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
February 4th, 2009
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.”
February 4th, 2009During the cold and dark Berlin winter days, I spend a lot of time with my boys in their room. And as I look at the toys scattered on the floor, my mind inevitably wanders back to New York.
By Christopher Nieman
NY Times Published February, 2, 2009
Mathias Poledna, still from Crystal Palace, 2006. 35mm color film with optical sound, 28 min. Courtesy Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne; and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna
1/28/09 - 3/22/09
New Museum
Mathias Poledna’s work Crystal Palace is a 35mm film installation comprised of a small number of long, static shots of the montane rainforest landscape of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. Using tightly framed medium-close to medium-wide shots, the film’s carefully selected scenes focus on the complex patterns, textures, and the overall abstract qualities of this environment, seemingly without human presence. Only subtle changes in light and movement in foliage provide visual cues to the passing of time. The film is accompanied by a dense and highly edited soundtrack created from on-location and archival field recordings that oscillate between distinct insect and bird sounds, and drone-like noise.
Poledna’s title, Crystal Palace, evokes the monumental glass-and-steel structure of that name constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, an important precursor of modern architecture and industrialized construction that was built to present the newest products of the capitalist economy, accompanied by exotic displays, fauna and flora. Poledna’s work explores how meaning becomes attached to images and sounds; it creates a complex tension between a specific place, its cinematic appearance, and historical concepts circulating around it. In Crystal Palace, Poledna specifically references Sounds of a Tropical Rainforest, a 1951 album of staged field recordings produced by Folkways Records for the American Museum of Natural History to accompany an exhibition about indigenous Amazonian people.
Poledna’s work is also informed by film history, particularly the interconnections between early film and popular and avant-garde cinema, as well as the history of visual ethnography. Unlike traditional documentary and ethnographic film, Crystal Palace lacks an authoritative voice as it investigates a foreign place through an extremely narrow focus and highly subjective framing. While it presents itself as a fragmentary document of an existing landscape and its history, its images seem to deviate only slightly from our common assumptions of how a tropical rainforest might appear. The images’ virtual motionlessness and extreme depth of field, which paradoxically makes them appear flat, enforces a nonobjective dimension in the work, which, along with the intense soundtrack, suggests the physiological experience of abstract and structural film.
This exhibition is curated by Russell Ferguson, Adjunct Curator, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. It is organized at the New Museum by Jarrett Gregory, Curatorial Assistant.
February 3rd, 2009
By LUC SANTE
NY Times Published: January 29, 2009
You might say there are two kinds of writers: those who keep a journal in the hope that its contents might someday be published, and those who do not keep a journal for fear that its contents might someday be published. In other words, no journal-keeping by a writer who harbors any sort of ambition is going to be entirely innocent. The complicated, somewhat voyeuristic thrill the reader might derive from seemingly prying open the author’s desk drawer is therefore, to a certain extent, a fiction in which both parties are complicit.
This notion inescapably comes to mind when one reads the entries by the young Susan Sontag collected in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25). Like any author’s journal worth reading, it contains items that anticipate prominent themes of her later published work, as well as others that seem terribly private. What’s unusual, maybe, is that sometimes the intellectual items sound more naked and the private items more hedged. The situation is far from simple anyway. As Sontag’s son, David Rieff, who edited the volume, explains in his very moving preface, she left no instructions as to what should be done with her journals — “she continued to believe until only a few weeks before her death that she was going to survive.” For that matter, “at least in her later life, my mother was not in any way a self-revealing person. In particular, she avoided to the extent she could, without denying it, any discussion of her own homosexuality or any acknowledgment of her own ambition.” And those two matters constitute by far the largest themes in the book.
In the end, Rieff decided that Sontag’s narrative of self-creation trumped any concern for discretion. The oddly evangelical-sounding title comes from an entry made in 1949, when she was 16: “Everything begins from now — I am reborn.” She is referring to sexuality, or at least to an acceptance of her physical self and a general feeling of carpe diem, but the sensation pervades the whole book. She was, in Rieff’s words, an “ambitious young person from the deep provinces who wants to become a person of significance in the capital,” and self-education in all senses of the term apparently occupied her every moment.
Her age is always at the fore. She is a mere 14 in the first entry, a thumping declaration of beliefs (atheism, socialism and “the only difference between human beings is intelligence”), and only 30 at the end, and her blend of sophistication and naïveté is such that she sounds more often like a much older person whose judgment is sometimes questionable than like a youngster in oversize clothing. Still, the sort of youthful zeal that leads her to peremptory judgments and furious imperatives — “Somewhere . . . I confessed a disappointment with the Mann ‘[Doctor] Faustus.’ . . . This was a uniquely undisguised evidence of the quality of my critical sensibility!”; “Read Condillac!” — never left her, in writing or in conversation. (I encountered her on various social occasions but didn’t know her well.)
She was always serious to a fault. Even if, later on, she was able to examine and analyze certain aspects of popular culture (as in “Notes on Camp,” 1964), she could undertake such a thing only in service to a higher goal — she was immune to subintellectual cultural pleasures. “How to defend the aesthetic experience?” she asks at 16, wanting it to consist of “more than pleasure,” although eight years later, in a rare moment of slippage, she confesses to “a kind of foolish pride which comes from dieting on high culture for too long.” Even as the narrative of the journals shows her consistently growing, broadening her focus, her dedication to high culture remains severe and unwavering — it is her church, which must be defended from half-measures and backsliding and squalid ease. She dismisses Faulkner’s “Light in August” as a type of “vulgar writing” and decides that by comparison to Kafka, “Joyce is so stupid.” She did not wait to be asked to become a gatekeeper, but took on the job before she had proper access to the gate.
In pointed contrast to this intellectual assurance, the emotional side of her education is touchingly uncertain and halting. She realizes at 15 that she has “lesbian tendencies,” then alternates between giving herself over to them and (in the spirit of the time) attempting to fight them: “I wanted so much to feel a physical attraction for him and prove, at least, that I am bisexual.” She remains a model student, for example making detailed lists of gay slang terms and lore, but homosexuality also causes her to engage with the concrete details of life — for instance, in her evocations of gay bars in late 1940s San Francisco — in ways that her high-mindedness curtails in other areas. She is eager and ardent, but self-lacerating, unsure that she deserves love and sex. She falls in love serially, but the tall, merciless H. soon comes to dominate her life — H. first appears in the Bay Area in 1949 and will reappear a decade later in Europe, still treating Sontag badly and trampling on her self-questioning passion.
Then Sontag marries. The sequence of events is breathtakingly abrupt. She moves to attend the University of Chicago on a scholarship in the fall of 1949. In November she writes, “A wonderful opportunity was offered me — to do some research work for a soc[iology] instructor named Philip Rieff.” In the next entry, Dec. 2: “I am engaged to Philip Rieff.” A few pages later, after a trip to California to interview Thomas Mann, comes the entry of Jan. 3, 1950: “I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness.” And then she is on to “War and Peace” and Balzac and lists of works on theology. Her decision to marry Rieff is never explained or examined, and in fact she says nothing more about the matter, barring an ambiguous recounted dream, until she begins fulminating against the institution of marriage in 1956. The intervening years barely exist in the journals — five years dissolve in nine pages. The birth of her son in 1952 goes unrecorded; he makes his first appearance in an aside.
She comes to life again in 1956, or perhaps it is the journal that does, once again brimming with reading lists and self-exhortations and accounts of intellectual conversations. A year later she has accepted a scholarship to Oxford, and she leaves her husband and son. We understand that there are tears and scenes — Rieff had wanted her trip to coincide with an appointment of his own abroad — but are swept up in her exhilaration: she has been sprung from jail. For a while, the pleasures of the journal become almost entirely narrative. She soon leaves Oxford for the greener pastures of Paris, and there she is reawakened, happily tossed in a whirlwind of intellectual, social and sexual activity. She renews with H., which is probably not the best idea in retrospect, but eventually she links with H.’s ex, the playwright Maria Irene Fornes, who is a much better match for her. In 1959 she returns to the United States, to New York City, where she gains custody of her son and begins writing professionally, editing and teaching. We leave her poised on the brink of her great public career.
“Reborn” is in some ways less like a normal book and more like a person — it is consistent in its deepest reaches, but subject to enormous mood swings. Some very large matters are barely glimpsed, whizzing by at terrific speed, while sundry smaller ones are examined in exhaustive detail. Motives often have to be guessed, and important players enter and exit summarily, without introduction. Various opinions and exhortations — or crotchets or tics — are repeated to the point where it takes a great deal of good will or simple affection to tolerate them. But Sontag does successfully elicit the reader’s good will and affection. We may never have seen her in quite this light — fully human and as flawed as any of us. We may want to go reread some of her more lapidary work, now appreciating the vulnerable soul that shared a body with that radical will.
Luc Sante’s most recent book is “Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005.”
February 2nd, 2009
Annette Kelm
House on Haunted Hill II (Day), 2005
C-Print
80 x 100 cm
24 JANUARY – 26 APRIL 2009
KUNSTHALLE ZURICH
The photographs by artist Annette Kelm (born in Stuttgart in 1975, lives and works in Berlin) appear to perpetuate traditional forms of photographic representation in an unspectacular way: i.e. they comprise still lifes, portraits, object photographs, architectural and landscape photographs in moderate formats, which tend to be based on conventional studio or landscape practices. Annette Kelm works traditionally, her photographs are taken with an analogue large-format camera and are individual handmade prints. She produces both individual photographs and series of works with individual motifs and, in her exhibitions, she always shows a combination of works which refuse to submit to a single reading of a theme or concept.
Annette Kelm appears to follow conceptual and critical strategies in that she photographs objects, architecture and design which refer to historically significant correlations. At the same time, she undermines the promise of objectivity in her works by adding props that seem surreal or appear to belong to a subjective mythology. The subjects are often presented against a neutral background in the style of traditional studio photography. However, the background is so present that it becomes part of the foreground and the photographed objects themselves.
The motifs in Annette Kelm’s photographs are presented directly in frontal view; but the familiar elements and interpretations of conceptual, staged, documentary, analytical photography are undermined by means of an effortless trick: the real and the fictional, objectivity and emotionality, the presented and the suggested collage to form a new plane of what images can be and, perhaps also, the reality they depict.
At the Kunsthalle Zürich, for the first time ever in an institutional exhibition, the artist combines a group of over 40 photographs from highly diverse worlds of motifs. The works were created from 2001 and also include new works specially developed for this exhibition.
The back hoofs of a horse in the snow hit a record labelled by the artist, which is presented on brightly coloured fabric. A parrot is held by a gloved hand – suggestive of falconry – against a not quite adequate plant background. A cowboy on a horse in a garden setting brandishes a large fan like a whip, linking contradictory evocations of nature. Fried eggs are shown with hands holding money; or they combine with a tilting house, which the artist photographed in Bormarzo Monster Park, established near Rome by Vicino Orsini in the 16th century – the haunted house itself only becomes reality through the addition of a bearded woman in the window. Series of a palm tree at night, the branches of an orange tree, holed targets and the portrait of a girl in a hooded jumper, whose various angles do not reveal any more about the subject, are mixed with large-format reproductions of textile patterns by American designer Dorothy Draper, the picture of the first electric guitar photographed against an African-looking textile backdrop, which was produced in the Netherlands and bought in Paris. A water glass with a eucalyptus branch standing on a textile with Hawaii island pattern, which almost melts visually into the depicted object, is loaded with associations through the title After Lunch, trying to built Railway Trails, which refers to the failed attempt to produce the first railway tracks with eucalyptus wood in America and thus interweaves material, plant and historical knowledge in another story of longing. The artist also shows the first Wurlitzer, a mechanical organ, which represents the transition from the acoustic to electronic generation of music. She photographed the instrument in situ in juxtaposition with a Miró print, which she stuck to the wall of a museum of musical instruments. Other real places feature in architectural photographs: for example Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House (Ennis-Brown House) of 1924, in which parts of the film Blade Runner were filmed, of which she presents two variants; day and night versions, whereby the night is not “real” night but a studio-generated night.
