Hair-Portraits of First Ladies. From left to right: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Martha Randolph,* Dolley Madison, Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Adams, Rachel Jackson,** Hannah Van Buren,** Anna Harrison, Letitia Tyler, Julia Tyler, Sarah Polk, Margaret Taylor, Abigail Fillmore, Jane Pierce, Harriet Lane,*** Mary Lincoln, Eliza Johnson, Julia Grant, Lucy Hayes, Lucretia Garfield, Ellen Arthur,** Frances Cleveland, Caroline Harrison, Frances Cleveland, Ida McKinley, Edith Roosevelt, Helen Taft, Ellen Wilson, Edith Wilson, Florence Harding, Grace Coolidge, Lou Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama.

NY Times Published July 4, 2009
By Laura Jacobs

It’s a kind of calligraphy, these ringlets and waves, hair combed, twisted and pinned. A first lady’s coiffure is a pattern, chosen as deliberately as the White House china, but prey to wind and rain, especially on cold Inauguration Days. It’s also prey to public opinion, should she dare to make quixotic changes in her ’do — a sign of flippancy and flip-flopping. Notice there are no flips. In the beginning, we see a newborn empire in those Josephine curls. The mid-20th century is marcelled. And in recent decades, increasingly liberated first ladies sport more leonine locks. Interestingly, there are no bangs. Perhaps this has less to do with hair and more to do with campaign promises of marital harmony and world peace.

June 29 - August 7 2009

Greene Naftali

Elad Lassry, artist, discusses animal subjectivity and the animal as subject in film and photography.

July 5, 2009 at 7pm

Mandrake

oslo editions

via

Los Angeles Premiere of Lawrence Weiner’s
Water in Milk Exists
Thursday, July 9, 8pm
Cottage Home
410 Cottage Home St. LA, CA 90012
Screening followed with a few words
by Lawrence Weiner and a reception.

cottage home

via

WHITE OUT To keep their place pristine, Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz, above, and his partner usually wear shorts and T-shirts at home.

MR. CLEAN Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz keeps a washer-dryer by the front door. he doesn’t entertain strangers much. “Our interior world stays much cleaner that way,” he said.

By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
NY Times Published: July 1, 2009

JAYNE MICHAELS, an interior designer who lives on East 57th Street in Manhattan, throws open her windows every chance she gets. “I need light and air in my life,” said Ms. Michaels, who favors gauzy fabrics in pale colors.

But breezes carry dirt, especially in New York, so once every six months Ms. Michaels pays about $400 to have her sofas, chairs, chaises and rugs shampooed.

It’s another price of living in New York: call it the dirt tax.

The dirt tax appears in cleaning costs, replacement costs and even the inability of New York homeowners to consider certain finishes and fabrics because they’re just not practical.

Not in a city where schmutz — the preferred New York term for the black gritty material — accumulates on every surface.

White rugs and sofas can become filthy anywhere. But experts (who include anyone who has ever dusted, vacuumed or swabbed in the five boroughs) say New York City’s dirt level is highly unusual.

And it inspires some unusual responses.

Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz, a prominent interior designer, and his partner, Steven Wine, a lighting designer, undress each time they enter their apartment on West 23rd Street, where almost everything is white. Then they put on “inside clothes” — usually shorts and T-shirts.

“You have no idea how much dirt you carry on your street clothes in New York,” said Mr. Noriega-Ortiz. When laying out the duplex apartment, he put the washer-dryer right by the front door.

He added, in an e-mail message: “Since we are not about to impose the remove-your-clothes-and-change rule on our guests, we tend to not entertain strangers that often. Our interior world stays much cleaner that way.”

Although none of his clients have followed his example (so far as he knows), many of them do ask guests to leave shoes at the door. Increasingly, he said, clients ask him to design foyers with benches for removing footwear, as a way of keeping their apartments clean.

Ms. Michaels said she advises clients who want light-colored fabrics to accept the inevitable: limited life span and extra expense. “I’m a prisoner to it,” she said of the cleaning regimen, which is performed by Delmont Carpet and Upholstery Cleaning Specialists in New York.

But in one concession to New York’s air, she had her drapes made of “wash and wear” polyester. In a different city, she said, she might have chosen linen. But not in New York. The last time she rinsed out the polyester drapes in her bathtub, she said, the water turned black.

The culprit is soot, said Richard Kassel, an air pollution expert with the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.

In one study cited by Mr. Kassel, soot in one stretch of Midtown Manhattan was found to contain 52 percent diesel exhaust, mostly from trucks, buses and construction vehicles. The other 48 percent was a mix of everything from ground-up car tires to sea salt, he said.

Even in New York, the amount of soot varies from block to block. Susan Moolman, a publicist who moved to Manhattan in 2007, said that the dirt was much worse at her previous apartment, near the entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, than at her current place on the Upper West Side.

Whether New York is a soot champion or just a contender is hard to know. Particle pollution is actually worse in cities like Bakersfield, Calif., and Pittsburgh, according to studies cited by the American Lung Association in its latest “State of the Air” report. But the particles measured are microscopic — “small enough to lodge deep in the lungs,” the report says. What New Yorkers think of as soot consists in part of much larger “chunks” that are not easily quantified, said Michael Seilback of the association. New York’s population density, traffic patterns and road conditions all contribute to the mix of dirt in the air.

In the early 20th century New York had more soot than it does today. Back then, engines were dirtier, apartment buildings had incinerators and factories abounded. “Housekeepers Have Difficulty in Keeping Homes Clean Owing to Greasy Deposits — Laundry Bills Higher,” said a 1922 New York Times headline.

But the construction boom of recent years may have worsened the soot problem for some residents. “I had one client, across the street from a construction site, who couldn’t open her windows for six months,” said Howard Sklar, owner of Durotone, a carpet- and fabric-cleaning firm based in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

The dirt tax is progressive, in that it seems to have a disproportionate impact on the rich. And that’s because only the rich insist on things like white silk rugs.

“The higher the discretionary income, the more likely they are to go for fragile goods,” said Mark Nelson, who designs and sells carpets through interior designers. His products, which frequently cost more than $50 a square foot (yes, foot), are often cream or ivory colored.

One way to keep interiors clean, many designers say, is to avoid opening windows.

That’s easy when the windows aren’t made to open, as is the case in some apartment buildings in Manhattan. But windows that don’t open pose a problem of their own: occupants have no way to wash the glass, and the building may not do it frequently enough.

In sleek modern towers, “you think you’re going to be floating above the city,” said Marc Kushner, an architect with the Manhattan firm HollwichKushner. “But in reality, you’re really looking out through grime.”

Mr. Kushner and his business partner, Matthias Hollwich, designed an apartment for a client on the Upper East Side with an entire wall of moldings, which was their way of reconciling the client’s desire for period detailing with their own contemporary sensibility. Since the building’s windows don’t open, Mr. Kushner said, he wasn’t worried about dirt collecting on the moldings.

But he is working on another apartment in a building where the windows do open. “The interior designer is from L.A.,” he said. “She suggested that we raise the bathroom vanities 12 inches, so they look like they’re floating. The first thing we thought, being from New York, is that there’s going to be so much dirt under there.”

