i wanted to point out a few articles of interest in the current East Bay Express:

this EBX article gives a bit of history and background to The Grouch (of "you ain't artsier than me" fame), a bay area native, and reveals that he's not really that much of a hater. or a grouch:

Anti-Artsy Emcee
www.eastbayexpress.com/music/...Content

"He explains that the song is set up as a parody, and the video is actually a pastiche of images borrowed from other people's videos: ink blots from Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," hand gestures from a Hewlett Packard commercial, silhouettes from an ad for iPods. In describing the video, Grouch is pretty open and unapologetic about his intent: The concept behind it, he said, "was that we were stealing from other people's artsy campaigns that they had already put out."

CocaineBlunts.com blogger Noz suggested that the song is actually a diss on Grouch's fanbase — a claim Grouch resolutely denies, though it has gained currency in the blogosphere. He said it's mostly about being an anti-elitist: the guy in the hip-hop scene who's not boasting about how he has the flyest clothes and the rarest records; the guy in the hippie scene who's not trying to front like a baller just because he ate brown rice and salad for lunch today.

Grouch takes the Barack Obama gambit in this album, emphasizing personal stories, ranting against elitism, and gabbing about life in the domestic sphere..."

if you want to watch the video, it's here:
www.youtube.com/watch



then, there's this interesting piece about Ariel Schrag, now known as one of the writers of The L Word but first famous at Berkeley High for self-publishing comic books about the awkwardness of being a teenager the she sold to her classmates:

Top Spy at Berkeley High
www.eastbayexpress.com/artscu...Content

"She wrote Awkward during the summer after her freshman year, cribbing it partly from sketchbooks she filled with cartoon depictions of stupid high school exploits (like spray-painting with boys or stealing yogurt pretzels from a store and getting chewed out by the cashier). "My brain sort of naturally did the perfect amount of editing, in terms of remembering what was interesting and forgetting what wasn't," Schrag said. Awkward is the most primitive of her comics, though it's still a thoroughly entertaining read, filled with a fourteen-year-old's chatty stories about her crush on actress Juliette Lewis, and the best guy friend who became a pseudo boyfriend, but not really...

Schrag finished Awkward before tenth grade and sold copies for five bucks a pop. By the time she started school in the fall, she was a minor campus celebrity."



and finally, a sad but revealing article on the recent demise of The Rockridge Institute, a thinktank co-founded by well-known linguist George Lakoff formed to focus on pushing the progressive movement forward. mostly interesting because 1) i'm working for a similar thinktank, and the lessons learned here about funding and image apply to many small progressive organizations, whether NGOs or not, and 2) the idea of 'framing' is something that we do a lot of in my environmental public policy work, and one around which me and my colleague formed an "environmental salon" in 2005; the shorthand for the name of the group was "enviro-framers", inspired by Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant.

Framing Issues Is Hard; Just Ask George Lakoff
www.eastbayexpress.com/news/f...Content

"Because Lakoff's best-selling book had received such acclaim, everyone assumed Rockridge was flush with cash. "People thought that they should just get stuff from us for free," said Joe Brewer, a fellow who wrote about environmental policy. He said advocacy groups would approach Rockridge talking excitedly about how they could use the institute's resources; when they heard there was a price tag attached, "they just turned off," Brewer said.

In fact, Rockridge suffered from the same fund-raising issues that plague all progressive organizations, where funding is often doled out in dribs and drabs for small, specific projects. Conservatives don't have that problem, Brewer said. "The Cato Institute will get a million dollars a year for five years, and the donor will say, 'Do whatever you need to do to reach your goals,'" he said. Whereas in the progressive world, it's more like: "Here's $20,000 and we're going to watch how you spend every penny, and no you're not going to get any more," he said.

...Brewer and his colleague Eric Haas both say that the group realized six months ago that "framing" was the wrong word for its focus. Too many people took that word to mean that the Rockridge Institute worked on spin, propaganda, and messaging, and that it wanted to slap some new labels on candidates and policy proposals to trick the public into supporting them. A review of Lakoff's best-seller in The Atlantic called framing "psychobabble," and Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel devoted a section of his own book to bashing Lakoff, saying that Lakoff is "flat-out wrong" to think that Democrats can win campaigns through word games."


cognitive framing and linguistics are something we spend a lot of time on in the public policy field, as the words used to describe an issue have so much weight and meaning and greatly affect how people think about a subject, whether it's immigration or healthcare or the economy or national security, and it's sad that the Rockridge Institute, as the author points out, ironically framed themselves in a way that negatively affected their success.