Deep Lux (Fashion), 30″ x 40″, 2007, Digital C-print

Nancy De Holl

The library shelves of Yves Saint Laurent.

By GUY TREBAY
NY Times Published: February 12, 2009

‘We started out with bare walls,’ the 78-year-old French business mogul Pierre Bergé remarked last year, after announcing his decision to liquidate the vast collections he and Yves Saint Laurent accumulated over the decades of their emotionally baroque but enduring relationship, “and we were happy.”

That happiness is plain to see in “Debut,” an obscure book of images captured by the Life photographer Pierre Boulat during six weeks in 1962 as Saint Laurent — an unknown before making his actual, meteoric debut four years earlier at Dior — prepared the solo collection that would introduce to the wider world a shy Algerian-born dressmaker whose talents eventually transformed him into one of the more potent cultural exports of late 20th-century France.

Shuttling between Saint Laurent’s showroom on the Rue Spontini and a two-room apartment on the Rue la Boétie, Boulat captured the creative beginnings of a designer who at his death last June was honored with a funeral widely characterized as fit for a king. The white-paneled walls of the Rue la Boétie apartment mark a simpler point in Saint Laurent’s trajectory. And the designer’s buoyant attitude in the photographs provides little indication of the phantoms and terrors, the depressions and addictions that would blight his later life.

The Saint Laurent of “Debut” is seen sketching at a folding card table covered with a crisp white cloth; and playing with Hazel, his Chihuahua; and leaning against a waist-high armillary sphere set beside a suburban-looking philodendron and a butler’s tray arranged for cocktails with Françoise Sagan. True, there is a white-coated butler serving drinks in the pictures. Even so, the setting looks distinctly modest and bourgeois.

“Debut” came to mind in October on a visit to Saint Laurent’s more celebrated lodgings, the opulent Aladdin’s cave he occupied at 55, rue de Babylone from 1969 until the day he died. The processes were well under way by then of dismantling the house and its contents in preparation for a five-session, three-day auction to be held not in a drab auction house but under the ribbed glass dome of the Grand Palais, the 19th-century exhibition hall where fashion spectacles are often staged now.

On Feb. 23, the hoard of treasures the designer ardently assembled (he called himself an accumulator, not a collector) begins its journey back into the world. Whether the market will find Saint Laurent’s things fine enough and rare enough to warrant the nearly $400 million that the 733 lots are expected to fetch remains to be seen.

“The estimates are low,” I was informed by Nicolas Kugel, a fifth-generation antiques dealer whose family firm was one of the designer’s primary resources. Given the lofty quality of the objects for sale, this judgment is distinctly relative. What is perhaps most compelling about the Saint Laurent auction is not the money it may yield (much of it to benefit a foundation set up to finance AIDS research) so much as the momentary glimpse it offers into the designer’s singular interior world before it is broken up and forever dispersed.

Cold rain was falling on the day last October when I first saw the apartment, a duplex in the Seventh Arrondissement. Unlike many Paris lodgings built for the upper classes, with their rooms arranged in telescoping enfilade, the Saint Laurent apartment is a cruciform space, entered directly from an interior courtyard and overlooking a garden, from whose windows, in other seasons, the thwack of balls in play at a nearby tennis court could be heard.

Celebrated long before Bergé and Saint Laurent bought it in 1969, the apartment was renovated in 1928 in sleek modernist style by an American who never took occupancy, having lost his fortune in the crash. In the intervening decades its sleek paneled walls and curvilinear spaces were preserved by the only other owner, Marie Cuttoli, a textile magnate and patron of the arts.

Cataloging was in progress when I arrived, and so the gloom of that particular day was offset by the bright antlike industry of workers scribbling descriptions, hauling a Léger off the wall to be photographed and gliding about wearing surgical booties and white cotton gloves.

“My wish,” the 19th-century diarist Edmond de Goncourt once wrote, commending his heirs to swiftly dispatch his collections into the hands of the auctioneer, “is that my drawings, my prints, my bibelots, my books, the works of art which have been the joy of my life, are not consigned to the cold tomb of a museum and the coarse gaze of the indifferent passer-by.” It was amusing that day to contemplate how Goncourt had anticipated the indifferent gaze of the uniformed fireplug standing guard at the door of Saint Laurent’s apartment, fiddling with his earpiece as the material joys of the late designer’s life were readied for sale.

For decades the arrangements of furniture, objects and astonishing pictures by Picasso, Léger, Ingres, Mondrian and Goya had rested in place in a kind of highly charged stasis. “Yves,” explained Philippe Mugnier, an attorney who was Saint Laurent’s friend and personal assistant for the final decade of his life, “hated for anything to be changed.”

An auctioneer who met me at the apartment conducted a tour, spouting descriptions that leaned heavily on the hyperbolic language of his trade. No expert’s eye was required, however, to recognize that the place was chockablock with the Important, the Exceptional and the Rare. For four decades Saint Laurent and Bergé collected with percipience and pockets that deepened thanks to blockbuster sales of fragrances like Opium and, eventually, of the label itself to the pharmaceutical giant Elf Sanofi for little more than twice the sum the auction is expected to realize.

The two men bought early, passionately and with an obstinate and eccentric eye. Assisted by the Kugel family and the French art dealer Alain Tarica, they sought out precious objects in private collections and also bought Art Deco masterpieces at a time when that style was undervalued and objects by master artisans like Jean Dunand and Gustave Miklos could be had for a relative song.

Here were the famous Dunand urns in lacquer and brass; here a unique Eileen Gray sideboard; here two cartoonlike 1920s Miklos stools, upholstered in leopard hide. Here was the de Chirico painting and the African-style stool by Legrain acquired from the estate of the dressmaker Jacques Doucet at a 1972 sale at the Hôtel Drouot. Here were the twining bronze lily-form mirrors from the studios of the artists Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, the original pair joined by others the designer commissioned until dark undulant bronze foliage overtook the music room.

Here were the symmetrical arrangements Saint Laurent favored because symmetry calmed him: a single table overlooking the garden was bracketed by matched alabaster urns, Renaissance bronzes, obelisks in veined crystal and lacquer vases crammed to capacity with the same quantity of the same cultivar of white rose.

Here were the silk-covered Italian dromedary sofas, set facing each other in front of a fireplace laden with massive geodes and rock-crystal specimens. Here on a coffee table were arrayed silver goblets from the workshops of 17th-century Augsburg, emblems then and now of wealth and ostentation, and the innumerable representations of serpents and birds that Saint Laurent amassed, symbols of an obsession with a natural world from which, toward the end of his life, he became increasingly removed.

“The surest sign of wonder is exaggeration,” the philosopher Gaston Bachelard once observed. Yet the exaggerated accumulations of Saint Laurent’s apartment seemed to represent not so much wonder as the memory of it, not the giddiness of acquisition you sometimes encounter in the lairs of compulsive collectors but something automatic and decadent. Saint Laurent was not the first person to apprehend that genius can often be a curse. Neither was he the first to withdraw from society, in all its disappointing dimensions, into the fixed and reassuring company of things.

