square white world

It is the desire to occupy a place from which one can take everything in, first and foremost visually, but also orally and audibly, that renders the theatre and theatricality so suspect.

- Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium, Fordham University Press, New York, 2004, p. 7

Samuel Weber calls Plato’s ‘cave’ in The Republic a theatre. He calls for a mediumistic interpretation of theatricality. I would rather consider the cave in Plato’s story theatrical on the basis of its exaggeration, its blatant artificiality. Theatricality, then, is problematic for being artificial by nature, rather than suspect for interesting us in its panoptic potential. This view of theatre includes the impression it gives of potentially showing everything and when Weber calls on Walter Benjamin’s notion of allegory to attest to the extra, the remainder, of what is in excess of the signifying system or regime installed by theatricality, he is sensitive to what I would more readily like to call exaggeration.

If Plato’s theatricality is not in the image he has chosen but first and foremost in his choice of adding a theatrical dimension, what we have in the ‘cave’ is indeed theatre by way of metaphor. The thought behind it has chosen a theatrical metaphor and done so not to express a theatrical truth or truth about theatre and its placing and setting of us up to see, hear and taste (? Weber writes ‘orally’) everything but to stage a truth about everything or set up a theatrical stage in order for that truth to be represented: the theatrical is constituted here by its metaphoricity. I would prefer to contrast this metaphoricity of the thought as it is theatricalised and/or performed with a theatricality particular in every instance of performance, a theatricality, that is, of theatre as it is thought. The theatre of thought depends on a generality, that supplied by metaphoricity. The thought of theatre is used to find a way to express and analyse the problematic natural artificiality we call theatricality.

As a note further on this line: I was reminded of the difference and the difference in relation to difference of theatricality and metaphoricity watching a DVD of Kraftwerk’s Minimum-Maximum. This is Kraftwerk in performance - which means doing not much apart from standing in a row in front of identical keyboards… while behind them a three-part screen explodes with all sorts, carefully contrived and often synched up with the songs, of graphic illustration.

I was struck by how innately theatrical the machine is. And it is so without speaking of our desire to see, hear, touch, taste, experience everything through our senses. It’s not its prosthetic McCluhan dimension that makes the machine dynamically theatrical, it is its strong artificiality. And this is where the risk lies, the danger: machines are sexy and dangerous. If they are prosthetic, the danger appears to lie in their exaggeration of single qualities, speed for example, strength, tele-vision. That they are machines makes them theatrical. Machines stage their own risky qualities. They make what they do obvious. They exaggerate. And this constitutes their appeal.

Machine designs are often said to be ‘revolutionary.’ I don’t think this is an entirely baseless description but applies less to the superfices of the machine than to its artifice: what it does AND what it stages. The delicious threat of being replaced or degraded by or upgraded to a machine exists and is compelling because robots are to the nth degree not us. The Big Other is a robot. We are literally upstaged by robots. Which is why robots are the future. (& Crime Oil - which is a trademark: contact for your order now.)

From the more limited point of view of metaphoricity, machines virtualise, become virtual, in the sense of virtual reality. They are put to work at creating a moral image, much like the ‘cave’’s use of a theatrical metaphor. Virtual reality is only sexy and dangerous to the extent that the artifice is highlighted, that it exaggerates us, itself or not us. The appeal of Second Life appears to lie directly in this performative dimension of prostheses or body modification. And the appeal of talking about Second Life or the immersive experience appears to have more to do with real-world implications on the nexus between artifice and nature, which is exactly that realm opened up, I would suggest, by the problematic of theatricality. In other words, our self-performance in virtual reality really really happens. It is exaggerated and signposts its artificiality. It takes place not within theatricality as a medium but theatricality as a problematic field.

ever wondered what the professionals use?

and do us a favour, when they ask you,

“where did you get the good oil on Crime Oil?”

tell them,

“the real oil on Crime Oil is only available here, at Square White World.”

lubricating the criminal element since 1999

Joyce Carol Oates:
If Obama wins, very likely there would be an efflorescence of a kind, perhaps most evident in the more public artforms - dance, music, theatre.

Gore Vidal:
Oliver Stone, I gather, is doing father-and-son stories. I’m very fond of Oliver, but you don’t need Freud when you’re dealing with Caligula.

