ArtSake

Quick Update: According to the Los Angeles Times blog Culture Monster, the National Portrait Gallery has changed the accompanying wall text of the not official “official” portrait of President George W. Bush. Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont believed the wall text did not accurately describe Bush’s presidency and wrote to the museum’s director about it. To follow the bouncing ball, you can read Sander’s letter and the museum director’s letter on Culture Monster.

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Hey writerly types: Poets & Writers Magazine, among other things a nutritious source of grants and awards information for writers, has, as they say, gotten bloggy with it.

Actually, nobody says that. Thank god. That would be so grating.

But check back at G&A: The Contest Blog as it progresses and grows, and you’ll become rich, RICH* beyond your wildest dreams!
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* With information.

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Fair warning: the word “official” will be used a lot in this post.

The official White House photograph of President-elect Barak Obama has been released. The photograph was created by South Dartmouth native Pete Souza who was recently named official White House photographer.

The official portrait paintings of outgoing President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush were recently unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. How official they are though seems to be unclear. According to the Washington Post, the Portrait Gallery described the paintings as the “official likenesses” of President and Mrs. Bush. But a White House spokesman later clarified that these are not the official “official portraits.” Those will be completed after the president leaves office and will hang at the White House.”

Photo Credit: Photograph of President-elect Barak Obama by Pete Souza

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Not sure how closely the tongue and the cheek are aligned in this one, but in the music blog of the UK’s Guardian, Steven Wells argues that the guitar needs to go the way of the gamer: lose the strings in favor of Guitar Hero-esque buttons. “Why are they still making guitars with ‘real’ strings that are difficult and boring to learn how to play and really make your fingers hurt?” he asks. “What is the point? Do we still slaughter our own cows? Dig our own wells? Work in the turnip fields for 18 hours a day, six days a week? No. Buttons have proven themselves to be much easier and more efficient.” Predictably, there are lots of, um, dissenting opinions expressed in the comments section.

The Berkshire Creative blog quotes the New York Times, noting a neat-o bright side to the nation’s economic crumminess: sales by independent craft artists are up.

Speaking of craft artists, in the Boston Handmade blog, Nancy Rosetta shares an experience that no doubt happens all the time but doesn’t always command the spotlight: artists commissioning other artists.

Two items film & video artists should check out at the always-intriguing New England Film site: first is the announcement of an online film festival, running from September 1, 2009 through October 16, 2009, of films under 30 minutes. Look for an official call for entries to be announced this month. What’s more, Lynn Tryba shares insight she gained at a recent workshop on raising money for your film, with fundraising guru Morrie Warshawski.

At Gasp!, writer Laura Axelrod shares candid, clear-eyed testimony about how her career pursuits as a writer sank her into debt. I love this post for challenging the notion that if you don’t make risky investments (i.e. max out your credit cards) now, you’re somehow not giving yourself a vote a confidence in your eventual success as an artist.

The NewsHour Art Beat blog shares a weekly poem, American Sublime… which just so happens to be by Elizabeth Alexander, the poet commissioned to write for President-elect Obama’s inaugural ceremony.

I’ve heard/read numerous whisperings, besprent about the web and artists’ teeming brains, about whether a new Works Progress Administration (WPA) for artists could emerge under an Obama administration. In an intriguing post, Arlene Goldbarb envisions what an Obama-administration arts WPA might actually look like.

Speaking of art and gov’t: have you heard about the online petition to persuade President-elect Obama to create a Secretary of the Arts cabinet post? (The idea purportedly originated with musician Quincy Jones.) Parabasis, a theater, arts, and politics blog that approaches topics with a blend of smarts and humor, takes the idea of a federal-level arts czar a step further by asking, “Why do we need one?” and coming up with some fascinating answers.

Think for a moment about the way science is funded by the government. Science is funded by all sorts of different agencies and quasi-gov’t entities. You have the NIH, the Army Corps of Engineers, NASA, the NSF etc. and so forth. Some of it is very practical and has to do with societal needs, some of it is basic/pure scientific research. Who funds what might surprise you (did you know that the bulk of prostate cancer research is done by the army not by the NIH?).

Something similar could be done for the arts, thus freeing up the NEA and State Arts Councils to do what they were originally designed to do: fund the creation of art, be the Pure Research arm.

Read the post.

Image: Debra Weisberg (Drawing Fellow ’08), CONSTRUCTED DRAWING #2, (2007), black and white tape on paper, 78 in x 81 in x 1 in. Debra’s work shows as part of “New Works on Paper” at OH+T Gallery, through January 31.

