Burnham was famous for the dictum “Make no little plans,” and Jules Guerin’s alluring watercolor renderings in the published “Plan of Chicago” gave this vision an ethereal cast.

by Paul Goldberger
The New Yorker

In the mid-eighteen-nineties, Daniel Burnham, then the most prominent architect in Chicago, met with a young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright. Burnham had been impressed by Wright’s talent but felt that he could use some seasoning. He offered to pay Wright’s tuition at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, to support his family, and to give him a job when he returned. Wright turned him down. It was one of the few times that Burnham, who was probably the most successful power broker the American architectural profession has ever produced, didn’t get his way, and he told Wright that he was making a mistake: the Beaux-Arts style, of which Burnham was a leading exponent, was taking over the country, and Wright was deluded if he thought that his modern approach, with its open spaces and horizontal lines, would ever amount to much.

Burnham and Wright went their separate ways, but their paths kept crossing, because if you had anything to do with American architecture around the turn of the century you inevitably ran into Burnham. He designed the Flatiron Building, in New York; Union Station in Washington, D.C.; Orchestra Hall in Chicago; Selfridges department store, in London; and more banks and office buildings than you could count. He got the train tracks that had despoiled the Mall in Washington for much of the nineteenth century removed and headed a Washington planning commission that, among other achievements, set the location for the Lincoln Memorial. Most important of all, a hundred years ago, in 1909, Burnham completed work on a document with the unassuming title “Plan of Chicago” that remains the most effective example of large-scale urban planning America has ever seen. Assisted by the young city planner Edward H. Bennett, he laid out the shorefront of Lake Michigan, quadrupling the amount of parkland and thus insuring that the lakefront would forever be public open space. He created the Magnificent Mile, the double-decker roadway of Wacker Drive, and the recreational Navy Pier, which extends into Lake Michigan. Envisioning Chicago as the anchor of an enormous region, he drafted a rough outline of highways to connect the city to the places around it. Quite simply, Burnham determined the shape of modern Chicago.

Chicago is marking the centennial of the Burnham plan with a yearlong festival of exhibitions and public events, including the construction, this June, of architectural pavilions in Millennium Park by Zaha Hadid and Ben Van Berkel—odd choices, given that their avant-garde allegiance would have been anathema to Burnham. Still, the scale of the celebrations seems apt. Burnham is famous for the line “Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” There is little evidence that he really said this, but everything he did suggests that he believed it. If Theodore Roosevelt had been an architect, he would have been Daniel Burnham.

Burnham was born in 1846, grew up in Chicago, and never went to architecture school. After trying his luck as a salesman, he fell into an apprenticeship in the office of William Le Baron Jenney, who built the first steel-framed skyscraper, and then set up a firm with John Wellborn Root. He and Root proved to be perfect partners: Root was a far more sophisticated architect, but Burnham excelled at bringing in business. The firm flourished in the construction boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and, in 1890, the partners were retained to advise on the plans for Chicago’s first World’s Fair. Burnham turned himself into an impresario, assembling a team of architectural rivals, including Richard Morris Hunt, Charles F. McKim, and Louis Sullivan, and assigning them each a building. (Root died of pneumonia early in the planning stage.) Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair was a historic success. At a time when even the most prosperous American cities were dirty, squalid, and dangerous, the fair seemed to offer the promise of another kind of urban world entirely. Known as the White City, it launched the City Beautiful movement, giving the country a seemingly insatiable appetite for monumental courthouses, museums, libraries, and train stations that made every city look as if its roots went back to ancient Rome.

Burnham decided to make the fair a template for the future of Chicago, and trumpeted the virtues of the City Beautiful to anyone who would listen. He had the instincts of a politician, and skillfully worked himself into Chicago’s power structure. In 1906, he secured the backing of an association of prominent businessmen, which paid for a staff; Burnham himself worked for nothing. He set up a penthouse office in the Railway Exchange Building, an enormous building that he had designed on Michigan Avenue, across from the Art Institute, and started by instructing his staff to gather data on major cities around the world. As the plan was coming together, he invited various influential people to the penthouse—the governor, the mayor, local politicians and businessmen, and fellow-architects like Wright and Sullivan—to test his ideas. It didn’t hurt that they could look out on the most spectacular view of the lakefront imaginable.

When the Plan of Chicago was made public, in 1909, it was published in a hundred-and-fifty-page book. Along with Burnham’s maps and plans, the book contained a series of stunning watercolors by Jules Guerin. Soft, hazy, and alluring, the pictures romanticized the immense metropolis, making it look like the seat of an empire. Burnham wanted to remake the city along the lines of Paris—the plan gained the nickname Paris on the Prairie—and, to a large extent, he succeeded, prescribing a series of projects that kept the city busy through the nineteen-twenties. Some things, such as a gargantuan civic center that would have made Les Invalides, in Paris, seem modest, were never built. But the campus of museums on the lakefront—including the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Museum of Science and Industry—and the network of parks, boulevards, piers, and lagoons that have kept the area in public hands for a century is the plan’s enduring legacy. It forms a startling contrast to the elevated highways and industrial buildings that have come to obstruct the waterfronts of most other American cities.

SUNNIER DAYS A North Atlantic right whale and calf off Florida. The whale remains endangered, but its population has more than tripled in a century.

By CORNELIA DEAN
NY Times Published: March 16, 2009

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. — The biologists had been in the plane for hours, flying back and forth over the calm ocean. They had seen dolphins, leatherback turtles, a flock of water birds called gannets and even a basking shark — but not what they were looking for.

Then Millie Brower, who was peering with intense concentration through a bubblelike window fitted into the plane’s fuselage, announced “nine o’clock, about a mile off.” The plane made a stomach-churning lurch as the pilots banked left and began to circle. And there, below, were a right whale mother and her new calf, barely breaking the surface, lolling in the swells.

The researchers, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Georgia Wildlife Trust, are part of an intense effort to monitor North Atlantic right whales, one of the most endangered, and closely watched, species on earth. As a database check eventually disclosed, the whale was Diablo, who was born in these waters eight years ago. Her calf — at a guess 2 weeks old and a bouncing 12 feet and 2 tons — was the 38th born this year, a record that would be surpassed just weeks later, with a report from NOAA on the birth of a 39th calf. The previous record was 31, set in 2001.

“It’s a bumper year for calves,” Richard Merrick, an oceanographer for NOAA’s fisheries service, said in an interview. “That’s a good sign.”

Actually, it’s one of so many good signs that researchers are beginning to hope that for the first time in centuries things are looking up for the right whale. They say the species offers proof that simple conservation steps can have a big impact, even for species driven to the edge of oblivion.

North Atlantic right whales, which can grow up to 55 feet long and weigh up to 70 tons, were the “right” whales for 18th- and 19th-century whalers because they are rich in oil and baleen, move slowly, keep close to shore and float when they die.

They were long ago hunted to extinction in European waters, and by 1900 perhaps only 100 or so remained in their North American range, from feeding grounds off Maritime Canada and New England to winter calving grounds off the Southeastern coast.

Since then, the species’ numbers have crept up, but very slowly. NOAA estimates that there are about 325, though scientists in and out of the agency suspect there may be more, perhaps as many as 400. It has been illegal to hunt the right whale since 1935, when the League of Nations put them under protection. Even so, researchers despaired of ever seeing a healthy right whale population here as long as ship strikes still maimed and killed them and fishing gear strangled them.

But “over the last four or five months there’s been a tremendous amount of good news,” said Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, a center of right whale research. For example:

¶Recent changes in shipping lanes, some compulsory and others voluntary, seem to be reducing collisions between whales and vessels.

¶The Bush administration agreed last year to lower speed limits for large vessels in coastal waters where right whales congregate.

¶Fishing authorities in the United States are beginning to impose gear restrictions designed to reduce the chances whales and other marine mammals will be entangled in fishing lines. Canada is considering similar steps.

¶In December, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spotted an unusually large aggregation of right whales in the Gulf of Maine. A month later, a right whale turned up in the Azores, a first since the early 20th century.

¶And last year, probably for the first time since the 1600s, not one North Atlantic right whale died at human hands.

“We are seeing signs of recovery,” Dr. Merrick said. He and others warn that it is far too soon to say the whales are out of danger. Calving seasons are known for their ups and downs. A single whale in the Azores does not prove the species is recolonizing its old haunts. Not everyone embraces the new shipping regulations. And so far this year, five whales have turned up entangled with fishing gear. Rescuers removed all or almost all of the gear from the five, including one whale freed last week after being successfully sedated for the process, a first.