When I visited in October, Moujik IV, the last in a series of French bulldogs the designer owned in his lifetime, snuffled forlornly about the apartment, flattening himself to a rug and worrying a bandage on an injured paw. The dog was there again when I returned to Paris in December to see the place restored to its intact state. Having toured the world, Saint Laurent’s precious objects had come back to the Rue de Babylone — the pictures hung again, the bibelots placed with exactness in order for a select group of collectors to visit and, presumably, to fall under their spell.

“It’s a bit haunted, that apartment,” Kugel said when I saw him, and his observation rang in my ear as I sat with Mugnier in December, watching Saint Laurent’s butler, Adil Debdoubi, lay out a drinks tray and discreetly uncork a bottle of Champagne.

Unlike Saint Laurent, who never left the house without a certain arrangement of amulets (a brass figurine of his dog, a small turquoise crucifix and a gold religious medal from his mother) in his right trouser pocket, I am not an especially superstitious person. And yet to visit Rue de Babylone that evening — to wander through rooms where the vases were kept filled with the white lilies and roses; to pass the Goya portrait of Don Luis María de Cistué (promised to the Louvre) and the massive Senufo bird sculpture that had accompanied the designer from his early happy days at the Rue la Boétie; to inspect the matchless suite of Mondrian pictures hung along a wall leading into the garden where Moujik went to lift his leg on a plinth supporting a Roman Minotaur sculpture — was to get the impression that Saint Laurent had not altogether quit the premises. And perhaps, in some sense, he has not.

Among the presentations at the festival was “Close Encounters With Birds of Prey,” a kind of Raptors 101 given by Bill Streeter of the Delaware Valley Raptor Center.

By KATE STONE LOMBARDI
NY Times Published: February 12, 2009

IT looked as if paparazzi had descended on the Croton Dam Bridge. Clusters of photographers with tripods and telephoto lenses conferred excitedly when they got the subject in their sights. Dozens of others had binoculars and telescopes trained on their elusive prey.

The celebrities they were pursuing? Bald eagles, which were spotted on the ice of the partly frozen Hudson River and nestling in trees on the shoreline. It was all part of Eagle Fest, an event that has been held annually for the last five years to celebrate the return of the bald eagle to the lower Hudson Valley.

“It’s such a success story, we wanted to share it with the public,” said Fred W. Koontz, the executive director of Teatown Lake Reservation, an Ossining-based nonprofit environmental organization — with an 834-acre nature preserve — and a co-sponsor of the event. “The bald eagles in the area are recovering, and they have been coming back.”

Bald eagles, among the largest birds of prey in North America, were once plentiful in New York. Before the 1900s, they used as many as 80 nesting sites, primarily in northern and western New York, according to the State Department of Environmental Conservation. But by 1976, only one pair of eaglets remained. Environmentalists blamed pesticides, particularly DDT (which was banned in 1972), for interfering with the raptors’ ability to reproduce.

In 1976, the state began its Bald Eagle Restoration Project in an attempt to re-establish a breeding population. Over 13 years, 198 nesting bald eagles were collected, mostly from Alaska, and taken to New York. They were reared in cages in towers in the mid-Hudson region and released.

Today, roughly 500 bald eagles winter in New York (they migrate here when the waters begin to freeze in Canada and Nova Scotia), and 143 pairs remain in the state during the summer. Dr. Koontz said that eight pairs had stayed year-round in the lower Hudson Valley.

The Eagle Fest, which was held on Feb. 9 and based at Croton Point Park, included heated tents with educational displays and talks by conservationists. But the wild eagles were the main event, and a white board kept visitors up to date on the latest sightings.

At 9 a.m., 6 bald eagles had been spotted from the boat ramp at the Croton-Harmon train station, 21 had been seen at George’s Island Park in Montrose, 9 had been spotted at the Croton Dam and 3 had been seen at Annsville Creek Paddlesport Center in Peekskill.

By 11 a.m., 25 eagles had been spotted at the dam, some of them feeding on a deer carcass on the partly frozen Hudson. Meanwhile, a peregrine falcon was perched on a street lamp at the train station.

Still more eagles could be seen from the shoreline of Croton Point Park. Frank and Patty Clark of Tarrytown saw two bald eagles flying about two miles out, over the Hudson. The Clarks were at the festival with their 3-year-old son, Frankie. All three had binoculars around their necks.

“I’ve never seen an eagle in the wild before,” Mr. Clark said. “It was exciting. They were both bald eagles. One was mature and one was immature.”

Mature bald eagles have the distinctive white heads and tails; the word “bald” in the eagle’s name comes from an Old English word that means white-headed. Younger bald eagles have brown heads.

Among the presentations at the festival was “Close Encounters With Birds of Prey,” a kind of Raptors 101 given by Bill Streeter of the Delaware Valley Raptor Center.

Mr. Streeter explained that the term raptor refers to any birds of prey — including hawks, vultures, falcons, owls and eagles. Raptors have hooked beaks, strong talons and feet that are disproportionately large for their bodies. The center where Mr. Streeter works treats sick and injured raptors. Most are set free when they have recovered, but some could not survive if released into the wild.

It was some of these birds that Mr. Streeter introduced as they perched on his falconer’s glove, including Ace, a peregrine falcon that had been hit by a car. Falcons, when healthy, can fly at 200 miles per hour and can kill birds four times their size, Mr. Streeter told his audience. Peregrine falcons are now nesting on Hudson River bridges from Manhattan to Albany.

Mr. Streeter also displayed a red-tailed hawk, a great horned owl and a saw-whet owl, but it was when he lifted Benson, a bald eagle, from his cage, that the audience let out a gasp of admiration.

Benson, though unable to fly because he had once been shot in the chest, still looked majestic. He was restless, and Mr. Streeter struggled to keep him perched on the glove.

He also displayed Julia, a 14-pound golden eagle, with 3 ½-inch talons and a 7-foot wingspan, “one of the most powerful birds in the United States.”

Festival visitors — some 4,000 by the end of the day — made their way from the heated tents to the various viewing sights. Dan and Carol Carhart of Denville, N.J., came to the festival on a bus tour. Self-proclaimed bird lovers, they have seen eagles all over the country.

Steve Brown of Manhattan came because his son Matthew, 7, had been studying birds in the first grade.

“We’ve taken up birding this year,” Mr. Brown said. “I knew eagles were on the Hudson, but I didn’t know they were this far south. We’re trying to get out and learn as much as we can.”

Hector DeLeon of Cortlandt Manor attended the raptor show and then made his way up to the Croton Dam. He was sporting a baseball cap with an eagle insignia and a sweatshirt with an image of a large bald eagle.

“I just really do like eagles,” he said. “They’re our national bird. They fly into a storm. They represent something.”

Still from Hollywood Sign Film 2009

POMEGRANATE JUICE AND PEPPER SPRAY
February 14 - March 14, 2009

Marc Foxx

Holy Shit (Matt Fishbeck & Ariel Pink)

Hotel Surazo by Wedeles and Manieu

Heinz Mack
“Relief Wand” (Relief Wall)
1960
Re-creation of the installantion at Galerie Diogenes, Berlin, 1960
Multiple materials

By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM
The Wall Street Journal
February 11, 2009
Los Angeles

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an extraordinary, sprawling blockbuster exhibition, “Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures,” argues a persuasive case against our clichéd views of East-West aesthetic divides. If the usual suspects — Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter — are included, so are some unlikely ones we don’t generally associate with postwar German art: Blinky Palermo and Nam June Paik. Stephanie Barron, LACMA’s senior curator of modern art, and Eckhart Gillen of Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH have jointly organized an amazing survey of German art from 1945 (the end of World War II) to 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) that neither sidesteps the complex political issues of the period nor makes them the central vantage point from which we view these works.

