This land is my land, this land is your land

Yes I know I am a day late. I had been planning on writing something about Thanksgiving. Lucky for me because today I was following the story of Maurice Clemmons, the cop-killer in the Seattle-area. I used to live in that area so I was curious. I noticed on the sidebar of the story that Sarah Palin supposedly misquoted John Wooden. Well Coach Wooden is one of the classiest men to ever live even if his team used to beat up on my alma mater so I had to check out that story.

The story being that Palin's book attributes leftist-Native American's quote to UCLA's John Wooden. Well I could see so much wrong with the story and the subject. Here's a clue about me, I am native American and a First American. I and everyone else who was, or will be, born and raised in America is a native American, however you have to have a certain ancestry to indigenous peoples to be a First American.

Okay so most people think that is only a small, semantic point but if you are one of us it is just another way to make us disappear into the population as a whole. The government policy used to be called "assimilation" which was another word for elimination of our culture and who we are. Assimilation was supposedly to help 'Indians' 'up out of'' their culture, 'up to' American civilization by 'eliminating Indian' practices and language 'from the savage'.

My great-grandfather was shipped off to Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania. At the age of twelve, on his third attempt at running away, finally made it all the way back to Oklahoma by hopping trains and walking at night so he would not be caught and sent back. True he never received a full education and when he was older he would have to have his teenage children drive his automobiles as he and his wife did not know how to drive. He failed in business when he tried to run a store. He wanted his children to speak the languages that he spoke, that he had learned from his father. Unluckily only two of his children wanted to learn their own language instead of English.

To conservatives and to liberals please stop belittling the First Peoples of the Americas. We are not going away and we are who we are. Our population is actually growing. What scares U.S. "Americans" is that the "Americans" from outside of borders imposed by the U.S. will outnumber any other U.S. population group in less than a decade. If population movements continue at similar rates Spanish will be the mother tongue of the majority of the people in the U.S. in forty years. That scares some people so much that they are trying to legislate a new apartheid in this country and stop the flow of people into the country from south of the border.

This does bring us back to Thanksgiving. Did you know that seven years after the first Thanksgiving that the colonists of Plymouth, with an influx of more English settlers every year, decimated the 'Indians' who helped them survive that first year. Just like Adolf Hitler they claimed that they needed more land to live.

Ever since then what we have had has been cut apart and taken away from us. Oh and by the way Sarah Palin, John Wooden Legs' grandparents died for the same land as my great grandparents and great-great grandparents died for but your ancestors were shooting at them and the buffalo that they depended upon.

If you see me and come over and say "How", you can expect me to say "Adios amigo". But if you say "o-e", "hello", "ni hao", "guten tag", "bonjour" or even "hi" we might just have a pleasant conversation. Just like my ancestors I believe we can share the land if you won't be hostile.

Pricing Masterpieces

I actually have many things that I note, thinking that I will write about them. This month it came down to two items related to art that I chose. I had a cousin get in touch with me on Facebook. It has been over 10 years (its approaching 10 years since I moved back from the west coast) since I have seen her as she lives in a different state. The news is that she is now going to art school and is sculpting.

Well I checked out her sculpture portfolio and the comments gave me a couple of things to comment on. I have been over educated in art some would say, but I have a couple of things to say about critiquing work of and by students. "Wow!" and "Beautiful", one word replies to art were never sufficient in a critique that I have lead. If you can't help the artist by what you say, don't show your limitations also. Stroking an ego does not really help an artist. Tell them what takes your breath away or what makes the art beautiful so that they consider the comment and let it help them.

I once was setting up an exhibit and there was a young man and woman looking at the work. The young woman actually looked at all the pieces and then told me that,"I wish I could take pictures like that because every time you took a photo you captured a story at that right instant." The young man who had been trying to talk to her and have her attention piped in, "Yeah they're cool." Hmmh, I wonder which statement helps me as an artist.

The other thing that bugged me in the comments on my cousin's artworks were I found where she mentioned that all the images were of student work. Who puts it into the minds of students that if they produce work while in school it is not as valuable as after they have their degree. I was exhibiting my artwork even during my undergraduate days, true what I exhibited was not created for assignments but that really shouldn't even matter. As long as professor's don't create the work for a student it should not matter that someone who was a student made the work. What should matter is the quality of the work.

