Stone Cupid Real

How I went to Washington to speak at Take Back America...


*Campaign for America’s Future is hosting a conference in DC this Mon-Wed 18th thru the 20th. As most of you know,I got a wild progressive hair, signed up for a good speaking/singing slot at 4:30on the 19th, and it went well. My visit to Washington, short notice though it was, has been truly invigorating and exciting and we made it happen. I'm blown away by the power of grassroots organization.

At the conference I reconnected with filmmaker Robert Greenwald (OutFoxed, Iraq for Sale), with whom I used to play volleyball in the '80's. I shook Barack Obama's hand after his stirring speech. I got to say hello to Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans from Code Pink, who made a good stink at Hillary's and Nancy Pelosi's speeches. I got to say hello to Jesse Jackson...I'll tell ya more when I get back, but those are some of the highlights.

My experience with people from Campaign for America's Future was really great. These people are a tireless class act. I have a new pal in Ian Mishalove, whose name you recognize from CAF's email missives. His generous help got me through a tech snafu before the speech, and he was there all during my speech, having planned to see it anyway before the event. I left my computer behind for several minutes, and got immediate assistance from Anne Thompson. And security found it for me... but the availability of the CAF people with unconditional dedication to service was pervasive at this conference. Ian's right here and he says hello, and that we should ALL come back next year!



The uber-progressive Meg at Ojai House (304 Montgomery here in Ojai) had a salon and boutique from 12-5 on Sunday June 10th on her lovely patio, and I sang there with Joe Woodard at 3pm. I had some of my new CDs available for sale, and Meg took donations for Julie Christensen goes to Washington* at her store all through the week. I had to book the flights and sign up for the conference by Sunday night, so the power of community triumphed. I already had $400 donated, and got $150 more at the show, so I needed airfare and food money. But thanks to Freaky Flier miles donations and the generosity of a Carol Lynn and Mary Jo’s sister in DC who put me up, I was on my way. It’s very exciting.

You can my speech listed on the tba site by clicking below. Below I've attached a copy of my speech close to how I gave it. I'd prepared a speech with pictures to talk about activism through art, and sang to some tracks, and played a video work in progress of "Where the Fireworks Are". (not my favorite thing, but ok under the circumstances.) There’s not enough music in this movement!



Thanks, everyone, for your help. I’m honored to be of service to the solution. Also check out the screen shot with TBA feature prominently from the New York Times today.





Here’s my Take Back America site , and the link to my speech listing






Here's a nice article Brett Leigh Dicks did in the VC Reporter, and below you can go to myspace and hear some of the songs...

Yours Truly and gratefully,

Julie
http://www.myspace.com/juliechristensenandstonecupid
http://www.stonecupid.com
(My speech with music..)
I remember a writer friend of mine describing another artist as a “citizen of the world”. That’s what I aspire to, as well. But as individuals, how much can each of us do to effect change in it?

In 1992, I was happy to be part of an organization called the Bohemian Women’s Political Alliance or BWPA. I’m sure you’ve been a part of similar organizations, or have thought about doing so, or even of starting one, or you wouldn’t be here. BWPA lasted as least as long as my pregnancy: that was the biggest creative thing I was doing at the time, and my son was born in early 1993. We were artists, performing artists, musicians… there were graphic designers and writers. We all had an interest in promoting a progressive, pro-choice agenda, and our wish list for change included lots of other things, too. Like Women’s Action Coalition, we wanted to stage events that would get attention to our aims. The difference in the beginning was that we were slightly more red lipsticked and inclined to sing rather than shout. Jackie Goldberg, a rising local political star at the time--now a state assemblywoman, spoke at our kickoff meeting, giving us all a lot of inspiration to be part of the institution of change.