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Candice Smith Corby, BENDING OVER BACKWARDS (2008), gouache on paper, 20 in x 24 in

In our recent Artist to Artist discussion between Candice Smith Corby (Painting Fellow ’08) and Julie Levesque (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ’05), Candice discussed how she balances her work as a painter with her life as a mother – and she sometimes incorporates the idea in the work itself (see above balancing act).

Another Massachusetts artist is exploring similar terrain, though in a different medium. Winchester director and producer Pamela Tanner Boll (who co-executive produced the documentary Born into Brothels), has produced/directed Who Does She Think She Is?, now screening at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston on selected dates from Jan 9 through Jan 18. The film explores the lives of women who have declined to choose between motherhood and creativity, including Cambridge painter Camille Musser.

Who Does She Think She Is? next screens at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston on Friday, January 9, at 8:15 PM.

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This is one in a series of nano-interviews, brief in length but expansive of heart, with participants in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Chris Castellani is the Artistic Director of Grub Street, host of the reading this Thursday, January 8 at Grub Street HQ in Boston, at 7 PM.

Grub Street is a terrific service organization for writers, offering classes, readings, galas, wit, panache, and many many other charming and edifying nouns. And Chris, an adept leader at Grub Street AND an award-winning novelist, is definitely over-qualified to be the subject of these miniaturized questions. But bless him, he answered a bunch of them anyway.

MCC: What’s new and exciting at Grub Street these days?

Chris: We reinvent ourselves every quarter with new classes, events, seminars and parties, so there’s always something exciting and a little bit risky going on. There’s no better way to keep the work interesting…

MCC: How do you balance your duties at Grub Street with your fiction writing career?

Chris: I treat them both like part-time jobs. Mornings I work on fiction, usually at the Diesel Caf in Davis Square. Afternoons 1-6 I’m at my desk at Grub Street. The hours are short enough that I leave both places wanting/needing more.

MCC: What are you working on these days, writing-wise?

Chris: I recently finished a draft of my third novel, which completes a trilogy. I’ve set it aside for a while and will go back to it for revision once I get some distance from it. In the meantime, I’m writing a personal essay for a forthcoming anthology called Mentors, Muses and Monsters.

MCC: What writer do you most admire but write nothing like?

Chris: In addition to their amazing work itself, I admire Whitman’s bravado, Grace Paley’s commitment to social justice, and George Herbert’s eloquent struggling.

MCC: What’s the most embarrassing sentence/line of poetry you’ve ever written?

Chris: My first stories were all set in contemporary, but they read like it was 1789 Calais. The very first line of my very first full-length story (in ninth grade) was “Victoria, clad in vestment ivory-white, set forth across a great distance to visit her dearest friend Mathilde.”

MCC: Were President-elect Barack Obama to create a cabinet post in the arts, whom should he appoint as Secretary?

Chris: He’s already begged me, but I told him I was too busy.

MCC: Who wins the poets vs. prose writers paintball war?

Chris: The poets, in a bloodbath. It’s that whole “carpe diem” mentality that makes them fight like they have nothing to lose.

MCC: Computer, longhand, or typewriter?

Chris: Computer. I only half-believe writers who tell me they write longhand.

MCC: Do you secretly dream of being a) a pop icon, b) an algebra teacher, and/or c) a crime-solver/writer a la Jessica Fletcher?

Chris: I want to be the first crime-solving algebra teacher to perform live with Beyonce.

MCC: How many revisions does your work typically go through?

Chris: Each sentence gets worked over dozens, if not hundreds, of times, and somehow they still come out creaky and malformed.

MCC: Do you ever revise your work on the spot during live readings?

Chris: Always. I wish I could rewrite everything I’ve ever published, including these responses.

MCC: Please revise the following sentence: “Though every muscle in his body urged him not to, Sanderson crept toward the tinted windows of the gray-green Caprice.”

Chris: “Muscled, all urge and body, Sanderson pressed Caprice up against the tinted windows.”

Chris and Grub Street host a reading with Kim Adrian, Ben Berman, Xujun Eberlein, Suzanne Matson, Monica Raymond, and JD Scrimgeour this Thursday, January 8, 2009, 7 PM at Grub Street, 160 Boylston Street, Boston MA. Read about all of the events in the Commonwealth Reading Series.

Christopher Castellani is the author of two novels, A Kiss From Maddalena, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and most recently, The Saint of Lost Things. A graduate of Swarthmore College with an M.F.A. from Boston University, he is the Artistic Director of Grub Street, a nonprofit creative writing center. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Read all of the nano-interviews.

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This afternoon, Ken Field will be interviewing the fantastic composer Michael Gandolfi (Music Composition Fellow ’03) live in the studio of WMBR in Cambridge. Ken’s New Edge program runs from 2:00-4:00 pm and the interview with Michael will be at 3:00 pm today.

Photo credit: Image of Michael Gandolfi by Peggy Friedland

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