A Sense of Doubt blog post #1592 - Lesbian Bars are Disappearing

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1592 - Lesbian Bars are Disappearing

Safe spaces for women -- all women and only women -- are a thing needed in our culture.
I am reading Ani DiFranco's memoir right now, and she speaks eloquently about the need for such spaces in relation to the Michigan Women's Music Festival, which came under fire from Transgender women who have been excluded. DiFranco's commentary on these issues is a reason enough to read her book.

I came across this article via my Lily Lines newsletter. Given discussions I have been having around these types of issues, such as diversity, safe spaces, gender, acceptance of others, heteronormative assumptions, and more, I wanted to share this article here on my blog.

We need these spaces, these places that I am not welcome, that I am not allowed to go, places that I respect the rules prohibiting my admission because as one woman points out in the article that follows it's an incredible gift to "not have to deal with men today."

Let's preserve these environments that give women those safe spaces.

That's all today. But this is important stuff.

https://www.thelily.com/lesbian-bars-are-disappearing-we-spent-a-night-at-one-thats-still-standing/

·     LGBTQ Lesbian bars are disappearing. We spent a night at one that’s still standing. Fifty years after the Stonewall riots, the bars that nurtured the movement are closing down Reina Gattuso June 27 This article is part of the Lily Lines newsletter. You can sign up here to get it delivered twice a week to your inbox. Photos by Jessica Imhoff. Walking into Henrietta Hudson feels like taking off a heavy backpack. It’s a humid June night in New York’s Greenwich Village, and inside the reggaeton-pulsing bar, a sparse crowd drinks beer and laughs. My shoulders instantly relax, and not just because I’ve escaped a spring downpour. “I hear all the time from customers — when they come in, they just breathe an air of relief,” says Victoria, a bartender and go-go dancer who asked to be identified by her first name to protect her day job.

It’s not strictly true: Men aren’t barred from Henrietta Hudson. Even on a Monday, there are a few interspersed among the women and nonbinary people who lean against the bar, paper decorations dangling rainbows overhead. “We’re an all-inclusive, lesbian-centric space,” says owner Lisa Cannistraci. Still, Henrietta Hudson is a bar made for and by queer women. That’s apparent in the gender makeup of tonight’s group, and in less tangible ways, too. It’s the ease with which women have their arms around each other — no stiffness or tiny glances to monitor for unwanted flirtation from men. It’s the camaraderie with which a trio of 40-something women, bubbly with booze, offer to buy me a beer.

Henrietta Hudson is cited as the oldest continuously running lesbian bar in the country. Alongside Manhattan’s Cubbyhole and Brooklyn’s Ginger’s, it’s one of only three left in New York City. When Cannistraci and her business partner, Minnie Rivera, opened Henrietta Hudson during New York City Pride in 1991, “Nobody wanted to live in the Village,” Cannistraci says. It was the height of the AIDS crisis, and queer people were dying by the thousands. Today, Greenwich Village brims with overpriced lattes and luxury athletic wear. With the New York City Pride parade around the corner, every billboard in the neighborhood is plastered with rainbows. Some women at Henrietta Hudson say this increasing acceptance means there’s now less need for lesbian spaces.

Some women are reluctant to give me their names; they say they’re worried about gender-based violence, homophobia or racist abuse. Even as their numbers dwindle, bars like Henrietta Hudson continue to provide a refuge for people who aren’t always comfortable in straight, or even gay-and-male, spaces.

In 1925, New York City’s first known “lesbian bar,” a woman-centered club in Greenwich Village called Eve Adams’ Tearoom, opened its doors among the neighborhood’s crowded tenements. It was run by a Jewish immigrant from Poland known as Eva Kotchever, and it didn’t last long. Kotchever was convicted of obscenity and deported back to Europe, where she was later slain at Auschwitz. But the idea of lesbian drinking spaces stuck. During World War II, queer people began moving en masse from smaller U.S. towns to major cities. By the 1950s, neighborhoods like the Castro District in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York had become home to large LGBTQ communities. The bar scene was dominated by gay men, but there were also spaces specifically for lesbians to meet, flirt and feel they were not alone. For women, who were barred from even entering restaurants without male guardians into the early 1900s, and who could lose their jobs or children if they were outed as lesbians, bars offered a rare taste of freedom. Run by the mob and frequently raided by police, these spaces were risky. But they also saved lives. “The bars are a matter of survival,” says Jack Gieseking, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, who is writing a book on queer New York City.

