, the constant disruption of dinner, and the panicked scampering of cats every time the doorbell rings, is how lame most the costumes worn by the little extortionists are.

Yellow Star

The cunt who thought she was being cute by making those yellow Stars of David with the words “not vaccinated” on them, to sell for 5 bucks to other bigoted morons, got me thinking. My Jewish parents did not live in Europe at the time of the WWII genocide, they lived in Cairo, Egypt.  They did not feel the negative impact of that war directly; and they did not have to wear those yellow stars.

Throughout the war, Egypt was under British control, and Cairo, where my parents lived, was spared.  But had the war not changed course when it did; Rommel, who was on the outskirts of Cairo, would have invaded; and my parents and their families (which at the time consisted of numerous tight members) would most likely have been taken, maybe even to a new camp, and would have been forced to wear those stars. My parents were lucky; and the dissolution of their family through coerced immigration, the “police interrogation” of my father for mistaken identity, and the confiscation of all their wealth would come only later at the hands of, not a German authoritarian, but an Arab one, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

So the Nashville Cunt got me thinking.  Until after WWII, when Israel was created, Arabs and Jews lived side by side peacefully.  In fact, it took decades for my father to call Israel by that name; most of my life, he referred to it as Palestine. Imagine if there had been no yellow Stars of David. Imagine if the Brits and the Americans, and all the other European countries had not turned away their Jews, and more pointedly, had not handed them over so willingly to the Nazis.  Imagine if the Brits, through guilt, had not carved up (well, carved up more of - but that’s another story) the Middle East and given that land, which got called Israel, to those displaced walking dead.  Imagine if Palestine had evolved in a natural way into a state with both Jews and Arabs living side by side; just as Egypt had been when my parents lived there, and just how all the other Arab countries were before that war. Imagine….

So... that cunt’s actions got me thinking of all this. And of how different this world would be; and how different my life and that of my family, broken into pieces through trauma because of people just like her, would also be.

 

Public Confession

 

Today I got frozen out of Facebook for taking a picture of bails of pine needles I had to spread, and posting it, tongue firmly held in cheek, with the Nazi motto, in German, about freedom and work; a phrase I am afraid of posting again lest I get kicked out of the entire internet. The following thoughts came to me after seeing a friend before I "arbeiten" spreading pine needles in the yard while getting “frei” on a glorious day. I always taught art from a very personal point of view, so maybe this is a teaching moment; though it’s probably just more contemporary exhibitionism from my uncensored mind.

What prompted this reverie is a phrase you never really want to hear from a friend whom you haven’t seen in decades, and whose parents were best friends with yours, while she introduces you to her son.  She said, "When my parents met Katya’s parents, they visited and spent all day at their place; when they came home they said they had an orgy."  Or words to that effect.😆  ….Ahhh the swinging 70’s… Though for my parents it was the swinging 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s. No wonder I was never home while growing up. As a child, I think I was aware of it, but blocked it.  I was aware of something, I just didn't look into it very closely - so very unlike me...  

I’ll hand it to my sex-crazed parents; their fun never happened when I was home. Were my parents actually sex-crazed?  Looking back on it, as I often do these days on my sixth decade on this planet, maybe. Sex certainly defined their relationship; and my mom defined her entire being in terms of her sexuality, something that seriously messed her up. And I am not saying this because I am a prude, I don’t even know how I feel about it; but I saw her mind break down at times, for long periods, due to her lack of having any other center; and then I saw her die a miserable and lonely death because of it.

I kept thinking of this while spreading my pine needles.  And I kept thinking about my parents' miserable relationship at the end of their lives when sex was no longer possible, while my dad, 15 years my mom's senior, battled prostate cancer.  And while doing yard work towards freedom, I kept thinking, as I am prone to do lately, about how all this marked my life.

