Good Morning Lowcountry

Shepard Fairey, etc. ...

Congratulations to native Charleston graphic artist Shepard Fairey who is getting all SORTS of attention for his fab Barack Obama poster. In The Washington Post:

"LOS ANGELES -- When the street artist and guerrilla marketer Shepard Fairey got word from the Obamaa people that they would welcome his contribution to the campaign, he knew what he wanted to create:  a phenomenon."

"All political art is propaganda (that is the point), but most political posters are bland, forgettable, wallpaper, like Fred Thompson on an off day. Fairey wanted something more iconic -- aspirational, inspirational -- and cool. In other words, he wanted to make posters that the cool cats would want. The 2008 Democratic primary season equivalent of the Che poster (with all that implies). More Mao, more right now. The kind of poster that might make its way onto dorm room walls of fanboys. The kind of poster that might sell on eBay, as a signed Fairey Obama recently did, for $5,900. He wanted his posters to go viral."

Read the story. Here's the photo.

(Shepard Fairey put his street-art sensibility to work for his candidate of choice, in hopes of "appealing to a younger, apathetic audience." By Jonathan Alcorn For The Washington Post







A few other good things to read, if you haven't read 'em already:

The Hillary Lesson: What Hillary Clinton's Campaign Has Taught Our Daughter

Baltimore Sun's great pix of Big Brown!

The Great American Novel?

Memories ...

I found some old pictures that I took. Really sort of old. From trips to Europe and various places. I will share just for fun:

Paris, 1975

Spain 1975
Near Rondo

 

Peep show

Did you see The Washington Post's Peeps Diorama Contest entries on Sunday?
Wow, great Peeps:

Only in Nottinghamshire ... and thoughts on sexism

Thank you to BoingBoing for this fabulous post about ...

: "A British businessman fed up with being targeted by vandals has installed a 30-foot Roman-style catapult on the premises to hurl bucket loads of chicken manure at culprits attacking his rural offices." A 30ft Roman catapult, loaded with chicken droppings from a nearby farm is primed each evening. And a cannon, which Mr Weston-Webb once used to shoot his wife across the River Avon, will fire a railway sleeper if triggered by an intruder.

Mr Weston-Webb was yesterday erecting a sign outside his business, which stands at the end of a farm track in the lower valley of the River Soar in Nottinghamshire — a place known locally as Soar Bottom. It reads: “Warning: These premises are protected by smart-poo and railway sleeper projectiles.”

That's the best use of a catapult I've seen since "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" used it to hurl dead cows and sheep.

Also, check out this New York Times article: So You Want To Be A Blogging Star. It's got the usual "rules" of the game we all know, but some helpful advice to writers who hesitate to push the button, or spend too long revising and editing their posts.

I have been notably slack at GMLc Blog in the past couple of months, posting only every couple of weeks. I have no excuse except that I'm overwhelmed by events (who ELSE is sick of the Democratic primary? raise your hand) and pollen and too much reading. So one more reading recommendation ... The $3 Trillion War ... and then I will get into my thought of the day.

Barack Obama's speech on race was honest, non-pandering, blunt and inspiring. All in all, brilliant. What is wrong to this writer with Rev. Jeremiah Wright condemning Hillary Clinton for not understanding what it means to be a black man in America and never having been called names is that it's a statement of the obvious. Neither has Rev. Wright been left out of conversations, dismissed or ignored in business meetings, whistled at, been groped, been date-raped, been the subject of late-night anonymous phone calls, had sexual innuendo thrown his way at every turn, been the subject of an industry built on sexually explicit images of his body type, humiliated, or had to listen to men endlessly discuss and legislate female body issues and posit that prostitution is a "victimless" crime.

Unknown Hinson

For those of you who need some levity today, check out "Venus Bound" by Unknown Hinson. I don't know old it is. I just found out about this guy although he has been around at least 10 years. He has played here. He's The King of Country Western Troubadors!

Soulja Boy instruction video

This is all the rage in Mount Pleasant (and everywhere else in the world) middle schools.

Cell phone hell

Today's MSNBC piece on Gotcha Capitalism is about the particular jail that cell phone companies put you in. Read it here.

I have been locked (sorry for all the prison metaphors) in a running battle with my cell phone provider over, oh, let's see, creeping hidden fees, their attempting to change my plan without my knowledge, their misunderstanding what plan I actually wanted, dropped calls, lousy 411 service, lousy service in general and their threats to cut off my service while I got all this straight.

During one discussion with the company, I asked them to please, please drop me so I could go with one or another of the other bad cell phone companies in the U.S. 

I also maintain that there is no binding contract that requires paying a disconnection fee to leave a company. That, to me, is ridiculous. It would be like a grocery store charging you to walk out without buying anything. I maintain that fee is illegal. I don't recall signing anything that bound me to pay it. In the conversation,  I invited them to sue me for it.

