Mary Jackson, a resident of Johns Island who grew up in Mt. Pleasant, is one of 25 winners of the MacArthur Foundation’s annual “genius grant,” a fellowship given to creative individuals distinguished by their efforts to push the boundaries of their respective fields.

The grant is worth $500,000.

Yes, that’s right — half a million dollars.

“I’m kinda speechless,” Jackson said. “I really don’t know what to say.

“When I got the call, it was astounding.”

For each of the next five years, Jackson will receive $100,000 with no strings attached, so that she can focus on an art form sprung from a tradition centuries old.

Jackson is a renowned fiber artist whose intricately fashioned baskets — made of sweetgrass, bulrush, and other Lowcountry plants — are displayed in museums around the world.

Some of these institutions include the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Museum of African American History in Detroit.

Some of her baskets have sold for as much as $20,000.

Jackson started learning to weave when she was four years old from her mother and her grandmother, who were themselves passing down a tradition that goes all the way back to slaves brought to South Carolina from West Africa and the Caribbean.

Baskets were utilitarian at the time, serving to winnow rice and other grains. Jackson has expanded the craft’s functional roots, creating finely designed and sculptural forms. She uses a variety of fiber to achieve an array of textures and colors. Her technique of coiling the fiber mirrors that of weavers currently working in Africa.

“She’s just extraordinary,” says Dan Socolow, head of the MacArthur Foundation’s fellowship program. “She turns a centuries-old art form into a 21st-century art form.”

Socolow said the fellowship is intended to aid recipients so they can be “a little bit freer and have a little bit more opportunity” as they continue to create and innovate.

As a MacArthur fellow, Jackson is now among an elite group of people that includes scientists, doctors, engineers, social activists, journalists, novelists, and artists.

Her award almost certainly ranks her among Charleston’s elite artists.

The “genius grant” is awarded every year to “creative individuals who inspire new heights in human achievement,” said Jonathan Fanton, president of the foundation in a written statement.

“With their boldness, courage, and uncommon energy, this new group of fellows … exemplifies the boundless nature of the human spirit.”

There have been 781 fellows since the fellowship began in 1981.

In the category of artists and writers, past recipients have included: pianist Stephen Hough, the surgeon and writer Atul Gawande, jazz violinist Regina Carter, novelist Thomas Pynchon, artist Kara Walker, journalist Katherine Boo, historian Jonathan Spence, choreographer Paul Taylor, art historian Kirk Varnedoe, filmmakers John Sayles and Errol Morris, and the late novelist David Foster Wallace.

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I love it when artists do something that, merely by an accident of fate, suddenly brings to focus a contemporary issue hanging in the ether but that thus far has not been dealt with.

That’s the case with a “musician” named DJ Girl Talk.

He’s covered in the New York Times a while back, because of his allegiance with the “pay what you want” movement and because of his recent coup, as a headliner of a big music festival in New Jersey last month.

He’s also a lightening rod in the raging copyright debate.

You see, Girl Talk (his real name is Gregg Gillis) doesn’t write his own songs. He doesn’t even play an instrument (as far as I can tell). He merely stitches together bits and pieces of other people’s music.

His craft follows the tradition of pastiche artists of the mid-20th century and the early pioneers of hip-hop. But his aren’t deep cuts, nor are they rearrangements of popular songs. He finds likenesses among them, syncing beats with melodies. The result is some pretty killer tracks that he’s asking fans to pay for.

His new CD is called Feed the Animals. It was released on a label called, um, illegalart.net.

Some say what he’s doing is illegal, but Gillis claims protection under the “fair use” clause of U.S. copyright law, which allows snippets of intellectual property to be reproduced without penalty.

Others say Gillis’ opponents — i.e., music industry VPs already scared to death by BitTorrent and LimeWire — are part of the overall problem with copyright law.

“Fair use,” according to the Times piece, articulating the position of progressive legal scholars, “has become important to the thinking of [what is sometimes called] the “copyleft,” who argue that copyright law has grown so restrictive that it impedes creativity [italics mine].