Art is always needed in a country that doesn’t much like it. Performance is all anybody cares about.

Paul Miller:
Usually when you have a rightwing lunatic such as Nixon, or more cynical regimes such as Reagan or Bush I’s administration, there’s a counterpoint. What ended up happening with Bush II is that the counter-culture response became incoherent.

The “culture-entertainment” industry is different now. They realise that the idea of rebellion can be made into an echo-chamber and sold back to you.

Britney Spears giving herself a haircut or the “hyper-realism” of the execution of Saddam Hussein spreading like video wildfire on people’s cellphones. It’s incoherence - montaged and edited a la Oliver Stone.

Elizabeth LeCompte:
The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park are all political works of art. Without the Bush administration I don’t think satire would have been as strong. It revived irony.

Theatre in America is in decline, however. A lot of the people who would have been writing for the theatre 100 years ago are now writing in television. In America, all art is denigrated, basically, with the possible exception of music. Written and spoken arts aren’t taken seriously here, and I don’t think they’ve ever been.

Edward Albee:
We have an administration of criminality, complicity and incompetence but no cultural legacy whatever from those eight years. It doesn’t seem to have produced the kind of rage that I would have expected it to. It shows me that we have a far more passive and ignorant society than I thought we had.

Somebody asked Beckett once why he writes if he’s such a pessimist. He said, “If I were a pessimist I wouldn’t write.”

Alex Gibney:
Unintentionally, the administration provoked a lot of political art that I think was very valuable.

It contributed to an extraordinary flowering of political documentaries - and not necessarily pure anti-Bush ones. The administration provoked a thoughtfulness, both in aesthetic terms and in terms of political thinking, that expressed itself in documentaries in a very exciting way. Iraq in Fragments, for instance, was a beautiful film - not overtly political but political in a deeper sense.

Lionel Shriver:
Hate figures are far more motivating than heroes, and W has graciously provided the collectively leftwing artistic community an embarrassment of riches. In fact, the biggest problem with the Bush era’s artistic legacy is that this widely despised president has tended to inspire polemics and agitprop. Many novels, films, plays, and artworks from the last eight years have been spitting with indignation, painfully obvious in their political intent, sledgehammer subtle in their execution, and clubby - since most of these works are preaching to the converted. Thus W may have bequeathed a whack of subject matter, but whether any of this stuff will be of enduring value is open to question. You have to ask yourself whether the diatribes denouncing Bush in a novel, such as JM Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (a book trying enough when it was published in 2007), will hold the faintest interest after January 2009.

And here’s the really bad news: Obama could be terrible for the arts. Why, when there’s barely an artist in the States who doesn’t support him? Art thrives on resistance.

Trisha Brown:
I was so in love with art-making - but I’m tired of the suppression of arts and I’ve shifted into other disciplines to find vitality and exchange.

Naomi Wolf:
there’s something about the brute force of this administration, and the fetishisation of brute force by this administration, which literally stands in opposition to civilisation and the arts.

I’ve done a lot of work on Germany from the Weimar period to the late 30s. There was a similar hostility then to the cosmopolitan, the urbanite, the avant garde, to any originality in art. Some of the most interesting visual artists we’ve seen in recent times, for example, were working behind the iron curtain, and of course, they had to work allegorically.

Much of the protest work I’ve seen [in America] has been very bad, pedantic, heavy-handed. I’ve seen so many bad monologues about the Iraq war, so many dreadful photo-montages. I think it’s because Americans don’t quite understand repression yet.

Usually writers are at the forefront of denouncing a regime: look at Václav Havel. Here, people have complained a lot, but in terms of organising a vanguard of resistance, of people getting out there and saying this is not the American way … Where is the Arthur Miller of this generation? Who is out front, somewhere visible and tricky and scary?

Daniel Libeskind:
At Ground Zero, we’re not sure if the performing arts centre planned will ever happen. This was a key part of the masterplan, but all that’s mattered in the World of Bush is the workings, and failures, of the market economy. So, Ground Zero could yet end up, unless we get a sympathetic new president, as a purely commercial venture.

[full text available here]

Where is there a similar attempt to question, articulate or even consider Helen Clark’s legacy? Whether political, polemical or cultural?

