I was pleased to be invited to participate on the steering committee for developing the Cleveland Municipal School District Arts Education Strategic Plan, which is a fairly large workgroup of many CMSD arts educators and administrators and other community representatives, that is working with consultant Ms. Dawn Ellis, the facilitating consultant and writer of our strategic plan. We had our first orientation today at 3 PM, at Trinity Commons, and it was a well facilitiated and enlightening activity. The format was very interactive, with Dawn surfacing key issues, themes and opportunities and driving participants through structured brainstorming. 

"I think Cleveland is a good place. Inner city is rough, but the outskirts is real beautiful, and great schools there. Plus my family, my mom and my sisters, they're all in Cleveland, so it's easier for me to be there than anywhere else." This quote, from an excellent Free Times interview with Charles "Wish Bone" Scruggs, of Cleveland-roots, Grammy award winning, multi-platinum rap trailblazers Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, sings the woes of a place branded as a "Shrinking City", where even the urban hard-core Thugs chose the 'burbs over the 'hood. The result of such out-migration, and downright defection, as is the case with all the other members of Bone, is the subject of a series of art exhibitions and related events taking place over the next month, all over town... which event sponsor Kent Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC) introduces by pointing out: "In 2005, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Cleveland had lost nearly 20,000 residents in just five years. The city’s population of 458,684 was the lowest in nearly one hundred years." Starting Friday, April 20, 2007, at 4:30 PM, with a lecture at CUDC, explore what it means when a city loses its Bones...

Location

What a spiritual day. The global global warming insight is starting to hit the fan, as it is becoming clear who are the terrorists of this world... polluters who will live to learn they lived "their way" to kill millions of the most impoverished people on Earth. It is good for humanity to have a new world of terrorists to consider, as we seem so quick to ignore mass-murderers. I always think about this around "Opening Day" in Cleveland, as so many in NEO celebrate ignorance of genocide. There was a disturbing little "editorial", er "column", by Cleveland Plain Dealer spiritual adviser Regina Brett about her attempts to summon an idol, St. Jude, to save from damnation the Cleveland baseball team known by the European name for the slaughtered native people of the Western Hemisphere - "the Indians" - seeking for our region redemption from damnation. Sorry, Regina, but you can't fool Mother Nature.

I need to raise an important point of federal budget minutia and ask that you email the Governor to protect riding and pedestrian infrastructure in NE Ohio.

The President wants to save some money so he has rescinded (or canceled) spending for transportation enhancement programs.  Because federal transportation money was already distributed to the states years ago, he can't cancel it directly, so he tells the Governors to decide where to cut.  Transportation Enhancement money is important to NE Ohio. In fact, of all states receiving transportation enhancement money, Ohio trails only California, Texas and Florida. But if Ohio receives a lot of money, we are also being asked to generate a lot of the rescission money – nearly $139 million.

From Groundworks: "a must-see performance". I know my friend Marjorie Talalay is very big on this troup so I believe this must be a must see... I'll try to see... learn more at Cleveland Public Theater... check it out... press release below...

Location

Johnny Mango World Cafe and Bar is a love at first and each sight, bite and margarita restaurant for me - creatively well decorated, eclectic environment, friendly staff, and always a great crowd... whether just a few tables of regulars or packed with anyone or everyone in town (generally on weekends... especially when the weather is great and sidewalk patio is open). The reason is a fresh juice bar, meaning some of the best drinks and smoothies possible, along with a great selection of Tequila... along with Momocho (which is next door), they have the best margaritas in town... along with a "world-cafe" menu of fun, unusual foods, cooked fresh, with fresh ingredients, in the open kitchen... and location, location, location in beautiful, vibrant Ohio City.

I received an informative email this afternoon from Richard McDougald Enty, Planning Team Leader, Programming & Planning Department, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, about some of their Transit Oriented Development initiatives and vision. It is very exciting to see this as an active subject for discussion and planning here. I am a strong supporter of Transit Oriented Development and consider it the core foundation on which we should rebuild the City of Cleveland and surrounding suburbs.  Here is the vision from RTA:

This week's edition of Dee Perry's arts & culture television program Applause!, on WVIZ, features a segment on REALNEO... so I'd like to invite all the friends of realneo to join us for a screening party for the first broadcast of the program, Thusday, March 29, from 7:30 - 8:00 PM, at the great A.J. Rocco's Cafe, at 816 Huron Road, by East 9th Street. As a special treat, I was pleased to learn that A.J. Rocco's had already planned a very cool and complimentary event for that evening - Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman will be the guest bartender from 6-8 PM.

