SHELTER from jason sussberg on Vimeo.
Lloyd Kahn claims that shelter is more than a roof over your head. As the author and publisher of over a dozen books on home construction, Lloyd has been grappling with the concept of home, physically and psychically, for over five decades. Situated in the financial and housing crisis, this film profiles Lloyd’s ideas on do-it-yourself construction and sustainability.
October 29th, 2010
John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times / October 27, 2010
At 33, Kim Jae-yeon, left, is the youngest of South Korea’s haenyeo, or women of the sea. She takes to the water with her aunt, Kim Choun-geum, from whom she is learning the diving craft.
By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times
October 27, 2010
Reporting from Mara Island, South Korea —
The sea is restless as Kim Jae-yeon perches on the rocky shoreline, eyeing the churning waters at her feet. Slowly, she wipes her goggles with a fistful of grass to keep them from fogging underwater and offers a prayer to the pounding surf for her good fortune.
Like six generations of women before her on this treeless speck of land in the East China Sea, the young mother of two is preparing for a dangerous job no man here is allowed to perform: free-diving for minutes at a time to catch abalone and other shellfish.
Kim is learning to join the ranks of the haenyeo, or women of the sea, whose role as ocean hunter-gatherers has long given them special status in a Korean culture dominated by men. These women on a group of islands south of the South Korean mainland have turned tradition on its head.
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For decades, divers here have groomed their daughters for a life at sea. They teach them how to conserve oxygen to extend their dives and stress the importance of working in groups, like a herd of watchful seals, vigilant against shark attacks, rip currents and marauding motorboats that buzz the surface.
The diving, with its daily hazards and emphasis on teamwork, has molded the women into a cohesive group that has often gathered by the campfire with the day’s catch to make decisions about village politics.
But this matriarchal way of life is now in peril. Modern fishing boats that encroach on their catching grounds have reduced the number of shellfish, forcing the haenyeo farther out to sea, leaving them less time to dive.
The diminished catch has made the profession a struggle for survival. Nowadays, the women are able to gather only enough catch to feed their families, with a bit left over to sell to tourists. Shellfish that once was sent to ports such as Japan now stays at home. And, lured away by careers on the mainland, fewer daughters are diving.
The number of haenyeo has plummeted by two-thirds in just a few decades, from 15,000 in the 1970s to slightly more than 5,000 today. On Mara Island, about the size of an 18-hole golf course with a full-time population of 80 residents, the number has dropped from 15 to seven.
At 33, Kim is the youngest haenyeo in South Korea, where half the divers are older than 70 and 90% are least 50. She isn’t diving for the money; Kim makes her living by running a restaurant. But following the lead of her mother, aunt and grandmother, she spends most mornings learning an ancient haenyeo trade that connects her to her ancestors.
“It’s now or never,” she said. “One day, the elders will be gone, and the sea will be mine alone. I want to learn all I can while there’s still time. So I can teach the other women who might one day come.”
On this morning, a typhoon is gathering 1,000 miles to the south and the swirling currents already thrash angrily. Even with only four years’ experience, Kim knows the sea is dangerous enough without bad weather.
As she struggles to put on her wetsuit cap, her aunt, Kim Choun-geum, 56, appears. The older woman patiently assists her niece, whispering words of encouragement. Then student and mentor slip into the churning water to join the others.
*
The haenyeo tradition dates back hundreds of years, handed down from mother to daughter, glorified in folk tales and songs. Some say women’s body fat enabled them to better endure the cold waters. Others say they’re just better divers than the men.
Even now, no man would dream of taking to the waters with the divers. This skill, they know, is women’s work, so they stay out of the way.
On these isolated islands, the women are often the breadwinners while the men stay at home to raise the children. The divorce rate is higher here than on the mainland, perhaps driven by the can-do spirit of women who grow weary of spouses who don’t pull their weight. The haenyeo have the final word on major decisions.
Like the earliest female sea divers in neighboring Japan, the Korean haenyeo once wore only flimsy cotton gowns that offered no protection against the bone-chilling cold. Working in groups, they pushed makeshift collection nets attached to a surface buoy while diving dozens of times a day, using iron picks and scythes to pry loose the shells from rocks as deep as 60 feet or more. They didn’t believe in overfishing, harvesting just enough to get by.
They eventually donned wetsuits, but there’s one modern convenience the haenyeo have shunned: oxygen tanks, which would allow them to exhaust the catch too soon.
Despite their caution, accidents are common. Each year a handful of divers die in shark attacks or by drowning. The work also takes a long-term health toll. Like many older haenyeo, Kim’s grandmother, Byun Chun-ok, 84, suffers from ear and lung problems. Her joints still ache years after leaving the water for good.
Kim’s aunt, Kim Choun-geum, is fully aware of the dangers of her job.
“One mistake and the ocean will kill you,” she said. “Our rule is to never get greedy.”
Although South Korean officials pledge to help preserve the haenyeo’s livelihood, the women say they need financial assistance for child care and medical checkups.