My mother…  Another thing I often hear from people about her is how they loved her. And my mom could actually be wonderful; and often I loved her too, but like an abused dog who always goes back to its owner because the owner is not always abusive.  People who say they loved her did not have to live with her; I did not have that privilege. On her 3 last miserable years on this planet, after a lifetime of her bamboozling male psychiatrists into diagnosing her with depression, she was finally diagnosed, by a great woman psychiatrist, with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  And that explained EVERYTHING I always knew, but never had words to explain. …And no, I have not forgotten my beloved father in this story.  Him I really did love unconditionally; but he was complicit, he enabled her.  He should have walked away from her long before he realized, also without words, what the family dynamic was; which with Narcissists is that they actually call all the shots.  He could have maybe saved himself a lot of pain (like the Republican party could have, had they not enabled, to the bitter end, the one who shall not be named).

It has been 3 years since my mom died, and I still don’t know how I feel about her. I want to love her; often, I miss her. 

Teach your children well.

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 (-;).

Vote

🔊 on

...they just might (watch to end)

The fact that numbers project seat gains in the Senate for Republicans is soul crushing. #vote #earlyandoften

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All prints for sale (in groupings or the whole shebang for the low price of $450). Never let it be said that this immigrant hasn’t learned to do what Americans do best: use any and all opportunities to sell shit 😉

Love is a Subaru if Love is Oil Consumption

Love might be a Subaru; but let me tell you what else is a Subaru: Oil Consumption is a Subaru. 

I’ve had two Subarus.  I loved my first one, even though it couldn’t hold the road for shit, and kept it until I could no longer find any parts for it.  And I do love my low mileage, still a stick, handles great, current one as well; but both guzzle oil in different ways.  

My first Subaru had to have all its seals replaced early on, and even after that, left its mark on many a pavement.  My current one just burns, for now, half a quart of oil straight into the atmosphere every 3,000 miles.  No, earth lovers who’ve bought into the ads of Subarus in the great unexplored, your Subaru is not very good for the environment whether or not it is a lemon like mine.  I bought my car new and it started being thirsty before its first oil change.  “Is this the norm?”, you might ask.  I don’t know; it has been and is with mine.

There actually is a bulletin about this problem with a slew of different Subaru models from 2013 including the 2013 Outback, which mine is.  I found out about the bulletin from my fantastic local mechanic, not from Subaru itself; however, once I did point out this relevant small fact to them, they were straight with me and ran an oil consumption test on my car for months in order to determine the rate at which my car was consuming oil.  What that entailed was me driving the 30 miles to the dealer every 1500 miles or when my low level oil light would come on and not go off, whichever came first. 

The Service manager at the dealership where I got my car has been nothing if not super accommodating to this most infuriating of problems.  Although he is the first in a string of barriers between me and Subaru upper management, he is always pleasant and correct; and all my oil changes and oil additions have been free ever since I bought the car.  Also, although I am here complaining about the lemon I was sold, I have to hand it to Subaru for doing the right thing (within bounds). 

Once it was determined that my car was indeed consuming oil at an “unnatural” rate, they did drop a new short block into my car.  The short block is the part with the cylinders, those from which my car is spewing hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.   Did I use the present tense for the verb “to be” in that last sentence?  Yes, I did and will come back to that; but the week Subaru dropped (I am assuming they did) a new motor into my car, I drove my 30 miles back home happy.  

…But here I am talking about this on Facebook, and I never get on Facebook when I am happy (-; 

New motor or not, I never did remove the quarts of expensive synthetic oil from behind my seat, and it turns out that’s a good thing, since yesterday, about 4,000 miles after Subaru dropped a new engine into my car, my oil consumption light came back on.  I called the Service Manager, and he told me to drive the 30 miles over there to get it checked.  I did, and low and behold, my Outback needed half a quart of oil which I again got for free.  The manager actually (dangerously) asked me if I was sure the light had come on and that the girl at the desk had asked if I even knew what the light looked like.  No, people who have seen me explode before, I did not eat his head off, I smiled southern-like and made a joke, but I can fucking draw that damn light if they want me to. I'll even make them a painting if they like.

The new story now, that a corporation has done all it will do to for the little guy (and really do appreciate what they've done), is that this over-consumption of oil is normal, and that I will have to add half a quart of oil in between oil changes which are to occur every 6,000 miles.  