You are welcome to a submit comment to this post … by way of protest, restitution or recapitulation: What is Helen Clark’s cultural legacy?

- Augusto Boal

Excerpts from Tom Magill’s interview with Augusto Boal [full text here]:

Communitage:

The word community, communitage in Portuguese, we use to define sometimes a region of the city, e.g., a slum. In this state there is a communitage within that slum. Sometimes we can talk about also the communitage of psychiatric hospitals or we can talk about the communitage of a trade union for instance, so the word communitage / community has not the same meaning as it has in English, and of course they don’t have theatre inside those communities.

a community having the same interests without specialities:

In slums there is no theatre, only one slum which is an area called Digegow, in Rio, has a community and curiously, Cicerly Berry, who is the great teacher of voice of the Royal Shakespeare Company, when she went to Brazil twice she went to that community in the slums to teach the people how to pronounce better, how to free their voices. And so community means that. It means a group of people who can be located geographically or because they have the same interests and they don’t have specialities so there is not a difference between that community theatre and the other forms because they don’t have other forms. And then we worked with those communities to make them produce theatre.

A “community theatre” is a special place in New Zealand, or, in the Boal’s example, the US:

… it is only for that region or whatever you know. It’s not in our case, our poor communities or workers’ communities. They don’t have theatre at all and then what they make is not creative theatre. But to help them make theatre, wherever, in any place, but not a special place, that is our task.

On building bulwarks:

all the barriers have been collapsing already and now what I think we should reinforce are some barriers instead of collapsing them. Building new walls against racism which is one of the horrible things that exist in the world. A wall against intolerance which is not accepting and is a form of racism, not accepting the existence of the other one. The wall against sexism which enslaves half of humanity - women. A wall against globalisation which makes all of us become clones of ourselves to become robots, so now is the moment to build barriers, to build walls and to fight against intolerance, against racism, sexism and globalisation, to fight vigorously against that.

On political and theatrical representation:

Democracy is a very beautiful system but has this inconvenience. You have extreme power in your hands and when you vote you lose that power. It’s a paradoxical reality and then you’re going to get power again, 2, 4, 8 years later to vote again and to lose your power the moment you exert your power. You use your power you lose it, and then we thought during this time how can we make the citizen be aware of what’s going on? To delegate power to the other ones is so horrible. When you delegate power you lose your power and then you become a spectator of that person. You may have confidence in the person, you may trust them, but it is something that when you speak with your voice and something else when someone speaks in your place. When someone speaks in your place, even if it’s an honest person, intelligent person, creative person, but that person will never translate correctly what you want to say.

On participation including both amateur and professional:

if everyone did theatre the professional theatre would be full every day because they would like to see what the other ones are doing. So sometimes professional theatre is not so interesting to the population because the population does not practice theatre. If you do theatre all of the time then you want to see a play done by others. The more you develop theatre inside the population in general, the more you create conditions for having bigger audiences, a more interested audience, more participation from the audience.

On copying methodologies:

I think that the bad results can come from an automatic, a mechanical transposition forcing a method that is flexible and not stratified, so if it serves as an inspiration it is good.

On the invention of theatre from rebellion - jumping out of not into the chorus:

If I think about the Ancient Greeks, the one who influenced me very much was Thespis. Why Thespis? Because he was the first person who was in a chorus in the dithyrambic chorus singing all disciplined the song that the poet had written and dancing the movements of the choreographer and saying what was the acceptable official story so he jumped out of that and refused to be inside the chorus and said what he really thought. So this act of rebellion, he invented the theatre with this act of rebellion when he went out and said I don’t agree with it, the chorus singing in poetry and he answering, replicating in prose. So this act of rebellion for me is extraordinary. A man invented the theatre. In this act of rebellion he jumped out of the chorus.

On funding:

I am a professional, we should have our money from the government because art in most cases is not self sufficient, you need sponsorship. But, we should have a balance, popular art should be developed for its own benefit and for the benefit of art in general.

(Augusto Boal was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

It was awarded to Martti Ahtisaari.)

Augusto Boal was arrested in 1972 after the publication of Theatre of the Oppressed. Following a brief outbreak of democracy, Brazil had been returned to a military dictatorship - by coup - in 1964. Censorship was most intense over the period 1968-73.

