Beginner's Guide to Community-based Arts

Average customer rating:

Dances around and past the sheep

Inspiring

Great Read and Superhelpful, Inspiring

left wing politics co-op the art

a terrific resource

Beginner's Guide to Community-based Arts
Keith Knight , and Mat Schwarzman
Manufacturer: New Village Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Multicultural | Contemporary Methods | Education Theory | Education | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0976605430

Book Description

Ten transformative local arts projects come alive in this illustrated training manual for youth leaders and teachers. This energetic guidebook demonstrates the enormous power of art in grass-roots social change. It presents proven models of community-based arts programs, plus techniques, discussion questions, and plentiful resources.

Writer Mat Schwarzman directs the Crossroads Center at Xavier University, which trains youth leaders nationwide in community-based arts activism. He holds a PhD in transformative learning.

Graphic storyteller Keith Knight is an award-winning cartoonist, rapper, and hip-hop musician with two nationally syndicated comic strips.

Customer Reviews:

Dances around and past the sheep.......2006-04-08

I love this book.
(Of course, I read all the Keith Knight cartoons first, then went back and read the book.)

Lots of good information here. It's a wonderful resource in these times of massive budget cuts for the arts.
The lesson is: DO IT YOURSELF (but get help!)

This book will get you started, and teach you to allocate the few available resources and align with like-minded activist folks to get the job done.

Should be required reading in every high school and college.

Inspiring.......2006-02-08

This book is wonderful; it's accessible, fresh, and inspiring. Its playful tone will appeal to young adult audiences. The illustrations are dynamic, the language is clear, and the structure is elegant.

Having taught reading and literacy for many years, I am suspicious of books that teach "methods." (There is always a new method or 'miracle program' out there being foisted on teachers.) Methods almost always become stale and tired and eventually end up constricting learners and teachers. What I like about the Beginner's Guide is that in lieu of a "method" the authors present a sound philosophy in which they make a connection between art and community. This is presented in a charming and informal manner and without needless complication or fuss. The authors' philosophy seems to be based on common sense, a deep feeling for humanity, and an understanding of art as a vital expression of that humanity.

The authors present their ideas in a clear and simple framework that can be used by artists, art students, and community members in any number of situations and for any number of purposes. It's difficult to imagine such a process becoming 'stale'; what you can do with this book is only limited by the energy and imagination of your community.

Great Read and Superhelpful, Inspiring.......2006-02-07

Great stories that provide models for meanigful arts programs. One reviewer here on amazon referred to the book being political and not arts centered. I found that to be way off base. What I got from the book is how art becomes a reponse to the struggles of different communities, and in turn helps to address those challenges. So, art is both an end in itself as well as a tool for articulating and facing the world. The drawings and the approach itself is grounded in how art is practiced with everybody, how art is powerful for everybody to engage in (not just those who get to call themselves "artists' and lead the "artistic life" of writing grants to arts councils). Keith Knight's comics in particular rock!

left wing politics co-op the art.......2005-12-22

"Community Based Arts" is new slang. It basically means, how to get someone who is so far outside the political realm of reasonableness to be politically influencial by using art as the method of empowerment. Art? Not important. Political impowerment..according to the general message of this book is important. It really goes into the face of what art is, and has been for a millenia.

Make no mistake about it. Schwarzman is a political activist that does not understand art, nor does he have a background in art.

This book is NOT for artists that want to learn how to write grants, because there is NO practical information about how to do anything except to teach non-artists about using their political beliefs to be artistically inspired.

If you are an artist and you need some REAL advice about how to get work and survive, then I'd go to the local arts council or to the web to other professionally oriented resources.

If you are an artist and you need to seek new sources of inspiration then you should read Robert Henri's book The Art Spirit, published in 1923. It's a beautiful book, and it has inspired artists of many mediums since its publication.

a terrific resource.......2005-11-15

This book can be used to formulate a grant, jazz up the funders, get students to learn about community work through comics, to teach college art students how to get out and get to work. I am so excited about this book because of how it outlines and lays out in simple forms the organizing process. They want you to be able to repoduce the processes. It's not high falutin art or theory gobbldigook. It is, on the other hand, a highly engaging funny cool and groundbreaking book about art. Comics of real artists doing real art. Great for artists, teachers, organizers, and people who work for social change.

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Over 1,000 detailed illustrations appear in this comprehensive sourcebook, offering artists, woodcarvers, and other craftspeople a rich and inspiring selection of forms, patterns, and motifs. Each design is identified by cultural and historical period, with descriptions of tools, techniques and materials. Hundreds of beautiful, functional forms include Viking carvings, designs of Northwest Coast Indians, Ivory Coast masks, and much more.