No one ever tells a professor that the work they create while they are teaching is teacher work. Professors are expected to produce up to a high standard or they are not given tenure. It's the same for students if they don't produce up to a high enough standard they do not get their degree. If an artist creates a masterpiece while they are a student it will not be remembered in a hundred years that it was student work. The term "student work" is usually used to devalue artwork by those who have financial considerations at mind unless it is someone applying for a professorship who is trying to show off his students' work.

The other thing I wished to comment on was Shepard Fairey who is having to protect himself from a photojournalist on the right to use an image of Barack Obama for the "HOPE" poster created for the Barack Obama presidential campaign. The photojournalist has the Associated Press waging the war for him that he created the image. Shouldn't Barack's parents weigh in and tell the AP photographer that, no, they created Barack Obama originally so unless he altered Barack Obama he owes them money, the money he earned. It is funny that Fairey was defending himself at his exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh for having used someone else's image. A videotape of Fairey at that museum in itself should have been brought as evidence in the case, if there ever was an artist that defined "fair use" law it was Andy Warhol.

Don't get me wrong I am for defending intellectual property of photographers but the photographer was just snapping the shutter at a press conference but he did not screenprint with very deliberate coloration and add the word "HOPE" to his black and white image that ran at less than a quarter page in size. The intellectual property that is being offended is Fairey's by a frivolous lawsuit that will put him in debt for the rest of his life even if he wins. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis should have used American lawyers to fight John Heartfield's right to create his montages from other people's images. They could have put him out of business sooner.

If you see me critiquing your work, listen because I will say what makes my opinion of it as a viewer. Remember I am not going to stroke your ego but I will try to help you.

Creating Fiction

I am currently working on two projects. One a thriller novel regarding an individual and genocide right out of contemporary events and the other a visual arts project about "middle" or "average" America. When I take on projects I do a lot of reading so that I am informed and also to study to create the best possible art that I can.

For the novel I have been reading a very good book, "The Lie That Tells A Truth" by John Dufresne. I have found this book really helpful although I have to admit that "writer's block" does not seem to be inflicted on me like it is with other authors. I have been encouraged to write because friends have always said that I can create these great story subjects with good characters that I should get them published. Well when I took up the dare it was not hard to complete stories as I usually like to research and create believable stories from a world of facts that is then given real characters with a specific plot.

What alarmed me with this book was that the author attacked the writer Ayn Rand as a poor writer because the writing has a political motivation. While Ayn Rand's writing can be difficult to read and is dated I would have to say that Rand's been more read than Dufresne and is not any more polemic than Doesteyevsky who Dufresne quotes at least several times. I understand that Rand is hard to read from when I was assigned The Fountainhead in high school and I tried to read Atlas Shrugged during college.

Besides this shortcoming I find Dufresne has plenty of good advice to writers.

The book I read for my visual art project is "The Big Sort; The Clustering of America and Why it is Tearing Us Apart" by Bill Bishop. This book should be read to understand politics in America and the problems that we have in America. We have fragmented ourselves and then been targeted by consumerism in all parts of our lives that we do not want to realize that their may be a different America outside of our neighborhood. America today believes in diversity as long as the others do not disturb me and my neighbors who will decide who is in our neighborhood. These same Americans do not understand that they actually buy into the consumed America per the targeting of corporations, churches and political parties instead of their own original independent ideas.

I guess in both projects I am trying to show created worlds in hopes of creating a better world so I guess that I am like Ayn Rand and Doesteyevsky (and probably Mr. Dufresne) in that concern.

Remember if you see me writing in my notebook I may be putting you in a novel so wave and check your local bookstore in a year or so, although I will use the "characters and events in this work are fictional" disclaimer.

The Answers That I Wanted?

As I am proud of stating, I am an exile in my homeland but in my life I have travelled across the globe. In college I studied other cultures and I made it my purpose in life to try to understand other peoples.

Some people would say that I have lived quite the privileged life going places that others dream of going to once in their lifetime. I have actually been to places where I am the only one of my "skin color" and the only one there in years so I was truly a curiosity to everyone else. In these situations you are neither real or not real, but an idea on two legs.

I was someone that no one had met but they all knew what I was, because being an American is being known worldwide. I am kind of a no one, a minor artist of small distinction, so there was no way that in the distant reaches that I have been that my work was known, let alone me. But being a different complexion from natives made me a foreigner and when discovered that I was an American I became "wealthy and caring" and apparently "famous" if I could travel to where they were.