“You can’t change depleted resources overnight,” said Ham Chun-bo, director of the Haenyeo Museum on Jeju, the main island in the chain. “And even with good policies, you can’t force young women to take up this job.”
*
Kim Jae-yeon never planned on becoming a sea woman.
She grew up on Mara, the kind of place where the unstaffed convenience store still features an honor system. But she fled to attend college on Jeju Island, and later met her husband, Park Hyung-il.
Eventually, after a series of failed businesses, the couple returned to Mara. For Kim, then 29, coming home was life-changing.
One day, while accompanying her aunt into the water, Kim’s eyes opened to the sea’s allure. After the stress of working office jobs on Jeju, she felt a jolt of freedom.
She started out with the easiest task, collecting seaweed in shallow waters. But even that exhausted her. “Every day I was so tired I’d vomit,” she recalled. “The sea is not an easy place to make a living. I came to respect my elders for their survival skills.”
She learned that her grandmother was once the island’s best diver, who could go the deepest, stay submerged the longest and return with the biggest catch. She heard stories of how the women of her grandmother’s day never complained about the cold or danger, instead telling jokes and singing songs to pass the time.
After hauling in their daily catch, the women would sit around a campfire at the beach and discuss village business or compliment one another’s fishing skills or bravery in the water that day. It was a simpler, self-sufficient life that Kim wanted for herself.
Although she makes most of her salary from the restaurant, Kim developed the quiet swagger of a haenyeo, bringing home twice as much money as her husband, a coastal preservation worker on Jeju.
“Sometimes it irritates me,” Park said. “When we argue, she plays the money card, just like a veteran haenyeo would do.”
As their profession wanes, the sea women are returning to a more traditional role. “Eventually we’ll give up our power and become like any other Korean woman,” Kim Choun-geum said. “That’s sad.”
But for as long as she can, Kim Jae-yeon, South Korea’s youngest haenyeo, will watch her elders to absorb the lessons of the deep. She feels guilty knowing many ignore their own dives to show her the way.
One day, Kim hopes to herself be a teacher to a new generation of haenyeo. She awaits the day her 8-year-old daughter is ready to go to sea.
“I’m already teaching her how to dive,” she said. “Whether she wants to become a haenyeo will be up to her.”
October 28th, 2010
Komposition Blau-Rot auf Weiss, 1965
Retrospective 1964–1977
October 31, 2010–January 16, 2011
October 27th, 2010
Sea Lion
2010
C-print with painted frame
14 1/2 X 11 1/2 X 1 1/2 inches
Opens October 30
October 26th, 2010
Peter Hujar Archive, “Paul Thek in the Palermo Catacombs, 1963″
A Paul Thek retrospective opened last week at the Whitney after Elenora Nagy’s restoration
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
NY Times Published: October 25, 2010
Eleonora Nagy remembers the first time she got a close look at “Untitled,” a 1966 sculpture by the artist Paul Thek. One of a series of works known as “meat pieces,” it looked like a fresh limb fragment that had gone bad — very bad.
“When we opened it up with the art handlers it was before lunchtime,” Ms. Nagy recalled. “And I went, ‘Ewww, my appetite is over.’ ”
That reaction was precisely what Thek (pronounced tek), a once-major figure in the New York art scene who died in relative obscurity in 1988, would have wanted, she said. With its bizarre hyper-realistic details — a shiny tongue of material that oozes from the innards, hairs that seem to grow through the surrounding yellow-tinted plexiglass case — the sculpture was meant to shock and repulse the viewer.
But Ms. Nagy, an art conservator, was less interested in the overall impression of the piece and more in its condition. After four and a half decades, “Untitled” had gone bad — very bad.
The piece had been knocked around a bit over the years, leaving flecks of material here and there. A fluffy white substance seemed to be growing, like mold, in one area. Outside the case, the hairs had lost their color. Above all, the surface of the “meat” was cracking and peeling.
“This piece was in such bad shape that no one had the courage to buy it,” she said. But the Whitney Museum of American Art had, in 1993, and last year it hired Ms. Nagy to work on it and other pieces for a Thek retrospective. The exhibition opened last week.
Because they are often made from unusual materials using unconventional techniques, modern works of art can present conservation difficulties that old master paintings or Italianate sculptures do not. For Ms. Nagy, who for nearly two decades has specialized in modern and contemporary art, including large mechanical works by Claes Oldenburg and Minimalist metal sculptures by Donald Judd, the often painstaking task requires knowledge of art, material science and even engineering — with healthy doses of detective work and improvisation thrown in.
“In every profession you have paved roads for how to do things — established rules, established literature,” she said. “For modern and contemporary art you don’t really have that. You’re flying blind.”
With the Thek piece, flying blind meant not even being certain what it was made of. The sculpture seemed to have a core of plaster, the “hairs” were certainly monofilament nylon, and there was evidence that polyurethane resin and Day-Glo paint had been applied. But it was unclear what the “meat” itself, including the cracked fleshlike surface, consisted of.
As a first step in what became a six-month process of stabilizing and conserving the piece, Ms. Nagy needed to remove the plexiglass case, or vitrine. There were, of course, no handy instructions — Thek, like many artists, had apparently never considered that years after he made a piece someone would want to open it up.
