Archive for October, 2010
MFA Student Rachel Heberling Exhibits Artwork at ROY G BIV Gallery for May
Thursday, October 21st, 2010
Department of Art at The Ohio State University
Gale Wallar ’71 Exhibit in Mowry Alumni Center
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010
We are in the process of installing paintings in the newly renovated lobby space in Mowry Alumni Center! The work of Gale Wallar, a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan, is gorgeous; paintings and drawings reflecting a life of travel with her husband, who served with the U.S. State and Treasury Departments. Gale will be here on campus on Saturday, May 16 from 2-4pm to accept her well deserved accolades!
Female veterans deal with physical, mental scars (Sacramento Bee, 02.27.2011)
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010Samantha Frost has been getting acupuncture to relieve pain from a neck injury she suffered while a security officer in the Air Force.
Jennifer Hubbard gets inhalers for an asthma-like condition from her days as a Marine Corps welder.
Cherrilyn Pugh, who had a 20-year military career, comes in for regular checkups at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs McClellan women’s clinic.
Increasingly, they are the face of the VA, joining Greatest Generation retirees and grizzled Vietnam vets. The ranks of female veterans are mushrooming in large measure because of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Already, 100,000 and counting have returned from the war zones and left the military. Now, nonprofits and government agencies alike â the VA medical system in particular â are grappling with that surge.
One fact that sets the wars apart is how many women have been close to combat.
Another truth about our current wars is that most of us have not been called on to make any real sacrifices. The least we can do for those who have served is to help make sure they’re made whole when they come home.
Janelle Adams grew up in Sebastopol and, like many Americans, was drawn to the military after 9/11. She served as an Army intelligence analyst for four years, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, she relies on the VA for all her health care, including treatment for migraines and other concussion-like symptoms from a vehicle wreck in Afghanistan. She was riding in a Suburban speeding from Bagram Air Base to Kabul when it flipped over rounding a curve, throwing her out.
Once she left active duty, it took six months of paperwork to become eligible for benefits, she says. “It’s a slow start getting in.”
She received more support at California State University, Sacramento, where she plans to graduate next spring with a biology degree. On campus, there’s a veteran success center and an active student group for the 1,200-plus veterans, more than a quarter of them women.
“It’s made the whole thing easier,” says Adams, 29. “There are a lot of people willing to help.”
She is among the nearly 250,000 women deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, 11 percent of all forces. Officially, they are excluded from combat, but there are no clear front lines, either. They have been in the middle of firefights and in convoys blown up by roadside bombs. More than 100 women have been killed and more than 600 injured.
Typically younger than male vets, they come home with all the wounds, visible and unseen, that men do. Some succumb to the same demons of depression and suicide.
About one in five female vets have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to VA data. Until recently, women had a higher burden of proof to get benefits since they were not supposed to be in direct combat.
It’s frightening and disgraceful how many are dealing with “military sexual trauma.”
Nearly one-fifth of returning women report abuse, but the real number could be much higher because many are afraid to speak out.
More than half the women returning from war zones have gone to the VA for health care, a primary reason why the number of female patients has doubled since 2004 to about 255,000 and is expected to double again by 2015.
The VA, which only began providing expanded services to women in 1992, is ramping up to offer comprehensive care tailored for women, including gynecological services, mammography and mental health treatment.
“People think it’s still their grandfather’s VA, but in 2011, it’s a whole new ballgame,” says Dr. Scott Gale, a gynecologist who is medical director for women’s health in the VA’s Northern California health care system.
It’s a work in progress.
While the VA has made significant strides â for instance, there are now advocates and social workers whose job is to help female veterans â it takes time to change the male-dominated culture of such a sprawling bureaucracy.
There are precious few places like the VA’s Menlo Park complex. It includes a residential recovery program for post-traumatic stress and an outpatient counseling center for emotional well-being. As the VA’s first and only “center of excellence for women’s health,” it is held up as the gold standard.
Dr. Natara Garovoy, a psychologist and program director of the Women’s Prevention, Outreach and Education Center, says it is distinguished by the early funding it received and the intensive mental health treatment it offers. In its first three years, however, only about 500 female veterans have gone through the outpatient program.
“My hope is that all women â no matter where they show up â will be given access to the care that they need,” she says. “My other hope is that there’s an understanding that women do need targeted services. They do have unique needs.”
Chandra Banks, a research fellow at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, calls the Menlo Park complex “phenomenal,” but says, “That’s the exception, not the rule.”
More common are Sacramento County’s two VA women’s clinics, which offer many of the same services, but in more modest surroundings. The women’s clinic occupies a corner of the VA’s outpatient center at McClellan, the Air Force base turned business park. There’s a separate waiting room where brochures on breast and bone health vie for attention with those on sexual trauma; a conference room for female-only group counseling sessions; and a half-dozen exam rooms. In the one with ultrasound machines, there’s a poster with pink and lavender baby booties and the slogan: “A healthy pregnancy should be the first gift you give your child. Let VA help.”
