More Coolo NASA Travel Posters

NASA has the best travel posters!

I wrote about some of their earlier posters HERE.  Well, they're at it again - repeated graphic excellence.  Check out the new posters HERE.

NASA travel poster!

Isn't that gorgeous?  Just makes you want to buy a ticket to far star-strewn places doesn't it?  Between NASA's poster campaign and the new Star Wars films space is suddenly cool again... maybe we'll get that Mars Colony in my life time.

And now that I've set up an inevitable and not-in-my-favor comparison, let me show you some more of the protest postcards I've been designing lately.  (Protest?  Why ever?)

A handy be-kind-not-cruel card to send to legislators about immigration issues.  

A health-care issues postcard.

And, for ticked-off women who, whatever your politics, are annoyed by powerful men
Not Listening...

In my head the Statue of Liberty is starting to live quite a heroic superhero adventure.  The perfect avitar for this moment in American history.

Please, if you're writing to your congressional representative or senator and you like a postcard design, feel free to print 'em and use 'em.  Pass 'em on!  

(Print on card stock at 4 1/4" x 6" or stuff, any sized, in an envelope.)

Oh, and don't forget the artsy one - the arts need all the help they can get:

From a behind-the-curtain artist's view, all these designs are collages done with computer image / photo editing software (rather than scissors and glue) from public domain images.  Turns out, for me at least, political upset means a chance to hone my computer / art skills!  Who knew?  So, if our American Experiment slides into Authoritarian Tyranny, maybe I can at least get work as a Propaganda Poster Hack.  Who knows? 

Or they'll need artists on Mars.

And, before I lose this stickynote again, here's a gem of a topical poem I found in the NY Times written by Susan McLean:

Trump seethes at what the writers say.

He'll pull the plug on the N.E.A.

The jokes on him. Art doesn't pay.

We write our satires anyway.

Presidents' Day

"The only security of all is in a free press.

The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed.

The agitation it produces must be submitted to."

Versus:

I think I'm going to go with Thomas Jefferson on this one.

Resist

Unknown photographer, please allow this usage

Today sees the new Trump Administration taking a swing at the environment.  

You know, all those "purple mountains majesty" and "amber waves of grain."  

But... 

some of us are kinda fond of the stuff.  It being our birthright n' all.  Protest has begun.  (See above, Greenpeace protest flag.)

The new government's first steps have been to stop the EPA acting and to muzzle it and Department of the Interior - along with Human Services and still other departments.  No public communication, no tweets or texts or blogs or talking to journalists or to the public.  Wiping websites of climate and other scientific data.

But...

some brave park rangers aren't having that.  Here's their response, an alt-National Park Service twitter page.  https://twitter.com/AltNatParkSer  Here facts and science and truth still have a home on the range.


ADDENDUM:

How could we pick this leader?  As usual, Shakespeare says it best:

Inauguration Day

Well, Donald Trump gets sworn in today.

Yesterday's political-news leak was that his proposed budget cuts spending for the Arts and Humanities to $ 0.

The Hill's Alexander Bolton reports that Brian Darling, a former Heritage Foundation staffer now a Paul Ryan aide, said about this budget:

"The Trump Administration needs to reform and cut spending dramatically, and 

targeting waste like the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be a good first step ..."

Sure, every civilization up till today has created its Great Public Art - pyramids, Versailles, operas, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Bolshoi Ballet, Muppets - art that survives its era and glorifies it.  Historically, it is Art that makes a civilization remembered as great.  

Or remembered at all.

But that junk's all "waste" so why should the United States of America spend a nickel?

Sistine-Trump

public domain image messed with

ADDENDUM:
The Washington Post has a good article on the stupidity of this "budget" idea HERE.

Addendum #2:
Need the dollars and cents?  According to the NEA, the arts adds $700 billion - that's $700,000,000,000 - to the American economy every year and employs 5 million Americans.  For comparison, the oil and gas industry (as best I can figure out) employs around 2.1 million workers - less than half!

Watch a nice NEA film:

A Little Bit More Charlie

After the murderous attack on the Parisian satirical paper Charlie Hebdo we - especially all artists - need to consider our stand on free speech.

I understand that the political cartoons and satire of Charlie Hebdo is no-holds-barred, unPC, sometimes irreverent past the line of offending anyone and everyone.  France has a proud tradition of political satire, a history starting during the lead-up to the French Revolution.  Satire is supposed to be offensive now and then.

Another historical fact... Since the experience of Salman Rushdi, the West is aware that certain groups are quite easily and violently offended.  It takes guts to offend when you know there's a death sentence against a novelist because someone disliked his writing.  Because of threats  Charlie Hebdo had a policeman to protect them.  Slaughtering that police officer and another and the editorial board and chief cartoonists of a magazine is...

Unthinkable.  Indefensible.

If a civilized person objects to writing or drawing they protest peacefully or go to court.  They cancel their magazine subscription.

It is, I think, a terrible comment on the present state of a great religious and ethnic community that was once a beacon of civilization - noted for scholars, scientists, and artists - that they are now represented to the rest of the world by these... murderers.

An Arabic astronomer... anciently cartooned

Old enough to be public domain.

Genuine followers of Islam need to take back their religion from the followers of evil.

The rest of us?  We need to support free speech.  Even free speech we don't like, which might include satire, political speech, certain artists' work, even neo-Nazi BS and stupid movies about North Korea.

I'll have to watch that movie now.  Really don't like the actors, but gotta see it now.

For myself, as a theater artist, I always evaluate the next play to see whether I agree with its point of view or, if it offends me, whether the material is, nevertheless, artistically true or important or useful to the world.  I've only had one play picketed so far.  Frankly, I think the religious picketers mis-read that script because the insult they perceived seemed, to me, only a joke that generations of Catholic school girls must have made, while the show as a whole was sweet-natured and, under the frivolity, a serious look at the relationship between Man and God.  But they had their point of view, the show had its, and the picketing was a peaceful debate between the two.

Isn't that the point?

Let's freely and peacefully discuss important things.  Let's support those who do.