Dream of Life: Patti Smith

The phenomenal Patti Smith [born Patricia Lee Smith] turns 63 today. Below is a remarkable video of her on the 80's children's television program "Kids Are People Too," featuring a performance of the 1977 mega pop hit "You Light Up My Life" with composer Joe Brooks. Tonight and New Year's Eve, she'll be appearing with her band at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City. Rock on Patti.



more [Wikipedia entry]

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James Brown May 3, 1933-December 25, 2006

[Four days late, we mark the second anniversary of the death of singer/composer/performer James Brown with a YouTube of "Sex Machine" from his 1970 album by the same name.]

Write Now

[for your consideration:]

The New Republic
Write Now
Mark I. Pinsky
Why Barack Obama should resurrect the Federal Writers Project and bail out laid-off journalists.

Monday, December 08, 2008

Read On

[image from google search for 'typewriter.' The site on which the image was found includes a link to Cornelius' song "typerite lesson." ]

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Fall 2008 Grants

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, a trail blazing leader in support of artist-centered initiatives, recently published a list of their Fall 2008 Grant Awardees.

The 'Stream' congratulates the recipients!

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Fall 2008 Grants Awardees

[image from google search for 'Andy Warhol.' Caption: "Andy Warhol. Marilyn Monroe."]

Phil Ochs

"Philip David Ochs (December 19, 1940–April 9, 1976) was a U.S. protest singer (or, as he preferred, a "topical singer"), songwriter, musician, journalist and recording artist who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and haunting voice. He wrote hundreds of songs in the 1960s and released eight LP record albums in his lifetime."

Below, a performance of his anti-war anthem,"I Ain't Marching Anymore," still relevant today, regrettably, as the Obama administration prepares to scale up the war in Afghanistan.



[Biographical notes from WiKipedia entry. Click here to listen to tracks from his exquisite 1967 album, "Pleasures of the Harbor," his most lyrical, existential work.]

Hanging Chads 2008 edition: you be the judge

Check it out: a four part interactive feature from Minneosata Public Radio on the challenged ballots in the razor thin U.S. Senate contest between Senator Norm Coleman and media personality Al Franken.

Click here to compare notes and cast your votes.

[graphic from MPR Web site.]

"... street furniture, outdoor advertising, and pedestrians ..."

Metropolitan Museum of of Art
New York, New York

New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940
September 23, 2008–January 4, 2009
The Howard Gilman Gallery

In the late 1930s, Rudy Burckhardt—then a recent émigré to America from Switzerland—created what are today considered to be some of the greatest photographs of New York ever made. This exhibition will present in its entirety a unique album (acquired by the Museum in 1972) of 67 now-classic images of street furniture, outdoor advertising, and pedestrians, selected and sequenced by Burckhardt in 1940."

[image from Met Web site. Caption: "Rudy Burckhardt (American, born Switzerland, 1914–1999), "Eagle" Barber Shop Window, New York City], 1939. Gelatin silver print; 7 1/16 x 9 11/16 in. (17.9 x 24.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Florance Waterbury Bequest, 1972 (1972.585.12) © Estate of Rudy Burckhardt."]

Sol LeWitt

Mass MoCa
1040 Mass MoCA Way
North Adams MA 01247

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective

through 2033

more

[graphic from MoCa Web site. Caption: "Wall Drawing 86: Ten thousand lines about 10 inches (25 cm) long, covering the wall evenly. June 1971. Black pencil. Private collection."]

Fight the H8 With Love!

"Fight the H8 With Love. Take the day off work and volunteer to be of service."

[Graphic from Day Without A Gay Web site.]

Craft Hackers

Fri, Dec 12, 2008 | 7:30 PM
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002



Craft Hackers
Modertated by Marisa Olson

$6 Members, $8 General Public

Craft Hackers is a panel discussion among artists who use crafting techniques to explore high-tech culture and the relationship between needlework and computer programming. Panelists include Cat Mazza, who translates moving images into stills knit in yarn; Christy Matson, who uses Jacquard Looms (some of the earliest computers) to knit landscape images from computer games; Ben Fino-Radin, whose witty needlepoint sculptures translate the World Wide Web into yarn and plastic, one pixel at a time; and Cody Trepte, whose embroidery of retired computer punch cards rekindles an old-fashioned love affair with the hand of the artist.


[graphic: embroidered punch card by Cody Trepte]

Door to Door Poetry

Machine Project
1200 D North Alvarado Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026
213-483-8761

Poetry Delivery Service this Sunday

"In the spirit of giving this holiday season, Joshua Beckman, our December Poet in Residence, will be offering free door-to-door poetry deliveries at certain times throughout the month. The first installment of the Poetry Delivery Service will be this Sunday, December 7th between the hours of 1-5pm. Deliveries will be made exclusively on foot to homes or other locations within a 1 mile radius of Machine Project. More info and the number of the Poetry Phone request line here:
machineproject.com/events/2008/12/05/poetrydeliveryservice."