Bars were also revolutionary. Today, the Stonewall Inn, located just a few blocks from Henrietta Hudson, overflows with throbbing beats, rainbow flags and lighthearted chatter. Fifty years ago, it was mafia-owned, its queer regulars subject to homophobic police raids. Everything changed on June 28, 1969, when Stonewall clientele fought back against police. A crowd of queer people — transgender, lesbian, gay, many of them people of color — defended the bar for days. A new, more militant gay movement was born from the dust of the uprising. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the bars that nurtured the movement are disappearing. Lesbian bars have always been outnumbered by majority gay-and-male spaces, but in the past few decades, the gap has widened. In 2017, only 36 of the 1,357 LGBTQ bars documented by gay travel guide Damron were specifically for queer women. In 2014, there had been 56. Iconic lesbian spaces, such as San Francisco’s Lexington Club, continue to shut down. (“Tragic,” one woman interjects as she overhears a group of us discussing its demise.) It’s a mystery that has inspired art projects, panel discussions and countless breathless headlines:

The women at Henrietta Hudson have some ideas. “A lot of people don’t necessarily go to bars to meet people,” says Katie Thrasher, a fitness instructor who tonight is selling raffle tickets in support of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, a historically LGBTQ nonprofit organization. “They’re on the apps.” “Being LGBT is becoming more accepted in society,“ says Libby Gilks, here on a Tinder date while visiting from England. (It’s going well.) “More people now feel comfortable going to straight bars.” And Victoria, the bartender, adds her two cents: “People shack up in relationships and they stop going out.”

Gieseking points to something else: cold, hard cash. Women, of course, make less of it than our male counterparts — 20 percent, or, according to some methodologies, even 51 percent less. The gap is even wider between women of color and white men. Gieseking cites exorbitant increases in rent — a reflection of the rapid gentrification of cities like San Francisco and New York. Queer women, by and large, can’t afford to live in city centers, and the bars they once flocked to can’t pay their bills, Gieseking says. At the same time, the increasing acceptance of a wide range of queer and trans experiences has created both more opportunities for LGBTQ socializing, and an identity crisis for historically cisgender-dominated lesbian spaces.

As lesbian bars become rarer, new venues to socialize are springing up. Queer parties — weekly or monthly events pulsing with sexiness and music — tend to be younger, more gender- and racially diverse and have less overhead, says Janhavi Pakrashi, who performs at Henrietta Hudson as DJ Tikka Masala. The transition is bittersweet for women who have spent their lives building lesbian spaces. Some historically lesbian spaces have their own histories of racism and trans exclusion; many think inclusion can only be a good thing. It’s what Cannistraci attributes to helping Henrietta Hudson stick around.

When Annette Chevalier first entered Henrietta Hudson more than 20 years ago, she found a haven. “This is my safe space,” says Chevalier, who is now a Henrietta Hudson bartender. A lot has changed in the past two decades. Yet looking around at the people gathered tonight under Pride-bright decorations, it’s hard to worry too much about the fate of queer nightlife. Queer women’s presence in public spaces has always meant resistance. That will continue. After all, before they became revolutionaries, the Stonewall activists were just a group of queer people at a bar.

E

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1906.30 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1454 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1591 - Why it's Fair to Compare the Detention Centers to Concentration Camps

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1591 - Why it's Fair to Compare the Detention Centers to Concentration Camps

I posted about this situation once already.

Here: https://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2018/06/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-1081.html

It's still happening. It's ongoing. It is not better.

Why aren't we all rising up against this?

Here's a reality check and a way for everyone to get involved.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/why-its-fair-to-compare-the-detention-of-migrants-to-concentration-camps.html

THE WORLD

Not Every Concentration Camp Is Auschwitz

Why it’s fair to use the controversial phrase in the debate over U.S. immigrant detentions.

By JONATHAN M. KATZ

 JUNE 20, 20182:59 PM

Poor refugees languish along the sidewalks of the reconcentrados, or concentration camps, of Havana.

