Due to a bug in the Uber messaging system, I'm really sorry (I won't do it again! I ain't no spammer!) but I have to use the comment system to let you know this:
First Article on Uber Electronica: Mushi Music!
Check out my first article on Uber Electronica!
It's about one of our fellow Uber members: Mushi Music! An original musician to discover, for sure someone to get inspiration from and to follow.
Thought you might be interested in this. sorry it's so long.
Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century
Edited by Chris Spannos
Dedication
This book is dedicated...
To the innocence, curiosity, and the wonder of early childhood, before soceity's defining institutions warp and corrupt.
To youth resistance and rebellion -- another world is possible!
To all adults struggling to change the world, living lives knowing everything is broken while new and better lives are waiting.
To older fols and those before them whose struggles offer lessons so we may stand on their shoulders to grab victory.
To human consciousness and potential waiting within, sometimes impatiently, for liberation.
To all revolutionaries everywhere and the lessons their efforts offer so we may win a new society and world.
Chapter 6
A Call to Artists: Support Parecon by Jerry Fresia
A history of art over the last hundred years, not as the history of the product, the piece, but as the history of the decision making within our industry, is the history of investors acquiring greater control over the distribution, definition, and making of art products - and thus over who we are. It is the history of power slipping further from the people who make the piece to the peolel who profit from the piece. Yes, there are individual art stars aplenty. But as workers in an industry, we are being ground into dust. I would argue that our responsibility as artists is to help invent institutions that protect and expand the opportunity for autonomous creative work. Our responsibility, in light of our current situation is to help build an economy sympathetic to the notion that art, as access to a creative life, is the province of every human being. With this in mind, let the following commentary serve as a call to artists to endorose the idea of a participatory economy and in particular the institutional design laid out in Michael Albert's Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Unless we make building socially just institutions part of our understanding of what it means to be an artist, all the verbiage about "content" and all the pieces of art dedicated to peace, equality, and a better way of life will, in the end, serve only as evidence that we got it wrong, that we fundamentally misunderstood what it is we do. All that stuff will serve as evidence that when we needed to and when we were called upon to build better ways of being creative as a people, we thought that art was simply about things.
A commentary and Call to Action
For the past fifteen years I have made my living entirely as a visual artist. I have been able to do this only by exibiting outside of the institutionalized academic-museum-g allery system. I exhibited outdoors in teh parks of San Francisco so I could control the distribution of my work and enjoy direct and personal relationships with my audience. Additionally, for a ten-year period, I worked with public and private officials and artists in reinventing this mode of exhibition to the point where it was something quite unexpectedly professional, wonderful, enchanting, and lucrative - as opposed to the conventional "swap meet" set of exhibitions that one might expect to find outside established venues. However, the model was impossible to sustain for a simple reason. Too few artists wanted to take time from their work to build an organiszation. Most artists had only one set of interests: making their art and promoting themselves within established institutions. In other words, the dominant modus operandi of the artist, as I know it, is the artist as individual and as entrepreneur. However, within the art industry today, entrepreneurialis m cannot lead to ownership of any consequence. Decision making with regard to distribution (exhibition), what counts as important art, and what gets funded is not in our hands no matter how "good" any of our art might be. The desisions that structure our life chances are in the hands of an investor class, an oligarchy, that excercises substantial influence over boards of trustees, both academic and museum, non-profit foundations, public art commissions, and teh galleries and auction houses that follow in their wake. The invididualist/ent repreneurial approach cannot lead but to utter dependency - a dependency on those who own galleries and control exhibition spaces, on critics, on those who control foundations or access to education, on those who direct competitions, on curators. This list is endless. And because we have become so thoroughly dependent on the institutions within the art industry, we are compelled to adopt as our own the very ideas, assumptions, and practices that the oligarchy uses within those industies that require our marginalization in the first place. If we provide free inventories to galleries before they take 50 or 60 percent of any sale, we say that that is the nature of things. If the work we make following art school is not saleble it is because the public is uneducated. If the cognoscenti define important work as conceptual - that is, a nonvisual visual art - we make an effort to understand, not to challenge. When we are told that only twelve of us in teh city of nearly one million people (San Francisco) can make a living in the gallery system because we have chosen a difficult way of life, we believe it. It gets worse. According to these cognosenti, art is not a thing of value, it is the thing of value. We produce that incredibly valuable thing and we are tagged as a class of workers with the moniker "starving." And we accept it! Unlike other trained professionals, we have no expectation of having health insurance, a modieum of security, the ability to buy a home, have kids, send them to college, go out to dinner regularly, or even travel comfortably. Instead, our expectation is that we will have a second job or a partner to support us in order to do the work that transforms teh filthy rich into better people. My argument is that we toil in isolation and buy into the notion that the average person cannot really understand our noble sacrafice, or that it is beyond the intelligence and aesthetic sensibility of the public, because we have lost touch with the history of our profession, particularly as it relates to our life outside teh studio. In ordoer to become free artists we need to become free from the institutions that require our marginalization. We need to get back into the game of defining art ourselves, of teaching art independently of universities, of building movement with other members of the community and other artists, of controlling exhibitions, and enjoying direct and personal relationships with the public that artists of Michelangelo to teh Abstract Expressionist enjoyed. In short, we need to build alternative institutions that permit us to have say over what we do, what we make, and how it is distributed. Let's take a look, then, at parecon, a well-thought-out proposal for a participatory economy that would better serve the interests of artists as artists and as living, breathing members of communities. Briefly, I would like to touch upon the concepts of Worker Councils, Balanced Job Complexes, and Participatory Planning, and how each might impact our lives.
