Nutter on the arts and the budget crisis

 

At a town hall meeting at City Hall on Friday to discuss the budget for the arts and announce his Arts Advisory Council, Mayor Michael Nutter again acknowledged that, yes, things are bad right now, and they will almost undoubtedly get worse. Tax revenues will continue to decrease as consumer spending plummets and the growing unemployed population finds it has less and less to spend on tax-generating goods and services.

Funding for the arts is one of the few areas that, as a whole, has actually seen net growth despite cuts, and this meeting was less gloomy than others past. The Philadelphia Cultural Fund alone grew by $750,000, or about 30 percent. Nutter and the four advisors that accompanied him — including Arts Director Gary Steuer and Finance Director Rob Dubow — were generally well received by the crowd that fully occupied City Hall’s conference room. When you look at how other cities’ arts funding has plummeted – from New York’s 7 percent cut to Atlanta’s 40 percent cut — the 4.5 percent increase Philly gets makes things seem almost utopic.

But no one asked the one question I thought someone would bring up: In light of the growth in arts funding, why don’t we transfer some of it into other areas to offset some of the other cuts? There are a few potential answers to this, I think.

• Even though city money has seen an increase, the real threat to the arts comes the damage to charitable endowments that have been swept into the economic whirlwind. I’m not certain how big the chunk of funding that originates from those sources truly is, but it’s almost certainly more than what will be offset by the growth of the city’s arts budget. Because the arts rely so much on private and non-profit sources, the increased city spending might be necessary to keep it zero-sum, or at least more so.
• Nutter looks at the arts like he looks at sustainability, a spend-money-to-make-money strategy that in the long run will make the city more financially solvent. It’s the same strategy behind moving the Barnes Foundation to Philly. The more people we can draw in with artistic and cultural attractions, and the more residents we can get to spend money at events, the better off we’ll all be.

 

(And of course, last night wasn’t without its cameos by Friends of the Barnes members, who time and again have proven themselves to be some of the most unstable interest group members in the city. Before the meeting started, one member stood in front of the audience and called us all to attention before giving the group’s mission statement, this time presented in a way that will somehow make leaving the Barnes in Montgomery County better for Philly. Another member later addressed Nutter directly with the same complaints: It will cost the city more money than it’s worth and consistently operate at a deficit. She asked Nutter to reconsider the move. Nutter told her he wouldn’t.)

• Nutter made big campaign promises to increase funding to the city’s cultural fund and arts institutions. The arts community is a powerful one, and many of the community’s members were just appointed to the city’s Arts Advisory Council. To shortchange them would not be a good idea.

Burning Love

City Paper staff writer and Philadelphia native Tom Namako put the post-World Series riots like this: “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.” For a few hours, I could get it. Brad Lidge’s winning pitch was the spark to a powder keg that’s been filled for the past 20 years. Fans had every reason to congest Broad Street by the thousands, climb on top of signposts, shout from the top of newsstands and spray champagne on anyone in close proximity. It was the one night when a drunken bro standing through the sunroof of a car would whoop at me and I would actually whoop back.

But the sight of my deformed bike outside Dirty Frank’s on 13th and Pine streets was the big comedown from two hours of an anarchic high. That’s when I stopped “getting it.”

The bike was locked to the railing of a house, not in the middle of the road, and yet you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that a car had run it over. How the back of the frame became so bent confounds me.

This was in one of the lower-key areas of the city’s collective celebration Wednesday night. It was only four blocks away that more spectacular destruction was taking place. My only means of transportation were gone, with SEPTA closed for the night and Broad Street shut down. On my way across Broad, riot police were clearing out the area. A few of them pushed a kid on the ground, and when I stopped to watch, one firmly pushed me and told me to get the hell out.

“Excuse me?” I said to him.

“Don’t,” my friend Steve said to me. “They’re just sick of this.”

It wasn’t until I got west of Broad that I realized exactly what they were sick of: The streets seemed post-apocalyptic. Nearly every news kiosk was overturned, and strewn City Papers and Philadelphia Weeklys concealed the gray of the sidewalk. You couldn’t walk 20 yards without crunching shards of broken beer bottles under your feet. Occasionally, the bright orange of a small fire would catch my eye.

The most serious fire ignited at 16th and Walnut. As I walked by, someone lit the heaping bags of trash, and I turned around to stomp it out with my feet and yelled at the arsonist, who responded by grabbing my knit hat and throwing it onto the nascent flames. By the time the police arrived, it had effloresced into something too large to extinguish with feet. Spectators surrounded it and snapped pictures with their camera phones.