Hugh L. Scott/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

As one of the few journalists permitted to tour the government’s new internment camp, about 40 miles from the southern border, the New York Times correspondent tried to be scrupulously fair. Forcing civilians to live behind barbed wire and armed guards was surely inhumane, and there was little shelter from the blazing summer heat. But on the other hand, the barracks were “clean as a whistle.” Detainees lazed in the grass, played chess, and swam in a makeshift pool. There were even workshops for arts and crafts, where good work could earn an “extra allotment of bread.” True, there had been some clashes in the camp’s first days—and officials, the reporter noted, had not allowed him to visit the disciplinary cells. But all in all, the correspondent noted in his July 1933 article, life at Dachau, the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany, had “settled into the organized routine of any penal institution.”

In the days since U.S. border protection agents released video of immigrants being kept in cages, and the first detained children began arriving behind the barbed-wire fences of a new government camp at Tornillo, Texas, people across the country have been struggling over how to think about what the Trump administration is doing. Some, horrified by the images and a leaked recording of children plaintively crying for the mothers and fathers from whose arms they’d been torn, have drawn comparisons to concentration camps of the past—particularly the most notorious ones of all, those of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. For others that comparison is going too far. “Stop already with the Nazi and Hitler analogies. Really. Stop,” conservative writer John Podhoretz tweeted. “What’s happening is its own kind of bad and you court discrediting the seriousness of your complaints about it by overstating things so tastelessly and wrongly.”


This is not just a debate over semantics. How we categorize what is happening on the Southern border has everything to do with how the public and lawmakers will respond. That is why Trump administration officials have spent so much time trying to justify, lie, and shift blame for their new policy. Even Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to confront the concentration camp label on Fox News, which he tried incoherently to deflect. It’s obviously true that the Customs and Border Protection camp at Tornillo is no Auschwitz. But in dismissing any such historical comparisons out of hand, people are making the common mistake of reading history backward—looking only at the endpoint of a decadeslong process and ignoring the hard lessons humanity has learned, again and again, about where a policy like the one President Donald Trump and his supporters are now implementing can go. To see what I mean, you have to start at the beginning of the short and brutal history of the concentration camp.

Concentration camps were born out of war—not in Europe, but Latin America. In 1896, the Spanish empire was trying desperately to hold onto one of its last remaining colonies, Cuba. Independence wars had been raging there for three decades, and the fight wasn’t going well for Spain. Cuban revolutionaries, known as mambises, used ambushes, dynamite, and their deep knowledge of Cuba’s mountainous countryside to defeat colonial reinforcements. Believing the mambises’ advantage lay in the support and intelligence they received from rural communities, the island’s Spanish governor, Gen. Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, declared a new policy he called, euphemistically, reconcentración. Starting on Oct. 21, 1896, all civilians had to move behind the barbed wire of a handful of garrison towns controlled by the Spanish army. Any Cuban found moving freely or transporting food through the countryside was subject to execution. Knowing from the start that controlling the people required controlling information, Weyler also set out to aggressively censor any news critical of what he was doing.

The immediate result was a humanitarian catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands died of disease and hunger. An assistant U.S. attorney, Charles W. Russell, who toured the island in January 1898, told the New York Times he had seen “women and children emaciated to skeletons and begging everywhere about the streets of Havana” and cities where a fifth of the population had died in the previous three months. A previous Spanish governor-general had considered, then decided against, implementing the policy, knowing full well how brutal its effects would be. But Weyler was a hard-liner who saw no difference between mambises and Cuban civilians. He believed it was his duty to starve and demoralize the people into surrender. But the unintended consequences of reconcentración doomed his war effort. Even Cubans who had been ambivalent about independence now resolved to fight to the death, since that seemed to be the only option either way. Worse for Spain, the horrific reports scandalized Cuba’s neighbors in the United States. When the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor in February 1898, for reasons that still remain unknown, advocates for U.S. entry into the war only had to remind the public of the concentration camps to convince them the fading European power was capable of any evil.