What is Southern?

Trust Edna Lewis to know ... even from beyond the grave. The celebrated chef from Virginia spent most of her life in New York, but she was consultant-in-residence at Middleton Place here in Charleston and developed a number of recipes there that you can still eat. Somewhere in GMLC Blog archives is a link to her obituary in The New York Times. She died at age 89 in 2006. Anyway, I see in Gourmet magazine that an unpublished essay of hers has been found. The topic: What is Southern? As far as GMLc is concerned, she nails it, even if we in Charleston DO use field peas instead of black-eyed peas for our Hoppin' John.

What GMLc Has Learned

Just because it's the Silly Season, I'd like to reprint part of an old GMLc column I wrote in the winter of 2004:

WHAT GMLC HAS LEARNED:

GMLc likes a monthly feature in Esquire magazine called "What I've Learned."
Usually the source of monthly wisdom is a celebrity, but this month Esquire asked readers what they have learned.
"Naps, naps, naps, naps," replied Mike Legeros, 39, of Raleigh.
And "It's impossible to understand why someone would pay $250,000 for a car until you've driven a $250,000 car," said Amanda Gobler, 24, of Royal Oak, Mich.
Here, for the record, is a sample of what GMLc has learned... or what GMLc can remember having learned anyway.

-- If the friend you're talking with on the phone doesn't respond to what you're saying, and when you stop talking not only doesn't reply but changes the subject, that friend... 1) had put the phone down and gone to another room 2) was thinking about what he/she was going to say next 3) thinks you're incredibly boring.

-- Law enforcement objects in the rear view mirror are close enough to read your expired license plate.

-- A new broom sweeps clean but sometimes too hard.

-- The old broom knows the corners.

-- Hormonal imbalance can make you wish you were dead.

-- Drink the first martini, sip the second, sniff the third.

-- Every Lowcountry sky is a gift.

-- We live near 1,000-year-old cypress trees.

-- No matter what the TV weatherman tries to tell you, rain is not bad weather... unless it comes with a hurricane.

-- The glass is half-full.

-- Good manners are not overrated.

-- Too much TV is assaulting.

-- One of the worst things a teenager can say is, "Where's the mop?"

-- An oyster roast steams oysters to a temperature that causes their shells to open, but not to a temperature that kills any nasty microbes they happen to be carrying.

-- It's not a good idea to stand with one foot on a boat and one foot on a dock.

-- They call that thing on a sailboat "the boom" for a reason.

-- Smile and nod, smile and nod, smile and nod, smile and nod.

-- Few things have more inherent joy than a family wedding.

-- Work is not fun. That's why they call it work.

-- Things take longer than you think they will.

-- The cult of victimhood needs fewer members.

-- Constant anger and fear over current world events are more damaging to us than the events themselves.

-- "The future is already here. It just isn't uniformly distributed." — William Gibson.

-- Conventional wisdom isn't.

-- We juggle the balls of family, friends, work. If we consider dropping one temporarily, we remember that the friends ball will bounce, the work ball will bounce, but the family ball is made of glass.

-- The best opening lines to loved ones are "How are you?" and "What can I do to help?"

-- People remember you for what you finish not what you start.

-- "Don't tug on Superman's cape."

-- "It's gettin' hot in here."

-- It's not all about you.

-- Some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

-- Palmetto bugs: the ultimate Lowcountry kitty toy.

-- Housework does not build character.

-- Of course there's a Santa Claus.

Just a few things to read

AP
Bloggers Consider Forming Labor Union
Monday August 6, 9:24 am ET
By Ashley M. Heher, AP Business Writer

Left-Leaning Bloggers Debate Forming Labor Union

Not sure about this. Most mainstream journalists do not operate under union protection (unfortunately) so why should bloggers. As for the Democratic presidential candidates appearing at Daily Kos convention, fine but I thought that candidates promising bloggers that they would hire a White House blogger was just pandering. And a dumb idea. What would we read on a White House blog? Certainly nothing that had not been vetted, sanitized, parsed and carefully released. OK, call me grumpy. It's Monday. At lunchtime. I'm hungry.

From McSweeney's Internet Tendency, "Reviews of New Food." The Chocolate-Dipped Altoids sound delicious.

Also, have you seen the site 862 National? Its mission: "826 National is a family of seven nonprofit organizations dedicated to helping students, ages 6-18, with expository and creative writing."

In case you missed it: "How To Escape From A Sinking Car."

Also at Slate, an argument against August.

And my favorite provocateur and intellectual snob, Christopher Hitchens and his take on the London bomb plot. (It was designed to kill women.)