For the second installment of her ongoing story series for Future Shipwreck, deftly skilled painter and fabric artist Megan Whitmarsh shares some thoughts on embroidery, Jim Henson and selling out. Don’t miss Megan’s solo show Radiant Artifacts at Rosenthal Gallery in San Francisco, which is on display through December 4th. Texans, you can check out Whitmarsh’s work at the Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, where she’s participating in the sculptural group show Small Works: Art + Object.

In grad school in New Orleans. I was bored with my own abilities in painting. I guess I felt like everything cool had been done and way better then I was going to do it. In retrospect I think embroidery is a natural medium for me partly because I grew up around it (my mom sewed and embroidered) and because I am drawn to limited, simple technologies. I don’t even like to use a sewing machine. I think there is something optimistic about using very simple mediums—it gives the viewer a sense that they too can create.

I saw the pilot of The Muppet Show in NY at the Museum of Television and Radio and you could see the puppeteers in the background wearing black leotards and moving around. The sets and everything were so simple you felt like you could go home and make your own Muppet show with some felt and some stuffing. I love that. My favorite muppet when I was a kid was probably Animal although I did own a Miss Piggy doll that had purple silk gloves. I secretly thought Kermit was boring. As an adult re-watching the Muppets I had this “aha!” moment that Kermit represented Jim Henson and was the artist orchestrating the whole thing. He made meta-jokes which as a kid I could not access, but now recognize. Kermit added a layer of sophisticated awareness and pointed out the edges of the frame so to speak. A kind of wink to the audience but in a way that held no irony or distance. I think Henson is really a genius artist whose work was generous and incredibly layered.

It is also interesting to me that he started out making commercials- particularly in the 60’s which you would think of as a virulently anti-commercial time for artists and hippie type people. He seems evolved in that he could operate in the commercial world with ease and be subversive in a quiet yet determined way, but always with gentleness. I think it is cool that he managed to make real, radical and lasting art while finding funding from some pretty non-creative industries. It seems especially pertinent now as artists are constantly crossing the line between “fine art” and the commercial world—and there is always a little anxiety about this naturally. I heard that No Age played a corporate gig and they changed their name for the event so that No Age did not “sell out”. But this seems silly. It’s only selling out if you make something you don’t want to make for money. If you are making what you want to make how is that selling out? It’s just redistribution of money. Better to go in the hands of the artist then stay in the pockets of a corporation, right?

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Wow, so the world is kind of fucked up. This isn’t news, but it’s easy to forget— especially when you live in a metropolitan liberal enclave surrounded by like-minded people. It’s easy to feel like everything is okay and prejudice, bigotry and hate are things of the past. It’s 2010! We must be in the future by now, right? But then we’re confronted with disturbing reminders—like the media reporting the suicides of five gay kids in the span of a month—that nope, being gay isn’t “just not a big deal these days.”

So, how do you tackle an intangible problem like “society’s deep-rooted fear and shame of homosexuality”? It’s intimidating, to be sure—and easy to feel helpless. But one simple thing that all queers can do to change the world is just be visible. I know, it seems like an embarrassingly unnecessary thing to say, in the year 2010, to an audience of artists and art-lovers. It shouldn’t be necessary to say these things, but there are still many musicians, actors and yes, even artists, who choose not to be open about their sexuality. It’s tough, because the line between being closeted and “post-gay” is a pretty murky one. Many artists simply don’t talk about it until asked. Sure, it’s an understandable fear that being queer in public might overshadow what you’re trying to say, which obviously isn’t always “Hey, I’m a homo.” But, get over yourself.

There are plenty of visibly queer artists whose work stands completely on its own two feet. And if you’re someone who’s making rad artwork and happens to be gay, the hypothetical trade-off between being pigeon-holed as a “gay artist” (whatever that means) and serving as a source of hope and inspiration for the suicidal gay teens of the world should be an easy one to make.