Annette Kelm’s works reveal both an interest in historical context, the history of industrial, craft and design and in questions concerning the artificial and the ambiguity historically experienced by cultural phenomena. Her photographs, which are realistic in their effect and oscillate between precision and ambiguity, transmit her motifs into a highly complex network of relationships, which are both visual and substantive in nature, in which constructive conflicts arise between what is shown and what is intended; thus seeing becomes more important than knowing.
February 2nd, 2009
Chef Roy Choi with a pork belly taco in one hand, a tofu in another.
Late last night in Westwood, among the dense maze of housing east of UCLA’s campus, was a line, at least an hour’s wait for some, of some 500 people waiting to grab some Korean inspired tacos and burritos and maybe the day’s special–Kimchi Fried Rice Cake with Egg-Shiso. Meet Kogi BBQ. It’s Korean food with the edge of a street taco on a catering truck mixed with the savvyness of Web 2.0 (follow them on Twitter to know their location).
Inside the truck is Chef Roy Choi, who speaks of food like its poetry. After all, Choi graduated at the top of his class at the Culinary Institute of America and has cooked at Le Bernardin in New York, in Iron Chef Michiba’s kitchen, at the Beverly Hilton and Rock Sugar Pan Asian Kitchen. But when he heard about an idea of Korean food on a taco truck, he said “sign me up!”
This is guerrilla gourmet at its best. “We’re Korean, but we’re American and we grew up in LA. It’s not a stigma food, it’s a representation of who we are,” explained Choi on the street last night. “Everything you get in that taco is what we live in LA. It’s the 720 bus on Wilshire, it’s the 3rd street Juanita’s Tacos, the Korean supermarket and all those things that we live everyday in one bite. That was our goal. To take everything about LA and put it into one bite… It’s Mexican, it’s Korean, it’s organic, it’s California, it’s farmer’s market, it’s drunk people after midnight.”
It was just over a month ago that Kogi BBQ founder Mark Manguera came up with the concept. It was one of those post-clubbing in Hollywood inebriated ideas born out of “I’m drunk and I’m hungry, why can’t I get some Korean food right this minute?” When you get those drunken thoughts, how often do you act on them? Not often at all, but Manguera did it in less than 30 days, just beginning last week, and is now the buzz of the town, thanks to online social networking and some damn good food.
“With Kogi, we really wanted to focus on grassroots,” said Mike Prasad, who is doing the branding and new media marketing for them. “Connecting and interacting with food lovers in real-time. Since the truck is out and about, it gives us a unique setting to engage people via Twitter, qik, and other social media tools. Like Roy says, it’s about the culture AND the food.”
UCLA student and LAist writer-on-hiatus Henry David came out to see why there were hundreds of people outside his apartment window last night. Of course, he had to sample. “They did a pretty good job of meeting the demand, churning out the food as quickly as possible while socializing with us at the same time,” he said. “I knew I had to try two of the KBBQ staples, short ribs and spicy pork. I was expecting Korean BBQ coming from a mobile kitchen to be a little tame, so I was surprised by the boldness of the flavor when I bit into the first taco. It’s not just that the spicy pork was well-seasoned (I’m not a fan of Korean BBQ that lacks marinade), but also the lettuce/onion/cilantro fixings were dressed with a flavorful sauce; possibly their own spin of miso? The combination of the meat and vegetables is quite rich and delicious, and the generous usage of cilantro definitely gives the dish a street taco taste. What I got from it was a very good marriage of Korean and Mexican flavors — and what could be more Angeleno than that?”
The Kogi BBQ team is taking the energy they’ve received from their online and street following and is going full force. This week, they’ll be at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market, hoping to be a permanent fixture there, a bar in Venice wants them to feed their customers on weekends and within the next couple weeks, they’ll add two more trucks to the fleet for the holiday season. Ultimately, one of their goals is to expand regionally.
Their menu consists of Korean Shortrib, BBQ Chicken, Tofu and Spicy Pork tacos ($2 each or 3 for $5). Add to that burritos ($5) and daily specials like Pork Belly Kimchi Fried Rice Cake w/ Egg-Shiso salad or short rib sliders. If those become popular, there’s a good chance they’ll become a regular menu item at the will of the people on the street.
There should be a lesson in all of this. If you have an idea that believe in, go for it. The Kogi BBQ team has proved that with smart planning and a solid business plan. Manguera admits that if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But you don’t know until you execute, experiment and have some plain old fun doing what you love.
February 1st, 2009This bluegrass classic The Lonely River by Ralph Stanley is played by Roman Barten-Sherman(age 5 3/4) on his baritone uke. recorded 1/09
February 1st, 2009
7. February – 26. April 2009 Bonner Kunstverein
February 1st, 2009
Atelier Bow-Wow
Small Case Study House
Opening reception: Friday, January 30, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Artist talk: Friday, January 30, 6:30 pm
Founded by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima in 1992, Tokyo-based architecture studio Atelier Bow-Wow explores the use and function of space within urban environments. Bow-Wow developed the term “pet architecture”–a style of small, ad hoc, multifunctional structures that make the most of limited space. Using the framework of art galleries or museums to experiment with form and behavior, Bow-Wow’s newly commissioned project for REDCAT is the culmination of an extended Los Angeles residency period, during which Tsukamoto and Kaijima researched the Case Study House program and made this postwar project a point of departure in thinking about domestic dwellings. Informed by the principles of the program–which enlisted architects to design low-cost homes for the masses with prefabricated materials–as well as the urban dynamics of contemporary Los Angeles, Bow-Wow’s Small Case Study House responds to contemporary models for housing in L.A. as they relate to concepts of customization, re-use, and “architectural behaviorology.” This is Atelier Bow-Wow’s first solo exhibition in the United States.
January 30th, 2009
Oliver Matter, a Swiss distiller in Kallnach who makes Mansinthe.
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
NY Times Published: January 28, 2009
KALLNACH, Switzerland — Few people in this quiet village of quaint chalets know the album “Eat Me, Drink Me,” by Marilyn Manson, the shock rocker. But almost everyone knows his taste for absinthe.
There could hardly be a greater contrast between Mr. Manson, the American bad boy who introduced the golden age of grotesque, and the 1,500 people who live quietly in the squat farmhouses strung out along Kallnach’s main street, their eaves reaching almost to the ground.
“They’re completely different,” said Beat Läderach, 47, who has been the town manager for 17 years. “We live off the land, a very sleepy existence. But it has its advantages: There is little unemployment, no vandalism; life is modest, comfortable, friendly.”
Yet Mr. Manson’s link to the town “is important for us,” Mr. Läderach said. The name Kallnach has become well known, he said, thanks to the success of a superpremium absinthe developed with Mr. Manson.
In a sense, the hills and valleys northwest of Kallnach, otherwise known for clocks, could be called the cradle of absinthe. Wormwood, absinthe’s defining ingredient, as well as the other herbs that go into it, grow in abundance here, deep in Switzerland’s Jura Mountains. In the late 19th century, absinthe was so popular that in Paris it rivaled wine as the drink of choice. French impressionists, like Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, not only drank it, but featured it in their works.
But absinthe, a liqueur that can have an alcohol content as high as 75 percent, was also known as the Green Fairy, a malicious sprite that was said to twist men’s — and women’s — minds and cause delirium, hallucinations, vertigo and even madness.
By the early 20th century, governments around the world were banning it. Absinthe lovers denied its toxicity, and blamed the wine industry for seeking to sideline a competitor. (Modern analysis has shown that the absinthes produced today have none of these effects.)
So how did the link between the shock rock singer, actor and artist and this drowsy village come about? It began in 2005, after Switzerland, following the example of the United States and many countries in Europe, legalized the production of absinthe.
The man who revived absinthe in Kallnach is Oliver Matter, whose great-grandfather first distilled schnapps here in the 1920s and shipped products to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 under the brand name Will Tell.
In 2004, just two months before absinthe was legalized by a Swiss national referendum, Mr. Matter turned his stills, big copper spheres in a shed just outside of town, to making the liqueur. “Actually I didn’t want to,” he said, leading a visitor through the still. “But I had a recipe. My great-grandfather was once owed money by a livestock trader who couldn’t pay him, so he gave him a recipe for absinthe instead. I had big mountains of my great-grandfather’s papers, and that’s where I found the recipe.”
After absinthe was banned by the Swiss in 1910, it went underground. “You could find it in every household,” said Mr. Matter, 40, a lanky man with a shaven head. “It was kept as medicine.”
By one guess, more than 20,000 gallons of this moonshine absinthe were produced annually, an estimate made possible because the orderly Swiss were meticulous about paying the alcohol tax.
Obviously, the world was ripe for the return of absinthe. Within days of beginning production, Mr. Matter was contacted by distributors seeking to sell his absinthe in big markets like England, France and the United States, where absinthe was rapidly becoming a craze.
One of the distributors who contacted Mr. Matter was Markus Lion, 41, a compact, lively businessman from southern Germany who was looking for quality absinthe for a particular customer, Marilyn Manson, whose manager was friendly with Mr. Lion. “Absinthe was becoming a topic,” Mr. Lion said. “And Manson was known as a connoisseur of absinthe.”
After a concert in Basel, a Swiss city northeast of here, Mr. Lion met Mr. Manson, a k a Brian Hugh Warner, and discovered they had friends and tastes in common, including absinthe. They agreed to produce a special absinthe, to be called Mansinthe, at Mr. Matter’s distillery.
After several trial distillations, Mansinthe was introduced in the summer of 2006, selling for about $65 for a 24-ounce bottle. Sales soared in the remaining months of 2006, to more than four times the total amount of absinthe Mr. Matter sold the year before. Now absinthe accounts for about half his annual sales of $1.3 million.
Soon the name Manson was on everyone’s tongue in Kallnach. Now Fritz Meyer, 68, stocks Mansinthe on the liquor shelves of his butcher and grocery store along Kallnach’s main road, next to bottles of Jack Daniel’s and Baileys Irish Cream. He sells pork sausages flavored with absinthe. “They’re very popular,” he said.
Mansinthe, Mr. Lion said, “gave a real push to the absinthe world.”
“We didn’t have to do much else,” he continued. “Manson was already a very controversial figure, just like the artists of the 19th century. So for me he was the ideal partner.”
Mr. Matter, who now has a T-shirt with the words “The Manson Gang” and “66.6 percent,” for the alcohol content of Mansinthe, said he was astounded by how well Mr. Manson was accepted locally, though he had never visited the village. “Curiously, no one ever came to us and said, ‘Why are you doing something like this?’ ”
Stefan Johner, 19, said he was not surprised. An apprentice mechanic who fixes tractors, he said he had never tried absinthe, preferring beer or wine, or whiskey or vodka if he wanted stronger drink. But he agreed that absinthe had a “certain tradition” locally.
Did Marilyn Manson fit in that tradition? “A little bit for sure,” he said. “He’s a little bit crazy,” he went on, his hands deep in the pockets of greasy blue overalls. “In Kallnach there are perfectly normal people, but also some who are a little bit crazy.”
January 29th, 2009
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
NY Times Published: January 26, 2009
OLHÃO, Portugal — In the early 1990s, João Navalho, a microbiologist fresh out of graduate school, came to the salt marshes in the Algarve region with a handful of young partners to grow and harvest microalgae. Their dream was to market the algae’s beta carotene as natural orange dye for the fast-growing organic food market.
The business foundered; the 37 acres of marshes, known as salinas, became a garbage dump for residents in this pocket of southwestern Portugal who did not know what else to do with their outmoded kitchen appliances. After years of frustrated effort, the partners suddenly changed course.
