By KEN JOHNSON
NY Times Published: May 19, 2011

For a generation that came of age in the late 1960s and early ’70s, three unusual reference books were catalytic consciousness raisers. “The Joy of Sex” and “Our Bodies, Ourselves” are still in print; the third and possibly most influential of all is less familiar to people born after 1980: the Whole Earth Catalog. Brainchild of the visionary techno-hippie artist Steward Brand, this compendium of resources for the New Age is the subject of “Access to Tools: Publications From the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974,” a modest but stirring time capsule of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Whole Earth Catalog did for counterculture youth in the ’60s what the Sears Catalog did for children of the Great Depression and what Google does for people of the Internet age: provide a way for ordinary people to connect with and make use of the global economy. Against the dominion of capitalist profiteers and the top-down cult of technocratic expertise, it aimed to put practical, intellectual and spiritual means of self-determination into the hands of the people. A telephone-book size tome printed on cheap paper in black and white and in all kinds of typographies, and peppered with sharp, often funny commentary on its products by its editors — as well as essays, short stories by writers like Wendell Berry and letters from readers — the catalog was nothing if not user friendly.

An ad for it described it as “a traditional instrument no more radical than Sears Roebuck and Consumer Reports, merely attuned to a new market, the sub-economy of dope and rock.” Its pragmatic, good-humored utopianism struck a resounding chord. During its years of regular publication, from 1968 to 1974, more than 2.5 million copies were sold. In 1972 it won a National Book Award.

The catalog’s cover image, a photograph of the earth shot from outer space, summed up its messianic purpose. Viewed from a sufficiently expansive perspective, the world was not so confusingly fragmented and chaotic as it might seem to surface dwellers. “Spaceship Earth” — in the coinage of the catalog’s ideological godfather, Buckminster Fuller — was understood as a holistically integrated system with all living things enmeshed in an ever-fluctuating ecological equilibrium. Against the specializing, often exploitative focus of modern science and technology and the compartmentalization of academia, the catalog offered a mind-expanding, cross-disciplinary smorgasbord of ideas and self-actualizing technologies, from books by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Carlos Castaneda to listings of companies selling bicycles, gardening equipment and dome-building kits. The postmodern, pluralist era owes a huge, insufficiently acknowledged debt to the Whole Earth Catalog.

David Senior, a bibliographer in the Museum of Modern Art library and organizer of the exhibition, observed that the tools most extensively proffered by the catalog were printed matter. So the materials displayed in Plexiglas-covered vitrines are books, pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides and other publications that either inspired the catalog’s editors or were produced under its influence. Included are books by the new-media guru Marshall McLuhan; architectural projects on paper by the British collective Archigram; the art collective Ant Farm’s “Inflatocookbook,” which provided instructions for inflatable dwellings; a book called “Guerrilla Television” (1971) produced by the Raindance Corporation; and a 1971 supplemental catalog update edited by the writers Paul Krassner and Ken Kesey, with a hilarious version of the Last Supper by R. Crumb on its cover. Visitors may also peruse copies of the catalog at a biomorphically shaped table. Their pages are yellowed and brittle but they are still compulsively readable.

The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog was published in May 1974 and sold for $5. Its 447 pages represented an amazing array of goods, services and information. The diversity was categorized into Land Use and Shelter, Industry, Craft, Community, Nomadics, Communications and Learning. And the opening salvo, Whole Systems, put it all into philosophical perspective. Besides the ideas of Fuller, it was informed by those of two now seldom-read theorists: the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose “On Growth and Form” (1917) found similar formal patterns in all sorts of natural phenomena and human-made processes, and the mathematician Norbert Wiener, whose “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (1948) understood events in the abstract terms of the new information theory underlying computer science. The lesson, now familiar to every Google user, was that all things great and small are nested within an infinitely expandable, multilevel and interconnected system of systems.

Wised up 21st-century folks may dismiss the Whole Earth Catalog as an artifact of a naïvely optimistic moment and a herald of the narcissism and consumerism of the ’70s and ’80s. Today’s art world and the broader creative culture to which it belongs are depressingly exclusive and factionalized. Academics steeped in the dour obscurities of European, neo-Marxist theory view conventional object-makers as foolish collaborators with capitalism. Traditional painters and sculptors see avant-gardeist posturing and doctrinaire moralizing in high concept arts involving social intervention or institutional critique. Yet the studio artist can’t help but feel defensive about creating luxury décor for rich collectors. To be a player in art now it seems you have to take sides, stifle doubt and vilify the opposition.

So maybe the time is ripe for a deep and wide reconsideration of the Whole Earth vision. In its generous embrace of theory and practice and its range from the cosmic to the mundane it epitomized the best impulses of American democracy. It was and still might be a great tool for thinking about how to rehabilitate our sadly distressed world.

“Access to Tools: Publications From the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974,” continues through July 26 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Sunday, May 22nd | 7:00pm

Back to the Land. Urban homesteads. Sustainable cooperatives. The movement that swept the nation in the ’70s is back with a passion. Economic, permaculture, and social concerns have drawn thousands across the country to rediscover the benefits of collective living. The new Process Media book “The Modern Utopian” is the definitive examination of the alternative communities in the ‘60s and ‘70s, documented by those who knew it and lived it—from the fabled Drop City to Morningstar Ranch, Timothy Leary at Millbrook to Detroit’s Translove Energies and the still-thriving Stephen Gaskin’s Farm. Join Process’s Jodi Wille as she leads a conversation with members of a new generation (mostly in their 20s and 30s) of intentional communities in LA and New Mexico.

Afterwards, Process presents a rare screening of the 1972 documentary/concert film Rainbow Bridge. This gem of occult/commune ’70s cinema features Warhol stars Pat Hartley and Chuck Wein, Dr. Bronner, cosmic surfers, black power soul sisters, clairvoyant shamans, Jesus freaks, and the actual inhabitants of a chic mansion commune in Maui called the “Rainbow Bridge Occult Research Meditation Center.” Then, Jimi Hendrix drops in, and on the slopes of the Haleakala volcano, he performs for his penultimate live concert in the U.S. before his departure from the planet only two months later

Watch the Trailer for “Rainbow Bridge”

Cinefamily

Thanks to Rodney Hill

via

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: May 19, 2011

Some years ago, one of my neighbors, an émigré Russian engineer, offered an observation about his adopted country. “America seems very rich,” he said, “but I never see anyone actually making anything.”

That was a bit unfair, but not completely — and as time went by it became increasingly accurate. By the middle years of the last decade, I used to joke that Americans made a living by selling each other houses, which they paid for with money borrowed from China. Manufacturing, once America’s greatest strength, seemed to be in terminal decline.

But that may be changing. Manufacturing is one of the bright spots of a generally disappointing recovery, and there are signs — preliminary, but hopeful, nonetheless — that a sustained comeback may be under way.

And there’s something else you should know: If right-wing critics of efforts to rescue the economy had gotten their way, this comeback wouldn’t be happening.

The story so far: In the 1990s, U.S. manufacturing employment was more or less steady. After 2000, however, it entered a steep decline. The 2001 recession hit industry hard, while the bubble-fueled expansion of the decade’s middle years — an expansion marked by a huge rise in the trade deficit — left manufacturing behind. By December 2007, there were 3.5 million fewer U.S. manufacturing workers than there had been in 2000; millions more jobs disappeared in the slump that followed.

Only a handful of these lost jobs have come back, so far. But, as I said, there are indications of a turnaround.

Crucially, the manufacturing trade deficit seems to be coming down. At this point, it’s only about half as large as a share of G.D.P. as it was at the peak of the housing bubble, and further improvements are in the pipeline. The Boston Consulting Group, which is now predicting a U.S. “manufacturing renaissance,” points to major U.S. firms like Caterpillar that once shifted production abroad but are now moving it back. At the same time, companies from other countries, especially European firms, are moving production to America.

And one potential disaster has been avoided: the U.S. auto industry, which many people were writing off just two years ago, has weathered the storm. In particular, General Motors has now had five consecutive profitable quarters.

America’s industrial heartland is now leading the economic recovery. In August 2009, Michigan had an unemployment rate of 14.1 percent, the highest in the nation. Today, that rate is down to 10.3 percent, still above the national average, but nonetheless a huge improvement.

I don’t want to suggest that everything is wonderful about U.S. manufacturing. So far, the job gains are modest, and many new manufacturing jobs don’t offer good pay or benefits. The manufacturing revival isn’t going to make health reform unnecessary or obviate the need for a strong social safety net.

