[Editor’s Note: RIVET’s expanding blog features now include a monthly art showcase on the first week of every month. As in the print magazine’s Artist Portfolio, the blog feature will showcase exceptional visual talent in all mediums. Please send submissions to ali @ rivetmagazine.org.] 

Brett Hamil is a cartoonist, writer, and standup comic living in WA.

1. If you could hang with any famous artist, who would it be and why?
Raymond Pettibon. His work is funny, poetic, anti-authoritarian, and irreducible; all qualities I attempt to emulate.

2. Favorite Seattle bookstore?
Elliott Bay (close second: Magus in the U-District)

3. Who is your biggest artistic inspiration?
George Grosz (close second: Zach Galifianakis)

4. What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Chicken

5. Where is the best place to view art in Seattle?
Crawl Space Gallery on Capitol Hill has been showing a lot of good stuff lately. (close tie for second: the Frye and the new SAM)

6. Who are you more like: Calvin or Hobbes?
Hobbes, the bon vivant and skeptic.

The smartest kid in my grad program wanted to write his first critical theory paper on the commodification and subsequent devaluing of literature using Oprah’s book club as the focal point.I knocked him around for this, with many snide asides about intellectual elitism, and encouraged him to look at NWA and Public Enemy as a better outlet for his Marxist critique.

Now, nobody needs to get Oprah’s back. She could hire a hit on me with the change in her seat cushions. And that wasn’t at all what it was about. I took him to task because the extension of the postmodern moment, the realization that art does not contain meaning but makes meaning in concert with audience, is that meaning is made both in conversation with and about a work.

(Maybe such distinctions only tickle me, a postmodern filtered Formalist.)

Whatever other critique you want to level at Oprah, her book club has meant more readers of serious works, and to me that is an absolute value. I look forward to being punched in the face by Jonathan Franzen when I one day try to rope him into this argument at a bar.

Regardless, it’s time for me to walk my talk, because a book that has arrived in my library queue at inopportune moments, was once purchased for me and then lost in the mail, a book I’ve flirted with for three years, is Oprah’s next - Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides’ tale of Calliope Stephanides and more precisely of the gene that turned Calliope into a hermaphrodite.

Perhaps the payment for my sin of waiting so long to read it will be to watch it mauled by two million red state housewives. Perhaps I’ll be vindicated and enriched by the breadth of conversation. But 100 pages in and this book totally has me. Does it matter that Oprah was my tipping point?

The newest weekly delivery craze to grace soccer mom’s doors across America is going to be, wait for it, milk. Certified fresh and organic milk from humanely treated cows will be delivered straight to her doorstep in reusable glass containers. Won’t June Cleaver be proud. Look for it in all major cities in mid 2008.

Israeli writer David Grossman has a piece in today’s New York Times Magazine about being a writer in Israel. It’s an achingly beautiful piece of work, tying together the common threads of writers everywhere, political, geographical, personal considerations aside. Working against an old threat from Mr. Kafka’s world, Grossman searches for and easily exposes the humanity behind the process of creation. He uses his personal story of loss to illustrate the violence, speaking of his late son who died fighting Lebanon. He uses language itself to show (rather than tell) how one continues to move on, to write, to be:

Writers know that when we write, we feel the world move; it is flexible, crammed with possibilities. It certainly isn’t frozen. Wherever human existence permeates, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and actually, there is no status quo. Even if we sometimes err to think that there is a status quo; even if some are very keen to have us believe that a status quo exists. When I write, even now, the world is not closing in on me, and it does not grow ever so narrow: it also makes gestures of opening up toward a future prospect.

I understand that it’s nor exceptionally creative to re-post information from elsewhere, but this one I could not resist. Sheryl Crow and Laurie David (producer of An Inconvenient Truth) got into some kind of scuffle with Karl Rove. From today’s New York Times:

“I honestly thought that I was going to change his mind, like, right there and then,” Ms. David said Sunday, The Associated Press reported.

Ms. Crow was at the dinner as a guest of Bloomberg News. Ms. David and her husband, Larry David, a creator of “Seinfeld,” were guests of CNN. Mr. Rove was a guest of The New York Times.

The one thing all three parties agree on is that the conversation quickly became heated.

As Ms. Crow and Ms. David described it on the Huffington Post Web site on Sunday, when Mr. Rove turned toward his table, Ms. Crow touched his arm and “Karl swung around and spat, ‘Don’t touch me.’ ”

Both sides agreed that Ms. Crow told him, “You can’t speak to us like that, you work for us,” to which Mr. Rove responded, “I don’t work for you, I work for the American people.” Ms. Crow and Ms. David wrote that Ms. Crow shot back, “We are the American people.”

In their Web posting, Ms. Crow and Ms. David described Mr. Rove as responding with “anger flaring,” and as having “exploded with even more venom” as the argument continued.

“She came over to insult me,” Mr. Rove said Saturday night, “and she succeeded.”

Mr. Rove did not respond to a request for comment on the women’s Internet posting on Sunday.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman said, “We have respect for the opinions and passion that many people have for climate change.” But, Mr. Fratto said, “I wish the same respect was afforded to the president.”

He accused Ms. Crow and Ms. David of ignoring the president’s environmental initiatives, like pushing for alternative fuels, and for “going after officials with misinformed assertions at a social dinner.”

Only one more day left of this year’s free Pop Conference at the EMP. I attended the Women’s Rooms panel this morning.

Miranda Campbell discussed record collecting as it relates to gender (and generation), using Enid and Seymour from the film Ghost World as major examples. Seymour is a total nerd and completist who has “record parties,” while Enid’s record purchasing seems to be an extension of her thrifting habit and hip fashion sense. Campbell explored the idea of young women buying records in pursuit of “camp hipness;” it holds some truth with me as someone who primarily collects 45s—way cute compared with their 12-inch LP counterparts—and seeks out records with attractive covers and colored vinyl. The problem is that some people interpret this kind of appreciation as indifference to or lack of knowledge about the actual music. To me, that’s a very close-minded view.

Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer (authors of the great new book on Sassy) talked about girl power anthems like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl.” Out of their paper came the idea that the more mainstream a performer is, the less seriously she’s taken as a feminist. Kathleen Hanna used to dress just as provocatively as Christina Aguilera, who speaks out for women’s issues in the media, sings feminist lyrics and supports domestic abuse charities. But Aguilera’s stuck being viewed as a pop tart, while Hanna is (appropriately) celebrated as a feminist hero.

Holly George-Warren, in her talk “Yodeling Our Way Out of the Kitchen,” presented the singing cowgirl as a career choice for independent young women as early as the 1930s. The histories and film clips of singers like Patsy Montana provided a rare look at a genre in which women weren’t overtly sexy or sexualized.

Take a peek at Ali Marcus’ blog for more thoughts on the Pop Conference.

The controversy over Don Imus and his incendiary remark is nicely summed up in this Wall Street Journal article. Many people are talking about the visual element of the incident as a key factor in the situation. If the show had not been televised, would it have aroused such fervor, such strong opposition?

As fate would have it, it is one of our very own Rivet contributors who has been credited with the discovery of this little shock-jock gem. Ryan Chiachiere was working the Imus Beat at Media Matters for America when he posted on the commentary which exploded over the next few days into a furious storm, ending in Imus’ eventual dismissal from his long and notoriously offensive career on the airwaves.

The question of where the responsibility for the firing lies is obviously much more complex than the straight-line approach indicated by that last sentence. The media has always been a force to be reckoned with, and now that “the media” includes a massive audience of watchers, readers, callers, and yes, bloggers, we can all acknowledge that the vast and bizarre web of influence is virtually impossible to track.

Isn’t it interesting, though, that it was not the original airing of the show that sparked the nation’s attention, but the posting of a video in the aftermath that got things rolling? There didn’t seem to be much of a reaction at all from people who were just listening to the show in their normal morning routines. People really started to notice several days later, as the WSJ reports, when the recorded video began to circulate widely. That might answer the question about visual aids, right?

Among the slew of intriguing panels at this year’s SXSW, there’s the one called Greening the Music Industry, calling attention to the fact that all businesses can make a concerted and important effort to help our impending environmental disaster. No folks, it’s not just the oil companies or the agriculture industry - it’s even those beautiful CDs that we love so much.