[graphic from Machine Project Web site.]

Vintage Tom Waits at 59

From Wikipedia: "Thomas Alan Waits (born 7 December 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car."

[YouTube video from AquaticBigfoot of a vintage 1977 performance of Tom Traubert's Blues.]

Dave Brubeck Take 88

On the occasion of the eighty eighth anniversary of pianist and band leader Dave Brubeck we post a video of the jazz classic and surprise 1959 hit "Take Five," a composition by saxophonist Paul Desmond, featured in a post last month on the 'Stream.']

Proposition 8 - The Musical

[With thanks to KMcL in NYC for the scouting tip, below, a witty piece of star-studded Old School entertainment + 21st century, media-savvy activism.]

Photography and Depression

New Orleans Museum of Art
One Collins C. Diboll Circle
City Park
New Orleans, Louisiana 70124
Photography and Depression
Through March 1, 2009

"... an examination of depression in all its forms, including mental and financial, through 82 works from the Museum's permanent collection.

Featured artists include a virtual who's who of photography, including Ansel Adams, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Dorothea Lange, Danny Lyon, Eadweard Muybridge, George Tice, Alfred Stieglitz, Weegee and many more.

The works are accompanied by text excerpted from Culture and Depression, a 1985 book by Dr. Arthur M. Kleinman, the distinguished professor, psychiatrist, medical and social anthropologist who is also the director of the Asia Center at Harvard University.

... organized by [NOMA] Curator of Photography, Diego Cortez...."

[photo from museum Web site.]

World AIDS Day

[On the occasion of World AIDS Day, we re-publish in full the article below Agence France-Presse – AFP.

Graphic also from AFP. Click to enlarge.]

Go back to basics, says UN ahead of World AIDS Day
November 28, 2008

GENEVA (AFP) — The United Nations on Friday urged countries to focus on the roots of the AIDS epidemic and draw on a panoply of tried-and-tested tools to help prevent HIV spreading among groups of people who most at risk.

"There is no single magic bullet for HIV prevention, but we can choose wisely from the known prevention options available so that they can reinforce and complement each other," said Peter Piot, the outgoing executive director of UNAIDS.

Launching a report ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1, Piot called for understanding how the most recent HIV infections were happening and why they occurred in the first place.

"Not only will this approach help prevent the next 1,000 infections in each community, but it will also make money for AIDS work more effectively and help put forward a long term and sustainable AIDS response," he said.

Unlike previous years, UNAIDS did not give any fresh figures for the number of infections and deaths ahead of World AIDS Day, saying the relevant data had not yet been amassed.

Statistics published ahead of the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City in August say that around 33 million people had the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 2007, in a range of 30.3 to 36.1 million.

Around 2.7 million people became infected, or on average around 7,500 people per day, while deaths were estimated at around two million.

Speaking at a press briefing, UNAIDS' director of evidence, monitoring and policy, Paul De Lay, said that so-called "combination prevention" -- which involves a behavioural, biomedical and structural approach to treatment -- was key to tackling the epidemic.

A biomedical approach could include male circumcision, or using anti-retrovirals to prevent mother-to-child transmission, while behavioural approach could include encouraging condom use or reducing the number of sexual partners.

"The epidemic is constantly changing, and therefore the analyses of new infections must be undertaken at regular intervals," he said.

Attention had to remain focussed on the most high-risk communities such as sex workers, injecting drug users and gay men, De Lay said.

Meanwhile, two leading organisations shone the spotlight on access to antiretroviral drugs, which can turn HIV from a death sentence to a manageable disease.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on Friday announced that two million people living with HIV had now been reached with the lifeline treatment through programmes it supports, an increase of 43 percent increase over a year ago.

The Global Fund provides nearly a quarter of all international resources to fight AIDS.

In another development, the International AIDS Society (IAS), which organises the big international conferences, called on the Group of Eight (G8) to stand by their pledge, set down at their Gleneagles summit in 2005, for universal access to antiretroviral drugs by 2010.

"Based on the G8's own reporting at its July 2008 meeting in Hokkaido, Japan the IAS has calculated that G8 countries have, to date, pledged approximately 22.2 billion specifically for global HIV programmes between 2008 and 2010," the IAS said.

"This amount is just 36 percent of the UNAIDS-estimated 61 billion dollars that is needed over this period."

At the end of 2007, some three million people had access to antiretrovirals, marking a major upturn in previous years, but this was still two-thirds short of a goal of universal access of 2010 enshrined by the UN and supported by the G8.