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We will be documenting here our delivery attempts, sucesses, and failures in our endeavors to get these posters in the hands of elected officials.

On January 27th and 28th, we passed through many, many metal detectors as we delivered to San Francisco based politicians with varying degrees of security.  Many people were wary of us whenever we asked for their pictures, so some of these pictures are on the sly and some are simply of the buildings where the offices of all our elected officials (or their underlings) work.  In general the delivery process went smoothly, however we wonder how many will actually end up in our official’s hands.  At Speaker Pelosi’s office the gentleman behind the desk asked if the Congresswoman was expecting them.  When we said no, he gave us a gentle smile and said, “ok”.

City Hall, San Francisco

This stack awaits delivery to the mailboxes of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors

On January 29th, we delivered to elected officials in Oakland.  It was weird how many of the offices of all the state representatives in Oakland had bullet proof glass separating the secretaries from the public.  Barbara Lee’s office had the most relaxed atmosphere, with workers in jeans.  The secretary of Mayor Dellums was very nice, while Loni Hancock’s secretary asked the most questions and seemed the most interested in our project.

Oliver sent this to me: A Handbook for the Nerd Companion

Welcome to a new day for optimism.

Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hanson

Celebrating their 25th year, 4th estate, a book publisher, decided to make a video celebrating the world of books.  The stop motion animation is fantastic.  On their Vimeo site, you can watch the making of this project (also stop motion,) which is pretty impressive.  They had help from APT and Asylum Films.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

Cause you can at the last minute go camping very close by and it looks like this:

A couple of New York based musicians (Jaime Austria and Peter Weitzner) inspired by a Quincy Jones interview, where he said “…next conversation I have with President Obama is to beg for a Secretary of Arts.” are spearheading a call to the Obama administration for the establishment of a Cabinet level Arts position.  Names that are being thrown around are A Secretary of the Arts, Arts Czar, and Minister of Culture.  The campaign is drawing a lot of attention and currently the signatures on the petition number at almost 124,000.  You can add your name here.

The position would not only create a direct voice for artists to the president, but would be able to look at the broad picture of the arts in this country.  Combining many disparate parts of government, the position could look at everything from arts education, the NEH, NEA, non-profit arts roles, cultural tourism, to arts copyright issues.

Seems like a good idea to me.  As we have learned from TPG8, there are more US citizens that are artists than there are in the US military.

Do it.

www.thepresentgroup.com/TPG-submissions.pdf

Click image to see full map.

As Barack Obama enters office next week, his mantra of change will finally have a chance to prove itself.  Looking at this map from the Atlantic, we see not only the state of the nation he inherits, but also that things over the past 8 years have changed quite a bit already.

Sources

Another example of someone believing in creating change in small doses- Ramit Sethi isn’t waiting around to see the change he wants in the world.  He’s contributing to it.

Check out the grant/advice he is offering. It’s due this Thursday!!

The end of the year is always crazy- holidays, getting sick, and a TPG release.  But for some reason, this year it seemed even crazier.  Maybe in part because our car was totalled by a drug-crazed lunatic, we did a show in LA and we were leaving for the holidays even earlier than normal. When we got to my parents house, we got crazy sick, but in the end had a long, forced rest that we badly needed.

And now it is a new year!
Here are some of the things we’re looking forward to:

*Another year of making great projects happen!  TPG9 already in the works!
*We’re taking the car crash as a cue and testing out life without owning a car.
*We’re gonna work from home in a different place: 1 month in Utah
*We are going to let more people know about TPG. One way or another. We love this project- it needs to be able to sustain.
*Exercise and healthy living.
*Finish some projects and organize our life.
*Perhaps we will unveil our next level of TPG projects.  TBD.

It’s gonna be a good one.