I do remember distinctly being told, when signing on the dotted line, that because the car required synthetic oil, I would be able to drive 10,000 miles between oil changes –> hah. Now I am told to check my oil every 3,000, or whenever the light comes on, and to add half a quart of miracle synthetic oil when needed.  Moreover, I was actually told that the low level oil light is actually a friendly reminder “as per the manual”.  I checked the manual, and this of course is bullshit; or could be if the manual were actually less vague….

My next car will be electric and not a Subaru; though I certainly will miss having a stick.

How Trump Will Be Reelected:

Not to be a fear monger or anything, but I am a pessimist... At the beginning of this so-called presidency, Bloomeberg said Trump would be re-elected because incumbents have the advantage... The other day I went to my hairdresser (neither of us voted for Trump) and he said, "You know he will be re-elected." And I said, "yeah, I know." ....

...And yet another day I was at the pool and a woman was telling me why she did not vote for Hilary, and that now, as she reads what Hilary continues to do (whatever that may be, an as if it mattered), she is more sure than ever about having voted for the right person. Reading and seeing what Trump has done since grabbing the country by its pussy does not seem to sway her at all... This woman was once a teacher.

When I get depressed and say that nothing Trump does changes the view of those who voted for him, my husband (who, unlike me (-;, believes in statistics) reminds me that of the 45 percent of people who voted for him 35% are un-swayable; but 10% might be, and it is on those 10% we have to count on... Small comfort.

... I was listening to PRI's The World yesterday and heard a segment in which Marco Werman was speaking to the editorial page editor of the Augusta Chronicle in Augusta, Georgia -> look for the July 18th episode in the link below, and click on "How Trump Supporters view Helsinki" if you actually want to listen to the point of view of a well spoken and educated man from Trump Country. The man thought the Helsinki fiasco was a disaster, so perhaps he could be one in the magic 10%... But as he spoke and explained why his readership stands by Trump, I knew that even this literate and seemingly reasonable man would probably still vote for Trump, especially if the Dems put in a super progressive candidate to pull from the extreme left.

If Trump is not brought up for charges on one of the many crimes he has committed (if he and not his minions actually committed them), and if that feckless Congress does not impeach him for, at least dementia, then we are talking 6 more years of this hell. I am not sure any institution will be left standing after that. The White House is on damage control today, and Helsinki will be but a distant memory next week...

Listen for yourselves (July 18 Episode- click on How Trump Supporters view Helsinki):
https://www.pri.org/programs/the-world

Trump Wars

So yesterday, when I was listening to the news oozing from my radio, I heard an interview with a soy farmer from Iowa (Trump territory) and head of the Soy Farmer Association (or some such, I was printing so not taking notes). The reporter was asking what the repercussions of a trade war would be to these farmers who export a large percentage of their crop to China and who had made a pretty sweet deal with them for their product in the past. The farmer was very worried about it. They talked on and I learned a lot about soy.

At the end of the interview, the reporter asked the question to which I had no doubt of the answer, “Who did you vote for?” And the answer was of course Trump. The reporter then asked if the man was satisfied with his choice, to which the man did not answer exactly but said, “Look who the alternative was.” At which point I exploded and started screaming at the radio: “WHAT!!?? ASSHOLE!!?? You were afraid of a rational woman whose actions would be predictable and would make more sweet trade deals for you, you PRICK!! Granted, a crook, but a crook within the normal bounds of this sorry ass political system!!!? Prick.”

And now voilà, China has approved tariffs on soy (and Sorghum and planes and...).

None of this has passed until everything passes. Maybe whatever general can possibly still appease the Prick in Chief might be able to sway him to cut different momentary deals (from tweet to tweet), but it will be a long road for some soy farmers. The silver lining being that China will buy soy from the other giant producer: Brazil; and that country is in a world of pain, it could use some good news… Of course Brazil has destroyed large swaths of the rain forest to plant the mono-culture that are large soy farms feeding China…

#soywars #tradedeal #pricksthatvoteforpricksgetpricked