Still, better to have those jobs than none at all. Which brings me to those right-wing critics.

First, what’s driving the turnaround in our manufacturing trade? The main answer is that the U.S. dollar has fallen against other currencies, helping give U.S.-based manufacturing a cost advantage. A weaker dollar, it turns out, was just what U.S. industry needed.

Yet the Federal Reserve finds itself under intense pressure from the right to make the dollar stronger, not weaker. A few months ago, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, berated Ben Bernanke for failing to tighten monetary policy, declaring: “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency.” If Mr. Bernanke had given in to that kind of pressure, manufacturing would have continued its relentless decline.

And then there’s the matter of the auto industry, which probably would have imploded if President Obama hadn’t stepped in to rescue General Motors and Chrysler. For those companies would almost surely have gone into liquidation, closing all their factories. And this liquidation would have undermined the rest of America’s auto industry, as essential suppliers went under, too. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were at stake.

Yet Mr. Obama was fiercely denounced for taking action. One Republican congressman declared the auto rescue part of the administration’s “war on capitalism.” Another insisted that when government gets involved in a company, “the disaster that follows is predictable.” Not so much, it turns out.

So while we still have a deeply troubled economy, one piece of good news is that Americans are, once again, starting to actually make things. And we’re doing that thanks, in large part, to the fact that the Fed and the Obama administration ignored very bad advice from right-wingers — ideologues who still, in the face of all the evidence, claim to know something about creating prosperity.

Blue Cave, 2011
Flashe on linen
79 x 105 inches

Through June 19, 2011

Brennan and Griffin

It’s a house disseminated by the view that can be found practically anywhere in the world consisting of four walls and a four sided roof, the spans are cut from the top, the corners disappear, instead, light emerges and the view is possible to see from all angles of the house. The size of the spans can change according to the view, the living room, dining room, bed room and bath room communicate with each other; the limits are defined by the corridor it self.

Jose Adriao

via

Robert Maxwell for New York Magazine

Roseanne Barr was a sitcom star, a creator and a product, the agitator and the abused, a domestic goddess and a feminist pioneer. That was twenty years ago. But as far as she’s concerned, not much has changed.

By Roseanne Barr
NY Magazine Published May 15, 2011

During the recent and overly publicized breakdown of ­Charlie Sheen, I was repeatedly contacted by the media and asked to comment, as it was assumed that I know a thing or two about starring on a sitcom, fighting with producers, nasty divorces, public meltdowns, and bombing through a live comedytour. I have, however, never smoked crack or taken too many drugs, unless you count alcohol as a drug (I don’t). But I do know what it’s like to be seized by bipolar thoughts that make one spout wise about Tiger Blood and brag about winning when one is actually losing.

It’s hard to tell whether one is winning or, in fact, losing once one starts to think of oneself as a commodity, or a product, or a character, or a voice for the downtrodden. It’s called losing perspective. Fame’s a bitch. It’s hard to handle and drives you nuts. Yes, it’s true that your sense of entitlement grows exponentially with every perk until it becomes too stupendous a weight to walk around under, but it’s a cutthroat business, show, and without the perks, plain ol’ fame and fortune just ain’t worth the trouble.

“Winning” in Hollywood means not just power, money, and complimentary smoked-salmon pizza, but also that everyone around you fails just as you are peaking. When you become No. 1, you might begin to believe, as Cher once said in an interview, that you are “one of God’s favorite children,” one of the few who made it through the gauntlet and survived. The idea that your ego is not ego at all but submission to the will of the Lord starts to dawn on you as you recognize that only by God’s grace did you make it through the raging attack of idea pirates and woman haters, to ascend to the top of Bigshit Showbiz Mountain.

All of that sounds very much like the diagnosis for bipolar disorder, which more and more stars are claiming to have these days. I have it, as well as several other mental illnesses, but then, I’ve always been a trendsetter, even though I’m seldom credited with those kinds of things. And I was not crazy before I created, wrote, and starred in television’s first feminist and working-class-family sitcom (also its last).

I so admire Dave Chappelle. You did right for yourself by walking away, Dave. I did not have the guts to do it, because I knew I would never get another chance to carry so large a message on behalf of the men and women I grew up with, and that mattered most to me.

After my 1985 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, I was wooed by producers in Hollywood, who told me they wanted to turn my act into a sitcom. When Marcy Carsey—who co-owned Carsey-Werner with her production partner, Tom Werner (producers of The Cosby Show)—asked me to sign, I was impressed. I considered The Cosby Show to be some of the greatest and most revolutionary TV ever.

Marcy presented herself as a sister in arms. I was a cutting-edge comic, and she said she got that I wanted to do a realistic show about a strong mother who was not a victim of Patriarchal Consumerist Bullshit—in other words, the persona I had carefully crafted over eight previous years in dive clubs and biker bars: a fierce working-class Domestic Goddess. It was 1987, and it seemed people were primed and ready to watch a sitcom that didn’t have anything like the rosy glow of middle-class confidence and comfort, and didn’t try to fake it. ABC seemed to agree. They picked up Roseanne in 1988.

It didn’t take long for me to get a taste of the staggering sexism and class bigotry that would make the first season of Roseanne god-awful. It was at the premiere party when I learned that my stories and ideas—and the ideas of my sister and my first husband, Bill—had been stolen. The pilot was screened, and I saw the opening credits for the first time, which included this: CREATED BY MATT WILLIAMS. I was devastated and felt so betrayed that I stood up and left the party. Not one person noticed.

I confronted Marcy under the bleachers on the sound stage when we were shooting the next episode. I asked her how I could continue working for a woman who had let a man take credit for my work—who wouldn’t even share credit with me—after talking to me about sisterhood and all that bullshit. She started crying and said, “I guess I’m going to have to tell Brandon [Stoddard, then president of ABC Entertainment] that I can’t deliver this show.” I said, “Cry all you want to, but you figure out a way to put my name on the show I created, or kiss my ass good-bye.”

I went to complain to Brandon, thinking he could set things straight, as having a robbed star might be counterproductive to his network. He told me, “You were over 21 when you signed that contract.” He looked at me as if I were an arrogant waitress run amok.

I went to my agent and asked him why he never told me that I would not be getting the “created by” credit. He halfheartedly admitted that he had “a lot going on at the time” and was “sorry.” I also learned that it was too late to lodge a complaint with the Writers Guild. I immediately left that agency and went to the William Morris Agency. I figured out that Carsey and Werner had bullshitted Matt Williams into believing that it was his show and I was his “star” as effectively as they had bullshitted me into thinking that it was my show and Matt Williams was my “scribe.” I contacted Bernie Brillstein and a young talent manager in his office, Brad Grey, and asked them to help me. They suggested that I walk away and start over, but I was too afraid I would never get another show.

It was pretty clear that no one really cared about the show except me, and that Matt and Marcy and ABC had nothing but contempt for me—someone who didn’t show deference, didn’t keep her mouth shut, didn’t do what she was told. Marcy acted as if I were anti-feminist by resisting her attempt to steal my whole life out from under me. I made the mistake of thinking Marcy was a powerful woman in her own right. I’ve come to learn that there are none in TV. There aren’t powerful men, for that matter, either—unless they work for an ad company or a market-study group. Those are the people who decide what gets on the air and what doesn’t.

Complaining about the “created by” credit made an enemy of Matt. He wasted no time bullying and undermining me, going so far as to ask my co-star, John Goodman, who played Roseanne Conner’s husband, Dan, if he would do the show without me. (Goodman said no.) That caused my first nervous breakdown.

To survive the truly hostile environment on set, I started to pray nonstop to my God, as working-class women often do, and to listen nonstop to Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power.” I read The Art of War and kept the idea “He that cares the most, wins” upmost in my mind. I knew I cared the most, since I had the most to lose. I made a chart of names and hung them on my dressing-room door; it listed every person who worked on the show, and I put a check next to those I intended to fire when Roseanne became No. 1, which I knew it would.

My breakdown deepened around the fourth episode, when I confronted the wardrobe master about the Sears, Roebuck outfits that made me look like a show pony rather than a working-class mom. I wanted vintage plaid shirts, T-shirts, and jeans, not purple stretch pants with green-and-blue smocks. She bought everything but what I requested, so I wore my own clothes to work, thinking she was just absent-minded. I was still clueless about the extent of the subterfuge.

