May 2 – June 20, 2009
Opening: Friday, May 1, 6 – 9 pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11 am – 6 pm
Zimmerstr. 88-89 10117 Berlin
April 19th, 2009By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: April 18, 2009
BERKELEY, Calif.
The first thing I wanted to do in the Bay Area was go out to Skywalker Ranch and ask George Lucas about a disturbing conversation we’d had at an Obama inaugural party in Washington.
Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” had told me that I had gotten Dick Cheney completely wrong, that Cheney was no Darth Vader. I felt awful. Had I been too hard on Vice?
Lucas explained politely as I listened contritely. Anakin Skywalker is a promising young man who is turned to the dark side by an older politician and becomes Darth Vader. “George Bush is Darth Vader,” he said. “Cheney is the emperor.”
I was relieved. In “Star Wars” terms, Dick Cheney was more evil than Darth Vader. I hadn’t been hard enough on Vice!
Lucas was on his way to Europe and didn’t have time to elaborate in person. But he sent me this message confirming our conversation: “You know, Darth Vader is really a kid from the desert planet near Crawford, and the true evil of the universe is the emperor who pulls all the strings.”
Sated, I went over to talk to the other celestial celebrity in San Francisco who inspires cultlike devotion for what she does with green cooking rather than blue screens: Alice Waters, who has created her own mythical empire of healthy food with her cookbooks, edible gardens in public schools and renowned Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse.
Waters has been much in the news lately as the fairy godmother of the White House organic vegetable garden, an idea she has been pushing since 1993. Instead, Bill Clinton installed a seven-seat hot tub on the South Lawn. Though he loved to eat, Bill was more a consumer of fast food than slow food, as Waters calls her movement to persuade Americans to sup on simple, locally grown foods free of pesticides and herbicides.
The 64-year-old Waters, who got her taste for revolutions in the ‘60s in school at Berkeley with the antiwar and women’s movements, wears a gold peace sign on a necklace. But with her radiant skin and her mesmerizing, hesitating arias about the sensual pleasures of food, she seems more like a ‘30s movie actress than a graying hippie. (I’m not surprised to find out she loves Turner Classic Movies and Hollywood’s vintage hotel, Chateau Marmont, that she named her restaurant after a character in Marcel Pagnol’s 1930s trilogy of movies, and that she thinks of her restaurant as theater.)
She wasn’t invited to the opening of the White House garden, and she understands why the Obamas would want “to keep a kind of distance from me and from that whole celebrity chef” aura. Barack Obama got upset during the campaign that he was painted as a finicky elitist after he complained about the price of arugula at Whole Foods.
She’s well aware of the criticism leveled at her in blogs for condescension and food snobbery. In a post on Friday called “Alice in Wonderland,” National Review stirred the pot against her: “The truth is, organic food is an expensive luxury item, something bought by those who have the resources.”
She says wryly: “I’m just put into that arugulance place. I own a fancy restaurant. I own an expensive restaurant. I never thought of it as fancy. People don’t know we’re supporting 85 farms and ranches and all of that.
“And so my first thing I say, it’s going to cost more and I want to pay for my food. I go to the farmers’ market; it makes me feel like I’m making a donation.”
Since the Obamas haven’t taken her up on her offer of a “kitchen cabinet,” she wants to do her first TV show called “The Green Kitchen.” She can do a soliloquy on the “discernment” of choosing the most ambrosial orange. But she also says that a recession is a time when people need to learn the basics — “a kind of everyday cooking, in a really tasty way. We’re really trying to take the ‘ie’ out of foodie.”
She says she’s sick of hearing about diets and obesity in America, and believes neither would be so prevalent if her European-style “delicious revolution” succeeded.
Waters is a visionary. She imagines a “peace garden” on the Gaza Strip that would employ people “from all sides.” She imagines a high school where the kids could run the whole cafeteria themselves, learning math, nutrition, art and food. She imagines starting gardens at Monticello and Mount Vernon that would “become the source of all food in the White House.” She imagines food being covered on the front page and the business page — not the food page, or on TV by “lesser” reporters like “the weatherman.”
Her most ambitious vision involves President Obama, who didn’t want beets in his garden. “I would just like to serve him some golden beets sometime that were roasted in the oven, that were not overcooked, that were dressed with a lovely little vinaigrette, maybe even diced in a salad,” she says in her seductive way. “Squeeze ‘em with a little lime. It’s fantastically nutritious.”
April 18th, 2009
THE WAY HE ALWAYS WANTED IT first appeared in Stephen Prina’s work as the title of an unrealized sound installation, scored in 1979 for a re-spatialization of Arnold Schönberg’s “Sechs kleine Klavierstücke” (“SixLittle Piano Pieces”), 1911, for one thousand eighty-one loudspeakers.
Its next appearance was as a component of Haberdashery, 2002. THE WAY HE ALWAYS WANTED IT II, 2008, is a 35mm film, shot at Ford House, a Bruce Goff-designed home in Aurora, Illinois, with a musical score derived from fragments of music written by Goff before he abandoned music composition at the age of thirty, with the defense that there were fewer great modern architects than composers so that he would have a better chance at leaving his mark as an architect. A place is held for this film in the context of the exhibition by a poster announcing two screenings of it: one at Anthology Film Archives, Monday, March 30, 2009, and one at Harvard Film Archive, May 3, 2009.
THE WAY HE ALWAYS WANTED IT III, 2009–the first video installation Prina will have made since 1976–uses an outtake from the aforementioned film to give body to this work.
THE WAY HE ALWAYS WANTED IT IV, 2009, is an edition of twenty photographs, culled from yet another outtake of the film project, frame enlargements of which have been selected and assembled to encourage close readings of small details.
THE WAY HE ALWAYS WANTED IT V, 2005-09, is a series of watercolors with graphite, made en plein air in Los Angeles, using a retrospective of slogans and linguistic motives from Prina’s work–including “It’s in our own best interests.”, “It was the best he could do at the moment.”, “WE REPRESENT OURSELVES TO THE WORLD.”, AND “SJP”–as a scaffold of language, functioning
as a pre-existing scheme to which the artist must respond. Blind Painting, No. 3, Fifteen-foot Ceiling or Lower (THE WAY HE ALWAYS WANTED IT/Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York), 2009, completes the chiasmus, with surplus, upon which this exhibition is built.
March 28 – May 2, 2009
537 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
Elad Lassry
Untitled (detail), 2008
16 mm film
9:20 minutes
Three Films Closes April 19 (Sunday) at The Whitney
Elad Lassry: Three Films is the first New York museum exhibition of this Los Angeles based artist who produces carefully crafted images in both photography and film. While often drawing on traditional photographic conventions, Lassry focuses his attention on the surfaces and histories of the objects and individuals he captures, asking the viewer to reassess even the most quotidian images. The three films in this exhibition draw upon the legacy of Structuralist film to examine and interpret modes of image production. Untitled (2008) reconstructs a series of 1970s photographs illustrating perception, using the film camera to shift the focus of the image from the mechanics of vision to the subjectivity of the individuals in the photo. Untitled (Agon) (2007) records two dancers performing the pas de deux from George Balanchine’s 1957 ballet Agon. Using a diagram from Doris Humphrey’s 1958 book The Art of Making Dances to determine the camera’s positions, Lassry examines the way cultural production is framed and transformed through different methods of representation. Finally, Zebra and Woman (2007) vacillates between two disparate subjects to both expose a synchronicity between forms and interrogate the construction of the image within the film frame.