Worker Councils
Another word for participatory economics is democracy. Together with other artists and members of the community in which we live, we would decide what work would be produced and for what purpose. I can hear artists screaming bloody murder as I type: we don't want a "big brother" telling us what to do. Agreed. But we haven't been doing too well with the director either. In fact, it would be hypocritical to inveigh against a worker's council without first knowing something about how we are bossed around right now. Consider this, following World War II, a tiny handful of economic elites, by virtue of their right as property owners, together with their political and cultural allies, were able to direct and shape the lives of visual artists in the following ways:
* Important art and important careers - read a modicum of remuneration - had to be divorced from European influences.
* Art that suggested political comentary had to be displaced by art taht suggested psychological angst - read abstraction.
* The teaching of art had to be removed from teh studio and jurisdiction of the master artist and placed into the hands of corporate representatives or boards of trustees and into the university.
* The studio itself, once a locus of social and public activity, a place of exhibition and distribution, had to become the studio of the isolated, angst-probing artist. By the 1970's, the studio, as the workplace of the individual artist, was transformed further. It now resembled a factory, where teh studio floor was the work site of artists' assistants who followed the direction of artists who in turned collaborated with the investor/collecto r.
* By the late 1960s painting and easel painting, as far as "important work" was concerned, were declared "dead," thus weakening the individual artist's access to and control over his or her means of production.
The question in this: What is it that we want? With worker councils, we, as participant decision makers, would enjoy far more power over our work and our lives than we have yet experienced.
Balanced Job Complexes
The principle central to this concept is a priciple that most artists probably already accept: creative work is the province of every human being. As an artist interested in finding more people responsive to what I do, I find it a terribly exciting possibility that everyone might have the opportunity to engage in creative work themselves. Indeed, if my chances of making a livingas a creative person are under assault, as in fact they are, it is in my interest to have involved as many people as is possible in creative work; work not only where workers alo make decisions but work where the creative process is central to the work process. In helping to design balanced job complexes we would have much to contribute. Our work is not governed by teh clock. We make time for reflection. An aesthetic dimension is always paramount. Mind and body are not seperate. Could it be a rewarding experience to play a meaningful role helping to construct way of working rooted in the knowledge we possess? Might it be fulfilling to have this kind of ingoing discussion with the broader community? Might it broaden the intrest in what we do? Would these types of personal contacts be a welcomed balance to the isolation of the studio? Besides, artists are already deeply involved in what could be described as a balanced job complex. If we are painters, we are already photographers, web designers, mailing list managers, marketers, promoters, frame-makers, grant writers, and expert application makers. If we have jobs in addition to making art we are even more extended. In a participatory economy, much of the competitive work, such as making applications, might be reduced in favor of teaching and sharing our knowledge of design, color, writing, song, dance, theater, and various other aesthetic considerations with a population who have not had the opportunity, in their everyday lives, to explore the various ways they could creatively and rewardingly accomplish sociallyl useful tasks.