As the 1992 presidential election campaign headed into summer, we weren’t happy with the way it was heading. Exene Cervenka of X, one of the founders of BWPA, went to the meeting of the anti-censorship (mostly male) artists, and made the point that most of their bodies weren’t at stake – yet – with the advancing of the Republican Right’s assault on a woman’s right to choose. And we all can see that that issue, along with a host of other assaults, has come back even stronger since the 2000 “s’election”. Exene spoke convincingly, and turned a few heads, and brought more attention to our small but loud group of renegades.

We worked real hard to get out the vote, and to be a part of countering that assault and to get Bill Clinton and other Democrats and Greens and even pro-choice Republicans elected that year. We made a well-researched voter guide and distributed it, and put a full page version of it in the LA Weekly, whose endorsements were not all in line with ours, so we got ours out there.)

The thing that happened to BWPA was this: As you can imagine, there were a few divas in the organization. No! We all worked together really well, though! We got a lot of things done, and I was truly impressed by the energy and fire around it. It gave me a taste for activism that I still carry to this day. Unfortunately, in late 1993, a rift began to happen that involved some control issues, and… well you can imagine the rest. Not animosity for most of us, just dissolution and disillusion.

You might be thinking, “Maybe artists shouldn’t all get together and do activism.” My point is not to denigrate the artist’s desire and capacity for activism. I’m just suggesting from experience that my most effective way of communicating is through my art. I’ve gone through a shift, naturally— by that I mean not consciously, except in that alpha-state quality of consciousness that attention to art cultivates in an artist: I’ve shifted now toward using the music of singing and songwriting and production that I’ve engaged in for 32 years toward effecting change in my world. Not the whole world maybe, but my little corner of it. Here’s a lullabye I wrote for my now 14-year old son…{Have a Pretty Dream}

Many of those BWPA people made the same shift back to the business of making art: they went out into the world and made art and music and performance art and literary work that was of consequence and had meaning: Exene (who among many great works collaborated with photographer Kenneth Jarecke in 1992 to make the book “Just Another War”—photos from the first Gulf War with poetic commentary written in Exene’s signature style of penmanship), Valerie Faris (who with her husband Jonathan Dayton directed Little Miss Sunshine and a host of rock videos), Vickie Thomas (casting director for Talk to Me, Blood Diamond, American Pastime, and Land of Plenty, and tons of other movies…) Julie Ritter of the rock band Mary’s Danish, Carole Cetrone (performance artist, activist, and creator of Death Tap 2000), Elizabeth Morgan, who produced “X the Unheard Music,”-- now showing again—with her husband Bill.

Two BWPA women spring to mind who have remained lifelong career activists with a string of great accomplishments: Meegan Lee Ochs, daughter of quintessential protest singer Phil Ochs is the organizer for California ACLU events. And Melanie Winter curated a BWPA Breast Cancer Awareness Art Project using breast casts, calling it the War Mammorial. She is now a point person for the LA River Project and has opened a State Park near downtown LA on the river!)

Last week I went to the opening of Exene’s collage exhibition; some of the BWPA members were there, financially secure enough to be able to buy some of the work, which is another benefit of making art consciously, one hopes! I was struck that though most of her work was not overtly topical, it reflected the artist’s modus operandi of dealing with life in these times. There’s a thread to her work that’s allied to the topical, to what we’re going through as humans, as women in this country, as artists and people in this world’s landscape.

In the 60’s and early ‘70s, when I was becoming more aware of folk-rock and other music, it was each artist’s sprinkling in of cues that they were “one of us” that made their work cool. It made the fact that one of those artists were playing somewhere also a moment of cultural/political import. This is important—Music and Art was how I became politically aware. Am I alone in this? [Yeah, I thought not.]

When you showed up to a concert or an opening or a festival with that in mind, there was power in numbers and it felt like peace was possible, after all. It’s more and more clear to me that a new cultural paradigm shift needs to happen and in fact is already happening to propel our movement of change forward.

. Over the past several years, there have always been maybe a couple songs on each of my albums where I got into something more political than the terrain of love and home life… but never has something propelled me into a writing spree like the election of 2004, and the feeling of betrayal I felt afterward. You know, it was almost like being a jilted lover. I always had to get real creative when I was in that kind of pain! So part way into my writing jag, I realized that may be what was going on. So—whatever it takes.