Efforts to protect the whales are costly. Surveying alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, said Barb Zoodsma, a NOAA biologist who coordinates survey efforts in the Southeast. In 2003, three researchers and a pilot died when their plane went down off Amelia Island, Florida.

“It’s a very expensive endeavor, and we are very cognizant of that fact,” Ms. Zoodsma said. Some wonder if it is worth it. “We have been pressured by some folks on the outside to say this is a lost cause,” said Greg Silber, who coordinates whale recovery efforts for NOAA, which is charged with protecting marine mammals and endangered species like the right whale.

The whales are so few and distinct in appearance that researchers identify them not just by number but by nickname. The whales are identifiable by patterns of growths on their skin called callosities. These callosities are colonized by pale, licelike creatures in patterns discernable even at a distance.

When survey teams spot a right whale, they can enter its description in an online database maintained by the aquarium and accessible to researchers around the world.

Sightings offer important clues to the movements and habits of the creatures. When the pod of whales was sighted in December, in the Jordan Basin, about 70 miles south of Bar Harbor, the individual whales were well known. But no one had seen them hang out in the basin before. Now, researchers think it may be a previously unknown wintering ground or even a place where whales mate.

When researchers learn where whales are, they can work to keep shippers out of the way. That is what happened in July, when shipping lanes that cross Stellwagen Bank, a national marine sanctuary north of Cape Cod, were moved slightly to the north. “One of the sanctuary staff had documented where the whale sightings were,” Mr. LaCasse said. The lanes now run through a less frequented area. And the sanctuary sends thank-you notes to ships that steer clear of the whales.

A similar change occurred off Saint John, New Brunswick, a hub for shipping oil into the Maritime Provinces. Lanes going into the city were moved a few years ago, after negotiations with the International Maritime Organization. Voluntary lane changes are in effect in places like Boston, Dr. Silber said. “The measured economic impact to mariners was minimal,” he said. But the changes brought “huge benefits” to the animals.

“Compliance appears to be quite high,” he said, adding, “We are optimistic.”

Moira Brown, a senior scientist at the aquarium, said researchers working with Canadian officials designated “an area to be avoided” south of New Brunswick where right whales congregate in summer. “Compliance there has been very good,” Dr. Brown said.

But entanglements with fishing gear continue to be a big problem.

When the researchers spotted Diablo, for example, she had something white on her fluke and, for a few anxious moments, they thought she might be snagged on fishing gear. Instead, like an estimated 80 percent to 85 percent of adult right whales, she carried a scar from a previous entanglement.

Entanglements can be lethal for the whales, Ms. Zoodsma said, especially if lines get caught in whales’ mouths or around their flippers. NOAA trains people to disentangle them, she said, but “when you have a 40-ton animal in a stressful situation” the work can be unpleasant and dangerous. And it is labor intensive. Last week’s effort to sedate and free an entangled whale involved a spotter plane, four boats and multiple attempts, she said. That is why preventing entanglements “is a first priority,” Ms. Zoodsma said. New efforts center on new gear, like lines that lie along the ocean floor or marker buoys that sit at the bottom until a fishing boat finds them electronically and signals them to bob to the surface.

Dr. Brown said the United States was taking a first step in this direction with regulations going into effect this spring. She said discussions were under way with fishing authorities in Canada. Meanwhile, researchers continue efforts to discover as much as they can about where the animals spend their time, what they eat and what natural factors may affect their health. One of their most unusual efforts involved dogs trained to sniff whale scat, which the animals usually produce at the surface. The samples the dogs helped collect offered valuable information about what the whales were eating and where they were feeding. They can also offer hormone clues about whether females are pregnant. Researchers want this information because despite this year’s baby boom, right whales are not reproducing as they should. The scientists want to know if the problem is impaired fertility, spontaneous miscarriage or some other issue.

In their book “The Urban Whale” (Harvard University Press, 2007), Scott D. Kraus and Rosalind M. Rolland, scientists at the aquarium, say they believe the last North American right whale deliberately hunted by people was a calf swimming with its mother off Palm Beach, Fla., in 1935.

But people will continue to kill right whales. Ship strikes “are still going to happen,” Dr. Merrick said. “To totally eliminate them would mean we would have to eliminate shipping.”

In the end, Ms. Zoodsma said, the value of a species is something “each individual has to sort that out for themselves.” But if right whales were to vanish, she said, “it would be a tremendous loss for future generations.”

Los Angeles
March 28 - May 16, 2009
OPENING RECEPTION:
March 28, 2009

peres projects

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: March 14, 2009

If you hang around the renewable-energy business for long, you’ll hear a lot of tall tales. You’ll hear about someone who’s invented a process to convert coal into vegetable oil in his garage and someone else who has a duck in his basement that paddles a wheel, blows up a balloon, turns a turbine and creates enough electricity to power his doghouse.

Hang around long enough and you’ll even hear that in another 10 or 20 years hydrogen-powered cars or fusion energy will be a commercial reality. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard one of those stories, I could buy my own space shuttle. No wonder cynics often say that viable fusion energy or hydrogen-powered cars are “20 years away and always will be.”

But what if this time is different? What if a laser-powered fusion energy power plant that would have all the reliability of coal, without the carbon dioxide, all the cleanliness of wind and solar, without having to worry about the sun not shining or the wind not blowing, and all the scale of nuclear, without all the waste, was indeed just 10 years away or less? That would be a holy cow game-changer.

Are we there?

That is the tantalizing question I was left with after visiting the recently completed National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F., at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 50 miles east of San Francisco. The government-funded N.I.F. consists of 192 giant lasers — which can deliver 50 times more energy than any previous fusion laser system. They’re all housed in a 10-story building the size of three football fields — the rather dull cover to a vast internal steel forest of laser beams that must be what the engine room of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise space ship looked like.

I began my tour there with the N.I.F. director, Edward Moses. He was holding up a tiny gold can the size of a Tylenol tablet, and inside it was plastic pellet, the size of a single peppercorn, that would be filled with frozen hydrogen.

The way the N.I.F. works is that all 192 lasers pour their energy into a target chamber, which looks like a giant, spherical, steel bathysphere that you would normally use for deep-sea exploration. At the center of this target chamber is that gold can with its frozen hydrogen pellet. Once one of those pellets is heated and compressed by the lasers, it reaches temperatures over 800 million degrees Fahrenheit, “far greater than exists at the center of our sun,” said Moses.

More importantly, each crushed pellet gives off a burst of energy that can then be harnessed to heat up liquid salt and produce massive amounts of steam to drive a turbine and create electricity for your home — just like coal does today. Only this energy would be carbon-free, globally available, safe and secure and could be integrated seamlessly into our current electric grid.

Last Monday at 3 a.m., for the first time, all 192 lasers were fired at high energy precisely at once — no small feat — at the target chamber’s empty core. That was a major step toward “ignition” — turning that hydrogen pellet into a miniature sun on earth. The next step — which the N.I.F. expects to achieve some time in the next two to three years — is to prove that it can, under lab conditions, repeatedly fire its 192 lasers at multiple hydrogen pellets and produce more energy from the pellets than the laser energy that is injected. That’s called “energy gain.”

“That,” explained Moses, “is what Einstein meant when he declared that E=mc2. By using lasers, we can unleash tremendous amounts of energy from tiny amounts of mass.”

Once the lab proves that it can get energy gain from this laser-driven process, the next step (if it can secure government and private funding) would be to set up a pilot fusion energy power plant that would prove that any local power utility could have its own miniature sun — on a commercial basis. A pilot would cost about $10 billion — the same as a new nuclear power plant.

I don’t know if they can pull this off; some scientists are skeptical. Laboratory-scale nuclear fusion and energy gain is really hard. But here’s what I do know: President Obama’s stimulus package has given a terrific boost to renewable energy. It will pay lasting benefits. And we need to keep working on all forms of solar, geothermal and wind power. They work. And the more they get deployed, the more their costs will go down.

But, in addition, we need to make a few big bets on potential game-changers. I am talking about systems that could give us abundant, clean, reliable electrons and drive massive innovation in big lasers, materials science, nuclear physics and chemistry that would benefit, energize and renew many U.S. industries.

At the pace we’re going with the technologies we have, without some game-changers, climate change is going to have its way with us. Yes, we’ll still need coal for some time. But let’s make sure that we aren’t just chasing the fantasy that we can “clean up” coal, when our real future depends on birthing new technologies that can replace it.

More Articles in Opinion »A version of this article appeared in print on March 15, 2009, on page WK12 of the New York edition.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: March 14, 2009

We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.

Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

These dangerous pathogens are now even in our food supply. Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland scholar who conducted the study.