“We looked around and said, we’re stupid!” Mr. Navalho recalled. “We have a lot of land here. What we should do with the salinas is produce salt!”
They asked the longtime locals for someone who might remember how to harvest salt the old way: by hand, as it was done here before industrialization made it cheap and plentiful, and small salt works fell into desuetude.
Like everything else in this undertaking, the answer was staring them in the face. Living on the edge of the marshes was Maximino António Guerreiro, a sunburned retired salt worker with a grizzled beard and missing teeth, who started harvesting here with his father more than four decades ago.
In 1997, the salt project began. Mr. Guerreiro cleaned out and rebuilt the long-abandoned patchwork of rectangular, clay-lined salt beds. With young workers from Eastern Europe, he opened sluices from the sea and set up a system of dams to control the water flow. He shared the secrets of salt: how to measure evaporation levels and determine the correct salt density and water temperature, when to add water and when to rake and skim.
“I had to quit school when I was 14 to help my father make salt every day, and then the work disappeared,” said Mr. Guerreiro, 56. “Now we’re back — making the most beautiful white salt in the world.”
The financing was difficult, Mr. Navalho said. “When we told the banks we wanted to make salt, they said that everyone had gone out of the business,” he said. “So we promised if we didn’t pay back they could take our necks.”
Two years later, Necton, the salt company Mr. Navalho created here, produced its first salt crop. Now it is one of the region’s new salt pioneers, struggling to revive what was once a flourishing trade in this part of Portugal. They are trying to convince consumers of the health and taste benefits of handmade, non-industrial salt and to compete in an increasingly sophisticated global salt market.
“Life begins in the ocean,” Mr. Navalho said. “What we are selling is ocean saltwater without the water. Call it sea dust.”
To many people, salt is salt. But to those for whom it is a gourmet condiment, few varieties compare to the crème de la crème of salt known as fleur de sel, harvested by gently skimming the white, lacy film from the surface of salty beds when weather conditions in summer allow.
Necton produces both traditional hand-harvested salt as well as a gourmet version, known here as flor de sal.
The history of Portugal and salt is long and romantic. The first known document related to Portuguese salt works dates from the 10th century, when a countess donated salt marshes to a monastery that she founded. A century later, the Algarve region was shipping salt across Europe; in the 15th and 16th centuries, salt helped make Portugal a global power. In one of his best-known works, the 20th century poet Fernando Pessoa, wrote, “Oh salty sea, so much of your salt is tears of Portugal.”
But Mr. Navalho confesses that his team learned many of its techniques from Guérande, the Brittany-based cooperative that restored traditional salt-making to France in the 1970s and whose brand dominates the hand-harvested salt business. France produces about 80 percent of Europe’s hand-harvested salt and fleur de sel.
Unlike French salt, which has a grayish hue, the Portuguese is a pure, shiny white. In France, rain churns up charcoal-gray mud from the bottom of the salt pans and leaves behind a grey residue, while Portuguese summers tend to be sunny and dry.
These days, European designer salt must compete with exotic salts from around the world, including Himalayan pink salt harvested at altitudes over 10,000 feet, a South Korean salt that is roasted in bamboo, and Hawaiian red Alaea, which gets its color from red clay.
There have also been reports of counterfeit hand-harvested salt. Nico Boer, the German co-manager of the Marisol salt works in nearby Tavira, said one Portuguese salt producer sold more than a dozen tons of industrial salt to the French several years ago, passing it off as hand-harvested.
“It’s a tough business,” he said.
The operations at Marisol and Necton are set on protected national land. At Necton, salt mountains sit in the open air, protected by black tarps. Women wearing hairnets and rubber gloves sift through the shiny salt as it flows along an assembly line, picking out bits of insects’ wings, brine shrimp and wood chips.
But Necton has bigger plans. Mr. Navalho has begun to cultivate an exotic salad vegetable called salicorne, which is in fact a small weed with fleshy, tart, dark-green branches. He hopes to build a bird sanctuary for the flamingos, egrets, plovers and other wild birds here. He is trying to draw summer visitors for tours of both the salts works and the little algae-growing he still does.
And Mr. Navalho, who was born in Mozambique, wants to expand operations to the eastern coast of Africa, to restore some of the abandoned salt fields built by the Portuguese 300 years ago.
First, however, he has to persuade customers to think about salt differently.
“People might like to drive a Ferrari, but they can’t afford it,” he said. “But they can afford the best salt in the world. I want people to stop asking, ‘How much does it cost?’ and start asking, ‘Where can I buy it?’ ”
Basil Katz contributed reporting from Paris.
January 27th, 2009
The Amberieu archive in Southern France contains a collection of 2,500 unpublished - and mostly unpublishable - autobiographies, diaries, scrapbooks, bundles of letters and collections of emails dating from the early 19th century to last month
By John Lichfield in Paris
The Independent UK
Everyone’s life is a novel, which has not yet been written. Or in some cases, it has been written but never published.
In a small town in eastern France, there is a library, or archive, of intimate secrets: a collection of 2,500 unpublished – and mostly unpublishable – autobiographies, diaries, scrapbooks, bundles of letters and collections of emails dating from the early 19th century to last month.
“There are as many diarists as there are amateur pianists. They just make less noise,” says Michel Vannet, custodian of the archive at Ambérieu-en-Bugey, near Lyons.
The man who co-founded the association, which snaps up these previously unconsidered literary treasures, Philippe Lejeune, puts it another way.
“There are no limits to literature,” he says, “it can turn up anywhere.”
Similar archives of unpublished “autobiography” exist in other countries, including Britain (at the University of Sussex). There is a library, in Burlington, Vermont, which offers a home to unpublished books of all kinds.
What makes the Ambérieu archive unique is that it is not just an archive. It is also a kind of intimate “book club” – everything received is read by volunteers and a one-page “review” published in the association’s journal. However, contributors can ask for their secrets to be hidden until their death or locked away until an agreed date in a “cupboard of secrets”. Inclusion in the Ambérieu archive guarantees simply that their writings, and their life’s story, will not die.
The closed archive contains a large, brown envelope which was deposited recently by an old woman with failing eyesight. In a covering letter, she wrote: “I don’t want you to read my diary because it will not contribute to public understanding. It is only a banal story of adultery … Until now I have destroyed all my writings… I felt the death of my words like a series of small suicides.”
The contents of the “open” archive range from a single, autobiographical poem, written in alexandrines, to a diary consisting of 65 200-page notebooks, delivered in a trunk. There are moving autobiographies of wartime, banal descriptions of the working life of postmen or plumbers, surreal scrapbooks of personal mementoes and a small sack of rose petals grown in the compost of a burned diary of “personal suffering”.
One woman sent a bundle of printed-out emails which she had sent to her friends when she thought she was dying of cancer. Someone tried to bequeath their furniture, claiming it represented his life. This was refused (for lack of room) but photographs of lovingly-assembled interiors are accepted.
After 16 years of existence, the Ambérieu library of secrets is proving to be a goldmine for researchers. A book appears this month by the historian Anne-Claire Rebreyent, Intimités Amoureuses. France 1920-1975, which charts changing French attitudes to love. Mme Rebreyent researched the book entirely in five years that she spent visiting the Ambérieu archive.
Some of the material consists of diaries or letters found in attics or antique shops. About 80 per cent was sent in by the authors or their children. Some “living” diarists are permitted to send an update every year.
More women contribute than men. Three-quarters of the texts are autobiographies, 20 per cent are diaries and five per cent are letters. The archive is the work of the Association pour L’Autobiographie et le Patrimoine Autobiographique (APA), founded in 1992 by Philippe Lejeune and Chantal Chaveyriat-Dumoulin,
M. Lejeune is France’s best-known academic specialist on autobiography, sometimes known as the “pope of autobiography”. Much of what is preserved at Ambérieu would fail the usual tests of literary merit or publishability, he says. But the texts have other qualities – of authenticity, of freshness, of originality of voice – which are not always found in officially recognised literature.
“The aim of an autobiography is not to be good but to be true – which it rarely fails to be,” M. Lejeune said.
No attempt is made to try to identify publishable work. Nothing is refused.
“We don’t want to establish a hierarchy among texts, but to give each of them a chance of being read,” M. Lejeune says. “Our ambition is to establish a system of ‘micro-reading’. Our aim is not for three or four texts to be read by a thousand people, but for a thousand texts to be read by three or four people.”
The 800 members of the association, who pay €38 (£34) a year, are split into half a dozen study groups. Each new entry to the archive is taken on by one reader, who writes a review published in the association’s twice-year Gardé-Memoire or memory safe. This acts as a kind of index.
Some insufferable texts are never read again. Writings which receive glowing reviews are passed around and discussed. Some – the “best-sellers” – end up being read by everyone in the association (many of whom are diarists themselves).
M. Vannet, director of the mediatheque which houses the archive, says: “We are a club of strangers that you meet on trains – the kind that want to tell you their life story.”
Hidden gems: A homage to melancholy
One of the oldest texts in the “archive of autobiography” at Ambérieu is a classic piece of early 19th-century melancholic romanticism by Victor Audouin, an obscure Parisian medical student. His diary was found in an antique shop: “I went to the Jardin du Luxembourg. The weather was magnificent. I found that I could not think. No idea presented itself to my imagination, which had been so lively a moment before. A melancholy, which was not without charm, captivated me entirely… Tears ran down my cheeks, which had no cause in my thoughts and which no amount of reasoning could halt. Finally, seven o’ clock came and the [park] drum woke me from this strange ecstasy. I walked home.”
January 27th, 2009
Christopher Williams 2005
(Triptychon / Triptych)
Velosolex 2200 (Front, Side, Back)
Serial Number 3128819
Moteur antiparasité
Date of Production 1964
China Art Objects January 24 to February 28, 2008
January 26th, 2009
Among the artists on the King roster were the Stanley Brothers, top; James Brown, center, who cut “Papa’s Got a New Bag” for the label; and the saxophonist Earl Bostic, above right, with King’s owner, Syd Nathan.
By RJ SMITH
NY Times Published: January 23, 2009
Cincinnati
A CROWD gathers around crumbling walls that are a small evolutionary step up from a miserable pile of bricks. The facade leaks water, and masonry falls off the sides of this big, old building, in a working-class neighborhood here.
This structure is a landmark of pop culture that never received the sendoff it deserved. Yet people are gathered here on a cold afternoon in mid-November not for a memorial service but to help resurrect King Records, the label that was once the home of James Brown, Nina Simone and Charlie Feathers.
King started as a so-called hillbilly label in 1943; moved into “race music” — the onetime name for what became rhythm and blues — around 1945; and attempted in ways great and small to merge both audiences until it essentially shut down a few years after the death of its owner, Syd Nathan. It never achieved the household-name status of Stax or Motown, but the crowd wants to change that.
It’s an appropriately eclectic mix of folks dressed in country and R&B styles from 40 years ago. There’s a septuagenarian African-American man in an ermine coat and felt bowler. There’s a bouffant-haired woman with a hard twang leaning on a walker. There’s even a guy with mutton chops who looks like a rockabilly werewolf.
That would be Billy Davis, onetime guitar player for Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. And like many of those assembled today, he recorded for King, the independent label where Charlie Feathers cut “One Hand Loose” and the R&B singer Little Willie John cut “Fever.” King is where “The Twist” was first laid down, by Ballard, and where Wynonie Harris made “Good Rockin’ Tonight.”
Now Cincinnati is rediscovering a landmark it barely knew it had. The occasion is the unveiling of a historical marker, financed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, celebrating the site as a historic address. Also announced at the event were plans to establish a King Records Center, including a recording studio, in the neighborhood. (Later this year the University of Illinois Press will publish “King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records,” by John Hartley Fox.)
Enough about New Orleans, Memphis or Nashville, and other, better-celebrated cradles of popular music. For Cincinnati, it’s star time.
“While no single city has naming rights as the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll, the elements that made rock ’n’ roll — the blend of country, blues and the big beat — were being created at King Records,” said Larry Nager, former pop music editor for several Cincinnati dailies and the author of the book “Memphis Beat.” “Whether it was the big-voiced jump blues of Wynonie Harris or the hillbilly boogie of Moon Mullican, these were the records that the first generation of rock ‘n’ rollers were cutting their teeth on.”
For about a decade, musicians, fans and local politicians and businesspeople had been working on their own to elevate King’s profile. “This place is holy, sacred ground,” said John Cranley, a former city councilman, who had started an effort to preserve the structure while in office. In recent years they’ve joined together to meet, and to watch their efforts reach a critical mass, in part because of the city’s nationally publicized racial problems.
“In 2001 the city made a name for itself with what the papers called a race riot,” said Elliott V. Ruther, a founder of the Cincinnati USA Music Heritage Foundation. “On some level it became, ‘O.K., Cincinnati, what are you going to choose to focus on about yourself? The K.K.K. at Fountain Square?” (He was referring to notorious displays erected at that site.) “We can focus on that. Or we can look to the 1940s, and the creative vision and business plan one man had.”
Another reason for the renewed interest in King is the energy of one of Cincinnati’s leading citizens. His name is Bootsy, baby.
At the dedication, Bootsy Collins — who was a studio musician at King until James Brown took him on the road, to say nothing of his long membership in Parliament-Funkadelic — pledged to say just a few words, but ended up calling local dignitaries out of the crowd and exuding an enthusiasm for what King meant — to the city and to himself as a young man raised in Cincinnati.
“All the artists and all the hip people hung around King,” Mr. Collins said later, at his home outside Cincinnati. “I was still going to school and I wanted to be hip and cool. At that time I never thought I’d actually be a professional musician; I thought playing music was just fun.”
“But the more I hung around King,” he added, “the more I started falling in love with music. From seeing how passionate and dedicated those musicians and artists were, I realized, ‘If I’m going to do this, I can’t be joking.’ ” Mr. Collins has even opened a restaurant in downtown Cincinnati that displays vintage King lore.
One crisp day in November, Brian Powers, a city librarian, offered a reporter a tour of other local landmarks. He parked beside the site of Herzog Studios, where Hank Williams recorded “Lovesick Blues” and which King used for some early recordings. Then he drove to the formerly blacks-only cemetery (this being in many ways a Southern town) where the bandleader Tiny Bradshaw rests. Bradshaw bridged big-band jazz and small-group R&B; he came to Cincinnati to record at King and liked it so much he stayed.
“Guys like this just did so much for American music, and America doesn’t even know about them,” Mr. Powers said. “Heck, Cincinnati barely even knows.”
Then he drove a short distance to a Jewish cemetery where lies the body of Syd Nathan. Syd, as any King pilgrim quickly learns, Syd was a trip.
Mr. Powers has written a reference book for the library on King and Mr. Nathan, the mogul who founded the label. Born in Cincinnati in 1904, as a young man he worked at a pawnshop and promoted wrestling matches. Then he opened a record shop and found he had, as he would put it, “shellac in my veins.” (In the early days, records were made of molded shellac.)
Mr. Nathan could be a loud and tactically crude man, who chomped on cigars and argued with half the artists who came through his studio. A stubborn self-starter, he would shout down James Brown when he thought he was right.
He brawled with Brown, his biggest act, countless times; he legendarily refused to record him live at the Apollo Theater in Harlem until Brown agreed to underwrite the recording himself. Despite their explosive relationship, together they helped change pop history.
One of Mr. Nathan’s innovations was to construct a facility not just for recording music but also for pressing records, designing album-cover art, and packing boxes and shipping them out. An industry outsider who learned as he went, Mr. Nathan to some degree assembled a music industry that he could control, all under his roof. Except for the cardboard album covers, which were manufactured elsewhere, the label did it all. With King’s facilities a record could be cut in the morning and acetates placed in D.J.s’ hands that night. More than once, a King artist was on the road back home to Macon, Ga., or Philadelphia, when he was surprised to hear his new song playing on the radio.
Another key to King’s success was its racial pragmatism. It’s probably a stretch to call Mr. Nathan a progressive, but he was colorblind in his pursuit of the widest possible audience. He didn’t just record both white and black acts; he had his ace R&B studio band playing on country records, and his country bands trying their hands at black pop hits, an almost unthinkable practice at the time.
The Stanley Brothers, for instance, did a version of Ballard’s “Finger Poppin’ Time,” and the African-American shouter Wynonie Harris covered the honky-tonk singer Hank Penny’s “Bloodshot Eyes.” It was a way of getting the most out of a hit, and perhaps it was Mr. Nathan’s stubborn nature to argue to those who told him blacks and whites would never like the same records how very wrong they were.
Besides King, Cincinnati has a notable musical history that has largely been forgotten inside or outside city limits. The local singer Mamie Smith moved to New York and recorded the pioneering “Crazy Blues” in 1920; Jelly Roll Morton recorded onto piano rolls in a downtown studio. After Prohibition a circuit of illegal casinos employing many musicians popped up across the Ohio River in Kentucky.
“Cincinnati was settled by good, solid German folk,” said Mr. Nager, who wrote the text on the King marker. “To them, honest work was making soap and killing pigs, not making music or cutting records. To them, the Jews, blacks and hillbillies working at King Records were gypsies, outsiders.” King Records, he said, “remains Cincinnati’s single most important cultural contribution to the world.”
Syd Nathan died in 1968; the label changed hands several times in subsequent years. Today the bulk of its catalog rests with Gusto Records, a Nashville company that appears to neglect its treasures.
The night the historic marker was unveiled, the alternative weekly City Beat held its annual Cincinnati entertainment awards show. The event was built around a tribute to King, and opened with a blazing, freaky set by Mr. Collins, paying tribute to James Brown. There was an acrobatic, youthful singer billed as Young James Brown, with Tomi Ray Brown, Brown’s last wife, singing backup for him. Even Danny Ray, the man who had draped the cape on Brown for decades, was there to introduce the tribute. At the end of the show, Ralph Stanley, the bluegrass patriarch who recorded for the label in the early 1960s, sang and sang until his voice gave out.
The music was a mix of the faith and the funk, fatback and fiddle tunes. Whatever happens to the brick structure that used to house the label, King will never really die as long as music like this can be heard in an old music hall in Cincinnati.
January 25th, 2009
Mary Heilmann
Blood on the Tracks
2005
Christopher Wool
Untitled
2007
I posted earlier this week about her show at Richard Telles, but also at Casey Kaplan (with images)
I made a repost the other day of “Beach Clown” found on ready4thehouse
, a term coined by K. M. Breslin. Today in my email inbox there are early images of the Beach Boys from Gerry Beckley of America. Pretty Amazing.
All images courtesy of Gerry Beckley
By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: January 17, 2009
As Barack Obama got to town, one of the first things he did was seek the counsel of past presidents, including George Bush senior.
As W. was leaving town, one of the last things he did was explain why he never sought the counsel of his father on issues that his father knew intimately, like Iraq and Saddam.
When Brit Hume did a joint interview last week with Bush father and son, dubbed “41st guy” and “43rd guy” by W., the Fox anchor asked whether it was true that “there wasn’t a lot of give and take” between them, except on family matters.
“See,” the Oedipally oddball W. replied, “the interesting thing is that a president has got plenty of advisers, but what a president never has is someone who gave him unconditional love.”
He talks about his father, the commander in chief who went to war with Saddam before he did, like a puppy. “You rarely have people,” he said, “who can pick up the phone and say, ‘I love you, son,’ or, ‘Hang in there, son.’ ”
Maybe he wouldn’t have needed so many Hang-in-there-sons if he had actually consulted his dad before he ignorantly and fraudulently rammed into the Middle East.
When W. admits the convoluted nature of his relationship with his father, diminishing a knowledgeable former president to the status of a blankie, you realize that, despite all the cocky swagger we’ve seen, this is not a confident man.
That is vividly apparent as we watch W. and Obama share the stage as they pass the battered baton. One seems small and inconsequential, even though he keeps insisting he’s not; the other grows large and impressive, filling Americans with cockeyed hope even as he warns them not to expect too much too soon.
Even Obama’s caution — a commodity notably absent from the White House for eight years — fills people with optimism.
W. lives in the shadow of his father’s presence, while Obama lives in the shadow of his father’s absence. W.’s parlous presidency, spent trashing the Constitution, the economy and the environment, was bound up, and burdened by, the psychological traits of an asphyxiated and pampered son.
The exiting and entering presidents are opposite poles — one the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance, and one a complex, polysyllabic professor sort who will make a decision only after he has held it up to the light and examined it from all sides.
W. was immune to doubt and afraid of it. (His fear of doubt led to the cooking of war intelligence.) Obama is delighted by doubt.
It’s astonishing that, as banks continue to fail and Americans continue to lose jobs and homes, W. was obtuse enough to go on TV and give a canned ode to can-do-ism. “Good and evil are present in this world,” he reiterated, “and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”
He gives the good-and-evil view of things a bad name. Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys. Good and evil intermingle in the same breath, let alone the same society. A moral analysis cannot be a simplistic analysis.
“You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made,” he said Thursday night. “But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.”
Actually, no. His decisions have been, for the most part, disastrous. If he’d paid as much attention to facts as fitness, 9/11, Iraq, the drowning of New Orleans, the deterioration in Afghanistan and the financial deregulation orgy could have been prevented.
Bush fancied himself the Decider; Obama fancies himself the Convener. Some worry that a President Obama will overdo it and turn the Situation Room into the Seminar Room. (He’s already showing a distressing lack of concern over whether his cherished eggheads bend the rules, like Tim Geithner’s not paying all his taxes, because, after all, they’re the Best and the Brightest, not ordinary folk.)
W., Cheney and Rummy loved making enemies, under the mistaken assumption that the more people hated America, the more the Bushies were standing up for principle. But is Obama neurotically reluctant to make enemies, and overly concerned with winning over those who have smacked him, from Hillary and Bill to conservative columnists?
If W. and Cheney preferred Fox News on the TVs in the White House because they liked hearing their cheerleaders, Obama may leave the channel on Fox because he prefers seducing and sparring with antagonists to spooning with allies.
Right now, though, it’s a huge relief to be getting an inquisitive, complicated mind in the White House.
W. decided there was no need to be president of the whole country. He could just be president of his base. Obama is determined to be president of as much of the country as possible.
We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog. It feels good.
January 18th, 2009
Beach Clown is the new style silently taking over this season, with labels like Band Of Outsiders & Dries Van Noten offering striped cotton shirts in sophisticated palettes. Whilst using the term ‘Beach Clown’ to specifically define a fashion style is a relatively new thing (*credit to Ms K.Breslin of Los Angeles here) its roots shoot back deep into the collective creative consciousness. Trying however to designate the original ‘Beach Clown’ can get as gratuitous as crowning an individual for producing the first striped painting. All we know is this; that the Bauhaus were big players and early promoters of the Beach Clown aesthetic, and that by the time the movement reached the states it had been reconstituted into a somewhat softer more malleable ‘lifestyle’ movement. Whilst Brian Wilson’s brothers denied his emphatic calls to name the band ‘The Beach Clowns’, for fear of being too closely associated with the style (viewed by many as European vice) they agreed to adopt the candy striped button down shirts as their signature look, and in doing so inadvertenty gave the Beach Clown movement its most enduring endorsement.
originally posted on ready4thehouse
Kelly Breslin gave me some other examples of her so called ” Beach Clown ” aesthetic I thought I should add. Evidently Beach Clown is more than fashion. Its a universal movement.
January 17th, 2009