Boal was imprisoned, suffered various types of torture, over a four month period, until he was eventually, like Caetano Veloso, deported.

He returned to Brazil in 1986 and has since then worked in Brazil and throughout the world on / in the theatre of the oppressed. Turning sixty-five in 1996, he was refused his pension on the grounds that he remained classified as a ‘menace to the state.’

International pressure on the Brazilian government to grant Boal the pension increased when it became widely known in 2005 that this classification still had not been revoked.

Is Boal still an unpensioned enemy of the state?

Is there a form of social conflict which is not terrorism and not capable of being delayed and repeated - represented - and which does not exemplify, provide a situation, a theatre for operations - with the suffering of people serving as backdrop to an ‘empty space,’ from which bursts of monologue?

And this is not to ask again whether terrorist acts serve as backdrop to capitalism, seen as some kind of homogeneous system of the world, in the theatrum mundi … but to get at what Simon Biggs called ‘complicity.’

Media work in what Deleuze called a theatre of repetition, reliant on recognition, the habit of the first passive synthesis. Acts / encounters which aim to break the deadlock, rock the status quo, engender thought, lose / have lost particularity in what used to be the anodyne of media commentary and is now the acid bath. They are habitual and become general. Virilio’s image, his analogon, is that they are total, turning the mirror on the work of art, on aesthesis, to give us the full immersion media-experience of their Ganzfeld virtuality. This gaze is pitiless.

Where I mean to draw attention to a ‘complicity’ is not only with the Image of thought-as-representation, rather than Deleuze’s thought-of-thought, of the media and its (re)mediation of spectacular terrorism, but also with art - as a disctinction-without-difference. I mean that the Crisis of Representation has left us with this legacy on the one hand and that on the other we have the past-futurity, the futurism, of a global Crisis of Values, which rests on the complicity of art, capital and terror, to the power of a ‘triplicity,’ and is that show in which this triunity is spectacularly confirmed.

In the circle of repetition of the selfsame there is no drama because it consists in what Neal Stephenson called a ‘consensus cluster.’ Conflict resolves before it arises: and its resolution is High Definition. The Society of the Spectacle … is also this … is also that … terror / capital … art / terror … art / capital … in endless combination, at rates of oscillation and substitution (exemplification) invisible to the naked eye …

- João Magueijo, cosmologist

… another sense is needed, beyond the habitual five, or six - the sixth being death, in which the creative act shall have no dominion - in answer to the problem of light which is faster than light.

go here for the source of the quote in the title. The virtual in the event of no difference being possible any more between it and the real signifies a totalization of the Image such that you get when code meets its nemesis: and there is a phase-shift; and code and encounter can’t be different any more.

‘Real’ in the event of reality not allowing a difference between the virtual and real world must however belong to the present which was. Or … the virtual world will not allow reality to differ from it at some point in the past.

This amounts to a prohibition on division or on decomplexification (to hold up against the prohibition on multiplication, the unnecessary creation of figures, characters, supernumeraries).

The real world was irreducible to the virtual because it was not after all virtual.

Then there was the law against reduction, pure and simple. And the incentivization of adding dimensions, to n-set.

With the proviso that we never arrived at the particular.

NATIONAL: 2008: Arts, Culture & Heritage Policy
by Christopher Finlayson, Arts, Culture and Heritage
15 July 2008

ARTS, CULTURE & HERITAGE

ENCOURAGING THE ARTS –
ENCOURAGING OUR ARTISTS

- Was Weist der Aisel von Mord, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1988

National values arts, culture, and heritage. We value them equally. We value the one - or do we mean the ones?

We value the one(s) we’re supposed to value and not the other one(s), or what is called in progressive parlance: the other’s ones.

To clarify: we value those arts, that culture and this heritage which are native to … us. Which is also not to say that we somehow devalue or disrespect those, that and this, not native, indigenous. and otherwise not conventionally deemed New-Zealand-made. It is to say that we don’t extend our support to it.

We, your incoming National government, have no place in supporting these arts, those cultures and heritages not native to New Zealand… native in the inclusive sense.

We believe there is an important role for government in supporting the arts at all levels. However, we are not going to tell you in this document how we define ‘level.’ As Michael said the other day about the English curriculum, ‘It’s like Dungeons and Dragons. If you get this number you advance to a higher level.’