Participatory Planning
Participatory Planning is the negocation among workers' and consumers' councils that is intended to replace the market system of distribution, a system of distribution based upon price and one's ability to pay. It is important to recognize that while various market relations have exsisted practically forever, for most of human history social relations (kinship, communal, religious, and political) exsisted apart from the relationships of buying and selling. But we happen to live in a very unusual period, historically - one where virtually all social relations are embedded within the market, where decision about what we make, who gains access to it, how we live and use our time are determined by the impersonal imperatives of price and profit. But this is an historical anomaly, a convention that we can be changed. Second, the irony for artists in this regard is that the market relations that we enter in order to gain access to the material means of life are skewed to the advantage of thevery wealthy largely because planning mechanisms already have been inserted within the market. But these planning mechanisms, unlike the participatory model that Albert and Hahnel advocate, are exclusionary and elitist. If you have strong misgiving about challenging market forces of distribution, as an artist you ought to be quite upset already. The investors and owners of culture are quite adept as using an array of planning mechanisms - art commissions and auction houses that utalize market forces, for exampla - to control the goose that lays the golden egg. The question becomes, If market-planning mechanisms are already in place, why do we permit them to be controlled by a few whose interests run counter to ours? And arguably against the interests of many? If we are the goose that lays the golden egg, how does it come about that our precious golden egg is taken from us? With our cooperation? My suspicion is that we are too busy making art to take a good look at the institutional matrix that has us by the short hair. One example, along these lines, is our acceptance of one planning mechanism that was designed to mitigate against popular influence in the arts: the public benefit corporation, better known as the non-profit. Non-profits are planning mechanisms. They are run by community elites, generally with artists representation, for the purpose of protecting culture within a market environment from popularizing influences. The sociologist Paul DiMaggio notes that non-profits, while claiming service to the entire community, actually function to mystify art and seperate teh community from the world of art and artists. Alice Goldfarb Marquis concurs and points to the "high-art" worlds of museums, operas, and symphonies where financial and social elites use the non-profit planning mechanisms for the same purpose. She notes that this capturing of culture is often accomplished by "pasting an altruistic, morally chase veneer over basically self-serving activities." Wealthy donors and trustees, she explains further, have long aligned themselves with "liberal, reformist intellectuals and critis who see themselves as guardians of high culture" and who hae campaigned "against almost every artistic innovation of the past two centuries." The non-profit as planning instrument by the investor class may be most visible in the creation of "art centers." In teh creation of teh Lincoln Center in New York City and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, for example, redevelopment interests, together with cultural elites and non-profits, use teh rhetoric of public access around art to acquire monopoly control over the distribution of the art product. Ther "art centers" then become the stie for glitzy chic-chic art events in order to anchor the array of upscale hotels, restraunts, and retailers that return competitive dividends to real estate investors. Many of us work with non-profits and do our best to make them function in a way that serves the community. but I ask, Is it not teh case that we are always poor? That we are always beseeching the rich? That our non-profits are not dedicated to challenging the starving artist paradigm or amplifying public involvement as decision makers? Artists today canot have it both ways. We cannot run from parecon-type market alternatives in the name of artistic freedom and at the same time play our role as sidekicks within exsisting planning mechanisms that permit the wealthiest among us to direct and control all that we do.
Summary
I am not criticising the intention of artists. We contribute much to rallies, marches, and numerous exhibitions, plays, music, and stories that inveigh against war and injustice. My concern is that this art spirit is not part of an institutional critique. We need a critique of our institutions so that we can develop a concrete strategy to build new ones. Artists opposed to war, to use on example, might be more effective by using their creative talents to build institutions that make the kind of war in Iraq impossible The good artis and the justice good artists seek cannot exist unless we first create institutions that require both. Our history is replete with such transformations. While the Impression period is often referred to as teh moment where visual art was first didiculed and later accepted as precient, let us recall that it was ridiculed not by the unsophisticaed masses in need of education but by the educated and powerful whose control over culture had to be eliminated. Impressionism was a frontal assault to artists upon art institutions that, in the words of the rebellious artists, erected artificial barriers between themselves and the public. Ditto jazz, rock n' roll, and Beethoven. Recall also that Michelangelo said of a statue that is was only by the "light of the public squre" that it could be judged. The pont is that we as artists are of the public and we are of the community. No better. No worse. And together it is necessary for us to regain control over our lives in order to become the artists we wish to become. Our best chance is to create the institutions necessary to give our voice best purchase. Democratic institutions. Participatory economics. Parecon. Finally it is importatnt, I belive, to explore further the artistic sensibilities that were widespread one hundred years ago, sensibilities that suggested revolutions required dancing, that suggested that, if what we create is not a better world, what is the point of our work? Creating better institutions, ones in which our voices are heard meaningfully, is both our responsibility and a pragmatic solution. It must also be our art. As Bertlot Brecht said: Canalising a river Rafting a fruit tree Educating a person Tranforming a state These are instances of fruitful criticism And at the same time instances of art."