My friend Peggy LaCerra went to Crawford to do some filming at Camp Casey, and was able to give a copy of some of my music to Cindy Sheehan, including this next piece, the title cut of my new record, “Where the Fireworks Are. If we can cut the lights, I’ll show a video I’ve started work on. (Of course my son, the budding filmmaker, said, “Mom, you need my help with this!” and some of his input is here already. Hopefully more is forthcoming…so it’s a work in progress.) {WTFA}



I’d like to put this next song to work somehow. I put an early mix of this next song up on Neil Young’s “Living With War” site a few months ago, and it peaked at number 75. I started off writing it about a friend of my son’s who was going through a family struggle, and as I wrote, the song went into the harrowing swirl that surrounds the victims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and their families. Far too many brave soldiers and other military personnel are coming home with depression and psychological wounds, not to mention wounds of the flesh and spirit. The army’s own reports from back in 2004 say 1 in 8 soldiers come home with PTSD. By this spring, the number of vets from Iraq and Afghanistan who had sought help for post-traumatic stress would fill four Army divisions, some 45,000 in all. There are 10-month waiting lists for processing requests to get help. The Defense Department has said that about 1,000 veterans who receive VA care commit suicide every year, and there are as many as 5,000 suicides a year among all living veterans. That’s just a facet of the devastation this war has caused. It urgently needs to be addressed, because not only is the military health care community ill-equipped and too short-staffed to deal with it, the sufferers have to jump through so many hoops to get seen, that there are daily tragedies while they wait. The social ramifications of this are mind-boggling.

When I read about these things, I wasn’t able to just post to my blog to express my helplessness. I found I had to go deep. There’s also a quote in this song from Seymour Hersh’s reports about MyLai.

{Boy in Pain}.

One day, when I got in touch with Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher to post an editorial of his on my blog, he wrote me back in the affirmative, saying he remembered my old band Divine Horsemen, and my singing with Leonard Cohen.

That jogged my brain. More and more I began to see that these things aren’t separate, and that they can feed one another. I give a certain amount of time in a week to updating the blog, but I’m more aware that the best way I can express myself is through music and poetry. That’s what I do, from my heart. I question myself, though. How can I say my art speaks louder than my blog when that gets 5,000 hits a month? My music doesn’t always land like I want it to. Or it isn’t always “politically correct” when it spills out. For better or worse, it’s my process of dealing with my world, and if I hit my marks, my personal struggle or knowledge of these things could strike a chord with someone who is listening. When Joni Mitchell sang in the early ‘70s “reading the news and it all looks bad—they won’t give peace a chance, it was just a dream some of us had…” she tipped her hand about who she was as a political being, then went on to the rest of her song about homesickness.* “I’ll even kiss a Sunset pig” –was one of the lines: Yeah, that’s it! Infiltrate!

One of the reasons I got a wild hair and signed up for speaking at this conference was that I saw that there was hardly any music or speeches concerning the arts and progressive good works. I didn’t go through the schedule with a fine-tooth comb, but that was my impression, so I signed up to talk about that.***

Like I said, what I see coming is a cultural paradigm shift. Though some songs and aesthetics from the ‘60s hold water in our context, I want to know, “What are we up to NOW in THIS pro-peace movement this time around?” We need to frame the message not in 1967, not in 1972, or even 1992. This is NOW. The landscape of the world has changed. Art has changed. The way we deliver art has changed. There’s a site called “Creative Commons” about which you probably already know, that’s causing us to rethink copyright. Kristin Hersh, formerly of the Throwing Muses, and on the label 4AD, makes some of her music available using that fair use structure, as well as conventionally.