Eventually she told me that she had been told by one of Matt’s producers—his chief mouthpiece—“not to listen to what Roseanne wants to wear.” This producer was a woman, a type I became acquainted with at the beginning of my stand-up career in Denver. I cared little for them: blondes in high heels who were so anxious to reach the professional level of the men they worshipped, fawned over, served, built up, and flattered that they would stab other women in the back. They are the ultimate weapon used by men against actual feminists who try to work in media, and they are never friends to other women, you can trust me on that.

I grabbed a pair of wardrobe scissors and ran up to the big house to confront the producer. (The “big house” was what I called the writers’ building. I rarely went there, since it was disgusting. Within minutes, one of the writers would crack a stinky-pussy joke that would make me want to murder them. Male writers have zero interest in being nice to women, including their own assistants, few of whom are ever promoted to the rank of “writer,” even though they do all the work while the guys sit on their asses taking the credit. Those are the women who deserve the utmost respect.) I walked into this woman’s office, held the scissors up to show her I meant business, and said, “Bitch, do you want me to cut you?” We stood there for a second or two, just so I could make sure she was receptive to my POV. I asked why she had told the wardrobe master to not listen to me, and she said, “Because we do not like the way you choose to portray this character.” I said, “This is no fucking character! This is my show, and I created it—not Matt, and not Carsey-Werner, and not ABC. You watch me. I will win this battle if I have to kill every last white bitch in high heels around here.”

The next battle came when Matt sent down a line for me that I found incredibly insulting—not just to myself but to John, who I was in love with, secretly. The line was a ridiculously sexist interpretation of what a feminist thinks—something to the effect of “You’re my equal in bed, but that’s it.” I could not say it convincingly enough for Matt, and his hand-picked director walked over and gave me a note in front of the entire crew: “Say it like you mean it … That is a direct note from Matt.” What followed went something like this: My lovely acting coach, Roxanne Rogers (a sister of Sam Shepard), piped up and said, “Never give an actor a note in front of the crew. Take her aside and give her the note privately—that is what good directors do.” She made sure to say this in front of the entire crew. Then she suggested that I request a line change. So I did. Matt, who was watching from his office, yelled over the loudspeaker, “Say the line as written!” I said, “No, I don’t like the line. I find it repulsive, and my character would not say it.” Matt said, “Yes, she would say it. She’s hot to trot and to get her husband in bed with her, and give it to her like she wants it.” I replied that this was not what she would say or do: “It’s a castrating line that only an idiot would think to write for a real live woman who loves her husband, you cocksucker.” ABC’s lawyers were called in. They stood around the bed while the cameras filmed me saying, very politely, over and over, “Line change, please.” After four hours of this, I called my then-lawyer, Barry Hirsch, and demanded to be let out of my contract. I couldn’t take it any longer—the abuse, humiliation, theft, and lack of respect for my work, my health, my life. He explained that he had let it go on for hours on purpose and that I had finally won. He had sent a letter to the network and Carsey-Werner that said, “Matt wasted money that he could have saved with a simple line change. He cost you four hours in production budget.” That turned the tide in my favor.

Barry told me Matt would be gone after the thirteenth episode. Which didn’t stop him from making my life hell until then. Some days, I’d just stand in the set’s kitchen weeping loudly. The crew would surround me and encourage me to continue. CJ, one of my favorite cameramen—an ­African-­American married to a white woman—would say, “Come on, Rosie, I need this job. I have five kids, and two of them are white!”

I was constantly thinking about my own kids’ being able to go to college, and I wrote jokes like a machine—jokes that I insisted be included in the scripts (lots of times, the writers would tell me that the pages got lost). But thanks to Barry, my then-manager Arlyne Rothberg, Roxanne, my brave dyke sister Geraldine Barr, the cast of great actors, the crew—who became my drinking buddies—the wardrobe department, and the craft-services folks, I showed up and lived out the first thirteen episodes, after which Matt left. Without all of them, I never would have made it. (Most of the crew now work for Chuck Lorre, who I fired from my show; his sitcoms star some of my co-stars and tackle many of the subjects Roseanne did. Imitation is the sincerest form of show business.)

Matt stayed just long enough to ensure him a lifetime’s worth of residuals. Another head writer was brought on, and at first he actually tried to listen to what I wanted to do. But within a few shows, I realized he wasn’t much more of a team player than Matt. He brought his own writers with him, all male, all old. Most of them had probably never worked with a woman who did not serve them coffee. It must have been a shock to their system to find me in a position to disapprove their jokes.

When the show went to No. 1 in December 1988, ABC sent a chocolate “1” to congratulate me. Guess they figured that would keep the fat lady happy—or maybe they thought I hadn’t heard (along with the world) that male stars with No. 1 shows were given Bentleys and Porsches. So me and George Clooney [who played Roseanne Conner’s boss for the first season] took my chocolate prize outside, where I snapped a picture of him hitting it with a baseball bat. I sent that to ABC.

Not long after that, I cleaned house. Honestly, I enjoyed firing the people I’d checked on the back of my dressing-room door. The writers packed their bags and went to join Matt on Tim Allen’s new show, Home Improvement, so none of them suffered at all. Tim didn’t get credit either.

But at least everyone began to credit me. I was assumed to be a genius and eccentric instead of a crazy bitch, and for a while it felt pretty nice. I hired comics that I had worked with in clubs, rather than script writers. I promoted several of the female assistants—who had done all the work of assembling the scripts ­anyway—to full writers. (I did that for one or two members of my crew as well.) I gave Joss Whedon and Judd Apatow their first writing jobs, as well as many other untried writers who went on to great success.

Call me immodest—moi?—but I honestly think Roseanne is even more ahead of its time today, when Americans are, to use a technical term from classical economics, screwed. We had our fun; it was a sitcom. But it also wasn’t The Brady Bunch; the kids were wiseasses, and so were the parents. I and the mostly great writers in charge of crafting the show ­every week never forgot that we needed to make people laugh, but the struggle to survive, and to break taboos, was equally important. And that was my goal from the beginning.

The end of my addiction to fame happened at the exact moment Roseanne dropped out of the top ten, in the seventh of our nine seasons. It was mysteriously instantaneous! I clearly remember that blackest of days, when I had my office call the Palm restaurant for reservations on a Saturday night, at the last second as per usual. My assistant, Hilary, who is still working for me, said—while clutching the phone to her chest with a look of horror, a look I can recall now as though it were only yesterday: “The Palm said they are full!” Knowing what that really meant sent me over the edge. It was a gut shot with a sawed-off scattershot, buckshot-loaded pellet gun. I made Hil call the Palm back, disguise her voice, and say she was calling from the offices of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Instantly, Hil was given the big 10-4 by the Palm management team. I became enraged, and though she was uncomfortable doing it (Hil is a professional woman), I forced her to call back at 7:55 and cancel the 8:00 reservation, saying that Roseanne—who had joined Tom and Nicole’s party of seven—had persuaded them to join her at Denny’s on Sunset Boulevard.

The feeling of being used all those years just because I was in the top ten—not for my money or even my gluttony—was sobering indeed. I vowed that I would make a complete change top to bottom and rid myself of the desires that had laid me low. (I also stopped eating meat for a year, out of bitterness and mourning for the Palm’s bone-in rib-eye steaks.) As inevitably happens to all stars, I could not look myself in the mirror for one more second. My dependence on empty flattery, without which I feared I would evaporate, masked a deeper addiction to the bizarro world of fame. I had sold my time and company at deflated prices just for the thrill of reserving the best tables at the best restaurants at the very last minute with a phone call to the maître d’—or the owner himself, whose friendship I coddled just to ensure premium access to the aforementioned, unbelievably good smoked-salmon pizza.

I finally found the right lawyer to tell me what scares TV producers worse than anything—too late for me. What scares these guys—who think that the perks of success include humiliating and destroying the star they work for (read Lorre’s personal attacks on Charlie Sheen in his vanity cards at the end of Two and a Half Men)—isn’t getting caught stealing or being made to pay for that; it’s being charged with fostering a “hostile work environment.” If I could do it all over, I’d sue ABC and Carsey-­Werner under those provisions. Hollywood hates labor, and hates shows about labor worse than any other thing. And that’s why you won’t be seeing another Roseanne anytime soon. Instead, all over the tube, you will find enterprising, overmedicated, painted-up, capitalist whores claiming to be housewives. But I’m not bitter.

