Chris Jeon, 21, a student at at University of California – Los Angeles, decided to travel to Libya to join the rebels for the last six weeks of his summer vacation. Here he is surrounded by rebels who are amassing about 130km from Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s hometown and stronghold.

Bradley Hope / The National
Sep 1, 2011

AN NAWFALIYAH, LIBYA // At the centre of a circle of cheering rebel soldiers near Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s hometown this week stood an improbable figure who gives new meaning to the term “road trip”.

Chris Jeon, a 21-year-old university student from Los Angeles, California,shrugging cooly, declared: “It is the end of my summer vacation, so I thought it would be cool to join the rebels. This is one of the only real revolutions” in the world.

In a daring, one might even say foolhardy, decision two weeks ago, Mr Jeon flew on a one-way ticket from Los Angeles to Cairo. He then travelled by train to Alexandria and by a series of buses to the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. From there, he hitched a ride with rebels heading west towards the Libyan capital of Tripoli. After a 400km (248-mile) trek across the desolate North African landscape, he was now in the town of An Nawfaliyah, the toast of his comrades and a newly anointed road warrior.

“How do you fire this thing?” he asked on Wednesday as a bearded rebel handed him an AK-47. Locating the trigger of the assault rifle and switching off the safety, Mr Jeon fired it in the air in two short bursts.

“I want to fight in Sirte!” he proclaimed, using hand gestures and pointing west towards Sirte. Whether the rebels understood him was far from clear. “It’s hard to communicate. I don’t really speak any Arabic,” he said.

Nevertheless, the rebels have clearly taken to the mathematics student with no obvious political leanings who decided to slum it as an Arab Spring revolutionary before going back to his calculator for fall semester.

At first glance, Mr Jeon looked like someone who took a wrong turn on their way to the beach or the Santa Monica Pier. He wore a blue basketball jersey emblazoned with a script “Los Angeles” and the number 44. The rest of his outfit, including army camouflage trousers, a grey-and-black kaffiyeh on his head, clear safety glasses and a bullet hanging on a necklace, came courtesy of the rebels, he said. He had been sleeping in the homes of local families or in the open air with the insurgents.

On Wednesday, Mr Jeon was carrying a Russian-made 12-gauge shotgun, not a typical accessory for a student strolling the country-club campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, where he expects to graduate next May.

His new mates have even bestowed on him a moniker that is a mish-mash of the names of local tribes and areas: Ahmed El Maghrabi Saidi Barga. When communication invariably reaches an impasse, he merely repeats his name and the rebels erupt in raucous cheers.

Although Mr Jeon did not arrive in Libya in time to catch the liberation of Tripoli, he has seen history unfold. He was aboard one of the first cars to roar into An Nawfiliyah last weekend, armed with his shotgun and a camera that no longer works because the battery is dead. “I have great footage,” he said.

As with most students, money is a concern. He did not buy a round-trip airplane ticket, he explained: “If I get captured or something, I don’t want to waste another US$800 [Dh2,900].”

As he waited along with the rebels this week for what many expect in the coming days will be the climactic battle for Colonel Qaddafi’s stronghold of Sirte, Mr Jeon wondered how he would deal with the inevitable question, “How did you spend your summer vacation?”

Only a few friends back in Los Angeles knew his true plans, he admitted. His family? Well, they thought he was going on a different trip.

As he recalled that deliberately vague version of his itinerary, it dawned on Mr Jeon that he might be blowing his cover by speaking with a reporter on a far-flung stretch of desert more than 11,200 kms (7,000 miles) from home.

“Whatever you do, don’t tell my parents,” he pleaded. “They don’t know I’m here.”

Thanks to Danielle Kays

Untitled (bl.dmnds.ppr.trngls.crdbrd.cnvs.), 2011, acrylic, glue, cardboard, canvas, 58 x 44 3/4 inches
(147.3 x 113.6 cm)

SEPTEMBER 10 –
OCTOBER 15, 2011

Opening Reception:
Saturday, September 10, from 5 to 7pm.

Richard Telles

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 1, 2011

“Have you left no sense of decency?” That’s the question Joseph Welch famously asked Joseph McCarthy, as the red-baiting demagogue tried to ruin yet another innocent citizen. And these days, it’s the question I find myself wanting to ask Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who has done more than anyone else to make policy blackmail — using innocent Americans as hostages — standard operating procedure for the G.O.P.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Cantor was the hard man in the confrontation over the debt ceiling; he was willing to endanger America’s financial credibility, putting our whole economy at risk, in order to extract budget concessions from President Obama. Now he’s doing it again, this time over disaster relief, making headlines by insisting that any federal aid to the victims of Hurricane Irene be offset by cuts in other spending. In effect, he is threatening to take Irene’s victims hostage.

Mr. Cantor’s critics have been quick to accuse him of hypocrisy, and with good reason. After all, he and his Republican colleagues showed no comparable interest in paying for the Bush administration’s huge unfunded initiatives. In particular, they did nothing to offset the cost of the Iraq war, which now stands at $800 billion and counting.

And it turns out that in 2004, when his home state of Virginia was struck by Tropical Storm Gaston, Mr. Cantor voted against a bill that would have required the same pay-as-you-go rule that he now advocates.

But, as I see it, hypocrisy is a secondary issue here. The primary issue should be the extraordinary nihilism now on display by Mr. Cantor and his colleagues — their willingness to flout all the usual conventions of fair play and, well, decency in order to get what they want.

Not long ago, a political party seeking to change U.S. policy would try to achieve that goal by building popular support for its ideas, then implementing those ideas through legislation. That, after all, is how our political system was designed to work.

But today’s G.O.P. has decided to bypass all that and go for a quicker route. Never mind getting enough votes to pass legislation; it gets what it wants by threatening to hurt America if its demands aren’t met. That’s what happened with the debt-ceiling fight, and now it’s what’s happening over disaster aid. In effect, Mr. Cantor and his allies are threatening to take hurricane victims hostage, using their suffering as a bargaining chip.

Of course, Mr. Cantor would have you believe that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. But that’s no more than a cover story.

Should disaster aid, as a matter of sound public finance, be offset by immediate cuts in other spending? No. The time-honored principle, backed by economists right and left, is that temporary bursts of spending — which usually arise when there’s a war to fight, but can also arise from other causes, including financial crises and natural disasters — are a good reason to run temporary budget deficits. Rather than imposing sharp cuts in other spending or sharply raising taxes, governments can and should spread the burden over time, borrowing now and repaying gradually via a combination of lower spending and higher taxes.

But can the U.S. government borrow to pay for disaster aid? Isn’t the government broke? Yes, it can, and, no, it isn’t. America has a long-run deficit problem, which should be met with long-run budget measures. But it’s having no problem at all borrowing to pay for current expenses. Moreover, it’s able to borrow funds at extremely low interest rates. Notably, right now the interest rate on the benchmark 10-year U.S. government bond is only slightly more than half what it was in 2004 when Mr. Cantor felt that it wasn’t necessary to pay for disaster relief.

So the claim that fiscal responsibility requires immediate spending cuts to offset the cost of disaster relief is just wrong, in both theory and practice. As I said, it’s just a cover story for the real game being played here.

Now, Mr. Cantor may end up backing down on this one, if only because several of the hard-hit states have Republican governors, who want and need aid soon, without strings attached. But that won’t put an end to the larger issue: What will happen to America now that people like Mr. Cantor are calling the shots for one of its two major political parties?