I walked up Broad to the site of an uprooted stoplight laying on the ground with its wires exposed. It wasn’t the first. On my way to 7-Eleven, I passed at least three more stoplights that had been ripped out of the ground, the lights broken out of the yellow caves. And 7-Eleven — the last late-night supplier of tobacco for smokers across the world — had closed to prevent looting.

No matter where I went, hoots and hollers carried down the streets. I had to think that this was no longer anymore about the Phillies winning than it was about an excuse for primal mob aggression. I had seen the aftermath, but I realized that there was more I hadn’t seen: overturned cars and store lootings slightly southward. Is this really how people react to good news?

The sideways kiosks provided for good makeshift benches. I sat down and smoked, and a man with a backwards 1979 Phillies hat came up to me and asked me if I was OK. I told him I was fine, I just hated seeing the city in such disrepair. I wondered aloud how much of the revenue Philadelphia earned from the World Series was lost in one fell, raucous swoop.

“You gotta understand,” the man started, “they’ve been waiting for this for years. It’s been 100 total sports seasons since Philly’s won a championship. They’re just happy to finally see it.” I asked why happiness translated into the destruction of property. The man shrugged.

I don’t get it.

There’s a fine line between teaching and indoctrination, and Jeremy Zilber treads it like a tightrope walker. His new children’s book, Mama Voted for Obama, is 24 pages of somewhat crude Adobe Illustrator images accompanied by a Dr. Seuss rhyming scheme: “She didn’t vote for a sly fox/ or a blue ox/ or a cat named Socks/ Mama voted for Obama!” goes one stanza. In each picture is a discreetly placed pro-Obama mouse decked out in a blue O shirt.

Mama Voted is Zilber’s latest follow-up to his last two child-friendly introductions to the Democratic Party,Why Mommy is a Democrat and Why Daddy is a Democrat. Why is mommy squirrel a democrat? Because like mommy, Democrats make sure that children share their toys, go to school and don’t hide their allowance in accounts in the Cayman Islands.

I’m all for counter-balancing Republican propaganda. The way MSNBC has swooned over Obama is only justified by Fox’s apologies for all things conservative. Zilber’s books might be seen in the same light — they were published only after Katharine DeBrecht wrote Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!, which follows Tommy and Lou as they start a lemonade stand and watch as half their earnings are snatched away to help poor leeches who don’t have startup capital for their own sugary enterprises. And of course, there’s Bill O’Reilly’s infamous The O’Reilly Factor for Kids.

Even so, this is dangerously close to some fascist shit. Teaching young kids about our political system shouldn’t extend beyond the nonpartisan Schoolhouse Rock or the most basic understanding of our Constitution. This is a bill. This is a president. This is a Congress. Now go play with Legos. I have a feeling this is only going to get more and more issue-specific. How soon before we see Mommy, Teddy Bear Kennedy is Stealing My Squirt Gun?

Rise Up With Fists

Ask Stewart Ebersole four times why he runs around Philadelphia tacking painted plywood fists on abandoned buildings and construction sites, and you’ll get at least five answers. He says it’s to liven up the city, make a statement about urban blight, create a scavenger hunt and just say what’s obviously said by blanketing the city with anarchistic clenched fists branded with the words “LIBER-8 ME.”

But woven throughout all these intentions is the idea that, Ebersole says, the greater portion of the Philly art scene is not hospitable to people like himself. He says the galleries and art spaces have become pompously exclusive with a fixation on financial markup, and the only venue that offered itself to him was the city. What is really being liberated, then, is art from galleries.

They Said, He Said

By Aug. 22, the protestors had been camped outside of Philadelphia Nursing Home for five days. Most of them were paraplegic and confined to electric wheelchairs, and the only two tents were occupied by the able-bodied, so when the chanting and slogan-shouting ended at around 7 or 8 p.m. each night, they would simply recline in their chairs to sleep. A few feet away, a giant banner was spread on the barrier of PNH: “MAYOR NUTTER TEAR DOWN THESE WALLS.” Behind those walls, the protestors said, was an institution that “warehoused” people, letting them languish in bedsores and human- and rodent-excrement. They wanted Philadelphia “out of the nursing home business.”

Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

 

Within the United States is the nation of Guyland, a demographic of 16-26 year-old white males who live by the credo “Bros Before Hos” and binge drink their ways through their formative years. At their most innocuous, the citizens of Guyland are nothing more than young men who play too many violent video games and watch too much porn (often with other guys). But at the core of Guyland are toxic mores that permit and encourage date rape, vile fraternity hazing and beating homosexuals.

Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook, posits that the hyper-masculine culture that has emerged among young men is the male backlash to gender equality. With more women achieving the same things as men, men now feel they must assert their manliness in increasingly extreme ways – ways that usually incorporate the degradation of women. Additionally, the homogenization of American culture has created an atmosphere in which these guys have choices of where to turn for camaraderie, as citizens of Guyland have become the dominant social groups on many college campuses and high schools.

From interviews with hundreds of guys, Kimmel writes a highly readable account of the Guyland mentality and its consequences for those both inside and outside Guyland’s borders. 

Review of “The Longshots”

The idea that Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst would direct a family film like “The Longshots” is the stuff of late-night talk show jokes, an idea so absurd that there would seem to be some law of nature prohibiting it. But you’ve got to hand it to Durst. The guy skyrockets to fame and coolness, plummets twice as hard, and manages to earn himself a job as a film director. “The Longshots” is his second film, following up on “The Education of Charlie Banks” last year, and Durst and screenwriter Nick Santora should be lauded for their ability to make it slightly less mundane than most family comedies. The real life-based story follows Jasmine Plummer (Keke Palmer) from humiliated nerd at school to the first female quarterback of a Pop Warner football team in history. Her athleticism is nurtured by her uncle Curtis Plummer (Ice Cube), a washed out former football player (in college or high school? The movie never really tells us) who became unemployed after the manufacturing sector upped and left their town of Minden, Illinois. They’re seldom shown apart as the film moves from symphony-backed sentimentality to football-in-the-crotch gag. For as one-dimensional as a family film directed by Fred Durst and starring Ice Cube inevitably will be, though, the film at least includes some subtle socioeconomic commentary about how the departure of blue-collar jobs has impoverished small American towns, and – surprisingly – there aren’t any moments so horribly executed as to be considered intolerable. But “tolerable” is the strongest endorsement the movie gets.

 

Charles Hayes

Double takes are common with Charles Hayes. It usually requires two glances for passers-by to realize that the grocery cart he pushes is not a homeless man’s compartmentalized life, but a makeshift art gallery with colored canvases and artistically spruced-up housewares.

It’s how Hayes, 62, has been showcasing his work for the past two months. Three times a week, he loads the grocery cart he found in Germantown with pictures depicting the creation of the universe and romantic loss, crutches encrusted with glitter and colorful stones, and lamps smeared with paint.

“I’ve met people who don’t go to art galleries but they’re still interested in art,” says Hayes, a North Philly resident. In that respect, his cart is a humble, mobile art gallery.

This is Not a Game

 

On Saturday, members of Casino-Free Philadelphia walked to the proposed site of Foxwoods Casino on Columbus Boulevard, carrying beach balls, umbrellas, liquid bubbles and floaties. They stopped on the sidewalk in front of the gate at the site, and they played.

As some of the members impersonated police, asking the gatherers what they were doing and demanding they leave, and others acted as irritated union workers, also instructing the activists to move, Casino-Free members playfully tossed beach balls, and invited them to join in the fun.

Call it the protester’s filibuster: When all else fails, chain yourself to a fence until you’re either bulldozed or hauled off in handcuffs.

I’m just not that into you, genetically speaking

By 2008, most of us have realized that the person you consider your “soul mate” is really just the carrier of some genes you think a mini You ought to carry in his DNA. But talking and spending time together are so 19th century, and they leave you blind as to whether the genes of your partner will create a child that can withstand an Ebola shower or one that will crumble at the first whiff of his own mucous.
So cancel your match.com membership and sign up with GenePartner, the online dating service that best matches your genes to prospective lovers’. For a fee of $199, GenePartner analyzes your saliva for its HLA (human leukocyte antigen) properties and allows you to see which members have opposite HLA. According to Dr. Wedekind (GenePartner gives no first name), a Swiss scientist who developed the method at the University of Bern, humans are most attracted to partners with different HLA, since it allows them to bear children with the highest resistance to diseases. We subconsciously evaluate someone’s HLA through our noses, says Dr. Wedekind and if someone’s great on paper but “just doesn’t click” with us, they usually just have unsightly HLA.
What do you do if you get paired up with the Elephant Man? The site doesn’t say, but you should probably ignore the jarring deformity and focus on the genes. It’s for the good of your kids.