It’s a tricky business that generally succeeds here: an exhibition grounded in politics but focused on art, recontextualizing familiar artists while also introducing to American viewers a number of artists whose work has never before been seen here.

The exhibition is organized into four sections (1945-49; the 1950s; the 1960s and 1970s; and the 1980s), and the labels clearly identify where each artist was born and worked — since a number of them were born in East Germany but moved to West Germany (there don’t seem to be examples of the opposite!). But the installation itself — which occupies a full floor of Renzo Piano’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum — avoids such distinctions, thereby emphasizing the curators’ goal of having us view the work primarily as art. (Word is that when the exhibition travels to museums in Nuremberg, Germany, and Berlin, the installation will separate East from West — presumably making a very different statement about the art.) LACMA has a history of such projects — “Degenerate Art” (1991) and “Exiles and Emigres” (1997) — and “Art of Two Germanys” once again demands of the viewer an openness to understanding the layered ways in which we can read art as we are guided by the curators through a maze of both politics and art.

The first gallery plays Wilhelm Rudolph’s drawings of Dresden in ruins off against Willi Baumeister’s dour abstractions — so that while it’s a subtle East-West bout, the most pervasive sense is of a somber postwar mood. Karl Hofer (West), who was counted among Hitler’s “degenerate” artists, is included here with a “Dance of the Dead” (1946) that eerily captures the moment of war’s end, and reminds us it wasn’t necessarily joyous. Underlining that is Hans Grundig’s “To the Victims of Fascism” (East), a 1946-49 artwork that is perhaps one of the earliest Holocaust memorials and owes much to the tradition of Pietà images — especially those in the manner of the Louvre’s majestic Avignon Pietà (c. 1455). It’s that keen visual interplay — on the walls and in our minds — that validates the curators’ decision not to pit the Eastern kitsch of Socialist Realism against some imagined higher-status world of Western abstraction. Viewers are constantly challenged: I was tempted to stand in the middle of a gallery, look around, and see if I could tell which works came from which side of that evil Iron Curtain.

While there are a handful of Socialist Realist paintings depicting workers in service to the idealized state — canvases we might have expected to populate half the show — the exhibition constantly refreshes our vision through the inclusion of artists as amazing as they are unfamiliar to American viewers. Prime among these is Werner Tübke, an East German realist painter of breathtaking skill, whose work West Germans had difficulty taking seriously because of his heroic status as one of the East’s major artists. Seen here, outside that politicized context, Tübke shines as a brilliantly eccentric talent — his “Reminiscences of Schulze, JD III” (1965) brings together traditional Last Judgment iconography with a searing political statement, including a Nazi hanging judge at its center. One hopes that more of Tübke’s work will be shown here. Willi Sitte’s “Massacre II” (1959) fits comfortably in a tradition that works its way from Goya through Manet to Picasso — taking on one conflict to suggest all, East or West.

While a more realistic visual language was encouraged in the East even before the Berlin Wall was imposed on that great city in 1961, artists such as Hermann Glöckner, working privately, were playing with highly refined expressions of abstract art that we might have assumed to prevail only in the West. There, the ZERO group artists — some of whom (Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, Günther Uecker) became familiar to American audiences during the brief 1960s mania for so-called kinetic and “op” art — played with new industrial materials that reflected both new options for abstract art and Western artists’ access to the growing wealth of the New Germany. And yet it’s interesting to note that only with the advent of more conventional painting and the varied, but gutsy, works of Georg Baselitz, Polke and A.R. Penck does one really feel the full emergence of West Germany as a world power in art, reflecting the country’s economic power.

Moving across the entire spectrum sits Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), who served in the war, gave new resonance to old materials such as felt and street detritus (in contrast with his ZERO colleagues), and was an influential teacher. He might have overshadowed much of this exhibition, but the curators wisely have underplayed him here — perhaps because he and Anselm Kiefer (difficult to underplay, given the scale of his paintings) are both better-known quantities to museum audiences.

Viewers will inevitably differ in citing highlights from an exhibition that spans a mere 45 years but includes more than 300 works in various media. For me, one of the joys was discovering unknown artists of the caliber of Wolfgang Mattheuer, whose painting “Scare” (1977) is a searing bit of realism that echoes an earlier German painting tradition without necessarily asserting anything about its East German origins. And surely one of the most stunning installations on view in any museum is the gallery in which the expansive centerpiece consists of old shoes and gloves (debris from Berlin’s bombed Anhalter Bahnhof, but also clearly suggestive of other tragedies), a floor assemblage by Raffael Rheinsberg (1980). We encounter this and look past it at a wall with three large paintings from 1982 that have swastikas at their center — Olaf Metzel’s “Turk Flat,” Albert Oehlen’s “Führer’s Headquarter’s” and Jorg Immendorff’s “Consequences.”

Having also traveled several political and artistic paths to reach this point, checking and rechecking the intersections of art and politics during the tumultuous years of a recovering and divided Germany, we realize that no amount of creation and re-creation enables either us or the artists to escape the haunting past — at least not yet. In that sense the exhibition mirrors thoughtfully the country whose artists are on view. A weighty catalog, with essays by a range of scholars, examines these issues further, and adds intellectual heft to a truly extraordinary exhibition.

Mr. Freudenheim, a former art museum director, served as the assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution.

“Incidents over the past few years have included arrests of a costumed Elmo, Mr. Incredible and the Scream on suspicion of aggressive begging and the jailing of a Freddy Krueger on suspicion of stabbing a man in a scuffle. A Chewbacca was arrested on suspicion of battery after allegedly head-butting a tour guide who complained about his treatment of two tourists from Japan.”

By Bob Pool
LA Times February 11, 2009

Holy Hollywood ending, Batman! Maybe this is a job for Superman!

That’s what Robin was probably thinking after the superhero sidekick was attacked and pummeled as he strolled in his mask, cape and tights among tourists on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

A series of assaults near Grauman’s Chinese Theatre has led to a plea for a city licensing system that costumed characters who pose for visitors’ photos hope will protect them.

Actors who dress like movie and TV personalities contend that vendors selling compact discs of music in the 6800 block of Hollywood Boulevard have attacked them and beaten them without provocation.

Some of the impersonators complain that police and private security guards who work in the area have been slow to respond when the sidewalk attacks have occurred.

Dozens of the colorful street actors show up daily on the north side of the boulevard between the famed movie theater and the Hollywood & Highland shopping center to pose for pictures in exchange for tips.

In complaints to Los Angeles police, Hollywood business leaders and city officials, the characters have blamed the attacks on aggressive music disc sellers who congregate near a record store on the block.

According to one veteran performing character, an associate of the assailants has bragged that they have ties to a South Los Angeles street gang.

Since late fall, more than half a dozen street performers have reportedly been beaten, including one costumed character who was hospitalized with a skull fracture. Several have been attacked more than once.

At the Walk of Fame, CD sellers had little to say about their relationship with the performers.

