This memorial is painted on the side of Mamma’s Food Shop on 6th street and Avenue C. Click the image above for a larger version. The mural is signed by Taboo!, an East Village drag queen. I couldn’t find much about her online except mention (and a photo) in this old Wigstock release.

The piece commemorates a mix of stars, artists, drag queens, and others. Some died of AIDS, others were East Village locals. Some names I recognize, others I do not. Members of a family quietly fading.

Jakob Nielson notes this urgent usability upgrade in his January 23, 2006 email newsletter:

“Kudos to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a rare example of a government agency employing usability guidelines to save lives. The FDA has changed the rules for the “prescribing information” which is the leaflet that goes into medication packages. Now, the leaflets will place the information that patients and doctors need first, in a highlights section. Not exactly a new idea in usability, but in the past, these leaflets were dominated by useless warnings that served no practical use for the vast majority of readers; the first several pages of stuff didn’t do any good except act as a defense against predatory trial lawyers.

The new FDA rules state that, ‘Overwarning, just like underwarning, can similarly have a negative effect on patient safety.’ Exactly: if you bury useful info in masses of useless info, then users won’t see the truly important warnings.

Poor usability of drug information = dead patients.

The FDA has finally recognized the need to save lives by fighting back against the lawyers and writing drug info for users instead of courts. The new regulations explicitly prohibit several types of law suits where trial lawyers have harassed the medical system into making the prescribing information harder to understand.”

The rule had been under consideration by the FDA for more than five years — and is the first major change to drug labels in 25 years! For a more information, see the FDA press release or the NY Times article, New Drug Label Rule Is Intended to Reduce Medical Errors. New rules also affect drug advertising on TV and in print.

The LA Times ran a great editorial last week in response to Bush’s State of the Union address. It chided him for hyping research, spending, and technology over policy and implementation.

“By and large, it isn’t a lack of technology that keeps the nation so dependent on oil. It’s the lack of will to use it.

Engineers have produced a basket of new technologies for making cars burn less gasoline, yet fuel standards for passenger cars in this country haven’t changed in more than two decades, and fuel economy has barely budged. Brazil has shown the way to energy independence by powering cars with ethanol made from sugar. This country, meanwhile, continues to pour billions of dollars in subsidies into producing ethanol less efficiently from corn. Advances in solar energy have made it less expensive and more reliable, yet only California is making a significant bid to exploit the power of the sun....

Technologies that could make the U.S. more energy independent sit on the shelf while the automotive industry dithers about raising the price of a car by a couple of thousand dollars (money that could largely be recouped in savings on gasoline) to raise gas mileage by about 20 miles per gallon. Bush also talked about investing in zero-emissions coal plants. Yet, after a former EPA administrator said the technology existed to reduce mercury pollution at coal-fired plants by 90% within a few years, the Bush administration issued far weaker regulations.

The energy legislation passed last year provides individual homeowners with tax incentives to install solar energy units, but it does nothing to lure builders into solar, which would have a far greater effect.

How about importing ethanol from Brazil to put more fuel-efficient cars on the road now? That would mean dropping tariffs and ending protectionism for U.S. corn growers.”

I tried to make a similar point here a few months ago, though was not as eloquent.

(via Planetizen)

Cut&Paint is a zine of stencil templates, ready to cut, ready to paint.

Volume two is in the works with a deadline for submissions on February 20, 2006. In addition to stencils, the issue will include a how-to section, photos of stencils on site, and articles on stenciling, public space, and politics. Check the submission criteria.

The first issue is nearly sold out of its run of 400 copies, so I helped the team post the stencils online. It’s a quick and basic site for now, but will evolve as we add more images. The first 41 stencils are up and ready for download at http://cutandpaint.org.

by Josh MacPhee
From Perspectives in Anarchist Theory, Fall 2005.

Anti-authoritarians have been extremely successful in using art and spectacle in recent years, whether to re-energize the protest movement in Seattle with both puppets and window smashing, or to fight dam construction in India with complex ceremonies and direct action theater. Historically, art has played an important role in revolutionary movements, and the Left has a long tradition of cultural resistance, particularly in the graphic arts. The graphics collective, Atelier Populaire played an integral role in the student-worker uprising in Paris in May 1968. Amilcar Cabral has written extensively on the central role of culture in the African liberation movements in the 60s and 70s.

Surprisingly most of this history seems lost to the Left itself, and we are far more likely to have a corporation mine our own visual history to create advertisements than to study and understand the history ourselves. Indeed, art and culture are rarely the focus of debate for anarchists and anti-authoritarians. As art has become increasingly rarefied in our society, and relegated to museums and expensive galleries, we have tended to spend decreasing amounts of time thinking about it. As a result, our definition of “Anarchist Art” is usually by default simply art created by an anarchist, whether it is a clip-art graphic, a heavy metal song, agit-prop street theater or an abstract painting.

Rather than being content with shallow, unconsidered or simply absent perspectives on art, I think it is extremely important that anarchists develop complex ideas about how art and culture operate in society, influence emotions and ideas, and are part of movements for social change.