At the Sacramento VA Medical Center in Mather, the women’s clinic is housed in a trailer. While there’s a design for a 3,000-square-foot permanent clinic slightly larger than the one at McClellan, there’s no money to build it.
Most places in California, and across the nation, female veterans have to search longer and harder for all the help they need. “You can find the services. The issue might be the distance that you might have to travel to get to the services,” says Barbara Ward, deputy secretary of the state Department of Veterans Affairs.
Gale says his “biggest challenge” is the size of the Northern California VA system, which stretches from the Oregon border to Sacramento and from the Sierra to the East Bay. Even with a mobile clinic, telemedicine and a 10th clinic soon to open in Yuba City, female vets in outlying areas are at a disadvantage.
California has the most female veterans of any state, about 167,000 of 1.8 million nationwide. With about 10,000, Sacramento County has the third most of any California county.
Among the most pressing needs is child care. Thousands are single moms, or divorced while deployed, and some miss medical appointments because they have to stay with their kids.
Another gap is more gender-specific programs, such as women-only counseling sessions for post-traumatic stress and sexual abuse.
Those were among the recommendations last fall from a national VA advisory committee on which Ward serves. Many of those shortcomings were also highlighted in an August 2009 state report commissioned by state Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, and the California Commission on the Status of Women.
Since the report, there are more programs aimed toward women and those with post-traumatic stress are being taken more seriously. But there are still not enough female clinicians and staffers, and insufficient assistance for female veterans who have children or are caring for parents or older relatives, Wolk says.
“We have a good ways to go,” she says.
State Veterans Affairs Secretary Rocky Chavez says he wants to improve services to female veterans who have children and who may be homeless. Female vets are at greater risk of being homeless than their male peers. While the VA has a goal to end homelessness among veterans by 2015 and funds about 500 homeless shelters, not many house women with children.
Ward and Chavez say they also want to better coordinate the benefits and services available to female vets from government agencies and nonprofits, so they can fill in the gaps and avoid duplication. It needs to be easier to navigate the maze of programs.
For that to happen, outreach to veterans is essential. Gov. Jerry Brown originally proposed to cut .9 million from veterans’ services, ending state support for county staffers who help veterans claim benefits and for Operation Welcome Home, started last year by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to help veterans successfully transition to civilian life.
After strenuous objections from officials â including Rep. Jerry McNerney, a Pleasanton Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs who in a letter urged Brown not to “balance our state’s budget on the shoulders of our nation’s veterans” â the governor and the Legislature restored the state’s .6 million contribution for the staffers.
That will help, but Chavez says the state can do more for veterans, men and women, returning from war zones.
“What we’re doing here in California is OK,” he says, “but it’s not where it needs to be.”
National Alliance to End Homelessness
CCAD Alumnus Wins Grammy
Sunday, October 17th, 2010
Michael Carney's graphic design for The Black Key's "Brothers" album earns him a Grammy award.
CCAD alumnus Michael Carney (CCAD 2004) received the best recording package Grammy for his art direction on the Black Key’s album Brothers.
In addition to his work as a Graphic Designer for American Eagle Outfitters, Michael is self-employed as a graphic designer within the music industry. He has worked with popular bands, including The Black Keys and My Morning Jacket . He has also worked with record labels Fat Possum Records, Warner Brothers, V2 Europe, and more.
The Black Keys, a blues-rock duo featuring Akron natives Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney (Michael’s brother), received Grammy Award nominations in four categories, including best alternative music album for Brothers. The single Tighten Up is in the running for best rock song and best rock performance by a duo or group with vocals, while Mud is nominated for best rock instrumental performance.
Gerrick D. Kennedy of the Los Angeles Times spoke with Carney after he received his Grammy. Read the article here. View Michael’s work on his website.
Columbus College of Art & Design Blog
The Library is on FIRE!
Saturday, October 16th, 2010
Cyrus Fire, that is, a talented painter from Columbus! Cyrus uses old skateboard decks and creates wonderful characters that are now inhabiting Gallery 2001 in Beeghly Library.
The works reference archetypal figures in a fresh way, and bring the gallery alive!
You can meet the artist Thursday, August 27th from 4:00pm – 5:30pm in the Gallery; the exhibit will run until September 17th.
State Rep, Citizens Plan Lawsuit To Prevent Statehouse Lockout
Friday, October 15th, 2010A state legislator and members of several unions have hired a lawyer to file suit to make sure they have access to the statehouse.
www2.nbc4i.com – Govt_politics
Cherry Picking on My Cherry Coke
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010Today’s scare du jour was just launched by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. They claim that the caramel coloring in Coke (and in dark beer and lots of other good stuff) is carcinogenic and ought to be banned. See "FDA Urged to Prohibit Carcinogenic ‘Caramel Coloring’".