“I don’t know anything about that,” said one, walking away with his stack of discs without further comment. “You’ll have to talk to the characters,” said another, who also turned away. A third allowed that “I’m smooth and mellow. They don’t bother me.”

But in an appeal to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, one performer alleged that the attacks have continued because authorities have “open disdain and distaste for the characters,” whom they view “as beggars.”

In a letter to Villaraigosa and City Council President Eric Garcetti, impersonator Christopher Mitchell asked that police and security guards from a local business improvement district be assigned to patrol “nonstop” along the block between 10 a.m. and midnight.

After that, the city should create a licensing system for characters and other performers on the block and institute rules for sidewalk CD sellers, proposed Mitchell.

A spokeswoman for Villaraigosa said his office is looking into the matter. So is Garcetti, who represents the Hollywood area.

Garcetti said a registration and permit system could be a solution to the Walk of Fame sidewalk turf wars. But he said officials need to be cautious about violating 1st Amendment rights and avoiding some of the legal problems caused by vendor and performer restrictions imposed at the Venice Boardwalk and Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade.

He will meet this week with Hollywood-area police Capt. Bea Girmala to discuss options, Garcetti said.

“Can we do something to regulate this? This is our calling card to the world,” he said of the Walk of Fame. “This is a real jewel, and all it takes is one or two incidents to ruin it.”

Kerry Morrison, head of the Hollywood Entertainment District business improvement group, agreed that “territorial scuffles over very precious real estate” take place on the sidewalk.

She said collection of a business license fee from performers and vendors could help pay for more intensive patrolling of the block by police and private security officers from her group. But crowds of characters asking for tips and vendors requesting “donations” for their CDs have become a turnoff for visitors, she said.

“They are intimidating to a lot of tourists who feel they have walked through the gauntlet,” Morrison said.

Incidents over the past few years have included arrests of a costumed Elmo, Mr. Incredible and the Scream on suspicion of aggressive begging and the jailing of a Freddy Krueger on suspicion of stabbing a man in a scuffle. A Chewbacca was arrested on suspicion of battery after allegedly head-butting a tour guide who complained about his treatment of two tourists from Japan.

For their part, the costumed characters contend that the handful of performers who in the past have been accused of shaking down tourists or causing other problems are no longer present on the block. They characterized themselves as an iconic piece of the Hollywood scene and part of the attraction that draws millions of tourists a year to the area.

But the performers claim the threat to them from aggressive CD vendors is real.

One character actress, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said she was threatened by friends of the music sellers after she witnessed one assault and called an ambulance and authorities.

On another occasion, performers claim, CD sellers looking for specific sidewalk characters ordered characters to unmask so they could identify them.

An attack on the character Nacho Libre was videotaped and posted on YouTube.

Alex Brovedani, a 27-year-old actor who portrays such characters as Batman and Robin on the boulevard, said he has been assaulted four times by CD vendors.

“Sometimes they try to horn in when we’re with tourists. Some characters will tell them to wait their turn. That’s when they start threatening,” Brovedani said.

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
NY Times Published: February 9, 2009

THE FACTS

Blowing your nose to alleviate stuffiness may be second nature, but some people argue it does no good, reversing the flow of mucus into the sinuses and slowing the drainage.

Counterintuitive, perhaps, but research shows it to be true.

To test the notion, Dr. J. Owen Hendley and other pediatric infectious disease researchers at the University of Virginia conducted CT scans and other measurements as subjects coughed, sneezed and blew their noses. In some cases, the subjects had an opaque dye dripped into their rear nasal cavities.

Coughing and sneezing generated little if any pressure in the nasal cavities. But nose blowing generated enormous pressure — “equivalent to a person’s diastolic blood pressure reading,” Dr. Hendley said — and propelled mucus into the sinuses every time. Dr. Hendley said it was unclear whether this was harmful, but added that during sickness it could shoot viruses or bacteria into the sinuses, and possibly cause further infection.

The proper method is to blow one nostril at a time and to take decongestants, said Dr. Anil Kumar Lalwani, chairman of the department of otolaryngology at the New York University Langone Medical Center. This prevents a buildup of excess pressure.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Blowing your nose can create a buildup of excess pressure in sinus cavities.

scitimes@nytimes.com

Amy Yao

Lesley Vance, Untitled (3) 2009, oil on linen, 14 x 20 inches

Rachel Uffner Gallery

via ready4thehouse

Silke Otto-Knapp

“Winterlong”

February 15th-March 21st, 2009

Opening Sunday, February 15th, 5-7pm

Overduin and Kite

thanks matt

thanks steve

Researchers have determined that black-coated wolves, like these in Yellowstone National Park, got their distinctive color from dogs.

By MARK DERR
NY TimesPublished: February 5, 2009

In a bit of genetic sleuthing, a team of researchers has determined that black wolves and coyotes in North America got their distinctive color from dogs that carried a gene mutation to the New World.

The finding presents a rare instance in which a genetic mutation from a domesticated animal has benefited wild animals by enriching their “genetic legacy,” the scientists write in Thursday’s Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science. Because black wolves are more common in forested areas than on the tundra, the researchers concluded that melanism — the pigmentation that resulted from the mutation — must give those animals an adaptive advantage.

Although common in many species, melanism in dogs follows a unique genetic pathway, said Dr. Gregory S. Barsh, a professor of genetics and pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the senior author of the paper.

Last year, Dr. Barsh and his laboratory identified a gene mutation responsible for the protein beta-defensin 3, which regulates melanism in dogs. After finding that the same mutation was responsible for black wolves and black coyotes in North America, and for black wolves from the Italian Apennines where wolves have recently hybridized with free-ranging dogs, the researchers set out to discover where and when the mutation evolved.

Comparing large sections of wolf, dog and coyote genomes, Dr. Barsh and his colleagues concluded that the mutation arose in dogs 12,779 to 121,182 years ago, with a preferred date of 46,886 years ago. Because the first domesticated dogs are estimated to date back just 15,000 to 40,000 years ago in East Asia, the researchers said that they could not determine with certainty whether the mutation arose first in wolves that predate that time, or in dogs at an early date in their domestication.

Robert K. Wayne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies canine evolution and is a co-author on the Science paper, said in an interview that he believed the mutation occurred first in dogs. But even if it arose first in wolves, he said, it was passed on to dogs who brought it to the New World and then passed it to wolves and coyotes soon after their arrival.

Dr. Wayne and his colleagues have dated the presence of dogs in Alaska to about 14,000 years ago and are now checking ancient dog remains from across the Americas for the mutation.

The researchers concluded that the mutation is subject to positive selection, meaning that it serves some adaptive purpose. Cross-breeding produces offspring with one set of genes from each parent, in this case a dog and a wolf. If all subsequent breeding takes place among wolves, the dog genes eventually vanish, unless one or more of them helps the organism survive.

Scientists have not yet identified the mutation’s purpose, but they suggested that its association with forested habitats meant the prevalence of melanism should increase as forests expand northward.

In an interview, Dr. Barsh observed that beta-defensin is involved in providing immunity to viral and bacterial skin infections, which might be more common in forested, warmer environments.

Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ethologist from the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the project, said more work was needed to show what adaptive advantage black coats might provide. But, Dr. Bekoff added, “This is an important paper that among other things should make us revisit and likely revise what we mean by a ‘pure’ species.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 8, 2009

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.

But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan.

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal.

In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small.

Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself.

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short.

So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

In places where the practice is banned as an unsightly nuisance to neighbors, right-to-dry activists and bloggers are forming an alliance.

By Alexandria Abramian Mott
LA Times February 7, 2009

When clothes dryers account for at least 6% of the electricity used by U.S. households, is it any wonder that line-drying is coming back? In places where the practice is banned as an unsightly nuisance to neighbors, right-to-dry activists and blogging eco-moms are forming an alliance. Their cause: to reduce energy consumption and to call upon sunlight rather than bleach to get those whites even whiter.

The movement also includes homeowners pinched by rising electric bills as well as some celebrity converts. Yes, there’s even a blog dedicated to tracking who’s who in L.A. line-drying. blog.linedryit.com/eco_facts/

Sophie Uliano, a resident of the Brookside area near Hancock Park, went so far as to hire a specialist to maximize the length of her clothesline in a small backyard dominated by a pool.

“It was one of my chores as a child growing up in Surrey, England,” Uliano said. “I’ll never forget the smell of burying my head in a basket of line-dried laundry. I still do it.”

Uliano, who hangs about 90% of her laundry during the summer and about 60% of it in winter, said no one has complained except for her husband, who always wants it taken down before guests come over.

For her, she said, “The fact that I line-dry my clothes is like a badge of honor.”

A 2001 Department of Energy report estimated that electric clothes dryers accounted for about 5.8% of total electricity usage in U.S. homes — a startling figure given that the same report said all indoor and outdoor lighting in American homes constitutes only 8.8% of electricity usage. Plus, the 5.8% attributed to dryers does not include electricity needed to power the motors of gas-heated dryers.

Still, some people see nothing purposeful or poetic in the image of clean sheets blowing in the wind.

“Homeowner associations recognize that if people throw their clothes over their fences and patio walls that their homes won’t be as aesthetically attractive,” said Richard S. Monson, president of the California Assn. of Homeowners Assns. “We’re criticized for this, but what it’s doing is protecting home values.”

It’s not just the beige-on-approved-beige gated communities that often prohibit line-drying. Homeowner associations at retirement communities, mobile home parks and condos often prohibit the practice. Elleven, Los Angeles’ first condo building to receive the U.S. Green Building Council’s gold LEED rating for environmentally conscious design, has sustainable bamboo flooring — but line-drying? That’s still strictly verboten, building manager Matthew Davidson said.

Real estate broker Margaret Goedeke lives in Newport Crest, a cluster of beachfront condominiums where open garage doors, flag poles and clothing lines are all prohibited. “We’re not even allowed to hang a towel outside,” Goedeke said. “Once in a while we’ll dry something on our deck, but we hide it. We’re very controlled.”

These kinds of rules drove British film producer Steven Lake to make “Drying for Freedom,” a documentary on line-drying in the U.S. that he said is in pre-production.

“The matter of wasted energy is something that draws my attention to this topic,” he said. “But mostly it’s the fact that in America, which to the rest of the world is considered to be the land of the free, citizens are banned from something as simple and silly as hanging out their washing.”

According to Lake, Southern California will play a particularly large part in the project.

“Not only is that part of the United States full of HOAs, but it is particularly hot, so there is no excuse not to do it,” he said.

If line-drying as a plot line sounds about as scintillating as watching compost decompose, get this: Lake’s film will feature one extreme case. “We’re including feuding neighbors in Mississippi where one man purportedly shot and killed another due to a dispute over a washing line. He didn’t want to see the laundry from his window.”

::

In her 20 years of drying clothes in her Van Nuys backyard, Kathy Arnos is happy to report she has yet to receive a death threat.

“Nobody has ever complained, because it’s completely private,” said Arnos, who is line-less, preferring to hang her clothes from patio chairs and umbrellas. “And even if they could see my clothes, I seriously doubt it would lower my property value.”

Arnos’ boyfriend, David Bower, also avoids the dryer. But instead of using his backyard in Hollywood, Bower hung two lines inside his garage.

“I worried that someone would take my clothes from my backyard,” he said. “And this way, I don’t have to worry about weather conditions.”

In L.A., renters and condo owners even post tips about undercover line-drying on websites such as laundrylist.org.

“Not everyone has a half-acre in the Palisades to dry their clothes,” said Uliano, who is the author of the eco-guidebook “Gorgeously Green.”

“I suggest that people who don’t have a yard do it the Italian way by getting a good old drying rack and placing it near an open window for the day.”

These are tactics that even Monson might agree with.

“We’re not against line-drying,” he said. “Not using dryers can be a good thing, especially in these economical times. We’re asking that residents do so with some discretion.”

Discretion is something Dean Fisher misses. Fisher, a 25-year-old interior designer, likes to line-dry from her Highland Park bungalow apartment. But her neighbor laid claim to a communal brick patio by tying rope between a fence and a tree.

“Oftentimes, I’ll have to fight my way through damp sheets as if I’m trailblazing in the rain forest,” Fisher said. “Or I’ll invite my friends out onto the patio only to be greeted by Dora the Explorer footie pajamas and old-lady bras. Ewww.”

The first place I remember hearing the idea of the roof as a “fifth facade” was Peter Eisenman talking about his Columbus Convention Center, from 1989, but completed in 1993.

With an awkward, constrained site sandwiched between downtown and a tangle of freeways, Eisenman recognized that the most important vantage points for the building were from the air–from passing motorists, conventioneers’ hotel rooms, and arriving airplanes. So he translated his program of entry lanes and loading bays sculpturally across the building.

You’d think the triumph of the rendering and virtual formmaking software and the whole, architecture as sculpture/object era would have heightened sensitivity to 360-degree design. But Google Maps makes it immediately clear that architects can be divided into those who consider the roof, and those who consider the roof an easy place to hide the air conditioner. Well, it ain’t hidden any more, folks.

I was reminded of this while surfing through pmoore66’s vast collection of aerial views of modern and contemporary architecture. While there are definitely wholly considered designs that look good on Google Maps, there are a very few–like Toyo Ito’s 2002 pavilion for the Serpentine–which seem to give special attention to the bird’s eye view.

On the one hand, it seems obvious that this vast, global audience should be factored into the creation of architecture. But on the other, it seems absolutely insane to design a structure, a space, for people who won’t be anywhere near it, but sitting in front of some screen on the other side of the world.

Maybe the next Bilbao Effect, sure to appeal to striving cities in these difficult budgetary times, will be to commission grand architectural designs purely for the benefit of the Google Maps audience. Like the rural streetscape camouflage which was applied to the roof of the Lockheed airplane factory in Burbank to thwart Japanese bombers during WWII, cheap, easy, flexible Potemkin roof structures could really put a town on the map, so to speak.

found on greg.org

Richard Serra Sculptures on Google Maps

The whole thing about the only human construct you can see from space is the Great Wall of China will be amusing to people growing up in the Google Maps era, where you can’t hide anything from the satellite’s surveilling eye. It’s the geospatial equivalent of explaining TV before remotes and cable: it’ll just make you sound old.

So kudos to Richard Serra for being ahead of the curve [no pun intended] on making work that turns out to be well-suited for viewing from our new conveniently God-like vantage point.

