A while back I foolishly said that I was going to regularly write about day-to-day events in my life. I wrote two entries and then didn’t write anymore. In fact, I haven’t written any blogs for months now. I feel really bad about this for some reason that I can’t quite understand. I guess I feel that I let myself down. I know that there aren’t a whole lot of people out there chomping at the bit for my next entry. Nevertheless it is a healthy thing for me to do. I have had some people say that they think blogging is somehow a narcissistic endeavor. I guess it can be, but I don’t think that is the case with me. In sharing thoughts and things with some kind of audience it encourages me to write. For me writing is a pleasure that I avoid like the plague. It is so weird that this is often the case with a lot of people I know. Why avoid something that brings you so much happiness? Go figure.
So onwards and upwards. I’m not going to make any promises that I will most likely break, but I am going to go at this again with a more regular schedule. I hope.
The other day I was going through a bunch of papers and files at Spiva. For those that don’t know what that means I will explain. I work at Spiva Center for the Arts, a non-profit. We have classes on making art. We have three galleries that display art of various mediums. We have seminars, talks, movies, and generally try to encourage culture in this fair city of Joplin. My official title is Gallery/Gift Shop Coordinator. I actually find a way to do a lot of maintenance as well as stick my nose into just about every aspect of the place. It is one of the best jobs I have ever had. I love the people I work with, I love what we do, and I feel that the people I come into contact with on a daily basis appreciate what I do as well. It is a good feeling.
So the other day I’m going through a bunch of papers and files at Spiva. Due to our non-profit status we have a tendency to never throw anything away. “Do we need this broken piece of tile?” “Sure we might use it for some class someday.” This is a typical conversation. We also keep all paperwork that we ever generate as well as signs and flyers. We never know when we might want it for some unforeseeable reason. So there are really a lot of resources that I have no clue we have. On down time I look around and see what I can find. I have found a lot of things that had I known we had I could have used to make my job easier. As I’m flipping through stuff I find a file of letters from third-graders from a couple of years back. Every year we have all the third-graders in Joplin come through for a week of “fun and exploration”. It is really pretty fun and very exhausting for everyone involved. All told we see about six hundred kids come through in a week. So these were letters from a bunch of kids saying thank you for letting them come and all that. I decided to sit and read through this stack of about eighty letters. As I did I smiled a lot and sometimes laughed out loud.
Many of the kids had actually addressed their thanks and kudos to some of the artists that were in the exhibition that they had seen. That year our exhibit was a showcase of “outsider” artists. Outsider artists are people who make art that have no training in the arts. They are usually outsiders in more than one-way actually. Most seem to be eccentric older men who just spontaneously started creating their own unique vision. One of the artists was this guy who was one of like thirteen kids and one of the five or so that survived. After his son was killed in Desert Storm and his health deteriorated, he started making pictures and 3-D art out of cardboard. But this isn’t what your thinking. He used the corrugated stuff that is in-between the top and bottom sheets. He used all these little curly-cues to make portraits, and freestanding sculpture. The work was amazing. It is the kind of art you enjoy aesthetically but also swoon over the obsessive tenacity that it would take to create. The kids by and large loved his stuff and there was a large stack of letters written specifically to him. I decided that the artist would get a real kick out of reading them himself. There was one small problem. In spite of all the stuff that we save, I couldn’t find any contact information for him.
I looked his name up on Google and found only a few reviews (remember he is an outsider, most of the art world will have nothing to do with these guys) and a gallery that carried some of his work. I called this gallery and the guy was real nice and spent about ten minutes digging through stuff looking for his address. Finally he gave me his “handler’s” phone number. Some guy in Garden City, Kansas named Dwayne West.
My boss Jo heard me as I was on the phone and came in after I finished.
“Did you find his address?”
“No but I got some other guys number that takes care of the artist’s affairs”
“Oh Dwayne West?”
“Yeah”
“Well you will enjoy talking to him. He is a really interesting guy. He was the prosecutor in the Cl…”
“No way, are you going to say the Clutter case?”
“Yeah”
“Hoollyyy Shit”
When I was eighteen my obsession with Southern Gothic novelists began. I read a few Faulkner short stories and landed for quite some time on the work of Truman Capote. I consumed everything that Capote wrote and saved “In Cold Blood” for last. I’m stubborn that way. “In Cold Blood” rocked my teenage world. It was the first book that actually scared me and made me aware of the random evil that exists in the world. For those that don’t know “In Cold Blood” was a true story written like a novel, a new form that Capote invented and perfected. The story was about a farm family named the Clutters that get brutally murdered for no real apparent reason.