Linda - Well Senora is amazing. First of all the song is beautifully written and sung of course. I like the video, it's emotional and the imagery is different. Once again you prove so versatile. Please keep up the great work. I must say love your vision. ;) Scott
So, I'm fairly positive we all agree - we love your hair. Could you post a clearer image of your new hair, please? I'm overdue for a hair cut, and I think the way you have it may be becoming on me as well. Thanks!
I'm diggin the new page! Although your last banner was cool since it looked like something out of silence of the lambs, i'm definitely liken' this one better.
color makes a difference ;) ps. Congrats on the proposal! <3 madhatta
""Hey Linda... in case you havn't heard Tila just dropped the EGP, but we aren't taking it to bad we are actually relieved that she's gone so now we can actually focus on charity missions, but there is still one matter I want to discuss with you. Will you and Audrey join us to fight for the future or just brush it off like the world is perfect ? We are noe building an EGP website without Tila Tequila what so ever. I know you guys are friends, but I'm not really digging her self centered ways anymore so the question stands are you still up for the challenge ?""
LOL! Dont worry Brantley she'll drop it like everything else..you know, "retirement".
Hey Linda. I manage a fotolog about you... I upload, photos of you... There are many fotologs of different subjects, there are soooooooooo many like 50 or more form Audrey, ... and people like that. I'm the first one in making one of you... And more people get to know you through there... most of the users are latin people, so I think is good for your career in a small level :) But I see so many gorgeous pictures here of you, but I can't upload them to the fotolog cause they're very small... can you tell me a way to see them bigger? or could you please upload them in the normal size :( I hope it doesn't bother you... love you... I leave her the fotolog link, if you wanna look around: http://www.fotolo g.com/lindastrawb erry
i just read 'i'm retiring'...wow.. .we all have gifts, but some can grab them and touch others in ways beyond our thoughts. your voice and words grabbed me a year ago and helped me to shake myself clean of the self-imposed expectations of others. you did that without knowing that you did that, but you did and there is a place in me where you will forever be.
Hey Linda... in case you havn't heard Tila just dropped the EGP, but we aren't taking it to bad we are actually relieved that she's gone so now we can actually focus on charity missions, but there is still one matter I want to discuss with you. Will you and Audrey join us to fight for the future or just brush it off like the world is perfect ? We are noe building an EGP website without Tila Tequila what so ever. I know you guys are friends, but I'm not really digging her self centered ways anymore so the question stands are you still up for the challenge ?
""Hey Linda... in case you havn't heard Tila just dropped the EGP, but we aren't taking it to bad we are actually relieved that she's gone so now we can actually focus on charity missions, but there is still one matter I want to discuss with you. Will you and Audrey join us to fight for the future or just brush it off like the world is perfect ? We are noe building an EGP website without Tila Tequila what so ever. I know you guys are friends, but I'm not really digging her self centered ways anymore so the question stands are you still up for the challenge ?""
LOL, Don't worry Brantley she'll drop it like everything else.
I know this is quite in advance, but I was wondering if you were going to have any shows in Cali during about the third week in January? The band trip for my university is going out there then and I'm hoping I could finally see you live. Unless you want to make a trip out to the Midwest (Milwaukee or Chicago) for a show sometime, because that would be amazing.
You are really talented and seem pretty fun & interesting. (Just thought you should know).
i came over to start backing up all my content to move and read that we might be able to save uber.com !!!! this would rule! this is a site run by artists for artists. i dont want to lose it!!! there's nothing else like it out there. please help us save it by signing up or posting art or a blog.. its our art community!
I have had to postpone because i've had so much art work that i haven't had much time for Lovely Chaos Records. but i've bought myself some time so i'll be able to finish mastering and videos and artwork.. lipdistortion.com coming soon..