I started to make a list with the Torqued Ellipse in front of Glenstone, Mitch Rales’ foundation in Potomac, and the suggestion from Guthrie of T.E.U.C.L.A., a torqued ellipse in the Murphy Sculpture Garden behind the Broad Art Center at UCLA, described at its installation in 2006 as “the first public work by sculptor Richard Serra installed in Southern California.”

And that reminded me that the Broads have had a Serra titled No Problem in their backyard for a while, which, thanks to Google Maps, is now public. Searching for that image led me to pmoore66’s collection of bird’s eye view Serras around the world at Virtual Globetrotting. If you count Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp, which he helped complete after Serra Smithson’s death [!], pmoore66 has sighted 44 Serras around the world using either Google Maps, or Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye View, plus another four shots on Google Streetview. [Here are the search results on Virtual Globetrotting for “Richard Serra”, but that link looks a little unstable.]

With more than 1,700 entries so far, pmoore66 appears to be almost single-handedly pinning down the modernist canon for architecture and outdoor sculpture. This warrants some looking into. Stay tuned.

The more oblique angles of birds-eye-view seems to suit Serra’s sculptures better, and they remind me of a series of little desk tchotchke-sized versions of monumental sculptures called minuments that I saw in the ICA London bookshop a few years ago. As soon as I can figure out how to get Google to stop spellchecking for me, I’ll get the artist’s name.

found on greg.org

Atelier Bow-Wow’s BBQ house, made with recycled materials, is part of a low-cost housing case study.

Hammock house by Atelier Bow-Wow

Sunset house by Atelier Bow-Wow

By BROOKE HODGE
NY Times T Magazine Published February 6

For its first solo U.S. exhibition, Atelier Bow-Wow — the Tokyo architecture studio led by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kajima — riffs on the post-World War II Case Study Houses. Small Case Study House, on view at the Gallery at Redcat in downtown Los Angeles through March 29, consists of three “microstructures” that collectively offer a contemporary spin on the idea of minimal low-cost housing.

The Case Study House program, which enlisted architects to design and build houses using prefabricated materials, has been a source of fascination and inspiration for Tsukamoto, who has built more than 20 houses in Japan with Kajima since Atelier Bow-Wow’s founding in 1992. For its L.A. debut, the firm designed three “microstructures”: a BBQ house whose stadium seating is directed toward central oil-can barbecues, a hammock house for repose and a sunset house for contemplation.

Like the Japanese teahouse, which is dedicated solely to the practice of the tea ceremony, each of these dwellings is a space for a single leisure activity that the architects identified as particularly Southern Californian. The full-scale, habitable structures are built from salvaged wood provided by the ReUse People, a company that deconstructs houses slated for demolition. If L.A. isn’t on your itinerary, Atelier Bow-Wow is designing the environment for “Krazy!”, an exhibition of Japanese anime, manga and video games that opens at New York’s Japan Society on March 13.

The Gallery at Redcat
631 W. Second Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
redcat.org

Matt Connors
Installation view Galerie Martin Janda, 2009

Group show at Galerie Martin Janda

By Roberta Smith
NY Times Published February 6, 2008

RICH ALDRICH

Bortolami

510 West 25th Street, Chelsea

Through Feb. 28

Richard Aldrich’s third solo show in New York is his first in one of Chelsea’s cavernous spaces. Its 20 paintings vary greatly in size, material and technique. They veer between large and small, abstract and sort of representational, and Romantic and Minimal. They go from thickly painted to nearly bare to excised canvas with exposed stretchers. It is clear that beyond the vertical rectangular format Mr. Aldrich does not intend to limit his options anytime soon.

And yet his work is very much of a piece. Whether severely attenuated or slyly voluptuous, it has its own style — a combination of understated bravado, brinksmanship and delicacy that amounts to a slackerish cosmopolitanism. Each work isolates some aspect of the process of making, looking at or exhibiting painting, or refers to the history of painting. You are invited to think outside the medium, sometimes with poetic input from a work’s title.

One work is a legible rendering of a man’s head and shoulders seen from the back (despite being mostly a brown blob surmounting a black one) and titled “Looking.” A larger version of the same painting, with part of the canvas cut away and a mirror affixed to the exposed stretcher, is titled “Looking With Mirror Apparatus.” Across from these hang two versions of a more conventionally decorative work, “Treib Painting” and “Large Treib Painting.” The larger copy is a softer, smoothed-out rendition of the smaller original; their images are abstract but suggest an easel.

In another work bare canvas has been cut away to reveal the thick stretcher bars; the gaps are accented with three long, ultra-thin strips of wood daubed with oil and wax that boil down image and support to a fragile, nearly invisible essence. The work’s title is “If I Paint Crowned I’ve Had It, Got Me,” which conveys a certain fear of the effects of artistic success. An irritatingly sparse painting exposes a different kind of hazard. It features an enormous spindly letter C rendered in striped shirt fabric; tiny letters complete the word, which is echoed in the title, “Coward Painting.”

This is a very smart, suave, nerdy show. Rauschenberg and Whistler — possible opposites — are invoked. The surface of “Whistler’s Mother” has just four large sheets of buff paper glued to its surface and, near the bottom, four small reproductions of full-length portraits by Whistler that are all in the Frick Collection. Shapes repeat among certain paintings. There’s a lot to look at, and sometimes Mr. Aldrich just lets himself go, covering a canvas with thick blocky strokes of color, as in “Untitled (Night Time Sky),” which seems to have cherries for stars.

Fri, Feb 20 at 8pm at Royce Hall UCLA Live

One of cinema’s most visionary, enigmatic and controversial directors, German film auteur Werner Herzog creates extreme, larger than life narratives that often blur the boundaries of reality and fiction. His eccentric, over-the-top characters –from actor Klaus Kinski’s maniacal conquistador in the 1972 classic Aguirre, the Wrath of God to the doomed “grizzly bear expert” in the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man—are often quixotic outsiders who test the limits of humanity with ill-advised hubris. This fascinating discussion with Herzog will be moderated by Paul Höldengraber, director of public programs at the New York Public Library.

Thanks to Steven Tsou for the below you tube link of Werner Herzog

By August Brown
Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2009

Lux Interior, the singer, songwriter and founding member of the pioneering New York City horror-punk band the Cramps, died Wednesday. He was 60.

Interior, whose real name was Erick Lee Purkhiser, died at Glendale Memorial Hospital of a heart condition, according to a statement from his publicist.

With his wife, guitarist “Poison” Ivy Rorschach, Interior formed the Cramps in 1976, pairing lyrics that expressed their love of B-movie camp with ferocious rockabilly and surf-inspired instrumentation.

The band became a staple of the late ’70s Manhattan punk scene emerging from clubs such as Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, and was one of the first acts to realize the potential of punk rock as theater and spectacle.

Often dressed in macabre, gender-bending costumes onstage, Interior evoked a lanky, proto-goth Elvis Presley, and his band quickly became notorious for volatile and decadent live performances.

The Cramps recorded early singles at Sun Records with producer Alex Chilton of the band Big Star and had their first critical breakthrough on their debut EP “Gravest Hits.”

The band’s lack of a bassist and its antagonistic female guitarist quickly set it apart from its downtown peers and upended the traditional rock band sexual dynamic of the flamboyant, seductive female and the mysterious male guitarist.