But Americans would be next to put concentration camps into action. America’s entry into the Spanish-Cuban war mushroomed into a conflict on two continents, in which the United States annexed the Spanish territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, as well as previously independent Hawaii. (We effectively took over Cuba, too, and established a naval station at Guantánamo Bay, where a century later another infamous prison camp would be built.) U.S. officials were especially pleased with the capture of the Philippines, a resource-rich archipelago and source of new land on China’s doorstep. Filipinos were not as enthusiastic about one imperial overlord replacing another, and in 1899 a new war broke out. As a guerrilla insurgency mounted, Gen. James Franklin Bell ordered Filipinos herded into “protected zones,” where they would be prisoners of the U.S. Army. As in Cuba, violators would be shot. “While Army officers … claimed that the camps were healthy and not overcrowded,” the military historian Brian McAllister Linn has written, the cost in human suffering was “unquestionably high.” Americans were shocked to learn their forces had adopted the tactics of “Butcher Weyler.” An anti-imperialist senator read into the record an anonymous U.S. soldier’s letter describing an American concentration camp in the Philippines as “some suburb of hell.” Such reports helped undermine public support for the war, though the U.S. occupation of the Philippines would continue until after World War II.

Those first experiments helped establish a pattern that concentration camps would follow from then on: punishing civilians through mass detention and keeping them separate from society. Some observers, looking even further back, see foreshadows in other parts of history, including the breaking up of African and black American families during slavery, and the forcible displacement of Native Americans in the conquest of North America. But researchers note key, specific characteristics that set the concentration camp apart from other atrocities. Camps “require the removal of a population from society with all its accompanying rights, relationships, and connections to humanity,” author Andrea Pitzer writes in her 2017 book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. “This exclusion is followed by an involuntary assignment to some lesser condition or place, generally detention with other undesirables under armed guard.”

Removal, exclusion, denial of rights, mass detention—those tactics appeared again in the concentration camps Britain used to subdue the Dutch-descended Boers of South Africa in 1900, the imprisonment of “enemy alien” civilians on all sides in World War I, and the Soviet Union’s “corrective labor camps,” better known by the Russian acronym for the agency that administered them: Gulag. The United States used them on its own territory in World War II to imprison its own citizens of Japanese descent. Not yet fully discredited as a term, President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself suggested in a 1936 memo, written five years before the attack on Pearl Harbor that, should Japan strike, the Navy should prepare to put Hawaii residents of Japanese descent into a “concentration camp in the event of trouble.”

Which brings us back, historically speaking, to Nazi Germany. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he made no secret of his intentions to punish those he viewed as enemies, stamp out “undesirables,” and restore an imagined Teutonic greatness of the past. His government built its first concentration camp at Dachau just over a month after he became chancellor, to house political opponents of the new regime. Hitler knew the histories of Spain, Britain, and the United States. He had experienced the strategies of stripping citizenship from and forcibly imprisoning civilian populations during World War I. As he consolidated power, his staff ramped up pre-emptive arrests of anyone it deemed a target or threat, gaining confidence with every step.

It is important to understand that at the time, no one—not even Nazis—thought of such camps as places for extermination. Concentration camp—Konzentrationslager in German—was still a euphemism for forcible relocation and imprisonment, not murder. Even Auschwitz wasn’t “Auschwitz” at first—at least not in the sense we mean it today. When the Nazis built what would become their most notorious camp in German-occupied Poland, in 1940, it was used first for criminals, then expanded in anticipation of receiving Soviet prisoners of war. Despite seeming in retrospect to have been masterfully planned, historians believe, Nazi rule was mostly “chaotic and improvisatory,” taking advantage of circumstances as they arose. It was not until 1942, as the Nazi high command decided on a campaign of total genocide against the Jewish people, that camps were redesigned for mass murder. By the end, an initial population of a few thousand prisoners had ballooned to more than 1.3 million who passed through Auschwitz’s iron gates. Most would never return.

After the war, when the scale and horror of the genocide became clear to the world, anything associated with Nazism, including the term concentration camp, became an explosive insult. But as ridiculous as it would be for modern generals not to study tactics the Nazis used, it would be absurd for people today to ignore modern parallels with the most dangerous parts of history just because invoking them risks an imperfect comparison with the Holocaust. It’s an unavoidable fact that one of the major reasons the Nazis were able to kill so many people so easily, once they decided to, was the dehumanization and isolation created by their original concentration camps. Convincing a bureaucracy to massacre civilians is hard. Subjecting legal prisoners to Sonderbehandlung, or “special treatment,” as the killing of 6 million Jews and many others was officially called, was easier. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt, a refugee from the Nazis who spent time imprisoned in a French concentration camp before the German invasion, later observed: “All [concentration camps] have one thing in common: The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of any interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.”