Our approach is intelligent intervention rather than constant interference. Please do not infer anything élitist from the élitist sounding phrase, ‘intelligent intervention.’ In fact, it would be very Labourite and Politically Correct for you so to do. We mean ‘intelligent’ to mean, based on our intelligence.

- Let Me Show You My Wonderful World, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1990

The National Party Research Unit has for some time been out in the field gathering arts, cultural and heritage intelligence at all levels.

Using this information our approach is to intervene and not interfere. We will come between the arts and artists, culture and culturati, heritage and inheritors (or, if you prefer, legatees) but not come in with some ideologically questionable agenda … some may have done so … some time.

Our policies focus on:

• Stimulating demand for the arts.
(we would like to titillate the nation’s taste buds)
• Supporting artists and arts organisations, not the bureaucracy.
(we believe that ‘organisation’ rhymes with ‘organic’)
• Ensuring funding agencies have cultures of service.
(the sector of highest employment in the developed world is the service sector; however, we hope to develop the service without employing a higher number of staff to serve.
(See our definition of culture, above: our culture is ours because we support our culture, and so on)
• Helping arts organisations operate on a sustainable, long-term basis.
(read ’sustainable’ as ’self-sustaining’ if you must)
• Promoting a culture of giving and community support.
(we support a culture of giving and ‘community support’ because the giving is what the culture does, not the government, just as ‘community support’ is a natural effect following on from strong and morally constituted communities in which our intelligence tells us we need not intervene)

- Range of Motion, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1990

OUR PRINCIPLES

• Building opportunity for all.
(’building’ is a participle and not a nominal piece of developed real-estate with bricks-and-mortar investment)
• Encouraging ambition.
(within the parameters of the portfolio, i.e. arts, culture and heritage. We imagine that ambitious heritage is all about wanting to make a come-back, possibly for those aspects of our national heritage which have been ignored and/or destroyed under three terms of the outgoing government. Ambition in culture should not be thought of as ideologically inflected. And the National Party is all about ambitious artists)
• Strengthening our communities.
(see above, ‘community support’ comes from strong communities; strong communities make extra support from government look like interfering, which rhymes with ’social engineering’)

- Krishna Stealing Milk, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1988

NATIONAL’S PLAN

1. Supporting Arts Funding
(as a good idea)

• Maintain the current level of taxpayer funding for arts, culture, and heritage, and promote additional sources of funding through turbocharging community groups. This is a serious undertaking and not to be confused with an initiative to improve conditions for boy racers.
• Focus the Ministry of Culture and Heritage on its core responsibilities, like a magnifying glass, and reform the Arts Council to improve service delivery. See above for our belief that service need not go hand on arm with employing more staff.
• Improve the Creative Communities scheme and strengthen links between the Arts Council, local authorities, and iwi. Details of how this improvement and strengthening will be achieved is not contained in our intelligence, however take it as read that what we’ve got so far confirms that there is a need for it.

2. Encouraging Artists
(’You go, boy!’ & ‘You go, girl!’)

• Maintain the PACE scheme and help establish a creative sector law centre. The PACE scheme is the most successful employment scheme we have in terms of numbers led into employment.

- Painters Lie with Fools Mask, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1988

However, our long-term thinking does not extend to considering the arts sector as the engine for the national economy. Simply put, too much is at stake to risk it on artists.
• Update the Copyright Act. Oppose resale royalty rights for art. We are and remain recidivists when it comes to remediation.

3. Maintaining Our Heritage
(see our definition of ‘our’ above: it is meant in an inclusive sense. Just like: President Elect Obama is an American, in the inclusive sense)

• Review the Historic Places Act, because it’s time we did.
• Support the National Portrait Gallery through the National Library. We as a Party are in favour of portraits and portraiture as a level in arts, culture and heritage. (See the discussion of ‘levels’ above.) We would like to see more portraits kept once they have been painted.
• Require Te Papa to improve the quality of service provided by the National Services Directorate. The latter has lately been dragging the chain.