For instance, take a look at what’s on the agenda for Smog Veil Records, who’s founder Frank Mauceri will be on the panel:

1. new Smog Veil HQ in Chicago - green building completion:
–solar, geothermal, and wind energy sustainability;
–use of recycled materials;
–LEED certification

2. elimination of jewel case packaging in new releases:
–replace with digipaks now;
–goal is to use completely plastic-free packaging, except for shrinkwrap;
–ultimately produce gross revenues from digital distribution greater than
hard goods, thereby replacing need for high-impact packaging;

3. stepped-up recycling program:
–use of recycled materials in building and hard good packaging;
–use of recycled materials in shipping packaging;
–use of recycled materials in office setting;
–goal is to reduce non-recyclable waste by 75%
SXSW officially begins today, so have a party with all the great music, film, and every other delicious little bit of press and gossip that it churns out.

Since pinpointing her bisexuality as a young 20-something in the early ’90s, Jennifer Baumgardner has worked at Ms., dated an Indigo Girl, co-written two successful feminist handbooks and given birth to a baby boy. I asked her some questions on the eve of her tour for Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, newly published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

AB: After collaborating with Amy Richards on your first two books, what was it like tackling this one on your own?

JB: Lonely, in a way. It’s funny, though, because it ended up being the most collaborative process of all. I had three assistants over the years and because I was pregnant and then had a baby during the journey to finishing this book, about five other people were intimately involved in the process. Having said that, I was excited but scared about writing a book without Amy. I knew it was crucial for each of us to step out on our own (and that it would help our collaboration and our relationship grow) but I rely on our rapport—to soothe the smarting of a bad review, to motivate me and to firm up my own thinking.

AB: How did writing Look Both Ways affect the way you view your own sexuality?

JB: Well, I don’t know if it affected my view of my sexuality so much, but it forced me to think about my relationships—and I did feel like I was validated when Amy and I would go out on the road and meet young women who felt similarly that they were not exactly gay or straight.

AB: The book focuses on bisexual women. How do their experiences generally differ from those of bisexual men?

JB: I think that women’s sexuality is taken less seriously in general and therefore them fooling around together is taken less seriously (i.e. tolerated), whereas men face more outright revulsion, violence, outrage and prejudice. On the other hand, there is so much energy focused lately on insisting that girls kissing girls is just a put-on and so stupid, which I chalk up to misogyny—people love to point at girls and say they are doing something wrong.

AB: I’ve never thought of my equality and partnership with my boyfriend as the result of “gay expectations.” Does the term apply to straight people as well as bisexuals in heterosexual relationships? Or do we 21st century straight girls merely benefit from “feminist expectations”?

JB: I guess you could call them feminist expectations, but I think women have been changed more by feminism than men have and thus you are more likely to have those feminist expectations met by a woman. I’m glad you have an equal partnership with your boyfriend. No doubt some of my troubles are a result of my own pathologies and not patriarchy (and I argue as much in the book).

AB: You write about the problem some people—both straight and gay—have with taking bisexuality seriously (as evidenced in Pheobe’s song on Friends, the New York Times article “Straight, Gay or Lying?” et cetera). Why can it be such a difficult idea to accept?

JB: I think straight people resist the idea of bisexuality because a lot of their acceptance of same-sex relationships is based on the belief that gay people are “born that way” and can’t help who they love. A bisexual person appears to be able to have a heterosexual relationship but doesn’t always opt to. I guess I would say that I can’t help that I am attracted to both sexes—and I don’t want to have to choose to be either gay or straight.

I think lesbians have issues with bisexual women because a lot of the lesbian-feminist endeavor was—and to some degree still is—about joining together and choosing each other over men and male attention. In the book, Jan Clausen is quoted saying that one her lesbian friends said that the fear was of being “the only one left”—meaning, the only woman still playing by those rules.

Both straight men and lesbians have been hurt by bisexual women, so some of the resistance comes from broken hearts. The trouble is, bisexual women have their hearts broken all the time, too. Love hurts.

–
See Jennifer Baumgardner on tour:

DePaul University Bookstore, Chicago, IL, March 7
Women & Children First, Chicago, IL, March 7
Book Passage, San Francisco, CA, March 11
Alexander’s, San Francisco, CA, March 12
Cody’s Books, Berkeley, CA, March 12
Powell’s Books, Portland, OR, March 13
Village Books, Bellingham, WA, March 14
University Bookstore, Seattle, WA, March 15
Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA, March 16
KGB Bar, New York, NY, April 3
Bluestockings, New York, NY, April 5
Harvard Book Store, Boston, MA, April 10

Click here for an absolutely stunning video on how the Web 2.0 is changing our world in big, fat, palpable ways. Come on, I dare ya.

Video by Dr. Michael Wesch
Music by DEUS