To everybody who likes to read this blog, my apologies for neither of us blogging much lately. Bunny and I have been keeping ourselves busy with lots of stuff that all together seems to have sucked all our diary-keeping time away. And since our July and August work-calender is looking very full, I doubt we’ll be blogging for a while.

On the other hand, it does feel nice to finally be wrapping up work on several of our ‘projects’. The IWTPYF book is finally done; now Mimi is trying to figure out how to get it ‘out there’ whenever she’s not working at the hospital.

Everyday morning Bunny and I have been working on preparing work for an upcoming show (November/December 2009) at the 1C03 Gallery at the University of Winnipeg. Right now it’s a lot of planning / reshuffling using our cute little gallery mock-up that Bunny made (thanks Bunny), plus making lots of drawings, some of which will eventually become much larger paintings. The working title for the show is The Pinky Show: Class Treason Story (excerpts).

A second art exhibition we are preparing for is scheduled for a bit later (late January 2010 opening) and will be held in Belgrade, Serbia at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art-Belgrade. That one is called Lecture-Performance and is a historical survey of the lecture-performance format and it’s development from the 1960’s onwards (Robert Morris, Martha Rosler, Andrea Fraser, etc.). The short video we posted on YouTube last night is related to our preparation for this exhibition. Bunny and I will have to sort through the questions, fashion that into an interview, and finish writing the answers to the questions and submit to the folks in Belgrade by July 20th. (*low-level panic*)

A third event we’re kinda-sorta preparing for is to do “something” with the Center for the Future of Museums (a project of the American Association of Museums). We were asked by their director if we would like to work with them to create a fabulous spectacle (j/k) for the AAM’s 2010 annual meeting in Los Angeles. It’s a big conference with about 6,000 museum people from all over the world all converging to… talk about museums (duh). We’re currently bouncing some ideas back and forth, trying to figure out what’s possible. Not sure if this one is going to happen or not, but (*cat alternative to crossing fingers*).

Also, we’re working on finishing up episodes 2A (Daisy) and 2C (Patrick Wolfe) of the Hawaii series - two of the parts that focus on Settler Colonialism. On our calendar we scheduled things out as if we’re going to be able to finish both episodes before the start of August (yeah, right). We’re pretty far along, but still, media production and unforseen delays go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Also, we’re still working on an episode about “nations”. I think we’ve been working on that one on and off for almost two years and now I just want to smash it with a large, rubber mallot. We just keep re-working it because I just don’t like the way it’s coming out.

Also, we are collaborating with the Center for Hegemony Studies on a really great community education project. We’ve been working with them every Monday or Tuesday for a little more than a year now, but I think from now is when our collaboration will really start going in all kinds of new and interesting directions (sometimes good things take a long time to take root). I’ll write more about this collaboration later in the year, after we’ve accumulated more documentation of said ‘things’!

One last thing - Bunny and I will be taking a long walk in the first two weeks of August. We’ll probably stay in desert-areas, but if we can get a ride with someone we were hoping to go as far as… I dunno, maybe New Mexico? We’ll see. But during that time we probably won’t be able to do e-mail everyday. We’ll try to get to a computer every few days to check in if possible. Kim & Mimi said they will take care of things like book orders or make t-shirts while we are gone, in case we get any PS Store orders.

As I’m writing this diary entry I just realized how much coffee we’re going to be drinking this month. There was a pretty good sale on coffee at the drug store and we bought 5 bags. Good thing.

Take care,
pinky

I hardly ever see stuff on TV that I want but this looks really good.

Posted by Bunny.

I know I said I wasn’t going to blog any more this month, but I’m always a sucker for a “Top 10 List”. When I saw Stephen Walt’s article in Foreign Policy about the ups and downs of empire maintenance, of course I couldn’t resist copy-and-pasting the main points here. I mean, it’s basically a two-for-one: favorite topic + favorite format! I like!

The basic question Dr. Walt poses is simple: Is there anything we (U.S. Americans) can learn about current place in the world by studying the rise and fall of the British Empire? Well, “yes”…

1. There is no such thing as a “benevolent” Empire.

2. All Empires depend on self-justifying ideology and rhetoric that is often at odds with reality.

3. Successful empires require ample “hard power.”

4. As Empires decline, they become more opulent, and they obsess about their own glory.

5. Great Empires are heterogeneous.

6. When building an empire, it’s hard to know where to stop.

7. It takes a lot of incompetent people to run an empire.

8. Great Powers defend perceived interests with any means at their disposal.

9. Nationalism and other forms of local identity remain a potent obstacle to long-term imperial control.

10. “Imperial Prestige” is both an asset and a trap.

Okay, I admit posting the above points is only a cheap come-on to try to get people to read the whole article (find it here!). But the article’s so short and won’t take more than 10 minutes to read (pondering time extra) - definitely waaay faster than reading Piers Brendon’s The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 plus Gibbon’s multi-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Thank goodness for internet mini-summaries!

Take care,
pinky

Here’s a nice follow-up to the last blog entry re: empires - a short list-based essay by Chalmers Johnson titled Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire, and Ten Steps to Take to Do So. Again, in the interest of making this entry as brief as possible, I’ve taken the liberty of stripping the list down to small-size (apologies to Dr. Johnson). Please read the complete essay here, or better yet, read his trilogy of books on the subject: Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis.

Three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire…

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the “opportunity costs” that go with them.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters — along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth — that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world’s largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism.

7. We should abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces.

9. We need to reduce the size of our standing army.

10. We must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

[ full essay here ]

Maybe it’s too obvious to be included in the above list, but my favorite reason to dismantle U.S. imperial structures is simply because they’re vicious and immoral. Enough is enough.

Okay, Bunny and I leave for our walk now.

Much love,
pinky