I'm so excited that i will have a new release very soon. I'm working hard to get it out as fast as i can. I hope you enjoy Senora and the video Justin Coloma made for it.
here's my latest drawing. for the Smashing Pumpkins. they are doing select shows all throughout august so check out the dates on smashingpumpkins.com these posters are going to be sold there. so go get one and try and find the strawberry i hid in it. ;)
ive been tongue tied steel cold walls self imposed you've been set on high, love and you're dangerously close to melting the current i dance up your legs i lick the heat you worship and i am hellbent to cut through a bitch gone silent in protest and the hours crust rust and mold your paradise bought with fools gold the cameras turn and you give them the angles its a slow dance that strangles i've hidden all my best ideas at the back of my throat i need you to help me untie them. ive been a model scientist i touched myself into a coma these drugs have got me uncrossing.. how could i ever deny them..
growing up is a strange thing. you can grow up suddenly in a space of a few days or slowly and steadily through a space of years. you never know. and when the change happens you can never go back nor would you want to. priorities change values change you start to want different things. im there right now. ive been arriving here for eight months. what used to turn me on just doesnt do it for me. its not exactly that im sick of myself haha. its actually that i love myself now and i am not so willing to throw myself into dangerous situations or damage myself to get somewhere im not even sure i want to go. or spend time with people i fear or people i know i wont like. ive had 6 years of reckless abandon in an industry and city that chews people up. now when i look around me i recognize the demons and destruction ive gotten to know them first hand. ive done the drugs. ive thrown the punches. i had such a childish romance with death.. now i feel that ive fallen in love with my life instead. im gonna stop trying to micromanage my future and im going to relax. this last year has taught me alot of things. who i am not anymore. who i dont want to become. who i really am. and what i want for my future. its not longer attractive to me to picture my life as a gypsy on the road with a broken heart or some bullshit that i read in a book that would kill my boredom. i want a much bigger life than that. what IS important is that i stop worrying and enjoy my life again. and have fun doing the things that i love to do. life is too short to worry. i need to roll with the punches. im anxious and excited to redefine what i am doing right now and to begin the next phase of what i hope to become very big life filled with all of the things i care about. i feel that this moment is like walking from one room to the next and shutting the door. and what demons and mistakes and scars are in that room can no longer hurt me. im retiring the girl who woke up wondering where she was still drunk. im retiring the girl who had to escape a producers house in the middle of the night and walk two miles home in hills shaking. im retiring the girl who did hard drugs in a shithole in silverlake. im retiring the girl who kept so much drama in her life that she wouldnt have to feel anything. im retiring the girl who played characters in order to be what she thought people wanted. im retiring the girl who gave herself to too many people who didnt deserve her. im retiring the lost girl who wrote the lost record and lost everything. im retiring the angry screaming terror that helped me fight for my life. im retiring the jaded girl who doesnt believe in anything or anyone. im retiring the girl who thought fame would bring her self worth. im retiring the girl who was careless with people and didnt take responsibility. im retiring the girl who would destroy everything and leave everything in ruin.
im leaving them behind. magnolia - the wild drunk party girl who sleeps in her heels and has too many lovers and who runs away faster than the gingerbread man... as if destruction were somehow glamorous. scarletta - the darkness, depressed, self obsessive, pity partying. thinks she's so much more complicated than anyone would ever understand. afraid of being plain. violent violet - the fighter. the one that will burn your house down. the one you dont fuck with. the one who survives anything. the razor sharp mouth.. the anger.
i dont need you girls anymore. but thankyou for getting me this far. im shutting the door on you.
my life is beautiful because im letting it be beautiful. and im allowing it to happen. and im taking all the good lessons. of hard work. patience. passion. fire. and faith with me. i want to spend my time doing what makes me happy.. whatever that is.
oh... and i love my justin for helping me see myself in this light and for giving me the opportunity to not have to fight and to remember how to be peaceful and happy.
girls, the right guy will always build you up and support you. only the shitheads will ask you to compromise yourself. trust me ive done my time in that jail cell.
my dad told me this story the other day when i was frustrated.
there once was a woman who woke up and only had three hairs left on her head so she said well, i guess ill have to braid my hair today.. and she went on and had a great day
the next morning she woke up and she only had two hairs left... she said well i guess ill have to part it in the middle today and she went on and had a wonderful day
the next morning she woke up and there was only one hair left.. she said well i guess ill have to do a mohawk today.. and went on and had an amazing day
the next morning she woke up and she was completely bald.. and she said oh great! i guess i dont have to do my hair today and went on and had an excellent day..
justin and i went to the beauty bar to celebrate with audrey (our lovely pink roommate) because she has a special tshirt out with ronysphotobooth.com and they are doing events at all the beauty bars. they had 3 dollar martinis that were really yum.. and i ate a weed lollipop so about an hour in i started feeling really "special" im not the party animal i once was but i still love a good party with wierd people and good drinks. i especially love parties where people are dressed really strangely. i love how alot of hipsters here in hollywood are wearing glasses like the ones my mom wore in the eighties. my mom rules so i back it.. and lauren paez is a babe.
