The Artist Presently Known As Ed

I Am Trayvon

As I write this note, the matter of Trayvon Martin's murder is only a bit over a month old, and my awareness of it is less than one week old. In the last week, his murder (as a young black kid in a hoodie, said to automatically mean he was a gangster) at the hands of a white vigilante who has so far not even been arrested is inflaming people of good will across the nation. Interesting then that I heard about all this on a Tuesday night in Florida not too far from where he was killed, and then on a Thursday night two days later, I was in Washington DC for the first time, and for a while, shooting pictures at the new memorial to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., where of all the memorials I visited, elicited the most visceral response in me. Over the weekend since, there was a phenomenon of people wearing hoodies and showing solidarity with Trayvon Martin. It's easy to imagine the great MLK chiming in with his great call for justice to be done. From one black man gunned down in total senselessness to another black man gunned down in the same way, and well before his prime... 

Cruel and Unusual

One doesn't need to say more.

I'm the dictator

I don’t know about you, but that “sieg heil!” pose is a little discomforting. I do believe Fuhrer Bush has uttered these same words. He’s building up a good collection of them. “The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper!” “There should be limits to freedom.” And so on.

Vidal's dead heroes

Gore Vidal is a prophet. This quote just cuts to the bone for me, much like all the the Trumbo book Johnny Got His Gun does. The picture is one of several I was able to download while such pictures were still restricted from the press.

Red Menace, 2004

The Red Menace once was communism, but now it is conservatism that turns a blind eye to the evils of war, the destruction of social networks (and not the Facebook kind), the evils of corporatism, environmental degradation, and all sorts of shit. In an ironic twist of history, where is the Joe McCarthy of our age, rooting out these people who really are destroying America?

Apocalypse. Now.

The second version of this graphic mocks the religious right who cheerleads for the end of the world. I don’t get it myself. But of all our presidents, this quasi-president had the power and the hubris to push us closer than ever wanted to get.

Abu Graib house of horrors

Just too easy to have fun with this one. Just think… people actually pay to go into a house of horrors that is far less scary than this place.

Some don't see the connection

I rode my bike around in Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery on Memorial Day in 2004 and saw many SUVs. I think its tragic. These people think it is the great expression of freedom to drive whatever they want, damn all consequences. Then I want to grab them by the neck and rattle their cages and give them a bit of the ol’ straightup: Don’t you people realize this car of yours contributes to your wars and more dead sons and daughters???

Fight Errorism

Never mind a War on Terrorism. I’ve since moved on from believing that Bush and Co. make mistakes just like you and me. I’ve come to believe that it plays into their love of deregulation and privatization in favor of a government that can focus on important stuff like bombing countries who have energy and resources of interest to us. If they can make a government program or plan (the social ones in particular) look bad or fail, they can justify abolishing such a program from the budget, and they can allow a private company to do the work, if at all. This makes more sense to me now. But for now, I had my little fun with wordplay. The picture itself was one of mine, taken by camera just shooting at the TV, almost randomly.

Fin de Siecle

It's one of the darkest things I ever produced. Fin de Siecle means “end of the century” in French (or Freedom, since “French” is out of vogue here…oops, out of popularity, since “vogue” is French, er, Freedom… ah, nevermind!). In this, at its full resolution, there are various medical images of brains, twin towers, skulls, suburban satellite images, dead grass, the Hooded Iraqi, my eyes and glasses, and maybe more that I have forgotten about. To me it is just a dark, dark collage of scary images that are taking place at this end of the century. It sort of speaks of fallen empire, peak oil, environmental destruction, the evils of war.

Sam and George

This is a bit of fun I put together in the middle-past, maybe in 2005 or so, and somehow forgot about it while working on it. Even though there are no shadows on the penguins, I think its good enough to go.

Gas Prices

A clever poster from me, in its understated way. I’m sort of ashamed about making the third octane number wrong—it should be 91 instead of 92. Oh well.

Here for the oil

I guess I was just making fun of the confusery of the Bush "logic" and reasoning for going to war.

We didn't need that economy anyway

Some old men are better off making models of ships. Some, who happen to be driving the world economy, develop some kind of thick skin about what their actions really mean in the world. Economists need to come out of the Chicago School ivory tower and see what their little calculations actually turn into when people bother to listen to them.