And, yes, I mean one of our parties. There are plenty of bad things to be said about the Democrats, who have their fair share of cynics and careerists. There may even be Democrats in Congress who would be as willing as Mr. Cantor to advance their goals through sabotage and blackmail (although I can’t think of any). But, if they exist, they aren’t in important leadership positions. Mr. Cantor is. And that should worry anyone who cares about our nation’s future.

The Three Rivers itHouse is an 1,200 sq ft second home for two Los Angeles based visual artists that functions as a retreat from their hectic urban lifestyle. After camping for their first two years on the pristine 7-acre site, the clients requested a house that would serve as the thinnest barrier to the outdoors while still maintaining basic indoor comforts. A second goal for the site, nestled between moss covered boulders and tall oak trees, was to create a house that would minimally disrupt the scenic landscape by creating a modest building footprint. Through a series of interconnected patios and interior living spaces, Three Rivers itHouse functions as a highly tuned instrument for enhancing one’s visual and physical relationship to nature.

Taalman Koch

Editorial
NY Times Published: August 30, 2011

In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party’s most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course.

These Republican leaders, who think nothing of widening tax loopholes for corporations and multimillion-dollar estates, are offended by the idea that people making less than $40,000 might benefit from the progressive tax code. They are infuriated by the earned income tax credit (the pride of Ronald Reagan), which has become the biggest and most effective antipoverty program by giving working families thousands of dollars a year in tax refunds. They scoff at continuing President Obama’s payroll tax cut, which is tilted toward low- and middle-income workers and expires in December.

Until fairly recently, Republicans, at least, have been fairly consistent in their position that tax cuts should benefit everyone. Though the Bush tax cuts were primarily for the rich, they did lower rates for almost all taxpayers, providing a veneer of egalitarianism. Then the recession pushed down incomes severely, many below the minimum income tax level, and the stimulus act lowered that level further with new tax cuts. The number of families not paying income tax has risen from about 30 percent before the recession to about half, and, suddenly, Republicans have a new tool to stoke class resentment.

Representative Michele Bachmann noted recently that 47 percent of Americans do not pay federal income tax; all of them, she said, should pay something because they benefit from parks, roads and national security. (Interesting that she acknowledged government has a purpose.) Gov. Rick Perry, in the announcement of his candidacy, said he was dismayed at the “injustice” that nearly half of Americans do not pay income tax. Jon Huntsman Jr., up to now the most reasonable in the Republican presidential field, said not enough Americans pay tax.

Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and several senators have made similar arguments, variations of the idea expressed earlier by Senator Dan Coats of Indiana that “everyone needs to have some skin in the game.”

This is factually wrong, economically wrong and morally wrong. First, the facts: a vast majority of Americans have skin in the tax game. Even if they earn too little to qualify for the income tax, they pay payroll taxes (which Republicans want to raise), gasoline excise taxes and state and local taxes. Only 14 percent of households pay neither income nor payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution. The poorest fifth paid an average of 16.3 percent of income in taxes in 2010.

Economically, reducing the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit — which would be required if everyone paid income taxes — makes no sense at a time of high unemployment. The credits, which only go to working people, have always been a strong incentive to work, as even some conservative economists say, and have increased the labor force while reducing the welfare rolls.

The moral argument would have been obvious before this polarized year. Nearly 90 percent of the families that paid no income tax make less than $40,000, most much less. The real problem is that so many Americans are struggling on such a small income, not whether they pay taxes. The two tax credits lifted 7.2 million people out of poverty in 2009, including four million children. At a time when high-income households are paying their lowest share of federal taxes in decades, when corporations frequently avoid paying any tax, it is clear who should bear a larger burden and who should not.

Exterior of Libros Schmibros in Boyle Heights. Photo: Marianne Williams.

September 1 2011, 05:30pm

Libros Schmibros – Boyle Heights Writers Play Westwood

Join us for a residency with David Kipen’s Boyle Heights lending library/used-book shop, Libros Schmibros.

Libros Schmibros at the Hammer presents a poetry reading with writers hailing from the heart of Boyle Heights–Kristy Lovich, Luis Rodriguez, and Abel Salas.

Hammer

By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
NY Times Published: August 27, 2011

YOU can see it all on YouTube. There is the former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his wife, Callista, signing copies of “Rediscovering God in America” at an event in Minneapolis. Suddenly, an attendee withdraws a Cheez-It box filled with sparkly glitter and dumps it on the authors.

“Feel the rainbow, Newt!” he says as he is hustled out of the room. “Stop the hate! Stop the anti-gay politics!” Welcome to “glitter bombing,” the latest act of political theater from the L.G.B.T. (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights movement. The targets, not surprisingly, are individuals who activists feel are hostile or insensitive to gay marriage and similar issues.

The Gingrich onslaught, on May 17, was the opening salvo. On June 16 in San Francisco, Nancy Mancias and Chelsea Byers of the group Codepink: Women for Peace poured glitter and bunches of long, thin, curly strips of pink paper — the kind found packed in gift baskets — on Tim Pawlenty, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Two days later, a lawyer, Rachel E. B. Lang, sprinkled Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, also a candidate. Then, on July 21, a contingent that included Nick Espinosa, who glittered the Gingriches, spread glitter at the headquarters of Bachmann & Associates, a Christian-oriented counseling practice run by Mrs. Bachmann’s husband, Marcus. The group was responding to stories that the clinic engaged in “reparative therapy,” which aims to persuade gays to become heterosexual.

“You can’t pray away the gay; baby, I was born this way!” they chanted as they tossed their sparkle of fairy dust. (Mr. Espinosa and his cohort returned to the clinic on Thursday; there they glittered a Marcus Bachmann impersonator who then joined in a celebratory dance.)

“I think the whole thing is a wonderfully fabulous way to protest,” said Diane Anderson-Minshall, executive editor of The Advocate, the gay news magazine. “It’s peaceful and it doesn’t hurt anybody. But it does get a really important point across in a fun way.” The phenomenon reflects the tenor of an evolving movement. The violence of the Stonewall riots in 1969, and the rage-fueled antics of Act Up in the 1980s and 1990s, spoke to a time when homosexuals were still persecuted by the police and AIDS was regarded as an automatic death sentence.

Now, as civil unions are busting out all over, H.I.V. is being brought to heel, and persons of different sexual orientations are assimilating into the American mainstream, glitter bombing is a decidedly less angry alternative.

“I think what you’re seeing now is a generational change,” Ms. Anderson-Minshall said. “It’s not more frivolous, but it is more lovely.”

Less confrontational than spattering fur coats with red paint to promote animal rights, or throwing pies at opponents, glitter bombing generally doesn’t yield dry cleaning bills. But glitter bombs have staying power. Weeks after the incident, the victim will probably still be brushing off pesky, iridescent pieces of the stuff, a tangible reminder of an issue that won’t go away.

Admittedly, this works both ways. “This morning I rolled out of bed,” Mr. Espinosa said weeks after his first bombing, “and found a piece of glitter still on me.”

Not everyone is convinced that glitter bombing (or “glittering,” for those who emphasize its nonviolent overtones) is a kinder, gentler form of pranksterism. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, told Fox News, “The people ought to be arrested who did this.”

When Mr. Gingrich was glittered, he said, “Nice to live in a free country.” Since then, his position has hardened.

“Glitter bombing is clearly an assault and should be treated as such,” he said in an e-mail. “When someone reaches into a bag and throws something on you, how do you know if it is acid or something that stains permanently or something that can blind you? People have every right to their beliefs but no right to assault others.”

