Art, Film & Politics on the North Shore

Hey Gang,

To read news about the arts in St. Tammany and surrounding parishes, visit my blog at Nola.com's St. Tammany Arts weblog.

Read about the business of filmmaking in the Greater New Orleans region at Nola.com's The Business of Film weblog, with reporting from me and Milena Merrill.

Or check out the latest activities of progressive, liberal Democrats on the North Shore at http://blog.nola.com/democrats/.

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My Other Blog...
Category: Art and Photography

Hello again, all, after a longish absence in the myspace blogosphere.
I'm just posting to tell you all about where I've been writing.

In November 2006, I began working with the North Shore Bureau of www.nola.com to report on the arts in St. Tammany Parish.  Nola.com is the online presence of the Times-Picayune, the 170-year-old New Orleans newspaper that won 4 Pulitzer Prizes, two Excellence in Journalism awards, and is home of Chris Rose, a finalist in Pulitzer's 2006 commentary category. 

I will be sharing news in all disciplines of the arts, plus artist opportunities (regional and international calls for art) as well as studio and performance education at the St. Tammany Art Association.

For weekly information on what's happening in St. Tammany Arts, click:  http://sttammanyarts.blogs.nola.com/

I will also soon begin posting information on the Business of Film blog, also at nola.com.  There you will find information relating to filmmaking in Louisiana, especially in Southeast Louisiana, plus industry news and artist opportunities.  Stay tuned.

Forward at will and send me your news!
Roberta

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Michigan professor speaks out

(a la Dr. Zoidberg) Already with the second posting! As I said, it's letters I write, so they're the source at the moment. This is another non-personal one that may interest ya'll.So there's this professor at Michigan State, apparently, who wrote an open letter... Aw, I'll let the sender set it up:

"Well, what do we have here. Looks like a small case of some people being able to dish it out, but not take it. Let's start at the top. The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman.Wichman sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student's Association. The e-mail was in response to the students' protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were "hate speech." Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following:

Dear Moslem Association: As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey!), burning's of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called "whores" in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France.

This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many, many of my colleagues. I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile "protests."

If you do not like the values of the West -- see the 1st Amendment -- you are free to leave. I hope for God's sake that most of you choose that option. Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.
Cordially, I. S. Wichman, Professor of Mechanical Engineering"

"Well! As you can imagine, the Muslim group at the university didn't like this too well. They're demanding Wichman be reprimanded and mandatory diversity training for faculty and a seminar on hate and discrimination for freshman. How nice.

But now the Michigan chapter of CAIR has jumped into the fray. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently doesn't believe that the good professor had the right to express his opinion. For its part, the university is standing its ground. They say the e-mail was private, and they don't intend to publicly condemn his remarks.
That will probably change.
Wichman says he never intended the e-mail to be made public, and wouldn't have used the same strong language if he'd known it was going to get out.

How's the left going to handle this one? If you're in favor of the freedom of speech, as in the case of Ward Churchill, will the same protections be demanded for Indrek Wichman? I doubt it.

Hey folks, send this to everybody and ask them to do the same and tell them to keep passing it around till the whole country gets it. We are in a war. What happened to our freedom of speech???

My response: As a member of "The Left", I'll answer. We'll back professor Wichman in his right to express his opinion. Free speech is necessary for a healthy democracy, and we--the ACLU, Common Cause, Public Citizen, Air America-- are the ones saying so. Why does the questioner doubt it?

Because it's anyone's guess what CONGRESS will say about it, and you won't hear the rest of us on FOX News. Many of the Dems want to represent the majority of us but are stymied by lobbyists and cronies. Both parties quickly lose touch when public policy has a cash value, and if you want to get ANYthing done, you'll play along.

Our "representatives" have given themselves raises for eight years, while keeping the minimum wage stuck in 1997. Redistricting (a la Tom DeLay) has resulted in a 98ncumbency rate. You put it together.

The public leaders, educators and scientists who DO represent my notions of good government don't get an audience with this administration. Then they're pushed to the margins of mass media, so you won't hear what we're all talking about unless you make an active search for it.

Oh, and with the Snowe Dorgan Bill passing out of committee last week to the Senate (see below attached), your access to information on the Internet is about to get more expensive, if not impossible.

Whoever wrote the email was right--we ARE in a war. Business controlling government and access to information...we've seen this one before, folks. PLEASE be concerned about it.

230 years and counting...Happy Independence Day*
Roberta

*with dependence on China

FROM MOVEON.ORG
Your senator, David Vitter, was the deciding vote AGAINST Internet freedom during a key vote yesterday in the Senate Commerce Committee.

The committee voted 11 to 11 on the Snowe/Dorgan proposal to preserve Net Neutrality one vote shy of passage. Your senator voted to let companies like AT&T put tollbooths on the Internet and gain more control over what you see and do online. The fight to preserve the free and open Internet now moves to the full Senate.

Please call Sen. Vitter today and say "shame on you" for opposing the Snowe-Dorgan Internet freedom proposal. Tell him to oppose any bill in the full Senate that doesn't protect Net Neutrality.

Here is the number: Senator David Vitter Phone: 202-224-4623Please click here to let us know you called and to share how it went:http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1885&tg=FSLA_2&cp_id=344&id=8146-2874211-72RqLfvsnWJw9HZWr7Ji.g&t=2After you call your senator's Washington, D.C. office, you can also call your local district office by clicking the above link. If you get voicemail, you can leave a message they will get it.