Regardless of whether the bacteria came from the pigs or from humans who handled the meat, the results should sound an alarm bell, for MRSA already kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.

MRSA (pronounced “mersa”) stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. People often get it from hospitals, but as I wrote in my last column, a new strain called ST398 is emerging and seems to find a reservoir in modern hog farms. Research by Peter Davies of the University of Minnesota suggests that 25 percent to 39 percent of American hogs carry MRSA.

Public health experts worry that pigs could pass on the infection by direct contact with their handlers, through their wastes leaking into ground water (one study has already found antibiotic-resistant bacteria entering ground water from hog farms), or through their meat, though there has been no proven case of someone getting it from eating pork. Thorough cooking will kill the bacteria, but people often use the same knife to cut raw meat and then to chop vegetables. Or they plop a pork chop on a plate, cook it and then contaminate it by putting it back on the original plate.

Yet the central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.

The peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America concluded last year that antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise in antibiotic resistance. The article said that more antibiotics were fed to animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire human population.

“We don’t give antibiotics to healthy humans,” said Robert Martin, who led a Pew Commission on industrial farming that examined antibiotic use. “So why give them to healthy animals just so we can keep them in crowded and unsanitary conditions?”

The answer is simple: politics.

Legislation to ban the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in agriculture has always been blocked by agribusiness interests. Louise Slaughter of New York, who is the sole microbiologist in the House of Representatives, said she planned to reintroduce the legislation this coming week.

“We’re losing the ability to treat humans,” she said. “We have misused one of the best scientific products we’ve had.”

That’s an almost universal view in the public health world. The Infectious Diseases Society of America has declared antibiotic resistance a “public health crisis” and recounts the story of Rebecca Lohsen, a 17-year-old New Jersey girl who died from MRSA in 2006. She came down with what she thought was a sore throat, endured months in the hospital, and finally died because the microbes were stronger than the drugs.

This will be an important test for President Obama and his agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack. Traditionally, the Agriculture Department has functioned mostly as a protector of agribusiness interests, but Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack have both said all the right things about looking after eaters as well as producers.

So Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack, will you line up to curb the use of antibiotics in raising American livestock? That is evidence of an industrial farming system that is broken: for the sake of faster-growing hogs, we’re empowering microbes that endanger our food supply and threaten our lives.

Mary Heilmann
Force Field, 1998
oil and sign enamel on canvas
50 x 40 inches

THE BALLAD THAT BECOMES AN ANTHEM
*CURATED BY STEPHEN WESTFALL* MARY HEILMANN, CHRIS MARTIN, REBECCA MORRIS, AMY SILLMAN, MARY WEATHERFORD, & STEPHEN WESTFALL
MARCH 21 - APRIL 19, 2009

ACME

Eli Cordero, 16, a junior at Carpinteria High School, has asked the school board to eliminate Native American imagery associated with the school and its team, the Warriors.

A student of Chumash descent asked the school board to remove Native American-themed images — though not the name ‘Warriors’ — from Carpinteria High. The request triggered an uproar.

By Steve Chawkins
LA Times Published March 15, 2009

Reporting from Carpinteria, Calif. — For 81 years, Carpinteria residents have cheered on their high school’s Warriors. And for about that long, graduating classes, community boosters and students have bestowed on the campus an array of Native American-themed logos, statues, murals and decals — all without any public protest.

But last year, a student of Chumash descent named Eli Cordero asked the school board to eliminate the symbols, though not the Warriors name. It was the kind of request that has rattled educators elsewhere for decades, and it triggered an uproar that could resound even after Tuesday, when the board finally is to rule which images to keep and which to ditch.

Since Eli approached the board last March, Carpinteria — a seaside town that takes pride in its avocados, its flowers and “the world’s safest beach” — has been a bit less laid back than usual.

Each side in the conflict has allegedly threatened violence. Board member Leslie Deardorff, who opposed the imagery, pulled her son from Carpinteria High — the town’s only public high school — after he was harassed. Hundreds of students walked out of class and marched to district administration offices to protest the possible loss of their Warrior images. Angry missives sizzled across the Internet, charging racism by those who want to retain the images and knee-jerk political correctness by those who want them gone.

For activists on both sides, the board’s decision won’t come a moment too soon.

“This has been absolutely gut-wrenching for me,” said Jeff Moorhouse, a Carpinteria High alumnus and leader of a group whose name is taken from the school’s unofficial motto: “Warrior Spirit Never Dies!”

“I want it to be ended,” he said. “It needs to end.”

Board member Beverly Grant, who believes the images are damaging stereotypes and who was the target of an unsuccessful recall effort led by Moorhouse, expressed the same urgency.

“When this first happened, I couldn’t squeeze a tomato in the grocery store without someone coming up and saying something nasty to me,” said Grant, a retired parole official. “They act like we’re trying to kill them, but we’re just trying to bring them into the 21st century.”

At the center of the storm is a 16-year-old junior who said he wears his hair shoulder-length as a tribute to his forebears, the Native Americans who made their home on California’s Central Coast. Eli sees “Warriors” as an ethnically neutral name, but he said the images have irked him ever since he was a child.

“There’s the big head in the parking lot,” he said, referring to a concrete bust of a headdress-clad Plains Indian chief that was a gift to the school from the Class of 1970. “That’s prejudice right there, looking you in the face.”

By all accounts, it has been many years since a mascot in Native American regalia walked the sidelines at Warriors games. But with the Warriors tradition going strong since 1928, Indian images adorn athletic patches, window stickers, T-shirts, even floor mats. An outdoor mural on the gym shows a chief flanked by likenesses of standout student golfers, basketball players and other athletes.

Many Carpinterians see most of the images as dignified and respectful, a tribute to Native Americans throughout the United States. They see nothing wrong with the Warriors logo: a stylized “C” incorporating an arrow and two feathers, despite assertions that it makes inappropriate use of sacred ceremonial items.

“It’s not a racial issue,” Moorhouse said. “Many people here grew up proud to be a Warrior, proud to call ourselves Warriors. It’s not about a team; it’s about a community.”

But such arguments are a tough sell to critics, who say the use of human figures as mascots is demeaning.

“We don’t have Jews out there dancing with yarmulkes,” Grant said.

Eli said he was inspired to protest after attending a discrimination workshop that was part of the high school’s “Be the Change” week. But critics say he was a pawn.

“The American Indian Movement is behind this,” said Scott Braithwaite, an Elk Grove social worker who is president of the school’s alumni association. “They found a kid and a cause celebre, and there they go.”

CorineFairbanks, leader of AIM’s Santa Barbara chapter, said it was established only last December, months after the Carpinteria controversy erupted. The national group had not heard of Eli, said Fairbanks, although it and various civil liberties groups now support his cause.

Teams named for tribes have long riled activist groups, though not necessarily some of their Native American namesakes.

In Los Angeles, the school board eliminated Native American team names in 1998. The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. bars postseason games at schools with such names, a rule that transformed the Southwestern Oklahoma State University Savages into the Savage Storm.

Twice, bans on Native American team names have made it through the California Legislature but been vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said such decisions should be local. Numerous California schools still bear Indian names, although tiny Colusa High School in Northern California has decided to drop its Redskins moniker by 2011.

In Carpinteria, the school board decided in a 3-2 vote last April to remove the Indian images. But after extensive public protest, the board backed off and appointed a 15-member Native American Imagery Committee, which met seven times and drew hundreds of often-vocal spectators.

Deardorff, the board member who transferred her son to a high school in nearby Santa Barbara after other students allegedly created a website to harass him, said she plans to transfer her daughter when she reaches high school next year. If the request is refused, she said she and her family will move.

“I won’t run again,” said Deardorff, who would face reelection in 2010. “I don’t need to do this to myself again.”

Meanwhile, another board member who voted against the imagery chose not to run and was replaced last fall by Lou Pannizon, a former Carpinteria High principal and athletic director who criticized the board’s decision as hasty.

The board’s committee weighed 13 images — some of which, like the Warrior logo, appear in many corners of the campus. Most of the votes were close; the committee recommended keeping the team logo by an 8-7 vote but voted 6 to 5 to purge the district’s logo of an Indian head, a canoe and arrowheads, leaving a shield and a sunset. The parking lot sculpture of the chief was rejected 7 to 5.

School officials expect passions at Tuesday’s meeting will run high. In a letter this week to the Coastal View, Carpinteria’s weekly newspaper, district Superintendent Paul Cordeiro called for “calm and civility.”

“My request to all who attend,” he wrote, “is to remember that, as adults modeling adult behavior, our kids will be watching.”

Death in its prime: from left, the Hackney brothers, David, Bobby and Dannis. The band’s 1974 demo tape was released last month as “… For the Whole World to See.”

By MIKE RUBIN
Ny Times Published: March 12, 2009

ON an evening in late February at a club here called the Monkey House, there was a family reunion of sorts. As the band Rough Francis roared through a set of anthemic punk rock, Bobby Hackney leaned against the bar and beamed. Three of his sons — Bobby Jr., Julian and Urian — are in Rough Francis, but his smile wasn’t just about parental pride. It was about authorship too. Most of the songs Rough Francis played were written by Bobby Sr. and his brothers David and Dannis during their days in the mid-1970s as a Detroit power trio called Death.

The group’s music has been almost completely unheard since the band stopped performing more than three decades ago. But after all the years of silence, Death’s moment has finally arrived. It comes, however, nearly a decade too late for its founder and leader, David Hackney, who died of lung cancer in 2000. “David was convinced more than any of us that we were doing something totally revolutionary,” said Bobby Sr., 52.

Forgotten except by the most fervent punk rock record collectors — the band’s self-released 1976 single recently traded hands for the equivalent of $800 — Death would likely have remained lost in obscurity if not for the discovery last year of a 1974 demo tape in Bobby Sr.’s attic. Released last month by Drag City Records as “… For the Whole World to See,” Death’s newly unearthed recordings reveal a remarkable missing link between the high-energy hard rock of Detroit bands like the Stooges and MC5 from the late 1960s and early ’70s and the high-velocity assault of punk from its breakthrough years of 1976 and ’77. Death’s songs “Politicians in My Eyes,” “Keep On Knocking” and “Freakin Out” are scorching blasts of feral ur-punk, making the brothers unwitting artistic kin to their punk-pioneer contemporaries the Ramones, in New York; Rocket From the Tombs, in Cleveland; and the Saints, in Brisbane, Australia. They also preceded Bad Brains, the most celebrated African-American punk band, by almost five years.

Jack White of the White Stripes, who was raised in Detroit, said in an e-mail message: “The first time the stereo played ‘Politicians in My Eyes,’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. When I was told the history of the band and what year they recorded this music, it just didn’t make sense. Ahead of punk, and ahead of their time.”

The teenage Hackney brothers started playing R&B in their parents’ garage in the early ’70s but switched to hard rock in 1973, after seeing an Alice Cooper show. Dannis played drums, Bobby played bass and sang, and David wrote the songs and contributed propulsive guitar work, derived from studying Pete Townshend’s power-chord wrist technique. Their musicianship tightened when their mother allowed them to replace their bedroom furniture with mikes and amps as long as they practiced for three hours every afternoon. “From 3 to 6,” said Dannis, 54, “we just blew up the neighborhood.”

Death began playing at cabarets and garage parties on Detroit’s predominantly African-American east side, but were met with reactions ranging from confusion to derision. “We were ridiculed because at the time everybody in our community was listening to the Philadelphia sound, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers,” Bobby said. “People thought we were doing some weird stuff. We were pretty aggressive about playing rock ’n’ roll because there were so many voices around us trying to get us to abandon it.”

When the band was ready to record, David chose a studio by pinning the Yellow Pages listings to the wall and throwing a dart; it landed on Groovesville Productions, a company owned by Don Davis, a successful producer for Stax Records. Groovesville signed the band, and in 1974 it began work at United Sound Recording Studios in Detroit, where it shared space with Funkadelic, the Dramatics and Gladys Knight. At the time David was 21, Dannis was 19 and Bobby, still a student at Southeastern High School, was 17.

“They were just so impressive, and the sound was just so big for three guys,” said Brian Spears, who was director of publishing at Groovesville and oversaw their sessions. “I knew those kids were great, but trying to break a black group into rock ’n’ roll was just tough during that time.”

The apparent nihilism of the name Death was also out of step with the times. “Nobody could get past the name,” Mr. Spears said. “It seemed to be a real detriment. When you said the name of the group to anybody, it was like, ‘Man, why you calling the group Death?’ ”

The Hackneys said Mr. Davis brought a tape of Death to a meeting in New York with the record executive Clive Davis. Afterward Don Davis told the brothers that Clive Davis had liked the recordings but not the band’s name; there could be no deal unless they changed it. “That’s when my brother David got a little angry,” Dannis said. “He told Don Davis to tell Clive Davis, ‘Hell no!’ ”

Part of the reason David refused was because he was writing a rock opera about death that portrayed it in a positive light, Bobby Sr. said. “He strongly believed that we could get a contract with another record label,” he added. “We were young and cocky, but David was the cockiest of us all.”

That defiance has become central to Death’s underground legend: what could be more punk rock than telling the suits to take a hike in the name of artistic integrity, even if punk didn’t quite exist yet? But separating fact from lore is tricky after three decades. The Hackneys remember Clive Davis’s label affiliation as Columbia Records, but Don Davis — who initially didn’t recall working with a band called Death — said in a phone interview that Clive Davis was with Arista Records, although he couldn’t remember the specifics of the meeting and if the group’s name was an issue. A spokeswoman for Clive Davis said he had no recollection of the group or of any meeting concerning it.

Death and Groovesville parted ways in 1976. Don Davis produced two No. 1 hits that year, one of which was Johnnie Taylor’s “Disco Lady.” The Hackneys, meanwhile, pressed 500 copies of “Politicians in My Eyes,” backed with “Keep On Knocking,” on their own Tryangle label but found it nearly impossible to get radio play in Detroit. Disco had begun to dominate the marketplace — thanks in part to “Disco Lady” — and control of radio playlists was shifting from local disc jockeys to corporate consultants. Bobby said 1976 “was really a tough year for us,” citing “the disco ebb tide” with particular chagrin. “We just figured nobody wanted to hear rock ’n’ roll anymore.”

As their disenchantment grew, the brothers were invited by a distant relative to visit Vermont. “So we came up here to clear our heads for a couple of weeks,” Bobby said with a laugh. “That was like 30-something years ago.”

“We’re still clearing our heads,” Dannis said.

Settling in Burlington, the brothers released two albums of gospel rock as the 4th Movement in the early 1980s. David became increasingly homesick and moved back to Detroit in 1982, continuing to make music until his death. In 1983 Bobby and Dannis formed a reggae band, Lambsbread, which became a familiar presence during Vermont’s late-1980s jam-band boom; eight albums later Lambsbread is still active on the New England college circuit. The two brothers bought a house together east of Burlington in Jericho, built their own recording studio there and raised families. Bobby Sr. and Dannis each have five children.

Bobby’s children were crucial to Death’s resurrection. The Hackneys had never shared the details of their Death experience with their kids. “We had moved on in our lives and thought that chapter was over because we went through so much rejection with that music,” Bobby said. “We just didn’t want to relive it, and I especially didn’t want to relive it again with my children.”

But last year Julian heard the Tryangle single at a party in San Francisco and recognized his father’s voice. Soon after, Bobby Jr. did a Google search that revealed the Holy Grail status of the band’s only release. This news astounded Bobby Sr., who dug the master tapes out of storage last May for the first time in three decades and sat down with Dannis for a listen. The music “literally took our breath away,” Bobby Sr. said.

“We looked at each other, and we said: ‘This is truly some of the best rock ’n’ roll we ever heard. Wow, David was right.’ David knew it, and always believed it, much more than we did.”

Bobby Sr.’s sons were equally impressed. Bobby Jr., a veteran of several Burlington hardcore bands, formed Rough Francis with two brothers and two friends to play Death’s music as a tribute to his family. (The band’s moniker comes from his Uncle David’s nickname.)

“We were just trying to find ways to inform people” about Death’s music, Bobby Jr. said. “When I first heard it, I thought: ‘This can’t be real. People have to know about this. This is crazy!’ I felt like I had found Jimmy Hoffa or something.”

The young Hackneys weren’t the only Death enthusiasts. In August 2007 a record collector named Robert Cole Manis, having heard “Keep On Knocking” on a 2001 bootleg compilation of obscure punk singles, found a copy of the Tryangle single on eBay and acquired it for $400 and $400 worth of rare records.

“It was true love when I first heard it,” Mr. Manis said. “I think the record is just phenomenal. It’s timeless. It’s an amazing document.”

While surfing the Internet last summer, Mr. Manis saw a posting from a friend of Bobby Jr.’s on a punk message board announcing the rediscovery of the Death tapes. Mr. Manis excitedly tracked down the Hackneys in Vermont and helped put them in touch with the Chicago indie label Drag City, which he had worked with on a previous reissue project.

The music is an “undeniable combination of classic and punk rock elements,” said Rian Murphy, a spokesman for Drag City. “You can put the needle down on that record in any given place and just be completely transported.”

The Hackneys and Drag City are discussing reissuing the 4th Movement records too, and Bobby Sr. and Dannis are considering playing some live shows as Death, with the Lambsbread guitarist Bobbie Duncan taking over on guitar.

Death’s newfound acclaim has surprised the Hackneys but, Bobby Sr. said, David had predicted that Death would find fame one day. “David came to me right before he died, and he had some master tapes of ours,” he said. “I jokingly said to him, ‘David, I have enough of our stuff, man, I’m running out of room.’ And he said, ‘Bob, you’ve got to keep all this stuff, the world’s going to come looking for it one day, and when the world comes looking for it, I’ll know that you’ll have it.

“You can only imagine the emotions that I go through in my quiet moments when I reflect on that.”

Mungo Thomson
The Varieties of Experience
March 3 - April 4, 2009

John Connelly Presents

PIERO MANZONI
Base Magica - Scultura Vivente, 1961
Wood
23 5/8 x 31 7/8 x 31 5/16 inches (60 x 81 x 79.5 cm)

Closes March 21

gagosian

As you travel east from Danshui along the number 2 highway that runs along the north coast of Taiwan, you come to the small town of Sanzhi Just before arriving in Sanzhi, there’s an interesting site hugging the shoreline - an abandoned hotel/apartment complex that looks like somewhere ET might call home. I first heard about this a couple of years ago, but it was only recently that I was able to get out there. The first attempt to go there with a friend was about a year ago. At the time, all we knew was that it was on the north coast somewhere but we weren’t quite sure where and we ended up turning right where we should have turned left, so we missed it. About 6 months later, I came across it on Google Earth which allowed me to learn exactly where it was. Even knowing where it was, it took another 6 months of waiting for the right combination of weather and light before I made it out there.

Accounts vary on the origins of this complex, and indeed, as to whether it was meant to be a hotel development or a housing development. Apparently, it was constructed in the 1960s and included/was to include a dam to protect it against sea surges, floors and stairs made of marble and a small amusement park. The site was commissioned by the government and local firms and there is no named architect. Local papers at the time reported that there were numerous accidents during construction which caused the death of some workers. As news of these accidents spread, no one wanted to go there, even to visit, and the project was subsequently abandoned. The ghosts of those who died in vain are said to still linger there, unremembered and unable to pass on. The complex was left in its unfinished state because no amount of redevelopment will bring people to the area due to superstitions about ghosts, and it can’t be demolished because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is taboo in Asian culture.

When I was there, I met 4 young university students who were passing by and stopped for a look. They didn’t want to get to close to the buildings for fear that the ghosts would take them. They told me there was “heavy evil” in the buildings.

via craig ferguson

via cabinessence

“If I had only followed CNBC’s advice, I’d have a million dollars today,” Mr. Stewart said, “provided that I’d started with $100 million.”

By BRIAN STELTER
NY Times Published March 13, 2009

Is the “weeklong feud of the century” finished?

Jon Stewart, the host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, critiqued CNBC’s coverage of the stock market on Thursday during a highly anticipated appearance by Jim Cramer, the host of the sometimes frantic stock market show “Mad Money” on CNBC.

Mr. Stewart questioned Mr. Cramer about the perception that CNBC acts as a cheerleader for the investment community. “The financial news industry is not just guilty of a sin of omission but a sin of commission,” Mr. Stewart said. Mr. Cramer agreed that he made a number of faulty predictions over the years.

The must-see-TV moment came more than a week after CNBC abruptly canceled Mr. Stewart’s interview with Rick Santelli, a reporter who had ranted about President Obama’s housing plan on the network last month. Mr. Stewart complained about the cancellation and spent eight minutes on “The Daily Show” playing video clips of the network’s mistaken financial forecasts. “If I had only followed CNBC’s advice, I’d have a million dollars today,” Mr. Stewart said, “provided that I’d started with $100 million.”

That first video has been viewed more than 1.5 million times on Comedy Central’s Web site for the show. Mr. Cramer and Mr. Stewart battled back and forth in a series of online columns and TV segments before meeting for the first time on Thursday on “The Daily Show” set. Comedy Central called it the “weeklong feud of the century.”

The Associated Press recaps it thusly:

Stewart said he and Cramer are both snake-oil salesman, only ”The Daily Show” is labeled as such. He claimed CNBC shirked its journalistic duty by believing corporate lies, rather than being an investigative ”powerful tool of illumination.” And he alleged CNBC was ultimately in bed with the businesses it covered — that regular people’s stocks and 401Ks were ”capitalizing your adventure.”

For his part, Cramer disagreed with Stewart on a few points, but mostly acknowledged that he could have done a better job foreseeing the economic collapse: ”We all should have seen it more.”

Cramer said CNBC was ”fair game” to the criticism and acknowledged the network was perhaps overeager to believe the information it was fed from corporations.

”I, too, like you, want to have a successful show,” said Cramer, defending his methods on ”Mad Money.” He later added: ”Should we have been constantly pointing out the mistakes that were made? Absolutely. I truly wish we had done more.”

The interview was televised on Thursday night. On Friday morning Mr. Cramer was expected to appear on “Morning Joe,” a program on MSNBC, a sister network of CNBC. But according to the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Mr. Cramer did not show up for the segment. “Guess he had a late night. That is too bad,” Mr. Scarborough wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Stewart’s brand of media criticism has drawn attention in the past. In 2004 he appeared on the CNN show “Crossfire” and criticized its left-versus-right pundit format. “You’re hurting America,” he told the hosts. Three months later, when the president of CNN canceled the show, he said “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.”

link to show

Beware is the new studio album by Will Oldham as Bonnie “Prince” Billy.

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy: Cinematic Americana
By Joel Meyer

WNYC, March 12, 2009 - Since Soundcheck is a live program, one guest is often waiting in the wings while another guest finishes an interview. The guest waits in a small room with a few chairs and a view of our studio. It’s a good place to chat with friends or tap out a message on an iPhone.

As a producer on the show, it’s my job to interrupt whatever they’re doing and politely but firmly push them into the studio for a live performance. The easygoing Will Oldham needed little such pushing when he came to Soundcheck in January to perform in his Bonnie “Prince” Billy guise. After I gave him the high sign, we walked into a tiny, soundproof hallway that leads directly into our studio.

The hallway is only a few feet wide and about seven feet long, with closed doors at either end. In such tight quarters, it’s a little like riding in an elevator — quiet and a tad awkward. Of course, my passengers are often nervous about performing live on the radio.

I’ll let you in on a secret: I try to break the ice every time with a joke. The same joke.

“I like to call this the ‘chute,’ ” I say. “Like in rodeo.”

I admit it. It’s a stupid joke. It’s not even funny. But rodeo is a weird thing to bring up, and I like to think it sort of wipes the mental slate clean. Few artists have time to say, “Hey, what kind of radio show is this?” before I yank them inside the studio.

But Oldham actually wanted to chat about rodeo. He is, after all, a musician who has turned Americana inside out, creating beautiful songs along the way.

“Have you ever seen The Misfits?” he asked quietly, looking across his massive beard.

It was my turn to be the surprised occupant of that tiny chamber. “Like the old Glenn Danzig band?” I asked, thinking, “Why is he bringing up heavy-metal vampires at a time like this?”

“No,” he replied. “The movie with Gable and Monroe. The Western. It’s the last film both of them made.” He paused. “Monty Clift didn’t last long, either. It has some great rodeo scenes.”

For someone who jokes about rodeo on a near-daily basis, I wouldn’t know a good rodeo scene if it bucked me off its back. I quickly changed the subject to another Western, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Twenty seconds later — an eternity in rodeo — Oldham was on the air, performing a song called “You Can’t Hurt Me Now,” two months before it was set to appear on his new album, Beware.

A few nights later, I watched The Misfits at home. It does, in fact, contain some great rodeo scenes. John Huston’s film also has a brilliant script from Arthur Miller, heartbreaking performances from every star and one of the most striking final scenes I’ve ever watched.

It was fitting that the recommendation came from a striking artist like Will Oldham. Also, I’ve stopped making the rodeo joke

Listen Now: Bonnie “Prince” Billy On WNYC’s Soundcheck

The Lieb House, a beach cottage designed by the architect Robert Venturi, began an interstate journey on Friday, crossing Upper New York Bay on a barge.

By TAMMY LA GORCE
NY Times Published: March 13, 2009

The house floating up the river was well known to many in the crowd, but Samantha Aezen was one of the few who could call it home.

“I lived in the house for a summer in 1976 and 1977 — it was our summer house,” said Ms. Aezen, 42, of Manhattan. “I was watching CNN one night a while ago and I heard this was happening. I had to come down. I’m just so glad it’s being saved.”

The Lieb House, a beach cottage designed by one of the nation’s most prominent architects that became widely studied as a model of modernism, was nearly torn down. Instead, on Friday, the house continued its unusual interstate journey, plodding up the East River on a barge, destined for a new resting place in Glen Cove on the North Shore of Long Island.

The spectacle attracted a throng of about 150 onlookers to the third floor of Pier 17 at South Street Seaport, including the 83-year-old Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Robert Venturi, who designed the house in 1969 for Nathaniel and Judy Lieb. The Liebs had it built near the northern tip of Long Beach Island on the Jersey Shore. The current owner of the property planned to demolish the structure, prompting the unusual rescue effort, which involved selling the house to an owner willing to relocate it.

Standing next to his wife and partner, the architect Denise Scott Brown, Mr. Venturi ignored the tangle of microphones and cameras thrust in his direction at the seaport, and applauded and waved with a weak smile as the 1,500-square-foot house and the barge carrying it came into view, wending its way northward propelled by a tugboat and trailed by a helicopter.

The new owners of the structure, Deborah Sarnoff and her husband Robert Gotkin, stood a few yards away from Mr. Venturi pacing nervously as their new guest cottage sailed by. They live in another Venturi-designed home, and are paying the moving costs, which are somewhere in the low six figures.

Students, architects and friends hung over the pier rail to capture the moment with cameras, and watched through binoculars as the house and barge faded into the distance after passing beneath the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges.

“I had to come,” said Yoshi Tsukamoto, 43, a Tokyo-based architect, who learned about the move during a visit. “Venturi is very famous. I’ve seen the Lieb House published in magazines. I’m so much influenced by him. This is once in a lifetime — something very special.”

Michael Blasberg, a freelance architect with the Manhattan-based firm of Weiss-Manfredi, said he had been following Mr. Venturi’s work since college. “I used to make pilgrimages to see his buildings,” said Mr. Blasberg, 61. “I’d rent cars. So I saw this house in New Jersey. I’m a little nostalgic about being here.”

Fred Adelson, an art professor at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., who got up before dawn to make it to Pier 17 in time for the float-by, said he had been preparing to write an article about the 40th anniversary of the Lieb House when rumors started circulating that it might be destroyed.

“This was a major monument in New Jersey architecture,” he said. “New Jersey’s loss is New York’s gain. The important thing is that it’s now getting the attention it deserves.”

The twenty-hour journey ended shortly after noon, in front of a crowd of about 130 at the new site in Glen Cove. The owners opened their property to the public for the occasion, attracting a mixture of friends, neighbors and local politicians, who drank hot chocolate and nibbled on cookies shaped like the giant “9” on the front door. The house was taken off the barge and moved to a small plot about 50 feet from the main house, where a foundation had been laid in the winter-burned grass. For the next week or so, it will be propped up on pilings as plumbing and electricity are hooked up.

“It looks terrific, I’m a little speechless,” said John Halpern, who is working on a film about Mr. Venturi. “There no damage, not even a glass, not even a scratch. It looks like it’s been unwrapped from a box.”

Walead Beshty: Passages
March 21 – May 2, 2009
LAX ART 2640 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034

Opening reception: March 21, 7-9pm

LAX ART

The Neues Museum in Berlin, whose modern restoration includes elements of the war-damaged original building.

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
NY Times Published: March 11, 2009

BERLIN — The Neues Museum briefly reopened here last weekend (was reborn, seems more like it), and local newspapers reported that more than 35,000 Berliners, many of them waiting hours in the cold in lines stretching nearly half a mile, filed into the still empty building over three days to see it.

The art that will go inside (Egyptian and pre- and early history, as in the prewar years) won’t be installed until the fall. This little preview was cooked up as a kind of civic ceremony. There was a ritual turning over of keys to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, an occasion when the building could speak for itself.

And it does, poetically, and not just for itself. It’s at the heart of the so-called Museum Island, a complex at the center of the city, which the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV in the 19th century conceived as a public sanctuary of culture and learning, a modern Acropolis. The Neues Museum opened in 1855 as the island’s “focal point,” in the words of the building’s architect, Friedrich August Stüler; and with its displays of art and archeology, it was meant to cultivate, as he put it, “the most elevated interests of the people.”

But, typical of Berlin, a city forever on the verge of greatness but never quite becoming the glorious megalopolis it dreams of being, only in 1930 did the last of the Museum Island buildings, the current Pergamon Museum, finally open. Then nine years later the whole complex had to be shut down with the onset of the war. Nine years and out.

The Neues Museum suffered more than any other structure there from Allied bombs dropped in 1943 and 1945. (This is not to mention the destruction to the art in it that was too large to be moved out for safekeeping.) For decades afterward the museum simply lay in shambles, exposed to the elements, neglected by the former Communist East Berlin to which Museum Island belonged.

Its revival now, at a cost of some $255 million, testifies among other things to the civic virtues of dogged perseverance, and as such the building is something of a cautionary tale too. In its tortured and conflicted efforts at urban renewal, Berlin these days often seems to wish both that the worst parts of its past could be erased and that better ones could be magically summoned back to life: as if the city might be returned to what it was in, say, 1928.

But the past persists, as a burden or opportunity, depending on one’s perspective, more so here than perhaps anywhere else in Europe. David Chipperfield, the London architect in charge of resuscitating the Neues Museum, recognized this truism and turned burden into opportunity. His renovation, an 11-year effort (ordeal is perhaps the more apt word at this point), began from the unobvious and instantly disputed proposition that a “Piranesian pile,” as he called the vivid jumble of remains, could yet be put back together. The undertaking would be the world’s biggest-ever Humpty Dumpty project.

All usable scraps and remnants of the original, countless thousands of pieces, big and small, including even bullet holes (if they weren’t too big), were to be incorporated into the building, as Mr. Chipperfield and his team saw fit. Every wall, floor, lintel, column, frieze, mosaic and ceiling was treated as part of this vast jigsaw puzzle. The process, Mr. Chipperfield has repeatedly said, entailed “millions of decisions,” technical, aesthetic and political.

Where no pieces of the original survived, new spaces were invented along the lines of Stüler’s original. The whole northwest wing of the building, for example, had been destroyed by the air raids; much of the southern end, including one magnificent gallery with a soaring cupola, now reinvented in ingeniously modern terms by Mr. Chipperfield, was demolished by the East Germans when they undertook an aborted renovation not long before the Wall fell. And the colossal stairwell, the centerpiece of the building, modeled after a plan by Stüler’s great teacher, the neo-Classicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel, was left an empty shell by the bombardments.

Reconceiving these and other gaps, Mr. Chipperfield copied the original proportions of Stüler’s rooms, which are beautiful, and also stuck with Stüler’s idiosyncratic but elegant layout, which appears symmetrical but isn’t. The goal was to come up with a satisfying visual whole that would remain everywhere legible and honest. Honest in that the new parts should look clearly new, the old, old, while the two go together gracefully. Concrete, wood, metal and recycled bricks, often covered with slurry so the original fragments blend more seamlessly in with what’s new, provide a subtle, muted palette for the modern interventions.

What results isn’t a Peter Brook-like Bouffes du Nord, the Paris theater: it isn’t shabby chic, or what German critics of this project have taken to calling “ruin nostalgia.”

It’s not the Gedächtniskirche, either, the so-called “hollow tooth” Memorial Church in West Berlin, bombed during the war, now preserved as an immense admonitory ruin, towering over one end of the city, laying entirely bare the evidence of its history.

Mr. Chipperfield’s museum is instead a modern building that inhabits the ghost of an old one. It’s a patchwork of vestigial shards, whose organization is the consequence of all those millions of decisions — decisions that in one respect should never have been the responsibility of any architect, since in this city historic preservation, especially with such freighted monuments, is always a matter of German responsibility and national identity, no less than a matter of esthetics.

But Mr. Chipperfield’s museum looks so beautiful and is so eloquent that it short-circuits doubt and criticism. Germans who complained over the years about “ruin nostalgia” (they were the real nostalgists) said that the country, by association with such a symbolic site, shouldn’t continue to be held hostage to the worst episode in German history. Better, they argued, rebuild the Neues Museum as it originally looked, from scratch, without all the bullet holes and rotting columns, along the lines of the fake 18th-century Hohenzollern Stadtschloss on Unter den Linden, the city’s central boulevard not far away, which, if Germany ever comes up with the nearly $1 billion the building will cost, is now on the drawing board.