April 18th, 2009
Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009
April 16 – June 27, 2009
555 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
By JUDITH WARNER
NY Times Published: April 16, 2009
Early this month, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old boy from Springfield, Mass., hanged himself after months of incessantly being hounded by his classmates for being “gay.” (He was not; but did, apparently, like to do well in school.)
In March, 2007, 17-year-old Eric Mohat shot himself in the head, after a long-term tormentor told him in class, “Why don’t you go home and shoot yourself; no one will miss you.” Eric liked theater, played the piano and wore bright clothing, a lawyer for his family told ABC news, and so had long been subject to taunts of “gay,” “fag,” “queer” and “homo.”
Teachers and school administrators, the Mohats’ lawsuit now asserts, did nothing.
We should do something to get this insanity under control.
I’m not just talking about combating bullying, which has been a national obsession ever since Columbine, and yet seems to continue unabated. I’m only partly talking about homophobia, which, though virulent, cruel and occasionally fatal among teenagers, is not the whole story behind the fact that words like “fag” and “gay” are now among the most potent and feared weapons in the school bully’s arsenal.
Being called a “fag,” you see, actually has almost nothing to do with being gay.
It’s really about showing any perceived weakness or femininity – by being emotional, seeming incompetent, caring too much about clothing, liking to dance or even having an interest in literature. It’s similar to what being viewed as a “nerd” is, Bennington College psychology professor David Anderegg notes in his 2007 book, “Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them”: “‘queer’ in the sense of being ‘odd’ or ‘unusual,’” but also, for middle schoolers in particular, doing “anything that was too much like what a goody-goody would do.”
It’s what being called a “girl” used to be, a generation or two ago.
“To call someone gay or fag is like the lowest thing you can call someone. Because that’s like saying that you’re nothing,” is how one teenage boy put it to C.J. Pascoe, a sociologist at Colorado College, in an interview for her 2007 book, “Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School.”
The message to the most vulnerable, to the victims of today’s poisonous boy culture, is being heard loud and clear: to be something other than the narrowest, stupidest sort of guy’s guy, is to be unworthy of even being alive.
It’s weird, isn’t it, that in an age in which the definition of acceptable girlhood has expanded, so that desirable femininity now encompasses school success and athleticism, the bounds of boyhood have remained so tightly constrained? And so staunchly defended: Boys avail themselves most frequently of epithets like “fag” to “police” one another’s behavior and bring it back to being sufficiently masculine when someone steps out of line, Barbara J. Risman, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found while conducting extensive interviews in a southeastern urban middle school in 2003 and 2004. “Boys were showing each other they were tough. They were afraid to do anything that might be called girlie,” she told me this week. “It was just like what I would have found if I had done this research 50 years ago. They were frozen in time.”
Pascoe spent 18 months embedded in a Northern California working-class high school, in a community where factory jobs had gone south after the signing of Nafta, and where men who’d once enjoyed solid union salaries were now cobbling together lesser-paid employment at big-box stores. “These kids experience a loss of masculine privilege on a day-to-day level,” she said. “While they didn’t necessarily ever experience the concrete privilege their fathers and grandfathers experienced, they have the sense that to be a man means something and is incredibly important. These boys don’t know how to be that something. Their pathway to masculinity is unclear. To not be a man is to not be fully human and that’s terrifying.”
That makes sense. But the strange thing is, this isn’t just about insecure boys. There’s a degree to which girls, despite all their advances, appear to be stuck – voluntarily – in a time warp, too, or at least to be walking a very fine line between progress and utter regression. Spending unprecedented amounts of time and money on their hair, their skin and their bodies, at earlier and earlier ages. Essentially accepting the highly sexualized identity imposed on them, long before middle school, by advertisers and pop culture. In high school, they have second-class sexual status, Pascoe found, and by jumping through hoops to be sexually available enough to be cool (and “empowered”) yet not so free as to be labeled a slut, they appear to be complicit in maintaining it.
Why – given the full array of choices our culture ostensibly now allows them – are boys and girls clinging to such lowest-common-denominator ways of being?
The strain of being a teenager, and in particular, a preteen, no doubt accounts for much of it; people tend to be at their worst when they’re feeling most insecure. But there’s more to it than that, I think. Malina Saval, who spent two years observing and interviewing teenage boys and their parents for her new book “The Secret Lives of Boys,” found that parents played a key role in reinforcing the basest sort of gender stereotypes, at least where boys were concerned. “There were a few parents who were sort of alarmist about whether or not their children were going to be gay because of their music choices, the clothes they wore,” she said. Generally, she said, “there was a kind of low-level paranoia if these high-school-age boys weren’t yet seriously involved with a girl.”
It seems it all comes down, as do so many things for today’s parents, to status.
“Parents are so terrified that their kids will miss out on anything,” Anderegg told me. “They want their kids to have sex, be sexy.”
This generation of parents tends to talk a good game about gender, at least in public. Practicing what we preach, in anxious times in particular, is another thing.
April 17th, 2009
“He lights newspaper at the base of three planks, coaxes the fire up the boards, then douses them with water after seven minutes. The primitive but painstaking process is said to protect wood against rain, rot, and insects for 80 years. It also gives the exteriors a reptilian texture that’s as striking as it is practical.”
Jamie Gross
“Fujimori wrapped his ‘cave’ with highly durable charred cedar boards; a traditional cladding material still used in Okayama prefecture. Normally, however, the boards come in lengths of less than two metres, for if they are any longer they warp with the heat of their production process.
Undeterred, however, the architect persuaded a group of ten friends, including the clients, to spend a whole day charring cedar boards by using a new experimental technique of his own. It took them one whole day to produce four hundred boards, all more or less eight metres tall, which were precariously but beautifully smoked in clusters of three.
The inevitable warping of the long charred boards was remedied by filling in the gaps with plaster, creating in the process the striking zebra pattern of the exterior walls.”
Yuki Sumner
April 16th, 2009
“We Chose Our Words With Care,
That Neon-Moonlit Evening;
It Was As If We Were,
Party To A Wonderful Alchemy”
1975-2008
April 26th-May 30th, 2009
Opening Sunday, April 26th, 6-8pm
Yoshihiro Tatsumi portrays himself as deeply moved at a 1960 demonstration in Tokyo, where he realizes that the crowd is as angry as the artists of the gekiga movement once were. His commitment to his art is reaffirmed.
By DWIGHT GARNER
NY Times Published: April 14, 2009
Underground comics took root in America in the 1960s and ripened with the counterculture; artists like R. Crumb, Kim Deitch and Art Spiegelman discarded the old funny-page formats and themes — beat it, “Blondie” — like so many desiccated cornhusks. In Japan, however, there had already been a comics revolution, and the man at its rowdy vanguard was Yoshihiro Tatsumi.
Mr. Tatsumi, born in 1935, came of age alongside Japan’s postwar obsession with manga, serialized black-and-white comics whose characters have a distinctive iconography: big, dewy eyes; tiny mouths; piles of spiky hair. Most manga takes place in a bright alternate universe where it seems as if any problem might be resolved with a cute-off: batting eyelashes at 10 paces.
Mr. Tatsumi began drawing manga as a child, but he quickly rebelled against the form’s aesthetic limitations. Manga was aimed largely at children, and its emotional and intellectual palette was circumscribed. Along with a cohort of young writers and illustrators, Mr. Tatsumi introduced in the late 1950s a bolder form of manga he called “gekiga” — darker, more realistic, often violent. The name stuck. And he became one of Japan’s most important visual artists.
Mr. Tatsumi’s work, long unavailable in English, has begun to be translated and issued by the Canadian publishing house Drawn & Quarterly in an annual series of books edited by the cartoonist Adrian Tomine. Now comes the big kahuna: Mr. Tatsumi’s outsize autobiography, “A Drifting Life.”
It’s a book that manages to be, all at once, an insider’s history of manga, a mordant cultural tour of post-Hiroshima Japan and a scrappy portrait of a struggling artist. It’s a big, fat, greasy tub of salty popcorn for anyone interested (as Americans increasingly are) in the theory and practice of Japanese comics. It’s among this genre’s signal achievements.
Manga, like rock ’n’ roll, is fundamentally a young person’s game. Mr. Tatsumi, 73, was born the same year as Jerry Lee Lewis; “A Drifting Life” was 10 long years in the drafting. But no strain of composition shows in this book’s marathon 855 pages, which chronicle his career from 1945 to 1960, the period of its greatest ferment.
Mr. Tatsumi was, he explains here, a geeky comics genius from the time he was in short pants. He began to draw manga in seventh grade in Osaka. Soon published widely, he formed a groundbreaking group, the Children’s Manga Association. The form’s masters were like gods to him. “Stories that capture the minds of children all over Japan,” his character says to himself. “How amazing it must be to be the person creating them.”
If success came quickly, confidence did not. Mr. Tatsumi’s family was poor. His father, a philanderer, was barely and sometimes shadily employed. Mr. Tatsumi’s mother and his three siblings made do as well as they could. Drawing manga was the author’s ticket to ride.
Once he was finished with school, Mr. Tatsumi began toiling in the cheesy, exploitative and highly competitive field of “rental manga.” These books were grab-bag collections that printed the work of several artists; readers borrowed them from stores and then returned them like video rentals.
Publishing houses cranked out rental manga like so much spicy sausage. To get the work done, publishers sometimes crammed their writers and illustrators into communal apartments for days or weeks at a time. In one scene in “A Drifting Life,” a publisher delivered a watermelon to one such apartment to “keep up your morale.”
Mr. Tatsumi does not deny the pleasures of this kind of quick-and-dirty work. His comics were being devoured by a wide and eager audience, and he was honing his craft. “For this 19-year-old boy with no guarantees for his future,” he writes, “the only place where he felt alive was in the realm of imagination.” There was “no freedom in reality,” he continues, but “any kind of transformation was possible in the imaginary world.”
All along, however, Mr. Tatsumi was also dreaming of something better: experimental work, “manga that isn’t manga.” He became obsessed with movies, both American and Japanese, and took note of their stylized visuals and their cool realism. He wanted to produce narrative comics instead of “manga with wild characters jumping about” or “manga that concerns itself with ‘humor’ and ‘punch lines.’ ”
After watching “Shane,” he was taken with the vividness of Jack Palance’s cruelty. And he fell hard for Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled phrasings. Mr. Tatsumi drafted a “Gekiga Manifesto” and, along with a group of like-minded artists, started a movement that ultimately changed the face of manga.
As “A Drifting Life” progresses, it becomes clear that Mr. Tatsumi is not content merely to tell his own story — or just the story of gekiga. He charts Japan’s small cultural milestones in the wake of the war. This book begins with a panel depicting Emperor Hirohito’s surrender but soon moves on to topics like Japan’s first domestically manufactured washing machine, its Miss Universe contestants, maritime disasters and taste for Coca-Cola. It’s ground-level pop history.
The rap against graphic novels or memoirs is that they’re a bastard form that guarantees that both the art and the writing will be second-rate. There’s a speck of truth there, to the extent that the relationship between illustration and prose, in long-form comics, is symbiotic: you wouldn’t necessarily want to pry one from the other.
Mr. Tatsumi’s prose has been translated from the Japanese, fluidly, by Taro Nettleton. The occasional banalities of the language are, you suspect, not the translator’s fault. But I wish Mr. Nettleton hadn’t continually saddled Mr. Tatsumi with long-winded verbs like “utilized” instead of simple ones like “used.”
Mr. Tatsumi’s art is more sophisticated, retaining the form’s strange sparkle even at gloomy moments; he definitely does write manga that isn’t quite manga. The genre can be a difficult one in which to portray aging. Mr. Tatsumi looks just about the same here at ages 10 and 25.
A book like “A Drifting Life” is fairly easy to pick apart on a drawing-by-drawing or line-by-line basis. Don’t make that mistake. Its pleasures are cumulative; the book has a rolling, rumbling grandeur. It’s as if someone had taken a Haruki Murakami novel and drawn, beautifully and comprehensively, in its margins.
A DRIFTING LIFE
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Translated by Taro Nettleton.
855 pages. Drawn & Quarterly Publications. $29.95.
By TARA PARKER-POPE
NY Times Published: April 13, 2009
Earlier this year, Harold and Freda Mitchell of Como, Miss., both came down with a serious stomach bug. At first, doctors did not know what was wrong, but the gastrointestinal symptoms became so severe that Mrs. Mitchell, 66, was hospitalized for two weeks. Her husband, a manufacturing supervisor, missed 20 days of work.
A local doctor who had worked in a Veterans Affairs hospital recognized the signs of Clostridium difficile, a contagious and potentially deadly bacterium. Although the illness is difficult to track, health officials estimate that in the United States the bacteria cause 350,000 infections each year in hospitals alone, with tens of thousands more occurring in nursing homes. While the majority of cases are found in health care settings, 20 percent or more may occur in the community. The illness kills an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people annually.
“It’s been the worst thing I’ve ever tried to get through in my life,” said Mrs. Mitchell, who remains weakened by the ordeal. “I really did think I was going to die.”