Location

I was quite honored to be contacted, a few weeks ago, by the producer of one of my favorite television programs, Dee Perry's "Applause", asking for information about REALNEO. Seems he was doing research on the spectacular Convivium 33 Gallery, which we have featured extensively on REALNEO, covering Christopher Pekoc here and Clarence Van Duzer here (photos from which were featured in Cleveland Magazine), so REALNEO came up in search results. The producer saw REALNEO as in interesting source of insight on arts and culture in NEO and suggested to his staff doing a segment on Applause about REALNEO. Even though we scheduled the interview, this seemed very abstract until I just saw a promotion on WVIZ for the show, featuring a scrolling view of the REALNEO home page.

Timing and participating in the World are everything. I was awed to be pulling out of the Hough Bakery complex parking lot in East Cleveland today, listening on WCPN to one of my favorite media sources on Earth - BBC's World Have Your Say - and hearing something like "broadcasting from the East Cleveland Public Library". U-TURN!!!

The great NEO-roots arts Champion David Thomas - driving force behind the amazing Pere Ubu, Rocket From The Tombs, and all things Ubu Projex - brings his Two Pale Boys to Cleveland for their only show in the United States. REALNEO will be there to share the excitement... see some brief notes from my interview with David Thomas from his last RFTT tour through Cleveland here. Make your plans now to turn out for this remarkable event and support the most innovative musical genius ever to rise from our region... and support the Beachland! More below:

 
DAVID THOMAS AND TWO PALE BOYSPERFORM ONE U.S. SHOW ONLY - at the Beachland

David Thomas and two pale boys continue to support their last release
titled, 18 Monkeys On A Dead Man's Chest (Smog Veil).  The album is the
group's fifth release and their third studio album.  It takes the group's
extraordinary sonic lexicon, the trademark soundscaping of  electronic
trumpeter Andy Diagram and guitar/synthesist Keith Moliné, and injects it
with a furious rock urgency. Check the zigzagging riffs and knife-edge
angularity of the blistering "Numbers Man."  There are no drums on this
track and no drums at all during the band's live performance of the material
from the album.

April 10th
at Beachland Ballroom
in Cleveland, Ohio
9:30 pm set time

18 Monkeys On A Dead Man's Chest contains the following nine tracks 1) "New
Orleans Fuzz," 2. "Numbers Man," 3. "Little Sister," 4. "Habeas Corpus," 5.
"Brunswick Parking Lot," 6. "Nebraska Alcohol Abuse," 7. "Sad Eyed
Lowlands," 8. "Golden Surf" and 9. "Prepare for The End."

"Ceaselessly inventive"
- Sunday Times

"Twisted and inspired, it is like everything and nothing you've ever
heard...beautiful and haunted stuff in which to both lose and find
yourself."
- Time Out

"His otherworldly, slightly deranged voice...bears comparison with no other
voice: child-like, full of guilt, pitched somewhere around, although not at,
falsetto, but - and this is the fulcrum of his appeal, around which his
whole oeuvre pivots - it has a serene, mournful quality. Nick Drake and Ian
Curtis had that quality too, but Thomas's palette is broader, his
inclination more avant-garde."
- The Guardian

Location

Dana Schutz, Relic, 2006
30 x 22 inches, #28 of 100

While chatting with my parents the other day, my dad mentioned they had just bought the above print by globally-hot NEO/CIA trained artist Dana Schutz, who blew the NEO art scene wide open this Fall with her fantastic exhibition of paintings that drew international acclaim and such massive crowds the MOCA gift shop sold out of everything on hand... here's a write up about this print from a Dana Schutz fan in Houston, and gushing praise about the show and MOCA from a visiting arts champion from Detroit (who I quote, about MoCA/Cleveland: "For me MOCA in Cleveland was bittersweet.  It was great to see that places like Detroit can build up and become something and even support young artists.  It is hope that Detroit ,too can have a contemporary.  But it was also a sad reality check that we are a city lacking a fertile art environment.  Let's hope that the talks of Detroit getting a contemporary will actually go somewhere.  Maybe we can kidnap some of the city planners from Cleveland????"). I hadn't heard anything about this important print (or any Schutz prints on the market), which my parents said Dana donated to MoCA to raise funds for them, so I asked my parents how they had heard about it and they said they believed they read about it in the international arts magazine ArtNews - not anywhere in NEO. They sought it out - bought it - and MoCA made money. There are more for sale... more money to be made for MoCA (at $2,200 a piece, making good money for MoCA)... more great arts investments to be made by arts patrons, here or elsewhere.

Go "Citizen" Ed Hauser. Doing good to do good, so all may do well! Here is his latest mapping of the landscape of redevelopment of NEO as abstracted by the powers who be to do well for themselves and their friends. Reply requested! I agree with Ed's conclusion:

For the second consecutive year, East Cleveland Mayor Brewer met with Meet the Bloggers today for a very candid and fascinating discussion recorded on audio for Meet the Bloggers podcast, and on video for other Internet release in the future. I was pleased to participate and found the discussion and Mayor Brewer's insights remarkable. I believe the other participants agreed. I'll post a comment here when the podcast is posted on Meet the Bloggers and you should be certain to listen! For now, some thoughts from this morning...

