kateingold.com

Check these out:

Anna Lappe’s Take a Bite out of Climate Change, and her writing partner Bryant Terry’s blog.

Don’t forget to sign up to get Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen download at the beginning of next year.

It’s time to make lunch!

My good friend, poet Gabe Gomez, is in town for a few days to participate in a panel about artists as refugees (he runs the Santa Fe Art Institute’s residency program which hosts artists who have been made homeless by political persecution, environmental catastrophe, etc). Fortunately for me, he has a bit of time to hang out and hunt for nifty art.

Banksy, the nearly-anonymous British graffiti and ‘fine’ artist, snuck into New Orleans for the third anniversary of Katrina, just days before we all evacuated for Gustav. Across the city he stenciled and painted a dozen mostly-political pieces. Many of them have been destroyed by the notorious Grey Ghost, an anti-graffiti vigilante who has been painting over graffiti of all stripes (including commissioned murals) since 1997. We went looking for the few Banksy pieces that remain and found two:

Bansky painting partly destroyed

The Bansky painting in context

Bansky painting of girl and raining umbrella

The top image originally showed two national guard soldiers looting from the building, carrying a TV out to the shopping cart behind them that already holds a boom box. The soldiers and the television have been blotted out with white paint (spray paint, so perhaps not work of the Grey Ghost?) and now appear as shadows or ghosts themselves. To see the image as it was painted, along with the other New Orleans pieces, visit Bansky’s website.

I was particularly sad to hear the refrigerator-as-kite piece was painted over. Also gone is the brass band in gas masks painting. Vandalism or public art? An ingenious political statement and way to encourage visits to the essentially abandoned areas of the city, or a sorry addition to the blight? Unfortunately the dialogue was ended as soon as the paintings were destroyed. Gag order or full-on execution, the result is the same in this case.

We’re heading back out tomorrow to look for Lincoln. I’ll post more photos if we find him, or even his wistful ghost.

Hey fabulous, however-few, readers:

I’ve decided to start anew over here at kateingold.com/wordpress. This will be my place to write about visual art, poetry, image and text, philosophy, etc etc, rather than the dreaded you know what. Our politics are broken, so my musings on them should stay at Broken Windows. Go check out my incoherent rants on the system at my new-old blog, Broken Windows. Change your links, if you’d like!