The group was asked to open for the Police on a major tour of Britain in 1979 and reached its critical apex in the early ’80s with such albums as “Psychedelic Jungle” and “Songs the Lord Taught Us.”

While the Cramps’ lineup revolved constantly, Interior and Rorschach remained the band’s core through more than three decades. The Cramps never achieved much mainstream commercial success, but instead found a reliable fringe audience for more than 30 years — they even played a notorious show for patients at Napa State Hospital in Napa, Calif.

“It’s a little bit like asking a junkie how he’s been able to keep on dope all these years,” Interior told The Times some years ago. “It’s just so much fun. You pull in to one town and people scream, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ And you go to a bar and have a great rock ‘n’ roll show and go to the next town and people scream, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.’ It’s hard to walk away from all that.”

The band’s influence can be clearly felt among lauded minimalist art-blues bands, including the Black Lips, the White Stripes, the Horrors and Primal Scream, whose front man, Bobby Gillespie, allegedly named his son Lux.

The Cramps’ most recent album, a collection of rarities, “How to Make a Monster,” was released in 2004, and the band continued to tour well into the later years of its career, wrapping up its most recent U.S. outing in November.

Interior was born in Stow, Ohio, on Oct. 21, 1948. A Times report in 2004 said that he and Rorschach (born Kristy Wallace) met in Sacramento, where they bonded “over their enrollment in an art and shamanism class and a shared affection for thrift-shop vinyl before hitting the road for New York City.”

In 1987, there were widespread rumors of Interior’s death from a heroin overdose, and half a dozen funeral wreaths were sent to Rorschach. “At first, I thought it was kind of funny,” Interior told The Times. “But then it started to give me a creepy feeling.”

“We sell a lot of records, but somehow just hearing that you’ve sold so many records doesn’t hit you quite as much as when a lot of people call you up and are obviously really broken up because you’ve died.”

Windfall
2008
56,0 x 76,0 cm
watercolour and collage on paper

January 30 - March 14, 2009 at Zeno X Gallery Antwerpen

found on an ambitious project collapsing

Duncan Campbell now completely lives without a refrigerator.

By STEVEN KURUTZ
Ny Times Published: February 4, 2009

FOR the last two years, Rachel Muston, a 32-year-old information-technology worker for the Canadian government in Ottawa, has been taking steps to reduce her carbon footprint — composting, line-drying clothes, installing an efficient furnace in her three-story house downtown.

About a year ago, though, she decided to “go big” in her effort to be more environmentally responsible, she said. After mulling the idea over for several weeks, she and her husband, Scott Young, did something many would find unthinkable: they unplugged their refrigerator. For good.

“It’s been a while, and we’re pretty happy,” Ms. Muston said recently. “We’re surprised at how easy it’s been.”

As drastic as the move might seem, a small segment of the green movement has come to regard the refrigerator as an unacceptable drain on energy, and is choosing to live without it. In spite of its ubiquity — 99.5 percent of American homes have one — these advocates say the refrigerator is unnecessary, as long as one is careful about shopping choices and food storage.

Ms. Muston estimated that her own fridge, which was in the house when they bought it five years ago and most likely dates back much longer, used 1,300 kilowatt-hours per year, or produced roughly 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide — the same amount from burning 105 gallons of gasoline. And even a newer, more efficient model, which could have cut that figure in half, would have used too much energy in her view.

“It seems wasteful to me to use even an Energy Star-rated fridge,” she said, “because I’m getting along fine without one.”

Ms. Muston now uses a small freezer in the basement in tandem with a cooler upstairs; the cooler is kept cold by two-liter soda bottles full of frozen water, which are rotated to the freezer when they melt. (The fridge, meanwhile, sits empty in the kitchen.)

She acknowledges that living this way isn’t always convenient. For starters, it has altered the couple’s eating habits.

“When we had the fridge, we were eating a lot of prepared food from the grocery store,” she said. But the cooler has limited room, and the freezer is for meat and vegetables. Without the extra storage, Ms. Muston finds herself cooking more — which requires more time and forethought because items from the freezer must be thawed.

Asked whether the couple had to give up any cherished foods, Ms. Muston sighed. “Cold beer,” she said. “Scott can’t come home and grab a cold beer out of the fridge anymore. He has to put it in the cooler and wait an hour.”

For the most part, though, the couple seems to have made a smooth transition to life without a refrigerator, something others have tried but failed to do. Beth Barnes, 29, who works for the Kentucky Bar Association, unplugged the refrigerator in her apartment in Frankfort last May to be “a little radical,” she said. After reading online comments from others without a fridge, she learned she could move condiments to a pantry, and that butter can remain unrefrigerated for a week or more. The main concern was how to store dairy products, a major part of her diet.

Ms. Barnes decided to use a cooler, which she refilled daily during the summer with ice that she brought home from an ice machine at her office. That worked fine until she began to travel out of town for her job this fall, and the system hit a snag.

In the end she compromised and bought a minifridge. “I could drop the refrigerator completely if I had a milkman,” she said. “I might eventually try it again if I ever figure out the milk situation.”

MANY environmentalists — even many who think nothing of using recycled toilet paper or cut the thermostat to near-arctic levels — see fridge-free living as an extreme choice or an impractical and excessive goal.

“The refrigerator was a smart advance for society,” said Gretchen Willis, 37, an environmentally conscious mother of four in Arlington, Tex., who recently read about the practice on a popular eco-themed blog, thecrunchychicken.com, and was astounded.

“I never would have thought of it,” Ms. Willis said, explaining that although she’s committed to recycling and using fluorescent bulbs, she draws the line at any environmental practice that will result in great expense or inconvenience. Living without a refrigerator, she said, qualifies on both counts: she would have to buy more food in smaller quantities because of spoilage, prepare exact amounts because she couldn’t refrigerate leftovers, and make daily trips to the grocery store.

“It’s silly not to have one,” she said, “considering what the alternative is: drinking up a gallon of milk in one day so it doesn’t spoil.”

Deanna Duke, who lives in Seattle and runs the site Ms. Willis visited, said that taking a stand for or against unplugging has become “a badge of honor” for those on either side. “It’s either ‘look how far I’m willing to go,’ or ‘look how far I’m not willing to go,’ ” she said. For her part, Ms. Duke may refrain from watering her lawn in an effort at conservation, but she’s firmly in the pro-refrigerator camp. “I can’t think of any circumstances, other than an involuntary extreme situation, that would make me unplug my fridge,” she said. “The convenience factor is too high.”

No-fridge advocates see things differently. They trade tips on Web sites about food storage (“In the winter I put perishables like mayonnaise outside … ”) and cite residents of developing countries and eco-celebrities like Colin Beavan, the self-proclaimed No Impact Man who ditched his refrigerator during the year that he tried to make no net impact on the environment, as proof that people can get along fine without electric refrigeration.

“Refrigerator lust is one of the things driving huge energy-use increases in the developing world,” wrote the blogger “Greenpa” on his “Little Blog in the Big Woods” two years ago. “A great deal of what’s in your fridge absolutely does NOT need to be there.”

That post has since drawn scores of comments, many from other people living without refrigerators. One woman who followed his lead wrote to report she was “over my initial panic from reaching into the freezer to get ice cream only to feel hot air coming from the vent in the back!!!”