We are not there yet in this country. But what is happening near the Southern border is an unmistakable step down that road. In a Tuesday tweet defending his new policies, Trump blamed his political enemies, the Democrats, for being “the problem,” and accused them of conspiring with immigrants who want to “pour into and infest our Country.” He has repeatedly accused the people he is now detaining from across Central America, including presumably their children, of being reinforcements for a Salvadoran-American criminal gang. Forget for a second that illegal immigration to the United States has declined consistently since its peak more than a decade ago in 2007, that immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans, or that most of the Central American children, women, and men imprisoned on the border are fleeing violence and poverty fueled by civil wars in which the United States played a leading role. Trump’s language, using a verb—infest—usually reserved for vermin or disease, is exactly in line with the kind of rhetoric and action that has defined concentration camps since 1896: the denial of rights, isolation, and concentration of undesirables by force.

Some may hope that these revitalized horrors will stay limited to the most vulnerable people—even including families who have risked everything to travel thousands of miles in hopes of reaching safety. But as the path from Spanish reconcentración to the gulags and death camps of the 20th century showed, once it is tolerated by society, a tactic does not tend to stay bottled up for long. Already the Trump administration has signaled its intention to begin stripping U.S. citizenship from those it feels don’t deserve it. Considering how even U.S. citizens deemed enemy combatants have already been treated under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, there is no telling what treatment people formally stripped of their most fundamental rights might expect if these new policies are allowed to continue.

Like with camps of the past, the Trump administration has tried to control the flow of information about what is going on inside the barbed wire. CBS News’ David Begnaud, one of the few allowed to see the cages at Central Processing Station “Ursula” in McAllen, Texas, reported after his visit that his team was not allowed to talk to anyone detained. Not only could the journalist not learn about the detainees’ experiences, but he was not allowed to put names or human faces on anyone being held. When information does get out, officials like Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen are instructing supporters not to believe it—a tactic that, as all authoritarian regimes have proved, often works.

Nonetheless, a clear majority of Americans are opposed to the most hard-line tactics being implemented on the border. Those numbers are likely to grow as stories mount about conditions in the sweltering heat at Tornillo and the baby jails of South Texas. Protests are underway, with nationwide marches planned for June 30. Some in the administration and its supporters are trying to stop the backlash by noting that inhumane deportation and detention practices existed under previous administrations as well—a fact that has been widely covered for years. But everyone builds on what comes before them.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1906.29 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1456 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1590 - THE SOLAR GRID - Ganzeer via LA Times

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1590 - THE SOLAR GRID - Ganzeer via LA Times

This post is really more for me than you. It's a giant reminder to me to really read The Solar Grid closely and in earnest. I have read it through, and I have been an avid reader of Ganzeer's newsletter -- Radio Frequency (details below), but I could not really explain it to you without re-reading it. So... it's time to re-read it.

Here's now you can read it, too.

https://thesolargrid.net/


READ!!

https://thesolargrid.net/Read


Here's how you can get in touch with and/or follow the art work of Ganzeer.

Copyright © 2019 Ganzeer, Inc., All rights reserved. Ganzeer, Inc. 1422 E 8th Ave. Suite 11 Denver, CO 80218 Add us to your address book You are receiving this email because you signed up to receive RESTRICTED FREQUENCY, a bi-weekly newsletter by Ganzeer. GANZEER'S SOCIAL: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Goodreads ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB: Website: ganzeer.com Webshop: garage.ganzeer.com Newsletter: restrictedfrequency.com Forum: resticted.academy CURRENT PROJECTS: Graphic Novel: thesolargrid.net Short Stories: timesnewhuman.com

And lastly, here's the LA Times article about him and his work.

He has since moved out of L.A.

http://www.laweekly.com/arts/tk-8141765

"The Banksy of Egypt" Moved to L.A. and Just Wants to Make Comic Books

TUESDAY, MAY 2, 2017 AT 7:32 A.M.

BY LIZ OHANESIAN

The year is 949 A.F. at the opening of The Solar Grid, a comic book series from multidisciplinary artist Ganzeer. A.F. stands for "after the flood" and two young people are digging through an abundance of trash. They work under the glare of the sun, searching for items that can be sold to big spenders, using a shopping cart as both a carry-all and a mode of transportation.