The legality of glittering isn’t clear. “I don’t think you’d get much disagreement that like so much else in the law, it’s all a matter of degree,” the First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said in an e-mail. “Touching someone’s body can be criminal. But it’s awfully unlikely that there would be a prosecution if it’s just a bit of glitter. But in theory, the more that’s dropped, the more likely is prosecution.”

So far, none of this season’s glitter bombers have been sued. One reason may be that the targets do not want to appear humorless — or litigious. But would the glitterati be so mirthful if an equivalent weapon were unleashed against them? Conceivably, a Tea Party member might pelt a liberal opponent with mounds of dried orange pekoe, with little or no lasting effect. Clumps of wet leaves, however, would be likelier to cling, stain or worse.

Don’t laugh. Provocateurs who hit Willie Brown, then the mayor of San Francisco, with three pies in 1998 to protest his policies toward the homeless were convicted on misdemeanor battery charges and sentenced to six months in prison. And the conservative activist Tim Eyman, who sought to reduce funds for public transit, claimed that he suffered corneal abrasion and chemical burns after he was hit with a pie. “We have been really careful to make sure that we wouldn’t do anything that could hurt anyone,” Ms. Lang said. “That includes the size of the glitter, which is so big that it can’t get into anyone’s eyes.” Indeed, she said that when a security guard removed her from the Bachmann forum, all he told her was, “Thank you for using the large glitter.”

Activists are already speculating about who should be next on the “glit” parade. The Yahoo News site The Ticket suggested that the most likely candidate was the former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. But anyone who is deemed insufficiently supportive of the L.G.B.T. agenda, Republican or Democrat, is fair game.

“I disagree with Barack Obama on a lot of things,” Ms. Lang said after her confrontation with Mrs. Bachmann. “If he were here, I would glitter him, too.”

“First Supper (After a Major Riot),” from 1974.”First Supper (After a Major Riot),” from 1974.

By RANDY KENNEDY
NY Times Published: August 25, 2011

LATE one December night in 1972, three members of an art collective here clambered out of a battered green Volkswagen bug and spray-painted their names — “Herrón, Gamboa, Gronkie” — on a footbridge of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, appropriating the entire museum as their own work of art simply by signing it.

The next morning Harry Gamboa Jr. returned with the fourth member of the group, Patssi Valdez, and immortalized the act with a glam shot of her posing in tight pants and a red top near the signatures, looking away coolly and seductively like Anna Karina in a Godard movie.

The stunt by the collective known as Asco exhibited all the hallmarks of the group’s outrageous style: angry, illicit, deftly and economically conceptual, and shot through with the high camp of Hollywood, whose sign they could see in the distance from the streets of East Los Angeles. The act was also pretty much noticed by no one except the four members themselves, who were always their own best audience. The paint was whitewashed before day’s end; the Los Angeles art world went on its way, paying little attention to a group of artists whose street performances and other unclassifiable productions were as compelling as practically anything bubbling up out of the urban dereliction of SoHo or other parts of Los Angeles during those years.

Almost four decades later, the same museum the collective defaced because its doors weren’t open to artists of their kind — Mexican-American, working class and poor, highly irreverent and politicized — is not just finally welcoming them inside but rolling out a red carpet for the occasion. “Asco: Elite of the Obscure, a Retrospective, 1972-1987,” the first survey of the group’s work, opens Sept. 4 as one of the Los Angeles County Museum’s main offerings for the sprawling Pacific Standard Time event, more than 60 collaborative shows opening throughout Southern California in the late summer and fall to tell the story of postwar Los Angeles art.

The Asco exhibition — organized with the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass. — has been almost a decade in the making. And its goal is nothing less than to rewrite part of that story and the broader history of urban art in the 1970s to give the collective its rightful place among the pioneers of its era. “It’s a show that’s phenomenally overdue,” said C. Ondine Chavoya, an associate professor of art at Williams College and one of the exhibition’s curators. “I felt it was overdue at the very moment I learned about Asco’s work many years ago. And now coming as it does as part of Pacific Standard Time means that it’s not going to be isolated or singular. It’s going to tie them in, finally, to a much larger history.”

The show is only one of several Pacific Standard Time shows delving into the history of Chicano art in the 1960s and ’70s, whose attitude and look seeped into mainstream art in ways only now being recognized. But the story of Asco lies even deeper, one of a subculture within a subculture, a group of artists fueled not just by their marginal existence within their city and country but by their alienation from the Chicano art movement as well.

The members were, as Mr. Gamboa has described it, “self-imposed exiles” who felt the best way to exercise artistic freedom and express solidarity with the Mexican-American cause was, paradoxically, to run screaming from most Mexican-American art at the time, or at least from its political strictures and the stereotypes imposed on it by mainstream culture.

Asco’s method was a kind of bombastic excess and elegant elusiveness that would have made Tristan Tzara proud, not to mention Cantinflas and Liberace. The Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote that the group “brought Zurich Dada of the late-1910s to 1970s Los Angeles.” But it was a distinctly Chicano brand of Dada, by way of David Bowie and Frank Zappa, drag and Pachuco culture, telenovelas and oddball UHF television stations, and New Wave and silent movies.

“Part of the art was just the idea that you would try to draw attention to yourself the way we did at a time when everyone around us was existing in despair,” Mr. Gamboa said in a recent interview, speaking of the guerrilla escapades of the group, whose members went their separate ways in 1987 and now barely speak to one another as the spotlight has reunited them.

In a 1997 interview with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, one of the group’s founders, the artist who calls himself Gronk (though at times also Groak and Grunk) described the collective as “just a rumor to a lot of people for the longest time” and “sort of thought of as drug addicts, perverts.”

“All kinds of names were hurled at us by other Chicano artists,” he said.

The collective’s chosen name, Asco, set the outré tone — it means disgust or nausea in Spanish and also evokes a sinister corporation or a mockery of the acronyms of the social-service organizations then proliferating in poor neighborhoods as a legacy of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. But the foursome’s unpredictable street theater and prodigious image-making beginning in the early ’70s — fake publicity shots and film stills, Super-8 movies, mail-art fliers — made clear that they were not simply trying to express their disgust with racism, police harassment and the Vietnam War but also using revulsion as a raw material and spreading a fair amount of it around.

Their first performance, “Stations of the Cross,” staged during the Christmas holidays in 1972 before the group had gelled or chosen its name, involved Mr. Gamboa, Gronk and Willie Herrón, another of the group’s founders, mocking both Mexican Catholic holiday traditions and the look of classic Mexican murals. The three dressed up as macabre pilgrims and unsettled shoppers along Whittier Boulevard, East Los Angeles’s central artery, trudging along with a huge cross made from cardboard, which they eventually dumped in front of a Marine Corps recruiting station; then they ran away.

Several years before Cindy Sherman started photographing herself as the protagonist in nonexistent movies to strip-mine the mechanisms of America’s image-making, Asco began an extensive body of work called “No Movies,” in which the members dressed up and photographed wildly cinematic scenes — one of the funniest and most memorable was called “The Gores,” a sort of Mansonesque horror movie inspired by pop singer Leslie Gore — late at night on the Los Angeles streets. The images from these never-to-be movies were then mailed out widely like publicity materials, a project that, as the film scholar David E. James notes in the show’s catalog, articulated deeply “both the affection and the anger, the desire and the hatred” the collective’s members had for the movies, in which people who looked like them were almost never seen.

