Johannes Wohnseifer (2009)
April 30th until June 20th, 2009
Opening April 30th, 6 – 9 pm

Johannes Wohnseifer will be opening his 5th solo exhibition at Johann König, Berlin, with new sculptures, wall pieces and photographs. Connected with each other formally as well as in content, the works investigate culturally shaped representational forms and transformation processes.
The series “Canon” (2009), a photographic documentation of historical and contemporary coffee-table books about the African continent, creates the frame for the exhibition. Using the principles of object photography, the book-covers and pages work as a kind of contextual parenthesis for a sculpture series. Composed of seven shelf-like objects, each “shelf” is in turn made out of nine elements which correspond in form, color and material exactly to those used by Gerrit Rietveld for his “Berliner Stuhl”. The De Stijl designer developed the chair in 1923 for his exhibition in the actual capital and brought it into the market as a do-it-yourself construction set, as he did with many of his license-free designs. Some shelves vary in the original gray-black-white palette of Rietveld’s design. Others are lacquered in monochrome yellow, white or red – colors in the standardized RAL- palette, used frequently by Wohnseifer in his works.
Formally, Wohnseifer uses Rietveld’s asymmetry and plane composition, however questions the logic of functionality. The free combination of the pieces gives way to bizarre forms which negating any function. The artist plays here with the idea of object “recycling”, a widespread practice in non industrial countries, in which discarded materials with almost no more value are transformed into practical or also humorous products. In addition Wohnseifer titles his transformed objects with street names pertaining to the African quarter in Berlin “Wedding”: “Sambesistraße”, “Dualastraße”, “Ugandastraße” and “Tangastraße” stand for an uncritical appropriation of a very questionable part of German colonial history within the Berlin street scenery. The artist thus triggers notional links between Berlin and Africa and vice versa, which also come forth in the wall pieces from the series “Shutter Stutter“ (2009). The aluminum pictures are reminiscent of blinds used to protect buildings from strong sun rays. Wohnseifer adapts the blinds’ form but dissolves their materiality into abstract painting. Colorful, striped staccatos create moving images, whose effect also works, on a linguistic level, on the title “Shutter Stutter”.
With this work Wohnseifer sets a comment on the possible reception of the exhibition, which questions the culturally defined system of values and their reading.

Johannes Wohnseifer (*1967, Cologne) lives and works in Cologne and Erfstadt. In 2008, the galleries Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Casey Kaplan, New York and Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid held solo exhibitions of the artist. In 2007 Wohnseifer’s series “Kleenex Mathematics” was shown at the Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver. The exhibition “Vertrautes Terrain – Aktuelle Kunst in und über Deutschland” at the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the shows “The Porn Identity. Expeditionen in die Dunkelzone” at the Kunsthalle Vienna recently presented works of the artist. Currently, Wohnseifer’s works can be seen at „Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection“ in the New York MoMA.

johannkoenig

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: May 10, 2009

Is this the end for Harry and Louise?

Harry and Louise were the fictional couple who appeared in advertisements run by the insurance industry in 1993, fretting about what would happen if “government bureaucrats” started making health care decisions. The ads helped kill the Clinton health care plan, and have stood, ever since, as a symbol of the ability of powerful special interests to block health care reform.

But on Saturday, excited administration officials called me to say that this time the medical-industrial complex (their term, not mine) is offering to be helpful.

Six major industry players — including America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a descendant of the lobbying group that spawned Harry and Louise — have sent a letter to President Obama sketching out a plan to control health care costs. What’s more, the letter implicitly endorses much of what administration officials have been saying about health economics.

Are there reasons to be suspicious about this gift? You bet — and I’ll get to that in a bit. But first things first: on the face of it, this is tremendously good news.

The signatories of the letter say that they’re developing proposals to help the administration achieve its goal of shaving 1.5 percentage points off the growth rate of health care spending. That may not sound like much, but it’s actually huge: achieving that goal would save $2 trillion over the next decade.

How are costs to be contained? There are few details, but the industry has clearly been reading Peter Orszag, the budget director.

In his previous job, as the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Orszag argued that America spends far too much on some types of health care with little or no medical benefit, even as it spends too little on other types of care, like prevention and treatment of chronic conditions. Putting these together, he concluded that “substantial opportunities exist to reduce costs without harming health over all.”

Sure enough, the health industry letter talks of “reducing over-use and under-use of health care by aligning quality and efficiency incentives.” It also picks up a related favorite Orszag theme, calling for “adherence to evidence-based best practices and therapies.” All in all, it’s just what the doctor, er, budget director ordered.

Before we start celebrating, however, we have to ask the obvious question. Is this gift a Trojan horse? After all, several of the organizations that sent that letter have in the past been major villains when it comes to health care policy.

I’ve already mentioned AHIP. There’s also the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the lobbying group that helped push through the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 — a bill that both prevented Medicare from bargaining over drug prices and locked in huge overpayments to private insurers. Indeed, one of the new letter’s signatories is former Representative Billy Tauzin, who shepherded that bill through Congress then immediately left public office to become PhRMA’s lavishly paid president.

The point is that there’s every reason to be cynical about these players’ motives. Remember that what the rest of us call health care costs, they call income.

What’s presumably going on here is that key interest groups have realized that health care reform is going to happen no matter what they do, and that aligning themselves with the Party of No will just deny them a seat at the table. (Republicans, after all, still denounce research into which medical procedures are effective and which are not as a dastardly plot to deprive Americans of their freedom to choose.)

I would strongly urge the Obama administration to hang tough in the bargaining ahead. In particular, AHIP will surely try to use the good will created by its stance on cost control to kill an important part of health reform: giving Americans the choice of buying into a public insurance plan as an alternative to private insurers. The administration should not give in on this point.

But let me not be too negative. The fact that the medical-industrial complex is trying to shape health care reform rather than block it is a tremendously good omen. It looks as if America may finally get what every other advanced country already has: a system that guarantees essential health care to all its citizens.

And serious cost control would change everything, not just for health care, but for America’s fiscal future. As Mr. Orszag has emphasized, rising health care costs are the main reason long-run budget projections look so grim. Slow the rate at which those costs rise, and the future will look far brighter.

I still won’t count my health care chickens until they’re hatched. But this is some of the best policy news I’ve heard in a long time.

May 8 – June 13, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, May 8, 6-9pm

“The inertia of habit gives way to an urge towards some sort of adventure, some sort of collective enterprise, to a sense of dangers and opportunities equally shared. It will perhaps be said that it represents a kind of complicity. For this very reason we have no reservations about declaring ourselves here and now the accomplices of René Magritte.”
-Paul Nougé

“So, he goes, walks and searches. What is he looking for? Most certainly: this man, such as I have portrayed him, this hermit, so gifted with an active imagination, who always travels through the great human desert, pursues a higher goal than pure leisure, a different, more comprehensive goal than the fleeting pleasure of the moment. He is in search of that certain something, which I allow myself to refer to as modernity; He is intent on releasing from fashion whatever is poetic from what is historical and eternal from what is ephemeral.”
-Charles Baudelaire

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present the work of Matthew Brannon, Marcel Broodthaers, James Lee Byars and William E. Jones. The opening reception will be held on Friday, May 8th from 6 to 9pm, and the exhibition will be on view at David Kordansky Gallery’s Culver City space through June 13th, 2009.

Matthew Brannon’s sculpture, The Price of Admission, carefully recreates an upholstered couch ruined by drips; of what substance these drips consist is a matter of speculation. His piece suggests a splattered couch in a painter’s studio, the infamous Hollywood institution of the casting couch, or even the psychoanalytic couch. The spots on Brannon’s couch recall the men’s fashion William S. Burroughs wrote about in The Wild Boys: luxurious suits that look as though bums slept in them, with urine stains, which on closer inspection, turn out to be intricate embroideries of fine gold thread.

Matthew Brannon’s work was recently included in 50 Moons of Saturn, curated by Daniel Birnbaum for the Torino Triennial, and in the 2008 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2007 he had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria and the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, Canada. He lives and works in New York City.

Marcel Broodthaers produced vacuum formed signs that could be mistaken for instructional objects or directional markers, but the “information” they impart could easily fill several volumes of exegesis. One sign reads, “Nous n’irons plus au bois,” referring to a poem by Théodore de Banville and to a centuries-old children’s song. The next line, “Les lauriers sont coupés,” became the title of an Édouard Dujardin novel that pioneered the stream of consciousness technique later employed by James Joyce. In fact, the line reads, “Les lauriers sont/ne sont pas coupés.” It is simultaneously an utterance and its negation, suggesting that Joyce both did and did not write Ulysses.

During his twelve-year career, Marcel Broodthaers produced an astounding variety of works, including enigmatic objects made of egg and mussel shells, typographic paintings, films, prints, photographs, and ephemeral installations. He has had extensive museum exhibitions, including Eulogy of the Subject at Kunstmuseum Basel, Angelus of Daumier at Centre Georges Pompidou, and retrospectives at the Walker Art Center and Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume. His first exhibition with Galerie Michael Werner was in 1969. He died in Cologne in 1976.

James Lee Byars made many “autobiographies,” and on view is one that he realized as a film. It contains a self-portrait, Byars’ image reduced to a tiny figure at the center of the composition and appearing in a brief flash, 1/24 of a second, the duration of a single film frame. Byars’ gold lamé piece The World Flag conjures the value of a precious metal formerly used as a global monetary standard and is taken as a symbol of luminous, inaccessible perfection. His Five Points Make a Man resembles Vesuvius’ human anatomical diagram and the face of a die rolled on a craps table.

James Lee Byars’ first solo museum exhibition was at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1958. Byars participated in the Venice Biennale in 1980, 1986 and 1999 and Documenta V, VI, VII and VIII. His first exhibition with Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne was in 1971. In 2005, Chrissie Iles curated James Lee Byars: The Perfect Silence for the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work was recently included in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. He died in Cairo in 1997.

William E. Jones presents “Killed”, a video composed of Farm Security Administration photographs that were rejected by the program’s director. Negatives destroyed by a hole punch are arranged by their missing parts, circular voids of uniform size, placed dead center in the frame. The documentary images appearing in brief flashes acquire a hallucinatory power. Another work, a suite of 21 prints based upon Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650), is illustrated “automatically,” but unlike the automatic writings of the Surrealists, the internet (rather than the unconscious) serves as a point of origin for the associations of word and image.

William E. Jones’s work is included in the Nordic Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale. He has exhibited in museums and galleries including Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Biennial (2008 and 1993); Wexner Center for the Arts; The Getty Center and the Sundance Film Festival. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

David Kordansky

Cabinet in Scrap Wood

By: Sam Grawe
Dwell Magazine

SG: How did you come to design?
PHE: When I was in school I already knew I wanted to produce my own furniture. After I got my degree in 1990, I had to go to military service, so we waited until 1993 to start. From that moment on we worked on creating a collection and a brand and activities that are recognizable. During the years we developed a whole collection, and over time—in Holland at least—it became sort of a brand. People wanted to have something of Piet Hein Eek. And they were not talking about me as a person, but as a business.
We always went to the fairs in Holland in order to be better known by the people themselves, instead of only the design-interested part of the population. That worked out very well. We settled the brand in Holland and we live on our activities there.
We were doing customized work, which can be the most beautiful way to work since everyone is constantly coming up with new ideas. I liked it very much but at a certain moment we found that everyone got overworked and overloaded with too many deadlines. We had to build in some routine, both in the organization and in the work itself. So we started internationally four years ago in order to sell more of each piece. That works out quite well. Now we just have to learn to cope with the growth.
SG: So, prior to design school in Eindhoven, did you have an interest in carpentry or woodwork?
PHE: Yes, from the time I was little I was always making things like lamps and cabinets and houses with matches. I was always gluing things together. It was a hobby.
SG: And were you interested in working with scrap material when you were making these things?
PHE: The scrap is a new thought for me. I see something I like and start thinking of all the possibilities for how it could be used. If I go for a walk in the woods I always come back with plastic bags full of pieces of the forest. It’s about seeing materials and techniques that are available for design, but not being used for that purpose. Scrap wood could be gold. It could be everything.
SG: Looking at the range of your work, it’s hard to tell if there’s a unifying “look.” Is there one “Piet Hein Eek?”
PHE: I think there is. It’s like a feeling.
SG: Do the materials determine the form then?
PHE: It’s the character of the material, the quality of it; and I don’t mean in terms of how it appears, but the way you can handle it and which machine you use. The combination of the technique and the material often gives a logical end result. But these are always split second ideas, even if they are very complicated. The trick is to keep that idea.
SG: So now that you’re trying this international approach where everything is replicable, do you think more in terms of product than concept?
PHE: Yeah, I really want to produce. We started in 1993 with art. Throughout the 90s I had solo exhibitions in Europe. But that’s free work, as I call it. I just make it for myself, I don’t make it to sell. The furniture and objects that I make they should be made in quantities. Some dealers and people ask me to make limited editions for them because they see how easy it is to make money off that, but I say no. I’m a designer. We’re trying to create a brand. It’s more profitable to put energy and capacity and money into creating a good collection with a good name, a transparent way of working, and a recognizable ideal. With a unique piece, once it’s sold, you have to do it again.
SG: Would you consider yourself as a “sustainable designer?”
PHE: The major thing is that you make durable things. If you buy a couch from IKEA with FSC-certified wood and you throw it away after two years, it is much worse than a non-FSC wood couch that you keep for 100 years. Recycling is good, but if you calculate everything, it’s not actually much better, because it takes energy to move the material to be recycled. If you account for everything, often the balance isn’t as clear as you thought it could be. For me, it’s about quality and creating a look that is timeless rather than a design that is fashionable. Most of our furniture gets old in a beautiful way.
SG: Can you walk me through the process of making the scrap table?
PHE: Well the scrap table was originally made out of leftovers from all these cupboards and other projects we make. We had a lot of little pieces leftover. At a certain moment I decided to create a puzzle, layering the scraps until they became strong. We made a table out of that. Then we did it ten times because I wanted to exaggerate the layers.
You want every project you make to be efficient. The price is very important. If you want to sell a chair it shouldn’t take more than one hour of work. Otherwise the price makes it impossible to sell in large amounts. We always know that even if an idea or product is very nice, if it takes too many hours, we can’t sell it. Everyday, our challenge is to get everything done in time.
Because of time you also throw a lot of material away, even if you’re efficient. That’s why we started making use of the leftovers and we started making products that take a lot of time. The whole essence with these was, the more time it takes, the better. When it came time to finish, we lacquered it ten times, just to exaggerate the process time. This gave it a very strong visual and tactile effect, which was successful immediately, but purely came out of the idea of exaggerating time in order to turn the world upside down.
Then of course I thought I would never sell anything because it’s the opposite of an efficient process. The whole design and value is the process itself. But almost immediately, we started selling it. It’s not so strange, if you think about it. If you are fed up with always trying to do everything on time, you are going to look at this and think, “Finally, something which took a hell of a lot of time.” Everything we do is always handmade. If you put energy into it, people should know it through the details and connections. Minimalism always tries to hide the details, which is not minimalistic, because you put energy into disguising what you’ve done.
SG: How long, in terms of just the process, would it would it take to do one table?
PHE: We have two phases. The production is about 20-30 hours. It depends on who is doing it and how the material is. The other thing is lacquer. It has to be done like nine times, sanding each layer in between. It’s logistically complicated.
SG: Would you say there is there anything Dutch about your design?
PHE: The problem is, if you say something is Dutch, people start comparing it with current Dutch design, and I don’t feel comfortable with that. A lot of people compare me with some deceased Dutch designers and I don’t mind. [laughs] I admire them a lot.
SG: So what is your take on Dutch design right now?
PHE: In the 1990s when we started, there was already a strong conceptualist stream in Holland. The world was enormously wealthy and didn’t know what to do with it. And then a group of Dutch designers came and put a bulb in the ceiling and said, “This is also a lamp.” And everyone else was like, “Yeah, this is also a lamp!”
Then in 2001, things changed, but the clear, conceptual approach was still an answer. Because both in wealth and in its absence, it’s very nice if somebody says, “Yeah, this bulb is also a lamp.” In other words, the same Dutch design has been appreciated for two different social reasons.
There’s much more discussion happening now politically, socially, sociologically, and the Dutch don’t have the only answers anymore. There are a lot of international designers who are very successful. But there is a Dutch mentality, you might say, which was appreciated by the world. A bulb in the ceiling is not design. Charles Eames is design. I’m not part of the conceptual; I always disliked it very much.
SG: Are there any other designers or architects working now whose work you admire or are inspired by?
PHE: It’s part of your job to look at something and recreate it in your mind, but I don’t look to other designers often, because everyone is influenced. I like Jean Prouvé, but I didn’t find him until about ten years after I started. I feel comfortable with his way of working, but he’s more an engineer than a designer.
SG: It seems that you have kind of designed these pieces for yourself. Do you envision a type of person who will buy the product—an end-user?
PHE: You are right when you say I design them for myself but I also like to sell them. I am not thinking about what the market wants, but what the market should want. I try to change people’s taste. I try to change their values or feeling of quality or beauty. I want to persuade people to see what I see.

Thanks to Rodney Hill

This is a repost of a piece i can’t stop thinking about. Ricky Swallow 2009. Carved of English Limewood.
Anyone recognize the pack?

By HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: May 7, 2009

When the painter Winslow Homer left New York City for this Catskills hamlet in the summer of 1878, he was reported to be “a little under the weather.” He was probably suffering a nervous breakdown. Whether the cause was a failed romance or despair at seeing the Gilded Age shatter around him, we don’t know. But he felt unmoored and clung to the natural world. The dozens of watercolors he did that summer were landscape-filled, with sloping pastures and wall-like mountains dwarfing human figures, idylls so perfect that they look unreal.

The New York State Thruway buzzes through that landscape now. Most of the pastures are gone, but the mountains are still here: Schunnemunk, behind a series of ridges; Storm King, running high and long before dropping into the Hudson. And recently, some new additions, baby mountains, have appeared: seven undulating, grass-covered ranges of them.

These mini-Catskills were conceived and built — molded is really the word — by the artist Maya Lin as a permanent installation at the Storm King Art Center, the 500-acre sculpture park that for almost half a century has been devoted to the display of outdoor works either designed for the location or too large or strange to fit comfortably elsewhere.

Ms. Lin’s ambitious piece, “Storm King Wavefield,” was commissioned by the center, and installation of it, under the supervision of David R. Collens, an artist and Storm King’s director, began two years ago. Set in a shallow, amphitheaterlike depression, once a gravel pit supplying material for the Thruway, it covers 11 acres. Its seven parallel rows of rolling, swelling peaks were inspired by the forms of midocean waves but echo the mountains and hills around them.

Marine references make sense in a part of the world carved and smoothed by glaciers, and terrestrial themes have been central to Ms. Lin’s art. “My affinity has always been toward sculpting the earth,” she wrote in her autobiographical book “Boundaries” (2000). “This impulse has shaped my entire body of work.”

That impulse was little remarked upon at the beginning of her career, when she was known mostly as a creator of urban commemorative sculptures, the first and most famous being her Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the Mall in Washington. Designed when she was still a graduate student in architecture at Yale, this long, low chevron of buffed black granite inscribed with names of the war dead was as much a monument to healing and humility as to heroics, and it became a flashpoint for American feelings about a divisive war and a disorienting era.

A few years later she completed the Civil Rights Memorial for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., again using black stone, this time a circular, tablelike slab of it incised with a historical timeline and rinsed by fountain water. In 1993 she returned to that format for her “Women’s Table” at Yale. Dedicated to the many women who had been underacknowledged presences at the university since the 19th century, the stone was carved with an open-ended spiral of numbers, each marking the enrollment of women in the university in a given year, with 1969 footnoted: “Yale admitted women into the undergraduate college.”

Initially, the political content of these works defined them. Now it is possible to step back and reassess them in light of Ms. Lin’s subsequent career, which took her out of the memorial business and in the more directly earth-sculpturing direction, a direction that, it turns out, she had been following all along.

Ms. Lin’s originating image for the Vietnam memorial, with its plain, straight slant like a Hudson Valley hillside, was of a blade slicing into and wounding the earth. The Civil Rights Memorial and “Women’s Table” were both based on a single natural process: the slow but certain shaping of earth, in the form of stone, by water. All three pieces were meant to interact organically, even sensually, with their viewers, inviting them to run their hands over stone, feel and hear the trickle of water.

In short, Ms. Lin was making a species of “earth art” from the start. And she has done so unequivocally since, most strikingly in a small series of “wave” pieces formed from piled and packed soil.

The first, “Wave Field,” installed at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1995, is a 10,000-square-foot grouping of earthen mounds, the highest six feet, their shapes based on those of scientifically measured ocean waves. The second piece, “Flutter,” covers 30,000 square feet of a plot near the Federal Courthouse in Miami; the undulant shapes, child-size at three to four feet high, were inspired by the textures made in sand by the action of waves.

Small working models for these works are on view, along with several indoors pieces, in the exhibition “Maya Lin: Bodies of Water” in the Storm King Art Center Museum.

The “Storm King Wavefield” is the third and last of the series and by far the largest at 240,000 square feet, with heights of 15 feet. Like its predecessors, it is made of natural materials: dirt and grass. Like any landscape, it is a work in progress. Vegetation is still coming in, drainage issues are in testing mode, and there are unruly variables: woodchucks have begun converting one wave into an apartment complex.

But the piece is already a classic. It has the gravity of Ms. Lin’s commemorative sculptures and the sociability of the earlier “wave” pieces, which lent themselves to picnics, play and privacy. And, more immediately than almost any of her other outdoor projects, it is inextricable from nature, which is where, as I say, all her art starts.

Born in 1959, Ms. Lin was raised in rural Ohio, and as a child visited the great Serpent Mound and other American Indian earthworks in the Midwest. Through her father, a ceramicist who grew up in a Japanese-style house in China, she developed an affinity for the nature-saturated, but also nature-framing, aesthetic embodied in the Zen rock-and-sand garden, and in the Chinese ink-and-brush landscape, with its misted and surreally scaled vistas.

As a distillation of nature, the Zen garden is highly controlled: you view it from a fixed point and from a distance; you don’t physically enter it. In that sense, it is an image rather than an environment. By contrast, the “Storm King Wavefield” is embracingly environmental.

Seen from a slight elevation, it complements its hilly setting but interrupts it. (There is, after all, something a little freakish about these slinky, reptilian swellings in the ground.) Because the work does both, it sharpens your eye to existing harmonies and asymmetries otherwise overlooked.

When you descend into the troughs between the lines of waves, you may experience an entirely different set of sensations. You lose sight of all the other waves and of the larger prospects beyond them. Now you are down in the earth; it is rising over you, not you over it. You’re suddenly smaller, but also protected. Outside sounds are muffled, large-scale distractions reduced. The grand vision of hills upon hills, recession upon recession, drops away.