What the article doesn’t address (not that it should have) is something beyond law. It’s an issue raised back in the early 1990s by a composer named John Oswald (see this profile from Wired).

Oswald is the creator of series of aural experiments generally called Plunderphonics. They are in the same spirit as Gillis Feed the Animals, but on a higher level of art and intellectual rigor.

Best-known in this series is probably 1993’s Plexure. It squeezes and mashes together thousands — yes, thousands — of artists from 1982-1992, the beginning of the digital era, into an 18-minute disc that was the musical equivalent of compressing a lump of coal for millennia until you have a rough diamond.

Oswald, in an essay titled “Plunderstanding Ecophonomics: Strategies for the Transformation of Existing Music,” appearing in the 2000 book Arcana: Musicians on Music, edited John Zorn, makes the following case.

Most of pop music unoriginal and lacking in value that to even cite each and every source in Plexure, and Oswald’s other works, would be giving more credence than the original works are due. (Oswald is keen on creating visual reflections of his music, as you can see to the left with “Jackoscan,” the subject of the Wired profile linked above)

The end, he said, resulted in something wholly original, “a radical transformation of familiar music,” while making a political and artistic comment on the “original” sources — that they weren’t all that important, more of the same really, derivatives of each other.

You may as well mix and match all their names. They’re that distinct from each other.

(In fact, Oswald does that here. Some examples: “Marianne Faith No Morrisey,” “Blondie Sabbath,” “Ozzie Osmond,” “Cheap Pixie Peppers,” “Beastie Shop Beach,” “Lynyrd Lovett,” “Cream Styx,” “Jello Bellafonte,” “Milli Fudge,” and “Ozzy Loaf”).

I tend to feel that most pop music is indeed just filler. With the ascent of single-song downloading, we are certainly more conscious of the fact that most albums, historically speaking, have been samey. Crap, even.

Even with good songs, there are only small portions within that provide that pop of emotion, that snap to hook you. That’s why they’re hooks.

I listened to DJ Girl Talk’s new “music” and I discovered he was doing something similar to what Oswald does, using all the good stuff of very popular songs, everything from R&B to rock to thrash metal to hip-hop.

Eventually, I had to wonder: Perhaps this is better than the originals.

Gillis is taking the best and leaving the rest. Perhaps that’s illegal, but it’s far more interesting.

Charleston City Paper

Here’s a test: Go ahead and name one song this summer that’s as powerful, invectious, and disposable as “Macarena.” Even last summer had a ubiquitous hook (Rihanna’s “Umbrella”) that everyone was humming, even if they didn’t know what it was or where it came from. The summer before that was accompanied by the cool soul of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”

The New York Times sent critic Andrew Kuo to find 2008’s Song of Summer, but didn’t find what you’d expect. Of the eight tunes he heard most frequently blaring out of apartment windows, car stereos, and iPods (among them Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” and Young Jeezy and Kanye West’s “Put On”), the best one is a doing-the-dozens-like trash-talker from HotStylz, a Chicago hip-hop collective. The tune “Lookin’ Boy” is, Kuo writes, “Good enough to hop out of bed and jam out to when a car drives by booming this at 4 a.m.!”

So here it is, the 2008 Song of the Summer.

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Charleston City Paper

Basically, he argues that when too many people own too much of a thing, it doesn’t work anymore and it actually hurts us all.

There’s much about science and technology, but he also discusses culture, especially the problems facing hip-hop artists and sound sampling.

How can we innovate with this problem? What’s the reward of being creative?

Charleston City Paper

That string began with the so-called Montauk Monster on Long Island, then a Big Foot, then this creature found in Texas last year that the discoverer swore was the Chupacabra, or goat sucker, of Mexican lore.

Turns out we want to believe.

Most people simply can’t not believe.

It doesn’t matter how educated you are. PhDs are as likely to believe in ghosts as high-school drop outs.