Nothing real or truthful makes its way to TV unless you are smart and know how to sneak it in, and I would tell you how I did it, but then I would have to kill you. Based on Two and a Half Men’s success, it seems viewers now prefer their comedy dumb and sexist. Charlie Sheen was the world’s most famous john, and a sitcom was written around him. That just says it all. Doing tons of drugs, smacking prostitutes around, holding a knife up to the head of your wife—sure, that sounds like a dream come true for so many guys out there, but that doesn’t make it right! People do what they can get away with (or figure they can), and Sheen is, in fact, a product of what we call politely the “culture.” Where I can relate to the Charlie stuff is his undisguised contempt for certain people in his work environment and his unwillingness to play a role that’s expected of him on his own time.

But, again, I’m not bitter. I’m really not. The fact that my fans have thanked and encouraged me for doing what I used to get in trouble for doing (shooting my big mouth off) has been very healing. And somewhere along the way, I realized that TV and our culture had changed because of a woman named Roseanne Conner, whom I am honored to have written jokes for.

Barr now lives in Hawaii, where she farms macadamia nuts. She has a new book, Roseannearchy (Gallery; $26), and will return to TV in Roseanne’s Nuts, a Lifetime reality show.

NY Mag

via

and via

Through June 18, 2011

Mitchell Innes & Nash

Inside Homeboy Industries. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)

By Gregory J. Boyle
The Los Angeles Times
May 11, 2011

Lorenzo had a hard time concealing his nervousness. Standing in front of a large room packed with Boeing employees in late March, the tall, lanky African American gang member described the arc of his life. At 22, he had spent nearly a third of his life incarcerated.

Peering out of his round, black-rimmed glasses, he talked about his seven months at Homeboy Industries (the largest gang reentry program in the country), and about how he had moved quickly from the janitorial team to become an assistant in the accounting department. “I used to steal money,” he said. “Now I’m counting it.”

I had the honor of witnessing Lorenzo’s seven-month journey from convict to accounting assistant, watching as he became the young man God had in mind when he made him. But despite his remarkable turnaround and the many things he had to offer an employer, Lorenzo’s prospects for finding a job outside our program were dim.

Opportunities for second chances are few for people like Lorenzo. Homeboy Industries is about the only game in town. Most employers just aren’t willing to look beyond the dumbest or worst thing someone has done.

Another “homie” recently came to me for help after, for the third time, he was let go from a job because his employer had discovered he’d done five years in prison. He told me the boss said, “You’re one of our best workers, but we have to let you go.” Then, with a desperate sadness, the young man added: “Damn, G. No one told me I’d be getting a life sentence of no work.”

The business of second chances is everybody’s business. We lose our right to be surprised that California has the highest recidivism rate in the country if we refuse to hire folks who have taken responsibility for their crimes and have done their time.

Even in this alarming economic climate, where the pool of prospective employees is larger than ever, we need to find the moral imperative as a society to secure places in our workforce for those who just need a chance to prove themselves. This can’t be the concern only of a large gang rehab center; it must also be part of our collective response to keep our streets safe and our communities healthy.

As a society, we come up lacking in many of the marks of compassion and wisdom by which we measure ourselves as civilized.

We are among the handful of countries that has difficulty distinguishing juveniles from adults where crime is concerned. We are convinced that if a child commits an adult crime, that kid is magically transformed into an adult. Consequently, we try juveniles as adults. We still execute people. And we belong to a small, exclusive club of countries that brands felons forever and denies them voting rights, access to employment and, sometimes, even housing.

Delegations from all over the world visit Homeboy Industries and scratch their heads as we tell them of our difficulty in placing our people in jobs after their time with us. Americans’ seeming refusal to believe in a person’s ability to redeem himself strikes these folks as foreign indeed.

Waiting for a piece of legislation or an elected official’s change of heart would seem unwarranted. Instead, faith communities and networks of employers need to create a groundswell that will afford opportunity to a population long shut out and denied a chance at redemption. And because gang involvement has always been about a lethal absence of hope, making room in the workplace for those who have made mistakes could also make a big difference in our public safety. Such a movement could not be more timely, because jails and prisons in the state will soon begin to release large numbers of inmates to reduce prison crowding and save money.

The Boeing employees who witnessed Lorenzo’s testimony knew instantly that they were in the presence of a young man who was a whole lot more than his rap sheet. But two weeks after his talk, Lorenzo was gunned down in a club — the 175th young person I’ve had to bury in my 25 years working with gang members. Tragically, his death came at the point in his life when Lorenzo had finally begun to imagine his future and not his funeral, though he knew that society’s labels would limit him and weigh heavily.

The mark of our society as civilized will come when we embrace confidence in the power of redemption.

Gregory J. Boyle, a Jesuit priest, is executive director and founder of Homeboy Industries. He is the author of “Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.”

NY Times Published: May 15, 2011
Editorial

Last year, Republicans refused to renew unemployment benefits unless the high-end Bush-era tax cuts were preserved. After the White House agreed to keep the tax cuts through 2012, they agreed to extend federal jobless benefits through 2011. Now, they want to renege.

The House Ways and Means Committee, on a strict Republican vote, recently passed a bill to let states use federal jobless money for other purposes, including tax cuts for business. This is a very bad idea at a time when the national jobless rate is 9 percent, and higher than that in 22 states. The $31 billion in yet to be paid federal benefits is desperately needed.

State unemployment benefits end after six months. Federal benefits, which average $293 a week, then kick in. In better times six months may be a reasonable period to expect a laid-off worker to find another job. But not these days. Right now, more than four million families depend on extended federal benefits to get by.

The bill would let states use the federal jobless money to pay debt that would otherwise have to be paid by raising business taxes. In particular, the bill could get businesses off the hook for increases that will be needed to repay $41 billion in federal loans that states took to cover shortfalls in their unemployment funds.

The tax increases would be largely automatic, because if a state does not pay back its loans within two years — which states are hard pressed to do — the federal government is required to recoup the money by raising federal unemployment taxes on employers in the state.

That leads to two important points. No one thinks it is a good idea to hit businesses with big tax increases when the economy is fragile. Nor is it necessary to stiff jobless workers to give businesses tax relief. Instead, Congress could delay and reduce the taxes until the economy is stronger, by forgiving loans for states that rebuild their funds — a fix detailed in a Senate bill by Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.

Republicans, however, aren’t looking to restore the funds to long-term solvency; they want to cut taxes no matter what the cost. And their business constituents — who have resisted paying unemployment taxes in good times as well as bad — don’t want to pay more taxes into the system, even after the economy has recovered.

That’s where the House bill comes in. Its main proponent, Representative Dave Camp, the Ways and Means chairman, says that under the bill, states can keep paying full federal benefits. But he also says they need the “flexibility” to prevent “job-killing tax hikes.”

Arkansas, Florida, Michigan and Missouri have passed their own laws this year that will cut business taxes by reducing the standard 26 weeks of state benefits, starting in 2012. Other states are also weighing cutbacks.

The Ways and Means bill has little chance of passing the Senate with the Democrats in charge. But it provides dangerous fuel to antitax efforts in the states. And it presages more fights to come in Washington.

Joblessness is not expected to fall much this year, so come 2012, federal benefits will need to be renewed. Republicans are sure to resist, even though the arguments for renewal are sound: the benefits bolster the economy by supporting consumption and they are a humane response to economic calamity. There are better ways to help the states and bolster business during tough times. Reducing unemployment benefits is the wrong choice.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: May 15, 2011

Six months ago President Obama faced a hostage situation. Republicans threatened to block an extension of middle-class tax cuts unless Mr. Obama gave in and extended tax cuts for the rich too. And the president essentially folded, giving the G.O.P. everything it wanted.

Now, predictably, the hostage-takers are back: blackmail worked well last December, so why not try it again? This time House Republicans say they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling — a step that could inflict major economic damage — unless Mr. Obama agrees to large spending cuts, even as they rule out any tax increase whatsoever. And the question becomes what, if anything, will get the president to say no.

The debt ceiling itself is a strange feature of U.S. law: since Congress must vote to authorize spending and choose tax rates, why have a second vote on whether to allow the borrowing that these spending and taxation policies imply? In practice, however, legislators have historically been willing to raise the debt ceiling as necessary, so this quirk in our system hasn’t mattered very much — until now.

What has changed? The answer is the radicalization of the Republican Party. Normally, a party controlling neither the White House nor the Senate would acknowledge that it isn’t in a position to impose its agenda on the nation. But the modern G.O.P. doesn’t believe in following normal rules.

So what will happen if the ceiling isn’t raised? It has become fashionable on the right to assert that it would be no big deal. On Saturday the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal ridiculed those worried about the consequences of hitting the ceiling as the “Armageddon lobby.”

It’s hard to know whether the “what, us worry?” types believe what they’re saying, or whether they’re just staking out a bargaining position. But in any case, they’re almost surely wrong: seriously bad consequences will follow if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.

For if we hit the debt ceiling, the government will be forced to stop paying roughly a third of its bills, because that’s the share of spending currently financed by borrowing. So will it stop sending out Social Security checks? Will it stop paying doctors and hospitals that treat Medicare patients? Will it stop paying the contractors supplying fuel and munitions to our military? Or will it stop paying interest on the debt?

Don’t say “none of the above.” As I’ve written before, the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army, so I’ve just described all the major components of federal spending. At least one, and probably several, of these components will face payment stoppages if federal borrowing is cut off.

And what would such payment stops do to the economy? Nothing good. Consumer spending would probably crash, as nervous seniors started wondering how to pay for rent and food. Businesses that depend on government purchases would slash payrolls and cancel investments.

Furthermore, markets might well panic, especially if interest payments are missed. And the consequences of undermining faith in U.S. debt might be especially severe because that debt plays a crucial role in many financial transactions.

So hitting the debt ceiling would be a very bad thing. Unfortunately, it may be unavoidable.

Why? Because this is a hostage situation. If the president and his allies operate on the principle that failure to raise the debt ceiling is an unthinkable outcome, to be avoided at all cost, then they have ceded all power to those willing to bring that outcome about. In effect, they will have ripped up the Constitution and given control over America’s government to a party that only controls one house of Congress, but claims to be willing to bring down the economy unless it gets what it wants.

Now, there are good reasons to believe that the G.O.P. isn’t nearly as willing to burn the house down as it claims. Business interests have made it clear that they’re horrified at the prospect of hitting the debt ceiling. Even the virulently anti-Obama U.S. Chamber of Commerce has urged Congress to raise the ceiling “as expeditiously as possible.” And a confrontation over spending would only highlight the fact that Republicans won big last year largely by promising to protect Medicare, then promptly voted to dismantle the program.

But the president can’t call the extortionists’ bluff unless he’s willing to confront them, and accept the associated risks.

According to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, Mr. Obama has told Democrats not to draw any “line in the sand” in debt negotiations. Well, count me among those who find this strategy completely baffling. At some point — and sooner rather than later — the president has to draw a line. Otherwise, he might as well move out of the White House, and hand the keys over to the Tea Party.

littleBits founded by Ayah Bdeir

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
NY Times Published: May 13, 2011

Late in 2007, Ayah Bdeir was working in a plush office in Midtown Manhattan, making a lot of money and feeling miserable. She was a financial-software consultant for a technology company. One of her specialties was peddling software for credit-default swaps — among the many complex financial instruments that would soon wreak havoc on the planet. Somewhere there was a thing from which these derivatives were derived, but Bdeir, atop countless layers of transacting, was too far away to see it, much less touch it.

Bdeir is 28, a petite and round-faced woman, gregarious and combustible. As she describes it now, the virtuality of her working life was deeply upsetting; she felt surrounded by the inconsequential, the endless conversation about how to display the nominal on PowerPoints that called for the making of future PowerPoints. Just before year’s end, Bdeir quit. She secured a fellowship, for considerably lower pay, from an art and technology center in Chelsea. She knew that she wanted her next project to be the opposite of a credit-default swap — tangible, constructive. And then it hit her: the opposite of her make-believe transacting would be to make things. A few years earlier, as a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, she fell in with a community that was trying to transform manufacturing — a new kind of small-scale, local manufacturing that could be done in the home, with machines no bigger than a microwave. Bdeir now resolved, over the strenuous objection of her mother and several friends, to become a new-age manufacturer.

At first, she pursued the idea as a financial-industry software executive might: she researched making, made plans to make and made PowerPoints about making. Meanwhile, she made nothing. Then, while earning some money by training not-very-tech-savvy designers in the use of electronics, Bdeir had the idea, in collaboration with a colleague, of making electronics components into Lego-like bricks that could be used by anybody, even the technically ungifted. She would make sets of self-contained bricks, filled with circuits, sensors, solar panels and motors that could be snapped together to create basic machines — for instance, a battery connected to a bulb and a pressure sensor that can illuminate or dim it. She would make things and allow others to make other things.

She would eventually turn the brick project into a business, selling $99 kits, called littleBits, for people to make their own crude gadgets. She wagered her career on the belief that in her resistance to the virtual, in her longing to make something actual, she was not alone.

And she wasn’t. Even as one boom era hurtled toward its end, a diffuse global community of nerds was at work on what it hoped would fuel the next one. They were coming to the same conclusion as Ayah Bdeir — that the new new thing was, in fact, things.

If you lived in Detroit in 1961 and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” at a drive-in, you might have caught a 30-minute trailer called “American Maker,” sponsored by Chevrolet. “Of all things Americans are, we are makers,” its narrator began, over footage of boys building sand castles. “With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form and we fashion: makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers.”

Fifty years on, the American maker is in a bad way. Such is the state of American industry that waste paper is among the top 10 exports to China, behind nuclear equipment but far ahead of traditional mainstays like iron and steel. Manufacturing employment has fallen by a third in the last decade alone, with more than 40,000 factories shutting down. More Americans today are unemployed than are wage-earning “put-it-togetherers.” But the American romance with making actual things is going through a resurgence. In recent years, a nationwide movement of do-it-yourself aficionados has embraced the self-made object. Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump. America will make things again, they say, because Americans will make things — not just in factories but also in their own homes, and not because it’s artisanal or faddish but because it’s easier, better for the environment and more fun.

What makes this notion something less than complete fantasy is the availability of new manufacturing machines that are cheap, simple and compact enough for small companies, local associations and even amateur hobbyists to own and operate. What once only big firms with hulking factories could fabricate can now be made in a basement or by e-mailing a design to an online factory-for-hire. These machines can produce all sorts of things, including plastic pencil holders, eyeglass frames and MP3 players.

Makers, as they call themselves, can’t compete with the long, orderly rows of workers from the poorer provinces of China or India who cut, stitch and solder bras, shoes and cellphones for pennies — or even with the hundreds of billions of dollars a year worth of stuff that continues to pour out of large, old-fashioned American factories. Their method involves creating “hacker space” cooperatives, where a few dozen members share a 3-D printer, a laser cutter and an oscilloscope and engage in collaborative manufacturing projects. Makers have created companies like Shapeways and CloudFab, which for a fee will manufacture small runs of products that you design. They are becoming kit makers like Bdeir, manufacturing building blocks that allow others to create things.

Neil Gershenfeld, an M.I.T. physicist who is an intellectual godfather to the maker movement, suggested to me that the new tools would over time change global industry as we know it. He predicts a wave of new competitors for the megacorporation that designs, makes and sells products all under one brand. Instead, Gershenfeld imagines a consumer of the near future downloading a design for a mobile phone through an iTunes-like portal; buying an add-on from another firm that tweaks the design; and having it printed at a neighborhood shop in a plastic shell of your choice.

The new personal factories may seem like crude toys for only the most die-hard D.I.Y.-ers. But in technology circles, they are talked about as a looming revolution that could change the way people work and create new opportunities for millions. Personal factories can perhaps be compared to the earliest personal computers — versions of their giant counterparts that are drastically cheaper but also slower and more clumsy. This futuristic vision is the one that the White House endorsed in a recent report on personal manufacturing: “Within a generation, you will have a hard time explaining to your grandchildren how you were able to live without your own fabber,” it said, using a popular word for the new manufacturing tools. “Personal-fabrication technologies present an opportunity for our nation to continue to lead the rest of the world in manufacturing, but in a new way.”

Before they could create their own little manufacturing hub in Detroit, Andrew and Ted Sliwinski and their associates had to cleanse their industrial space of the stench of meat. Bucket after bucket of hydrogen peroxide and bleach helped to turn a former cold-storage warehouse in the Eastern Market of Detroit into a D.I.Y. manufacturing cooperative.

The Sliwinski brothers came to Detroit from the suburbs of Philadelphia with the romantic notion of partaking in a revival of the city’s tradition of making things. They and their colleagues rent the 7,200-square-foot warehouse, where more than two dozen members of the cooperative share laser cutters, 3-D printers, plastic vacuums and power drills. The ground floor holds the more basic appliances — drills and saws and such. Once a week, they open up the space, named OmniCorpDetroit, to the public for an “open hack night” — something that many cooperatives do. (Since our meeting, Andrew decided to move again, to California, where he plans to establish a new hacker space.)

Andrew and Ted have their desks upstairs, where the fancier work is done: there are electronics-making stations, with oscilloscopes and other tools; a community sewing center with machines that do complex embroidery; there is MakerBot Industries’ CupCake CNC, a so-called 3-D printer that spits out small plastic wares. Makers describe it as the IBM PC of personal factories — at $699 and sold in kits for assembly at home, it is the democratizing technology.

When I was there, I felt an urge to make something of my own. Andrew volunteered to help. He is 28 and slender, with a thick, rust-hued beard. He was wearing a wool hat, thick-framed plastic glasses, a black hoodie and black jeans, giving him more the look of know-it-all record-store clerk than of manufacturing champion. But the man knew what he was doing. He guided me to the Web site Thingiverse.com, which abounds in digital models — three-dimensional files that the CupCake can print out. I browsed and chose an iPad stand.

I downloaded the files, and the computer processed them. The CupCake is a wood box, about the size of a blender, with open windows on three sides. The fourth side is covered with a rainbow thicket of wires and circuits; a spool of black plastic coil, which is melted to create the final object, poked in through the roof. As we instructed the computer to print, Andrew warned,“Oh, yeah, and it will start to smell like burning plastic.”

Which it soon did. The CupCake began to print. First the nozzle moved back and forth smoothly, dropping black plastic in neat rows. It was building a base for my object. Then it began to jitterbug, dashing unpredictably this way and that, depositing bits of the melting goo one layer at a time. Slowly it formed an iPad stand. But then, 19 minutes in, the machine lost the plot and began to squirt everywhere, and we had to start over.

We raised the melting temperature and tried again. Failure once more. Andrew tinkered with the machine and repeatedly muttered, “It’s not superhappy right now.” It was hard not to wonder whether it wouldn’t be easier just to have the Chinese do it.

Andrew said that the design I picked might have been flawed. We decided to try something easier: a hexagonal nut. At last, in less than half an hour, we had our perfect little nut. It was simple, unambitious and wonderful, though it might have been quicker to get it at a hardware store.

At the end of a long day, I accompanied a handful of makers to dinner at the nearby Cass Cafe. It was full of students and the artsy types now trickling into the city. Detroiters have various levels of appreciation and contempt for these outsiders, with their taste for all things free-range, open-source and wiki. OmniCorp fits well into this mix, because for its members and others in the maker community, manufacturing is about more than economic renewal; it is also about pushing back against the passivity that technology has bred, about being a smart consumer who knows what goes into your stuff. Making, for some, is a new liberal virtue. Andrew told me one day: “There is something calming or reassuring or relaxing that happens when you build something with your hands. You’ve just made something bigger than yourself. You’re not just being a consumer anymore.”

When Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone went office hunting in New York and found the perfect loft five blocks from Wall Street, they ran into two peculiar requirements from the landlord: they could rent the place if they had nothing to do with hedge funds and investment banks and if they could produce bank statements showing that their rent money was kept in such banalities as savings accounts, not in derivatives or futures. The landlord learned a lesson from the previous tenant, a trader who vacated when Wall Street collapsed.

The landlord was sufficiently reassured by the nature of the business, which is to do in a $6,000-a-month Manhattan apartment what the conventional wisdom says can profitably be done only in Shenzhen. Their company, Adafruit Industries, sells do-it-yourself electronics kits, which they manufacture and ship so that you, in turn, can make your own crude iPod equivalent or bespoke baby monitor or D.I.Y. phone charger. They are regarded as trailblazers among their fellow makers, because they actually manufacture in Manhattan and profitably. According to Torrone, the company had $2 million in sales in 2009, up from $60,000 in 2005, its first year.

In Adafruit’s spacious loft, seven full-time employees, Torrone and Fried, the engineer-founder who owns the company, labor away on the kits. The full-timers are paid more than $50,000 a year and receive health benefits. I asked Torrone, the creative director, how it was possible to compensate these employees and create physical things profitably in Manhattan. He told me that making things right where they are invented allows Adafruit to build, test and perfect new products more swiftly. The higher price of rent and labor are balanced by a reduction in shipping bills, so that the costs are manageable. One of the company’s best-selling kits, for a battery-powered cellphone charger, costs Adafruit $6 in parts and labor, Torrone said, and is sold to retailers for roughly $12. Moreover, he said, being in New York gives the company access to creativity and talent that is worth paying for.

“It would be cheaper if we were in the middle of nowhere,” Torrone told me, “but we’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere.”

Adafruit also illustrates how a good part of this new manufacturing operates through open-source sharing and what can be called social tinkering, in contrast with the manufacturing of the past, which emphasized patents, trade secrets and proprietary invention. Fried got the idea for such a company when, as a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, she began making simple MP3 players and cellphone jammers, just for nerdy kicks, and made the recipes for her creations — CAD files, software, mechanical drawings — public on her blog. Requests poured in for kits that would allow people to make what she designed, and Adafruit was born.

Today Adafruit remains an open-source company. It publicizes how its kits are made, so that you can clone them, and also reveals how it runs as a business. The company says which Internet service provider it uses, which shipping company, which software runs its online shopping system. Torrone told me that they share this information so that other companies, including rivals, can cut to the chase of genuine discovery and not get bogged down reinventing wheels.

At Adafruit, I did some quality-assurance work, which seemed a good way of understanding what the company did. I tested 40 circuit boards by pressing them against a set of pins. Thirty-seven passed. I placed each board in a pink bag and heat-sealed it. Later, I ran checks on bagged kits to find which of three clear light bulbs mistakenly shone yellow when electrified.

It was surreal to do this assembly-line work in Lower Manhattan. It felt like a violation of the economic laws of nature. The tasks were at once mindless and engaging. They required focus, because if you were distracted for a minute, you would mess up and your error would ramify into the world. But it also felt as if it could get old fairly quickly. The most invigorating part was that I didn’t think about e-mail, my phone or Twitter while I was making. I was, against all modern odds, indivisibly present.

It was that very feeling that Ayah Bdeir craved after leaving the world of finance. When that world tumbled into full-fledged crisis at the end of 2008, pangs of guilt shot through her. It was her swaps that had done this. “I was shocked, and I felt bad, because somehow I was contributing to this injustice, and I had no idea,” she told me. “I felt guilty for a while. I have three degrees; I speak three languages; I pride myself on my scientific and mathematical thinking — how could I not have understood the social, economic and political dimensions of something that I was working on that ended up ruining the world?”

She has now found peace in her littleBits. On my trip to New York, I was able to play with her prototype kit. (The real ones, a first batch of 300, will be shipped to customers this spring.) The little Lego-like bricks snapped together magnetically and repelled one another when you put them the wrong way, which prevents electric shocks or unintentional meltdowns. The kit is simple enough for children to play with. But Bdeir keeps a black notebook of ideas for future bricks that she hopes will allow customers to make more-complex machines.

She told me that when she received the packaging for her prototype and finally had the total kit in hand, as it would come to customers, she sent her family an e-mail: “LittleBits exists in the world because of me.” It was the heralding of the new and a last swipe at her own past: she now could boast of a real and tangible contribution — something that was because she made it.

Circulation 2011
19 x 8 x 120 inches
48.3 x 20.3 x 304.8 cm
enamel paint on aluminum

Through June 18, 2011

damelioterras

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

By RIMA SUQI
NY Times Published: May 11, 2011

Dieter Rams is considered by many to be a design legend. The 78-year-old German designer is probably best known for the work he did as the design director at Braun (a job he held from 1961 until 1997), where he was responsible for some of the best-looking and -sounding stereo components ever made, along with a host of other products like shavers and kitchen appliances. He has inspired a number of other designers, including Jasper Morrison, Naoto Fukasawa and Jonathan Ive, the senior vice president for industrial design at Apple, who wrote the foreword to “As Little Design as Possible: The Work of Dieter Rams,” by Sophie Lovell, out next month from Phaidon Press.

Mr. Rams was recently in town to celebrate the 50th birthday of his 606 Universal Shelving System and to attend the opening of the corresponding exhibition, “60s 606 Is 50,” at the Vitsoe showroom in NoHo. On a recent afternoon, he was dressed in a sharp tan corduroy suit, wearing his trademark horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a cane, when he met a reporter at Vitsoe, a company created in 1959 to produce his designs.

