Now where did I put that damn bandana?

So I picked up this book on anarchy which has gotten me thinking alot about politics, more so than usual I suppose, and has me wondering exactly what kind of benefits each system has.By each system I mean capitalism vs. socialism, vs. libertarianism, vs. anarchy. Some of you may stop here and say " but wait, anarchy isnt a system, its the absence of all systems" and while you'd mostly be right its not just about getting rid of the government to leave us to function on our own in the same way we functioned before. Its more about an entire change in the social structure of things. Its a change in the views towards community, governing forces, labor, workers, the force of the middle class, the force of the aristocracy, and all those things in society that place any group or individual above the rest. Its about operating on a smaller, far more individualistic scale only without power being afforded to any one individual. Now I havent read much about it before and I am not finished reading the book Im currently reading, so I dont have the fullest understanding I could of anarchy, but Im getting there. Am I an anarchist? Probably not. Am I going to be breaking out my old black hoodie and donning a bandana around my mouth to protest the protests? Not likely any time soon. But the thing thats getting me lately, which caused me to pick up the book I did is that society as I see it is just totally loosing sight of reality. Its stuck in corporate propoganda, reality television, any quick fix it can find, and it seems as if its also stuck in the search for what things were like in "the good old days" and how to get back to that through conservative policy and patriotism. And the thing is; thats bullshit. The good old days are this myth utilized as an excuse for not thinking and not changing. There was nothing good about the good old days. Women were stuck in roles that men saw fit for them, blacks and other minorities were stuck in roles that whites saw fit for them, people died from things as basic as the flu( some still do), the cold war was on, the red scare was at a fever pitch, the government was (and is still) using flimsy excuses to invade countries that were operating against their designs and sex education or lack thereof was leaving poor women pregnant, abandoned, confused, and sometimes sterile ( thanks to anti abortion laws). Now admittedly not all that happened at once, but if you use anything more than 20 years ago to fill the definition for "the good old days" you can easily see how troubled those days were. Now of course some of you may say "but mary, if your for progress, how come you have something against corporations?, after all they are just the progress of a businesses into success" and in a way you'd be right. Technically I am against large corporations and conglomorations, but the key is the manner in which they are handled, not the fact that they are sucessful businesses. It bothers me that they have enough power to run small businesses out of town, it bothers me that many of them (not all) have policies that are more about making a cheap saleable product than making sure their workers have health insurance, it bothers me that if they are large enough they can be legally registered as individuals ( much like human beings) and therefore not be held to the same taxation, audit styles, and reviews as other smaller organizations, it bothers me that they can get away with many of the things they do, and while Im not disagreeable to them "making it in their industry" Im disagreeable to the way they seem to take precedence in some of the highest ranking decisions that are made in and for this country.Anyway, thats only the half of it, and while I could go on forever I wont. Dont expect me to be disrupting any random protests with chants of "AN-AR-CHY" and dont expect to find me with bottles of spray paint ready to draw my A's askew from my circles, but the concept of anarchy is food for thought just the same.

Be very Careful, you may be staring at Van Gogh's Ear...

Yesterday I went with a couple of people to see this Basquiat exhibit and film(Downtown 81) at the Brooklyn Museum. Basquiat is one of my favorite artists so I was pretty excited. Then one of the people in the audience during the question and answer period asked why Basquiat was treated as some sort of child genuis or childlike sauvant, considering how intellectual he actually was and how much of what was going on at the time he incorporated into his paintings, not to mention past history and tounge in cheek commentary on money and property and coprorate greed. At first I didnt think too much about it. It was a legitimate question certainly, I just didn't think about it. Then one of the people I went with brought it up again at dinner. And he had a point in what he said. He was annoyed at the way the question got answered because every on that stage new what a genuis Basquiat was and couldn't explain why he was protrayed as childlike. It bugged him because so many black artist get down played as some sort of strange phenomena, something out of the norm or some undefinable genuis as though genuis was just granted to them out of the blue. History portrays people like Andy Warhol as these intelligent, together, eccentrics who have all this knowledge and eduction and experience that they utilize to add to and create better art. But Basquiat came from a wealthy haitian family. He had means and education, and the space to choose. Yes eventually he did live on the streets, but that was initially a choice and a rejection of his background. Now this is not meant in any way to diminish his brilliance, he was truly an incredible artist. But why is his learning and education played down? Why is his wealth played down? Is it easier to dismiss someone and their abilities by calling them a fluke? Is it right to ignore all that his education did for him when it could be usitlized as an example of what funding can do for people with talent and how we ought to disperse funding more widely in order that it reaches every talent out there? Anyway, I guess I can see how it can be overlooked, I overlooked that aspect of it myself when the comment was first made. I guess the thing is though, now that I realized I overlooked that, how do we fix it?