All ranting aside, that brings us to today’s rad queer: Steven Beckly. He takes awesome photos. Some of them happen to be pretty gay, and they make the fragile little heart of my inner isolated small town teenager skip a beat. I came across Beckly’s work when he shared some photos on Tumblr of his friend, the awesome toymaker Jon Knox. I followed the links back to Beckly’s portfolio, where I fell in love with his photo series Little Wolf: Let’s Make Some Memories—fifteen eerily staged, gorgeously lit images of Beckly and his boyfriend simply being a couple in love.

Also awesome: Single Rooms, in which he asks his subjects to inhabit the transitory space of a motel room and create a character based on the space. It conveys a similar, though more melancholy, sense of longing. Finally, Beckly’s Uncivil Unions / Hush appropriates archival images of same-sex pairs and recontextualizes them (sometimes with the subtle assistance of Photoshop) as memento mori of queer love goneby.

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If I was going to characterize my Oregon home with a particular song, I’d go with Tom Wait’s “All the World is Green.” It’s a song my hippie roommates sing by the fire when it’s raining too much to leave the house. It’s melancholy, like the blanket of clouds over Eugene that never really breaks from September through May. It longs for things to grow back that we have destroyed, like relationships and forests (“We can bring back the old days again, when all the world is green.”) The title describes one observation that many people have when they first visit Oregon, before they see between the trees and notice all of the scars on the land.

In February I took up a photography project to document the ongoing conflict between Earth First! activists and the logging industry. Here, activism still has a physical battlefield. The environmental anarchism that characterized Eugene in the 90′s has waned since the federal government made a number of arrests in the early 00′s (the “Green Scare”). Still, the forest defenders come back every year.

View the rest of my photo essay after the break. Listen to Tom Waits while you watch for a more complete sensory experience. It’s a love song, I know, but the color is just right. (more…)

I loved that he cleaned up after himself before leaving an ice cream shop in Wapello, Iowa. He didn’t have to. The event was over and the press had left. He is used to taking care of things himself and I think this is one of the qualities that makes Obama different from so many other political candidates I’ve encountered. – Photographer Callie Shell

But most interestingly, whatever happens, will we ever truly take control of our destinies? Will we write our generation’s own story– or will it be written for us by a cynical group of our elders?

Seven years ago this week, the engineer behind the world’s most notorious airliner hijacking vanished into obscurity. Despite the world’s biggest military superpower (arguably) putting forth their best efforts to find him, and despite a standing $52 million reward offered to anyone who can provide information leading to his capture, Osama bin Laden is still out there.

But it doesn’t matter if he’s alive or dead, or if those fuzzy recordings of cryptic bearded men are really him, because he’s more of a symbol than a human being these days. He plays an important role in the neo-con narrative: the supreme villain– he gives Bush something tangible to rhetorically define himself in opposition to. In reality, we know they’re more like two sides of the same coin– two men on religious crusades who see the collateral damage in their wake as justifiable means to some impossible end. To quote Charlie Kaufman, “You explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this.” Yes, the Bush years are the deadly byproduct of hack Hollywood screenwriting.

Making bin Laden the black king on his chimerical chess board (with Hussein as the reluctant queen?), Bush has been able to keep the game going as long as bin Laden remains unfound– after all, what better reason is there for America to continue living in fear than the possibility of bin Laden’s return? But as Bush’s time runs out, he’s finally preparing to fight the big boss: NPR reported yesterday that the military has entered Pakistan and intends to “hammer al Qaeda before the November election.” We’ll just have to keep tuning in to Fox News to see how this chapter in the Bush saga plays out!

Before there was bin Laden, the face of skyjacking was D. B. Cooper. So much the same and so much the opposite of Osama, the man calling himself Dan Cooper performed a vanishing act of his own on– literally– a dark and stormy night in 1971. In a freshly ironed shirt and a dark suit with a mother of pearl tie clip, he boarded a Boeing 727 and nonchalantly passed a note to a stewardess demanding $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes.

After releasing the flight’s passengers at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, Cooper drank a bourbon and had meals delivered for the crew while the FBI acquiesced with this anonymous terrorist’s demands, and the plane took off for Reno, Nevada with four crew members left aboard. Somewhere above the southern forests of Washington, Cooper closed the crew in the cockpit and parachuted into the night, with no light to guide his fall, never to be heard from again.

Naturally, there was a manhunt. In fact, the FBI made Cooper their top priority. Private investigators, boy scouts, adventure hunters, and mystery buffs have poured over the facts for almost four decades, and yet no one has ever been able to find D. B. Cooper– dead, or alive. Just over $5,000 of the loot was found in 1980, decaying on a nearby riverbed, but none of the other bills have ever been recorded as having passed through the treasury.

D. B. Cooper is a folk hero. People root for him. They hope he survived, and that he’s living the good life on a beach in Mexico. They like him because he was clever and polite, and because he didn’t hurt anyone, but I think most interestingly because, as Leonard Nimoy noted, “He did it for money– not a cause.” Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a concept with capitalist undertones smoldering beneath its surface.

Skyjackers in the 60s were frequently re-directing American airliners to Havana for a variety of reasons, often pulling off their schemes without a hitch– but such daring feats of transnational border-crossings became mere punchlines and nuisances in the eyes of the public. Were those desperate Cuban skyjackings more or less justifiable as acts of the “pursuit of happiness” than the D.B. Cooper incident? Are we more likely to forgive people who step outside the bounds of the law to manipulate economic systems rather than political ones?

D.B. Cooper, the vanishing skyjacker, the Robin Hood of the 70s, and Osama bin Laden, the phantom menace of the 00′s, hidden in caves or buried underground or living lives of luxury, or maybe never existing at all, just characters in a couple of equal but opposite narratives about taking over the skies and then disappearing into thin air.

+ Read more about D.B. Cooper in truTV’s 12-part analysis

Awesome. Post a casting ad on Craigslist for all types of actors to deliver “edgy, balls-out” political messages, film the auditions, and post the results on YouTube. Starry-eyed hopefuls and seasoned nutjobs pouring their heart into x-rated political ad copy equals a rollicking Internet laugh riot!

The simplest, but most captivating entertainment of this decade has come from exploiting Hollywood’s down-and-out dreamers for comic value– in you need proof, just turn on VH1. Maybe it’s the Bush administration that makes us want to laugh at people failing. We project our anxieties and frustrations on Britney Spears and the loseWeight Exercisers who try out for “American Idol,” because it’s a lot easier to impeach them from the halls of pop culture (and the chambers of our hearts) than it is to affect any real political change. Bush could care less if we hate him, he’s the most annoying kind of asshole boyfriend– he never even stops being a jerk long enough to acknowledge our anger. But the bastards of pop culture crave our attention like needy sycophants, so it’s a lot easier to take out our rage on them. In this cultural moment, we’re the child-abused high school bully, pantsing the homos in Drama Club.

Does that matter? It doesn’t make these videos any less hilarious, does it? I think I lost my point here. The videos are from “Sunday Knight Productions,” a fake ad agency that promises “cutting-edge, paradigm-shifting, earth-shattering marketing solutions.” They put a lot of work into their satirical website, but the humor of b.s. corporate-speak was kinda played out even before Tim & Eric started doing it. Just check out the videos: it’s funny when people are sincere.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Miramax announced today that due to the WGA strike, the previously shelved sequel to There Will Be Blood has been given the green light, and will be directed by Brett Ratner. Industry insiders are already whispering the word “Oscar” in the same breath as “Blood From Inside Of My Body Comes Outside From An Opening Between My Legs“, which will be in part based upon the seminal educational film, Periods 101. Dakota Fanning is in talks to take on the lead role, while it’s rumored that Zac Efron will showcase his dramatic versatility in the project, co-starring as the wise older sister.