Asco’s founders, now all in their late 50s, met at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, which also produced the members of the band Los Lobos and became known later for the work of the teacher Jaime Escalante, of “Stand and Deliver” fame.

While Gronk was Asco’s only gay member, an androgynous sensibility pervaded the group — in its photographs, its performances and particularly its look, with lots of shaved eyebrows and Theda Bara makeup.

In many of their no-budget, experimental antics, the group’s chief worry was almost never the conventional one for artists — Will anyone pay attention to us? — but whether the attention they got would get them arrested or attacked or worse.

“I always felt like a bullfighter in many ways,” Mr. Gamboa said in a recent interview over lunch with Mr. Herrón at the Los Angeles County Museum, only a hundred yards from the spot where they once spray-painted their names. “The art was to walk away unscathed but to have touched the danger.”

And the danger was often very real. In one of the group’s pieces, “Decoy Gang War Victim,” from 1974, Asco members went at night to neighborhoods marred by gang violence and created fake crime scenes, in which Gronk would play a young corpse on the pavement, surrounded by police flares. The scene would be photographed and the pictures would be sent to newspapers and television stations, as a way to sow confusion both in the news media — which Asco saw as inciting and perpetuating gang violence — and maybe even among the gangs themselves, to prevent more violence.

The performance recalls one from 1972 by a fellow Angeleno and recent M.F.A. graduate, Chris Burden, “Deadman,” in which he placed himself under a tarp surrounded by flares on a busy city street, where cars swerved to avoid him.

Asco’s ideas sprang less from the kind of Conceptual explorations of performance and body art then pouring out of graduate art programs and more from their experience on the streets transformed by media-saturated urban savvy, what Gronk called an “aesthetics of poverty.”

But the methods and results were often strikingly similar to those of more established artists.

“What we’ve been up against is the idea, I think, that these are just regional artists or that they mattered only within the context of a certain time in L.A.,” said Rita Gonzalez, the show’s curator along with Mr. Chavoya. “They never achieved the market success of a lot of their peers or the esteem within academia.”

Part of this was by design, of course, growing out of a deep ambivalence about the establishment’s embrace. The group’s founders have since gone on to individual careers — Ms. Valdez is a painter; Mr. Gamboa teaches at the California Institute of the Arts and remains an active artist; Mr. Herrón is a painter and founder of the punk band Los Illegals; Gronk is a successful artist and stage designer, collaborating most recently with Peter Sellars.

But all, to varying degrees, have sought success only on their own terms. As Mr. Gamboa once told a Smithsonian interviewer, with wonderful Seinfeldian skepticism: “I look at that carrot and it looks a little spoiled to me. I’m not exactly allergic to carrots, but the way it’s dangling — it just — it doesn’t look right. It should be at least on a plate.”

Even now that the Los Angeles County Museum is delivering the carrot on what is arguably a pretty nice plate — a show of photographs, films and artworks that will take up half a floor of the Broad Contemporary wing, accompanied by a hefty catalog — not all are so sure they’re happy. “The big surprise of the show is that we’re all going to be in it, too, stuffed,” said Mr. Herrón, who wears a safety-pin earring and a pair of jet-black shades that never leave his face.

Like many struggling young bands that basically grew up together, Asco — which expanded in the 1980s to include a large number of new members and collaborators — eventually imploded, the result of longstanding rivalries and grudges among its founders, which linger today.

“We all defied Newton,” Mr. Gamboa said by way of explanation. “For every action, there was a completely disproportionate reaction.”

But the end result was not exactly a surprise for a group that usually operated at white-hot intensity, he said, adding that he had no idea whether the retrospective would ultimately result in the recognition he and his former collaborators deserved or whether, true to Asco’s nature, the collective would always be more a legend than a fact.

“Who knows?” he said. “That’s the way L.A. is, too. It’s a desert with mirages. A thing happens and then, poof, it’s gone.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 28, 2011

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

To see what Mr. Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the G.O.P. nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”

The second part of Mr. Perry’s statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.

In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.

But never mind that, Mr. Perry suggests; those scientists are just in it for the money, “manipulating data” to create a fake threat. In his book “Fed Up,” he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.”

I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind: Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

So how has Mr. Romney, the other leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination, responded to Mr. Perry’s challenge? In trademark fashion: By running away. In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!

Of course, we know what’s motivating Mr. Romney’s sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: August 27, 2011

WHY is it not a surprise to learn that Dick Cheney’s ancestor, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was a Civil War soldier who marched with Sherman to the sea?

Scorched earth runs in the family.

Having lost the power to heedlessly bomb the world, Cheney has turned his attention to heedlessly bombing old colleagues.

Vice’s new memoir, “In My Time,” veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong.

His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune.

Cheney may no longer have a pulse, but his blood quickens at the thought of other countries he could have attacked. He salivates in his book about how Syria and Iran could have been punished.

Cheney says that in 2007, he told President Bush, who had already been pulled into diplomacy by Condi Rice: “I believed that an important first step would be to destroy the reactor in the Syrian desert.”

At a session with most of the National Security Council, he made his case for a strike on the reactor. It would enhance America’s tarnished credibility in the Arab world, he argued, (not bothering to mention who tarnished it), and demonstrate the country’s “seriousness.”

“After I finished,” he writes, “the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

By that time, W. had belatedly realized that Cheney was a crank whose bad advice and disdainful rants against “the diplomatic path” and “multilateral action” had pretty much ruined his presidency.

There were few times before the bitter end that W. was willing to stand up to Vice. But the president did make a bold stand on not letting his little dog be gobbled up by Cheney’s big dog.

When Vice’s hundred-pound yellow Lab, Dave, went after W.’s beloved Scottish terrier, Barney, at Camp David’s Laurel Lodge, that was a bridge too far.

When Cheney and Dave got back to their cabin, there was a knock at the door. “It was the camp commander,” Cheney writes. “ ‘Mr. Vice President,’ he said, ‘your dog has been banned from Laurel.’ ”

But on all the nefarious things that damaged America, Cheney got his way for far too long.

Vice gleefully predicted that his memoir would have “heads exploding all over Washington.” But his book is a bore. He doesn’t even mention how in high school he used to hold the water buckets to douse the fiery batons of his girlfriend Lynne, champion twirler.

At least Rummy’s memoir showed some temperament. And George Tenet’s was the primal scream of a bootlicker caught out.

Cheney takes himself so seriously, flogging his cherished self-image as a rugged outdoorsman from Wyoming (even though he shot his Texas hunting partner in the face) and a vice president who was the only thing standing between America and its enemies.

He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney.

It’s easier for someone who believes that he is America incarnate to permit himself to do things that hurt America — like torture, domestic spying, pushing America into endless wars, and flouting the Geneva Conventions.

Mostly, Cheney grumbles about having his power checked. It’s bad enough when the president does it, much less Congress and the courts.

A person who is always for the use of military force is as doctrinaire and irrelevant as a person who is always opposed to the use of military force.

Cheney shows contempt for Tenet, Colin Powell and Rice, whom he disparages in a sexist way for crying, and condescension for W. when he won’t be guided to the path of most destruction.

He’s churlish about President Obama, who took the hunt for Osama bin Laden off the back burner and actually did what W. promised to do with his little bullhorn — catch the real villain of 9/11.

“Tracking him down was certainly one of our top priorities,” Cheney writes. “I was gratified that after years of diligent and dedicated work, our nation’s intelligence community and our special operations forces were able on May 1, 2011, to find and kill bin Laden.”

Tacky.

Finishing the book with an account of the 2010 operation to put in a battery-operated pump that helps his heart push blood through his body, he recounts the prolonged, vivid dream about a beautiful place in Italy he had during the weeks he was unconscious.

“It was in the countryside, a little north of Rome, and it really seemed I was there,” he writes. “I can still describe the villa where I passed the time, the little stone paths I walked to get coffee or a batch of newspapers.”

Caesar and his cappuccino.

Raf Simons, the intensely private designer behind Jil Sander, opens the doors to his home, and quite possibly to his most impressive collection yet. An Evan Holloway sculpture, two Andro Wekusa sculptures, a Ron Arad “Rolling Volumes” chair and a Pierre Chapo table and chairs.

By WHITNEY VARGAS
WSJ. MAGAZINE
AUGUST 25, 2011

If Raf Simons weren’t the influential fashion designer behind Jil Sander and his own eponymous line, he’d like to be a ceramicist. “There’s something so romantic about it,” he says. “I think about the South of France, the nature of clay, working with your hands. Fashion is such an octopus. You’re connected to so many people: suppliers, pattern makers, production teams, marketing teams, vendors. . . .” Six years ago, the 43-year-old Belgian went from being the under-the-radar, trend-driving menswear designer of Raf Simons to the top man at Jil Sander. With that coveted post, which includes overseeing men’s and women’s wear, has come much critical praise—particularly for exploring minimalism through proportion and color in women’s wear—and countless opportunities. But Simons remains notoriously private. Quiet and sensitive, he lives alone in Antwerp, preferring the gentle lull of that city to the hardworking buzz of Milan, where he is obligated to spend almost 110 days a year for Jil Sander. He does not attend the high-flying black-tie affairs that are standard for so many of his peers. And he rarely allows himself to be photographed. “I’m not so rock and roll,” he says, jokingly. “I’m more techno.” In more ways than one, his art-filled apartment has become his sanctuary.

Designed in 1968—Simons thinks it’s kismet that it’s the year he was born—by a Belgian couple who imported Modernist furniture, the two-story, open-floor-plan apartment is a primer in mid-century Modernism. A longtime collector of mid-century furniture, Simons knew he would buy it the minute he saw the wenge-wood floating staircase, built-in cabinets and floor-to-ceiling sliding-glass windows. That it’s located in Antwerp’s heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, far from the ritzy homes and shopping area near the city’s central cathedral, didn’t matter in the least. Nor did the creaky floorboards and outdated electrics. Simons, who purchased the apartment nearly six years ago, hasn’t changed a thing. “It’s perfect just the way it is,” he says, sitting on a Pierre Chapo chair in a plaid button-down shirt and paint-splattered Alexander McQueen denim shorts. “I love the ’50s and ’60s; we were going to the moon; people were wondering what the world was going to be like; there was this idea about being surprised by the future.” He’s even learned to embrace some of the home’s quirkier elements, such as five marble planters that randomly jut out of the entryway floor. (Finding plants that can survive in the low light has proved more difficult.)

Although lauded for exploring haute-couture concepts on the runway, Simons never attended fashion-design school. Instead, he studied industrial design at a small school in the Belgian city of Genk, specializing in furniture making. He gave it up, in part, because he found the manufacturing process too slow and isolating. But a quick glance around his minimalist apartment shows that furniture remains more than a passing interest. When it came to decorating, Simons did it all himself. There is a Pierre Jeanneret couch and chairs in the living room, upholstered in navy cotton with red piping. (The pieces were originally made in the ’50s for public buildings in Chandigarh, India, the architecturally rich northern capital that was a popular testing ground for Modernist designers, such as Jeanneret and his cousin Le Corbusier.) Another set, in black cowhide, resides on the second-floor balcony. Upstairs, these are complemented by a low Chapo coffee table and Georges Jouve ashtray. A Ron Arad “Rolling Volume” chair serves as a bridge to the contemporary art on the walls. Downstairs, the Jeanneret is mixed with a Margot rug and various George Nakashima originals, including a conoid bench, woven lounge chair and rare dining-room table with five asymmetrical legs.

Casually sitting at the table, Simons doesn’t mind that his glass of Diet Coke starts making a ring on the wood. “I spend a lot of time reading about artists, trying to figure out how they approached something. Where did it come from? Nakashima wanted his work to be lived in,” he says. “When you have a house that’s overly designed, it’s so slick. I don’t like that. I could never say, ‘Watch out, don’t sit on that.’ ”

The psychology behind creativity is something that’s always interested Simons, even as a young boy growing up in the remote Belgian village of Neerpelt. The only child of a military father and a mother who cleaned homes, he practically lived in the town’s record store, poring through Kraftwerk and Joy Division albums that would inspire his early fashion collections. “My whole life I’ve always had to be surrounded by creative things,” he says. “I find it relaxing to be in touch with creations by other people.” In order to pay his way through college, Simons spent weekends scouring Antwerp’s flea markets for small objects that he would then resell at a markup. Today, his apartment is filled with colorful mid-century ceramics—a distant cry from the porcelain figurines and glass bowls that used to be his stock-in-trade. A Picasso Madoura ceramic, from his owl series, rests on a sideboard. Large collections, by various artists, are safely tucked away behind sliding pocket doors: Pol Chambost vessels in black and honeybee yellow; Jacques and Dani Ruelland vases in brick red, mustard and hunter green—which Marc Jacobs also collects; brittle-looking mirrors and objects with metal plates by Juliette Derel. “Nobody is into it,” he says, referring to the Derels. “But I like that it’s ugly.”

Simons was a gifted young furniture designer who soon caught the eye of Linda Loppa, the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts’ then–fashion director and unofficial den mother to Antwerp’s tight-knit talent pool. But Simons was enamored of the academy’s former graduates, tagged the Antwerp Six: Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs and Marina Yee, who, by the early ’90s, had made a name on the international fashion scene with their conceptual, often haunting collections. “I always know what I want to do, where I want to go, but I honestly don’t know what drew me to fashion,” he says. “At the time, fashion in Antwerp was booming and it just seemed like this supportive environment filled with possibility.” It was an unfamiliar world to Simons, which made it all the more attractive. “For me, curiousness is one of the most romantic things,” he says. “I was a huge Helmut Lang fan and I remember I’d see just a little fragment from one of his [runway] shows on TV or catch something in a magazine. It made fashion seem mysterious. I wanted to have access, to be a part of it.”

Loppa introduced Simons to her father, a tailor, who agreed to help him produce his first samples—full of ideas, he designed 500. With his 1995 debut—he showed skinny, tight-fitted suits on lanky teenagers cast from the streets—the fashion industry was suddenly teetering on its high heels trying to get a peek at what the designer would do next. “Fashion is a beautiful environment in a way, even though it’s becoming so industrialized, because you feel things very early on,” he says. “It’s the immediacy. I think clothes are meant to be worn—which is why I don’t particularly like to see museum shows about fashion. Fashion only makes sense in relation to a human body, how people behave when they wear something, how they walk. It’s why I can’t stand when a designer says, ‘I did that first, four seasons ago.’ It’s about the moment. Four seasons ago, it wasn’t the moment.”

Ten years later, in a move that surprised many in the industry due to his lack of women’s-wear experience, Prada SpA, which owned Jil Sander at the time, tapped Simons to take the helm at the ailing house. While his men’s clothes continue to explore themes of identity and disenfranchisement, his women’s have come to define an entirely new guard of intellectual, fashion-forward customers.