“I hardly ever see artists who are really considering what is going to happen to their work,” Ms. Nagy said. “The point is to get it done and get the idea out.”
After spending most of a day quietly studying the piece and determining that the hairs only appeared to go through the case, she slowly removed the plexiglass. That allowed her to have the sculpture X-rayed. But it was too fragile to be moved to a museum with X-ray equipment, so a portable machine was brought to the Whitney’s storage facility in Manhattan.
The X-rays confirmed that the interior of the piece was plaster, perhaps with a foam core as well that did not show up on the films because of its light density.
The “meat” had been built up on the plaster, leaving delicate brush strokes that were faintly visible. But what material had Thek used?
A little detective work was in order. The artist’s longtime assistant, the artist Neil Jenney, remembered him using paraffin and carnauba wax on some projects. “We’d heard that it was wax,” Ms. Nagy said. “I smelled it on a few things. But we did not know exactly what it was.”
She sent a few tiny samples off to Narayan Khandekar, a conservation scientist, and other collaborators at the Harvard Art Museums.
“In some cases taking a sample damages something that is really pristine,” Ms. Nagy said. But obtaining the samples from “Untitled” was simple — she just picked up a few flecks that had come off over the years. “It’s like, Come on, make use of it,” she said.
At Harvard, the scientists used Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to analyze the samples. “They matched it very nicely with a beeswax sample,” Ms. Nagy said.
Analysis of other samples determined that what earlier conservators thought might be mold — and which Mr. Jenney had said might even be fake mold, placed by the artist for verisimilitude — was palmitic acid, which evaporated from the beeswax over time and crystallized in the enclosed space of the vitrine.
“Unless you can prove what it is, you’d rather leave it if you know it doesn’t ruin the piece,” Ms. Nagy said. In this case, she knew Thek was no chemist, so he could not have been responsible for the acid. It was an unintended consequence of enclosing the piece in the vitrine, so it was removed.
Now that she was certain that much of the sculpture was made of beeswax, Ms. Nagy could plan how to deal with the cracking and peeling on the surface. As it turned out, that required a good deal of improvisation.
Ms. Nagy grew up in Hungary, where her father was a mechanical engineer and her mother a chemist. Her brother became a mechanical engineer too. “I’m the cuckoo,” she said, but then corrected herself: “I’m basically doing the same things. But I have to deeply understand fine art materials and techniques. In that sense I have a different creative side.”
As a teenage art student, she was already specializing in sculpture, learning how to cast lead and bronze and taking plastering classes. Then she started doing conservation work and, in her words, “treated nearly everything: Egyptian cat mummies, prehistoric pieces, Inuit pieces, leather, ancient Chinese artifacts, Brazilian Baroque, Hungarian Baroque, French Baroque, Gothic, you name it.”
But then, she said, “I started to be interested in modern and contemporary works because I was doing my own art, too.” She was fascinated by polyester and fiberglass and other modern materials.
Beeswax is hardly modern — the Egyptians used it in mummification thousands of years ago. And the use of plaster for frescoes is only slightly more recent. With the Thek piece, Ms. Nagy said, the materials were not that terribly new, but the combination of them made the work extremely difficult.
Early on, a decision had been made not to repair the cracks cosmetically, following a basic conservation principle that less is often more. In this case, if Ms. Nagy could just bring the peeling edges together, the cracks would largely disappear when viewed through the yellow tint of the vitrine.
But flattening the peeling edges was no easy task. First, drawing on her experience, Ms. Nagy selected a mixture of resins that could consolidate the beeswax and penetrate the plaster. “I had to use something which also works for the plaster,” she said. “Unless I fix the structure inside I have no chance to fix the wax on top, because it will open up again.”
After diluting the mixture with solvent, she applied it drop by drop, from a syringe, allowing the liquid to work its way under the top layer of wax through capillary action.
With the right amount of resin in place — enough to bind the materials but not ooze out and be visible — the peeling edges could be flattened and brought together. Conservators have tiny hot-air guns and irons for this kind of work, but those tools might have melted the wax and destroyed Thek’s brush strokes. So instead, Ms. Nagy manipulated the wax with her hands, her fingers providing enough heat to soften it.
Once flattened, the wax had to be held in place, and the work was too fragile and oddly shaped, with all the hairs sticking up, to use clamps.
So Ms. Nagy made little sacks of lead pellets — some as small as her fingertip — that she could stack, pyramid-style, on the edges to keep them stable while the resin set. She could work on only one crack at a time, turning the sculpture for each one so that the sacks of pellets would not fall over, and then waiting several days for the resin to set. “It was a nightmare job,” she said.
But it succeeded — not in returning the piece to its exact original state, Ms. Nagy said, but in protecting it from further damage.
“Our purpose was actually not making it beautiful again,” she said. “We think it’s much better to be honest. The original impact what he wanted is here. Even when it was all in bits and pieces, even then people went ‘ewww.’ So it worked, even then. But we were really concerned about the actual stability of the piece.”