Senator Vitter took $12,000 in contributions this election cycle from big telecommunications companies, according to www.opensecrets.org, and then sided with them in yesterday's vote.

Senators who voted yesterday had a clear choice between siding with big money or siding with their constitutents. While 1 million everyday people petitioned Congress to save Net Neutrality, big telecommunications companies like AT&T gave nearly 1 million dollars in campaign contributions to members of the Senate Commerce Committee this election cycle. Politicians need to be held accountable for making the wrong choice.

Thanks for keeping the pressure on Congress as we fight to save the Internet.Eli Pariser, Adam Green, Noah T. Winer, and the MoveOn.org Civic Action teamThursday, June 29th, 2006

6:57 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Trashing artists

Hello friends,
Well, this is my first blog post, and in keeping with my grousing nature, I'm putting up an email from one of my brothers, and my grouse-y response.
Emails to friends and family seem all I have time for these days, so what the hell--I'll just put the opinions here too. Maybe it'll lead to some useful dialogue.

SUBJECT: Denzel Washington, and Brooks ArmyMedicalCenter

The Media Missed this one!!!! Please read this, then send it to everybody you know. They'll thank you as they forward this to others as well.

Don't know whether you heard about this but Denzel Washington and
his family visited the troops at Brook ArmyMedicalCenter, in
San Antonio,Texas(BAMC) the other day. This
is where soldiers who have been evacuated from
Germany come to be hospitalized in the United
States, especially burn victims. There are some
buildings there called Fisher Houses. The Fisher
House is a Hotel where soldiers' families can stay,
for little or no charge, while their soldier is staying
in the Hospital. BAMC has quite a few of these houses
on base, but as you can imagine, they are almost filled
most of the time.

While Denzel Washington was visiting BAMC, they gave
him a tour of one of the Fisher Houses. He asked how
much one of them would cost to build. He took out his check
book and wrote a check for the full amount right there
on the spot. The soldiers overseas were amazed to hear
this story and want to get the word out to the American
public, because it warmed their hearts to hear it.


The question I have is why does someone as insignificant as :
Alec Baldwin, Madonna, Sean Penn and
other Hollywoodtypes make front page news with their anti-everything
America trash yet Denzel Washington's Patriotism doesn't even make page 3 in the Metro section of any newspaper except the Local newspaper in SanAntonio.

A true American and friend to all in uniform! This needs as wide a distribution as we can create.
GOD BLESS YOU, DENZEL, FOR YOUR PATRIOTISM


My response:

It reads like an urban legend, and so it partly is:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/denzel.asp


I don't know when Baldwin or Madonna last made front page NEWS anywhere, (just entertainment mags, probably), but the last thing I read about Sean Penn was in The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane history professor who witnessed Penn's patriotism first-hand as they navigated the filthy waters of a flooded New Orleans, rescuing people from rooftops.
Penn was down here for days working to save his fellow countrymen and was viewed as quite patriotic to people around here. I don't know if he wrote any checks, but he did write open letters to the Bush administration and publicly criticized them frequently-- again, the acts of a patriot who loves his country and hates to see it abused.

This chain mail is just another attempt to denigrate lefties, especially left-leaning figures in the entertainment industry who express their politics publicly...a practice that has baffled me ever since I first heard people like Rush, O'Reilly and all manner of pundits who deliver scorn upon artists for doing so.
Tell me, why exactly shouldn't artists speak freely? I suppose they're not entitled to free speech just because they have microphones thrust at them all the time?
Indeed, it seems quite responsible to take those opportunities to say something significant.

Why are "Hollywood types" criticized so harshly (and by the way, that term is used for all kinds of liberals, which includes some of the poorest Americans)?
Why is criticism of the Bush administration _so_ offensive to neo-cons?
Because neocons take _personally_ any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy.*

For centuries, it has been the artists who spoke critically of leadership--from court jesters (who were EXPECTED to criticize their king to help him gain perspective) to stand-up comedians (if it weren't for guys like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, there might be no HBO...and dammit, I gotta have my HBO).

There is the argument that artists should just shut up and entertain--well, if it's a dancing monkey you want, look to Britney Spears (a self-proclaimed Bush supporter). You can have her.
But some of us want a little more from our artists than mere T&A.

* a snip from an article by Dr. Craig Roberts, former Asst. Secty of the Treasury for Economic Policy and contributor to the Wall Street Journal and National Review: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7056

...and another snip, that, if you've read this far, might be compelling:
"Because of the triumph of delusional "new conservatives" and the demise of the liberal media, this war is different from the Vietnam war. As more Americans are killed and maimed in the pointless carnage, more Americans have a powerful emotional stake that the war not be lost and not be in vain. Trapped in violence and unable to admit mistake, a reckless administration will escalate.
"The rapidly collapsing US dollar is hard evidence that the world sees the US as bankrupt. Flight from the dollar as the reserve currency will adversely impact American living standards, which are already falling as a result of job outsourcing and offshore production. The US cannot afford a costly and interminable war.
"Falling living standards and inability to impose our will on the Middle East will result in great frustrations that will diminish our country."
~Roberta

6:32 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment