Three Lives: Peter Hujar, Paul Thek, & David Wojnarowicz

October 29 – December 23, 2011

Mathew Marks

Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park swept and scrubbed on Thursday afternoon, hoping to stave off eviction.Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
NY Times October 13, 2011
Updated, 9:21 p.m.|

Young people in knit hats and jeans scurried around Thursday wielding brooms and trash bags, moving mountains of sleeping bags, backpacks and jackets out of the way.

By cleaning up Zuccotti Park on their own, they were trying to persuade the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties, to back down from its plan to send in cleanup crews Friday morning and begin to enforce new rules on the use of the park that would end the Occupy Wall Street protest, at least in its current form.

But as the day wore on, it seemed that the protesters’ efforts to placate Brookfield might, in the end, not matter, and all sides were girding for a Friday showdown. The police said they were ready to step in if the company asked for help in removing protesters or enforcing the new rules, while protesters planned to form a human chain around the park and, using Facebook and Twitter, called on sympathizers to join them.

Some protesters saw the cleanup as tantamount to an eviction notice, and they vowed to stand their ground, even if it meant being arrested. “This is a public park privately held — I don’t even understand what that means,” Travis Nogle, a 32-year-old protester and “earthship builder” from San Francisco said as he changed his shoes and prepared to pitch in with the cleanup. “We have a constitutional right to protest.”

Zuccotti Park, a plaza that takes up an entire downtown block, is owned and maintained by Brookfield but open to the public. While the police have confronted and arrested demonstrators during marches in the streets and on the Brooklyn Bridge, they have largely left the Zuccotti Park protests untouched, allowing the people there to camp out around the clock while ringing the park with barricades and dozens of officers.

But in a letter to the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, this week, the company’s chief executive, Richard B. Clark, said that sleeping protesters were blocking walkways “at all hours of the day and night.” The letter said that there had been neighborhood complaints of “lewdness, groping, drinking and drug use” and that the company had not been able to perform its daily maintenance.

“We fully support the rights of free speech and assembly,” he wrote, “but the matter in which the protesters are occupying the park violates the law, violates the rules of the park, deprives the community of its rights of quiet enjoyment to the park, and creates health and public safety issues that need to be addressed immediately.”

The company circulated a notice in the park Thursday explaining its plan: it would clean a third of the park at a time, allowing protesters to return to each section once the job was done. More important, however, was the company’s vow to enforce new rules that it imposed after the protest began about a month ago, which seem aimed at the very essence of the occupation: no camping, no tents, no tarps, no sleeping bags, no lying on the ground or on benches, and no storage of personal property on the ground or walkways “which unreasonably interferes with the use of such areas by others,” the company said in its notice.

While demonstrators tried to tidy up the park Thursday — at one point a power washer was obtained, but there was no water available to pump through it — Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, called on City Hall officials to try to reach a deal with the protesters. And the New York Civil Liberties Union issued a statement, saying: “The city must not use the cleanup as a pretext for mass arrests. To do so would be a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment and the spirit of dissent.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg received a decidedly mixed reception when he went to Zuccotti Park Wednesday night to announce the cleanup.

Thirteen City Council members wrote in a letter to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that they supported a cleanup, but added, “The new rules you are enforcing, however — in particular the prohibition on sleeping bags and gear — is an eviction notice and potentially an unconstitutional closing of a forum to silence free speech.”
A sign in Zuccotti Park sets out the rules.Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesA sign in Zuccotti Park sets out the rules. Click to enlarge.

But Brookfield, in a statement, seemed intent on carrying out its plans: “As sections of the park are cleaned, they will re-open to the public. All are welcome to enjoy the park for its intended purpose as an open neighborhood plaza, in compliance with posted rules.”

City Hall issued its own statement Thursday afternoon, standing behind Brookfield’s decision to clean its own park and demand that protesters abide by their rules. “We will continue to defend and guarantee their free speech rights, but those rights do not include the ability to infringe on the rights of others, which is why the rules governing the park will be enforced,” said Marc La Vorgna, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg.

According to Jerold S. Kayden, a lawyer and professor of urban planning and design at Harvard University and an expert on private parkland, New York City gives the owners of public spaces like Zuccotti Park the right to impose “reasonable” rules of conduct. While many private parks and plazas have nighttime curfews, Zuccotti and others — created under an earlier zoning law — are generally required to be open to the public at all times. “I would suspect that the city might view rules against sleeping overnight and permanent occupation to be reasonable,” he said. “But reasonableness is in the eye of the beholder.”

Still, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators held out hope they could forestall the Brookfield cleanup by taking care of their own sanitation. The cleanup efforts were slow at first, with only a handful helping in the morning.

“Every action you see here is autonomous,” said Fred Pantozzi, a protester filling plastic bags with trash.

“Autonomous enough for people not to be doing it,” added another protester, Henry Perkins, a 21-year-old student at the University of Alabama.

Gradually, however, more people heeded the call. Volunteers taped off sections of the park, hauled off debris and scrubbed walkways clean.
Some said that if the police took away their sleeping bags they would sleep in the park sitting up.

A girl in a purple plaid jacket and short skirt said this was not a good idea. “If we stay up all night without sleeping bags we’re going to get sick and we’re going to look crazy on TV,” she said. “Activist burnout is a real thing. If you can take one night to sleep at a friend’s house and rest up.”

Mr. Perkins was putting abandoned clothing into clear plastic bags. He said he had not had a shower in five days, but somehow managed to keep fairly clean. He hoped the protesters would not be evicted. “My autonomous plan is to wake up before they get here and to be out of the way,” he said. “I will move quadrant by quadrant. I hope they don’t kick us out.”

please help these guys!

False Prop, 2011
acrylic on canvas, wood, cardboard
dimensions variable
(canvas size: 180 x 150 cm)

22/10/2011 – 20/11/2011

KUNSTHALLE DÜSSELDORF

Through November 12, 2011

Marc Foxx

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 9, 2011

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

Ken Price, Green and Cream, 1966. Glazed ceramic. 4 x 8 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches

Through February 5, 2012

The Getty

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

A granite boulder at the Stone Valley Quarry will be transported to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 60 miles away over the course of nine nights, traveling through the crowded metropolis at six miles an hour.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
NY Times Published: October 7, 2011

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — It is just under 60 miles from the Stone Valley Quarry here — an expanse of dust, boulders, roaring bulldozers and cut granite hillsides — to the lush campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Museum Mile. Behind a pile of rocks the other afternoon, out of sight from the road, workers scurried around a 340-ton, 21-foot-high solid granite boulder, trussed with red steel girders, gleaming under the desert sun. If all goes well, this boulder will be hovering over a cut in the earth on the grounds of the museum, and be open for viewing, by the end of November.

The piece, known as “Levitated Mass,” by Michael Heizer, a California-born sculptor known for huge outdoor installations that make extensive use of earth and rock, is by any measure an ambitious and brash use of outdoor space. But more ambitious might be the logistics of moving Mr. Heizer’s rock, which was dynamited out of a hillside, from here to there. It is a trip that will take the boulder through the heart of one of the most congested urban centers in the country: nine nights at six miles an hour, through 120 miles of roads, highways, bridges, overpasses, overhead wires, alarmingly low-hanging traffic lights and sharp turns.

The effort, nearly five years in the planning (though Mr. Heizer has been making sketches of it as far back as the late 1960s), feels nothing short of a military movement: an incursion through a bewildering thicket of state, city and county regulations and a region with a notoriously difficult street grid. Even the matter of where to pull over each day is a challenge; this is not a Motel 6 kind of trip.

“You can’t cowboy this through,” said Rick Albrecht, the project manager for the move, leaning against a ladder, his sunglasses and hard hat covered in dust. “You have to be meticulous about this.”

Michael Govan, executive director of the museum, offered a hint of the bureaucratic obstacles involved, and never mind the technical ones.

“A million permits,” he said. “And the State of California is always reviewing the state of its bridges and roads. So a route plan that would have worked a couple of days ago doesn’t work today.” He compared the project to erecting the Great Pyramids of Egypt. “The Egyptians didn’t have rubber tires or diesel engines,” he said. “But they also didn’t have weak streets.”

Yet Mr. Govan raised his hand when asked, in an interview in his office last week, if the oft-delayed move would be put off again. “This is going,” he said. “It’s going. It has to come before the rainy season,” which begins in November. (Two days later the move was put off another week; it is now scheduled to begin the week of Oct. 17.) Mr. Albrecht’s company, Emmert International, makes a business of moving very large objects, like the Hubbell Telescope and a building here and there. But this is the first time he has been asked to oversee the relocation of a giant rock. “That’s what the artist wants,” he said. “So that’s what the artist is going to get.”

How do you do it? The rock has already been raised off the ground by hydraulic lifts and put in a cradle; steel trusses were built around the cradle, all part of a modular tractor with 22 axles, each with its own set of brakes, and 196 wheels. It will weigh 1,210,900 pounds, including the rock. “That’s a lot,” Mr. Albrecht said. “But the weight per axle should be about 349,950 pounds. That’s not so bad. You’ll get more on some of these rock trips coming out of this quarry every day. We’re not worried.”

The rig will be about 295 feet long and 27 feet wide and require a crew of 12 people to operate it. The modular assembly means it should be able to turn, like a caterpillar, and thus navigate corners in Los Angeles that can challenge more conventional rigs. Door to door the distance is 60 miles, though the actual drive is going to be closer to 120 miles, as engineers plot a route that can accommodate the huge size of what is known as the Prime Mover, and one that steers clear of low bridges and wires. Any route must have stopover spots to park the rock as it waits for night. “The last thing we are trying to figure out is where they are going to park it in South Central the night before,” said John Bowsher, the director of special installations at the museum, referring to the Los Angeles neighborhood.

Teams of workers will be deployed to lift telephone and power lines, swing traffic lights to the side and lay down steel plates on suspect patches of roads or bridges. Once the rock arrives at the two-and-a-half-acre lot at the museum that will become its home, another process will begin: disassembling the transporter and sliding the boulder so it is centered over a 456-foot-long slot that has already been slashed into the ground and covered with concrete. The rock will be moved with a gantry system of pulleys, and positioned at the direction of the artist, Mr. Bowsher said, to make certain the final angle is exactly right. That will take another two weeks.

The rock is to rest on two lips that extend partly over the slot from each side of the cut, to help create the illusion that it is hovering in space. Viewers will be able to walk under the rock and peer up 15 feet at its underside.

Mr. Govan said the sculpture fit into his vision of trying to expand the museum beyond its walls and described it as both “super ancient and super modern.”

“It fits into a grand tradition of using public space,” he said.

He said Mr. Heizer had long been drawn to the Stone Valley Quarry because of the nature of its granite. “Black-and-white speckled with a little bit of rust in it,” Mr. Govan said. “He saw the rock and asked the quarry not to touch it.”

Steve Dumont, a heavy-equipment operator at the site, said rocks like that normally don’t last long at the quarry. “We usually blow them up because we don’t want them this big,” he said. “This has been here a long time.”

The whole project will cost close to $10 million, and Mr. Govan said he has drawn criticism about the wisdom of such a project at a time when California is reeling from cuts to everything from colleges to parks.

“I get these letters and telephone calls: ‘I can’t believe you. The economy is so bad, and you’re moving a rock?’ ” he said. “People have this image that we are buying it and spending money on a rock. But we are putting more people to work here in L.A. than Obama. I mean, all the money is going to have an economic impact in California.”

Mr. Govan left little doubt when asked if this work was to be a permanent exhibition at the museum. “Try to move it,” he said.

2011, acrylic, textile, paper, cardboard, canvas, 15 1/8 x 12 1/8 inches

By BROOKE HODGE
NY Times Published September 29, 2011

Cardboard shapes and cutouts were stacked on a table, jars of brightly colored paints lined a shelf, and the floor was covered with paint-spattered paper when I visited the Los Angeles artist Lecia Dole-Recio in her studio. Dole-Recio was hard at work on a new series of paintings for several solo exhibitions this fall, including a show at Richard Telles Fine Art in L.A. that is on view through Oct. 15 and an exhibition at the Secession in Vienna that opens in December.

Dole-Recio’s studio is a long, high-ceilinged space at the back of the Echo Park house she shares with her partner, the filmmaker Erin Cassidy, and their son, Desmond. On the day I visited, many of the artist’s new paintings hung on the studio walls. Her strong, simple geometric shapes, stripes, circles and polka dots, and the colors from her palette of lush greens, blues and strong powerful reds — with the occasional glimpses of plum, magenta, copper and gold — seemed to be in conversation with each other across the narrow room. Each of Dole-Recio’s “paintings” is actually a hybrid of painting, collage and drawing; in this new body of work, she also incorporates textiles into her layered surfaces.

For the first time, the new work is “a complete embrace of my studio practice,” she explained. “I’m working with my entire process and incorporating all aspects of it into the work. I cut cardboard stencils to paint the geometric shapes on the canvas and then I include the stencil itself — both the positive and negative parts of it. The tea towels that I wet my brush on and clean up spills with are there too, along with the actual spills. Since I work on the ground rather than the wall, my studio floor is always covered with paper, and over the years it has accrued a dense field of splatters, splashes and drops of paint.” By incorporating the residue of works past, each of the paintings is like an archive and the new work, which is surprisingly fresher and more open than Dole-Recio’s earlier densely layered paintings, celebrates both the deliberate and the incidental moments of an artist’s practice, as it exudes a confident love of making.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 6, 2011

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.

When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.

It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts.

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.

Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?

Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.

Bear in mind, too, that experience has made it painfully clear that men in suits not only don’t have any monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer. When talking heads on, say, CNBC mock the protesters as unserious, remember how many serious people assured us that there was no housing bubble, that Alan Greenspan was an oracle and that budget deficits would send interest rates soaring.

A better critique of the protests is the absence of specific policy demands. It would probably be helpful if protesters could agree on at least a few main policy changes they would like to see enacted. But we shouldn’t make too much of the lack of specifics. It’s clear what kinds of things the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it’s really the job of policy intellectuals and politicians to fill in the details.

Rich Yeselson, a veteran organizer and historian of social movements, has suggested that debt relief for working Americans become a central plank of the protests. I’ll second that, because such relief, in addition to serving economic justice, could do a lot to help the economy recover. I’d suggest that protesters also demand infrastructure investment — not more tax cuts — to help create jobs. Neither proposal is going to become law in the current political climate, but the whole point of the protests is to change that political climate.

And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today’s Republicans, who instinctively side with those Theodore Roosevelt-dubbed “malefactors of great wealth.” Mitt Romney, for example — who, by the way, probably pays less of his income in taxes than many middle-class Americans — was quick to condemn the protests as “class warfare.”

But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies that failed to deliver economic recovery even as bankers repaid the favor by turning on the president. Now, however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over. All it has to do is take these protests as seriously as they deserve to be taken.

And if the protests goad some politicians into doing what they should have been doing all along, Occupy Wall Street will have been a smashing success.

Concetto Spaziale “Natura” (Spatial Concept “Nature”)
1961
Bronze
Overall: 33 x 38.5 x 34 inches (83.8 x 97.8 x 86.4 cm)

Lucio Fontana and Sterling Ruby

Through October 15, 2011

Andrea Rosen

By Richard Cromelin, Special to the Los Angeles Times
October 6, 2011

Bert Jansch, a revered, enigmatic Scottish singer-guitarist whose effect on a host of prominent musicians eclipsed his own fame, has died. He was 67.

Jansch died Wednesday at a hospital in London of lung cancer, a disease he first battled in 2009, his spokesman Mick Houghton told the Associated Press.

Jansch canceled some appearances as the opening act on Neil Young’s U.S. concert tour last fall to undergo treatment but rejoined him for some dates earlier this year.

Young was just one of the high-profile artists who celebrated Jansch’s evocative songs and virtuosic, rough-hewn fingerpicking. Others included Jimmy Page, Paul Simon, Pete Townshend, Donovan and the Smiths’ Johnny Marr. In recent years Jansch was embraced by a younger generation of musicians, led by Devendra Banhart, Beth Orton and Pete Doherty.

“He could take the blues and jazz and traditional British folk music and blend those together into a style. I think that was the main influence of his playing,” said singer-guitarist Richard Thompson, who frequented Jansch’s London club appearances in the 1960s. “He was also a great songwriter.”

If Jansch’s own recordings reached a limited audience, his music tended to surface through other artists. Led Zeppelin’s “Black Mountain Side” was based on Jansch’s arrangement of the traditional “Blackwater Side.” And the guitar part on Young’s “Ambulance Blues” was a rewrite of Jansch’s “Do You Hear Me Now?”

Young later said it was an inadvertent lift, and was always lavish in acknowledging Jansch’s influence, calling him an acoustic counterpart to Jimi Hendrix.

“That first record of his is epic,” Young said in a 1992 interview. “I was especially taken by ‘Needle of Death,’ such a beautiful and angry song.”

Jansch was also an inveterate outsider, wary of fame and attuned to his own bohemian muse.

“In the early days, I didn’t conform to anything, be it school, work, where I lived. There were no rules,” Jansch said in 2006.

“If you put a rule in front of me, I would break it because it would get in the way of the process of living, and from leaving school up until my first marriage I was a tramp on the streets. When I made the first album, I had no home and no possessions — not even a guitar. I borrowed one from [folk musician] Martin Carthy for the recording.”

Jansch was born Nov. 3, 1943, in Glasgow and grew up in Edinburgh. He became hooked on guitar at age 7 and was initially inspired by hitmakers such as Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and Lonnie Donegan, whose skiffle style incorporated folk and traditional jazz.

In the city’s clubs he heard such folk musicians as American Pete Seeger and fellow Scot Davy Graham, whose guitar style and experimental spirit influenced him profoundly.

He left home when he was 15 and was teaching guitar and playing in clubs a year later. After hitchhiking around Europe, he settled in London where he shared an apartment and musical ideas with another celebrated guitarist, John Renbourn.

Jansch began drawing crowds at Soho folk clubs with his amalgam of British folk and American blues, flavored with unusual tunings and an improvisational invention. His unpredictability was enhanced by his heavy drinking.

“Sometimes he’d be actually brilliant. Sometimes he’d be too drunk to play,” recalled Thompson.

With that borrowed guitar, Jansch recorded his first album in his kitchen on a reel-to-reel tape deck. Released by the small Transatlantic label in 1965, “Bert Jansch” quickly put him in the front ranks of the U.K. folk underground. Donovan, a friend and admirer, included a Jansch song on his debut album, and referenced him in two songs for his 1966 album “Sunshine Superman”: “Bert’s Blues” and “House of Jansch.”

Though Donovan-like celebrity was not Jansch’s goal, fame of a sort did come his way when he and Renbourn joined singer Jacqui McShee, bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox to form Pentangle in 1967. The jazz-flavored folk group’s third album was a Top 5 seller in England, and the quintet even made inroads in the U.S. Pentangle disbanded in 1973, due in part to the members’ prodigious alcohol consumption.

True to his free-spirited ways, Jansch moved to Wales and became a farmer after Pentangle’s demise, then returned to London and continued to record and perform, mainly in Europe. He also continued drinking, until he quit cold in 1987 after suffering an alcohol-related pancreatic illness.

Jansch reunited with the other original members of Pentangle to accept a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio2 Folk Awards in 2007. They also began touring and had been working on new material with plans for recording.

Jansch’s 23rd album, “Black Swan,” came out in 2006. With contributions from Orton and Banhart, and production by Banhart’s band member Noah Georgeson, it affirmed the veteran’s stature as a role model for the new generation of folk visionaries.

“In a way I’ve gotten used to it,” Jansch said at the time. “I suppose after years and years, it’s all dawning on me, all this influence stuff. At first it was quite frightening, with all the influential persons in the world. I’m the last person to consider myself being an influence on anybody.”