Arcade Fire (more Canadians!) and Conor Oberst and others are expressing themselves musically about the dichotomy of religion and the political, and in this time where the lines between church and state are blurred beyond recognition, that’s refreshing to see in pop culture. Others are talking, writing, and painting about it, too. Many progressive Christians are beginning to question this fundamentalist and theocratic “crusade” that is rampant in the government, the judicial system, the military, and in the corporate culture, as well as the fundamentalism of other religions in the world. I know some artists who are practicing Christians who are pretty upset by this whole state of affairs, by their religion being hijacked for dubious power grabbing, and I hope they come up with some great art with that in mind. I have a lighter piece of music here that I think some of you might relate to. When the “rapture” they talk about comes, I’m not going anywhere, and I hope to see a lot of you around still.

{Rapture Index=0”}



We’ve got an America that is more interested in who’s winning American Idol than in who’s dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and here at home AFTER Katrina and the wars. We’ve got an America who is stuck on the treadmill of bills to pay and things to consume. An America who thinks it won’t help to vote, because the elections are rigged or bought, or if we do manage a clear mandate, they’ll just betray our trust, anyway.

There will be a straw poll at the end of this conference to endorse someone for president, as I understand it. I hope that person is here this week, and I hope they won’t let us down. But I’m not putting my eggs in one basket anymore. I have to be part of this, too. And so do you.

During and after the 2004 election, there was a lot of hand-wringing about what went before, and the Right Wing of the Republican party as it grew was happy to take that ball and spin it against us. Instead of whining, we have to make art, we have to art our asses off if that’s how we can express our feelings in this climate. If you don’t make art, help support an artist, or a candidate, or yourself by finding a way to incorporate your political agenda into your work life. Since the 2006 election, we’ve got a golden chance to get mainstream America to start listening and looking. Digital filmmaking and myspace (until Rupert Murdoch starts charging for it), book self-publishing, Creative Commons… I found an art site called “juxtapoz.com” that appears to be a people’s art tool. There are many indie music sites out there: CD Baby, where anyone can make their music available physically and digitally, Indieclectic.com, which even includes some mainstream artist, Neil Young’s Living With War audio and video pages (beware of some earnest yet skip-over pieces), Air America rides the airwaves again… Music for America, an independent site with a progressive aim put out a compilation last year including Bright Eyes, OK-Go, David Byrne, Death Cab for Cutie, Sleater-Kinney, REM, Fountains of Wayne, Tom Waits, Elliot Smith, and others. I only saw a couple women on that compilation, but that’s an opportunity for activism, isn’t it?

Since the Dixie Chicks came through their fire, I think there might even be a few more major record labels that are coming around. There are a more than a few substantial labels who AREN’T members of the same RIAA that wants to shut down Internet Radio. Buy from RIAA safe labels when you can. This is a sticky issue that I’m researching right now, because I want my newest record to be more widely distributed. Do I go with an RIAA label? Or do I find a way around it? I have on the table a list of non-RIAA labels and CDs. Take a look. You’ll find Arcade Fire’s label, Merge, the White Stripes’ V2, YepRoc, Dualtone (Brett Dennen’s label) SubPop, Shout Factory, Red House, Nettwerk, 4AD, Anti-(that would be Nick Cave and Neko Case), Beggar’s Banquet, Saddle Creek , the Bright Eyes collective’s home, and Downtown, who is the label for Gnarls Barkley’…! These entities are part of the solution, not stuck in the problem of “how do we figure out how to make a profit from difficult art that may not be decorative, sofa-size, safe-as-milk, fluff?”

When the right wing challenged us they said, “so come up with solutions to these problems for which you blame us.” Instead of pointing fingers, we’ve got to own that there WERE and ARE solutions at least to reviving our languishing priorities on the home front. But mainstream America has not been listening; can’t listen thru the din of the authorized corporate entertainments that keep us in a mollified stupor. It’s hard to compete. Even (and maybe especially) printed media is just as much at fault as Fox and other network TV and Clear Channel radio for the march to war and allowing these scandals to go on unabated.