For the living room, the designer has picked off-white upholstery, he said. “We’ve warned her about that, especially close to the windows.”

But even sealed windows don’t solve the soot problem entirely. Mr. Nelson and others said that gases created by basement heating systems often rise through buildings’ interiors.

Because the gases tend to follow load-bearing walls, which are continuous, they concentrate around the edges of rooms, he said.

The gases leave oily deposits as they pass through carpets, which are really room-size filters.

And when dirt hits those deposits, it sticks. One result can be a dark line around the perimeter of the room, known as filtration soiling.

Mr. Nelson remembered one particularly egregious case.

The setting was an apartment on Park Avenue in the 70s. A “very nice” couple had bought hand-tufted wool carpet that was installed wall to wall in their bedroom. “It was a light beige,” he said.

Soon, they noticed a dark line forming around the edges of their carpet. Mr. Nelson called Mr. Sklar, who is a certified carpet inspector. (“If you buy a new carpet and you think there’s something wrong with it, the industry dictates that a certified inspector come out to look at it,” Mr. Sklar said.) He discovered a case of filtration soiling — or as he sometimes calls it, “ring around the collar.”

Mr. Sklar told Mr. Nelson, who told the couple that “it wasn’t a carpet problem, it was a New York City problem,” Mr. Nelson said. “That’s not what they wanted to hear.”

But “if you buy white carpet, what do you expect?” Mr. Nelson added, momentarily forgetting his role as an enabler of the impractical carpet habit. “You buy a pair of linen slacks — you know they’re going to wrinkle. It’s the nature of the beast.”

When people ask him, he recommends choosing darker colors, especially for stairs. And he suggests creating a buffer zone to allow dirt to dissipate before shoes reach the carpet.

People in buildings with carpeted lobbies or foyers tend to have cleaner carpets inside their apartments, he explained. “The big question is, what carpeted surface will your feet be on before they get to your apartment?”

For those who simply have to have light-colored carpet, there is a way to prevent filtration soiling. “It’s a procedure that is done prophylactically,” Mr. Nelson said, before the carpet is installed. “It’s referred to as ‘soot seal.’ ”

“Basically, you take roofing paper, and you caulk and seal it into the perimeter of the room,” he said. “Then you do your normal install, with tack strips and padding.”

The roofing paper, he explained, prevents the gases from concentrating around the edge of the room. The process, he said, generally costs about $500 a room. But it’s worth it, he said, for people spending $20,000 or more to carpet a single room.

Mr. Sklar, who lives in Westchester, said that even after all he has seen, he understands the appeal of white carpet.

“White carpet makes a small apartment look bigger,” he said. “My son was living in an oversized closet. When my wife decorated, she did everything in whites and beiges, and all of a sudden it at least looked like a room.”

As for upholstery, Mr. Noriega-Ortiz still endorses white, because it can be bleached. “Bleach this and it’s white again,” he said, pointing to a snow-white chaise in his apartment. “What are you going to do when there’s a stain on your red sofa?”

Vicente Wolf, the well-known interior designer, lives in a white-on-white loft on West 39th Street. After describing dirt as “a price we pay for living in New York,” he said, “If it bothers you that much, take off your glasses.”

Matt Walker
BBC Editor, Earth News July 1

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered.

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same interrelated colony, and will refuse to fight one another.

The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

What’s more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.

Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.

These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the ‘Californian large’, extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society
Entomologists reveal the ant colony’s true size

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.

But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.

Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their cuticles.

But further experiments revealed the true extent of the insects’ global ambition.

The team selected wild ants from the main European super-colony, from another smaller one called the Catalonian super-colony which lives on the Iberian coast, the Californian super-colony and from the super-colony in west Japan, as well as another in Kobe, Japan.

They then matched up the ants in a series of one-on-one tests to see how aggressive individuals from different colonies would be to one another.

Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn’t get on with those from the Iberian colony.

One big family

But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.

These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another.

In short, they acted as if they all belonged to the same colony, despite living on different continents separated by vast oceans.

The most plausible explanation is that ants from these three super-colonies are indeed family, and are all genetically related, say the researchers. When they come into contact, they recognise each other by the chemical composition of their cuticles.

“The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society,” the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they report their findings.

However, the irony is that it is us who likely created the ant mega-colony by initially transporting the insects around the world, and by continually introducing ants from the three continents to each other, ensuring the mega-colony continues to mingle.

“Humans created this great non-aggressive ant population,” the researchers write.

via achinect

Palms, 1977 ( MOCA Permanent Collection )

Malibu, 2009 ( 70 years old and still riding a shortboard )

By LESLIE KAUFMAN
NY Times Published: June 29, 2009

This month, Edward Reilly, 35, finally let go of the television he had owned since his college days.

Although the Mitsubishi set was technologically outdated, it had sat for years in Mr. Reilly’s home in Portland, Me., because he did not know what else to do with it, given the environmental hazards involved in discarding it.

“It’s pretty well known that if it gets into the landfill, it gets into the groundwater,” he said. “Its chemicals pollute.”

But the day after the nationwide conversion to digital television signals took effect on June 12, Mr. Reilly decided to take advantage of a new wave of laws in Maine and elsewhere that require television and computer manufacturers to recycle their products free of charge. He dropped off his television at an electronic waste collection site near his home and, he said, immediately gained “peace of mind.”

Over the course of that day, 700 other Portland residents did the same.

Since 2004, 18 states and New York City have approved laws that make manufacturers responsible for recycling electronics, and similar statutes were introduced in 13 other states this year. The laws are intended to prevent a torrent of toxic and outdated electronic equipment — television sets, computers, monitors, printers, fax machines — from ending up in landfills where they can leach chemicals into groundwater and potentially pose a danger to public health.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates 99.1 million televisions sit unused in closets and basements across the country. Consumer response to recycling has been enormous in states where the laws have taken effect. Collection points in Washington State, for example, have been swamped by people like Babs Smith, 55, who recently drove to RE-PC, a designated electronics collection and repurposing center on the southern edge of Seattle.

Ms. Smith’s Subaru Outback was stuffed with three aged computer towers that had languished in her basement after being gutted by her teenage sons, who removed choice bits to build their own souped-up computers. “It’s what geeks do,” she said.

Since January, Washington State residents and small businesses have been allowed to drop off their televisions, computers and computer monitors free of charge to one of 200 collection points around the state. They have responded by dumping more than 15 million pounds of electronic waste, according to state collection data. If disposal continues at this rate, it will amount to more than five pounds for every man, woman and child per year.

Use of the drop-off points was so overwhelming at first that the Washington Materials Management and Financing Authority, which oversees the program, urged consumers to consider holding off until spring.

“We were getting 18 semi loads a day when the program first started,” said Craig Lorch, owner of Total Reclaim, a warehouse on the south edge of Seattle that is among the collection points.

Still, states that pioneered the electronic recycling laws report that consumer participation remains strong over time. Maine, which was one of the first to approve such a law, in 2004, says it collected nearly four pounds of waste per person last year.

“If you make it easy, they will recycle their stuff,” said Barbara Kyle, national coordinator of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco. If products are recycled rather than dumped, parts of the machines are refurbished for new use where possible; if not, they are disassembled, their glass and precious metals are recycled, and the plastics, which have no reuse market, are often shipped overseas to developing countries for disposal.