Greenspan brain fart

Good one, Al... didn't see the biggest bubble the world has ever known.

Greenspan mea culpa

Alan Greenspan has this smarmy look to him in this pic. I'd like to think he is just a befuddled old man, but he's not off the hook that easy. I hope the Ayn Rand era is coming to an end soon, or else we're all up the creek.

Greenspan god is dead

Ayn Rand was a mentor to Alan Greenspan who managed the sweep of the US economy for a couple decads. But Ayn Rand's philosophies are some of the most savagely self-centered (and by extension anti-regulatory) I have heard of. Little surprise that the explosion of all manner of minimally regulated market and financial activity exploded during the Greenspan years, and then went bust just a while after he left. He said he didn't see it coming. Oh?

Operation Iraqi Liberation

I had heard that the Operation Iraqi Freedom was going to be called Operation Iraqi Liberation, until someone noticed the acronym would be a little too easy to jump on and criticize. I think I heard all that long after I made this.

Ownership society

The Ownership Society is the euphemistically named philosophy of deregulation and privatization of services and programs that actually helped people. You know—privatize social security (the best social plan ever in the country), and make it so that people “own” their own success or failure because they have to make investment decisions of their own. They also talk about home ownership on the rise, but that is a joke—many people now get homes with loans that they have no business getting because the credit industry is getting so risky, and anyone who has blood in their veins can get a loan. One day, a massive crash awaits us, and who knows what can result if massive parts of the population owe massive debt that a determined and aggressive lender wants to have paid back. Some fear a return to indentured servitude. Some think the lenders too will collapse because their lending is so whack that they have no basis in reality to claim a return on their loans. Who knows.

War president

I’m pretty sure I was under the influence of Dalton Trumbo’s book Johnny Got His Gun. Taking some shots of a cattle sign from the nearby mountains, a graveyard shot from Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery, a screen shot of a protest sign in The Fog of War, and some tortured images done in Photoshop, I just thought it would evoke the madness of war and the senseless slaughter of men herded off to battle. My truck window sticker for several years said “Not My President” and that is echoed here—I don’t subscribe to his legitimacy, being put in power by the Supreme Court more than the people, hence the word president in quotation marks. I think he had to create a war so he could be that “war president” that would make him great in the absence of brains and balls, and mostly, a heart where usually a person has one.

American gothic cathedrals

The oldest of the posters here, probably done in early 2002 when I started to take any note of the world around me. My title here is a play on words. The twin towers are essentially our cathedrals—the place where America worships its true gods—wealth, power, expansion. The gothic cathedrals of Europe were the high water marks of expressions of religious faith, their construction reaching for the heavens. They reflected the priorities of the society that birthed them. Our towers do the same. But it wasn’t always so. The America of today still attempts to celebrate the boring rural folks who supposedly are the backbone of the nation. But they have been displaced, and now we are in love with a ghost of our former national identity. Maybe that’s the sad expression on their faces. And maybe they are filing away from the carnage with a realization that they have their work to return to back on the farm, the same as many of us will have to face up to as peak oil strips the urban experience of its perceived glories—lights, heating, recreation, waste of all sorts, as men pursue all sorts of meaningless work at the expense of the meaningful work that their great grandparents did.

Jesus wants his church back

I made a number of these with different captions but only this one seems to be at the intended size and resolution. Imagine replacing this caption with:

“I run the show around here.”
“Someone stole my sheep!”
“Am I gonna have to come down there and kick some ass for real this time?”
“I’ve been the victim of Identity Theft.”
“I’ll come back when you all learn to play nice together.”

Made in China

This was done about the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, shortly after Michael Phelps cleaned up everything in sight.

I can’t help but think of how China is getting rich off our inability to shut off the endless flow from our wallets. Well, someone is getting rich, while the workers who prop up that whole system are experiencing their version of what our nation experienced a century ago when we struggled to figure out how to industrialize, and the industrial world had to in fact figure out how to make citizens into consumers in order to actually consume and use the things which the industrial process was now capable of making. Our growing pains included fights for union representation and social justice concomitant with that. It included the fight for an 8 hour work day and weekends. Basically, it fought for human dignity in the face of the growing power of the Machine.

But China itself seems to be a machine. And the Olympic games were the user-friendly front end of it, but what lurks beneath?