Jansch is survived by his wife Loren and son Adam. Another son, Richard, preceded him in death.

via

Manfred Kuttner – Vier – 1963

Thomas Bayrle, Axel Dick, Rolf Glasmeier, Manfred Kuttner, Charlotte Posenenske
Sat 08. Oct 2011 – Sat 12. Nov 2011

Johann Koenig

Presenting four recordings of Harry Pussy’s Mandolin

Thursday, October 6th

7pm

Bortolami

thanks to todd feder

via

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 2, 2011

The dire state of the world economy reflects destructive actions on the part of many players. Still, the fact that so many have behaved badly shouldn’t stop us from holding individual bad actors to account.

And that’s what Senate leaders will be doing this week, as they take up legislation that would threaten sanctions against China and other currency manipulators.

Respectable opinion is aghast. But respectable opinion has been consistently wrong lately, and the currency issue is no exception.

Ask yourself: Why is it so hard to restore full employment? It’s true that the housing bubble has popped, and consumers are saving more than they did a few years ago. But once upon a time America was able to achieve full employment without a housing bubble and with savings rates even higher than we have now. What changed?

The answer is that we used to run much smaller trade deficits. A return to economic health would look much more achievable if we weren’t spending $500 billion more each year on imported goods and services than foreigners spent on our exports.

To get our trade deficit down, however, we need to make American products more competitive, which in practice means that we need the dollar’s value to fall in terms of other currencies. Yes, some people will shriek about “debasing” the dollar. But sensible policy makers have long known that sometimes a weaker currency means a stronger economy, and have acted on that knowledge. Switzerland, for example, has intervened massively to keep the franc from getting too strong against the euro. Israel has intervened even more forcefully to weaken the shekel.

The United States, given its special global role, can’t and shouldn’t be equally aggressive. But given our economy’s desperate need for more jobs, a weaker dollar is very much in our national interest — and we can and should take action against countries that are keeping their currencies undervalued, and thereby standing in the way of a much-needed decline in our trade deficit.

That, above all, means China. And none of the arguments against holding China accountable can stand serious scrutiny.

Some observers question whether we really know that China’s currency is undervalued. But they’re kidding, right? The flip side of the manipulation that keeps China’s currency undervalued is the accumulation of dollar reserves — and those reserves now amount to a cool $3.2 trillion.

Others warn of bad consequences if the Chinese stop buying United States bonds. But our problem right now is precisely that too many people want to park their money in American debt instead of buying goods and services — which is why the interest rate on long-term U.S. bonds is only 2 percent.

Yet another objection is the claim that Chinese products don’t really compete with U.S.-produced goods. The rebuttal is fairly technical; let me just say that those making this argument both overstate the case and fail to take the indirect effects of Chinese currency policy into account.

In the last few days a new objection to action on the China issue has surfaced: right-wing pressure groups, notably the influential Club for Growth, oppose tariffs on Chinese goods because, you guessed it, they’re a form of taxation — and we must never, ever raise taxes under any circumstances. All I can say is that Democrats should welcome this demonstration that antitax fanaticism has reached the point where it trumps standing up for our national interests.

To be fair, there are some arguments against action on China that would carry some weight if the times were different. One is the undoubted fact that inflation in China, which is raising labor costs in particular, is gradually eliminating that nation’s currency undervaluation. The operative word, however, is “gradually”: something that brings the United States trade deficit down over four or five years isn’t good enough when unemployment is at disastrous levels right now.

And the reality of the unemployment disaster is also my answer to those who warn that getting tough with China might unleash a trade war or damage world commercial diplomacy. Those are real risks, although I think they’re exaggerated. But they need to be set against the fact — not the mere possibility — that high unemployment is inflicting tremendous cumulative damage as we speak.

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said it clearly last week: unemployment is a “national crisis,” with so many workers now among the long-term unemployed that the economy is at risk of suffering long-run as well as short-run damage.

And we can’t afford to neglect any important means of alleviating that national crisis. Holding China accountable won’t solve our economic problems on its own, but it can contribute to a solution — and it’s an action that’s long overdue.

Hoffmann A, 2011, silver gelatin print, walnut frame, 14.5 x 11.5 x 1.5 inches (36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8 cm)

Through November 12, 2011

White Cube

Marchers claimed a roadway on the Brooklyn Bridge. Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

By AL BAKER, COLIN MOYNIHAN and SARAH MASLIN NIR
NY Times Updated, 1:23 p.m. Sunday

| In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.