With it gone, you’re encouraged to concentrate on the details of what’s around you. That’s what, I suspect, all of Ms. Lin’s outdoor work is asking you to do: touch the stone, feel the water, smell the air, see how that patch of grass is different from another.

I suspect that the search for a similar kind of focus, and the relief from boundlessness it brings, is what Homer was after in Mountainville that summer. Whether he found it, I don’t know. He ended his life in a very different landscape, on the coast of Maine, where he produced painting after painting of waves crashing on rocks, water demolishing land, ceaseless natural destruction frozen in time.

In its own way, some of Ms. Lin’s most recent work has a similarly adamant, end-time character. I refer to the long-planned, multipart project she calls “The Last Memorial,” with which, over decades, she plans to monitor globally the corruption and demise of the natural environment that has been her subject and source.

What forms she will call on remain to be seen. But “Storm King Wavefield” is a different kind of work. Neither fatalistic nor utopian, commemorative nor history-free, natural nor artificial, unstable nor fixed, it is a puzzle to ponder but also — first things last — a soul-soothing place of retreat.

“Storm King Wavefield” is on permanent view at Storm King Art Center, Old Pleasant Hill Road, Mountainville, N.Y.; (845) 534-3115, stormking.org. “Maya Lin: Bodies of Water” remains on view at the Storm King Art Center Museum through Nov. 15. A traveling survey of Ms. Lin’s work, “Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes,” organized by the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington, Seattle, is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, through July 12.

The Los Angeles Times
By Hector Tobar
May 7, 2009

Imagine we could dismantle the skyscrapers on Bunker Hill and step back in time to the downtown Los Angeles that was.

In place of soaring glass and steel, we find the squat wood frames of Victorian mansions and humble clapboard apartments hugging old palm trees. Studebakers and Fords with bulbous bodies and chrome ornaments glide down the streets, guzzling gas.

Just about everyone smokes, including the down-on-his luck writer gazing out from his room at the Alta Loma Hotel. He daydreams about the novels he will write, and takes the Angel’s Flight to the bottom of the hill, where he frequents one of the city’s many cafeterias.

“Los Angeles, give me some of you!” John Fante writes in his 1939 novel “Ask the Dust.” “Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

Last month was the centennial of John Fante’s birth. He died in 1983, and much of the L.A. of his famous Bunker Hill novels is gone now.

It was swept away with wrecking balls and bulldozers in the years after the freeways came through.

This is what L.A. does to its history. Much of Chavez Ravine was swept away too, along with the old Chinatown and so much more.

That’s because one of L.A.’s great traditions is smashing and stomping upon our own history.

We are addicted to newness. So we topple landmarks and neighborhoods as if they were unsightly weeds.

It might be happening again, in Century City, where a jewel from another era of Los Angeles history is facing the threat of demolition: the Century Plaza Hotel, a 19-story modernist curve designed by the same architect who gave New York City the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

“This city is constantly reinventing itself, and part of that reinvention is destruction,” said Leticia Muñoz of Heritage Square Museum in the Arroyo Seco.

A fifth-generation Angeleno, Muñoz is a relative newcomer to the fraternity of Southern California historic preservationists, a long-suffering group of activists.

This month Muñoz is organizing a photo exhibit at Heritage Square celebrating the memory of Bunker Hill, Chavez Ravine, the old Chinatown and other lost Los Angeles neighborhoods. They’re all places that disappeared long before she was born.

“I grew up listening to my grandparents’ stories about La Loma,” said Muñoz, 26, using the name the locals gave to Chavez Ravine, a neighborhood demolished to make way for Dodger Stadium.

Salvador and Rosa Muñoz lived in La Loma until it was clear they couldn’t stop city officials from evicting them. In the years that followed, “It was all they ever talked about,” Muñoz said.

Heritage Square is an especially appropriate place to organize an exhibit on lost L.A. It’s a kind of rescue shelter for Victorian-era buildings. It’s also one of the best kept secrets of L.A. history.

Located on a city block, the museum consists of eight buildings. Each was erected in 19th century Southern California, and each was saved from the wrecking ball and moved to the Arroyo Seco in the 20th century.

There’s an old octagonal house from Pasadena there, along with a quaint little train station that was one of the first to serve the Westside.

“Everyone driving by on the Pasadena Freeway sees us here,” said one museum official, “but most people never stop by to visit.”

L.A. history is like that. We sort of know it’s there, waiting for us at the next freeway exit. But how often do we make the effort required to see it?

For “Lost to ‘Progress’: the Modernization of Los Angeles,” which closes June 28, Muñoz and co-curator Jessica Maria Alicea-Covarrubias have gathered about four dozen photographs from local collections.

The black-and-white pictures include several incarnations of Bunker Hill. In 1903, we see a horse-drawn carriage roll down 3rd Street near the Angel’s Flight railway. A group of children dig a Victory Garden in 1945. And finally, two buildings, known as “the Castle” and “the Salt Box,” are rolled off the hill in 1969, just as the new skyscrapers begin to rise.

The Castle and the Salt Box were moved to Heritage Square. Those buildings are only a memory now, because they burned down just weeks after arriving at the museum. But if you read Fante’s novels you can smell, feel and hear the Bunker Hill neighborhood where they once stood.

“I . . . scaled the incline to the top of Bunker Hill,” Fante wrote in “Ask the Dust.” “A night for my nose, smelling the stars, smelling the flowers, smelling the desert, and the dust asleep, across the top of Bunker Hill.”

Fante was the unofficial poet laureate of Bunker Hill. In his writing, Bunker Hill lives on as a place where men read pulp fiction and scratch together quarters to buy a little whiskey. Milk trucks park on the steep streets, and strangers meet in the hallways of the old hotels and rooming houses.

As in 21st century Los Angeles, social and ethnic divisions are never far from the surface. In “Ask the Dust,” Fante’s fictional alter ego, the writer Arturo Bandini, arrives in a hotel where the manager asks him if he is either Mexican or Jewish. He is neither — so he is allowed to check in.

Bandini, an Italian American, falls in love with a “Mayan princess” of Mexican descent — and soon the couple are hurling ethnic slurs at each other.

Having arrived from Colorado to America’s new paradise on the Pacific, Bandini struggles with writer’s block. Los Angeles is an empire of sunshine. He loves the place, even though it makes him “sick” again and again. One day, he types an entire page with the same two words over and over again: “Palm tree. Palm tree. Palm tree.”

Too bad there isn’t enough of the old Bunker Hill left for a real Fante literary tour. We lost that four decades ago. In exchange, we got part of our skyline, including the highest building west of the Mississippi.

The towers are grand. But a little more history and official recognition of its value would be nice too.

The ‘hobbit’s’ foot bones

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
The Independent UK
Thursday, 7 May 2009

A miniature species of extinct humans, nicknamed “hobbits”, possessed unusual anatomical features explained by their complete isolation from the rest of humanity for thousands of years on their remote island home in Indonesia, studies have found.

The tiny people, who grew to an adult height of no more than three feet, astounded scientists in 2004 when a skull and partial skeletons were unearthed from a cave on the island of Flores. Radiocarbon dating suggested that the species, Homo floresiensis, had lived in and around the cave for tens of thousand of years before dying out about 17,000 years ago.

The latest research into H. floresiensis has found that they were flat-footed, long-toed creatures who could walk easily on two legs but would have found it difficult to run at speed. A separate study suggests that their very small heads, which were perfectly in proportion to their bodies, were the evolutionary outcome of living on such a remote island for so long.

Two studies published in the journal Nature also cast further doubt on the idea that the hobbits were ordinary people suffering from some kind of pathological condition, such as microcephaly – when the skull fails to grow normally. Many scientists believe there is now little doubt that the hobbits were indeed a human species who had evolved as a result of island dwarfism, when larger animals gradually become smaller over the generations.

“That evidence has been overwhelming for some time now. Our study provides additional and unequivocal confirmation that we’re dealing with a new species. The pathology debate is officially over,” said Professor Bill Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York, who led the study into the hobbit’s foot bones. “Their big toe was surprisingly short and more similar to a chimpanzee’s in relative length than to humans.

“However, like chimpanzees again, the free parts of the lateral toes were relatively very long and the bones within were curved, whereas human toes in this region are short and straight,” Professor Jungers said.

The investigation of the hobbit’s foot bones also revealed that the miniature humans lacked an arch. In other words, they were flat footed. “They still walked just fine despite having relatively long feet and funny proportions, but they needed to lift their feet a little higher off the ground to clear their toes, possibly by flexing their ankles or knees more. They were designed quite adequately for walking, but were poorly adapted for long-distance running,” Professor Jungers said.

A range of small stone tools found alongside the bones suggest that the hobbits hunted and butchered local animals that lived on the island at the time, such as pygmy elephants, giant rats and reptiles, such as the Komodo dragon. But their ancestral origins remain a mystery.

The long toes of H. floresiensis suggest they could be the direct descendants of a hominin similar to an early human ancestor such as H. habilis, rather than the more recent H. erectus, a species known to have migrated out of African long before the migration of our own species, H. sapiens.

Alternatively, the hobbits may be the descendants of a dwarfed H. erectus that not only underwent a miniaturisation of its body, but reverted to more primitive features. Professor Jungers said that both scenarios are possible, although at present he favours the idea that the hobbits were descended from a bipedal hominin that had escaped Africa before H. erectus.

A separate study by researchers from the Natural History Museum in London investigated the problem of the hobbit’s very small skull and brain by comparing it with the skull of extinct pygmy hippos that lived on the island of Madagascar. Like the hobbit, the hippo’s skull had become smaller over time and in perfect proportion to the miniaturisation of its body.

Eleanor Weston, who led the study, said that the hippo shows for the first time that island dwarfism results in the miniaturisation of skull and brain seen in the hobbit. Dr Weston said: “Whatever the explanation for the tiny brain of H. floresiensis relative to its body size it is likely the fact it lived on an island played a significant part in its evolution.”

Intelligence test: The concept of island dwarfism

A key difficulty with the idea that the hobbits are a new species of human is that their brains are so small. How could a brain about the size of a grapefruit provide the intelligence to make and use the exquisitely carved stone tools found alongside the bones of H. floresiensis?

Adrian Lister and Eleanor Weston of the Natural History Museum in London believe that their expertise in studying “island dwarfism” in other animals has resolved the problem. Their study of an extinct species of dwarf hippo on the island of Madagascar showed for the first time that skull and braincase do indeed become smaller in direct proportion to the miniaturisation of other parts of a dwarfed body. In other words, the exceptionally small head and brain of H. floresiensis can be explained by evolutionary pressures resulting from living on an island, rather than the result of some kind of medical condition. And they seemed to have lived happily with small brains.

Island dwarfism is a well-known phenomenon. Extinct pygmy mammoths have been found on Wrangel Island in Siberia, along with dwarfed elephants on Mediterranean islands. Dwarfism is a way of surviving the limited resources of an isolated habitat, Dr Weston said.

“We found that the brain sizes of extinct dwarf hippos were up to 30 per cent smaller than you would expect by scaling down their mainland African ancestor,” said Dr Weston. “If the hippo model is applied to a typical H. erectus ancestor, the resulting brain capacity is comparable to that of H. floresiensis.”

thanks to steven tsou

Untitled, (San Francisco Botanical Garden), oil on linen, 2009

April 23 – May 30 2009

Imart Gallery, Korea

via arch daily thanks to nate lentz

A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?

The New Yorker
When Underdogs break the rules
By Malcolm Gladwell
May 11, 2009

When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.
The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.
But when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedouin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway? The Turks sat in Medina “on the defensive, immobile.” There were so many of them, consuming so much food and fuel and water, that they could hardly make a major move across the desert. Instead of attacking the Turks at their point of strength, Lawrence reasoned, he ought to attack them where they were weak—along the vast, largely unguarded length of railway line that was their connection to Damascus. Instead of focussing his attention on Medina, he should wage war over the broadest territory possible.
The Bedouins under Lawrence’s command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them “an untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle.” But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, forty-five pounds of flour, and a pint of drinking water, which meant that he could travel as much as a hundred and ten miles a day across the desert, even in summer. “Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power,” Lawrence wrote. “Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage.” The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence’s troops were all legs. In one typical stretch, in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24th, sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu al-Naam on March 25th, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at Istabl Antar on March 27th, raided a Turkish garrison and derailed a train on March 29th, returned to Buair and sabotaged the railway line again on March 31st, dynamited eleven rails at Hediah on April 3rd, raided the train line in the area of Wadi Dhaiji on April 4th and 5th, and attacked twice on April 6th.
Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus, in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. “This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes,” Lawrence writes in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” of one stage in the journey:

We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.

When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence’s band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks, and lost only two men. The Turks simply did not think that their opponent would be mad enough to come at them from the desert. This was Lawrence’s great insight. David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.
ivek Ranadivé is an elegant man, slender and fine-boned, with impeccable manners and a languorous walk. His father was a pilot who was jailed by Indira Gandhi, he says, because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of India’s planes. Ranadivé went to M.I.T., because he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his way. The Ranadivés are relentless.
In 1985, Ranadivé founded a software company in Silicon Valley devoted to what in the computer world is known as “real time” processing. If a businessman waits until the end of the month to collect and count his receipts, he’s “batch processing.” There is a gap between the events in the company—sales—and his understanding of those events. Wall Street used to be the same way. The information on which a trader based his decisions was scattered across a number of databases. The trader would collect information from here and there, collate and analyze it, and then make a trade. What Ranadivé’s company, TIBCO, did was to consolidate those databases into one stream, so that the trader could collect all the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processing was replaced by real-time processing. Today, TIBCO’s software powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street.
Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. “We’ve been working with some airlines,” he said. “You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.” Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag. “What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn’t make it,” Ranadivé said, “telling you we’ll ship it to your house.”
A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time—not once every month or two. “Everything in the world is now real time,” he said. “So when a certain type of shoe isn’t selling at your corner shop, it’s not six months before the guy in China finds out. It’s almost instantaneous, thanks to my software. The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”
You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a Solomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks between economic adjustments seems central to the process of deliberation. To Ranadivé, though, “deliberation” just prettifies the difficulties created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because it’s several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five minutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you stepped off the plane.
Is it any wonder that Ranadivé looked at the way basketball was played and found it mindless? A professional basketball game was forty-eight minutes long, divided up into alternating possessions of roughly twenty seconds: back and forth, back and forth. But a good half of each twenty-second increment was typically taken up with preliminaries and formalities. The point guard dribbled the ball up the court. He stood above the top of the key, about twenty-four feet from the opposing team’s basket. He called out a play that the team had choreographed a hundred times in practice. It was only then that the defending team sprang into action, actively contesting each pass and shot. Actual basketball took up only half of that twenty-second interval, so that a game’s real length was not forty-eight minutes but something closer to twenty-four minutes—and that twenty-four minutes of activity took place within a narrowly circumscribed area. It was as formal and as convention-bound as an eighteenth-century quadrille. The supporters of that dance said that the defensive players had to run back to their own end, in order to compose themselves for the arrival of the other team. But the reason they had to compose themselves, surely, was that by retreating they allowed the offense to execute a play that it had practiced to perfection. Basketball was batch!
Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance—and endurance battles favor the insurgent. “And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.
anadivé’s basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division, representing Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye’s Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadivé had never played basketball, he recruited a series of experts to help him. The first was Roger Craig, the former all-pro running back for the San Francisco 49ers, who is also TIBCO’s director of business development. As a football player, Craig was legendary for the off-season hill workouts he put himself through. Most of his N.F.L. teammates are now hobbling around golf courses. He has run seven marathons. After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who played Division I basketball at Duke and U.S.C. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent’s best player in order to shut her down. The girls loved Rometra. “She has always been like my big sister,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “It was so awesome to have her along.”
Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually, that’s not an issue, because teams don’t contest the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding, to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player. “Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.
The second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent’s end, within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline the girls would turn their attention to the second. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. “When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”
The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time, they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent’s basket, they rarely had to take low-percentage, long-range shots that required skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team’s players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by three points.
“What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses,” Rometra Craig said. She helped out once Redwood City advanced to the regional championships. “We could hide the fact that we didn’t have good outside shooters. We could hide the fact that we didn’t have the tallest lineup, because as long as we played hard on defense we were getting steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with the girls. I told them, ‘We’re not the best basketball team out there.’ But they understood their roles.” A twelve-year-old girl would go to war for Rometra. “They were awesome,” she said.
Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—the railroad—and not where they were strong, Medina. Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. Lawrence extended the battlefield over as large an area as possible. So did the girls of Redwood City. They defended all ninety-four feet. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence . . . courage.”
“It’s an exhausting strategy,” Roger Craig said. He and Ranadivé were in a TIBCO conference room, reminiscing about their dream season. Ranadivé was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was sitting at the table.
“My girls had to be more fit than the others,” Ranadivé said.
“He used to make them run,” Craig said, nodding approvingly.
“We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadivé said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.” He turned to Craig. “What was our cheer again?”
The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison, “One, two, three, ATTITUDE!”
That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
“One time, some new girls joined the team,” Ranadivé said, “and so in the first practice I had I was telling them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I showed them. I said, ‘It’s all about attitude.’ And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn’t get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, ‘No, no, it’s not One, two three, ATTITUDE. It’s One, two, three, attitude HAH ’ ”—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.
n January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn’t lost since December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Redmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, by contrast, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center had torn up his knee the first week of the season, which meant that their tallest player was six feet five. Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was six feet two. But from the opening buzzer the Rams launched a full-court press, and never let up. “We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way,” Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. “These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack.” Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won, 87–79.
In the world of basketball, there is one story after another like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. People look at upsets like Fordham over UMass and call them flukes. Basketball sages point out that the press can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers—and that is true. Ranadivé readily admitted that all an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back: the girls were not good enough to handle their own medicine. Playing insurgent basketball did not guarantee victory. It was simply the best chance an underdog had of beating Goliath. If Fordham had played UMass the conventional way, it would have lost by thirty points. And yet somehow that lesson has escaped the basketball establishment.
What did Digger Phelps do, the season after his stunning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. The UMass coach, Jack Leaman, was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids. Did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not.
The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that game was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn’t play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, thirty-eight years later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. “They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I’d ever seen,” Pitino said. “Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage.”
Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and used the press to take the school to its first N.C.A.A. tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. At the University of Kentucky, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Pitino took his team to the Final Four three times—and won a national championship—with full-court pressure, and then rode the full-court press back to the Final Four in 2005, as the coach at the University of Louisville. This year, his Louisville team entered the N.C.A.A. tournament ranked No. 1 in the land. College coaches of Pitino’s calibre typically have had numerous players who have gone on to be bona-fide all-stars at the professional level. In his many years of coaching, Pitino has had one, Antoine Walker. It doesn’t matter. Every year, he racks up more and more victories.
“The greatest example of the press I’ve ever coached was my Kentucky team in ’96, when we played L.S.U.,” Pitino said. He was at the athletic building at the University of Louisville, in a small room filled with television screens, where he watches tapes of opponents’ games. “Do we have that tape?” Pitino called out to an assistant. He pulled a chair up close to one of the monitors. The game began with Kentucky stealing the ball from L.S.U., deep in L.S.U.’s end. Immediately, the ball was passed to Antoine Walker, who cut to the basket for a layup. L.S.U. got the ball back. Kentucky stole it again. Another easy basket by Walker. “Walker had almost thirty points at halftime,” Pitino said. “He dunked it almost every time. When we steal, he just runs to the basket.” The Kentucky players were lightning quick and long-armed, and swarmed around the L.S.U. players, arms flailing. It was mayhem. Five minutes in, it was clear that L.S.U. was panicking.
Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the “rush state” in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo—and L.S.U. could not find a way to get out of the rush state. “See if you find one play that L.S.U. managed to run,” Pitino said. You couldn’t. The L.S.U. players struggled to get the ball inbounds, and, if they did that, they struggled to get the ball over mid-court, and on those occasions when they managed both those things they were too overwhelmed and exhausted to execute their offense the way they had been trained to. “We had eighty-six points at halftime,” Pitino went on—eighty-six points being, of course, what college basketball teams typically score in an entire game. “And I think we’d forced twenty-three turnovers at halftime,” twenty-three turnovers being what college basketball teams might force in two games. “I love watching this,” Pitino said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. “Every day, you dream about getting a team like this again.” So why are there no more than a handful of college teams who use the full-court press the way Pitino does?
Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures was endless. In the nineteen-forties, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedevilled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in “Violent Politics,” a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”
It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Kentucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through the desert on the back of a camel. It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score than swarm about, arms flailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.
“I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press,” Pitino said. Louisville was the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. “Then they e-mail me. They tell me they can’t do it. They don’t know if they have the bench. They don’t know if the players can last.” Pitino shook his head. “We practice every day for two hours straight,” he went on. “The players are moving almost ninety-eight per cent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections”—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instruction—“they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working.” Seven seconds! The coaches who came to Louisville sat in the stands and watched that ceaseless activity and despaired. The prospect of playing by David’s rules was too daunting. They would rather lose.
n 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”
Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.
The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.
Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.
“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.
This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.
T. E. Lawrence, by contrast, was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from Sandhurst. He was an archeologist by trade, a dreamy poet. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. And David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn’t know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches,” David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield.
The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.
“In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet,” Lenat said. “It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out.”
It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.
he trouble for Redwood City started early in the regular season. The opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls, who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press a twelve-year-old girl learned something much more valuable—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.
“There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot,” Ranadivé said. “He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up.”
Roger Craig says that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. “The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs—‘That’s a foul! That’s a foul!’ But we weren’t fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense.”
“My girls were all blond-haired white girls,” Ranadivé said. “My daughter is the closest we have to a black girl, because she’s half-Indian. One time, we were playing this all-black team from East San Jose. They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age the more nervous they get.” Ranadivé shook his head: never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw him out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.”
At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from somewhere deep in Orange County. Redwood City had to play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their own referee as well. The game was at eight o’clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six, to beat the traffic. It was downhill from there. The referee did not believe in “One, two, three, attitude HAH.” He didn’t think that playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. He began calling one foul after another.
“They were touch fouls,” Craig said. Ticky-tacky stuff. The memory was painful.
“My girls didn’t understand,” Ranadivé said. “The ref called something like four times as many fouls on us as on the other team.”
“People were booing,” Craig said. “It was bad.”
“A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?” Ranadivé shook his head.
“One girl fouled out.”
“We didn’t get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But . . .”
Ranadivé called the press off. He had to. The Redwood City players retreated to their own end, and passively watched as their opponents advanced down the court. They did not run. They paused and deliberated between each possession. They played basketball the way basketball is supposed to be played, and they lost—but not before making Goliath wonder whether he was a giant, after all. ♦

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
NY Times Published: May 4, 2009

In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all.

It was the inventor’s biggest project, and his most audacious.

The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. One midsummer night, it emitted a dull rumble and proceeded to hurl bolts of electricity into the sky. The blinding flashes, The New York Sun reported, “seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand.”

But the system failed for want of money, and at least partly for scientific viability. Tesla never finished his prototype tower and was forced to abandon its adjoining laboratory.

Today, a fight is looming over the ghostly remains of that site, called Wardenclyffe — what Tesla authorities call the only surviving workplace of the eccentric genius who dreamed countless big dreams while pioneering wireless communication and alternating current. The disagreement began recently after the property went up for sale in Shoreham, N.Y.

A science group on Long Island wants to turn the 16-acre site into a Tesla museum and education center, and hopes to get the land donated to that end. But the owner, the Agfa Corporation, says it must sell the property to raise money in hard economic times. The company’s real estate broker says the land, listed at $1.6 million, can “be delivered fully cleared and level,” a statement that has thrown the preservationists into action.

The ruins of Wardenclyffe include the tower’s foundation and the large brick laboratory, designed by Tesla’s friend Stanford White, the celebrated architect.

“It’s hugely important to protect this site,” said Marc J. Seifer, author of “Wizard,” a Tesla biography. “He’s an icon. He stands for what humans are supposed to do — honor nature while using high technology to harness its powers.”

Recently, New York State echoed that judgment. The commissioner of historic preservation wrote Dr. Seifer on behalf of Gov. David A. Paterson to back Wardenclyffe’s preservation and listing in the National Register of Historic Places.

On Long Island, Tesla enthusiasts vow to obtain the land one way or another, saying that saving a symbol of Tesla’s accomplishments would help restore the visionary to his rightful place as an architect of the modern age.

“A lot of his work was way ahead of his time,” said Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center, a private group in Shoreham that is seeking to acquire Wardenclyffe.

Dr. Ljubo Vujovic, president of the Tesla Memorial Society of New York, said destroying the old lab “would be a terrible thing for the United States and the world. It’s a piece of history.”

Tesla, who lived from 1856 to 1943, made bitter enemies who dismissed some of his claims as exaggerated, helping tarnish his reputation in his lifetime. He was part recluse, part showman. He issued publicity photos (actually double exposures) showing him reading quietly in his laboratory amid deadly flashes.

Today, his work tends to be poorly known among scientists, though some call him an intuitive genius far ahead of his peers. Socially, his popularity has soared, elevating him to cult status.

Books and Web sites abound. Wikipedia says the inventor obtained at least 700 patents. YouTube has several Tesla videos, including one of a break-in at Wardenclyffe. A rock band calls itself Tesla. An electric car company backed by Google’s founders calls itself Tesla Motors.

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, sees the creator’s life as a cautionary tale. “It’s a sad, sad story,” Mr. Page told Fortune magazine last year. The inventor “couldn’t commercialize anything. He could barely fund his own research.”

Wardenclyffe epitomized that kind of visionary impracticality.

Tesla seized on the colossal project at the age of 44 while living in New York City. An impeccably dressed bon vivant of Serbian birth, he was widely celebrated for his inventions of motors and power distribution systems that used the form of electricity known as alternating current, which beat out direct current (and Thomas Edison) to electrify the world.

His patents made him a rich man, at least for a while. He lived at the Waldorf-Astoria and loved to hobnob with the famous at Delmonico’s and the Players Club.

Around 1900, as Tesla planned what would become Wardenclyffe, inventors around the world were racing for what was considered the next big thing — wireless communication. His own plan was to turn alternating current into electromagnetic waves that flashed from antennas to distant receivers. This is essentially what radio transmission is. The scale of his vision was gargantuan, however, eclipsing that of any rival.

Investors, given Tesla’s electrical achievements, paid heed. The biggest was J. Pierpont Morgan, a top financier. He sank $150,000 (today more than $3 million) into Tesla’s global wireless venture.

Work on the prototype tower began in mid-1901 on the North Shore of Long Island at a site Tesla named after a patron and the nearby cliffs. “The proposed plant at Wardenclyffe,” The New York Times reported, “will be the first of a number that the electrician proposes to establish in this and other countries.”

The shock wave hit Dec. 12, 1901. That day, Marconi succeeded in sending radio signals across the Atlantic, crushing Tesla’s hopes for pioneering glory.

Still, Wardenclyffe grew, with guards under strict orders to keep visitors away. The wooden tower rose 187 feet over a wide shaft that descended 120 feet to deeply anchor the antenna. Villagers told The Times that the ground beneath the tower was “honeycombed with subterranean passages.”

The nearby laboratory of red brick, with arched windows and a tall chimney, held tools, generators, a machine shop, electrical transformers, glass-blowing equipment, a library and an office.

But Morgan was disenchanted. He refused Tesla’s request for more money.

Desperate, the inventor pulled out what he considered his ace. The towers would transmit not only information around the globe, he wrote the financier in July 1903, but also electric power.

“I should not feel disposed,” Morgan replied coolly, “to make any further advances.”

Margaret Cheney, a Tesla biographer, observed that Tesla had seriously misjudged his wealthy patron, a man deeply committed to the profit motive. “The prospect of beaming electricity to penniless Zulus or Pygmies,” she wrote, must have left the financier less than enthusiastic.

It was then that Tesla, reeling financially and emotionally, fired up the tower for the first and last time. He eventually sold Wardenclyffe to satisfy $20,000 (today about $400,000) in bills at the Waldorf. In 1917, the new owners had the giant tower blown up and sold for scrap.

Today, Tesla’s exact plan for the site remains a mystery even as scientists agree on the impracticality of his overall vision. The tower could have succeeded in broadcasting information, but not power.

“He was an absolute genius,” Dennis Papadopoulos, a physicist at the University of Maryland, said in an interview. “He conceived of things in 1900 that it took us 50 or 60 years to understand. But he did not appreciate dissipation. You can’t start putting a lot of power” into an antenna and expect the energy to travel long distances without great diminution.

Wardenclyffe passed through many hands, ending with Agfa, which is based in Ridgefield Park, N.J. The imaging giant used it from 1969 to 1992, and then shuttered the property. Silver and cadmium, a serious poison, had contaminated the site, and the company says it spent some $5 million on studies and remediation. The cleanup ended in September, and the site was put up for sale in late February.

Real estate agents said they had shown Wardenclyffe to four or five prospective buyers.

Last month, Agfa opened the heavily wooded site to a reporter. “NO TRESPASSING,” warned a faded sign at a front gate, which was topped with barbed wire.

Tesla’s red brick building stood intact, an elegant wind vane atop its chimney. But Agfa had recently covered the big windows with plywood to deter vandals and intruders, who had stolen much of the building’s wiring for its copper.

The building’s dark interior was littered with beer cans and broken bottles. Flashlights revealed no trace of the original equipment, except for a surprise on the second floor. There in the darkness loomed four enormous tanks, each the size of a small car. Their sides were made of thick metal and their seams heavily riveted, like those of an old destroyer or battleship. The Agfa consultant leading the tour called them giant batteries.

“Look up there,” said the consultant, Ralph Passantino, signaling with his flashlight. “There’s a hatch up there. It was used to get into the tanks to service them.”

Tesla authorities appear to know little of the big tanks, making them potential clues to the inventor’s original plans.

After the tour, Christopher M. Santomassimo, Agfa’s general counsel, explained his company’s position: no donation of the site for a museum, and no action that would rule out the building’s destruction.

“Agfa is in a difficult economic position given what’s going on in the global marketplace,” he said. “It needs to maximize its potential recovery from the sale of that site.”

He added that the company would entertain “any reasonable offer,” including ones from groups interested in preserving Wardenclyffe because of its historical significance. “We’re simply not in a position,” he emphasized, “to donate the property outright.”

Ms. Alcorn of the Tesla Science Center, who has sought to stir interest in Wardenclyffe for more than a decade, seemed confident that a solution would be worked out. Suffolk County might buy the site, she said, or a campaign might raise the funds for its purchase, restoration and conversion into a science museum and education center. She said the local community was strongly backing the preservation idea.

“Once the sign went up, I started getting so many calls,” she remarked. “People said: ‘They’re not really going to sell it, are they? It’s got to be a museum, right?’ ”

Sitting at a reading table at the North Shore Public Library, where she works as a children’s librarian, Ms. Alcorn gestured across a map of Wardenclyffe to show how the abandoned site might be transformed with not only a Tesla museum but also a playground, a cafeteria and a bookshop.

“That’s critical,” she said.

Ms. Alcorn said the investigation and restoration of the old site promised to solve one of the big mysteries: the extent and nature of the tunnels said to honeycomb the area around the tower.

“I’d love to see if they really existed,” she said. “The stories abound, but not the proof.”

via Here Everything is Stlll Floating

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: May 2, 2009

WASHINGTON

How quaint.

The Republicans are concerned about checks and balances.

The specter of Specter helping the president have his way with Congress has actually made conservatives remember why they respected the Constitution in the first place. Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the shrinking Republican minority, fretted that there was a “threat to the country” and wondered if people would want the majority to rule “without a check or a balance.”

Senator John Thune worried that Democrats would run “roughshod” and argued that Americans wanted checks and balances. Senator Judd Gregg mourned that “there’s no checks and balances on this massive expansion on the size of government.”

Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to put the best face on it, noting, “This will make it easier for G.O.P. candidates in 2010 to ask to be elected to help restore some checks and balances in Washington.”

This is quite touching, given that the start of the 21st century will be remembered as the harrowing era when an arrogant Republican administration did its best to undermine checks and balances. (Maybe when your reign begins with Bush v. Gore, a Supreme heist that kissed off checks and balances, you feel no need to follow the founding fathers’ lead.)

After so many years of watching a White House upend laws, I now listen raptly when President Obama plays the constitutional law professor. He was asked at his news conference Wednesday night about the Republican fear that he will “ride roughshod over any opposition” and establish one-party rule.

“I’ve got Democrats who don’t agree with me on everything,” he said. “And that’s how it should be. Congress is a coequal branch of government.” You almost thought the professor in chief was going to ask the assembled students to please turn to page 317 in their Con Law book.

He went on to reassure Republicans that his vision of the presidency is very different from the imperial view held by the Boy Emperor and his regents.

“I do think that, to my Republican friends, I want them to realize that me reaching out to them has been genuine,” the president said, adding, “The majority will probably be determinative when it comes to resolving just hard-core differences that we can’t resolve, but there is a whole host of other areas where we can work together” and “make progress.”

The officials who actually represented a threat to the country while they were running the country are continuing to defend themselves. But they just end up further implicating themselves.

Condi Rice, who plans to go back to being a professor of political science at Stanford, got grilled by a student at a reception at a dorm there on Monday.

I’ve often wondered why students haven’t been more vocal in questioning the architects of the Iraq war and “legal” torture who landed plum spots at prestigious universities. Probably because it would have taken the draft, like the guillotine, to concentrate the mind. But finally, the young man at Stanford spoke up. Saying he had read that Ms. Rice authorized waterboarding, he asked her, “Is waterboarding torture?”

She replied: “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”

This was precisely Condi’s problem. She simply relayed. She never stood up against Cheney and Rummy for either what was morally right or what was smart in terms of our national security.

The student pressed again about whether waterboarding was torture.

“By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture,” Ms. Rice said, almost quoting Nixon’s logic: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

She also stressed that, “Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after Sept. 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans.”

Reyna Garcia, a Stanford sophomore who videotaped the exchange, said of Condi’s aria, “I wasn’t completely satisfied with her answers, to be honest,” adding that “President Obama went ahead and called it torture and she did everything she could not to do that.”

As Mr. Obama said in his news conference, it is in moments of crisis that a country must cleave to its principles. Asserting that “waterboarding violates our ideals,” he said he had been struck by an article describing how Churchill would not torture prisoners even when “London was being bombed to smithereens.”

“And the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts and over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people,” he said. “It corrodes the character of a country.”

Class dismissed.

For years, beginning in the early 1970s, Mr. Jones photographed the drop-outs of Gate 5, an alternative houseboat community in Sausalito.

By WILLIAM GRIMES
NY Times Published: March 23, 2009

Pirkle Jones, whose images of migrant farm workers, threatened California towns and valleys and the Black Panthers at the peak of their power made him one of the most admired photographers of his generation, died on March 15 in San Rafael, Calif. He was 95 and lived in Mill Valley, Calif.

The death was confirmed by Jennifer McFarland, the director of the Pirkle Jones Foundation.

Mr. Jones, a disciple of Ansel Adams, brought a sensitivity to visual texture and a sense of historic urgency to subjects as varied as the California landscape, the San Francisco skyline and a countercultural houseboat community in Sausalito. Perhaps his most remarkable photographs, taken in the tumultuous year 1968, captured the leaders of the Black Panther Party as they would have liked to be seen: bold revolutionaries poised to overturn the white power structure.

“He was a man of huge social conscience, and he brought that to the work,” said Karen Sinsheimer, the curator of photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which gave Mr. Jones his first retrospective exhibition in 2001. “But he also made absolutely beautiful prints, just perfect, with crisp detail and a vast tonal range in black and white.”

Adams, his mentor, who died in 1984, once paid him a high compliment. “His photography is not flamboyant, does not depend upon the superficial excitements,” Adams said. “His pictures will live with you, and with the world, as long as there are people to observe and appreciate.”

Mr. Jones was born in Shreveport, La., and bought his first camera, a Kodak Brownie, when he was 17. He began exhibiting his work at camera clubs in the 1930s.

In 1941, when he was employed at a shoe factory in Lima, Ohio, he enlisted in the Army and served in the Pacific theater. He passed through San Francisco on the way out and returned after the war to enroll in the new photography department at the California School of Fine Arts, headed by Adams.

From 1947 to 1953 he worked as an assistant and printmaker to Adams, who brought him into an artistic circle that included Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange and Minor White. He also met and married Ruth-Marion Baruch, a fellow photography student and poet, who became a lifelong collaborator. She died in 1997.

In 1956 Ms. Lange asked Mr. Jones to help her document the Berryessa Valley, soon to disappear underwater with the completion of the Monticello Dam. Their photo essay, “The Death of a Valley,” recorded the last year of life in the valley’s towns and farms and, published as a single issue of Aperture in 1960, became a classic of photojournalism. Mr. Jones later called the collaboration “one of the most meaningful photographic experiences of my professional life.”

He went on to collaborate with Adams on a photo essay on the building of the Paul Masson Mountain Winery. In 1961 he and his wife spent time in Walnut Grove, Calif., to create the portrait of a dying town.

“I’ve always thought of my career as a bridge between the classic photography of Ansel Adams and the documentary work of Dorothea Lange,” he told Art & Antiques last year.

In 1968 Ms. Baruch became a friend of Kathleen Cleaver, the wife of the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, through their work with the Peace and Freedom Party. From July to October 1968, Mr. Jones and Ms. Baruch photographed Black Panthers in the Bay Area with the stated goal of promoting a better understanding of the party.

The moment was fraught. Huey P. Newton, the party’s minister of defense, was on trial on a charge of murder in the death of a police officer, and relations between the Panthers and the police threatened to become open warfare. (Newton was convicted of manslaughter.) Mr. Jones’s photographs of three Panthers standing on courthouse steps holding a “Free Huey” banner and of male and female Panthers posing with guns became emblematic images of the era.

An exhibition of the Panther photographs at the De Young Museum in San Francisco drew more than 100,000 visitors. The photographs were published in book form as “Black Panthers,” with an introduction by Ms. Cleaver.

Mr. Jones turned to more peaceful subject matter. For years, beginning in the early 1970s, he photographed the drop-outs of Gate 5, an alternative houseboat community in Sausalito that he nearly joined. In the final decades of his life, he concentrated on the landscape around his glass-and-redwood house in Mill Valley.

It was not because of failure of nerve. Only once, he told Art & Antiques, had he ever stepped back from taking a picture.

“In the ’70s, I saw a fortuneteller at a flea market,” he recalled. “She said that she’d put a curse on me for the rest of my life if I took her picture. So I didn’t

Brand lives on Mirene, a tugboat moored in Sausalito, on the San Francisco Bay.

By EDWARD LEWINE
NY Times Published: April 15, 2009

Deceased 1960s pal he’d like to see again: Abbie Hoffman. He was brilliant and a card and dangerous to know and delightful in every way.

His best line: In 1966 I had buttons made with the paranoid-sounding slogan, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” Well, we got the photos from NASA in 1969.

Moving house: The Mirene is a working, 64-foot-long tugboat built in 1912. We take the boat out cruising from time to time. We turned the wheelhouse and skipper’s cabin into our bedroom, with two rooms and a bath below.

Why a boat: The main thing is our houseboat community here, which is exceptionally congenial. The boat is inexpensive to live on, and you have no problem with earthquakes, wildfires or rising sea levels due to global warming.

Green living: I didn’t choose the boat because it’s green, but it is. It doesn’t take much to heat 450 square feet. Cooling is no issue on the water. We have solar panels and a demand water heater and use biodiesel fuel when we cruise.

Morning routine: Get up at 6:30 or 7:00 a.m. The trip from the bedroom involves going down a ladder outside. I breakfast in the galley and then go off to work.

Job description: I design stuff; I start stuff; I found stuff. On the passport I put “writer.”

Bad trip: That was my first trip. I had 400 micrograms of LSD under quite clinical circumstances at a psychological research institute in Menlo Park, Calif. It was in a white room with therapists sitting around.

Good trip: In 1963 or ’64 I showed up at the door of Ken Kesey, the novelist and LSD evangelist. I was involved in Kesey’s Acid Tests, which were happenings where LSD made its way around and everyone was there to entertain each other.

Acid Test memento: I have my Acid Test graduation diploma. The conceit was, “Can you pass the acid test?” Mine was signed by Neal Cassady, who inspired Kesey and was the model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

On the wagon: Since 1969 I haven’t used psychedelics. I realized I’d seen all I needed to see.

Drug of choice: I’m stoned right now on two cups of coffee. I’m 70, and the easiest way to young-up your mind is to drink caffeine.

Worst thing about the 1960s: Let’s see. I made the mistake of being married during the sexual revolution. Nice marriage; inopportune timing.

Pets: We had cats, but we had to put them down. That was horrifying, and we replaced them with a life-size stuffed tiger.

Home office: I work in a landlocked fishing boat named the Mary Heartline, which sits about 100 yards from the tugboat in a parking lot. It looks like a Victorian cottage.

Item you need on a tugboat: You’ll always be glad that someone has stolen a shopping cart, so you can get stuff from your car to your boat.

Controversial stand: That technology can be green. The book I just finished, “Whole Earth Discipline,” has chapters on why nuclear is green, cities are green, genetic engineering is green. The romantic nature-is-perfect approach is just horse exhaust.

Back to the WELL: I founded the WELL, a pioneering online community, in 1985, with Larry Brilliant and some others. The name is short for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link. I have the American Heritage Dictionary I used to find the name.

Exercise routine: I hike Mount Tamalpais.

Evening routine: My wife, Ryan Phelan, and I tend to go to restaurants or throw together a dinner around 9 p.m. I’ll read a novel or a comic. We’ll take a bath together and be in bed by 11:30.

Favorite gadget: I have this memo-keeping device that must be 75 years old. It’s from the house I grew up in in Illinois. It uses rolls of adding-machine paper — which you can still get — and you write on it and tear the paper off.

Obsession: Getting rid of alien, invasive plants. I bear down on this form of pampas grass that comes from South America and has no business in California.

Art collection: We don’t have room for much. We do have a 1.5-inch-long enamel drawing of the Mirene under fireworks in the bay.

What he drives: A Land Rover LR2. As soon as there’s a good hybrid S.U.V., we’ll get one. We need a mountain vehicle.

Favorite item in boat: I have the table at which Otis Redding reportedly wrote “Dock of the Bay.” An antiques dealer in Sausalito obtained it. Everyone likes to believe the legend.

Native American memorabilia: I used to be a member of the Native American Church. I have my old peyote-ritual gear: the feather box, eagle-bone whistle and tortoise-shell rattle. That’s for use with peyote, a spineless cactus that gives you an eight-hour trip.

Favorite vacation: We got a weekend place on the Petaluma River. It is a dead dairy farm, and that is where we are every weekend.

Always in fridge: Root beer and Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. I love root-beer floats.

Next big purchase: Hearing aids. That is going to be $2,000 or more.

At age 5, he wanted to be: A veterinarian. As an early teenager I wanted to fight forest fires.

Current project: With the Long Now Foundation, I am helping to build a 10,000-year clock inside a mountain in Nevada. We are trying to get people to think long-term, because civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

This Long Century #10
By Ricky Swallow

— The first songs I knew, got into, remembered without trying were all culled from the few audio cassettes my father owned that resided between the wheelhouse of his fishing boat, The Marie Glen Valena, and the glove compartment of our Ford Falcon. The combination of a moving vehicle and the right (frequently wrong) song was like extra company, the neutral family member no one disagreed with. All those albums: Tom Waits, The Heart of Saturday Night; The Eagles Greatest Hits; AC/DC’s Back in Black and Dire Straits, Love Over Gold, are time machines for me, with individual songs containing ‘adult’ emotions and narratives that I’ve only just caught up with. My brothers and I knew from The Eagles, for example, that “city girls just seem to find out early, how to open doors with just a smile” long before we had any real reference for the words city or girls.

My grandparents only listened to opera and classical music, and generally only in the afternoons when they rested or in the car when running errands. I’d be talking with my brother, asking questions, and my grandfather would say, “Ricky, do you like music? You like good music right?” and I’d say, “Yeah, I like music,” and he’d get this stupid grin and say “Well shut up then!” This exchange happened every other day.

The morning I received the news that he’d died, I just went back to bed broken and played Simon Joyner’s Songs for the New Year over and over. It seemed like the only record I owned that was melancholy enough to keep me company, keep me as miserable as I wanted to be, and help me get out all the water before I had to face anyone. Listening now it seems more optimistic lyrically – the words just happen to be moored to music that keeps them down. It’s as if the recording itself, after failing to rise, has conceded to staying in bed for the day.

I’d like to lie down on the ocean
And clear the city from my lungs
Sometimes it rains while I’m drifting
But then I’m dried off by the sun

When something’s done you need a song. When I worked for my brother Lobster fishing, he would blast the music across the deck from the wheelhouse only after the last pots had been collected/baited and returned to the sea, and it was time to stream home. By that time the tapes were long gone and it was all radio. I’d hose down the deck mats and stack all the gear away neatly at breakneck speed for the reward of extracting myself out of my oilskins and boots, so I could sit up in the wheelhouse with the hum of the engine and radio hits tempered by the summer glare and the knowledge that the rest of the day was mine to burn. So I loved the radio, forgave the obnoxious morning banter between songs, allowed it to soothe the morning’s exhaustion and fill the remote silence in the cabin between Pierre and I. One morning the song Zombie by The Cranberries came on, the volume escalating, and I turned back from the deck to see my brother at the wheel banging his head back and forth out of time…the hilarious movements of a reformed metal head adrift with responsibility.

What’s in your head, in your head?
Zombie, zombie, zombie

I’m not even sure if it’s okay to listen to the Arcade Fire as a contemporary adult, but my wife started this tradition years back – of washing them through our speakers to mark the end of a struggle with a particular painting, or celebrate the completion of a group of work for an exhibition. Occasionally the ritual is applied to my studio accomplishments also, and yes, sometimes there is dancing. Of late The Fire has been replaced with Phoenix’s new album, in an attempt to bring summer nearer. But generally anything with an overtly triumphant tone, an uncomfortable uplifting feeling works.

People say that your dreams
are the only things that save ya.
Come on baby in our dreams,
we can live on misbehaviour.

Back when I was reaching out, feeling out the prospect of this perfectly serviceable friendship turning into something more romantic, I reverted back to the mix tape (actually a mix cd) as messenger. In a bold move I threw everything into that pot, everything short of ‘I just called to say….’ After all I didn’t write the songs and couldn’t be held accountable for them giving the wrong impression were the message not reciprocated. Winter by the Rolling Stones from the album Goat’s Head Soup was the first track on the compilation, and it was also repeated at the end of the mix. Call it maximum glitch, or the Tonight’s the Night approach*. At the time every line seemed an appropriate reconstitution of my own desires. Enduring winter in London was killing me. There’s a real longing in Jagger’s delivery that comes from the exhaustion of being without – waiting for the seasonal obstacle to pass in anticipation of a new cycle, a new someone to occur. I could never decide if the words were ‘sometimes I wanna wrap my cord around you’ or ‘coat around you’ (I’m now pretty sure it’s coat); in any case ‘sometimes I wanna head to California, sometimes I wanna keep you warm, warm, warm’ follows, the point being you had to be right beside someone in order to provide that kind of warmth. I never owned up to purposefully repeating the song, dodging the subject until the magic of the mix had taken hold and the confession could become part of a more permanent (LA) story.

And I hope it’s sure gonna be a long hot summer,
and a lot of love will be burning bright.

Some records arrive at the right moment both personally and collectively. At the time of writing I’ve been searching for some resolution to seemingly irreconcilable conflicts within my family, and the whole time Bill Callahan’s latest album Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle has been guiding me through. A prisoner of my car stereo, I return to my car, turn the ignition over and the album is automatically there, “you again” I think. Calm and direct, it has managed to keep me floating above the weirdness, perhaps because the album seems to be a personal evaluation/evolution of sorts, Callahan singing back to himself from a distance, leaving me thinking in the space between his well chosen words. I’ve also been reading Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Rousseau, and finding parallels with Callahan’s guarded and clever message – a message that’s always seemed so independent from the necessity of peers and the charms of conventional communication. It asks as many questions as it makes statements and in doing so activates the listener as participant, as accessory to the production. For me it holds a unique currency within the Smog archive. There’s something more inclusive in the tone this time around, a frankness to the lyrics promoting a simple wisdom without leaning too heavily on irony to remain intact. The personal played plural.

I used to be darker, then I got lighter,
then I got dark again

* Alternate versions of the song Tonight’s the Night, open and end Neil Young’s album of the same title released in 1975.

Ricky Swallow
Los Angeles, April 2009
—

Ricky Swallow is an Australian born artist living and working in Los Angeles. His detailed sculptures and installations explore the inexorable passage of time, and the enduring nature of objects. Swallow represented Australia in the 2005 Venice Biennale, and has recently participated in exhibitions at PS1, New York, The Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, Yokohama Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

ricky swallow

this long century

“I never wanted to be part of planet Earth,” Sun Ra once said, “And I did everything not to be part of it.” This was true. The one thing he did do that kept him here, till his death in 1993, was make transcendent music.

By HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: April 30, 2009

PHILADELPHIA — The jazz musician Sun Ra, ambassador from the Airy Kingdom World Tomorrow, creator of Enterplanetary Solar Exploding Music, and founder of the Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra, is a hero of mine.

To my ears he was not only a genius composer, keyboardist and bandleader, but also constantly surprising. One minute he’s playing elevator schmaltz; then he’s making you float on air; then he’s making you deaf. I love that he was a sharp dresser, sort of kingly, sort of queenly, in faux leopard-skin capes and miner’s hats with lights.

I also admire him for transcending existential categories. He insisted he hadn’t been born, but always existed, coming to Earth from outer space, specifically the planet Saturn. Like many immigrants, he was self-invented, but radically so. He rejected being black or white or American or even human. He opted for extraterrestrial and wore his otherness like a crown.

You’ll find evidence for all of this in “Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68,” a small, piquant exhibition of art, writing and ephemera related to his life at the Institute of Contemporary Art here.

Although he kept the precise facts of his early life under wraps, documents show that he was beamed down to Birmingham, Ala., in 1914 as Herman Poole Blount, affectionately known as Sonny. In 1952 he changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, Ra being the ancient Egyptian solar god. And as a performer he became Sun Ra.

He had at least as many talents as monikers. In addition to being a musician, he was a poet, philosopher, painter, graphic designer, street lecturer, activist and entrepreneur, as well as a numerologist and mystic. He worked out the fate of the universe through interpretive readings of the Bible, the Koran and Flash Gordon comic books, concluding that “the only way this world can be saved from being completely destroyed is through music.”

With that in mind, he composed and played without cease for 60 years, first in Birmingham, then in Chicago and New York, and finally in Philadelphia, where he lived until just before his death in 1993.

He also recorded, packaged and tried to sell his music, which, because it was unconventional, wasn’t easy to do. It is the practical side of his career that this exhibition of album jacket designs, posters, news releases and socio-spiritual manifestos, most of them from his formative years in Chicago, focuses on.

Organized self-promotion was not one of his skills. He was too reserved and too much an outsider. Shy and studious as a youth, he got by on his prodigious keyboard talent. But a visionary experience he claimed to have had gives an idea of his sense of apartness.

“My whole body changed into something else,” he reported many years after. “I could see through myself, I wasn’t in human form.” He said he was taken on an intergalactic trip by creatures with “one little antenna on each ear,” who told him to leave school because “the world was going into complete chaos.”

It’s always a little hard to tell if Sun Ra was being serious or not, but a sense of alienation seemed to be part of his makeup. In Chicago, where he went to find work after World War II, he met the ideal business partner in Alton Abraham, a teenager with spiritual interests similar to his own — both were members of an occult, utopian black separatist secret society — but with the organizational and promotional abilities he lacked.

Partly because both men were proponents of black self-sufficiency, do-it-yourself was their business style. This meant they could entirely monitor their product. Gradually they shaped the image of the musician who would become Sun Ra, and of the band he would lead, first called 8 Rays of Jazz, then the Arkestra. (The respelling may be based on the way “orchestra” was pronounced in Alabama; it also incorporates the name Ra written forward and backward.)

It was at this point, in the early 1950s, that a Sun Ra “look” for the band started to come into focus: a mystical-historical-comical blend of science fiction, Egyptology, Southern mummery, Freemasonry, nightclub theatrics (costumed acts were big at the time) and African masquerade, with rakishly flipped-brim Robin Hood caps — later beanies with propellers — thrown in.

To maintain complete control over the increasingly experimental music, Sun Ra and Mr. Abraham created their own label. They called it El Saturn Records and, using local black-owned businesses as a resource, they oversaw every aspect of album production, from recording, to pressing disks, to packaging and sales.

They paid close attention to the appearance of the product, ensuring that it looked handmade and offbeat. Sun Ra created some of the early record jackets himself. His specialty was fancy lettering with abstract flourishes, as seen in the colored pencil drawing of his name, as large as a Turkish emperor’s tugra, on the cover of “Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow.”

A few other artists — LeRoy Butler, James Bryant and one who signed himself Aye — later contributed more graphically dynamic images. But most of the designs were by Claude Dangerfield, a self-taught painter and a high school friend of several Arkestra musicians.

He was responsible for the art on many of the albums made in Chicago and later in New York — “Super-Sonic Jazz,” “We Travel the Spaceways,” “Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra Visits Planet Earth.” And it was his work that most consistently embodied the Arkestra’s signature space-age theme.

The theme had wide currency in cold war America, from doomsday Hollywood films to pop songs like “The Purple People Eater.” But the fantasy of traveling into outer-space blackness to find other, friendlier future worlds, had a specific pertinence to black nationalist thinking at the time. (When Sun Ra said, “Space is the place,” certain people knew where that place was.) In the 1990s this trend was retrospectively given the name Afro-Futurism, and Mr. Dangerfield’s art, like Sun Ra’s persona, embodies it.

There’s quite a bit of Mr. Dangerfield in the exhibition, which was originally organized by John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terri Kapsalis for the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. The work encompasses not only his original jacket designs, but also hand-painted color separations and some of the plates used for the first printings. Seen in the light of the digital present, they are time-worn artifacts, but together they give a vivid sense of the grass-roots, cottage-industry enterprise that El Saturn Records was.

Sun Ra was pretty grass roots too. In the Chicago years he was still a local phenomenon, performing mostly in black clubs on the South Side. Even when he moved to New York City in 1965, his audience didn’t change much at first. His mercurial shifts, from bebop to improvisation to Disney film tunes, with Latino and African riffs folded in, left earthlings confused. And when the Arkestra stood on a stage and instrumentally screamed at listeners, people headed for the door.

Nor was Sun Ra himself always easy to take. Although a certain adorableness eventually accrued to him, he could be heroically furious in the pre-Black Power Chicago years, and speak with a prophet’s wrathful, rebuking voice. It comes through loud and clear in five typed broadsheets on view in the show.

He used them as scripts for street lectures, and in them highly conflicted racial polemics take the form of slicing, aggressive wordplay that spares no one’s feelings, white or black. He was speaking from one step beyond all that. “I never wanted to be part of planet Earth,” he once said, “And I did everything not to be part of it.” This was true.

The one thing he did that kept him here was make transcendent music. You get a taste of it in a short 1968 film by Edward English called “Spaceways,” which plays in one of the galleries. The film fleetingly places Sun Ra in the context of the civil rights and Black Power movements, which is right. But the best, most moving part is a long sequence in which the Arkestra is heard rehearsing for a Carnegie Hall concert.

The band — based in Philadelphia and still active today — is large here, maybe two dozen men; the percussion section is huge. Basically what we hear is a grand chorale of drums, chimes, bells and everything else. The Arkestra has become a celestial biofeedback machine, a thundering angel band, and Sun Ra, crowned, robed and serene on keyboard, is at its center, as majestic as an aging Rembrandt.

As the rhythms build, level out and build again, you feel they could go on forever. And you wish they would until, like a space ship, mountain-huge and transparent as air, they lift off.

“Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68” continues through Aug. 2 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia; (212) 898-7108, icaphila.org.

via an ambitious project collapsing

Exclamation marks used to be frowned upon. Now look what’s happened! We use them all the time! Hurrah!!! But what is it about the age of email that gets people so over-excited?

Stuart Jeffries
The Guardian, Wednesday 29 April 2009

There is a town of 1,471 happy souls in Quebec called Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!. The second “Ha!”, amazingly, is part of the town’s name, not my commentary on the first “Ha!”. Unlike, for example, the Devon town of Westward Ho! Ho! There, the second “Ho!” is mine. Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! is the only town in the world whose name has two exclamation marks. It will remain so until Wolverhampton is renamed Wolverhampton!! to highlight its funky new Black Country vibe, which, all things considered, seems unlikely.

Or maybe I’m wrong. After all, exclamation marks – those forms of punctuation derided by the funless and fastidious – are making a comeback, thanks to an internet renaissance that is bleeding over into every form of written communication. Once it was bad form to end a paragraph with an exclamation mark. Now it’s borderline obligatory. Once it was enough to put a sign on your door: “Back in five minutes.” Now, without the flourish of an exclamation mark, that sign lacks verve or at least zeitgeisty voguishness. Go figure!

More of that later. First, why did Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! get its enviable name? The Commission de Toponymie de Québec says that Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! is so named because in olden times “le haha” in French meant an impasse, and that there was just such an unexpected obstacle blocking a waterway near the site of the future town. Eighteenth- and 19th-century canoeists paddling down the local river came across such a haha, then had to get out of their canoes and take a vexing 80km detour. Hence the town’s name.

But if the commission’s explanation is right, then surely the town should have been called Saint-Louis-du-Haha. But it isn’t. What happened? Someone went potty with the exclamation marks, throwing them around with gay abandon!!! The two exclamation marks serve as reminders of those happy days when we weren’t so parsimonious with what Lynne Truss, in her book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, calls, “a screamer, a gasper, a startler or (sorry) a dog’s cock”. That was her “sorry” not mine.

Novelists (at least male ones) are apt to be mean-spirited about dog’s cocks. “Cut out all those exclamation marks,” wrote F Scott Fitzgerald. “An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.” It isn’t actually. When one German starts a letter to another with “Lieber Franz!” they are merely obeying cultural norms, not laughing at their own jokes. Nor is chess notation, which teems with exclamation marks, especially funny. No matter. Elmore Leonard wrote of exclamation marks: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” Which means, on average, an exclamation mark every book and a half. In the ninth book of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Eric, one of the characters insists that “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.” In Maskerade, the 18th in the series, another character remarks: “And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.”

There are lots of people these days with figurative underpants on their heads. That’s because in the internet age, the exclamation mark is having a renaissance. In a recent book, Send: The Essential guide to Email for Office and Home, David Shipley and Will Schwalbe make a defence of exclamation marks. They write, for instance, “‘I’ll see you at the conference’ is a simple statement of fact. ‘I’ll see you at the conference!’ lets your fellow conferee know that you’re excited and pleased about the event … ‘Thanks!!!!’”, they contend, “is way friendlier than ‘Thanks’.”

Shipley is comment editor of the New York Times, and Schwalbe, editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books. Those of you thinking that grown men with serious jobs should be above such phrases as “way friendlier” should realise that in the 21st century, adult appropriation of infantilisms is de rigueur, innit? Today, no one reads or cares about Fowler’s Modern English Usage, in which it is maintained: “Except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.”

Shipley and Schwalbe argue that in the internet age, a dash of sensation is just what is needed. “Email is without affect,” they write. “It has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be.” Shipley and Schwalbe are merely offering a post-hoc justification of what already happens online. OMG!!! We like totally used exclamation marks before Shipley and Schalbe said it was OK!!!

Hold on a second. Why should email in particular be without affect? Weren’t earlier forms of written correspondence – telegrams, say, or letters – equally so? There must be something else going on. Arguably, users of each form develop styles to suit the medium. Telegrams, for instance, were likely to be terse, if only for financial reasons. Thus, one day Victor Hugo sent a telegram to his publisher. He wanted to know how his new book was doing. His telegram read: “?”; the publisher’s reply: “!”. The exclamation mark, you see, meant Hugo’s book was doing well. The publisher could have deployed sentences of Proustian length to explain the novel’s success among the target demographic of 18- to 35-year-old Parisians, but he saved a few centimes by cutting to the chase.

It is important to realise that advances in technology (if that’s what they are) affect how we write. And how we write includes how often we deploy the beloved gasper. Before the 1970s, few manual typewriters were equipped with an exclamation mark key. Instead, if you wanted to express your unbridled joy at – ooh, I don’t know – the budding loveliness of an early spring morning and gild the lily of your purple prose with an upbeat startler, you would have to type a full stop, then back space, push the shift key and type an apostrophe. Which is enough to take the joie de vivre out of anyone’s literary style. In the springs following the advent of the manual typewriter’s exclamation marks, typed paeans to seasonal budding loveliness teemed with exclamation marks. Or at least I hypothesise that they did. I wasn’t paying attention at the time.

But technological change is not the only reason for variations in the use of exclamations. Carol Waseleski’s unexpectedly diverting paper, Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication, found that women used more exclamation marks than men. But why was this? Are women more excitable? Some theorists (notably D Rubin and K Greene in their paper Gender-Typical Style in Written Language) had argued that the exclamation mark was often a sign of excitability, and that “a high frequency of exclamation points can be regarded as sort of an orthographic intensifier signalling ‘I really mean this!’” They also argued that this might convey the writer’s lack of stature; that, in fact, a confident person (read: man) could “affirm their views by simply asserting them”. Perhaps then the use of multiple exclamation marks is not simply a sign that someone is wearing underpants on their head, but of deeply unmasculine insecurity about expressing one’s thoughts. Or maybe that’s just my theory!

Waseleski found otherwise. She concluded that exclamation marks were not just marks of excitability but of friendliness, and suggested that one reason women use them more than men is because they were, as a gender, less likely to be socially inept, funless egotists – which isn’t quite how she put it. Instead, she wrote: “The results point to the need to reconsider the negative labels that have often been associated with female communication styles, and to investigate [their use] as they relate to email and other forms of computer-mediated communication.”

Let’s have a go. Why are exclamation marks so big in the internet age? “I haven’t noticed any great explosion of exclamation marks recently,” says Truss, “but I do think people are generally trying to get expression into email – and exclamation marks are good for getting attention.” One possibility is that one can read and send so much stuff that it becomes a less self-conscious medium. Hence those slackers who write everything in lower case, and those who lock their shift keys to FRANKLY ANNOYING EFFECT. Hence, too, perhaps, a free-and-easy way with exclamation marks.

But that’s simplistic: there are thousands of emailers who are all-too-conscious – for instance, those who write for that harsh taskmaster, posterity, and weigh every orthographic mark with unwonted care.

We are all, as Marvin Gaye noted, sensitive people with such a lot to give – and some people give (unwittingly) too much of themselves in email correspondence and that gets on the nerves of tight-arse limeys such as me. But the opposite applies: sometimes email correspondents seem to be expressing friendliness when they are really not. Consider email kisses from strangers (as I did in an article). Were all those women who concluded their angry letters complaining about my articles with kisses really coming on to me? Sadly not. Instead, they were bending the knee to a cultural norm of email correspondence whereby friendliness is obligatory. I thought these women were rushing things; in reality they were treating me the same as they would any other correspondent. It’s very confusing.

Shipley and Schwalbe are right when they say a sentence without exclamation marks is less friendly than one with at least two. When, though, did friendliness become the arbiter of orthographic etiquette? There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness. In this post-literal time, exclamation marks become signs of sarcasm as witty correspondents rebel against their overuse. Hence: “I loved your last email! OMG did I LOVE it!!!!!!” The point is they didn’t. They were being IRONIC.

The origin of the exclamation mark is uncertain. The first one appeared in print around 1400. The exclamation mark, it has been argued, derives from the Latin Io (which means joy). One day (we hypothesise) somebody wrote a joyful upbeat sentence and to clinch that sense, they concluded it by putting the second letter of Io under the first.

How lovely it would be if we could recapture that original, pre-ironic wonder that made writers slip the o under the I! And how lovely it would be if we named our towns with transforming marks of wonder just as some French Canadians did all those years ago. Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! It just raises your spirits to read that lovely name, doesn’t it? No? Well, it raises mine!

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 30, 2009

The 2008 election ended the reign of junk science in our nation’s capital, and the chances of meaningful action on climate change, probably through a cap-and-trade system on emissions, have risen sharply.

But the opponents of action claim that limiting emissions would have devastating effects on the U.S. economy. So it’s important to understand that just as denials that climate change is happening are junk science, predictions of economic disaster if we try to do anything about climate change are junk economics.

Yes, limiting emissions would have its costs. As a card-carrying economist, I cringe when “green economy” enthusiasts insist that protecting the environment would be all gain, no pain.

But the best available estimates suggest that the costs of an emissions-limitation program would be modest, as long as it’s implemented gradually. And committing ourselves now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump.

Let’s talk first about those costs.

A cap-and-trade system would raise the price of anything that, directly or indirectly, leads to the burning of fossil fuels. Electricity, in particular, would become more expensive, since so much generation takes place in coal-fired plants.

Electric utilities could reduce their need to purchase permits by limiting their emissions of carbon dioxide — and the whole point of cap-and-trade is, of course, to give them an incentive to do just that. But the steps they would take to limit emissions, such as shifting to other energy sources or capturing and sequestering much of the carbon dioxide they emit, would without question raise their costs.

If emission permits were auctioned off — as they should be — the revenue thus raised could be used to give consumers rebates or reduce other taxes, partially offsetting the higher prices. But the offset wouldn’t be complete. Consumers would end up poorer than they would have been without a climate-change policy.

But how much poorer? Not much, say careful researchers, like those at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even with stringent limits, says the M.I.T. group, Americans would consume only 2 percent less in 2050 than they would have in the absence of emission limits. That would still leave room for a large rise in the standard of living, shaving only one-twentieth of a percentage point off the average annual growth rate.

To be sure, there are many who insist that the costs would be much higher. Strange to say, however, such assertions nearly always come from people who claim to believe that free-market economies are wonderfully flexible and innovative, that they can easily transcend any constraints imposed by the world’s limited resources of crude oil, arable land or fresh water.

So why don’t they think the economy can cope with limits on greenhouse gas emissions? Under cap-and-trade, emission rights would just be another scarce resource, no different in economic terms from the supply of arable land.

Needless to say, people like Newt Gingrich, who says that cap-and-trade would “punish the American people,” aren’t thinking that way. They’re just thinking “capitalism good, government bad.” But if you really believe in the magic of the marketplace, you should also believe that the economy can handle emission limits just fine.

So we can afford a strong climate change policy. And committing ourselves to such a policy might actually help us in our current economic predicament.

Right now, the biggest problem facing our economy is plunging business investment. Businesses see no reason to invest, since they’re awash in excess capacity, thanks to the housing bust and weak consumer demand.

But suppose that Congress were to mandate gradually tightening emission limits, starting two or three years from now. This would have no immediate effect on prices. It would, however, create major incentives for new investment — investment in low-emission power plants, in energy-efficient factories and more.

To put it another way, a commitment to greenhouse gas reduction would, in the short-to-medium run, have the same economic effects as a major technological innovation: It would give businesses a reason to invest in new equipment and facilities even in the face of excess capacity. And given the current state of the economy, that’s just what the doctor ordered.

This short-run economic boost isn’t the main reason to move on climate-change policy. The important thing is that the planet is in danger, and the longer we wait the worse it gets. But it is an extra reason to move quickly.

So can we afford to save the planet? Yes, we can. And now would be a very good time to get started.

EVAN HOLLOWAY
Untitled, 2009

JASON MEADOWS
Gunslinger, 2008

JASON MEADOWS
Soul Singer, 2008

April 27 – May 8 2009

Marc Foxx

Altered Postcard 13: Brooklyn Museum, Yellow, 1985
oil on postcard
3.5 x 5.5 inches
8.9 x 14 cm

closes May 2 at David Kordansky