Ganzeer was inspired while in the midst of moving to Los Angeles about two years ago. Some bits and pieces of what would become The Solar Grid came to him during a brief stint living in New York, but the visual of the kids and the shopping carts hit him as he looked for a downtown apartment. "You pass through Skid Row and you see the contrast is insane. I haven't seen anything like that anywhere. Ever," he says over coffee in Silver Lake, the L.A. neighborhood where he settled after a little more than a year of downtown life. "I've been to a lot of places. I've never seen anything like that, where you have that level of severe poverty exactly right in front of a place where people are going clubbing and partying and spending money very nonchalantly."

When Ganzeer began work on The Solar Grid, he thought it would be a four-issue story with a fast-paced plot. Instead, the dystopian world he built kept growing. He released the first issue in April 2016 and, to date, three installments are available online. Altogether, this will be a nine-volume story, with each piece of the epic ranging in length from 30 to 50 pages. Ganzeer is currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to fund the rest of the series and, ultimately, release it as a hardcover book.

There are a lot of issues packed into just that first chapter of The Solar Grid, from destruction of the environment to racism and sexism to security leaks. It's certainly reflective of the times, but there's also inspiration coming from the artist's personal story. Ganzeer started thinking about what would become The Solar Grid as the refugee crisis became bigger news. At the same time, though, he had just uprooted himself from Egypt, where he was raised and where he began his career as an artist, to head to the United States.

"When you're in Cairo, you feel like that's the world, like you're enveloped in everything that's happening there," he says. "Then you go to a place like New York and everything revolves around New York. There is a complete detachment from everything else happening outside in the world."

Ganzeer arrived in the United States as a celebrated artist. In fact, it wasn't too long after his move that he was profiled by The New York Times. NYC culture website Animal referred to him as the "Banksy of Egypt." During the Egyptian Revolution, Ganzeer took his art to the streets. He had already been showing at galleries internationally, but this was the moment when his profile soared. In fact, Ganzeer's arrest in connection to his art made news. As Ganzeer became better known, he fell into a situation similar to bands that are expected to play that one big hit at every show. The difference, though, is that Ganzeer's big hit was tied to a major political moment in his home country.

"The point of doing Egyptian Revolution stuff was it being part of the revolution and that was it," he says. "If I'm doing something in an art gallery, I'm going to do something that I think is appropriate for the audience of this art gallery and the place and the time and so on. It's not about rehashing this old thing that you think is popular and exotic and is going to sell or whatever."

Ganzeer eventually had his fill of the gallery world — "I don't really want people to say what I should or shouldn't be doing," he says — and comics gave him a way to express the ideas that were filling his head. He still shows his art; in fact, Ganzeer is part of a street-art exhibition going on in Munich. Right now, though, The Solar Grid is his focus.

"I don't really want to do that very ephemeral, in-the-moment sort of art," he explains. "I want to do something that could last for decades or years after it's done, because that's what comics did for me." He name-checks V for Vendetta and The Watchmen as books that have greatly influenced him over the years — "more than any singular work of art," he adds.

Despite growing up as a comic book reader, Ganzeer didn't think that this would be the right art outlet for him. "It is one of those things where I felt like I was never, probably never good enough to do," he says. "I was reading superhero comics, mainstream comics and then there's a particular house style, there's a school of how you're supposed to do that."

Indie comics, though, showed Ganzeer that there wasn't one way to draw stories, and The Solar Grid certainly falls under that category. Ganzeer has been releasing the work on his own, online, to a small following of readers. The drawback is that he is starting over to build a readership. "I have people who are more interested in 'I want the original drawing of a thing,'" he says.

Still, comics have been good for him creatively, as he has more freedom in what he can do. Plus, he can explore the themes of this project for a longer time than he would with an art show. The politics of Ganzeer's work are still there — they're just changing with the times and the medium.

Ultimately, Ganzeer wants to make work that is more than an image. "And if it's going to mean something, there has to be some kind of social or political context," he says. "There's no such thing as art that means something without it being that. It's impossible."

Jeff Koons Isn't Exactly "Woke" — but He Has Other Nice Qualities

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1906.28 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1455 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.