Simons’s rise has afforded him the ability to pursue his first love: contemporary art. “It’s my biggest passion,” he says. “Fashion is so intense. Art takes me away.” In his marble entryway, three gnarled ceramic sculptures by Sterling Ruby greet guests stepping off the elevator. Ten framed flags by Mike Kelley, depicting anarchic symbols like skulls and bones, soar above the main sitting area. Off that, a sculpture by Evan Holloway of a seated man impaled by metal rays gets pride of place, taking up a good quarter of the living room. On the walls hang paintings by Brian Calvin, William Daniels and Cristel Brodahl. With its sliding doors and expansive windows, as Simons says, “It’s not the most functional apartment for art,” so he rotates his collection a few times a year with pieces from storage.

If the analytical psychology, functionality and rapid momentum of fashion is Simons’s left brain, the creative expanse of art is his right. “Unlike fashion, art isn’t applied,” he says. “It doesn’t have to serve anybody. It doesn’t have to be there for any other reason than to give an impression of what the world is about. I used to approach fashion the way I would art. I wanted it to be conceptual, but it’s not like that. People don’t dig that deep into the brain of the designer when they buy a skirt at a shop.”

It’s this “dialogue” between designer and consumer that Simons finds most fascinating. He stills gets nervous before every runway show, not because of what the critics will write—that, he says, he’s learned to get over in a few days’ time—but because he genuinely wants people to like his clothes enough to wear them. “As a designer, it’s your responsibility to pay attention. You have to face an audience,” he says. Soon, Simons might get the chance to see more men and women in his designs. He recently broke the Italian license agreement for his eponymous line. Now that he’s a free agent, temporarily handling all production in-house for Raf Simons from his Antwerp studio, he’s considering moving to Berlin or New York—New York being the front-runner because of its connection to the art world and because he instinctively prefers the city. “In this business, I know I could work somewhere else one day,” says Simons. “But I’ll always keep this apartment.”

Thanks to Kelvin

WSJ

September 3 – October 1, 2011

Opens September 3
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Marc Foxx

Michal Czerwonka for The New York Times

A group kayaks down the Los Angeles River as part of a pilot program put on by the Los Angeles Conservation Corps.

By JENNIFER MEDINA
NY Times Published: August 25, 2011

LOS ANGELES — As they stood on the bank, the small and eager group exchanged the requisite disparaging jokes about the Los Angeles River, best known for its uninviting concrete channels that make many think of a drainage ditch.

“You think we’ll turn into a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle if the water touches us?” asked Aaron Goldstein, one of the group.

They could be forgiven for their dark humor. After all, there had not been an approved float trip down the river in more than seven decades. For many people, the river is best known from its many movie appearances, including a fiery chase in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and the climactic battle against giant mutant ants in “Them.”

But in a few minutes, the 10 people gathered in Balboa Park, about 20 miles northwest of downtown, would take to the river in kayaks and canoes, as part of a pilot project to allow paddling on the waterway. For advocates who have spent decades fighting politicians who suggested that the river be paved over for a new freeway, the inaugural boat rides are the best sign yet that a revitalization is coming — at least on the sections lined with willow trees and cattails.

“Every great city has a river,” said Steve Reizes, 50, a property manager who occasionally bikes along part of the river to commute between his home in Sherman Oaks and his office downtown. “They market riverfront properties and restaurants and all kinds of things. Why shouldn’t we have that, too?”

The 280 spots for the trips sold out within 10 minutes this month. Mr. Reizes used two computers to ensure that he could get a pair of the $50 tickets, a strategy usually associated with diehard fans looking for seats at a hot concert.

Just a few years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers decreed that the river was not even a river, with parts of it too dry to be considered much of a waterway. But last year, the Environmental Protection Agency reversed that decision and said that the 51-mile river could be navigated like any other, although parts of it can dry to a trickle at times. This summer, the corps granted a limited permit to the Los Angeles Conservation Corps that would allow a set number of paddlers on a 1.5 mile stretch for seven weekends.

So with the sun already blazing one recent Sunday morning, George Wolfe, the founder of L.A. River Expeditions and the leader of the trips, gathered the group for a brief safety lesson. Mr. Wolfe, who traveled the length of the river on an unauthorized three-day trip several years ago, gave his standard warning: You never travel the same river twice. Just last week, he spotted an oil barrel in the water.

“If you fall in the water, don’t panic,” Mr. Wolfe said, as a few in the group laughed nervously. For many of them, it would be their first time in a kayak. “The first thing you should do is stand up. Chances are it’s just a few inches.”

Perhaps aware of other fears, he added: “Also don’t worry — this water isn’t safe to drink, but it is safe for contact.”

Moments later, the group headed into the water underneath a street overpass. The water was murky with grit, but the leaders encouraged the paddlers to revel in the silence and allow themselves to be immersed in nature. Within moments, plastic foam cups and beer bottles could be spotted in the water, but so could shimmering blue dragonflies and electric-green duckweed.

Most of those on the water had seen stretches of the river before, using the bike path and walkways that line it in some parts, visiting a bird preservation area. And one participant confided that the concrete banks served as a good hideout for smoking marijuana when he was a teenager.

The view from the water seemed wholly different somehow. The two-and-a-half-hour trip had plenty of stretches that felt worlds away from the city. When the group spotted a great blue heron on a branch, a reverent silence fell. The paddling stopped for a few moments as they watched the bird open its wings and glide through the sycamores.

The cameras came out again moments later when a few egrets were kind enough to stay still, stretching their long graceful necks like Hollywood starlets.

And while it was far easier to spot plastic bags and rusting shopping carts than fish, a few people waved from the banks, where they were reeling in catfish that they said they would eat for dinner that night.

As the boaters glided through the final stretch of calm water, it was hard for them to square this bucolic scene with the concrete vistas that they knew so well elsewhere on the river.

“Why didn’t they ruin this part?” one participant wondered.

The sentiment was exactly what Mr. Wolfe and other advocates wanted to hear. “We’re at a tipping point — once they let people on, nobody will want to come off,” he said. “If this is the will of the people, politicians will have a hard time arguing that this isn’t an attraction.”

As the group pulled the boats ashore near the Sepulveda Dam, the afternoon sun inspired a round of celebratory beers. But on the van ride back to the starting point, Lavanya Mahendran lamented the absence of a waterfront bar.

“Instead, we’re all going to go our own ways,” she said. “And just have to hope we can come back to a river again.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: August 25, 2011

As I write this, investors around the world are anxiously awaiting Ben Bernanke’s speech at the annual Fed gathering at Jackson Hole, Wyo. They want to know whether Mr. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, will unveil new policies that might lift the U.S. economy out of what is looking more and more like a quasi-permanent state of depressed demand and high unemployment.

But I’ll be shocked if Mr. Bernanke proposes anything significant — that is, anything likely to make any serious dent in unemployment or offer any serious boost to growth.

Why don’t I expect much from Mr. Bernanke? In two words: Rick Perry.

O.K., I don’t mean that Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, is personally standing in the way of effective monetary policy. Not yet, anyway. Instead, I’m using Mr. Perry — who has famously threatened Mr. Bernanke with dire personal consequences if he pursues expansionary monetary policy before the 2012 election — as a symbol of the political intimidation that is killing our last remaining hope for economic recovery.

To see what I’m talking about, let’s ask what policies the Fed actually should be pursuing right now.

Obviously, the U.S. economy remains deeply depressed, and under normal conditions we would expect the Fed to pump it up by cutting interest rates. But the interest rates the Fed normally targets — basically rates on short-term U.S. government debt — are already near zero. So what can the Fed do?