The police said it was the marchers’ choice that led to the enforcement action.

“Protesters who used the Brooklyn Bridge walkway were not arrested,” Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department, said. “Those who took over the Brooklyn-bound roadway, and impeded vehicle traffic, were arrested.”

But many protesters said they believed the police had tricked them, allowing them onto the bridge, and even escorting them partway across, only to trap them in orange netting after hundreds had entered.

“The cops watched and did nothing, indeed, seemed to guide us onto the roadway,” said Jesse A. Myerson, a media coordinator for Occupy Wall Street who marched but was not arrested.

A video on the YouTube page of a group called We Are Change shows some of the arrests.

Around 1 a.m., the first of the protesters held at the Midtown North Precinct on West 54th Street were released. They were met with cheers from about a half-dozen supporters who said they had been waiting as a show of solidarity since 6 p.m. for around 75 people they believed were held there. Every 10 to 15 minutes, they trickled out into a night far chillier than the afternoon on the bridge, each clutching several thin slips of paper — their summonses, for violations like disorderly conduct and blocking vehicular traffic. The first words many spoke made the group laugh: all variations on “I need a cigarette.”

David Gutkin, 24, a Ph.D. student in musicology at Columbia University, was among the first released. He said that after being corralled and arrested on the bridge, he was put into plastic handcuffs and moved to what appeared to be a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus, along with dozens of other protesters, for over four hours. They headed first into Brooklyn and then to several locations in Manhattan before arriving at the 54th Street precinct.

Men and women had been held separately, two or three to a cell. A few said they had been zip-tied the entire time. “We sang ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ ” said Annie Day, 34, who when asked her profession said, “I’m a revolutionary.” Ms. Day was wearing laceless Converse sneakers: police had required the removal of all laces as well as her belt. She rethreaded them on the pavement while a man who identified himself as a lawyer took each newly freed person’s name.

None of the protesters interviewed knew if the bridge march was planned or a spontaneous decision by the crowd. But all insisted that the police had made no mention that the roadway was off limits. Ms. Day and several others said that police officers had walked beside the crowd until the group reached about midway, then without warning began to corral the protesters behind orange nets.

The scene outside the Midtown South Precinct on West 35th Street around 2 a.m. was far more jovial. Only about 15 of the rumored 57 people had been released, but about a dozen waiting supporters danced jigs in the street to keep warm. They snacked on pizza. One even drank Coors Light beer, stashing the empty bottles under a parked police van. When a fresh protester was released, he or she ran through a gantlet formed by the waiting group, like a football player bursting onto the field during the Super Bowl. “This is so much better than prison!” one cheered.

“It’s cold,” said Rebecca Solow, 27, rubbing her arms as she waited on the sidewalk, “but every time one is released, it warms you up.”

The march on the bridge had come to a head shortly after 4 p.m., as the 1,500 or so marchers reached the foot of the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the bridge, just east of City Hall.

In their march north from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan — headquarters for the last two weeks of a protest movement against what demonstrators call inequities in the economic system — they had stayed on the sidewalks, forming a long column of humanity penned in by officers on scooters.

Where the entrance to the bridge narrowed their path, some marchers, including organizers, stuck to the generally agreed-upon route and headed up onto the wooden walkway that runs between and about 15 feet above the bridge’s traffic lanes.

But about 20 others headed for the Brooklyn-bound roadway, said Christopher T. Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who accompanied the march. Some of them chanted “take the bridge.” They were met by a handful of high-level police supervisors, who blocked the way and announced repeatedly through bullhorns that the marchers were blocking the roadway and that if they continued to do so, they would be subject to arrest.

There were no physical barriers, though, and at one point, the marchers began walking up the roadway with the police commanders in front of them – seeming, from a distance, as if they were leading the way. The Chief of Department Joseph J. Esposito, and a horde of other white-shirted commanders, were among them.
Police secured some protesters’ hands with plastic ties.Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesPolice secured some protesters’ hands with plastic ties.