October 26th, 2010
The Paris Review
October 1, 2010
By Nick Antosca
When my dad gave me a stack of his old college paperbacks, I think the education he hoped to foster was aesthetic, not erotic. But one of the books was Lolita, and to a twelve-year-old boy with passable reading comprehension skills, the twelve-year-old girl with the “honey-hued shoulders” and the apple-patterned dress was, above all else, sexy:
There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs.
At least Nabokov was teaching me fresh vocabulary. I had to look up nates, of course, but another new word, nymphet, was helpfully defined throughout the book. Suddenly I saw the world through wiser eyes. Who among my seventh-grade classmates, I wondered with a frisson, was such a creature? What girl had that “soul-shattering, insidious charm” that, while invisible to me, made the antennae of certain adult males tremble?
For much of middle school, I’d been enamored of a smart and introverted girl in my grade. I’ll call her Anna. Red-haired, freckled, and painfully pale, Anna was hardly a dead ringer for Dolores Haze, but I was observant enough to recognize the “ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb”—that marked her as a nymphet.
My imagination required a corresponding nympholept, and the Humbert Humbert of Brunswick Middle School could only be our affable fourth-period teacher, a tall, handsome, offhandedly suave man who was soon slipping in Anna’s bedroom window to ravish her—and be ravished by her—on a nightly basis, as a perturbed cocker spaniel looked on. (I’d once overheard her mention her dog at school.) I loathed and admired him. How could I ever hope to compete?
What Nabokov prettified with a murderer’s fancy prose style, I saw with bracing clarity. This was 1995, and hardcore Internet porn was not yet easily accessible to twelve-year-olds, but my imagination was ambitious. No permutation of heterosexual sex escaped it.
Let me re-emphasize that their trysts took place entirely inside my head. I spent most fourth periods in a daze, playing obscene scenarios on a mental loop. Whenever I tired of one (her parents are sleeping, and Anna and our teacher have to be quiet), another effortlessly assembled itself (our class goes on an overnight field trip, and Anna and our teacher have adjoining rooms). I was like the narrator of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, constructing an elaborate erotic saga that starred two people I hardly knew.
Underneath it all ran a current of guilt. Even if I didn’t quite grasp the nature of my radical misreading of the novel—Humbert’s a predator, not a competitor—I understood that for the majority of readers it didn’t tend to provoke reactions like mine. How weird and fucked-up was I?
Years later, in high school, Anna became my first girlfriend. Occasionally I’d look at her and remember with a jolt of mortification the six weeks or so she spent as one of my mental sex puppets. We had a running game of asking each other, “What are you thinking?” at unexpected moments, and the unspoken rule was that you had to answer honestly. I always did, but she never asked at the right time. That was probably for the best.
October 24th, 2010
Lucas Ransom, 19, and his buddy Matthew Garcia were enjoying the waves at Surf Beach when a shark appeared out of nowhere and pulled Ransom under. ‘It was all really quick,’ Garcia said.
By Steve Chawkins and Catherine Saillant, Los Angeles Times
October 23, 2010
Six-foot waves were breaking when Lucas Ransom and his longtime buddy Matthew Garcia arrived at Surf Beach west of Lompoc on Friday morning.
No wind, glassy conditions — they agreed it was going to be a great session for Garcia on his surfboard and Lucas on his beat-up red bodyboard.
Before they plunged into the chilly waters, Ransom pulled out his cellphone.
“You wouldn’t believe these waves, Mom. I can’t wait to get to them,” he told Candace Ransom, who said have fun, call afterward.
That was the last she heard from the 19-year-old son she described as a fearless athlete with “the sweetest heart.”
They’d been in the waves about 45 minutes when a shark appeared out of nowhere and pulled Ransom under, Garcia said. There was no warning. The shark appeared to be about 18 to 20 feet long. Ransom looked at his friend a couple of feet away and said “Help me, dude,” before getting lost in the waves, Garcia said.
“It was very stealth,” he said. “You would have never known there was a shark in the water. It was all really quick.”
The water turned red, he said: “Imagine a river of blood. That’s what the wave looked like for a minute.”
Ransom’s left leg was ripped off at the pelvis, his parents said. Garcia tried to give him chest compressions as he pulled him to shore. But he was bleeding profusely and died before they got there.
Witnesses told authorities that the young men were about 100 yards offshore when the attack occurred. Fire personnel from Vandenberg Air Force Base pronounced Ransom dead at the scene. Authorities quickly closed Surf Beach and two other beaches nearby for at least 72 hours. Surf Beach is on Vandenberg’s 42 miles of coastline, but the public has access to it from California Highway 246.
Federal and state wildlife officials are working to identify the type of shark that attacked Ransom. A shark expert said Friday that, based on its behavior and Ransom’s injury, it most likely was a great white.
“It takes a shark of massive size and jaw to inflict that kind of injury,” said Andrew Nosal of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
Great whites seek prey at the water’s surface and attack with enormous ferocity from underneath, Nosal said, adding that the silhouette of a surfer on a bodyboard looks a lot like a sea lion on the surface. After they bite, it’s too late. “It may be mistaken identity,” he said.
About 75% of fatal shark attacks are caused by great whites. Even so, attacks are exceedingly rare, Nosal said. The last fatality in California was in 2008, when a 17-foot shark killed a retired veterinarian who was swimming off Solana Beach.
Lifeguards said that shark may have been a great white. The victim, a triathlete who regularly swam off the San Diego County beach, was wearing a wetsuit and may have been mistaken for a seal, they said.
Fellow swimmers who witnessed the 2008 attack said there was an extraordinary boil in the water before the shark struck, biting 66-year-old Dave Martin in the legs. He, too, suffered massive bleeding and was dead before he was pulled to shore.
Clay Garland, the head ranger at Jalama Beach, about an hour south of Friday’s attack site, said surfers have told him that they frequently spot sharks at Surf Beach. He said such sightings are rare at Jalama. “In the 12 years I’ve been here, we’ve only had two sightings,” he said.
There have been at least 11 other fatal shark attacks along California’s coast since 1950.
Ransom and Garcia were wearing wetsuits, said Matthew Ransom, Lucas’ father. The two swam competitively at Perris High School, close to the small rural town of Romoland in Riverside County, where Ransom grew up.
Matthew Ransom said his son always loved the water and became a lifeguard at 16. A few months after he completed his training, he helped resuscitate a boy who had been pulled unconscious from a community pool in Murrieta, where Ransom was a summer lifeguard.
The city honored Ransom and two other lifeguards for their efforts, his father said.
“He did CPR and got the little boy to choke up the water,” Matthew Ransom said. “I was really proud of him.”
Lucas was thrilled to be accepted at UC Santa Barbara — his “dream school” because it was so close to great surfing breaks on the coast, Candace Ransom said. He was a junior majoring in chemical engineering and hoped to attend pharmacy school after graduation, his mother said.
Garcia, 20, who was Ransom’s college roommate, is studying computer science. The pair surfed whenever they had a free moment, Garcia said. They also played together on the water polo team.
Garcia said his friend had a sunny, goofy personality, dressing in outrageous costumes and body paint each year for the wild Isla Vista Halloween parties.
“He was a great guy and great friend,” he said.
Matthew Ransom said the family takes consolation in the fact that Lucas died doing something he loved. “He was in his element,” his father said. “They had a big swell up there. He went out smiling.”
At Surf Beach on Friday, gray skies and rolling sand dunes greeted visitors, as did the sign solemnly posted by two Vandenberg Airmen in black berets.
“Warning. Recent shark attack. Beach closed.”
October 22nd, 2010
Johnny Hernandez/Getty Images
It’s become a cultural norm: women of a certain age cut off their hair.
By DOMINIQUE BROWNING
NY Times Published: October 21, 2010
MY mother hates it. My sister worries about it. My agent thinks I’m hiding behind it. A concerned friend suggests that it undermines my professional credibility. But in the middle of my life, I’m happy with it. Which is saying a lot about anything happening to my 55-year-old body.
I feel great about my hair.
I have long hair. I’m not talking about long enough to brush gently on my shoulder — when I tilt my head. I’m not talking about being a couple of weeks late to the hairdresser. I’m talking long. Long enough for a ponytail with swing to it. Long enough to sit against when I’m in a chair. Long enough to have to lift it up out of the sweater I’m pulling over my head. Long enough to braid.
What’s worse (to my critics) is that my hair is graying. Of course it is. Everyone’s hair is graying. But some of us aren’t ready to go there. That’s fine with me — I’m not judgmental about dyes. In fact, I find the range and variety of synthetic hair color to be an impressive testament to our unending chemical creativity. I’m particularly fascinated by that streaky kaleidoscopic thing some blondes do that looks kind of like Hair of Fawn. For my own head, I’m a tad paranoid about smelly, itchy potions.
No one seems to have any problems when a woman of a certain age cuts her hair off. It is considered the appropriate thing to do, as if being shorn is a way of releasing oneself from the locks of the past. I can see the appeal, and have, at times in my life, gone that route. Some women want to wash the men (or jobs) right out of their hair. Others of us have to have at them with scissors. Again, I do not judge. Go right ahead, be a 60-year-old pixie.
So why do people judge middle-aged long hair so harshly? I’ve heard enough, by now, to catalog the multitudinous complaints into several broad categories.
You’re Acting Out
Long hair is not the appropriate choice of grown-ups. It says rebellion. Hillary Rodham Clinton softens her do, and sets off a bizarre Howl of Angry Inches, as if she had betrayed some social compact. Well, my long hair is indeed a declaration of independence. I am rebelling, variously, against Procter & Gamble, my mother, Condé Nast and, undoubtedly, corporate America in general. Whereas it used to be short hair that was a hallmark of being a liberated woman — remember the feminist chop? I do; I did it — these days, long hair is a mark of liberation.
My mother has a lot to say about my looks: Where did you find that shirt? Did you forget your makeup? She recently suggested, fluttering her hands in the vicinity of her ears, that I get just a very little trim. As if she thought she could still trick me into the barber’s chair to re-enact one of the central traumas of my childhood, when I was marched into a hair salon (so that’s where mothers went?) with hair to my waist and came out an outraged, stunned, ravaged 7-year-old with a stylish, hateful pageboy.
My mother’s favorite expression to me is “Make an Effort.” What she doesn’t understand, of course, is that just because things don’t turn out the way she thinks they should doesn’t mean an effort wasn’t made. It is incredible how parents and children never let go of old habits of relating. My mother still makes me feel like a 15-year-old. However, that no longer feels like a bad thing, if you see what I mean.
You’re Still Living in the ’70s
And why not? I like being 55 going on 15. As far as I’m concerned, we never did get better role models than that gang of girls who sang their hearts out for us through lusty days and yearning nights: Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Cher. Emmylou Harris is still a goddess in my book, with that nimbus of silver hair floating past her shoulders. Next thing you know, we’ll take to wearing beaded leather headbands across our foreheads. And, I might add, that was a good look.
If you want to throw Princess Grace, Brigitte Bardot, Ingrid Bergman, Pussy Galore, Sophia Loren, Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Huppert, Julie Christie and Catherine Deneuve into the mix, who am I to complain? While those sexy sisters are hovering, I might note, with a sense of wonder, that Europeans are much more comfortable with long hair on women of a certain age. But then again, they’re more comfortable with women of a certain age in general. Perhaps I should move to Paris. Come to think of it, this would be making the kind of effort that would make my mother happy.
Long Hair Is High Maintenance
Yes, I’ll admit that it is a look that requires tender loving care. It is impossible to body surf without getting seaweed tangled up in it. It is impossible to get it completely dry when one is in a rush to get to a job interview or a blind date. It is impossible to forget one’s hairbrush when one travels. It is impossible to garden or farm or weave or cook without one’s hair getting in the way. I have knitted many a gray strand into many a scarf. Which, by the way, I consider a nice touch. Anyone who disagrees can send me back his Christmas present. It is impossible to let the vacuuming go for too long, lest the bezoars (new vocabulary word) become large enough to choke a tiger.
You would think that having long hair means you are spending a lot of money on hair products. I won’t even tell you what my Madison Avenue hairdresser, Joseph — the consummate high-end hair professional! — told me about how we shouldn’t even be using all those chemically laden shampoos. O.K., I will tell you: Those shampoos strip out the hair’s protective oils, and then you have to replace them with other chemical brews. He recommends regular hot water rinses and massaging of the scalp with fingertips. A little patience is required while the scalp’s natural oils rebalance themselves and — voilà — glossy, thick tresses, for free.
Is it not wonderfully sexy the way our grandmothers, those women of the prairie, or concrete canyons, would braid their hair up in the morning and let their cowboys unravel them at night? Is there not a variety of excellent looks for taming long hair in high winds? What is cooler than stopping to wrap a silk scarf around your mane before you step into a zippy convertible?
Men Like Long Hair Wait. You say that like it’s a bad thing? Long hair is archetypal. And everyone knows that archetypes are all tangled up with desire. There’s a reason mermaids, Selkies and witches have long hair. Ballerinas, too. We all know Rapunzel’s tale, how she sat at the top of her lonely tower, her long hair hanging out the window, until finally, a prince climbed its ropy length to rescue her. Or impregnate her, depending on which version you read. Either way, it worked.
Men like to play with women’s long hair. They like to run their fingers through heavy tresses. They like to loosen tight braids. They like it when long hair tents over their faces during soulful kisses. The long of it is that long hair is sexy. (So is short hair, of course, but in a different way, and we’re not making that case — yet.) The short of it is that long hair means there is always, at least, hope.
October 21st, 2010
Dismountable house, 1944
Metal & wood
6 x 6 m
19.6 x 19.6 feet
October 20 through December 23
October 20th, 2010
Katherine Taylor for The New York Times
OCEAN GEMS A bright reddish piece was named shard of the year at the North American Sea Glass Festival.
By CORNELIA DEAN
NY Times Published: October 18, 2010
HYANNIS, Mass. — Laura McHenry started walking Cape Cod beaches searching for sea glass a few years ago, when her marriage was breaking up and she was looking for something she and her daughter Katie, could do together for fun.
“Sometimes we’ll just sit on the rocks and just comb through,” said Ms. McHenry, who lives in Centerville, Mass., as Katie, 10, displayed her finds nearby. “It’s a great place to talk.”
History draws Rachel Mack, of Grandview-on-Hudson, N.Y. “These could have come from the Half Moon,” she said, pointing to white clay pipe stems, each an inch or two long and perhaps half an inch in diameter. She finds these artifacts when she kayaks along the shore of the river Henry Hudson sailed 400 years ago.
Richard LaMotte’s wife got him into it. She is a jeweler who works with sea glass, and he went with her on expeditions to Chesapeake Bay beaches near their home in Chestertown, Md. Mr. LaMotte, who works for a water analysis equipment company, got interested in how water acidity affected the glass, and how the chemicals used to make glass changed its color over the decades. Soon he was consulting archaeologists and studying the history of American glass manufacturing. Now his book, “Pure Sea Glass” (Sea Glass Publishing, 2004), is a bible for collectors.