The idea has generated some interest in Western Europe, too. Last fall, scientists at Oxford University in England revived the “Einstein refrigerator,” a pressurized gas fridge that runs without using electricity that is co-credited to Albert Einstein. And Veneta Cucine, the Italian kitchen company, has lately unveiled a concept kitchen called the iGreen, which has no refrigerator but instead uses trays under the countertop to hold fresh produce.

PEOPLE who do best without a refrigerator often have certain built-in lifestyle advantages — they live alone and don’t have to cook large meals for a family, say, or they live on a farm or within walking distance of a grocery store. In the case of Duncan Campbell, who has been living happily without a fridge for three years, it was the food he was used to eating.

Before making the switch, Mr. Campbell, 53, already hewed to a diet focused around long-lived staples like beans and grains, and had begun to can the vegetables he grows in the garden behind his house in Columbus, Ohio. By using a small chest freezer for fruit and leftover soups, he said, he has no trouble whipping up a meal.

The one thing he hasn’t been able to adjust to is the reaction from friends. “Even people I meet who are energy conscious gasp when they hear I’m going without a fridge,” he said.

Ms. Duke, the eco-blogger, has noticed a similar response from her readers when she mentions the no-fridge topic on her blog. “I think a lot of people in the environmental movement have a romanticized idea about living like a pioneer,” she said. “But moving icepacks around and rotten food doesn’t have the same romantic appeal as hanging your clothes on a line.”

A bigger issue for serious environmentalists may be figuring out just how much good one is actually doing by unplugging the fridge — a common problem with green-oriented lifestyle choices.

Mr. Campbell was surprised to read online that refrigerators do not use all that much energy. Marty O’Gorman, the vice president of Frigidaire, said an 18-cubic-foot Energy Star-rated Frigidaire refrigerator uses about 380 kilowatt-hours a year — less than a standard clothes dryer — and costs a homeowner $40, or about 11 cents a day.

Pascale Maslin, the founder of Energy Efficiency Experts, a Washington-based company that conducts energy audits on homes and other buildings, said people may focus undue attention on the refrigerator’s energy consumption simply because they often hear — incorrectly, it turns out — that it is the household appliance that uses the most energy other than heating and cooling systems.

“If I was to examine my life and ask what would reduce my carbon footprint, I would say stop eating meat,” Ms. Maslin said. “That’s much more significant than unplugging your fridge.”

As for the strategy of switching to a dorm-style fridge, Mr. O’Gorman said downsizing from a standard model to Frigidaire’s smallest minifridge would result in only about $6 in energy savings over a year.

It’s this sort of practical calculus that has led many who advocate sustainable living to view unplugging the fridge as a dubious practice. They point out that it is likely to result in more trips to the store (which burns more gas, for those who drive) and the purchase of food in smaller portions (thus more packaging).

“It’s easy to look at your bill and say, ‘I’m saving energy,’ ” Ms. Duke said. “But you need to look at the whole supply chain.”

Nevertheless, both Ms. Muston and Mr. Campbell said they have no plans to plug their fridge back in now that they’ve adjusted to life without it.

“I realize it’s not a big deal in terms of energy use,” Mr. Campbell said, but “it doesn’t change my mind. I don’t like the hum of the thing, and I’ve discovered I don’t need it.”

If You Must Have Cold Beer …

There are still ways to save energy (and money) for those unwilling to give up the refrigerator.

• Once a year, unplug the refrigerator and clean the door gaskets and compressor coils; if there are pets in the house, clean the coils every three months.

• Buy a refrigerator that has the freezer on top, a configuration that is more efficient than a side-by-side model (in part, because it is generally smaller). Also, choose an Energy Star-rated unit, which is up to 20 percent more efficient.

• Try not to open the door too often, to limit the frequency with which the compressor runs, and choose a model that comes with an alarm to warn that the door is ajar.

• Don’t place the refrigerator next to the oven or in a spot that receives direct sunlight. The higher the ambient temperature, the more the unit has to work to keep cool

Catalina Island foxes are a subspecies found only on the 75-square-mile island. The usual population of about 1,300 had fallen to 100 by 1999, but has rebounded to 784 thanks to conservation efforts and favorable weather.
The small animals may come off the endangered species list next year, thanks to an eight-fold population increase in just a decade.

By Louis Sahagun
La Times February 3, 2009

The wild fox population on Santa Catalina Island is so robust that biologists said Tuesday they may seek to have the small animals taken off the federal endangered species list next year.

The number of Catalina Island foxes — a subspecies found only on the 75-square-mile island 22 miles off the coast of Southern California — topped out at 784 in a new count, a remarkable rebound for animals that were nearly wiped out a decade ago after an outbreak of distemper possibly introduced by someone’s pet.

“These numbers are fantastic news,” said Julie King, senior wildlife biologist for the Catalina Island Conservancy.

Rain — and a lack thereof — contributed to the population growth, King said.

“In 2007, we had an extreme drought with less than 3 inches of rain,” she said. “As a result, mule deer were dying in great numbers, and the foxes were able to scavenge off the carcasses. By the time breeding season arrived in 2008, we literally had obese foxes, and females in such good condition that they were having larger-than-normal litters.”

In addition, 2008 was “a good rain year, so the rodent population exploded,” she said. “The mice were convenient to-go packages of protein for females to retrieve and feed to their pups.”

About 1,300 foxes once lived on the island. The population had crashed to roughly 100 by 1999, when the conservancy and the Institute for Wildlife Studies launched a $2-million recovery program that included vaccinations and a captive breeding facility.

In 2004, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the fox as endangered.

“For a small conservancy to bring a species back from the brink of extinction to a stabilized, growing population in less than 10 years is no small feat,” said Carlos de la Rosa, chief conservation and education officer for the conservancy. “The foxes will be starting their breeding season in the next few weeks, so you will probably start seeing more pairs of foxes than singles on the roads during February and March.”

On Tuesday afternoon, conservancy biologist Calvin Duncan and volunteer pilot Mike Sheehan conducted an aerial survey of the island’s 56 foxes outfitted with telemetry collars, which emit a rapid-fire pinging sound if an animal has not moved for 12 hours.

After an hour of flying about 2,500 feet above rugged island terrain, Duncan gave a thumbs up and said, “We got everybody. All 56 are accounted for, and there are no fatalities.”

The foxes are trapped once a year and inspected for any illnesses, including an unusual ear cancer that recently began showing up in older foxes. “We want to keep them as virus-free as possible,” Duncan said.

Air and ground observations suggest the omnivorous 5-pound foxes are faring well, feeding at night on cactus fruit, berries and insects, scurrying through shrubs and ravines, and establishing territories.

The island’s captive breeding program ended in 2004. But the foxes’ problems are not over. Today, the primary cause of death among foxes is “road kill,” Duncan said. “We’ve got 4,000 people living in Avalon, and driving all over the island.”

The conservancy’s fundraising efforts have fallen $150,000 short of the $222,000 needed to sustain the fox recovery effort through the end of the year.

All field activities, equipment, radio collars, vaccines, medications, fuel, vehicles and seasonal staff are funded through grants and donor contributions, King said.

“We’re reaching out to people interested in contributing,” she said. “A radio collar costs $250, a vaccination is about $10. These costs add up quickly.”