But those who hold deep religious beliefs are less likely to buy into the paranormal.

Those who attend church infrequently, or never, are more likely to believe Big Foot and the Montauk Monster are really, really real.

From LiveScience: The bottom line, according to several interviews with people who study these things: People want to believe, and most simply can’t help it… . A related question: Does belief in the paranormal have anything to do with religious belief? The answer to that question is decidedly nuanced, but studies point to an interesting conclusion: People who practice religion are typically encouraged not to believe in the paranormal, but rather to put their faith in one deity, whereas those who aren’t particularly active in religion are more free to believe in Bigfoot or consult a psychic. “Christians and New Agers, paranormalists, etc. all have one thing in common: a spiritual orientation to the world,” said sociology Professor Carson Mencken of Baylor University.

Oh, and that Chupacabra? Not the mythical slayer of domestic animals.

Nope. DNA testing showed it’s just a coyote.

The famed glass artist gave a talk and presentation recently at Google’s speakers series in California. Chihuly is widely recognized for his distinct work. His Gardens of Glass series has been exhibited in municipal botanical gardens throughout the country. The Columbia Museum of Art will open a new exhibit of Chihuly’s works called Seaforms, showcasing about 35 works and preliminary sketches of shells within shells, and other forms inspired by the ocean, which he worked on over a 14-year period. That show begins Sept. 5.

Dan McCue, a terrific business journalist, has sent City Paper a story about Charleston’s connection to Bollywood, which is shorthand for India’s hugely profitable movie business. Dan reports on Robert Miller, head of a local company called ReelSports that specializes in sports action sequences in films like Miracle.

In June, Miller won the Indian equivalent of a passel of Golden Globes and Academy Awards for a field hockey movie called Chak De! India (or Go! India). A scene from the movie can be seen above. Miller is now working on a movie about cricket, which India’s national pastime.

More significantly, Miller, who works out of his office on East Bay Street, is on the vanguard of a global trend in which Westerners are striking gold on the subcontinent. But the showbiz is a two-way street. Indian power brokers are looking West, too.

Last month, The New York Times reported on hip-hop musician Snoop Dogg’s appearance in an Indian music video called Singh is Kinng. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that actor Sylvester Stallone inked a deal with an Indian movie company. And today, NPR reports that a company called Reliance is buying up movie theaters around the country.

Dan’s story comes out in Wednesday’s issue of Charleston City Paper.

Click here to listen to the article from MIT’s Technology Review.

I found this article by the sometimes controversial feminist writer Camille Paglia (she wrote the Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson). The 2007 article published in Arion, a journal of the arts from Boston University, is actually a transcript of a speech she gave in 2003. You can read the article in pdf format here.

I also came across John Patrick Diggins’ review of The Secular Age by Charles Taylor. It has nothing to say about the rocky marriage of art and religion but does address the role of spirituality in public life, something that has become unfashionable for liberals to talk about since the 1960s, leaving blowhards like James Dobson to do it for them.

This cropped up last week when a musician named DJ Girl Talk continued to challenge copyright law by stringing together a huge assortment of pop songs and then charging people for the CD. He’s claiming protection under the “fair use” clause of copyright law, but some legal experts challenge that claim.

From The New Yorker: The point isn’t that private property is a bad thing, or that the state should be able to run roughshod over the rights of individual owners. Property rights (including patents) are essential to economic growth, providing incentives to innovate and invest. But property rights need to be limited to be effective. The more we divide common resources like science and culture into small, fenced-off lots, Heller shows, the more difficult we make it for people to do business and to build something new. Innovation, investment, and growth end up being stifled. Opportunities forgone aren’t always easy to see. The effects of overuse are generally unmistakable—you can’t miss the empty nets of fishing boats working overfished oceans, or the scrub that covers an overgrazed field. But the effects of underuse created by too much ownership are often invisible. They’re mainly things that don’t happen: inventions that don’t get made, useful drugs that never get to market.