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4 Titles By Catherine Spencer : Dominic's Child Naturally Loving That Man Callahan! A Lasting Kind of Love
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Providing information on synthesizing and processing sound with specialized programs, this reference is written for musicians of all skill levels. In addition to describing specific computer/music programs and methods of working with them, information is given on the theoretical data necessary for the user to understand the concepts behind programmed sound-processing algorithms. Special attention is given to the sound editor Cool Edit Pro, which is endowed with the most advanced methods of signal processing. Other programs examined include GigaStudio 160, T-RackS 24, Waves MaxxBass, FreeFilter, LoudnessMaximizer, Compressor, and PhaseScope. Sound signals, spectrums, sampling, and filtering theory are also discussed.

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A solid technical multimedia guide.......2002-12-06

PC Music Home Studio: Secrets, Tips, & Tricks would have appeared in our computer column but its value to any musician or home recording artist makes it an item not to be missed by any with a love for composing, performing, and recording their own music. PC Music Home Studio provides technical and special information on processing sound using specialized computer programs. From specific computer music programs and methods of working with them to understanding how sound is edited, compressed, and filtered, PC Music Home Studio is a solid technical multimedia guide highly recommended for all levels of computer users and musicians.

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The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles
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Cultures of all epochs have consulted oracles in times of need. This fascinating exploration of the enduring popularity of oracles examines how they are interpreted and why. Taking examples from literature and history, from the oracles at Delphi to those in Macbeth, and further still to the works of Kafka and Bob Dylan, and even in the film The Matrix, Wood combines storytelling and commentary to provide a lively account of humanity's persistent faith in signs, which continues to exert an important influence on the course of civilization.

Customer Reviews:

Very very good.......2004-08-19

This is an enjoyable book, one which can be read straight through or left at one end of the sofa and picked up and continued when the mood strikes one. Or when the omens are promising. The author is learned and writes gracefully, evoking an earlier age -- or many earlier ages -- when literary critics and scholars wrote lucid, elegant, and insightful prose for their peers as well as for the educated -- or simply the interested -- general reader.

I won't say much about the topic, oracles, except to say that we homo sapiens seem to have a rather persistent propensity to be afflicted by oracle-ism: a kind of prophetic wisdom, at odds with commonsensical or empirical knowledge, and therefore acquired on the cheap. And convincing because it implies a flattering interest in us by significant powers.

Do not waste your time or money reading this book........2003-10-28

The book lacks any sort of cohesiveness. The author rambles on about superfluous facts, which makes for a very dull story. Do not waste your time reading the book. The poor showing also indicates that books reviewed by the Washington Post (as this one was )can be duds.

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"Just Mary": The Life of Mary Evelyn Grannan
Margaret Anne Hume
Manufacturer: Dundurn Press
ProductGroup: Book
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ASIN: 155002597X
Release Date: 2006-01-01

Book Description

Just Mary and Maggie Muggins are names that will arouse memories in those who grew up with CBC radio and television in the 1940s and 1950s. The creator of these and other children's shows, former Fredericton schoolteacher Mary Grannan, became a radio star when she hit the national airwaves in 1939, her popularity peaking when Maggie Muggins moved to television in 1955. Long before The Friendly Giant and Mr. Dressup appeared, her work helped to shape the legacy of gentle children's programming on CBC. Building on her broadcasting success, Grannan published over thirty books, most runaway best-sellers. Attired in stylish dress, extravagant hats, and enormous earrings, she made frequent guest appearances at public events across the country. She received the Beaver Award for her broadcasting and was honoured by the International Mark Twain Society and the Institute for Education by Radio at Ohio State University.

"Just Mary": The Life of Mary Evelyn Grannan is the first biography of this creative and once well-known Canadian woman. Immersing the reader in rich detail while showcasing excerpts of her writings through the years, the book presents an intimate examination of her life journey through previously unreleased personal letters, archives, an abundance of photographs, and interviews with family, friends, colleagues, and former students. This is the private Mary Grannan as the public has never before known her.

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Five lives are entangled by politics, passion and personal tragedy when arson becomes murder and Tom Harant, the accidental witness re-discovers his own personal sense of mission and dedication to serving the children in his school.

Customer Reviews:

Unique book.......1999-07-23

I am one engineer who have to make the system of the electronic intelligence. But I don't have the good experience about this area. From this book, I can get the good guideline and reference. It is very good chance for my qualities. Because I cannot find more good guide-book from other place.

Book Description

An honest and unflinching look at the final phase of the American empire, and the sources of our decline.

The Twilight of American Culture appeared in 2000 like a thunderbolt, warning that America's corporate culture and rampant materialism would set of an international counter-response. In his new work, Morris Berman discusses the coming collapse of the American economy, the erosion of democratic ideals, and the emergence of a "seamless propaganda machine" that has destroyed popular discourse to the point that we now dwell in a miasma of propagandistic fog. Berman's central point is that it is the specific details of the way we live—our values and daily behavior—that have brought about this state of affairs, from which there can be no return.

Customer Reviews:

A Uniquely Perceptive and Insightful Study.......2007-09-26

This may have been one of the most important books of 2006.

Certainly, there has been tremendous negative attention, considering the author has decided to understand the American character based on the decisions we have made, as a people, over the previous two centuries. The picture that emerges is not the rosiest, and considering how insistent we are as a people on a narrative that can attribute to us no harm and no evil and no mistakes, this is a tremendously powerful and incisive work.

Anyone who is curious as to the future decline of the United States as a global power, as well as the contradiction between our rhetoric in the Middle East and our increasing inability to a fact politics globally, would be happy to read this book. I myself, a student of history, read of the work twice, from cover to cover, and each time founded more rewarding.

Taking a structural point of view, Dr. Berman informs us that the decisions that allowed America to become powerful involved certain preferences for individualism, expansion and exploitation which in the end have turned us, within no less than 30 years, from a great economic engine of the world into the world's largest debtor. It is certainly powerful stuff. No doubt the typical flag-waving crowd will find it unpalatable, but that does not make it any less true.

Scary!.......2007-09-22

I am a German, who lived in the USA from 1980 to 1990. Mr. Berman's description of US society closely matches my own observations, first as a student at CALTECH, later working in North Carolina.
Contrary to some reviewers, I did not find a socialist "slant" in this book, except for the last few (bad, they are the reason for the one star deduction) pages. I am not a historian, so I cannot judge, if the parallels to the Roman empire are accurate or debatable, but it seems clear from the book, that US society is on the downhill path - this is simply not the America where the rule of law prevailed, and which was admired world over anymore.
I am afraid, that Americans, who have never or rarely reavelled abroad will not be able to understand what the author tries to convey.
I recommend the book to anyone, who wants to get a clear picture of contemporary US society, and US values.
It is sad, that the truth looks like this.

Here it comes..........2007-09-21

"As we progress through the centuries, the parallels between contemporary America and late-empire Rome, and the subsequent slide into the Dark Ages, become increasingly suggestive. The third century AD was characterized by near continuous warfare, combined with a collapse of the currency and the rise of a military monarchy" [page 305]. Given what we've witnessed of escalating US military adventures since 1945, the recent weakening of the US dollar to parity with the Canadian dollar, and the rise of the power elite (Eisenhower's "military industrial complex"), Berman's analysis seems accurate.

Berman characterizes a Dark Age as possessing four characteristics: 1) the triumph of religion over reason, 2) the atrophy of education and critical thinking, 3) the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture, and 4) political and economic marginalization. His ignoring the unconstitutionality of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and the actual nature of 911 (adopting a Chomsky-esque "blowback" interpretation) weaken Berman's otherwise insightful analysis. Hopefully, Berman will include such material in subsequent editions of this otherwise well-written, insightful study.

This book - taken together with the online BBC film The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, MJ Mikael's online film The Corporation, CW Mills' The Power Elite, Thomas E Ricks' Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Chris Hedges' War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Eustace Mullins' The Secrets of the Federal Reserve - The London Connection, Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild, and Professor David Ray Griffin's Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory - provides a good glimpse of just how dark things really have become.

"Individualism" is Not the Problem--It's the Solution.......2007-09-15

While I agree with Mr. Berman's argument that American culture is a vast wasteland, and getting vaster and ever more wasted, I wish he and others wouldn't say that "individualism" is one of the reasons. I'm so tired of hearing this word used as a negative.

Now think: if the great majority of Americans are living a lifestyle of overconsumption and filling themselves with mindless entertainment, if they haven't had an original thought in God-knows-when, if they're dumb and getting dumber, fat and getting fatter, robotic and getting more robotic--how can you possibly call them "individuals?"

What they actually are--and you're not going to like this--is a community. The fact that they don't commune with each other (except through shared references to things outside their own inner experience) doesn't mean they're not a community. Their community's ground rule is that they NOT commune with each other, at least not in any meaningful way. But because they share the same way of life and have the same demands (e.g., "I want my MTV!"), they're a community.

Individualism is our only hope. Only an indvidual can turn off the TV, reconnect to his/her own spirit, and resolve to keep living that way no matter what. And from that position, s/he may create something really ALIVE and model for our American community what it means to BE alive.