That’s a nice cane.

The cane was a present from Nanna Ditzel 40 years ago. I never knew at that time I would need it one day. I had an operation. I have a new part in my knee, some mechanical thing.

Are you enjoying New York?

I like to be in New York. Le Corbusier described it in the 1930s as a “wonderful catastrophe.” It is still a wonderful catastrophe, but inspiring. One thing I am crazy about is the seafood — the littleneck clams. I like them very much, at that place in Grand Central Station.

The Oyster Bar?

Yes, it is always busy.

Are you really retired? You don’t seem like the retiring type.

Yes. I sit, I think, I make some drawings. As a designer, you cannot retire totally. I have some new things coming, but it’s a question of investigation and some money.

What’s an average day for you?

I am not an early bird. I go to bed normally between midnight and 1 o’clock, so it is understandable that I cannot be an early bird. I wake up around 9 o’clock. Even when I was with Braun, and I was responsible for a lot of people, if they had meetings, I had to be there at 8 or the latest 9. But if there were no meetings, I always tried not to start before 9 o’clock.

You have a very nice Japanese-style garden at your home in Kronberg.

I was often in Japan for Braun, and I was always fascinated by the Japanese garden.

What about it?

The whole arrangement, with the water, the stones, how they cut the trees down to bonsais. So I decided, as I built my house in 1971, not only to insulate the swimming pool but also to make a garden influenced by the Japanese gardens.

There is always something to do there — it’s a kind of design to cut the trees in a way that they are not getting bigger but still have their own charisma. But it is not a real Japanese garden, because we have different weather, so I call it a Japanese-inspired European garden. You have to spend a lot of time on it, and sometimes I don’t have the time, so I hear about it from my wife.

How did you meet your wife?

She’s a photographer. I was falling in love with a photographer who was a friend of hers. They studied together. Then she, the first, decided to marry another man, and leave me with her friend.

So it happened that we lived together a long time without being married; we married after 10 years. We don’t have children. We had a cat — she died — and now we can’t decide if we should get a new one. She was a very special cat.

Are you an only child?

I am the only child. And it was not a nice time. My parents decided in 1940 or 1939 that they couldn’t live anymore together; I was sent to boarding school. I was 14 or 15 as the war was ending. I was living mostly with my grandparents, because before, during the war, everything was difficult. The schools were closed because of the bombings. So I came back to my birth city, Wiesbaden, not far from Frankfurt, and stayed with my grandparents. My grandfather was a carpenter, he specialized in surfaces. I learned from him how to polish pianos, for example.

Were you interested in that?

My interest was to stay with architecture, with additional studies for landscape planning.

You mean urban planning?

Yes. I think it is now very important. There is a lot of bad architecture. What we need more is to look at how our landscape should look in the next decades.

What’s wonderful in New York is that old train park. I want to see that.

The High Line can get very crowded — you should go early. Tell me more about your home. For someone who advocates having “less,” you seem to have collected a lot of things there.

If I don’t have those things, I cannot improve them. I have to work with those things. It doesn’t end when you are finished, especially with the shelf system. It’s improved in a lot of details.

Are you still trying to improve other things?

Most of the things are done already — you can’t make it better. Look at chairs: there are enough chairs. There are bad chairs, some good ones, mostly bad ones. But there are, even with a chair, possibilities to make it more comfortable or, from the economic point, you can make it cheaper, save some material or you can try new materials.

I hear you’ve started a foundation.

The idea behind it is to help young designers to get an education.

Will it also provide funds to preserve your house?

The house belongs to the foundation.

It must be odd to think about things like that.

People say that the house, with all the things, it looks like a museum. Of course it does. There are all those things I worked on, and some things I am still working on. We have nobody, no children. That is the reason we made the foundation. I am interested that it stays in the right hands.

System 4, Hummingbird, 2011

2 x 4″, bolts, plastic-coated cable, 1/2″ painted pine plywood, acrylic artist’s color, 4 x 4″ pine, painted Styrofoam, black gesso, 1/2″ pine plywood, acrylic, yellow gelatin, staples, nails, 1/2″ molding strips, 1″ pine plywood, wall paint, balsa wood with acrylic, armature wire, scotch tape, aluminum wire, molding strips, birch plywood, monofilament, eyebolt
8′ x 92″ x 92″ (243.8 cm x 233.7 cm x 233.7 cm)

Through July 22, 2011

Pace

Rebecca from d k on Vimeo.

Rebecca Morris is enviably unapologetic – a trait I find particularly impressive in women, considering for many of us, “I’m sorry” were amongst our first spoken words.
This is not to say Rebecca is anything close to callous or oblivious to those around her – It’s just that she seems to exist in a well-constructed, well-calculated world with little thought to how others may perceive it. She balances herself effortlessly on the teeny tiny space between passionate drive (writing a manifesto) and indifference (really not giving a shit).

How Did I Get Here

Through June 18, 2011

1301PE

via

NY Times Published May 10, 2011
By MARK BITTMAN

If you have gone to school, worked in an office, factory, or other large workplace, you’ve probably eaten — and hated — your fair share of institutional cooking. I still remember the name of the food service company that ran the cafeteria where I went to college, and I would still revile it, except it deserves partial credit for forcing me to learn how to cook.

Yet I have seen the future of cafeteria food, and it is bright.
This particular story begins at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. I visited its cafeteria on one of the Meatless Mondays instituted by Sodexo, one of the big-three food service companies in the country. Despite Sodexo’s claim to be “the world leader in quality of daily life solutions” — that’s really saying something! — I didn’t expect the food to be great, and indeed it wasn’t.

But it was better than I’d expected, and Meatless Monday was more than just hype: the company was clearly promoting healthy options in general, and meatless ones in particular. More important, the meatless dishes brought new thought and vigor — maybe even inspiration — to the menu, which in general was about what you’d imagine. Since then, Sodexo has expanded the Meatless Monday program to 2,000 locations, including Toyota and the Department of the Interior.

I have some issues with Meatless Mondays, a campaign developed at Johns Hopkins, because too many dishes that might have once featured meat contain prodigious amounts of cheese. (Portobello mushrooms are also in abundance, and that’s a great thing.) This substitution of cheese for meat isn’t universal, but it occurs frequently enough so that the main message is lost. The way to follow a diet that’s more sustainable for both body and planet is through eating plants and unprocessed food rather than animal products and ultra-processed food; substituting a cheese-heavy sandwich on white bread may send a somewhat beneficial “eat-less-meat” message, but it doesn’t send the same one as a salad or a vegetable stir-fry. Nor does it do you or anyone else any good.

An even better model is the Bon Appétit Management Company, a food service operation that’s part of the Compass Group. (Compass also owns Restaurant Associates, which runs the cafeteria at The Times.) I’ve visited three of Bon Appetit’s 400 locations in recent months, the “cafés” at the University of San Francisco (twice), Roger Williams University (in Bristol, RI) and one of their several locations at the University of Pennsylvania. While the last of these three was a small, nearly intimate scene — presumably making it less of a challenge to produce its astonishingly appealing food — the other two are sizable, serving upwards of 55,000 meals a week.

Bon Appétit Management Company, the brainchild of Fedele Bauccio, who founded the company in 1987 after a long career in food service, has gotten a fair share of well-deserved positive publicity. The chefs (and even the cooks, many of whom prepare the food they serve) have broad, independent powers, the food is locally sourced whenever possible and the company has committed — not just given lip service to — sustainable seafood, cage-free eggs, fair labor practices, antibiotic-free meat (when possible), a reduced carbon footprint in general, and a huge proportion of not only vegetarian but vegan options (their use of cheese has actually declined in recent years, a company-wide goal).

Furthermore, they do real, from-scratch cooking — no “bases” are used for stocks or sauces, soups, salad dressings and salsas are made from scratch, and even much of the lemon juice is fresh-squeezed. At one operation, the yogurt is made on premises. At Roger Williams, Rhode Island-grown potatoes are peeled and cut for frying, which puts the café ahead of many of the country’s top restaurants. (If you’re going to eat fries, this is the way to go.)

