Book review
"Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century"
edited by Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond, 2004, Columbia College, Chicago.
http://www2.colum.edu/center_for_arts_policy/putting_arts_picture.htm

"Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century" is an important book -- a breakthrough document that cogently explores the role of the arts in innovative educational practice and school-improvement policy in the contemporary world. What makes it a break-through book?

A tax on bottled water? A proposed 10.5% sales tax in Cook County? When does it stop?

Mayor Daley has even been quoted as saying:

"I'm open to more innovative ideas on things to tax..."

Wouldn't it be cool if we could fund the Chicago Public Schools with something other than taxes?

Local businesses spend money to advertise. One day, all that money they spend will be with companies located in Silicon Valley. Our local economy will be devastated when all this money leaves the state and never comes back.

When we were little, and had just learned to print (with pencils so large that, as one comedian has described them, they needed to rest on our shoulders), we forged our first, enormous letters out of silky textured, fragrant graphite that positively slid across the page. I remember the distinctive sound of those thick pencils, traveling up and down the sheet, traversing the dotted blue lines suspended between the solid blue top lines and the solid blue bottom lines of each row of first-grade narrative, leaving graphite trails in their wake.

Books, shoes, computers, and blenders.

You’re probably pretty good at finding dirt cheap products on the internet, right?

What about oil changes, dry cleaning, yoga class, and tomorrow’s lunch?

The internet doesn’t mean much to you when it comes to shopping locally. You can’t really use the internet to find where today’s cheapest gallon of milk is, can you?

Imagine if you could find every lamp on sale in Chicago as easily as you can find the “mail order” ones online?

T-shirts, chocolate bars, silent auctions, and bake sales.

We've all sold this stuff to raise money. The big problem is that as soon as it's over, you have to start thinking about what you're going to sell the next time around, and how you're going to hit up the exact same people again and again.

It's too much work. It's too hard. And non-profits go under ever day because of it.

But aren't your supporters more loyal to your non-profit than they are to a TV show, or Hollywood, or Google, or junk mail, or to the newspaper?

Want to save money? Who doesn't. Want to save money while bringing sustainable prosperity to Chicago? Even better. Citizenpowered seemed like the perfect place to start a blog about SaveChicago.org. Our new company launched two months ago and the main thing we've learned so far is not to try to tell the whole story all at once. So, a simple introduction is in order, wouldn't you say?

We are all familiar with the concept of “Writer’s Block”, but that is just a subspecies of a much more widespread malady (the veritable “common cold” of aesthetic identity) that for lack of a better term, we’ll call “Stuckness”. Recently, some light was shed on this chronic ailment by the comedian, actor, writer, and banjo player Steve Martin while he was being interviewed by Charlie Rose on the eponymous talk show:
http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2007/12/12/1/an-hour-with-steve-martin

I recently joined my family in New York City to attend the Bar Mitzvah of my sister’s (step)grandson, Sam. The service was held at the wonderful Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, built on such progressive principles as “anyone who takes the pulpit is free to say what they wish.” Among the prominent people who have availed themselves of that freedom are Dr. Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Justice Louis Brandeis, and Albert Einstein.

I was talking recently to a doctor who cares for many terminal patients, and who not only has to deal with the complex shifts of thinking that the dying require to accept the ending of their lives, but also has to deal with the tangled webs of response that families have to these leave-takings.