When a few not-quite-comatose Americans notice this, they might be tempted to try living the same way. And from what THEY create, a few more might join them, and then a few more until we reach that overused phrase, "the tipping point." And that's how our culture turns back to Life, if it ever will at all.

But don't ever expect that to happen through "more community." These days, that's just another station to tune in and out of, depending on how good its production values are.

The case for America in decline (4.5 *s).......2007-09-11

According to the author, Americans are so steeped in the ideology of Americanism, which consists of bits of individualism, self-centeredness, consumption as primary activity, and above all a belief in the superiority of the American people, that we do not notice the decay of our culture, let alone the pernicious impact of the ongoing efforts of American political and economic elites to impose American values and institutions on the rest of the world. We are unable to see, just like other dominant cultures of the past, that our way of life and our interactions with the rest of the world are unsustainable. The author contends that we, as a nation and as a society, are actually in decline.

The 9/11 attacks were a prime motivation for this book. They were another wakeup call for America: despite their horrific nature, a chance to understand how we are viewed by others. But Americans, encouraged by a particularly non-reflective president, have chosen to understand 9/11 as an attack of Evil upon Good. In that line of thinking, however America chooses to interact with the rest of the world must, by definition, be based on goodness, purity, and light. That is a decidedly arrogant, non-historical attitude. The in-depth analysis that the author undertakes of our foreign policies over just the last fifty years, especially in the Middle East, is precisely what is missing from the American understanding of 9/11. We are constantly changing our positions in our relations with foreign entities, often quite hypocritically. Though we claim to stand for self-determination and democracy, we have suppressed numerous indigenous political movements throughout the world, such as those in Guatemala, Chile, and Iran, while supporting brutal dictatorships in those places and elsewhere. The American people consistently and continually accept the deceptions and justifications for our foreign maneuvers that create tremendous resentment around the world.

The author strongly suggests that it is not surprising that dysfunctional foreign machinations would arise from our culture. He finds our culture to be mindless, isolating, and indifferent to others. We hardly have a sense of community, let alone actual communities. A community in America is a gated enclave in which the residents never interact, or a pseudo town square in a shopping mall in which only shopping activities are permitted. We allow the market place, or more correctly powerful economic entities, to have widespread social effects. For example, job losses are seen to be the result of the workings of a benign marketplace, even empowering in some views, and not as being devastating to families and communities. We as a society have decided to provide virtually no social safety net to counter the harshness of laissez-faire capitalism. Americans are woefully ignorant about community sustaining information such as history, current affairs, the workings of government, etc. Instead American life consists mostly of shopping and being passively entertained - television, spectacles, spectaculars, constant travel, etc. We simply do not have the social inclinations and knowledge to direct a coherent and friendly political approach towards ourselves and other nations and people.

An alarming trend observed by the author is a turn to fundamentalist religion in the US. Perhaps it is a reaction to the emptiness of the standard American life, but it is not a solution. There is a large element of groupthink that goes along with fundamentalism, as well as a rejection of an outlook that questions everything and tries to supply rationality. Fundamentalism produces the simplistic Good vs. Evil outlook that precludes a serious examination of ourselves and our actions. President Bush is perhaps the epitome of that view. Whether it is a cynical stance or not, the President and his handlers have convinced the American people that a permanent War on Terror is necessary to combat pervasive evil. Of course, terror is merely a continuation of the previous incarnation of evil, communism, which permitted all manner of interventions in the world that brought untold misery and damaged our reputation irrevocably.

The book really offers no solutions to the current state of American society and our foreign relations. There may be none. The author regards the American people as the "greatest obstacle to progressive change in the US." He notes that the concept "American people" is almost sacred with any criticisms being especially damaging to the speaker. To place quite so much emphasis on the American people is a bit disingenuous. The fact is that corporations dominate our society: workplaces, schools, information flow, leisure, the material basis of life, definitely the political process - most everything. It is most difficult for individuals, or even large groups, to counter that vast influence. The author notes in particular that the key aspect of our foreign policy is to ensure the free flow of goods produced by American corporations.

History is strewn with countless organizations and even entire societies that have been unable to pull back from debilitating practices and have essentially disappeared. The author does not suggest the pending disappearance of American society, although with America as the hegemon of the world, the environmental effects of global, free-running capitalism could well be devastating to the entire planet, not just the US.

This book is a follow-up to the author's previous work, The Twilight of Capitalism. He is not happy with American culture and this diatribe - not too strong of a word - continues the assault. Yet the malaise and general dysfunctional condition of American society, as noted by Jimmy Carter some thirty years ago, can hardly be dismissed. Most of what the author says cannot be ignored without endangering our own domestic tranquility and our relationships in the world.

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

Average customer rating:

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire
Morris Berman
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0739475878

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