The laws vary significantly from state to state. But in most, manufacturers are responsible for the collection and recycling system, although some will pay states or counties to handle the pickup. The newest laws tend to require recycling of a broader range of items, including printers and fax machines.

Many laws, including those for New Jersey and Connecticut and New York City (none of which are yet in effect) specifically ban residents from dumping electronics into the regular trash.

Least thrilled with the patchwork of laws are electronics manufacturers. “Our hope is there will be a national law before there is a law in every state,” said Parker Brugge, vice president for environmental affairs and industry sustainability for the Consumer Electronics Association, an industry advocacy group.

Mr. Brugge said it was difficult for manufacturers to keep up with dozens of laws and rules, many of which they consider impractical. New York City, for example, is pressing manufacturers to agree to pick up at apartment buildings.

Manufacturers say a reasonable rate for collection and processing of waste is 25 to 30 cents a pound. Still it is more than they say they can recoup from reselling the metals they harvest, particularly for televisions.

Peter M. Fannon, the vice president for technology and government policy at Panasonic’s North American subsidiary, said his company would prefer a national law that would put local governments in charge of collection and the industry in charge of recycling.

“We think it is unreasonable that an individual industry be designated as trash collector,” Mr. Fannon said.

State lawmakers counter that they cannot afford to wait for a national bill. With constant upgrades in technological capability, they say, manufacturers build obsolescence into many of their designs, causing outdated electronics to become the bane of the waste system.

The E.P.A. estimates that 2.6 million tons of electronic waste were dropped into landfills in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available. Once buried, the waste leaches poisons like chlorinated solvents and heavy metals into soil and groundwater.

Recycling programs do not address the problem of electronics that are already leaching poison in landfills. Nor do they prevent the frequent shipment of plastic shells covered with chemical flame retardants overseas to poor and developing nations; once there, they are often incinerated, because they cannot be reused, and spew toxic chemicals into the air.

The Office of the Inspector General at the Justice Department has a continuing investigation into accusations that several federal prisons with electronics recycling contracts had used inmates to do the work without taking adequate safety precautions, exposing them to unhealthy levels of airborne particles.

Ultimately, said Ms. Kyle, coordinator of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, recycling does not eliminate the root problem: the vast amount of electronics generated in the first place and fated for disposal.

Carole A. Cifrino, the environmental specialist who manages Maine’s e-waste program, said she hoped the strict recycling would eventually prompt manufacturers to rethink their designs.

“Maybe since they have some responsibility for the cleanup,” Ms. Cifrino said, “it will motivate them to think about how you design for the environment and the commodity value at the end of the life.”

Placed on the Tip of a Wave
July 11 - August 15, 2009

Regen Projects

canada gallery

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: June 27, 2009

I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?

Now what does that have to do with pulling us out of the Great Recession? A lot. Historically, recessions have been a time when new companies, like Microsoft, get born, and good companies separate themselves from their competition. It makes sense. When times are tight, people look for new, less expensive ways to do old things. Necessity breeds invention.

Therefore, the country that uses this crisis to make its population smarter and more innovative — and endows its people with more tools and basic research to invent new goods and services — is the one that will not just survive but thrive down the road.

We might be able to stimulate our way back to stability, but we can only invent our way back to prosperity. We need everyone at every level to get smarter.

I still believe that America, with its unrivaled freedoms, venture capital industry, research universities and openness to new immigrants has the best assets to be taking advantage of this moment — to out-innovate our competition. But we should be pressing these advantages to the max right now.

Russia, it seems to me, is clearly wasting this crisis. Oil prices rebounded from $30 to $70 a barrel too quickly, so the pressure for Russia to really reform and diversify its economy is off. The struggle for Russia’s post-Communist economic soul — whether it is going to be more OPEC than O.E.C.D., a country that derives more of its wealth from drilling its mines than from tapping its minds — seems to be over for now.

At the St. Petersburg exposition center, showing off the Russian economy, the two biggest display booths belonged to Gazprom, the state-controlled oil and gas company, and Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank. Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent: Two-thirds of Russia’s exports today are oil and gas. Gazprom makes the money, and Sberbank lends it out.

As one Western banker put it, when oil is $35 a barrel, Russia “has no choice” but to reform, to diversify its economy and to put in place the rule of law and incentives that would really stimulate small business. But at $70 a barrel, it takes an act of enormous “political will,” which the petro-old K.G.B. alliance that dominates the Kremlin today is unlikely to summon. Too much rule of law and transparency would constrict the ruling clique’s own freedom of maneuver.

China is also courting trouble. Recently — in the name of censoring pornography — China blocked access to Google and demanded that computers sold in China come supplied with an Internet nanny filter called Green Dam Youth Escort, starting July 1. Green Dam can also be used to block politics, not just Playboy. Once you start censoring the Web, you restrict the ability to imagine and innovate. You are telling young Chinese that if they really want to explore, they need to go abroad.

We should be taking advantage. Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs than they would supplant. The world’s best brains are on sale. Let’s buy more!

Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door; 2) double the budgets for basic scientific research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; 3) lower the corporate tax rate; 4) revamp Sarbanes-Oxley so that it is easier to start a small business; 5) find a cost-effective way to extend health care to every American.

We need to do all we can now to get more brains connected to more capital to spawn more new companies faster. As Jeff Immelt, the chief of General Electric, put it in a speech on Friday, this moment is “an opportunity to turn financial adversity into national advantage, to launch innovations of lasting value to our country.”

Sometimes, I worry, though, that what oil money is to Russia, our ability to print money is to America. Look at the billions we just printed to bail out two dinosaurs: General Motors and Chrysler.

Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters. Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.

Some of the first eerie signs of a potential health catastrophe came as bizarre deformities in water animals, often in their sexual organs.

Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs. In heavily polluted Lake Apopka, one of the largest lakes in Florida, male alligators developed stunted genitals.

In the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into “intersex fish” that display female characteristics. This was discovered only in 2003, but the latest survey found that more than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.

Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.

These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.

“A lot of these compounds act as weak estrogen, so that’s why developing males — whether smallmouth bass or humans — tend to be more sensitive,” said Robert Lawrence, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s scary, very scary.”

The scientific case is still far from proven, as chemical companies emphasize, and the uncertainties for humans are vast. But there is accumulating evidence that male sperm count is dropping and that genital abnormalities in newborn boys are increasing. Some studies show correlations between these abnormalities and mothers who have greater exposure to these chemicals during pregnancy, through everything from hair spray to the water they drink.

Endocrine disruptors also affect females. It is now well established that DES, a synthetic estrogen given to many pregnant women from the 1930s to the 1970s to prevent miscarriages, caused abnormalities in the children. They seemed fine at birth, but girls born to those women have been more likely to develop misshaped sexual organs and cancer.

There is also some evidence from both humans and monkeys that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors. Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls.

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward screening endocrine disrupting chemicals, but at a glacial pace. For now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.

“We should be concerned,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “This can influence brain development, sperm counts or susceptibility to cancer, even where the animal at birth seems perfectly normal.”

The most notorious example of water pollution occurred in 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and helped shock America into adopting the Clean Water Act. Since then, complacency has taken hold.