They and hundreds of other enthusiasts gathered here this month for the annual meeting of the North American Sea Glass Association, to celebrate a hobby that seems an odd mix of amateur archaeology, environmental monitoring and antique collecting, with a little chemistry thrown in.
At the meeting they trade shards of glass and porcelain, buy and sell sea glass jewelry and crafts, seek expert help identifying their finds and hear presentations on shipwrecks, the glass industry and other topics.
Membership is growing and enthusiastic, Mary Beth Beuke of Sequim, Wash., the group’s president, said in an interview, and sales of sea glass and its crafts are booming, even though the glass itself “is getting harder to find.”
Though sea glass collectors talk about bottles, porcelain and other cargo lost in shipwrecks, most sea glass originated far more prosaically, in garbage dumped into the ocean or piled in coastal landfills. A blue shard may be the remains of a Noxzema jar or a bottle of Bromo-Seltzer; old Coke and beer bottles produce pale-green and dark-brown shards. Now this kind of dumping is mostly a thing of the past; bottles are made of thinner glass, and plastic has replaced glass in many products.
Still, collectors and volunteers at the meeting say there is plenty to find if you know where and when to look, and what to look for. According to Mr. LaMotte, orange shards often come from glass items manufactured in the Art Deco period or from tableware manufactured in the early 1900s. Red shards are rare — old Schlitz beer bottles are one source. Some yellow shards are from glass made with uranium dioxide. These shards glow when exposed to an ultraviolet or “black” light.
But sea glass hunters do not necessarily limit themselves to glass. Some look for crockery shards, bottle stoppers, fragments of old toys, marbles — virtually anything that left human hands to be tumbled by the sea.
Devoted collectors find themselves studying glass in antique shops, at shows for bottle collectors and in museums. Eventually, some become adept at identifying even tiny finds.
At her display, Ms. Mack picked up something that looked like a dark gray stone. Small chips revealed its shiny black interior — “glass from the 1700s,” she said. “It probably held beer.”
The meeting also offered plenty of advice on finding good hunting spots. Seek out shorelines where there was manufacturing or shipping at least 50 or 100 years ago, accomplished collectors advise. For example, Ms. Mack said she has good hunting at the sites of former cross-Hudson ferry routes, where she finds the remains of bottles thrown overboard a century or more ago.
Sites with prevalent onshore winds are best, Mr. LaMotte advises in his book, and the best time to look is the first low tide after a big storm.
“It’s frustrating, but it’s fun,” said Vickie Carter of Newark, Del., a volunteer at the meeting. She collected sea glass as a child in Montauk, on Long Island, but when she took her husband there more recently, the pickings were slim. Today they hunt Woodland Beach, Del., in search of what she calls “the perfect piece — the perfect blue, the perfect red, the perfect orange.”
A perfect piece, she said, is smooth and totally frosted. When they find one, she said, “it goes into a jar and we continue to look.”
Carole Lambert, whose “Sea Glass Hunter’s Handbook” is her third on the subject, confesses that her interest feels, at times, “a bit loopy — picking up garbage from the beach.”
October 19th, 2010
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 17, 2010
Last month a Chinese trawler operating in Japanese-controlled waters collided with two vessels of Japan’s Coast Guard. Japan detained the trawler’s captain; China responded by cutting off Japan’s access to crucial raw materials.
And there was nowhere else to turn: China accounts for 97 percent of the world’s supply of rare earths, minerals that play an essential role in many high-technology products, including military equipment. Sure enough, Japan soon let the captain go.
I don’t know about you, but I find this story deeply disturbing, both for what it says about China and what it says about us. On one side, the affair highlights the fecklessness of U.S. policy makers, who did nothing while an unreliable regime acquired a stranglehold on key materials. On the other side, the incident shows a Chinese government that is dangerously trigger-happy, willing to wage economic warfare on the slightest provocation.
Some background: The rare earths are elements whose unique properties play a crucial role in applications ranging from hybrid motors to fiber optics. Until the mid-1980s the United States dominated production, but then China moved in.
“There is oil in the Middle East; there is rare earth in China,” declared Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s economic transformation, in 1992. Indeed, China has about a third of the world’s rare earth deposits. This relative abundance, combined with low extraction and processing costs — reflecting both low wages and weak environmental standards — allowed China’s producers to undercut the U.S. industry.
You really have to wonder why nobody raised an alarm while this was happening, if only on national security grounds. But policy makers simply stood by as the U.S. rare earth industry shut down. In at least one case, in 2003 — a time when, if you believed the Bush administration, considerations of national security governed every aspect of U.S. policy — the Chinese literally packed up all the equipment in a U.S. production facility and shipped it to China.
The result was a monopoly position exceeding the wildest dreams of Middle Eastern oil-fueled tyrants. And even before the trawler incident, China showed itself willing to exploit that monopoly to the fullest. The United Steelworkers recently filed a complaint against Chinese trade practices, stepping in where U.S. businesses fear to tread because they fear Chinese retaliation. The union put China’s imposition of export restrictions and taxes on rare earths — restrictions that give Chinese production in a number of industries an important competitive advantage — at the top of the list.