Right after Jo told me this I called and got an answering machine. I left my information and hung up. I opened the Joplin Globe (our newspaper here) and on the second page was the headline “Clutter Prosecutor Affirms Capital Punishment”. Talk about synchronicity! Here is a case that is fifty years old and the same day that I get Dwayne’s number the Joplin Globe picks up an obscure AP story and puts it on the second page of the paper! I knew that destiny was in play and eagerly awaited a return call from Dwayne.
A couple of weeks went by and the wow and flutter that is Spiva pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind. But the moment finally came and the call was sent to me and there on the other end of the phone was Dwayne West, a piece of literary and personal history. We exchanged greetings and he gave me Jesse Monte’s address (yeah I intentionally saved that for later as a gift for those that are still reading). After all the real business was over I took in a breath.
“Mr. West let me say that it is particularly exciting to talk to you. When I was eighteen I read “In Cold Blood”
A slight grunt from Dwayne.
I continued.
“I was really stunned by that book and it is just a personally moving thing that I am talking to someone that is actually connected to that book”
“Yes, I was the state attorney and it was a big case so I prosecuted it. The Clutters went to my church”
I sudden lump developed in my throat. This wasn’t just a story in a book. This was real. It was very real for him and I felt stupid for bringing it up.
“Out pastor was against the death penalty and ahh…well I disagreed with him on that point. There was no doubt that they were guilty because they never claimed otherwise and we got them hanged pretty quickly, relatively speaking, after that. And I can tell you one thing, they haven’t killed anyone else since.”
I laughed in the way that I have learned to laugh from being around my grandfather and other older people. If you don’t know what I mean I can’t explain it.
“Yes sir I don’t imagine so.”
“If they couldn’t find anyone to do it I would have hung the bastards myself.”
That was the definitive end of that topic and I knew it.
Dwayne went on to ask me about my job and what my interests were and we began a very pleasant exchange that was just as natural as talking to farmer at the tailgate of his truck. Eventually I let out that I had been in a few bands over the years.
“Oh yeah? What do you play?”
“Well sir, I’m a singer and songwriter”
“Well that’s good, I have been trying my hand at writing songs myself”
Dwayne went on to tell me that he had in fact written a musical with fourteen songs and two acts. The subject was the founder of his town of Garden City, a fella by the name of Buffalo Jones. If that name doesn’t sound like the makings of a folk hero tall tale then I don’t know what is.
Turns out that Buffalo Jones was so named for being quite a skilled hunter of said beast and later its benefactor. Buffalo Jones saw that the buffalo (really a bison, but I won’t go down that road right now) was in danger of extinction. Having been a part of the extinction process he apparently felt the need to take the problem upon his own shoulders. Bringing calves from Texas to Kansas he was able to raise his own herd and exported the unique American breed to zoos all over the world. He also inspired Zane Grey to write his first book, “Last of the Plainsmen” about Buffalo Jones after going on a hunting expedition with him. Dwayne was using Zane Grey as the narrator of his tale.
The whole idea lit my torch! What a cool old guy! What a cool idea! It was like “Waiting for Guffman” but real and hopefully a lot better. I encouraged him and told him about my limited experience with play production and such.
“Well I’m pretty anxious to get this thing going, I’m 79 and well I would like to see it done before I’m gone.”
I bet the man lives to be a hundred.
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Monday, April 20, 2009
Monday, October 8, 2007
Paper money, Paper Tigers
A Political Rant
I have been spending a lot of my free time lately trying to wrap my mind around economics and trade policies. This isn’t as easy as economists make it sound. There is no empirical science to the process. In fact, that is the greatest lie that I have found about economics, it isn’t a black and white world. Now I know that most people understand that there are different theories about how an economy should work. The thing that I think eludes many of us is that within each theory is a theoretical framework that is itself based on even more theories.
For example: Many people are freaked out that we have a huge trade deficit with China. Being freaked out about the trade deficit is part of a theory of why that is something to freak out about. The thinking goes that America is losing manufacturing jobs and those are good jobs that we don’t want to lose. No one could argue that the loss of high paying jobs with benefits is a good thing. The reason that we have lost these jobs is because companies are going to places like China to produce goods at a cheaper cost. So those are the facts of the case. There is no disputing these as facts. Now we get to the theories on the matter; as a result of this, America will slowly devolve into a third world country as our dollar diminishes and our job market becomes more and more service and retail based (jobs that pay less with less benefits). Pat Buchanan points out in his book, “Where the Right Went Wrong” that this trade policy is tantamount to economic treason on the part of our government. He believes that America needs to manufacture it’s own goods and keep the jobs here as we did for two hundred years previously. This is all well and fine, but the fact is, Americans can’t afford stuff made by Americans anymore. The reason that companies went overseas is because they had to stay competitive with the stuff that was already coming in to our country from other countries. There is a belief that we can tariff those goods and force American companies to stay here. Ironically Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) had an idea about what this would accomplish over two hundred years ago, this would simply hurt the poorest of Americans by making the simple commodities of life even more expensive, combined with the taxes we already pay this seems hardly to be in the interest of Americans and more in the interest of our debtors.