This is cafeteria food that you actually want to eat, food that deserves to be served with wine. At each of these operations, I ate from the same line as the students, and sampled a fantastic vegetarian muffaletta sandwich, vegetable-stuffed crepes, Indian “burritos” with spinach and tofu, tacos more reminiscent of Los Angeles than New York, stir-fries made to order and in-season, from-the-farm asparagus, turnips, lettuce, herbs and more. I can only imagine how good these cafeterias are come July.

I sat with the chefs at all three cafés, and I found them committed to showing customers a better way to eat. They’re demonstrating that mass-produced and mass-served food can in fact be real food. Bon Appétit does not share many of its numbers, but we can assume that while real ingredients costs less, preparing them costs more.

This is in general true of real cooking: you spend less on ingredients, because you’re not buying “value-added” junk — but you have to work a bit harder. To have this happen in the cafeteria, one of the most despised of all American institutions, is downright inspiring.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

The sculptor John Chamberlain in his studio at Shelter Island, N.Y.

By RANDY KENNEDY
NY Times Published: May 8, 2011

SHELTER ISLAND, N.Y. — When a visitor pulled up outside an elegant shingled house here on a recent morning, three intact cars with familiar names — a Mitsubishi, a Land Rover, a Ford — were parked in the driveway. Next to them, wheel-less and sitting atop shipping pallets, were two sinuous, towering conglomerations of paint-encrusted steel that had clearly once been cars but that had been crushed, twisted, crumpled and squeezed into another realm of existence, somewhere between oblivion and timelessness.

The names of these vehicular things, according to paper tags dangling from them, were ones Detroit would never have thought up: “Peaudesoiemusic” and for the other, “Wetstarsescort,” which sounded like the title of either a bebop album or a soft-core porn movie.

No tags were needed to identify the man responsible for these creations. Anyone with a passing familiarity with postwar American art would have been able to identify them across a football field as the work of John Chamberlain, who has almost singlehandedly given automotive metal a place in the history of sculpture.

Now 84 and in bad health for years, he no longer cuts the outsize, profane, hard-drinking and wildly industrious figure he once did in the art world. But he recently made big news when he left his gallery of more than 20 years, Pace, to join the larger, flashier empire of Gagosian, where a show of new pieces — including the two in the driveway, awaiting a truck — opened on Thursday on West 24th Street in Chelsea; another is to open on May 20 at one of Gagosian’s London outposts.

Mr. Chamberlain has never much liked granting audiences to people with notebooks or tape recorders. (Even when the Smithsonian Institution got him to sit down in 1991, the record noted: “Chamberlain was reluctant to be interviewed.”) But he extended an invitation for a reporter to visit, perhaps to demonstrate, as he prepares to step onto a larger stage, that he is still very much involved in the making of his pieces.

That morning, past 9,000 hangarlike square feet littered with scraps of fenders, car hoods rolled like tortillas and enough finished sculpture to fill a museum, Mr. Chamberlain was found sitting in a wicker chair in the living quarters of his studio, with his back to a big picture window. Next to him were his fourth wife, Prudence Fairweather, 60, and a combination walker and rolling chair, which he uses to get around. He was told that it was nice to meet him.

He extended a hand and looked up from beneath the brim of his black fedora. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that if I were you,” he said.

Today would not be a workday, he declared, if that was what anybody was expecting: “I work one day on, one day off now. I worked yesterday.” But in the middle of his studio space sits a strange battered-looking chair made out of piles of rubber bands. “And that’s where they park me,” he said, when he is making work. Sitting there he oversees a team of fabricators from Belgium who, at his direction, take up pieces of metal, sometimes put them in a big blue crushing machine, and weld or simply fit them together like puzzle pieces, rotating the sculpture as it comes together so he can see it.

His lungs are bad, and he can’t take much welding smoke, so he often wears a mask. Not long ago both the rubber-band chair and Mr. Chamberlain briefly caught fire when welding sparks shot the wrong way. “It freaked all of us out, naturally,” Ms. Fairweather said. “But for him it was just another day at the office, I guess.”

Born in Rochester, Ind., the son of a tavern keeper but raised mostly by his grandmother after his parents divorced, Mr. Chamberlain made his first sculptural works out of welded iron, in thrall to the Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith. But in the late 1950s he discovered that automotive detritus was both plentiful and already covered in wonderfully weathered paint that looked as if Willem de Kooning himself had put it there. “It was like, God, I finally found an art supply, and it was so cheap it just made you laugh,” he said.

Within a decade of becoming famous as the crushed-car sculptor, he grew weary of both the heavy metaphorical baggage usually hung on his pieces — that they represented the wreckage of Manifest Destiny or of the American dream itself — and the endless automotive questions. “What the hell — do you talk to a painter about what kind of paint he’s using?” he bellowed, sounding both menacing and comical, like Warren Oates doing a Walter Brennan impression. “It’s boring.”

He worked for many years on pieces made from other things, some as pliant as foam rubber, paper and foil. (He speaks of his obsession with the idea of “articulate wadding.”) But he has never completely abandoned his signature car parts. And a few years ago, when he and his wife came across an auction of the holdings of an unusual vintage car museum in Switzerland, they bought dozens of pristine 1940s and ’50s Cadillacs, Fords and Chevys. Mr. Chamberlain wasted no time, as he said with a gleam in his eye, taking them right to a shop and “yanking the motors out of them, and the transmissions and the brakes and the suspensions, the glass, all the wheels, the upholstery, the ——”

“Everything Chamberlain hates,” Ms. Fairweather interjected, using her husband’s last name, as she always does.

He cut her off, leaning forward and glaring: “Because it’s not useful to me!”

Wrestling with his own compromised corporeal material, he said, is a much more uncertain business. “I’m going through one of those multi-month illnesses that either you get through or you die,” he reported, matter-of-factly. “But I think I’m going to get through this one. Doing the work here is very helpful. If you stop working, that’s all she wrote.”

It would certainly be nice if he could smoke again. Or drink more, he said. (“I once had a drink with Billie Holiday, and I smoked a joint with Louis Armstrong. Those are my real claims to fame. Write that down.”) But he is on oxygen and doesn’t care for the mild clientele at Shelter Island bars. He sighed, stared at his visitor, grimaced, then grinned broadly, flashing his teeth.

“I could complain,” he said. “But I gave up complaining years ago. It never seems to do any good.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: May 8, 2011

The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe’s single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?

Well, what I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.

So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong.

The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.

Let me focus mainly on what happened in the United States, then say a few words about Europe.

These days Americans get constant lectures about the need to reduce the budget deficit. That focus in itself represents distorted priorities, since our immediate concern should be job creation. But suppose we restrict ourselves to talking about the deficit, and ask: What happened to the budget surplus the federal government had in 2000?

The answer is, three main things. First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade. Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so. And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs.

So who was responsible for these budget busters? It wasn’t the man in the street.

President George W. Bush cut taxes in the service of his party’s ideology, not in response to a groundswell of popular demand — and the bulk of the cuts went to a small, affluent minority.

Similarly, Mr. Bush chose to invade Iraq because that was something he and his advisers wanted to do, not because Americans were clamoring for war against a regime that had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, it took a highly deceptive sales campaign to get Americans to support the invasion, and even so, voters were never as solidly behind the war as America’s political and pundit elite.

Finally, the Great Recession was brought on by a runaway financial sector, empowered by reckless deregulation. And who was responsible for that deregulation? Powerful people in Washington with close ties to the financial industry, that’s who. Let me give a particular shout-out to Alan Greenspan, who played a crucial role both in financial deregulation and in the passage of the Bush tax cuts — and who is now, of course, among those hectoring us about the deficit.

So it was the bad judgment of the elite, not the greediness of the common man, that caused America’s deficit. And much the same is true of the European crisis.

Needless to say, that’s not what you hear from European policy makers. The official story in Europe these days is that governments of troubled nations catered too much to the masses, promising too much to voters while collecting too little in taxes. And that is, to be fair, a reasonably accurate story for Greece. But it’s not at all what happened in Ireland and Spain, both of which had low debt and budget surpluses on the eve of the crisis.

The real story of Europe’s crisis is that leaders created a single currency, the euro, without creating the institutions that were needed to cope with booms and busts within the euro zone. And the drive for a single European currency was the ultimate top-down project, an elite vision imposed on highly reluctant voters.

Does any of this matter? Why should we be concerned about the effort to shift the blame for bad policies onto the general public?

One answer is simple accountability. People who advocated budget-busting policies during the Bush years shouldn’t be allowed to pass themselves off as deficit hawks; people who praised Ireland as a role model shouldn’t be giving lectures on responsible government.

But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.