View of Lake Erie and the Historic Coast Guard Station from the frozen beach of Wendy Park, on Whiskey Island, taken 02/15/07 around 5:30 PM, after a classic NEO blizzard, in Cleveland, Ohio.

Help us identify qualified candidates for the Cleveland Arts Prize winners for 2007!

Nominations are open!  Go to our website and nominate the person you think best for the Prize!

I'm just old enough to remember Watergate, and Nixon's resignation, and President Ford pardoning him, and Chevy Chase spoofing Ford throughout his presidency, and the end of the Viet Nam War, and then Ford was gone, defeated by Carter. Ford died December 26, 2006, and the headline in the Plain Dealer the following day was "The Accidental President." The news also referred to him as "a healer", taken from the title of Ford's autobiography "A Time To Heal". To me, his legacy was not especially memorable, until I learned Ford had conducted a series of interviews with Watergate investigative reporter Bob Woodward, of the Washington Post, to be published after Ford's death, which make public Ford's exclamation "Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq." This was published in the Washington Post December 28th, and spread like wildfire, and is certainly Ford's greatest contribution to world peace imaginable.

On Sunday, December 24, 2006, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Sheryl Harris wrote a column I thought to write myself, titled "My holiday gift to you: A list of Ohio politicians who sold you out", "a list of the Northeast Ohio legislators who voted to curtail your consumer rights" by passing lobbyist, lawyer and industry-benefiting Amended Substitute Senate Bill Number 117, allowing significant corporate entitlements to soar through the Ohio legislature without community debate. The amendments are most significantly designed "to prohibit the use of enterprise theories of liability against manufacturers in product liability claims, and to include public nuisance claims under the definition of product liability claims", meaning to protect the paint industry here from liability for the public nuisance they have caused by selling lead based paint nearly a century after it was known to harm humans, as proved in their loss to the State of Rhode Island earlier this year. The amendments also protect car dealers, scam loan sharks, manufacturers, etc. from real accountability for harming the public. The legislators who are guilty of this abuse of their offices were listed in the PD article with the suggestion that is "a keepsake you could clip and save." Local blogger Jill Miller Zimon repeated the list on her excellent blog, "Writes like she talks", and I repeat it here, so it may be as present in cyberspace and available to the world as possible. We will need this list over the next many years, until all of these anti-Ohioan men and women are driven from public "service", as they have shown they do not protect public interests. By having this information in as many public places as possible, I hope we the people will be more successful protecting the public than has our legislature under current rule. The list of sell outs and further harms they cause the public is as follows, from Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Sheryl Harris:

Since late June, 2006, a growing team of innovative community leaders has been working together with Lamond Williams, the owner of Hot Sauce Williams BBQ, and East Cleveland Mayor Eric Brewer and Community Development Director Tim Goler, and government leadership in Cleveland, to determine how best to redevelop the historic Hough Bakery Complex, formerly the Star Bakery, which Lamond also owns. The objective is to use that redevelopment as a catalyst for transformation of the neighborhoods surrounding that significant property, located on Lakeview, partially in both Cleveland and East Cleveland. On the map above, the Star Complex is in magenta, and the green circle marks a 1/2 mile radius surrounding that - the other colored areas are key neighborhoods and assets within that radius.

I was very pleased to be joined by the new Director of Development for East Cleveland, Tim Goler, last Monday, November 13, 2006, at the Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council (GCLAC) Steering Committee meeting. Tim has an undergraduate degree in early child development, and has taught kindergarten and 4th grade, and he has a master's degree in urban planning from Cleveland State University, and has been active in that field, nationwide, including working in environmentalism in NEO. So, he is an excellent addition to the team in East Cleveland, and to the war against lead poisoning in our region. Short story, he has assured me East Cleveland is not intimidated by Sherwin-Williams suing them for suing the paint industry over the public nuisance of lead poisoning in that community, nor efforts of State Rep. Bill Seitz, a Cincinnati Republican, who hopes to tweak previously passed legislation that would prevent cities or anybody else from using the state’s public nuisance law to sue the lead pigment manufacturers - Tim Goler is in step with East Cleveland Mayor Eric Brewer and their law department in pursuing due process and justice and they will drive an aggressive battle against lead poisoning in this region.

The NY Times has caught on to what I've been proposing to NEO leaders for two years as a cluster for future economic and workforce development here (don't expect this story in the PD). Can we now show some common sense and give smart IT a try here - connecting social computing, artificial intelligence and cognitive science within our context of regional development... read on and read all the historical links throughout the TOPSOIL area of this site, and let's move on to be leaders in this important sector of the global economy.