There is also a belief that there is only so much money and wealth in the world and that if another country is getting wealthier that that means another country will be getting poorer. Now the thing is, this may or may not be true. There are more factors in the mix of why America may be in some kind of financial trouble than just our trade arrangements with China. In fact, I’m starting to believe that China is a big distraction to the real problem. I don’t think that China is a threat to us, financially or otherwise. We are in debt to China for the goods that they give us. Think about that. Can China make us poor by giving stuff to us? We can refuse to continue in this way, we are not obligated to continue to take things on credit and China could quit thinking that we are good for it as well. The fact is, it is mutually beneficial. Maybe we should look at who raises the most stink about this stuff and look at their motivations. The Federal Reserve makes a lot of stink about it. I wonder why?
But I can’t go on and on and expect anyone to care. I think that what I’m trying to get to is the nature of money. China is not buying gold from us for our debt to them, they are buying money that is capable of becoming merely paper. China holding dollars and securities based on those dollars means that they are in effect buying our debt. This should make us happy because it means that the dollar that everyone is freaking out about is good enough for the Chinese. They must have a lot of confidence in the American dollar. They must think that we are doing something right. And we are. We are doing a lot of things wrong on the flipside and that is what we should be focusing on, not China.
I have been going through PJ O’Rourke’s book “On The Wealth of Nations” which is an overview on Adam Smith’s economic polemic “The Wealth of Nations”. I have been falling in love with the founding fathers and the pioneers of governmental and economic theory as it relates to a free country. We really don’t need to read much of today’s hacks unless they are rooted in these amazingly brilliant men. These old guys were really into freedom. They were really not into government doing much of anything. You see, almost across the board they had this notion that was started by a man named John Locke. Locke believed that people, all people had the sense to know what was beneficial to them. This notion evolved into the idea of “self interest rightly understood”. If left alone, people would do what was good for them, and in turn this would be good for the people around them. Simply put it works like this. If I’m poor and I want to eat, I realize I need to produce something that someone will want and trade with me, or I need to find someone to work for, and that means I need to have something they need in skills or brute strength. Pretty simple isn’t it? And then there is the notion of division of labor. If I want a loaf of bread I can raise the wheat, grind it, make a loaf and there you go. The loaf only took me about four months to make. But if we have some that raise the wheat, some that grind it and some that bake it, I can simply go to the store and have a loaf in about five minutes. We all get something out of it. This is called a free market. But the problem comes when there are those who produce nothing. Of course a merchant and a waitress produce nothing, but they are part of the process of trade. But politicians, bankers, and others of this sort really produce nothing. Their existence is necessary, but it should be limited not dominant. When the merchants and bankers get too much power they become dangerous, they become people who would make the general populace their slaves. Our labor will benefit them and not ourselves. The less a government messes with our freedom to make a living and own our property and do with it what we shall the better off we are. Adam Smith was livid about property rights because he grew up in a feudalist state in Scotland. He was appalled that all the land was kept by the wishes of people who had been dead for hundreds of years. He would be equally livid over someone telling someone that they can’t farm their land because of the future generations that need wet- lands. Either way, it is a tyranny of those that aren’t in possession of life in the here and now.
I was thinking about all of this and I wondered why so many artists are communist or at the least socialist in their thinking. Where is art if there isn’t any disposable income? Where is art if there is no middle class? I think we need to abolish the National Endowment of the Arts so that artists can get more clarity about how economics and art are related.
Yeah, I said it was a rant didn’t I?
Support Ron Paul and make a noise about him. We need someone like this guy now. Watch “Freedom to Fascism”. Read some books about our Constitution and our Founding Fathers. There is good reason to have pride in our heritage. I’m not saying that there weren’t mistakes, but man there has been some really good successes too. If modern political theory, foreign policy, economic foolishness, and Constitutional buggery are getting you down, just go back and find common sense again in the simple institutions that we started with.
I have been spending a lot of my free time lately trying to wrap my mind around economics and trade policies. This isn’t as easy as economists make it sound. There is no empirical science to the process. In fact, that is the greatest lie that I have found about economics, it isn’t a black and white world. Now I know that most people understand that there are different theories about how an economy should work. The thing that I think eludes many of us is that within each theory is a theoretical framework that is itself based on even more theories.