Those deformed frogs and intersex fish — not to mention the growing number of deformities in newborn boys — should jolt us once again.

By JERÉ LONGMAN
NY Times Published: June 27, 2009

JOHANNESBURG — On an unlikely United States national soccer team, there is no more unlikely player than defender Jay DeMerit, whose nickname is Rags to Riches and whose adventurous career path to the Confederations Cup involved van rides on boxes of socks and underwear, living in an attic and being hugged by Elton John.

If few expected the Americans to reach Sunday’s final against Brazil, even fewer expected DeMerit to be starting on the back line.

“I’m probably the most improbable of all the improbable events going on,” the chatty DeMerit, 29, said.

He grew up in Green Bay, Wis., played three sports in high school and went to the University of Illinois-Chicago, where he did not remind anyone of Franz Beckenbauer. Some young players refine their skills at the academies of Barcelona and Manchester United. DeMerit played summers for Green Bay 7 Up.

He designed the team logo and spent most of his time as a groundskeeper for the local school district. “One year, I graduated from cleanup crew to lawns and hedge clippers,” DeMerit said.

Eventually, he played with the developmental team of the Chicago Fire, but went undrafted by Major League Soccer upon graduation in 2003. His closest contact with the big time, DeMerit said, came one day when DaMarcus Beasley of the Fire walked into the bar where he worked.

“Nobody in here knows you, but I do,” DeMerit said he told Beasley, handing him a free drink. “Good luck with your season.”

Beasley was soon headed to Europe, and DeMerit would even beat him there, but Beasley’s career was flying first class while DeMerit’s was stowed in baggage. He had a gnawing feeling that he could be a professional, but while Beasley ended up first at PSV Eindhoven in the Netherlands in 2004, DeMerit alighted in 2003 at Southall, a semiprofessional team outside of London. If Dante had a seventh circle of soccer hell, this was it.

DeMerit lived with a soccer-playing friend, Kieron Keane, in the attic of Keane’s mother’s house. Bed was a mattress on the floor. The pay was about 25 bucks a week. Practices were held on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and games were played on Saturdays. On Sundays, they played in a pub league.

“People showed up hung over just to get a run in,” DeMerit said.

Each Saturday morning, the Southall manager picked up DeMerit and Keane in a blue minivan with no rear windows. During the week, the van was used to haul dry goods for sale at a market stall. The human cargo had to make do.

“We used to play paper, rock, scissors,” DeMerit said. “The loser had to sit in the back on top of boxes of socks and underwear.”

And the winner?

“He got to sit in front while the manager rolled his own cigarettes,” DeMerit said.

Five or 10 people tended to stray past for each match.

“It wasn’t Lambeau Field,” DeMerit said.

In 2004, Southall’s assistant moved up a few rungs on the English soccer ladder to Northwood. DeMerit followed. He thought his style of defense was perfectly compatible with the English game: aggression without anger.

He relied on speed, strength and agility as a defender. He did not particularly need skill, he figured, only a determination not to let those with skill get a kick on the ball.

During a preseason match for Northwood, DeMerit impressed the manager of another club, Watford, which played at a level just below the English Premier League. An audition with Watford led to a contract for the 2004-5 season. DeMerit’s career began to ascend, as if he were a small-town singer who found his big-city voice on “American Idol.”

On May 21, 2006, Watford met Leeds United in a playoff for promotion to the Premier League. Before the match, Aidy Boothroyd, the Watford manager, told USA Today that DeMerit was brave and essential in defense.

“He will put his head where other people are not even prepared to put their feet,” Boothroyd told the paper.

As it happened, DeMerit put his head onto a corner kick, directing it into the net for the game’s first goal. Watford won, 3-0. Still, the United States did not offer him a spot on its 2006 World Cup team.

If DeMerit had not stirred Bruce Arena, who was the coach of the United States team, he had caught the attention of Elton John, an inveterate soccer fan and Watford’s former chairman.

During training for the 2006-7 season, DeMerit said that John arrived and said, “Where’s the American?” He wanted to talk about football, but the N.F.L., not soccer. “He wanted my opinion on whether Brett Favre should leave the Packers,” DeMerit said.

John, according to DeMerit, wore two Super Bowl rings, saying he was friends with the Kraft family, which owns the New England Patriots. “He threw one at me and said, ‘Have a feel of that,’ ” DeMerit said.

Occasionally, John would helicopter in to Watford’s training site, DeMerit said, and sometimes awakened at 5 a.m. in the United States to watch Watford’s games on television.

“It’s pretty crazy when you get hugs from Elton John,” DeMerit said.

Last fall, John abruptly resigned as Watford’s president for life, upset with the club’s drooping fortunes. DeMerit’s career has proceeded with more equanimity.

After niggling injuries, he finally got a start with the United States national team in 2007. And when Carlos Bocanegra was sidelined with a hamstring injury at the Confederations Cup, DeMerit eagerly slipped into central defense, playing superbly against Spain in the semifinals.

“He has a good balance between being hard and aggressive and still making good decisions,” Coach Bob Bradley said.

Now comes a rematch with Brazil, which defeated the timid Americans by 3-0 in group play. DeMerit said he would approach Brazil on Sunday the way he has always approached soccer.

“I understand where I am and where I need to go,” DeMerit said. “It comes with being patient and waiting for an opportunity and not being daunted by the task ahead.”

thanks to jonathan maghen

By RANDY KENNEDY
NY Times Published: June 25, 2009

HERE’S a good art-world quiz question, one that could stump many an astute insider: What do Sol LeWitt, Sonic Youth, Dean Martin, Mel Brooks, Merle Haggard, Hudson River School painting and midcentury New Jersey tract housing have in common?

The answer, Dan Graham — a Zelig of so many creative circles over the past four decades it is dizzying to keep track — sat recently sipping an iced tea and eavesdropping on conversations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a retrospective of his work opened Thursday, finally adding him to the ranks of conceptual art’s thorny 1960s pioneers to receive a full-blown American career survey. (The show, organized with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, began there and travels to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis after it closes in New York on Oct. 11.)

Among his conceptual peers, those who set out to wrest art from the realm of objects and move it more fully into one of ideas, Mr. Graham, 67, is someone whose work does not come easily to mind even for an informed artgoing public. In part this is because his restless intellect has never allowed him to settle into anything resembling a signature style or to be easily categorized. (Most attempts at categorization are parried by Mr. Graham himself with a professorial annoyance and fencer’s agility, and he dislikes being called a conceptual artist and says he is not a professional one in any sense, calling art his “passionate hobby.”)

If the world had nothing else for which to thank him, it might be enough that during a brief stint as a dealer he gave LeWitt his first solo gallery show, along with presenting early work by Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. Or for the part Mr. Graham played later in the formation of Sonic Youth — he helped Kim Gordon, one of the group’s founders, land her first New York apartment in his Lower East Side building and cast her in an all-girl “band” for a 1980s performance piece, jump-starting her music career. When Mr. Graham, rumpled and white-bearded with a kind of Mr. Natural aura, shows up at cutting-edge rock concerts these days, well-read 20-somethings tend to mill around him admiringly.

But it is the way his artistic DNA has seeped into the work of younger artists over such a prolonged period that underscores his importance. Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney who organized the show with Bennett Simpson, a curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, said that prominent artists as well distributed over the years as Tony Oursler (video artist, born 1957), Rirkrit Tiravanija (known for the shows in which he cooks for gallery visitors, born 1961) and Wade Guyton (who “paints” with printers, born 1972) all showed strong traces of Mr. Graham’s influence. Their work looks and feels almost nothing like his, or like one another’s, a remarkable testament to the way Mr. Graham’s fascination with perception and with the conventions of art and mass-produced culture have become part of the contemporary art landscape.

Because so much of his work — from early pop-culture writing to performances with video cameras to his well known mirrored pavilions — is about what Mr. Simpson called “the way one experiences the space of the self,” it has also seemed more prescient as each new iteration of the Web alters the calculus of media, society and individuality.

“The pieces make sense, in a way, even more than they did 10 years ago,” Ms. Iles said, “when they had a completely different kind of reading because we hadn’t gotten to this stage yet, the stage of Twitter and Facebook and Flickr.”

Mr. Graham grew up in Union County, N.J., the son of a chemist (his father, whom he has described as abusive) and an educational psychologist, and pursued no formal education after high school. But by the time he was a teenager — difficult years during which he said he was “almost psychotic” — he was educating himself at breakneck speed, absorbing Margaret Mead and Claude Lévi-Strauss, along with the literary critic Leslie Fiedler and the French Nouveau Roman writers.

He wanted to be a writer, and when this passion united with another for rock music, he began a sporadic career as an odd sort of critic. One of his often-cited pieces, published in the rock magazine Fusion in 1969, wasn’t about music at all; it was a rigorous, admiring deconstruction of the way Dean Martin unconsciously — or maybe consciously — deconstructed the medium of television every week on his variety show through the creation of his shambling, supposedly bourbon-saturated persona.

“The audience is never ‘taken in’ by the myth of Deano’s ‘personality,’ ” Mr. Graham wrote, putting Martin in the unlikely company of Brecht and Godard. “Instead, it is made aware that this is an artifice — the sustaining scaffold necessary to support the premise of the show.”

Partly because Mr. Graham had no money for conventional art materials and, like many artists in those days, wanted to separate the worlds of art and commerce, his early work focused on magazines as kinds of conceptual, disposable galleries, in which he tried — and usually failed — to place articles as “artworks.” (In one essay, cited in the show’s catalog, he compares magazines to the pods in the 1956 movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” things “subliminally planted in the home” that go about disseminating new ideas about design and living as they pile up in the living room.)

After the Upper East Side gallery he co-owned went under in 1965, Mr. Graham, a despondent 23-year-old with mounting debts and no driver’s license, took the train to New Jersey to move back in with his parents. But on the way, gazing out at the consecutive forms and colors of tract housing from the train window, he conceived the first work that made a name for him as an artist, one that has since become a touchstone of conceptualism.

Called “Homes for America,” it is a series of amateur-seeming snapshots of suburban architecture, published in 1966 in Arts magazine after Esquire turned it down. The blandly colored pictures tweak Minimalism — the houses look like Judd boxes — and send up the sorts of erudite essays then being published in magazines like Esquire that probed the standardizing soul of suburbia. (Another piece he tried to get published around this time, called “Detumescence,” was a simple one-page explanation he had solicited from a medical specialist, describing what happens to the male body and psyche in the moments after orgasm.)

“I never made money in art,” said Mr. Graham, who for much of his professional life lived in a small $450-a-month apartment on the Lower East Side and was not represented by a gallery. “I was never successful. Artists and musicians knew about me, but I think the work was always too early.”

His fortunes have improved in recent years; he lives alone in a nicer apartment in NoLIta and is represented by a prominent gallery, Marian Goodman, though he says the work still doesn’t sell well, and he speaks disparagingly of “superstars,” including a few represented by his own gallery, like Pierre Huyghe and Tino Sehgal, making it clear that he is not counted among them.

Given the feverish nature of his interests it comes as little surprise that talking to Mr. Graham is less like a conversation than like being swept into a tsunami of language, with gale-force allusions. Over iced tea and later over lunch at the Whitney, where he was helping oversee the show’s installation, he pinballed from science fiction and Philip K. Dick to Albert Bierstadt and the Hudson River School (he said that most of his work is heavily influenced by a similar concern with light) to bisexuality. (“I think it helps to have bisexual tendencies,” said Mr. Graham, who is straight. “I wish I was bisexual.”)

Though many critics through the years have complained that Mr. Graham’s work can be hard to love and too dryly pedagogical, he said he sees himself as a Jewish comedian working firmly in the tradition of Jewish comedy greats like Mel Brooks and Andy Kaufman, whom he considers to be great conceptual artists.

“Anarchistic humor is very important to my work,” he said, calling “Homes for America” a piece of “pure deadpan humor — it’s a fake think piece.” Works in which the humor is more readily apparent have included one that placed large-screen televisions on people’s front lawns so that passers-by could see what the inhabitants were watching that moment on the television inside the house. Another work proposed altering a suburban house so that it would have a glass front and a mirror bisecting the interior: anyone walking by would be able to see not only the inhabitants but themselves and the street reflected inside the house, making a funhouse out of distinctions between private and public space.

His glass pavilions have been placed indoors and outdoors in locations as remote as the Arctic Circle in Norway. And while they might look like curvaceous updates on Minimalist sculpture or like perceptual exercises — you can look through the glass, but it is often mirrored enough so that you look at yourself too in the landscape — he said he wants people to think of them as existing “somewhere between architecture and television.” He notes that children and the elderly tend to understand them intuitively.

“All my intellectual ideas come from popular culture,” he said, at one point protesting: “I’m not deconstructing it. I’m celebrating it.”

He is a cultural sponge who seems to want to absorb and commandeer every conversation within his hearing. He can speak with almost equal enthusiasm and knowledge about the latest Seth Rogen movie, the Kinks, Mad magazine or Merle Haggard (whose superb prison ballad “Sing Me Back Home” Mr. Graham included on a three-CD mixtape called “Dan Graham’s Greatest Hits,” which he gave to a reporter and gives to almost anyone who speaks with him about music). In the lunch discussion with Mr. Simpson and Ms. Iles, when the conversation meandered onto anti-Semitism and “The Merchant of Venice,” he somehow managed to veer it into an examination of the J. Geils Band.

Spending time with Mr. Graham, you can usually figure out when he is kidding, but it’s very hard to figure out the ways in which he might be going about it. A compulsive head scratcher when he is holding forth, Mr. Graham also compulsively refers to the astrological signs of anyone he might be talking about: Britney Spears is a Sagittarius, Wittgenstein was a Taurus, Judd a Gemini. Asked why he cares, he said, “Because it’s a cliché, and I love clichés because they’re mostly true.”

The photographer and art historian Jeff Wall has written that while many other conceptual artists “abjured, apparently for good, any involvement with the world” outside of their methodologies, Mr. Graham’s aim has always been “to remain involved with the wider world as a subject and occasion for art, but to structure that involvement in the rigorously self-reflexive terms” opened up by conceptualism.

Stating it more simply, Philippe Vergne, the director of the Dia Art Foundation, calls Mr. Graham’s work “elitism for everyone.”