Well, in 2000 an economist named Ben Bernanke offered a number of proposals for policy at the “zero lower bound.” True, the paper was focused on policy in Japan, not the United States. But America is now very much in a Japan-type economic trap, only more acute. So we learn a lot by asking why Ben Bernanke 2011 isn’t taking the advice of Ben Bernanke 2000.

Back then, Mr. Bernanke suggested that the Bank of Japan could get Japan’s economy moving with a variety of unconventional policies. These could include: purchases of long-term government debt (to push interest rates, and hence private borrowing costs, down); an announcement that short-term interest rates would stay near zero for an extended period, to further reduce long-term rates; an announcement that the bank was seeking moderate inflation, “setting a target in the 3-4% range for inflation, to be maintained for a number of years,” which would encourage borrowing and discourage people from hoarding cash; and “an attempt to achieve substantial depreciation of the yen,” that is, to reduce the yen’s value in terms of other currencies.

Was Mr. Bernanke on the right track? I think so — as well I should, since his paper was partly based on my own earlier work. So why isn’t the Fed pursuing the agenda its own chairman once recommended for Japan?

Part of the answer is internal dissension. Two weeks ago, the committee that sets monetary policy declared that conditions “are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through mid-2013” — that is, it didn’t even promise to keep rates low, it just offered an observation about what the state of the economy is likely to be. Yet, even so, the statement faced serious internal opposition, with three inflation hawks on the committee voting against it and calling it a mistake.

The larger answer, however, is outside political pressure. Last year, the Fed actually did institute a policy of buying long-term debt, generally known as “quantitative easing” (don’t ask). But it faced a political backlash out of all proportion to its modest effect on the economy, culminating in Mr. Perry’s declaration that any further monetary easing before the 2012 election would be “almost treasonous,” and that if Mr. Bernanke went ahead and did it, “we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”

Now just imagine the reaction if the Fed were to act on the other and arguably more important parts of that Bernanke 2000 agenda, targeting a higher rate of inflation and welcoming a weaker dollar. With prominent Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan already denouncing policies that allegedly “debase the dollar,” a political firestorm would be guaranteed.

So now you see why I don’t expect any substantive policy announcements at Jackson Hole. Back in 2000, Mr. Bernanke accused the Bank of Japan of suffering from “self-induced paralysis”; well, now the Fed is suffering from externally induced paralysis. In effect, it has been politically intimidated into standing by while the economy stagnates. And that’s a very, very bad thing.

Political opposition has already crippled fiscal policy; instead of helping to create jobs, the federal government is pulling back, acting as a drag on output and employment.

With the Fed also intimidated into inaction, it’s hard to see any end to the ongoing economic disaster.

Western Costume, Aurora
2011
Digital C-print. 20 x 16 in.

September 10, 2011 – January 8, 2012

Hammer

The Los Angeles Times
By: Anthony York
August 24, 2011

Gov. Jerry Brown has a new tax proposal to sell the Legislature: raise levies on some large out-of-state corporations in exchange for new sales-tax exemptions for companies who make products and hire people in California.

Under a plan to be unveiled in Sacramento on Thursday, Brown will ask lawmakers to revert state sales tax formulas to the way they were computed before 2009. That would force many large companies that sell their goods in California, but do not employ many Californians, to pay more in sales taxes.

The request was part of Brown’s original budget plan that was rejected by lawmakers. What’s new is how Brown wants to spend the roughly $1 billion that the tax tweak would generate. Instead of using the money for general state spending, Brown wants to give new tax credits to companies that employ people in California.

Administration officials called the proposal a “revenue neutral” proposal that would allow the state to offer new tax breaks to smaller businesses, but would not directly help the state’s general fund. They say the proposal is aimed at rewarding companies that employ people in the state as California wrestles with a 12% unemployment rate.

Brown also wants to expand tax credits for new hires made by small companies in the state. The proposal would require some Republican support in the Legislature — something Brown has found elusive throughout his young governorship. A Brown spokesman Wednesday said the administration hoped this new proposal would fare better.

“At some point, Republican legislators are going to have to decide whether California jobs are more important than tax breaks for these corporations that send jobs out of state,” said Brown spokesman Gil Duran.

Brown is expected to be joined Thursday by representatives from Boeing, electric car maker Tesla and other companies that have manufacturing jobs in California.

Brown’s proposal comes less than a week after the state’s unemployment rate ballooned back to 12%, the second-highest in the nation behind only Nevada. Earlier this month, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced his plan to put state workers back to work. Brown has publicly questioned the power of state government to put a dent in the jobless rate, but last week appointed former Bank of America executive Michael E. Rossi as his senior advisor on jobs.

Bryce Vickmark for The New York Times

HOOF AND MOUTH MAN Daniel Lieberman studies how the human head and foot have evolved over the millenniums.

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
NY Times Published: August 22, 2011

Among his academic peers, Daniel Lieberman, 47, is known as a “hoof and mouth” man.

That’s because Dr. Lieberman, an evolutionary biology professor at Harvard, spends his time studying how the human head and foot have evolved over the millenniums. In January, Harvard University Press published his treatise, “The Evolution of the Human Head.”

We spoke in a Cambridge hotel room for three hours last winter and then again on the telephone in June. An edited and condensed version of the two conversations follows.

Q. Why heads?

A. Our heads are what make our species interesting. If you were to meet a Neanderthal or a Homo erectus, you’d see that they are the same as us — except from the neck up. We’re different in our noses, ears, teeth, how we swallow and chew. When you think about what makes us human, it’s our big brains, complex thought and language. We speak with our heads, breathe and smell with our heads. So understanding how we got these heads is vital for knowing who we are and what we are doing on this planet.

Q. Are there any practical benefits to your research?

A. There are. A majority of the undergraduates who register for my evolutionary anatomy and physiology class here at Harvard are pre-medical students. Learning this will help them become better doctors. Many of the conditions they’ll be treating are rooted in the mismatch between the world we live in today and the Paleolithic bodies we’ve inherited.

For example, impacted wisdom teeth and malocclusions are very recent problems. They arise because we now process our food so much that we chew with little force. These interactions affect how our faces grow, which causes previously unknown dental problems. Hunter-gatherers — who live in ways similar to our ancestors — don’t have impacted wisdom teeth or cavities. There are many other conditions rooted in the mismatch — fallen arches, osteoporosis, cancer, myopia, diabetes and back trouble. So understanding evolutionary biology will definitely help my students when they become orthopedists, orthodontists and craniofacial surgeons.

Q. Your other specialty is the evolution of the foot. Why this emphasis on the farthest points of our bodies?

A. Actually, I’m interested in the entire body. However, I got into feet because of my interest in heads. Some years ago, I was doing an experiment where I put pigs on treadmills. The goal was to learn how running stressed the bones in the head. One day, a colleague, Dennis Bramble, walked into the lab, watched what was going on, and declared, “You know, that pig can’t hold its head still!”

This was my “eureka!” moment. I’d observed pigs on treadmills for hundreds of hours and had never thought about this. So Dennis and I started talking about how, when these pigs ran, their heads bobbed every which way and how running humans are really adept at stabilizing their heads. We realized that there were special features in the human neck that enable us to keep our heads still. That gives us an evolutionary advantage because it helps us avoid falls and injuries. And this seemed like evidence of natural selection in our ability to run, an important factor in how we became hunters rather than just foragers and got access to richer foods, which fueled the evolution of our big brains.