After allowing the protesters to walk about a third of the way to Brooklyn, the police then cut the marchers off and surrounded them with orange nets on both sides, trapping hundreds of people, said Mr. Dunn. As protesters at times chanted “white shirts, white shirts,” officers began making arrests, at one point plunging briefly into the crowd to grab a man.

The police said that those arrested were taken to several police stations and were being charged with disorderly conduct, at a minimum. A police spokesman said some protesters — mostly those without identification — were still “going through the system” late Sunday morning.

A freelance reporter for The New York Times, Natasha Lennard, was among those arrested. She was later released.

Mr. Dunn said only people at the very front could hear the warning, and he was concerned that those in the back “would have had no idea that it was not O.K. to walk on the roadway of the bridge.” Mr. Browne said that people who were in the rear of the crowd that may not have heard the warnings were not arrested and were free to leave.

Earlier in the afternoon, as many as 10 Department of Correction buses, big enough to hold 20 prisoners apiece, had been dispatched from Rikers Island in what one law enforcement official said was “a planned move on the protesters.”

Etan Ben-Ami, 56, a psychotherapist from Brooklyn who was up on the walkway, said that the police seemed to make a conscious decision to allow the protesters to claim the road. “They weren’t pushed back,” he said. “It seemed that they moved at the same time.”

Mr. Ben-Ami said he left the walkway and joined the crowd on the road. “It seemed completely permitted,” he said. “There wasn’t a single policeman saying ‘don’t do this’.”

He added: “We thought they were escorting us because they wanted us to be safe.” He left the bridge when he saw officers unrolling the nets as they prepared to make arrests. Many others who had been on the roadway were allowed to walk back down to Manhattan.

Mr. Browne said that the police did not trick the protesters into going onto the bridge.

“This was not a trap,” he said. “They were warned not to proceed.”

In related protests elsewhere in the country, 25 people were arrested in Boston for trespassing while protesting Bank of America’s foreclosure practices, according to Eddy Chrispin, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department. The protesters were on the grounds and blocking the entrance to the building, Mr. Chrispin said.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, speaking briefly before marching in the Pulaski Day Parade in Manhattan on Sunday, also defended the police’s actions.

“The police did exactly what they were supposed to do,” the mayor said, noting that those who march without the city’s permission would continue to get summonses. “It’s very easy to get a permit,” he added.

As the morning wore on, Zuccotti Park had the hallmarks of Sundays the world over. There was brunch: someone had donated bagels and lox. There was the morning paper: protesters who had camped for the night read the self-published newspaper “The Occupied Wall Street Journal,” some snuggled the metallic blankets usually worn by marathon runners. One man brushed his teeth without water, standing up.

The scene was largely quiet, save a man in a fedora freestyle rapping with drummers in the east corner of the park. Many of those who had been arrested returned at about 3 a.m. to a heroes reception, said Rick DeVoe, 54, from East Hampton, Mass. They were sleeping in.

“It’s not always at a fever pitch,” Mr. DeVoe said. “It’s not easy sleeping out, it’s not easy going to jail.”

Quiet political discussions continued around the sleepers. One woman gave a pep talk to what looked like a new recruit. “It’s about taking down systems, it doesn’t matter what you’re protesting,” she said. “Just protest.”

Some tourists wandered in between the makeshift beds and volunteers sweeping up cigarette butts. A man visiting from Virginia and his 4-year-old son snapped photos, as did an elderly couple passing through.

The young people protesting in Wall Street and beyond reject this vain economic order. They have come to reclaim the future. People protest during the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ rally in New York, 17 September. Photograph: Steven Greaves

By: David Graeber
The Guardian Published Sunday 25 September 2011

Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?

There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.

Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?

Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.

But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world’s financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.

Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like “Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?”

It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an “economy” is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.

Perhaps, it’s not surprising. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we’re all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.

What we’ve learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the “third world debt crisis”. But the global south fought back. The “alter-globalisation movement”, was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of “austerity”.

The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What’s different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.

When the history is finally written, though, it’s likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it’s clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side.

We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don’t know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

more in todays ny times

Exploded Fortress of Solitude, Installation View, 2011

Through October 22, 2011

Gagosian London