Design / architecture

• An Artist's Guide to September 11 Relief Efforts
• A Non-Profit's Guide to September 11 Relief Efforts

November 2001, 29 pages (artist's guide), 19 pages (nonprofit's guide). The New York Foundation for the Arts, 155 Avenue of the Americas, 14th floor, New York, NY 10013, 212-366-6900.

November 2001, 24 pages. Working Group on International Collaboration in the Arts, Arts International, 251 Park Avenue South, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10010-7302, 212-674-9744, 212-674-9092 fax.

Overhaul of Elementary and Secondary Education

Last October I attended my first "Social Theory, Politics and the Arts" conference, speaking on a panel with playwright Brian Freeman, writer Karen Clark, and puppeteer/actor Jonathan Youtt to offer reflections from artists at the conference's culmination. The gathering's international scope was refreshing and eye-opening.

The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture by John Seabrook
2000, 215 pages, Alfred A. Knopf

American Culture, American Tastes Social Change and the Twentieth Century by Michael Kammen
1999, 320 pages, Basic Books

The cultural landscape of Maine is as rich and diverse as its natural landscape, although it is less well known. Recent initiatives have brought attention to the arts and culture of this rural state that is home to 1.4 million residents and covers two million acres, 2,000 miles of rugged (and increasingly developed) shoreline, and a vast area of working forest, farms, and urban settings not unlike its northern NewEngland neighbors.

Allen Ginsberg begins his essay "Meditation and Poetics" with this paragraph: "It's an old tradition in the West among great poets that poetry is rarely thought of as 'just poetry.' Real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness, or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with the phenomenal universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it. Poetics isn't mere picturesque dilettantism or egotistical expressionism for craven motives grasping for sensation and flattery.

The Minnesota Regional Arts Councils (RACs) system is one of a kind. Established in 1977 by the Minnesota State Legislature, the Regional Arts Councils work in partnership with the Minnesota State Arts Board to share responsibility for equitably distributing legislative arts funding throughout the state. The result of this system is decentralized decision- making for providing arts grants, establishing programs, and providing services.

In a past report on challenges facing San Francisco Bay Area arts nonprofits (Reader, Vol. 11, No. 2), I wrote at length about space. Many nonprofits had been forced to seek new office, rehearsal, and storage space due to a steep rise in Bay Area real estate costs fueled by demand from a dot-com economy for start-up locations. The situation seems to have eased somewhat, in part due to funder- and municipally-driven programs as well as to a general downturn in the economy.

We are at a new turning point in the field of aging. The past twenty-five years have witnessed two major conceptual shifts that have fundamentally influenced the course of research, practice, and policy deliberations.