Maybe with the success of the Neues Museum, which will open officially on Oct. 16, the Schloss supporters will reconsider that misguided plan. Meanwhile, from the slender bow-string iron trusses, lovingly restored in the upper-story galleries, to the marbled floor in the octagonal room where the famous head of Nefertiti (now on view in Schinkel’s Altes museum next door) will be installed, and even to the new concrete galleries whose simplicity is itself a revelation, the new Neues Museum offers a variety of small technological and visual marvels that speak, as Stüler intended, to the benefits of keeping an open mind.

As for the grand central stairway, now under a basilica roof, it rises between bare brick walls toward towering windows, toward the light, then doubles back to lead upward again to more windows, more light. The concrete and dark-beam design reinvents Stüler’s original concept, which becomes a kind of chrysalis out of which now emerges a new, modern grandeur. The space is a metaphor, you might say, for Germany today, which surely Stüler would also have appreciated.

Even the 19th-century frescoes by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, which once traced the progress of man from the Tower of Babel to the glory of Prussia, persist as small fragments embedded high up in the brick, like half-recalled dreams come to life. In such ways the Neues Museum isn’t Lazarus exactly, but it’s almost a miracle. And with it Berlin has one of the finest public buildings in Europe.

Again.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Ny Times Published: March 11, 2009

CAMDEN, Ind.

The late Tom Anderson, the family doctor in this little farm town in northwestern Indiana, at first was puzzled, then frightened.

He began seeing strange rashes on his patients, starting more than a year ago. They began as innocuous bumps — “pimples from hell,” he called them — and quickly became lesions as big as saucers, fiery red and agonizing to touch.

They could be anywhere, but were most common on the face, armpits, knees and buttocks. Dr. Anderson took cultures and sent them off to a lab, which reported that they were MRSA, or staph infections that are resistant to antibiotics.

MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) sometimes arouses terrifying headlines as a “superbug” or “flesh-eating bacteria.” The best-known strain is found in hospitals, where it has been seen regularly since the 1990s, but more recently different strains also have been passed among high school and college athletes. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that by 2005, MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans a year, more than AIDS.

Dr. Anderson at first couldn’t figure out why he was seeing patient after patient with MRSA in a small Indiana town. And then he began to wonder about all the hog farms outside of town. Could the pigs be incubating and spreading the disease?

“Tom was very concerned with what he was seeing,” recalls his widow, Cindi Anderson. “Tom said he felt the MRSA was at phenomenal levels.”

By last fall, Dr. Anderson was ready to be a whistle-blower, and he agreed to welcome me on a reporting visit and go on the record with his suspicions. That was a bold move, for any insinuation that the hog industry harms public health was sure to outrage many neighbors.

So I made plans to come here and visit Dr. Anderson in his practice. And then, very abruptly, Dr. Anderson died at the age of 54.

There was no autopsy, but a blood test suggested a heart attack or aneurysm. Dr. Anderson had himself suffered at least three bouts of MRSA, and a Dutch journal has linked swine-carried MRSA to dangerous human heart inflammation.

The larger question is whether we as a nation have moved to a model of agriculture that produces cheap bacon but risks the health of all of us. And the evidence, while far from conclusive, is growing that the answer is yes.

A few caveats: The uncertainties are huge, partly because our surveillance system is wretched (the cases here in Camden were never reported to the health authorities). The vast majority of pork is safe, and there is no proven case of transmission of MRSA from eating pork. I’ll still offer my kids B.L.T.’s — but I’ll scrub my hands carefully after handling raw pork.

Let me also be very clear that I’m not against hog farmers. I grew up on a farm outside Yamhill, Ore., and was a state officer of the Future Farmers of America; we raised pigs for a time, including a sow named Brunhilda with such a strong personality that I remember her better than some of my high school dates.

One of the first clues that pigs could infect people with MRSA came in the Netherlands in 2004, when a young woman tested positive for a new strain of MRSA, called ST398. The family lived on a farm, so public health authorities swept in — and found that three family members, three co-workers and 8 of 10 pigs tested all carried MRSA.

Since then, that strain of MRSA has spread rapidly through the Netherlands — especially in swine-producing areas. A small Dutch study found pig farmers there were 760 times more likely than the general population to carry MRSA (without necessarily showing symptoms), and Scientific American reports that this strain of MRSA has turned up in 12 percent of Dutch retail pork samples.

Now this same strain of MRSA has also been found in the United States. A new study by Tara Smith, a University of Iowa epidemiologist, found that 45 percent of pig farmers she sampled carried MRSA, as did 49 percent of the hogs tested.

The study was small, and much more investigation is necessary. Yet it might shed light on the surge in rashes in the now vacant doctor’s office here in Camden. Linda Barnard, who was Dr. Anderson’s assistant, thinks that perhaps 50 people came in to be treated for MRSA, in a town with a population of a bit more than 500. Indeed, during my visit, Dr. Anderson’s 13-year-old daughter, Lily, showed me a MRSA rash inflaming her knee.

“I’ve had it many times,” she said.

So what’s going on here, and where do these antibiotic-resistant infections come from? Probably from the routine use — make that the insane overuse — of antibiotics in livestock feed. This is a system that may help breed virulent “superbugs” that pose a public health threat to us all. That’ll be the focus of my next column, on Sunday.

Row 1 (left to right): Brancusi, Moore, Giacometti; Row 2 (left to right): Noguchi, Bourgeois, Koons

February 12 - April 11, 2009

Gagosian
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075

gagosian

Scientists have discovered a highly unusual fish with fangs made of bone.

By Richard Black
BBC News website

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Dubbed the “Dracula” fish, the creature is about 17mm (0.7 inches) long and has been found in only one Burmese stream.
The researchers, from London’s Natural History Museum (NHM), believe the fish lost its teeth over evolutionary time, but later evolved the bone fangs.
Writing in the Royal Society’s journal Proceedings B, they say the males use the fangs to jostle each other - but do not appear to draw blood.
“When you watch them in captivity you can see the males sparring,” said NHM’s Ralf Britz.

“They display with their lower jaws open incredibly widely, then they nudge each other; but we don’t see any wounds.”
Dr Britz, who has worked with Burmese wildlife for more than a decade, named the species Danionella dracula in honour of mythology’s most eminent fanged predator.
Early developer
The tiny specimens came to the UK in a consignment of aquarium fish, and at first the researchers mistook them for another related species.
“After a year or so in captivity they started dying; and when I preserved them and looked at them under the microscope, I thought ‘my God, what is this, they can’t be teeth’,” Dr Britz told BBC News.

Rather than being true teeth, the fangs are made of bone
“And when I looked in more detail, and stained the bone and cartilage with different colours and used an enzyme to dissolve away the muscle, I saw they clearly were not teeth.”
Instead, the jawbones appear to have developed rows of sharp protrusions resembling teeth and presumably serving the same purpose - plus, in the males, these extraordinary fangs.
Using DNA data to place the new species in its family tree, the researchers believe the lineage lost its teeth about 50 million years ago.
Compared to relatives, they appear to reach sexual maturity when their bodies have not fully developed.
The Dracula fish contains 44 fewer bones than its most studied relative, the zebrafish Danio rerio, and these are bones that form late in the zebrafish’s life.
The researchers believe the Dracula fish evolved to mature sexually before its body was fully developed - perhaps because individuals reproducing earlier in life had more reproductive success.
Given that these scientists, experienced with the family of fish, did not immediately spot D dracula as a new species, they suggest it is entirely possible that the little fanged creatures are swimming round unrecognised in other aquaria even now.

Paul McCartney

John Updike

Jim Henson

found on a new website called nerdboyfriend

thanks to michael wells

By MIKE TIERNEY
Ny Times Published: March 11, 2009

ATLANTA — Travis Henry was rattling off his children’s ages, which range from 3 to 11. He paused and took a breath before finishing.

This was no simple task. Henry, 30, a former N.F.L. running back who played for three teams from 2001 to 2007, has nine children — each by a different mother, some born as closely as a few months apart.

Reports of Henry’s prolific procreating, generated by child-support disputes, have highlighted how futile the N.F.L.’s attempts can be at educating its players about making wise choices. The disputes have even eclipsed the attention he received after he was indicted on charges of cocaine trafficking.

“They’ve got my blood; I’ve got to deal with it,” Henry said of fiscal responsibilities to his children. He spoke by telephone from his Denver residence, where he was under house arrest until recently for the drug matter.

Henry had just returned from Atlanta, where a judge showed little sympathy for his predicament during a hearing and declined to lower monthly payments from $3,000 for a 4-year-old son.

Three days after the telephone interview, he was jailed for falling $16,600 behind on support for a youngster in Frostproof, Fla., his hometown.

“I love all my kids,” he said in the interview, but asserted he could not afford the designated amounts, estimated at $170,000 a year by Randy Kessler, his Atlanta lawyer. Kessler said Henry was virtually broke.

“I’ve lost everything in this mess I’ve gotten myself into,” Henry said.

His eldest child was conceived while Henry was in high school, before he was named Mr. Florida Football and a Parade All-American. The child was unplanned as were all but one of his offspring, he said.

“I’m like, ‘Whoa, I’m going to be a dad,’ ” Henry recalled.

He was wed, at 19, to another of the nine mothers, who was six years older. Henry’s mother, who picked oranges for a living, disapproved.

“She was going crazy over it,” Henry said. He added that he filed for annulment within a year “for her.”

Two relationships while he attended the University of Tennessee produced two more children. Attending the annual N.F.L. rookie symposium as a 2001 draft pick of the Buffalo Bills, Henry watched a skit that dramatized the repercussions of imprudent sexual activity. It might as well have been geared toward him.

Henry laughed through the sketch. “I thought, ‘That ain’t ever going to happen to me,’ ” he said.

But it had, and it was just beginning.

Henry maintained that he was involved long-term with many of the mothers. Some, he said, told him they were using birth control, and he professed surprise at discovering they became pregnant by him.

“I did use protection at first,” he said. “Then they’d be saying they’d be on the pill. I was an idiot to trust them. Second or third time with them, I didn’t use it. Then, boom!”

In four instances, he attested, “I was trapped.” If not for his football cachet and accompanying wealth, “I guarantee you that wouldn’t have happened.”

“My counselor asks me, ‘How can you do the same thing over and over?’ ” he said, unable to provide an answer.

“Knock on wood, or something, I’m blessed not to have AIDS. That never crossed my mind.”

Henry declined to discuss aspects of his drug case. He was arrested last fall in Colorado with another man and has pleaded not guilty to charges that could net him 10 years to life in prison if convicted. The arraignment is scheduled for next month.

At the latest child-support hearing in Atlanta, Henry testified vaguely that sizable cash withdrawals were connected to his criminal matter, not to any conspicuous consumption for himself.

In an interview, Robert Wellon, the lawyer who represents the mother in Atlanta, Jameshia Beacham, characterized Henry as spending “like there was no tomorrow,” thus depriving the children of money.

The Denver Broncos gave Henry a five-year, $25 million contract in 2007. Cut last year by the team, which cited injuries and off-the-field commotion, he received only $6.7 million.

Piling on to the child-support issues, Henry failed an N.F.L. drug test. He successfully appealed, avoiding suspension, but faced another penalty from the league for what he said was missing subsequent test dates. Though Henry insisted his body has three more seasons in it, his quandary all but dooms any chance of his suiting up again.

Henry is seeking to modify child-support obligations. Some mothers and their lawyers will have none of that, saying he has squandered a small fortune on luxuries like cars and jewelry.

“I feel sorry for the guy, trust me,” Wellon said. “On the other hand, when you take those kind of actions, there are consequences. He could have taken care of the money.”

Henry argued that, within the context of richly paid athletes, he was not out of line. He contended that he owned no more than three vehicles at once and figured he had spent $250,000 on jewelry. “That ain’t a lot,” he said. Nevertheless, he was hoping to pawn some jewelry to pay off one of many debts and gain freedom.

If there were excesses, Henry said, they involved his immediate family, like picking up travel expenses to games during his seven-year career, highlighted by three 1,200-yard-plus seasons.

“I have a big heart,” he said. “I was taking care of a lot of people. I was acting like somebody who never had nothing. Could never get into that saving mode.”

Kessler, his Atlanta lawyer, said Henry could catch up on child support with access to $250,000 that the judge ordered be placed in a trust. Kessler has appealed the ruling.

“Travis is tackling this head-on,” he said, suggesting that this distinguishes him from other athletes in similar predicaments.

Henry made no excuses but said absentee fathers were part of the landscape during his developmental years. His father disappeared early on, only to resurface at the dawn of his football fame.

“There was no love lost; he wasn’t around when I needed him to be,” said Henry, who indicated that he gets along with his father.

Henry voiced no love for the mothers of some of his children. “Everything was cool,” he said before he signed the rich contract with Denver. “Then they were out for blood.”

After his drug arrest, Henry said he developed severe migraines that required a visit to an emergency room.

“I’m trying to get through the storm,” said Henry, who is eager to impart the same advice to N.F.L. rookies that he once ignored. He would tell them, “Don’t ever think it can’t happen to you.”

Back in Denver, his fiancée awaits. They set a wedding date but agreed to postpone it until the storm dissipates.

One other subject they agree on: Neither wants children

14. Mar - 25. Apr 2009
Opening reception March 14th, 2009, 6-9 pm.

Johann Konig, Berlin

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We believe the bicycle with the greatest positive impact on the environment is a fading champion that has already served a meaningful life and is resuscitated for a second chance at glory.

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website

New Government logos for two economic recovery programs, with an Obama touch.

By Steven Heller
NY Times Blog March 10

Government-sponsored logos are nothing new: The famous blue eagle of F.D.R.’s 1935 Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) was designed by the noted advertising art director Charles Coiner. But last week President Obama unveiled the logos for two economic recovery programs of his own: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (Tiger). “These emblems are symbols of our commitment to you the American people,” he said about the brand marks that will remind the public “that your government is putting the economy back on the road to recovery.”

And like their Depression-era predecessor, these marks did not emerge from whole cloth (or magic pixels). Steve Juras, the creative director of the Chicago firm Mode Project (which collaborated on the Obama campaign’s “O” logo), led the designers Aaron Draplin of Draplin Design Co. and Chris Glass of the design collective Wire & Twine to develop the right marriage of type and image. The White House guidelines for each logo were very clear. “It was explicitly stated that the ARRA logo not look ‘governmental,’ ” Juras said. “We were asked to create a ‘visible sign of progress’ in a contemporary way while referencing energy, education and health care. The goals for Tiger were even simpler: Use a tiger motif to speak to the Department of Transportation’s new initiative, and be sure to include ‘USDOT’ somewhere in the mark.”

The goal was to turn them around in just under four days.

Obama’s branding during and after the campaign has been vigorous and intelligent. But does Juras believe there is a distinctly “Obama” graphic design ethos? “It’s not really about ‘Obama’ branding anymore,” he replied. “It’s more about branding the administration, and it’s best to let the administration speak to its own overarching ethos. That having been said, the direction — ‘don’t make it look too governmental’ — that we were given certainly stakes out an interesting position.”

What’s also interesting about this logo is that its goal is to become obsolete. Just as the W.P.A. was retired when the Depression was over (and World War II began), the ARRA logo is tied to the fate of the economy. “Hopefully, the recovery effort will work so well and so quickly that we’re no longer in recovery but back at full strength and don’t need it,” Juras said. “The sooner it becomes a historical artifact, the better.”

Meanwhile, what does he hope these marks accomplish? “I would say that we are more interested in how people who know little or nothing about design respond to them in their daily lives,” he said. “That is to say: Does the logo give the truck driver or the grocery store clerk or the plumber a little more confidence in our economy? Does a young kid derive some hope for the future by stenciling it on her lunchbox? Only time will tell, I suppose.”

So far the administration has commissioned only a few new marks, but if they are embraced as signs of national optimism, does Juras anticipate more work on the horizon? “That’s a question for someone in the administration,” he said. “I do think that a lot of designers would like to see the Obama administration foster some sort of Design Institute, a think tank existing outside of the Washington bureaucratic structure. Something like this could open up the ‘design for government’ process to a lot of different voices.”

But design is not the solution to the mess America is in. I asked Juras to tell me frankly whether the new marks are just Band-Aids or real symbols of change. “Good question,” he said, “although I don’t necessarily see it as an either/or situation. There’s nothing wrong with a Band-Aid if you’ve got a bad cut, and we all know that real symbols of change can be used in inappropriate ways. Like most things, though, time and popular response will ultimately answer this question.” I guess that’s where Obama’s slogan “Hope” comes in.

Steven Heller, a former art director at The New York Times, is a co-chair of the MFA Design Department at the School of Visual Arts and a blogger and author.

Every so often we uncover some new shards of ceramic and glass in our garden. Yesterday, it appears as though we have found a match (see figure 2). It seems as though the match is from the Roxbury Semi-Porcelain factory in England, also showing a stamp of Ridgeway. It could date back to the mid 19th century. Our place was built in the early 1900’s, so perhaps we are on to something. More to come as the research continues.

posted on research - arm