So I got interested in how we developed these stable heads. I’m a runner myself. It’s always interesting to study one’s passion. By 2004, we’d found enough evidence to publish a paper in Nature where we declared, “Humans were born to run.” We cited the many dozens of adaptations in the human body that had made us into superlative endurance runners, even compared to dogs and horses.

Before bows and arrows and before horses were tamed, we did “persistence hunting” where we ran kudu, wildebeest and zebra into exhaustion. These animals can’t pant when they gallop. They overheat. People would find a big animal and chase it till it collapsed. You need no technology to do this, just the ability to run long distances, which all of us have.

You can see proof of this capability every November when 45,000 people run for many hours through the streets of New York.

Q. People with bad backs often blame evolution for their pain. They say, “My back aches because man was not meant to walk on two feet.” Are they right?

A. If that were true, natural selection would have its toll and we’d be extinct. What is more likely is that many people sit in chairs all day, get no exercise, and thus have weak backs. We did not evolve to sit in chairs all day.

Q. In your lab, you study the phenomenon of barefoot running. How did that become part of your portfolio?

A. About a year after the Nature paper came out, I gave a public lecture where this bearded guy, with only socks and duct tape on his feet, came up to me and said, “I don’t like to wear shoes when I run — how come?” He’d become a barefoot runner because his feet hurt in shoes. The man was “Barefoot Jeffrey,” a Harvard grad who owned a bicycle shop in Jamaica Plain. What a great question!

Obviously, people had run barefoot for millions of years before shoes, socks, Nikes. I’d sometimes wondered if some of the sports injuries that runners get are related to an issue connected to how people run in shoes — the heel strike, it’s called. When most of us run, we land hard on our heels, and that causes a shockwave and it travels up your leg and eventually hits your head, which jiggles really fast. Those of us who wear shoes think that’s normal, to land with a big jolt.

So I asked Barefoot Jeffrey to come to the lab and show me how he ran. He ran in this beautiful way that was completely collision-free. Light as a feather. When he hit the ground, he didn’t land on his heel. Instead, he landed on the ball of his foot, and there was no shock wave that hit his head. That led us to producing another paper in Nature where we actually studied barefoot runners like Jeffrey.

We also went to Africa and went to people who’d never worn shoes. What we discovered was that people who run barefoot tend to run differently than people who wear modern shoes; they run in a much lighter and gentler way because it would hurt to run the way people do in shoes.

Q. And what’s the value to knowing this?

A. To prevent sports injuries. We think that one reason runners crash into the ground is because the shoe makes it possible to hit the ground hard. My lab is currently studying the Harvard track team to measure if runners who use a barefoot style are injured less than runners who land on their heels.

Q. Do you run barefoot?

A. Only in the summer. Obviously, you cannot run barefoot in a New England winter! Then, I use a shoe that brings me more toward the barefoot style. It’s called a “minimal shoe,” and it’s more like a glove for the foot. Some people tell me it looks silly. But I like the way it feels. And I love running barefoot when I can. You get all this wonderful sensory pleasure from your feet. You feel the grass and the sensation of the earth. You get bathed by sensation. There are a lot of sensory nerves in the feet.

Right now, every sports gear company is now developing a line of these minimal shoes. One company, I should inform you, has helped fund some of my laboratory research, though I’ve not had anything to do with their product.

Q. Is your research part of a trend?

A. It’s part of this movement to try to listen to evolution in our bodies. We evolved to eat different diets, to run differently and live differently from the ways we do today. People are looking to evolution to find out how our bodies adapted and what might be healthier for us. That’s good.

Opening Saturday September 3, 2011
7-10 PM

luettgenmeijer

By CLAY TARVER
NY Times Published: August 18, 2011

“Your husband’s a guitarist, right? Does he want to play in the Dad Band for the Spring Faire?” That’s verbatim what a father from our preschool asked my wife. She and I shared a big, long laugh. Until I noticed she wasn’t laughing. In fact, she seemed hurt. “You wouldn’t even do that for your own kids,” she said, “would you?”

It’s just that I had sworn I wouldn’t be one of those parents. The kind who dress their kids in AC/DC onesies. The kind who send their kids to rock schools. But, as my wife pointed out, maybe I took it all too far the other way. You see, I’d never told my kids about my music life. Ever.

I was in two definitively obscure bands. The first was Bullet LaVolta. But in the second one — Chavez — I really found my vibe. I started it in New York in 1992 with Matt Sweeney, who sang and played guitar, and then later we added James Lo on drums and Scott Marshall on bass. We put out two albums on Matador Records that we’re still really proud of.

For me, Chavez was this perfect creative beast. We had all these annoyingly strong ideas about what we wanted to do, and we did them. We did them exactly. But eventually, life pulled us apart. I found work as a screenwriter, married and had kids. Scott had kids, too. James returned to composing for modern-dance pieces. Matt kept making great music with other people.

I didn’t just have kids, actually. I had twin boys, then a third boy. That was a disorienting plunge. And my career didn’t make it any easier. Screenwriting pays, but it’s lonely and anonymous. I’ve worked steadily for 15 years and logged one actual credit to my name. Being in a band? It becomes your name. It’s as if you’re married or something. You become Clay From Chavez or Stephen From Pavement.

Anyway, the more I missed it, the weirder I got. I stopped playing music around the house. I never played guitar for my kids. When the Dad Band proposal came up, my wife finally said: “Know who you need to rock with? A therapist.”

The shrink made me identify the person I was when I was happiest. I talked. She wrote. The name on her notepad was literally Clay From Chavez. Great. She said I had to find a way to be a dad and be that guy. She even threw Carl Jung at me: “Nothing has a stronger influence . . . on their children than the unlived life of the parents.”

Instead, I quit therapy and went back to pretending music didn’t exist. And it almost worked. Until Matador asked Chavez to play its big 21st-anniversary party in Las Vegas.

Our show went shockingly well. But midway through, Matt said into the mike: “Wanna know something? Clay’s kids don’t even know he’s in a band.” As the audience laughed, I forced a smile and made a mental note to yell at him later. But when we came offstage, I ran into Stephen From Pavement. Know what we talked about? Our kids. Then Bob From Guided by Voices told me his son was offered a golf scholarship to college. I looked over to see the band playing after us, whose name is so punk this magazine won’t even print it. The singer brought his toddler son onstage with him.

That’s when I realized I’m an idiot. Yes, the band was really important to me. Yes, I’m still a conflicted mess about it. And that’s what I didn’t want my kids to see. But enough. It was time to come clean.

A few days later, I was back home at a stoplight with my 7-year-olds, Lewis and Augie. They asked the question every father has to answer sooner or later: “Dad, did you know there’s a band called the Butthole Surfers?”

As they laughed, I got all serious: “Believe it or not, your dad played with the Butthole Surfers. Back in 1989. I — ”

Twins: “You were a Butthole Surfer?!”

Me: “No. I was in a band that opened for — ”

Twins: “Were you famous?”

Me: “No. We were not famous. We were good, though. I — ”

Twins: “Are the Butthole Surfers good?”

Me: “Eh, overrated. I mean, ‘Another Man’s Sac’ has a few moments, but — ”

Twins: “Wait, what?”

Me: “Never mind. Just listen. That band was Bullet LaVolta. But you know last weekend? When Mom and I went to Las Vegas? I went to play with another band. It’s called — ”

Twins: “Yeah, yeah. Chavez.”

As the light went green, I turned around in my seat: “How’d you know about Chavez?”

Twins: “We’re 7. Not stupid.”