The claim can be summed up as follows: industrial caramel is unnatural and the product of scary-sounding processes involving scary-sounding chemicals; one of the resulting constitutive chemicals, 4-methylimidazole, has been found "in significant levels" of five brands of cola; 4-methylimidazole causes cancer in lab rodents; therefore, my Cherry Coke is a cancer hazard. Is there anything to it?
Well, sure enough there’s a study of lab rats and mice that found small increases in the risk of lung cancer and leukemia that increased as doses (the rodents got the equivalent of thousands of cans of cola per day worth of 4-methylimidazole) increased. See "Toxicity and Carcinogenicity Studies of 4-Methylimidazole in F344/N Rats and B6C3F1 Mice". But something else very interesting happened along the way to a good health scare – something not mentioned by the CSPI.
It turns out that while there were small and at best equivocal indications that 4-methylimidazole might be associated with one or two rodent cancers there were big, statistically significant and dose-dependent associations between cancer prevention and 4-methylimidazole consumption. For example, compared to the rodents not given 4-methylimidazole the female rodents drinking cola by the barrel were essentially completely protected from mammary tumors as well as a host of other cancers. Overall, rodents on a cola binge experienced a greatly reduced risk of many cancers and saw some tumor rates reduced by orders of magnitudes compared to their cousin rats and mice not given 4-methylimidazole.
There was no call for research into the protective effects of caramel coloring. The great big silver lining wasn’t even disclosed. Instead, the two insignificant bits of data showing a small risk of tumors in rodents were cherry picked from the forest of data and the big effect, a cancer-protective effect, was completely ignored.
I’ll go out on a limb and predict that this scare, like the CSPI acrylamide in bread, chips and roasted coffee is going to give everybody cancer scare, is also headed for the dustbin of history.
Doo-sung Yoo’s interdisciplinary performance project in 2010 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition
Tuesday, October 12th, 2010Doo-sung Yoo, a candidate of the M.F.A. degree in the Department of Art, will show his interdisciplinary project, Pig Bladders-clouds in Rainforest, during the opening reception of the 2010 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition in the OSU Urban Art Space Gallery, 50 W. Town Street, on Saturday, May 8th at 7pm.
Pig Bladders-clouds in Rainforest is an interdisciplinary performance project. Many collaborators including Visual artists, dancers, fashion designers, and sound designers will modify Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest [1968] and manipulate David Tudor’s music, Rainforest [1973] alongside the Organ-machine hybrids project, a series of flying sculptures which combine pig bladders with electronic devices and helium-plastic bags. The project explores choreographic relationships between artificial living things and the human body through an interactive narrative with experimental sound.
Introduction of Doosung’s artwork in the website of the Urban Art Space http://uas.osu.edu/mfa2010/dyoo
Doosung’s previous performances of Pig Bladders-clouds
in downtown Columbus, OH in 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJTB-LebTDI&feature=related
in downtown Reno, NV in 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvxZ1NasrHo&feature=related
Department of Art at The Ohio State University
Mike Huckabee’s insincere birther backpedal
Monday, October 11th, 2010
Andrew Sullivan on the utterly insincere claim by Team Huckabee that their guy “misspoke” yesterday when he falsely stated President Obama grew up in Kenya:
Here’s [Huckabee's] original quote:
“One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American … his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British are a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”
Well, how do you get a view of the Mau Mau revolution in Indonesia? So I don’t buy the mis-spoke explanation. And Obama did not “grow up with” a Kenyan father and grandfather. Seriously, how can you have any understanding of Obama without knowing he yearned for his absent father and was brought up largely by his white mom and white grandparents?
Sullivan also noted the most damning aspect of Huckabee’s birtherism: that “the only” reason he is “not confident” that there is proof Barack Obama was born overseas is that the Clintons couldn’t find any hard evidence. As Meteor Blades wrote yesterday, this allowed Huckabee’s interviewer to suggest that the Clintons were concealing the truth about Obama’s true birth status, a suggestion Huckabee did not dispute.
Clever Mike didn’t make the mistake of actually challenging the authenticity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He simply let Malzberg handle that with innuendos that the Clintons’ oppositional research team probably found something fishy about it but made a deal with Obama not to say anything as long as his team said nothing about some allegedly nefarious thing in Hillary Clinton’s background.
… What he means is what many politicians — and a multitude of radio hosts — mean: Obama is other, not really an American, and he has no right to the Presidency. It’s a reprehensible point of view no matter who expresses it. But Huckabee is one of the GOP’s golden boys.
Amen. Mike Huckabee’s squishy birtherism leaves us with just two options: either he actually believes that President Obama was born overseas but doesn’t think it can be proven, or he’s perfectly happy to cynically peddle false conspiracy theories to his lunatic base. I’d bet on the latter, but whichever it is, when you combine it with his recent round of gay-bashing (here and here), you’re reminded that no matter how nice he might seem on TV, he is, at heart, nothing more than Rick Santorum with charisma.
“Pay for Success Bonds”
Thursday, October 7th, 2010A grouping of interesting articles on a new funding initiative from the US and Australia.
National Alliance to End Homelessness