4. Supporting the Sectors
(there are disciplines and then there are disciplines that need to be punished)

• Update the Film Commission Act and reform the commission. Maintain the Large Budget Screen Production Grant and the Screen Production Investment Fund. Peter Jackson has offered his own intelligence in intervening in the Film Commission. As has almost every successful New Zealand film maker.
• Retain the Music Commission and maintain NZ On Air funding for Kiwi music. Ensure Rockquest continues. We are about continuance. Music is not our thing.
• Support the reform of the Authors’ Fund. Too many authors spoil the fund.
• Require all state funding agencies to place a greater emphasis on emerging artists. Once they realise they are in the matrix they wake up and find themselves covered in something which looks and feels like jelly. Plus they have holes where they’ve so recently been plugged in. As a source of power, nothing beats emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As it long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As it long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As it long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. And another emerging. We are the jelly. We have always been there.

- Allegory of Water, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1987

There’s something to be said for a country of approximately 4 million people who want to hold a national election as if it were a US presidential race - to which at times it actually referred.

Prime Minister Helen Clark in her concession speech played the ‘gracious in defeat’ role which was so recently attributed to John McCain. In addition she announced that she would stand down from leadership of the Labour Party. Possibly because the blame for the defeat in the party vote does not rest with her leadership; possibly to avoid that blame … and accentuate the positive of 9 years of responsible government both in terms of foreign affairs and economically: lower unemployment rates and a higher, and an existing, minimum wage.

… As far as John Key is concerned, he has been schooled, whether by watching TV over the past couple of days, or by an advisor, on how to deliver a speech. Go slow, John, they’ve said to him. It’s a question of phrasing. We won’t be getting over your speech defect in one lesson but it’s less noticeable if you measure your words.

And the question of for whom JK is the acceptable face, in view of the lack of brains or potential for duplicity, and the requisite smarts therefor, among the old boys we know, becomes no clearer: Steven Joyce ?… Tim Groser ? .. or the Honourable Undead Sir Roger Douglas, who has been returned to parliament under the Act list, after all … ?

The alliance even if it be on a confidence and supply basis which most scares me remains that potentially existing between National and the Maori Party. Why? … Because it is a case of sheer opportunism on the latter’s part. And, as Sandra Lee also said, the notion of the Maori Party as National’s “Treaty partner” in parliament would be a constitutional abuse. However, mutual respect, says JK, is sufficient to secure such an expedient dialogue.

Asked to comment on the US election, Noam Chomsky said, ‘We should have no illusions.’ He was remembering Kennedy. His BBC interlocutor wondered whether he would be hanging out the flags. ‘We should not be hanging out flags no matter where we are,’ said Chomsky.

Chomsky’s point was that it would be in such a measure as President Elect Obama would be seen not to deliver on his promises that his legacy could properly be judged, in that measure to which there’d be disillusion. The BBC, determined to reach a positive statement, pursued the line of questioning to ask whether it might not be taken as an advance that there would soon be a black man in office. Chomsky answered that the civilizing forces leading to this resulted from the disillusion and subsequent activism after JFK.

He didn’t remove Kennedy as sign but pointed to a process taking place alongside the election of a president upon whom the population had pinned their hopes. Disillusion, loss of hope, the argument runs, as long, I suppose, as they are explosive in their publication, catalyze popular movements, activism, more effectively than elected leaders with socially progressive agendas.

JK promises to help those who need help; he says that the country has not met its potential; he argues in favour of ambition and the opportunity to improve oneself without excessive government intervention. This agenda, he has said, will not be fulfilled without going into debt … to Australian banks; we will be in fact paying for your election decision by going deeper and deeper into debt.

… Unless, as every poll, apart from saying National would win, has also indicated, we cannot trust him and them.

And so we are nicely delivered back into the precinct of the cynical and the negative.

It seems clear-cut for Key: he will be judged by his failure in the measure to which it inspires us to do better.

Which is no more than judging him by his own stated principles.

In the meantime, Allah be thanked we have Obama for him to cuddle up to in foreign policy and not Bush I or II.

- Isabel Samaras, painting detail

“Nexx will be New Zealand’s online marketplace for social lending. We’ll let people borrow and lend money directly with each other, without greedy banks and unpredictable finance companies in the middle.“

Is there a similar programme to assist non-profit organisations and non-commercial enterprises - such as those found here - to find backers, sponsors, patrons?

San Fran has one: