My Mind 4/10/10 - 4/16/10

(I said I'm going to be testing out some

How I was keeping my mind clean this week:

• B.C. today is incomprehensible (as the Comics Curmudgeon can easily attest to you), but did you know that in 1962 it was both incomprehensible AND incomprehensibly political?
• Everyone wants tax-exempt status.
• Portraits of office facades.
• Flight maps of Europe.

How I was keeping my mind fit this week:

• If you remember our old back-and-forth about quality (Guardian recap here), here's Mission Paradox on value. RTWT, obviously, but the take-away is that all those extras theater companies are looking to do beyond shows aren't just icing on the cake -- they may be what justifies your existence.
• This awesome, if mind-blendering, series of graphs documenting how psychology lags behind the markets. And a Bonus Graph from the Frontal Cortex.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates lays out the three sides that fought in the Civil War.

Important facts:

• Israel will confiscate your iPad. Maybe they're afraid of what happens if Hamas has easy access to their PDFs from their couch?
• If you didn't already know, the future of TV is online.
• Evangelicals may not be more political than their counterparts. But take that fact with a grain of salt.
• Obama can only be beaten by a generic Republican, not by most existing Republicans. (Scott Brown is not on that list, however, and considering as my only feelings about him is "Generic Republican," could he be that name?)
• The price tag on a Public show, according to Oskar Eustice, is $600,000. (h/t Matthew Freeman who wonders if it's true that most of that is wages)
• Greece is set to burn through IMF loans of $4,000 Euros per person in the next 11 months.
• Toronto passed a measure that earmarks its Billboard tax to the arts.
• The best way to make revenue from your own music appears to be a self-pressed CD. It beats iTunes, retail sold CDs, etc. by a wide berth -- only CDBaby comes close.

Things to watch in the future:

• Will we ban whaling?
• Did HP bribe the Russian government in 2003, when CA-SEN candidate Carly Fiorina was CEO?

Theory of Change I

Mission Paradox blog asks:

What's your theory of change?

How does your presence, or your organization's presence, in the arts somehow make the arts different from what they were before?

How does your presence move your art form forward?

I'm currently working on a more elaborate theory of change, taking into account a report I recently read about how small communities build thriving arts programs. ( http://www.mrac.org/resources/pdf/ThrivingArts.pdf ) The points that I've so far been working on are such:

1) An artists' association with the place he's in.
2) An artists' association with the audience he interacts with
3) An artists' association with the other artists in his community
5) An artists' association with seemingly unrelated arts associations (food appreciation groups, amateur science clubs, church groups, etc.)
6) An artists' association with figures and institutions of power and influence (banks, corporations, political bodies)
7) An artists' association with education and how the future of culture is formed

As of right now, I'm working on exactly HOW those associations spark change, but at the moment, it seems like if you're an artist and you're looking to change those things, those are the associations you need to build.

Association with other artists and with your own audience are very clear to most artists, but I wonder how aware most arts groups are about the importance of the rest.