What is so frightening about C. difficile is that it is often spurred by antibiotics. The drugs wipe out the targeted illness, like a urinary tract or upper respiratory infection, but they also kill off large portions of the healthy bacteria that normally live in the digestive tract. If a person comes into contact with C. difficile, or already has it, the disruption to the beneficial bacteria creates an opportunity for the harmful bacteria to flourish.
The public health community has been sounding the alarm for years about the overuse of antibiotics and the emergence of “superbugs” — bacteria that have developed immunity to a wide number of antibiotics. But the C. difficile problem shows that the threat is not generalized or hypothetical, but immediate and personal.
“One of the things that we counsel consumers about is to make sure that an antibiotic is really necessary,” said Dr. Dale N. Gerding, an infectious disease specialist at the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University in Chicago. “There are many good reasons for taking an antibiotic, but an illness like sinusitis or bronchitis winds up being treated with antibiotics even though it will go away by itself anyway.”
Even appropriate use of antibiotics can put a person at risk. Dr. Gerding said his own adult son came down with a C. difficile infection after taking antibiotics for tonsillitis.
The typical treatment for C. difficile is another course of antibiotics, typically the drug vancomycin. But the situation can quickly turn tragic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported on several cases of pregnant and postpartum women who developed life-threatening C. difficile infections after being treated for minor infections. In some instances, a C. difficile infection can be treated only by emergency surgery to remove the patient’s colon. Doctors say many patients report that they continue to suffer from regular bouts of diarrhea even after the infection is gone. About 20 percent of patients with the infection suffer a relapse, and C. difficile support groups have emerged on the Internet.
In the case of the Mitchell family, Mr. Mitchell had been taking antibiotics for another health problem, and the treatment apparently led to his C. difficile infection. Mrs. Mitchell probably contracted the illness from her husband. The spores from C. difficile are hardy, and contaminated surfaces must be scrubbed down with bleach to eradicate the germ. Doctors say Mrs. Mitchell’s illness is unusual because most people are protected by their own bacterial flora and wouldn’t be vulnerable to C. difficile if they had not been taking antibiotics, even after close exposure. The risk of contracting C. difficile outside the health care setting remains low, at about 7 cases per 100,000 people, studies show.
C. difficile is not a new illness, but it appears to be spreading at an alarming rate. The rate of C. difficile infection among hospital patients doubled from 2001 to 2005, according to an April 2008 report from the C.D.C. The rise in C. difficile cases around the world is linked with the growing use of all antibiotics, particularly a class of drugs called fluoroquinolones, which came into widespread use around 2001. The use of acid-suppressing drugs, including proton pump inhibitors like Prilosec, also may be a risk factor, although studies have been contradictory.
In addition to becoming more common, C. difficile is also becoming more deadly. Several years ago, the mortality rate from a C. difficile infection was around 1 to 2 percent. But today, various studies estimate that the death rate is 6 percent. The reason is that a hypervirulent strain has emerged that emits higher levels of toxins than earlier strains.
Many patients are far more familiar with another superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which can cause a severe and potentially deadly skin infection. MRSA started off primarily as a hospital-based infection but has become increasingly common in the community.
Hospitals may become more motivated to control C. difficile if the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decides to withhold reimbursement for cases of hospital-acquired C. difficile infections. The system already withholds reimbursement for certain other preventable hospital infections.
In addition to careful use of antibiotics, patients and hospital visitors should always be vigilant about hand washing, and visitors should not sit on a patient’s hospital bed or use a patient’s restroom if it can be avoided. Patients should always report severe diarrhea symptoms to a doctor, particularly if they have taken antibiotics recently.
“Up until about 2002, this was a very mild disorder and very few people ever died from it,” said Dr. Perry Hookman, a gastroenterologist and associate professor of medicine at the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami. “But in the past few years the bugs have become hypervirulent, more severe and now it’s a global threat.”
April 14th, 2009
Jennifer Bornstein, Phantom Limb, 2009, black-and-white film in 16 mm, 18 minutes. Production still.
Lauren O’Neill-Butler
Artforum April 2009
The set in Jennifer Bornstein’s 16-mm abstract film Phantom Limb, 2009, is the same one used in the television show Boston Legal, but you’d never guess it. The eighteen-minute black-and-white work unfolds slowly and silently and ends where it began, with the opening scene flipped backward and in negative. Superimpositions and mirror reflections are spread throughout, in homage, perhaps, to early Surrealist film, and these transitions seem to suit her subject: mirror boxes, traditionally used to treat phantom-limb pains. Bornstein’s work feels a bit like therapy, too: As the camera’s roaming lens closely scans the floral wallpapered surfaces of the set through repetitive and hypnotic movements, it’s hard not to feel increasingly relaxed, or nearly numb. Even the whir of the projector seems to play a role. By the end of the film, when past and present collide, I felt an uncanny, pleasurable, and disorienting stupor.
“Evergreen,” a new series of photographs (her first exhibited in nearly ten years), offers another approach to feeling severed. Intrigued by the story of Treva Throneberry, who enrolled at Evergreen High School in Vancouver, Washington, at age twenty-eight, in these works Bornstein captures dull teenagers amid their even duller academic surroundings. While the images do not seem to offer anything more than the current (and itself cyclic) milieu at the school or point to the elaborate masquerade that Throneberry created in the late 1990s, they do recall the slippery identity issues at play in Bornstein’s late-’90s portraits of herself with young boys. These would have been nice to see here too, in yet another kind of reflection.
GAVIN BROWN’S ENTERPRISE
620 Greenwich Street
April 4–May 2
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 12, 2009
This is a column about Republicans — and I’m not sure I should even be writing it.
Today’s G.O.P. is, after all, very much a minority party. It retains some limited ability to obstruct the Democrats, but has no ability to make or even significantly shape policy.
Beyond that, Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats.
But here’s the thing: the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. And they could return to power if the Democrats stumble. So it behooves us to look closely at the state of what is, after all, one of our nation’s two great political parties.
One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties” that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties — antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.
But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.
Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.
But the charge of socialism is being thrown around only because “liberal” doesn’t seem to carry the punch it used to. And if you go back just a few years, you find top Republican figures making equally bizarre claims about what liberals were up to. Remember when Karl Rove declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to the 9/11 terrorists?
Then there are the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. Crazy stuff — but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were murderers, claims that were supported by a campaign of innuendo on the part of big-league conservative media outlets and figures, especially Rush Limbaugh.
Speaking of Mr. Limbaugh: the most impressive thing about his role right now is the fealty he is able to demand from the rest of the right. The abject apologies he has extracted from Republican politicians who briefly dared to criticize him have been right out of Stalinist show trials. But while it’s new to have a talk-radio host in that role, ferocious party discipline has been the norm since the 1990s, when Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, became known as “The Hammer” in part because of the way he took political retribution on opponents.
Going back to those tea parties, Mr. DeLay, a fierce opponent of the theory of evolution — he famously suggested that the teaching of evolution led to the Columbine school massacre — also foreshadowed the denunciations of evolution that have emerged at some of the parties.
Last but not least: it turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.
But that’s nothing new, and AstroTurf has worked well for Republicans in the past. The most notable example was the “spontaneous” riot back in 2000 — actually orchestrated by G.O.P. strategists — that shut down the presidential vote recount in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.
So what’s the implication of the fact that Republicans are refusing to grow up, the fact that they are still behaving the same way they did when history seemed to be on their side? I’d say that it’s good for Democrats, at least in the short run — but it’s bad for the country.
For now, the Obama administration gains a substantial advantage from the fact that it has no credible opposition, especially on economic policy, where the Republicans seem particularly clueless.
But as I said, the G.O.P. remains one of America’s great parties, and events could still put that party back in power. We can only hope that Republicans have moved on by the time that happens.
April 13th, 2009
By ROBIN POGREBIN
NY Times Published: April 12, 2009
He is not a celebrity architect, not one of the names that show up on shortlists for museums and concert hall projects or known beyond architecture circles. He hasn’t designed many buildings; the one he is best known for is a thermal spa in an Alpine commune. And he has toiled in relative obscurity for the last 30 years in a remote village in the Swiss mountains.
“He has conceived his method of practice almost as carefully as each of his projects,” the citation from the nine-member Pritzker jury says. “He develops buildings of great integrity — untouched by fad or fashion. Declining a majority of the commissions that come his way, he only accepts a project if he feels a deep affinity for its program, and from the moment of commitment, his devotion is complete, overseeing the project’s realization to the very last detail.”
For Mr. Zumthor, 65, winning the Pritzker, which is awarded annually to a living architect and regarded as architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, is a kind of vindication. “You can do your work, you do your thing, and it gets recognized,” he said in a telephone interview from Haldenstein, the Swiss village where he lives and works.
Mr. Zumthor is the 33rd laureate to receive the prize, which consists of a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion and is awarded at a different architecturally significant location each year. This year’s ceremony is to be held on May 29 in Buenos Aires.
The project most closely associated with Mr. Zumthor is the spa he completed in 1996 for the Hotel Therme in Vals, an Alpine village in Switzerland. Using slabs of quartzite that evoke stacked Roman bricks, Mr. Zumthor created a contemporary take on the baths of antiquity.
He is also known for his use of wood, as in St. Benedict Chapel in Sumvitg, Switzerland, which evokes a giant hot tub.
The Pritzker jury praised Mr. Zumthor’s use of materials. “In Zumthor’s skillful hands, like those of the consummate craftsman, materials from cedar shingles to sandblasted glass are used in a way that celebrates their own unique qualities, all in the service of an architecture of permanence,” the citation said, adding, “In paring down architecture to its barest yet most sumptuous essentials, he has reaffirmed architecture’s indispensable place in a fragile world.”
Mr. Zumthor said that his projects generally originated with materials. “I work a little bit like a sculptor,” he said. “When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It’s not about paper, it’s not about forms. It’s about space and material.”
Mr. Zumthor’s buildings do not share a common vernacular. They range from tall and circular to low-slung and boxy. For his Field Chapel to St. Nikolaus von der Flüe, completed in 2007, in Mechernich, Germany, Mr. Zumthor formed the interior from 112 tree trunks configured like a tent. Over 24 days, layers of concrete were poured around the structure. Then for three weeks a fire was kept burning inside so that the dried tree trunks could be easily removed from the concrete shell. The chapel floor was covered with lead, which was melted on site and manually ladled onto the floor.
For an art museum in Bregenz, Austria — a four-story cube of concrete, steel and glass that opened in 1997 — Mr. Zumthor used glass walls that at night can become giant billboards or video screens.
His Kolumba Art Museum in Cologne, Germany, completed in 2007, rises out of the ruins of the Gothic St. Kolumba Church, destroyed in World War II. The Pritzker jury called the project “a startling contemporary work, but also one that is completely at ease with its many layers of history.”
Mr. Zumthor said that he deliberately kept his office small— no more than 20 people. “That’s the way it’s going to be so that I can be the author of everything,” he said.
“I’m not a producer of images,” he added. “I’m this guy who, when I take on a commission, I do it inside out, everything myself, with my team.”
One of Mr. Zumthor’s best-known designs never came to fruition. In 1993 he won the competition for a museum and documentation center on the horrors of Nazism to be built on the site of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Mr. Zumthor’s submission called for an extended three-story building with a framework consisting of concrete rods. The project, called the Topography of Terror, was partly built and then abandoned when the government decided not to go ahead for financial reasons. The unfinished building was demolished in 2004.
Born in Basel, Switzerland, Mr. Zumthor as a teenager served a four-year apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker. He studied at the Basel Arts and Crafts School and spent a year at Pratt Institute in New York. In the 1970s he moved to Graubünden, Switzerland, to work for the Department for the Preservation of Monuments. He established his own practice in 1979 in Haldenstein, where he and his wife, Annalisa Zumthor-Cuorad, brought up their three children.
Mr. Zumthor said that his village had been an inspiration and a refuge. “It helps you concentrate,” he said. “And also collaborators coming here are not distracted by all the things of the big city. To come up with me, you’re in the Alps. It’s sort of a commitment. It’s a beautiful feeling. Of course you have to like the mountains.”
April 12th, 2009
Macroscope
2008
Painted, stained, vanished woods, metal hardware, rubber, found metal, aluminam and copper sheeting, Plexiglas, aluminum angle, bungee cord and nylon strap.
108 H x 46 W x 25 D inches
WIld Pitch
2008
Painted wood, metal hardware, found metal objects, fabric, baseball glove, baseballs.
90 H x 75 W x 55 D inches
Great new work from Jason Meadows on Marc Foxx’s website
April 11th, 2009
The endurance running hypothesis, the idea that humans evolved as long-distance runners, may have legs thanks to a new study on toes.
The Seed Magazine
by Maywa Montenegro
Ann Trason, Scott Jurek, Matt Carpenter. These are the megastars of ultra-distance running, athletes who pound out not just marathons, but
dozens of them back-to-back, over Rocky Mountain passes and across the scorching floor of Death Valley. If their names are unfamiliar, it’s probably because this type of extreme running is almost universally seen as a fringe sport, the habit of the superhumanly fit, the masochistic, the slightly deranged.
But a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors. Over time, the survival of the swift-footed shaped the anatomy of modern humans, giving us a body that is difficult to explain absent a marathoning past.
Our toes, for instance, are shorter and stubbier than those of nearly all other primates, including chimpanzees, a trait that has long been attributed to our committed bipedalism. But a study published in the March 1 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, by anthropologists Daniel Lieberman and Campbell Rolian, provides evidence that short toes make human feet exquisitely suited to substantial amounts of running. In tests where 15 subjects ran and walked on pressure-sensitive treadmills, Lieberman and Rolian found that toe length had no effect on walking. Yet when the subjects were running, an increase in toe length of just 20 percent doubled the amount of mechanical work, meaning that the longer-toed subjects required more metabolic energy, and each footfall produced more shock.
“If you have very long toes, the moment of force acting on the foot’s metatarsal phalangeal joint becomes problematic when running,” explains Lieberman. Our hominid ancestors, Australopithecus, of which Lucy is the most famous specimen, had significantly longer toes than humans. “Lucy could have walked just fine with her long toes,” says Lieberman. “But if she wanted to run a marathon, or even a half-marathon, she’d have had trouble.”
The March study is the first attempt to assess the ER hypothesis using an experimental approach, but the idea that humans have a marathoning past first surfaced more than two decades ago, when David Carrier, a runner and grad student in the lab of evolutionary biologist Dennis Bramble, convinced his mentor that running ability might explain a number of unique human features. Over the years, Bramble’s team at the University of Utah and Lieberman’s team at Harvard have amassed a small ream of physiological and morphological evidence that they believe points to a distance-running legacy. In 2004 the groups copublished a list of 26 such markers on the human body, including short toes, a hefty gluteus maximus and Achilles tendon, springy tendon-loaded legs, and the little-known nuchal ligament that stabilizes the head when it’s in rapid motion.
The paper earned the cover of Nature and generated quite a stir within bio/anthro circles. But it did nothing to answer a fundamental question: What good would endurance running have been to primitive man? On an evolutionary battleground — where the struggle is to eat or be eaten — speed, and not endurance, should be the prized trait. If a tiger in high gear could outpace Homo erectus within 10 seconds and a deer in 20, being able to run at a modest pace for hours at a time does not seem like an evolutionary advantage.
Christopher McDougall came up against this very conundrum in his spirited book Born to Run (Knopf, May 2009). McDougall, neither anthropologist nor biologist, is a journalist originally given an assignment for Runner’s World that morphed into a consuming fascination with feats of high mileage, particularly with that of the Mexican Tarahumara Indians, reclusive canyon dwellers reputed to be the best endurance athletes on earth. Wearing shoes fashioned from tire strips to cushion their feet, the Tarahumara cover up to 400 miles in festive, multiday events drawing runners and spectators from multiple villages. They are also the picture of health, enjoying almost total immunity to cancer and the diseases that plague modern society. For McDougall, the Tarahumara seem to confirm what Lieberman has been arguing all along, that humans are built for running. To find out why, McDougall inevitably found his way to the Harvard researcher, who shared with him an intriguing theory.
We know that roughly 2 million years ago, Australopithecus, with its tiny brain, hefty jaw and diet of rough, fibrous plants, evolved into Homo erectus, our slim, long-legged ancestor with a big brain and small teeth suited for tearing into animal and fruit flesh. Such a transformation almost certainly involved a reliable supply of calorie-laden meat, yet according to the fossil record, spear points have been in use for 200,000 years at most, and the bow and arrow for only 50,000 years, leaving an enormous stretch of time when early humans were consuming meat without the use of tools. Lieberman believes they ran their prey to death, often called “persistence hunting.”
In the book, McDougall recounts the Harvard researcher’s eureka moment, which happened on a five-mile jog one summer afternoon with his half-mutt border collie, Vashti: It was hot, and after a few miles, Vashti plopped down under a tree and refused to move… As he waited for his panting dog to cool off, Lieberman’s mind flashed back to his time doing fossil research in Africa…Ethnographer’s reports he’d read years ago began flooding his mind; they told of African hunters who used to chase antelopes across the savannahs, and Tarahumara Indians who would race after a deer ”until its hooves fell off.“ Lieberman had always shrugged them off as tall tales…but now he started to wonder. So how long would it take to actually run an animal to death?
Drawing on Harvard’s extant cache of locomotion data, Lieberman began crunching numbers comparing speed, body temperature, and body weight of humans and various conceivable prey. A deer and a decently fit man, Lieberman discovered, trot at almost an identical pace, but in order to accelerate, a deer goes anaerobic, while the man remains in an oxygenated jogging zone. The same is true for horses, antelopes, and a slew of other four-legged creatures. Since animals can run anaerobically only in short bursts before they must slow down to recover, a human in pursuit may have the final advantage. And because quadrupeds can’t pant while they run, they also quickly overheat. To run down dinner, Lieberman realized, might simply have been a matter of spurring the poor beast into a sprint enough times to make it collapse from hyperthermia.
“Running an animal to heatstroke is something that most humans can do, and that other animals can’t,” says Lieberman. “It’s a compelling explanation for why these capabilities evolved, and frankly, nobody’s come up with a better idea yet.”
But plenty of skeptics remain, some who doubt that persistence hunting was the reason humans evolved with the capacity for distance running, and some who doubt the ER hypothesis altogether. University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist John Hawks, who researches the acceleration of human evolution since the advent of agriculture, questions how a trait that is supposedly specific to endurance running could persist today, when tools and farming have long since replaced the old selective pressures of hunting. “If these features really were distinctive to long-distance running, shouldn’t they have disappeared?” he asks.
Hawks also thinks that Lieberman and Rolian’s short-toe findings are essentially more evidence that humans are optimally designed for walking. “That’s exactly what we should expect,” Hawks says of the finding that toe-length variation does not affect walking. “If we see that toe length makes a big difference for running, that’s relatively good evidence that toe length wasn’t selected for.”
Still, ER theory has much on its side. Ultramarathoning is a cross-cultural phenomenon, and persistence hunting can be found in cultures all over the globe: The Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana, the Aborigines of Australia, the Masai of Kenya, and the Tarahumara are but a few examples of tribes whose lore includes the epic hunt. Hawks would argue this is a sophisticated cultural adaptation, but it could also mean that we have a common, fleet-footed ancestor.
Whether scientifically bona fide or not, it’s also hard to discount McDougall’s story of the Tarahumara’s supreme health and athleticism, and his sense of having tapped into something primordial — a feeling doubtlessly reinforced by his own metamorphosis from out-of-shape jogger to efficient ultradistance trekker. “They think it’s just a bunch of us crazy joggers out there who think running is important,” says Lieberman of his critics. The critics may be right about that, but it does seem that the endurance running hypothesis has legs.
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
By Christopher McDougall; Knopf; Out May 5
originally found on arts and letters daily
April 11th, 2009
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 9, 2009
Thirty-plus years ago, when I was a graduate student in economics, only the least ambitious of my classmates sought careers in the financial world. Even then, investment banks paid more than teaching or public service — but not that much more, and anyway, everyone knew that banking was, well, boring.
In the years that followed, of course, banking became anything but boring. Wheeling and dealing flourished, and pay scales in finance shot up, drawing in many of the nation’s best and brightest young people (O.K., I’m not so sure about the “best” part). And we were assured that our supersized financial sector was the key to prosperity.
Instead, however, finance turned into the monster that ate the world economy.
Recently, the economists Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef circulated a paper that could have been titled “The Rise and Fall of Boring Banking” (it’s actually titled “Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry, 1909-2006”). They show that banking in America has gone through three eras over the past century.
Before 1930, banking was an exciting industry featuring a number of larger-than-life figures, who built giant financial empires (some of which later turned out to have been based on fraud). This highflying finance sector presided over a rapid increase in debt: Household debt as a percentage of G.D.P. almost doubled between World War I and 1929.
During this first era of high finance, bankers were, on average, paid much more than their counterparts in other industries. But finance lost its glamour when the banking system collapsed during the Great Depression.
The banking industry that emerged from that collapse was tightly regulated, far less colorful than it had been before the Depression, and far less lucrative for those who ran it. Banking became boring, partly because bankers were so conservative about lending: Household debt, which had fallen sharply as a percentage of G.D.P. during the Depression and World War II, stayed far below pre-1930s levels.
Strange to say, this era of boring banking was also an era of spectacular economic progress for most Americans.
After 1980, however, as the political winds shifted, many of the regulations on banks were lifted — and banking became exciting again. Debt began rising rapidly, eventually reaching just about the same level relative to G.D.P. as in 1929. And the financial industry exploded in size. By the middle of this decade, it accounted for a third of corporate profits.
As these changes took place, finance again became a high-paying career — spectacularly high-paying for those who built new financial empires. Indeed, soaring incomes in finance played a large role in creating America’s second Gilded Age.
Needless to say, the new superstars believed that they had earned their wealth. “I think that the results our company had, which is where the great majority of my wealth came from, justified what I got,” said Sanford Weill in 2007, a year after he had retired from Citigroup. And many economists agreed.
Only a few people warned that this supercharged financial system might come to a bad end. Perhaps the most notable Cassandra was Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, who argued at a 2005 conference that the rapid growth of finance had increased the risk of a “catastrophic meltdown.” But other participants in the conference, including Lawrence Summers, now the head of the National Economic Council, ridiculed Mr. Rajan’s concerns.
And the meltdown came.
Much of the seeming success of the financial industry has now been revealed as an illusion. (Citigroup stock has lost more than 90 percent of its value since Mr. Weill congratulated himself.) Worse yet, the collapse of the financial house of cards has wreaked havoc with the rest of the economy, with world trade and industrial output actually falling faster than they did in the Great Depression. And the catastrophe has led to calls for much more regulation of the financial industry.
But my sense is that policy makers are still thinking mainly about rearranging the boxes on the bank supervisory organization chart. They’re not at all ready to do what needs to be done — which is to make banking boring again.
Part of the problem is that boring banking would mean poorer bankers, and the financial industry still has a lot of friends in high places. But it’s also a matter of ideology: Despite everything that has happened, most people in positions of power still associate fancy finance with economic progress.
Can they be persuaded otherwise? Will we find the will to pursue serious financial reform? If not, the current crisis won’t be a one-time event; it will be the shape of things to come.
April 9th, 2009
By NICHOLAS KULISH
NY Times Published: April 4, 2009
BERLIN — A dingy line of red tile runs across the otherwise brown floor of the men’s changing room at the public swimming pool in my Berlin neighborhood. It tells you where to take your shoes off and, in the meantime, a fair amount about German thinking.
As their eyes alight on the small sign that goes with it, which reads “barefoot zone” in German, grown men freeze as though they have hit a force field, or had an electric shock administered for being foolish enough to try to pass it still shod. But I can not say what the repercussions would be. This being Germany, I have never seen anyone wearing shoes on the far side of the line and certainly would not risk it myself.
Such strict obedience is all the more impressive when you realize that the red line’s ruthless effectiveness comes with no staff members watching over it, no video camera in evidence, nor, as far I am aware, even any electric shocks. Yet I am certain that in a changing room in Paris, much less Rome, the narrow little line’s authority would be nonexistent, a half-hearted suggestion or maybe just a joke.
I thought of that dull line of tile as American policy makers tried last week to persuade the German government to cross a psychological threshold, and break fiscal discipline to spend their way out of recession.
In most daily interactions, the Germans do not need anyone to enforce their rules. They follow them — and remind one another to follow them through impromptu lectures that are often heated — because they are raised to know that is what they are supposed to do.
What the Germans call Ordnung (the usual translation is “order,” but it is a much broader concept) is the unwritten road map of one society’s concerted effort to permanently banish the instability and violence that have marked its history. That sense of insecurity includes Germany’s forced division in the cold war, the Nazi era and the hyperinflation of the 1920s, but it also stretches at least as far back as the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century, which decimated much of the German territories and population, and was a formative trauma.
The response has been to develop a national knack for sticking to the program, not just in specific areas, but in most aspects of life. The autobahn is more than just a highway with stretches where you can drive as fast as you want; it is also a marvel of self-organization. Old Fiats chug along in the right lane, while newer Volkswagens cruise the middle one, allowing sparkling Porsches to zoom by in terrifying blurs on the left. Everyone is in their assigned places, except for the fact that places have not been assigned.
More endearing to me are earnest Teutonic attempts to be laid back, as when a young would-be tough at a local basketball court — mistaking Berlin’s Volkspark Friedrichshain for upper Manhattan’s Rucker Park circa 1970 — boasted that I had better brace myself for the playground game, because “in street ball, there are no rules.” He then proceeded to enumerate carefully and politely which rules were ignored (e.g., three seconds in the lane), which were laxly enforced (non-shooting fouls) and which were still obeyed (traveling).
A German friend disagreed with my broadest stereotyping, pointing to the profusion of German tax dodgers who rush to Liechtenstein and Switzerland, and the exceptional number of people here who cut in line. “You say Italians have no respect for rules, but they will actually kick you out of a restaurant for asking for parmesan on your tuna pasta,” he pointed out. But he admitted that Germans were more likely to trust that each rule was probably written for a good reason, intended for the greater good.
Living in Germany, a foreigner quickly learns to appreciate the precise punctuality of trains and trams, but also to have a healthy fear of that same punctuality in dinner guests who appear when they were invited, instead of 20 minutes later. A group of Germans lined up on an empty street corner, even in the middle of the night, waiting for a light to change before crossing, is one of the favorite first impressions taken away by visiting Americans, who are usually jaywalking past as they observe it.
For self-reliant Americans, the German devotion to all manner of precise rules and regulations is impressive and stifling in equal measures. For American policy makers, it appears to have bred no small amount of exasperation recently.
During the often heated trans-Atlantic debate over the financial crisis, and how to respond to the worsening recession that has grown out of it, I often have felt as though the American side sometimes fails to take into account that it is talking to Germans. Indeed, if there was going to be a disagreement between the United States and Germany over stimulus and regulation, one could guess just by looking at the words, stripped of their economic context, who has been on which side of the divide.
President Obama’s approach to the financial crisis has been typically American — bold, improvisatory and on the fly. The Germans have been studied and measured, evincing a far greater trust than the Americans in their social-security system to patch the cracks in the foundation of their economy.
Of course that is due in part to the famed German aversion to excessive deficit spending, stemming from gut-level fear of a repeat of the hyperinflation of the 1920s. But there is also the German adherence to rules, love of a good plan and cautious, thoughtful approach when it slowly becomes apparent that a return trip to the drawing board may be necessary.
Can we really blame them? They tried improvising once, tearing up the rule book in the first half of the last century, letting a little charismatic speaker with an even littler mustache tell them how to get out of a tough economic pinch. He, too, posed as a man of order, but everyone, and especially the Germans, agrees that led only to chaos and destruction.
But today’s Germans also love keeping to the slowly forged consensus because, as the last 60-odd years have demonstrated, it really does run pretty well for them. Despite reasonable working hours and long vacations, this country of 82 million people is the largest exporter of goods in the world, beating even China. But the kind of society built to excel at tinkering with precision-tuned industrial machines may not be so good at retooling policies on the fly.
German stubbornness in resisting a shift of responses to the current economic crisis has led more than a few Keynesians to pull out more than a little of their hair. It might be for the best if those fans of vigorous impromptu spending came along to the pool with me — not to relax, but to learn how to coax Germans to cross a red line, rather than expect them to do what is hardest for them, which would be to just jump over it with both feet.
April 9th, 2009
So Mei, 5, and So Sei, 12, at the Tuol Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh. A survey found that few Cambodians under 30 were aware of the current Khmer Rouge trials.
By SETH MYDANS
NY Times Published: April 7, 2009
TRAPAENG SVA, Cambodia — Sum Touch has stopped trying to tell her grandchildren about the killings, starvation and terror she lived through when a Communist Khmer Rouge regime ravaged Cambodia 30 years ago.
“It seems that even if I tell them they don’t believe what I say,” said Mrs. Sum Touch, 71, who lost many members of her family. “It hurts my heart that they don’t know what happened.”
There is a former killing field nearby and a shed filled with the skulls and bones of some of the victims. But many of the young people here, it seems, have no idea why or how they got there.
As it struggles to leave its past behind, Cambodia today suffers from a particularly painful generation gap: those who survived the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, and their children and grandchildren, who know very little about it.
“I don’t like it, but what can you do?” said Ty Leap, 52, who sells noodles and fruit drinks from a roadside stall. “It really is unbelievable that those things happened.”
For nearly four years, from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge caused the deaths of 1.7 million people from starvation, overwork and disease as well as torture and execution as they tried to construct a harsh peasant utopia.
Almost everyone here of a certain age has stories to tell of terror, abuse, hunger and the loss of family members. But those stories often fall on the deaf ears of a new generation that either cannot conceive of such brutality or seems unwilling to learn about it.
“Some older people get so upset at their children for not believing that they say, ‘I wish the Khmer Rouge time would happen again; then you’d believe it,’ ” Mr. Ty Leap said.
As much as 70 percent of Cambodia’s population is under the age of 30, and four out of five members of this young generation know little or nothing about the Khmer Rouge years, according to a survey last fall by the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
That ignorance — among both young and older — seems also to embrace the trials of five major Khmer Rouge figures that began last month, a process that is meant, in part, to begin a process of healing and closure.
Parts of the trial sessions are being broadcast, and newspapers are carrying reports, but even in this village at the edge of a former killing field 25 miles south of the capital, Phnom Penh, many people said they were not aware that they were under way.
“I miss some programs so I don’t know about that,” said Khieu Hong, 36, who was listening to a small transistor radio. “If you want to know about the trials you should ask the police or the old people.”
Hun Ret, 36, a cattle trader who lives nearby, said he strongly supported a trial in order to punish Khmer Rouge perpetrators. But he was surprised when he was told that the trial had already started.
Again the Berkeley study seemed to support the perception of widespread ignorance. It found that only 15 percent of the people it surveyed said they knew much at all about the trials, although that number is likely to have risen since the hearings began. The study was based on personal interviews with 1,000 people during the last three weeks of September.
Beyond the question of age, ignorance about the past appears to be a combination of culture and policy and perhaps also the passivity of a people too exhausted by history to confront its traumas.
The trials are being held under pressure from the United Nations and Western governments in a nation that might have preferred the approach of its prime minister, Hun Sen, who once proposed that Cambodia “dig a hole and bury the past.”
Mr. Hun Sen was a mid-level Khmer Rouge commander, though there is apparently no evidence that he committed major crimes. Several ranking members of his ruling party and the military are also former members of Khmer Rouge.
Because of these cross-currents in recent Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge period has not been taught in school, causing some teachers who are survivors to feel orphaned by their students.
A new high school text book that discusses the Khmer Rouge years has been prepared, but it will reach only a portion of the country’s students.
“I talk to them, but they don’t always believe what I tell them,” said Kann Sunthara, 57, a chemistry teacher. “My father and husband and brother and sisters and many others died. Sometimes when I’m telling about them I have to turn my back and cry.”
Another teacher, Eam Mary, 41, who was severely tortured as a boy under the Khmer Rouge, said he can only catch the attention of his class when he tells weird stories, like the times he was forced by hunger to eat baby mice or lizards or worse.
“They say ‘Ew, disgusting!’ ” he said. “And at the same time some of the kids in the back of the class are playing and not paying attention.”
The generation gap seems evident here at the former killing field where dozens of skulls and bones have been preserved in a makeshift memorial — one of hundreds around the country — as evidence that the massacres really did happen.
Some older people say they still hear the cries of wandering ghosts whose bodies have not been properly laid to rest.
“They come out at night and frighten people,” said Mr. Khieu Hong, the man with the radio. “They cry ‘Whoo, whoo!’ It sounds like somebody is being tortured and crying out.”
But the children who graze cattle nearby seem deaf to the moans of ghosts.
For some of them, the bones are playthings. Sometimes they stick their fingers into the eyes of the skulls, like bowling balls. Sometimes they put them on their heads like scary caps, the children say. Sometimes they kick them.
But they seemed confused when they were asked whose skulls these were.
“They are the skulls of ghosts!” said Prok Poeuv, 11, standing near the small stupa that houses the bones. But he said he did not know whose ghosts these were, and he said he had never heard of the Khmer Rouge.
Sok Dane, 12, said she knew a little more. “My grandmother tells me that in the Khmer Rouge time some people hit other people,” she said. But that was all she knew, and the meaning of “Khmer Rouge time” was unclear to her.
Chhun Sam Ath 42, a mother of six who lives in a shanty beside the collection of skulls, is one of the better informed villagers. She has a glossy handout about the tribunal although she does not read very well.
She said some children here, deep in their souls, may know more about the past than they seem to.
“I think some of my children are reborn from the victims in the killing field,” she said. “When people come and leave offerings for the skulls, my daughter always runs to get the food, as if they were bringing it for her.”
April 8th, 2009