Category: Art

What Lindsay “Majikthise” Said

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She writes on the impending retirement of Cathy Guiswite and notes that while Ms. Guiswite might be a bit of a feminist trailblazer, the character, a desperate woman obsessing about a husband and her thighs is not:

If “Cathy” has any feminist value, it can be subsumed under the maxim: “If you can’t be a good example, you can at least be a horrible warning.”

I would further note that Ms. Guiswite’s actual “feminist trailblazer” cred is pretty thin.

She is not the first female syndicated mass market cartoonist, that would have been Dale Messick, the creator of Brenda Starr.

Though to give Ms. Guiswite her due, she certainly was a trailblazer in coffee mugs, t-shirts, and other commercial knock-offs.

Motivation, and What Works

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It Sounds good, but is it true?

I know that American, or more accurately Anglo-Saxon, management styles suck. We have no better examples than the economic meltdown, the collapse of 2 of the big 3 auto makers, BP, etc.

The overpaid masters of the universe model is a failure, and I would argue that it was eminently foreseeable.

Certainly the ideas and techniques suggested here are worth a try, and in any case, the cartooning on a white board is worth the 10 minutes 48 seconds.

H/t The Big Picture

A Marxist Analysis of the Financial Meltdown

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It’s kind of like watching a dinosaur walking down main street

There is some things here that are right, and some that are wrong, and the hard part is determining which is which, but the white-board cartoons make it entertaining. (11:10)

To be true, I’m not sure just how “Marxist” the lecturer, David Harvey is.

I really don’t know him, and this lecture really sounds a bit more Fabian Socialist than full blown Marxist, but in any case it is a new way to look at what happened, and heterodoxy is what is needed here.

H/t Felix Salmon.

Finally, Someone in Arizona Stands Up to Bigots

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In Prescott, Arizona, the administrators at commissioned a mural depicting current students at the school:

Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project, the fourth in a series of community murals painted by a group of artists known as the “Mural Mice.”

Unfortunately, since some of these actual students at the school were black and Hispanic, Steve Blair, a City Councilman and right wing talk show host on KYCA-AM, threw a hissy fit over the description of darkly complected students.

The weasels school administrators responded to this by ordering the artists to lighten the children’s faces:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity. But the school’s principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

It’s gotten a lot of coverage, and as a result, Steve Blair has been fired by the radio station, so apparently there are limits to racism in Arizona.

Here’s hoping that the voters will do so in the next election, but my guess is that they will elect him mayor.

Deep Thought

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This is an interesting take on the Star Wars story.

Of note, the changes that George Lucas has made since the original has come out have had the effect of dehumanizing the troops of the Empire, in the original cut of Episode IV, you had Stormtroopers screaming as the fell, but now they are just a bunch of clone automatons.

I think that his idea was to make it more family friendly,* but what it has really done is to remove any element of the basic costs and immorality of war from the story.

Now all the damage is done to robots and clones, who, after all, aren’t people.

This is why dumbed down child friendly pap is frequently not only, not child friendly, but actually immoral.
</Rant>

*Much like he did in the infamous Christmas special.