We are in the midst of finding a workaround to go outside of that stream and into the culture. This movement, like the beats and the hippies and punk rockers before us, needs to coalesce around culture. We need to go into the streets and the information superhighway to create this culture. There IS a subculture thankfully, to be sure, but it doesn’t seem to have coalesced and reached a critical mass that is noticed, undeniably, by the nation at large.

When it is, look out. We may have always had help from Canadians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, but each of us artists could organize, collaborate and nationalize around this in a positive pro-active way. I welcome ideas, because this is still a seed from my point of view. If I’ve missed something, please let me know (afterward in the hall)… I long for places where I can count on a diverse scene to grow and to cultivate the artistic expression of where we are right now, as Americans and world citizens.

Things may be reaching a tipping point, because four years ago, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks happened to mention something onstage that was bugging her and her bandmates--how they felt about the status quo. The meanness that followed was mostly based on the fact that up until that point, there was not much indication in their music that showed where their sentiments lie. A similar backlash hit Linda Ronstadt on a showroom stage in Vegas.****

I’m not saying we should wear our art like a flag, or be exclusionary and divisive. I’m longing for honesty and integrity and commitment. I don’t know if I’m getting it right. It’s a process that may never end until I do, and it’s why I keep trying to express it in a way that’s art, and not pamphleteering! It’s the artist’s conundrum.

The German Expressionists basically let everyone know where they stood during the days of the Weimar Republic between World Wars, and eventually had to leave their home. The folksingers of the 50s and 60s were probably watched closely, in that tenous post-McCarthy era. I worked a lot with –Canadian!--folksinger and poet Leonard Cohen, whose politics at some points during the time I’ve known him would surprise people, but he talks in his art about these issues; Not coming from a particular stance, he explores them. His audience cherishes that. I cherish that, and it really has taught me that I have to find my OWN voice.

As we build through the 2008 campaign, we’ll need a presidential candidate that is almost musically well-spoken, charismatic yet practical and energetic. We’ll probably need someone willing to talk about religion in this country, and certainly to facilitate the reversal of the attacks on our constitution. It’s going to take passion and intelligence. It’s also, for better or for worse, going to take packaging this person to appeal some to all the different groups in our society.

Because the culture finds a way to bring differing groups together, the time is now to get progressive art solidly in the media limelight and into the educational curriculum. What we’re up against is the iconography of the imperial, and the cowboy, the frontiersman. We’ve got to go into our own frontier with a new soundtrack, a new palette.

I’m really thrilled to be here with such a vibrant community of people here at this conference.* I do think there needs to be more music in this movement. There’s room for a lot of music—hey, how about new and original theme music for when these candidates walk on?-- and art, and filmmaking, and poetry, and performance art, and street busking, and fashion. Take your regular paying gigs, but leave room to benefit the growth of awareness in the culture. Let everybody know who you are. If more of us do it, people won’t be scared.

The Dixie Chicks won the Grammy this year in a huge triumph for letting people know who we are, and for not just shutting up and singing. We’re going to make some changes in this country and it’s gotta happen soon—sooner than 2008, because we can’t just go in on the eve of our third questionable election—without a landslide. A cultural landslide.

I hope it’s been what you came for.





#Music = 18:24 (no “rapture index =4:30)

*California, from 1971’s “Blue”

**When I was networking on the site in California, Ian Mishalove sent a note saying he was interested in coming to my talk and that he plays the bass and it sounded good. Now I know he’s probably busy over there with Ned Lamont, or setting up this or that, but it made me feel good, anyway.

***There’s a speaker session concurrently with this one in the next room, on Hip Hop and the Culture of Resistance, which is great. It wasn’t there the day I signed on. And there was a panel earlier about Culture, too.

****She spoke out and was ostracized. Now, you know and I know that they were probably progressive. Ronstadt dated Jerry Brown, hello?! But their audience evidently did not and these artists got slammed. It shouldn’t be that way, but evidently it is.

I got here by raising funds in my community.

Julie Christensen, delivered 6/19/2007

www.stonecupid.com