I try not to ask questions in such situations but rather observe. Enough questions are asked of me and I want to learn through observation about those I visit. Even if I asked questions would I not just get the answers that I wanted. I have learned that it is better to be a nobody who takes notes (with a camera or a pencil).

In a foreign country this is easy but when I am in America I blend in and it is more difficult to observe as an outsider and people want to involve me, but not be recorded. This is partly because of Americans sense of personal independence / space that mistrusts observation as if it is a way of trying to take something precious, their independence from them.

You can't call it an issue of pride as I have observed more proud people that live in abject poverty compared to average Americans. Typically I have discovered that those who are impoverished are more willing to share themselves because it is the only real thing that they have to share. The people I have visited are proud of themselves, their families, hometowns and countries no matter what we think of their situation. Some of the people I have visited live in nations where they are constantly observed. Other people live in such remote places that no one cares about their lives to observe them or take the time to visit them.

There are lessons to be learned from people who are literally only numbers that are managed and other people who are not even numbers. I am an exile in America because of who I am and that I choose to try to be outside of my culture to observe, a foreigner, trying to glean some insight into my own culture and this makes me a suspicious figure to the Americans.

I often refer to my cultural heritage as being "mut" as I am a mixture. A term for a creature of no pure breeding. Due to my complexion I fit in with the majority and because of racial, cultural and socio-economic background I am accepted by minorities.

I live in an area that is a hotbed against illegal immigration even though borders are distant, immigrants relatively few, but an area that is proud of its history of ingenious, tough pioneers that were illegal settlers. They have legislated their animosity against new immigrants to their part of the American Dream.

When I visit foreign countries "educated" people are always proud to share their ability to communicate in English, usually taught to them in a more pure form than the dialect I hear at home. In America we try to insist that immigrants learn "our" language and complain that we can not understand foreigners' accents (my aging father detests English actors because he can not understand them).

Americans call up telephone call centers in foreign countries because something we have (an item or a question) needs to be fixed at that moment. Americans state that they become angry because the operator on the other end of the line, who earns a smaller income but is typically as educated or more than the American, can not be understood.

Dignity is not what you have but how you act and the most dignified people tend to be hungry but happy to have a life.

If you see me sketching something come over and have a look.

No I don't endorse animal consumption of alcohol

I am starting this blog out with a piece I created last year but is now appropriate for other reasons, the automobile company bailouts. The piece is entitled "Found On Road Dead."

I am not trying to draw a link between an autombile company and the consumption of alcohol or animals instead I understand why one company did not accept a government bailout. The company realized that if they could survive a recession without the government telling them how they would come out of it better than the other American automobile companies they would have something better than the others. The overly marketed and thus "conscientious"American consumer could be pursuaded to buy a bailout-free vehicle even if the consumer was still in debt and piling up more credit if they can find it. That's how our corporate model and economy work now.

I am not endorsing or criticizing this American automobile company. I am trying to point out corporate responsibility goes as far as the profit margin. While I sell artwork and life since it is art also I am the wrong person for endorsements as I prefer being anonymous here. I am an American from the middle of nowhere that can fit into the crowd just about anywhere in this country.

Okay I do not endorse mixing alcohol with driving automobiles (call a cab if you party). I do not endorse animals consuming alcohol (whoever sold it to them should be closed) or animals driving automobiles (whether they have consumed alcohol or not). I do however endorse alcohol when consuming animals. The appropriate beverage per the fruit of the glaze on a roasted duck or bourbon or whiskey on barbecue beef or smoked ham is delicious.

I know I will catch some heat for this endorsement from vegetarians and animal lovers. My doctor should not worry about these culinary choices as the alcohol cooks out with the heat. I mean the heat from the cooking. As for the heat I might take from vegetarians and animal lovers that is my decision that I will live with anonymously (at least I don't have to share the meal with them so I can have more). By the way I love my pets and I watch the livestock fattening up, I care for both sets of animals.

I don't have to worry about what I endorse however because I am the best and worst commercial endorsement vehicle. I am anyone, everyone and no one with my anonymity. No one will pay me because they can not be sure if I endorse the product, who would be reached by my endorsement and what else I might endorse. People don't have to buy what I am selling.

If you think you see me, smile and wave. I'll smile and wave back.