“For Graham,” he writes in the show’s catalog, “enjoyment is central, but it is never a commodity; rather it is a channel for amused skepticism.”

Typically Mr. Graham disagrees vehemently, for several complexly interrelated reasons, calling Mr. Vergne a Paris-educated elitist himself, one who understands nothing about America.

“But I know that he knows a lot about rock music and likes it,” Mr. Graham conceded. “So I guess he’s not all bad.”

Thanks to Mari Eastman

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“The Oriental Therapies”
June 26th 2009 - September 12th 2009
Opening reception on Friday,
June 26, 7:00 - 9:00 pm

galerie buchholz

Scientists say that this bone flute, found at Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany, is at least 35,000 years old.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
NY Times Published: June 24, 2009

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.

Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they began spreading through Europe or soon thereafter.

Archaeologists Wednesday reported the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represented the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.

A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered a few years ago at another cave, as well as two flutes made from the wing bones of a mute swan. In the same cave, archaeologists also found beautiful carvings of animals.

But until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and were not dated precisely enough to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music. The earliest solid evidence of musical instruments previously came from France and Austria, but dated much more recently than 30,000 years ago.

In an article published online by the journal Nature, Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues wrote, “These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.”

Although radiocarbon dates earlier than 30,000 years ago can be imprecise, samples from the bones and associated material were tested independently by two laboratories, in England and Germany, using different methods. Scientists said the data agreed on ages of at least 35,000 years.

Dr. Conard, a professor of archaeology, said in an e-mail message from Germany that “the new flutes must be very close to 40,000 calendar years old and certainly date to the initial settlement of the region.”

Dr. Conard’s team said an abundance of stone and ivory artifacts, flint-knapping debris and bones of hunted animals had been found in the sediments with the flutes. Many people appeared to have lived and worked there soon after their arrival in Europe, assumed to be around 40,000 years ago and 10,000 years before the native Neanderthals became extinct.

The Neanderthals, close human relatives, apparently left no firm evidence of having been musical.

The most significant of the new artifacts, the archaeologists said, was a flute made from a hollow bone from a griffon vulture; griffon skeletons are often found in these caves. The preserved portion is about 8.5 inches long and includes the end of the instrument into which the musician blew. The maker carved two deep, V-shaped notches there, and four fine lines near the finger holes. The other end appears to have been broken off; judging by the typical length of these bird bones, two or three inches are missing.

Dr. Conard’s discovery in 2004 of the seven-inch three-hole ivory flute at the Geissenklösterle cave, also near Ulm, inspired him to widen his search of caves, saying at the time that southern Germany “may have been one of the places where human culture originated.”

Friedrich Seeberger, a German specialist in ancient music, reproduced the ivory flute in wood. Experimenting with the replica, he found that the ancient flute produced a range of notes comparable in many ways to modern flutes. “The tones are quite harmonic,” he said.

A replica has yet to be made of the recent discovery, but the archaeologists said they expected the five-hole flute with its larger diameter to “provide a comparable, or perhaps greater, range of notes and musical possibilities.”

This week, Dr. Conard began a new season of exploration at Hohle Fels Cave. “We’ll see how it goes,” he said by e-mail. “I never have expectations. One never finds what one is looking for, but one normally finds something interesting.”

Archaeologists and other scholars can only speculate as to what moved these early Europeans to make music.

It so happens that the Hohle Fels flute was uncovered in sediments a few feet away from the carved figurine of a busty, nude woman, also around 35,000 years old, noted Dr. Conard and his co-authors, Susanne C. Münzel of Tübingen and Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. That discovery was announced in May by Dr. Conard.

Was this evidence of happy hours after the hunt? Fertility rites or social bonding? The German archaeologists suggested that music in the Stone Age “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.”

There has been a lot of worthless chatter about what President Barack Obama should say about Iran’s incipient “Green Revolution.” Sorry, but Iranian reformers don’t need our praise. They need the one thing we could do, without firing a shot, that would truly weaken the Iranian theocrats and force them to unshackle their people. What’s that? End our addiction to the oil that funds Iran’s Islamic dictatorship. Launching a real Green Revolution in America would be the best way to support the “Green Revolution” in Iran.

Oil is the magic potion that enables Iran’s turbaned shahs — “Shah Khamenei” and “Shah Ahmadinejad” — to snub their noses at the world and at many of their own people as well. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. By coincidence, he’s been president of Iran during a period of record high oil prices. So, although he presides over an economy that makes nothing the world wants, he can lecture us about how the West is in decline and the Holocaust was a “myth.” Trust me, at $25 a barrel, he won’t be declaring that the Holocaust was a myth anymore.

The Obama team wants to pursue talks with Iran over its nuclear program, no matter who wins there. Fine. But the issue is not talk or no talk. The issue is leverage or no leverage. I love talking to people — especially in the Middle East — on one condition: that we have the leverage. As long as oil prices are high, Iran will have too much leverage and will be able to resist concessions on its nuclear program. With oil at $70 a barrel, our economic sanctions on Iran are an annoyance; at $25, they really hurt.

“People do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must,” observed Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy specialist. And nothing would tell Iran’s leaders that they must change more than collapsing oil prices.

Mr. Obama has already started some excellent energy-saving initiatives. But we need more. Imposing an immediate “Freedom Tax” of $1 a gallon on gasoline — with rebates to the poor and elderly — would be a triple positive: It would stimulate more investment in renewable energy now; it would stimulate more consumer demand for the energy-efficient vehicles that the reborn General Motors and Chrysler are supposed to make; and, it would reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator.

That is how — as Bill Maher likes to say — we make the bad guys “fight all of us.”

Sure, it would take time to influence the regime, but, unlike words alone, it will have an impact. I believe in “The First Law of Petro-Politics,” which stipulates that the price of oil and the pace of freedom in petrolist states — states totally dependent on oil exports to run their economies — operate in an inverse correlation. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up because leaders have to educate and unleash their people to innovate and trade. As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down because leaders just have to stick a pipe in the ground to stay in power.

Exhibit A: the Soviet Union. High oil prices in the 1970s suckered the Kremlin into propping up inefficient industries, overextending subsidies, postponing real economic reforms and invading Afghanistan. When oil prices collapsed to $15 a barrel in the late 1980s, the overextended, petrified Soviet Empire went bust.

In a 2006 speech entitled “The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia,” Yegor Gaidar, a deputy prime minister of Russia in the early 1990s, noted that “the timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market.

“During the next six months,” added Gaidar, “oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms. As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.”

If we could bring down the price of oil, the Islamic Republic — which has been buying off its people with subsidies and jobs for years — would face the same pressures. The ayatollahs would either have to start taking subsidies away from Iranians, which would only make the turbaned shahs more unpopular, or empower Iran’s human talent — men and women — and give them free access to the learning, science, trade and collaboration with the rest of the world that would enable this once great Persian civilization to thrive without oil.

Let’s get serious: An American Green Revolution to end our oil addiction — to parallel Iran’s Green Revolution to end its theocracy — helps us, helps them and raises the odds that whoever wins the contest for power, there will have to be a reformer. What are we waiting for?

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 27th 6 to 9 PM

June 27th to July 18th.

China Art Objects

Vent Haven Museum, in Fort Mitchell, Ky., is dedicated to the art of ventriloquism. The museum, opened in the 1970s, features rows and rows of dummies. Nearby in Cincinnati, the American Sign Museum’s collection includes signs with gilded lettering and neon.

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
NY Times Published: June 21, 2009

FORT MITCHELL, Ky. — There is nothing quite like the gasp that escapes your mouth as you walk through three small buildings on a residential street here and find yourself mutely stared at by 1,400 eyes and grinned at by hundreds of painted lips over leathery chins. You are sharing company with beings barely this side of cartoon, bearing long proboscises or protruding goggle eyes, shapeless torsos and eerie charm. Lining the walls are photographs of these very figures perched on the knees or cradled against the shoulders of the men and women who once gave them voice: dummies and their ventriloquists.

Visitors to Vent Haven are required to take personal tours to go through the museum, which house more than 700 figures. More Photos >
At the Vent Haven Museum the unsettling amazement is unremitting. In one room you almost feel as if you have bumbled onto a stage surrounded by a peculiar audience, each listener gawking in silence. In another the figures are arrayed in rows like Pinocchios who have finally made it to school. Just as no two humans are smart in precisely the same way, no two of these creatures are dummies in precisely the same way.

But gasps are not only reserved for collections as surreal as this. A few miles away in Cincinnati you enter a nondescript factory building and the reaction is similar. You find yourself staring at illuminated enticements for doughnuts, barbers, beer and the United Pentecostal Church. A red outline of a shoe proclaims “repair,” and a neon-lighted sign for “Blood’s Paints” sports the company’s antique motto: “Blood makes good paint.”

This is the American Sign Museum. About 200 are displayed, lighted and unlighted, each a compressed call for attention. No street could ever contain them all — a 1930s sign for Dolly Madison Ice Cream, say, alongside an 1880s sign for a Butler, Pa., “Jeweler and Optician”? — but here in one cavernous room the effect is refined and clamorous, a mixture of nostalgia and daring.

The gasps arise partly because in both of these eccentric museums you are overwhelmed by visceral sensations, the sheer accumulation of unexpected objects. Each collection is the result of an obsession that wrenched them from their surroundings, in celebration of a craft.

The Vent Haven Museum grew out of the passion of William Shakespeare Berger, a Cincinnati businessman, who began accumulating the paraphernalia of the ventriloquist’s art in 1910. He later served as president of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists and before his death, in 1972, endowed this museum, which began in his home.

Ventriloquists, or vents as they call themselves, continue to donate dummies and photographs. In various rooms there are tributes to 20th-century vents like Edgar Bergen, Paul Winchell and Shari Lewis, along with displays about great dummy makers like Charles Mack, Frank Marshall and the McElroy Brothers. And while the 750 or so dummies do not seem overly impressed, their guild’s masters apparently are: every July more than 400 vents gather nearby for a “conVENTion,” which includes a visit to the museum to pay homage.

The American Sign Museum has similar trade connections. Founded in 1999 by Tod Swormstedt, who spent much of his career in his family’s publishing business, including editing the trade’s oldest publication, “Signs of the Times,” the museum contains more than 3,500 cataloged items. There are signs, organized by period and construction (neon, porcelain, plastic); sign-making equipment (like tins of “U-Do-It” graining compound); photographs and lettering samples. The museum is also tapping the trade for donations to complete the building of a new 19,300-square-foot home. (More than $1.5 million has already been raised and spent, with an additional million dollars being sought for the project.)

Ordinarily such close ties to a trade might be a liability. But promotion is part of the point. These museums do not point at objects; they exclaim. The excitement of the collector is part of the lure.

That impact is amplified because personal tours are required at each. At the sign museum Mr. Swormstedt, endlessly knowledgeable about how signs were made, mounted and used, projects a relaxed enthusiasm. At Vent Haven the curator Jennifer Dawson leads the tours, though mine was conducted by the departing curator, Lisa Sweasy, who not only fielded a journalist’s questions, but also the prodigious commentary of a 10-year-old enthusiast accompanied by his parents and his own homemade dummy.

In neither museum, though, has the collection yet matured into a full-scale exhibition. At the sign museum the focus on technology — the ways signs were gilded or molded, say, or the way three-dimensional letters evolved — is of interest, but it isn’t what draws us. These American signs speak a remarkable language, competing for attention and graphic inventiveness.

They blink and glisten, using gilded letters to proclaim elite sophistication at the end of the 19th century, or incandescent bulbs to suggest innovation at the beginning of the 20th. Roadside signs from the middle of that century, mounted during a growing automobile culture, had to make their plea doubly arresting. During the Sputnik era, when a glowing spiky sci-fi sphere from Anaheim, Calif., signaled to motorists that they were approaching Satellite Shopland, who could doubt that this strip mall was worth a stop?

But we also see something that the creators did not: how the typeface or imagery fits into broader ways of thinking and feeling. The signs speak to us, long after “Old Barbee Whiskey” or “Cole Batteries” or “Flying A Service” have ceased to mean much, because we can hear the voice of their origins. The museum should help more with this, expanding interpretation and establishing context. But we gasp partly because these signs have channeled those voices with such vitality, making uncanny connections to lost worlds.

The effect of the Vent Haven Museum is similar, but more intensely personal. Its figures are also silent objects constructed in order to give voice to — what?

Walk among them though, and you can almost hear the nattering rustle of jests and jokes. Two heads from 1820s London, made with papier-mâché and glass eyes, have the intensity of fine sculpture, with expressions so strong, they could not have been that versatile. Others, demonstrated by Ms. Sweasy, seem like autonomous beings who might consider becoming vents themselves.

But as Steven Connor’s 2001 book, “Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism,” shows, such dummies are a recent phenomenon. The word “ventriloquist” comes from Latin roots alluding to speech from the belly — which means speech from anywhere but where we expect. The ability to throw one’s voice is cited by Hippocrates and alluded to in accounts of oracles. Cardinal Richelieu is said to have used a ventriloquist in 1624 to frighten one of his bishops. It wasn’t until the 18th century that it became widely used as entertainment. Modern ventriloquism was a rationalist rebellion against spiritualism; magic was turned into magic show.

But it wasn’t until the latter part of the 19th century that the disembodied voice found a secure home in a puppet. Here it isn’t just the voice that is thrown; it is the imagination. Psychological realism generally trumps physical realism: the dummy gives voice to the psyche. It is really the dummy who vents, saying things the vent cannot.

In horror films like “The Dead of the Night” (1945) or “Magic” (1978), the dummy, unleashed, wreaks havoc. On the other hand, vents like Shari Lewis cultivated the innocence of the thrown voice, while Señor Wences, with great virtuosity, turned a head in a box into an occasion for playful patter and farce. (Search YouTube.)

In recent years ventriloquism itself has come to seem less central. But not at Vent Haven. It is hard to imagine another place so clearly evoking the manifold powers and passions of the inner voice, simply by displaying figures who are its empty vessels — signs awaiting significance. How else can you respond to silence so weighted with potential, except by producing an inarticulate cry? So we look. And we gasp.

Vent Haven Museum is in Fort Mitchell, Ky.; (859) 341-0461, venthavenmuseum.net; American Sign Museum is in Cincinnati; (800) 925-1110, Ext. 336, signmuseum.net.

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of three early sculptures by Charles Ray at 523 West 24th Street. Ink Line, Moving Wire, and Spinning Spot were made in 1987 and 1988 and are exhibited here for the first time in over twenty years.

Ink Line, 1987, is a continuous stream of black ink traveling from a dime-size opening in the ceiling into a similar hole in the floor. At first glance, the narrow stream appears static, but when carefully observed, the viewer is able to detect subtle fluctuations in the ink’s flow. Ink Line relates to the artist’s iconic Ink Box from the previous year, in which a steel cube is precipitously filled to the brim with black ink. Although Ink Line has been widely reproduced, this is the first time it has been exhibited publicly.

Spinning Spot was made in 1987. In this work, a section of the floor measuring 24 inches in diameter is set spinning at 33 RPM. The third work in the exhibition is Moving Wire, from 1988, consisting of a single 8.5 foot length of wire. Both ends of the wire protrude from the wall and are set 14 inches apart. As one end of the wire extends out from the wall at random intervals, the other retracts.

Charles Ray is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of his generation. Ray has been included in two Venice Biennale (1993, 2003), Documenta IX (1992), and four Whitney Biennials. His monumental sculpture, Hinoki, 2007, will be exhibited in the new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago this May. In June, Ray’s first commissioned outdoor work will be permanently installed at the edge of the Grand Canal at the Punta della Dogana in Venice. The artist currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Charles Ray remains on view through June 27, 2009, at 523 West 24th Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues). Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. For further information, please contact Stephanie Dorsey at (212) 243-0200,

Mathew Marks

The modernized Westfalia diesel camper is available — in Europe.

Dan Neil for The Los Angeles Times
June 19, 2009

In a column a few weeks ago I rolled a grenade under the epically chintzy VW Routan, and whilst so doing bemoaned the fact that VW — the company whose heritage of van-making includes the beloved Westfalia camper van — did not offer a modern version of the Westy, preferably with a high-output diesel engine and all-wheel drive. Au contraire, readers wrote back. VW offers precisely that vehicle, in Europe.

I happened to be on the Continent this week anyway and so arranged to borrow the vehicle you see here, the VW California, which is, maddeningly enough, not offered in California or anywhere else in the U.S. (more on that in a moment). This particular model was equipped with a gleaming, beautifully made custom bike rack. That makes the vehicle a California Biker.

Wishes do come true.

Did you go to Humboldt State? Did you vote for McGovern twice (once as a write-in candidate)? Did you stop following the Grateful Dead because they became too corporate? Brace yourself. This is the Westy of your dreams: a state-of-the-art camper van with a gas stove, running water, an electrically deployed pop top, a fold-down double bed, rotating front captain’s chairs and a staggering number of reading lights, climate outlets, cabinets, storage bins and convenience features, and all of it executed with the kind of aerospace precision one might associate with Piaggio corporate jets.

Now, obviously this isn’t your beloved split-window Westy, in which I’m sure you sired many a love child you later named Summer and Prometheus. Where once there were gingham curtains, the neo-Westy has tinted and double-glazed windows and roll-out privacy screens that deploy from the window frames. Where once there was painfully crude lacquered pine cabinetry, there’s laser-cut blond wood like something that retails at Design Within Reach. The old Westy had a roll-out canvas awning, the quality of which was unknown outside certain Bedouin tribes. The California has a high-tech laminated awning that cranks out on lever arms.

And the signature move for the Westy — the pop top — is here a push-button electro-hydraulic affair, as opposed to the toiling, hand-crank job of decades past. The button to open and close the top — “offnet” and “schliessen” in the van’s native German — is located on a central overhead control panel that also monitors camper systems such as battery levels, 230-volt connection status, “cool box” status and fresh- and gray-water levels. Nifty.

It would take too long to describe the thousand clever details of the California, such as the way the front seats rotate to face the cabin or the way the table hides away in a sliver of space beside the couch. Built into the rear hatch is a canvas compartment that neatly holds two folding chairs. It takes roughly three minutes to go from rocking down the highway to a fully established base camp, with the top up, the awning deployed and the chairs set out. Now where’s that Frisbee?

There is one more huge difference between this vehicle and the old Westy, which moved like a heavily medicated Galapagos tortoise. The California actually goes pretty quick, thanks to a heroic intercooled and turbocharged five-cylinder diesel engine, good for 174 horsepower at 3,500 rpm and a Freightliner-worthy 295 pound-feet of torque at 2,000 rpm. Backed up by a six-speed manual transmission, our California was easily in the 10-second range in accelerating to 60 and could effortlessly cruise at Autobahn speeds. The diesel also allows the big van to get 30 mpg. Amazing.

I spent the day bombing around the Black Forest in the California and, while I left no sport-bike riders crying in their helmets, I must say, the California acquitted itself well. In a fast corner it has got body lean like a Spanish galleon, but it’s manageable. Braking is secure. Steering is direct and communicative. And I’m not complaining, but VW chose to shoe this Percheron with the raciest horseshoes in the world, Dunlop SP9000 radials. What’s that about?

On the downside — if this is a downside — the thing sounded positively agricultural at idle. Also, all this content comes at a cost in the not-trivial curb weight of 6,600 pounds. If you listen closely you can hear quaint wooden bridges scream as it goes over.

The overarching impression is one of exceptional, out-of-the-park quality. Here, a little back story is useful. Westfalia was, in fact, a company that did camper conversions for lots of brands, most famously for VW. However, in 1999, Mercedes-Benz bought the company and ended the VW collaboration. VW brought its conversion business in-house. What we have here is a factory-spec conversion, built to Wolfsburg’s standards pretty much by hand and, I’m guessing, probably at a bit of a loss, only to hold up a tradition.

Why not sell the California is the U.S.? Why do we get only the rough-trade Routan? One rather large word: homologation. It would cost far too much to make the diesel California legal in the States, considering the small number of vehicles the company could actually sell at a price exceeding $50,000.

On the other hand, maybe not. What if VW of America heard a loud outcry for the California? What if people started sending deposits? In these more constrained times, the California seems like the perfect vehicle for people downsizing from the awful hugeness of traditional RVing.

Make a wish. Wake up the genie. But be careful that when you ask for “California Biker,” you don’t get Sonny Barger.

Anyone who handles old books will have come across these small and sometimes beautiful labels pasted more or less discreetly into the endpapers. Publishers, printers, binders, importers, distributors and sellers of books — new, second-hand and antiquarian — used to advertise in this way their contribution to bringing the book to market. Most of the earliest examples shown here belong to binders (e.g., the Marcus Ward ticket, ca.1841); this is a continuation of binders’ earlier practice of sewing into the binding a small ticket with their signature.

This collection began with labels found in our own books, but now it is mainly a virtual collection — each entry is digitally scanned from books found in the excellent research library to which we repair in our spare time. We must admit to having gone from “coming across” the labels in our book-browsing to actually searching for them.

The collection will continue to grow, with new accessions displayed on this page around the first of each month. We have also begun to research the characters and institutions behind each of these labels — and there are some great stories! Look for these in the weeks to come.

Seven Roads

Thanks to Danielle Kays