For example: Many people are freaked out that we have a huge trade deficit with China. Being freaked out about the trade deficit is part of a theory of why that is something to freak out about. The thinking goes that America is losing manufacturing jobs and those are good jobs that we don’t want to lose. No one could argue that the loss of high paying jobs with benefits is a good thing. The reason that we have lost these jobs is because companies are going to places like China to produce goods at a cheaper cost. So those are the facts of the case. There is no disputing these as facts. Now we get to the theories on the matter; as a result of this, America will slowly devolve into a third world country as our dollar diminishes and our job market becomes more and more service and retail based (jobs that pay less with less benefits). Pat Buchanan points out in his book, “Where the Right Went Wrong” that this trade policy is tantamount to economic treason on the part of our government. He believes that America needs to manufacture it’s own goods and keep the jobs here as we did for two hundred years previously. This is all well and fine, but the fact is, Americans can’t afford stuff made by Americans anymore. The reason that companies went overseas is because they had to stay competitive with the stuff that was already coming in to our country from other countries. There is a belief that we can tariff those goods and force American companies to stay here. Ironically Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) had an idea about what this would accomplish over two hundred years ago, this would simply hurt the poorest of Americans by making the simple commodities of life even more expensive, combined with the taxes we already pay this seems hardly to be in the interest of Americans and more in the interest of our debtors.
There is also a belief that there is only so much money and wealth in the world and that if another country is getting wealthier that that means another country will be getting poorer. Now the thing is, this may or may not be true. There are more factors in the mix of why America may be in some kind of financial trouble than just our trade arrangements with China. In fact, I’m starting to believe that China is a big distraction to the real problem. I don’t think that China is a threat to us, financially or otherwise. We are in debt to China for the goods that they give us. Think about that. Can China make us poor by giving stuff to us? We can refuse to continue in this way, we are not obligated to continue to take things on credit and China could quit thinking that we are good for it as well. The fact is, it is mutually beneficial. Maybe we should look at who raises the most stink about this stuff and look at their motivations. The Federal Reserve makes a lot of stink about it. I wonder why?
But I can’t go on and on and expect anyone to care. I think that what I’m trying to get to is the nature of money. China is not buying gold from us for our debt to them, they are buying money that is capable of becoming merely paper. China holding dollars and securities based on those dollars means that they are in effect buying our debt. This should make us happy because it means that the dollar that everyone is freaking out about is good enough for the Chinese. They must have a lot of confidence in the American dollar. They must think that we are doing something right. And we are. We are doing a lot of things wrong on the flipside and that is what we should be focusing on, not China.
I have been going through PJ O’Rourke’s book “On The Wealth of Nations” which is an overview on Adam Smith’s economic polemic “The Wealth of Nations”. I have been falling in love with the founding fathers and the pioneers of governmental and economic theory as it relates to a free country. We really don’t need to read much of today’s hacks unless they are rooted in these amazingly brilliant men. These old guys were really into freedom. They were really not into government doing much of anything. You see, almost across the board they had this notion that was started by a man named John Locke. Locke believed that people, all people had the sense to know what was beneficial to them. This notion evolved into the idea of “self interest rightly understood”. If left alone, people would do what was good for them, and in turn this would be good for the people around them. Simply put it works like this. If I’m poor and I want to eat, I realize I need to produce something that someone will want and trade with me, or I need to find someone to work for, and that means I need to have something they need in skills or brute strength. Pretty simple isn’t it? And then there is the notion of division of labor. If I want a loaf of bread I can raise the wheat, grind it, make a loaf and there you go. The loaf only took me about four months to make. But if we have some that raise the wheat, some that grind it and some that bake it, I can simply go to the store and have a loaf in about five minutes. We all get something out of it. This is called a free market. But the problem comes when there are those who produce nothing. Of course a merchant and a waitress produce nothing, but they are part of the process of trade. But politicians, bankers, and others of this sort really produce nothing. Their existence is necessary, but it should be limited not dominant. When the merchants and bankers get too much power they become dangerous, they become people who would make the general populace their slaves. Our labor will benefit them and not ourselves. The less a government messes with our freedom to make a living and own our property and do with it what we shall the better off we are. Adam Smith was livid about property rights because he grew up in a feudalist state in Scotland. He was appalled that all the land was kept by the wishes of people who had been dead for hundreds of years. He would be equally livid over someone telling someone that they can’t farm their land because of the future generations that need wet- lands. Either way, it is a tyranny of those that aren’t in possession of life in the here and now.
I was thinking about all of this and I wondered why so many artists are communist or at the least socialist in their thinking. Where is art if there isn’t any disposable income? Where is art if there is no middle class? I think we need to abolish the National Endowment of the Arts so that artists can get more clarity about how economics and art are related.
Yeah, I said it was a rant didn’t I?
Support Ron Paul and make a noise about him. We need someone like this guy now. Watch “Freedom to Fascism”. Read some books about our Constitution and our Founding Fathers. There is good reason to have pride in our heritage. I’m not saying that there weren’t mistakes, but man there has been some really good successes too. If modern political theory, foreign policy, economic foolishness, and Constitutional buggery are getting you down, just go back and find common sense again in the simple institutions that we started with.
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