Then came the trawler event. Chinese restrictions on rare earth exports were already in violation of agreements China made before joining the World Trade Organization. But the embargo on rare earth exports to Japan was an even more blatant violation of international trade law.
Oh, and Chinese officials have not improved matters by insulting our intelligence, claiming that there was no official embargo. All of China’s rare earth exporters, they say — some of them foreign-owned — simultaneously decided to halt shipments because of their personal feelings toward Japan. Right.
So what are the lessons of the rare earth fracas?
First, and most obviously, the world needs to develop non-Chinese sources of these materials. There are extensive rare earth deposits in the United States and elsewhere. However, developing these deposits and the facilities to process the raw materials will take both time and financial support. So will a prominent alternative: “urban mining,” a k a recycling of rare earths and other materials from used electronic devices.
Second, China’s response to the trawler incident is, I’m sorry to say, further evidence that the world’s newest economic superpower isn’t prepared to assume the responsibilities that go with that status.
Major economic powers, realizing that they have an important stake in the international system, are normally very hesitant about resorting to economic warfare, even in the face of severe provocation — witness the way U.S. policy makers have agonized and temporized over what to do about China’s grossly protectionist exchange-rate policy. China, however, showed no hesitation at all about using its trade muscle to get its way in a political dispute, in clear — if denied — violation of international trade law.
Couple the rare earth story with China’s behavior on other fronts — the state subsidies that help firms gain key contracts, the pressure on foreign companies to move production to China and, above all, that exchange-rate policy — and what you have is a portrait of a rogue economic superpower, unwilling to play by the rules. And the question is what the rest of us are going to do about it.
October 17th, 2010By EMILY STEEL And GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
October 16
The Wall Street Journal
Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.
The problem has ties to the growing field of companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online—a practice the Journal has been examining in its What They Know series. It’s unclear how long the breach was in place. On Sunday, a Facebook spokesman said it is taking steps to “dramatically limit” the exposure of users’ personal information.
“A Facebook user ID may be inadvertently shared by a user’s Internet browser or by an application,” the spokesman said. Knowledge of an ID “does not permit access to anyone’s private information on Facebook,” he said, adding that the company would introduce new technology to contain the problem identified by the Journal.
“Our technical systems have always been complemented by strong policy enforcement, and we will continue to rely on both to keep people in control of their information,” the Facebook official said.
“Apps” are pieces of software that let Facebook’s 500 million users play games or share common interests with one another. The Journal found that all of the 10 most popular apps on Facebook were transmitting users’ IDs to outside companies.
The apps, ranked by research company Inside Network Inc. (based on monthly users), include Zynga Game Network Inc.’s FarmVille, with 59 million users, and Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille. Three of the top 10 apps, including FarmVille, also have been transmitting personal information about a user’s friends to outside companies.
Most apps aren’t made by Facebook, but by independent software developers. Several apps became unavailable to Facebook users after the Journal informed Facebook that the apps were transmitting personal information; the specific reason for their unavailability remains unclear.
The information being transmitted is one of Facebook’s basic building blocks: the unique “Facebook ID” number assigned to every user on the site. Since a Facebook user ID is a public part of any Facebook profile, anyone can use an ID number to look up a person’s name, using a standard Web browser, even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private. For other users, the Facebook ID reveals information they have set to share with “everyone,” including age, residence, occupation and photos.
The apps reviewed by the Journal were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities.
Defenders of online tracking argue that this kind of surveillance is benign because it is conducted anonymously. In this case, however, the Journal found that one data-gathering firm, RapLeaf Inc., had linked Facebook user ID information obtained from apps to its own database of Internet users, which it sells. RapLeaf also transmitted the Facebook IDs it obtained to a dozen other firms, the Journal found.
RapLeaf said that transmission was unintentional. “We didn’t do it on purpose,” said Joel Jewitt, vice president of business development for RapLeaf.
Facebook said it previously has “taken steps … to significantly limit Rapleaf’s ability to use any Facebook-related data.”
Facebook prohibits app makers from transferring data about users to outside advertising and data companies, even if a user agrees. The Journal’s findings shed light on the challenge of policing those rules for the 550,000 apps on its site.
The Journal’s findings are the latest challenge for Facebook, which has been criticized in recent years for modifying its privacy rules to expose more of a user’s information. This past spring, the Journal found that Facebook was transmitting the ID numbers to advertising companies, under some circumstances, when a user clicked on an ad. Facebook subsequently discontinued the practice.
“This is an even more complicated technical challenge than a similar issue we successfully addressed last spring on Facebook.com,” a Facebook spokesman said, “but one that we are committed to addressing.”
The privacy issue follows Facebook’s effort just this month to give its users more control over its apps, which privacy activists had cited as a potential hole in users’ ability to control who sees their information. On Oct. 6, Facebook created a control panel that lets users see which apps are accessing which categories of information about them. It indicates, for example, when an application accesses a user’s “basic information” (including a user ID and name). However, it doesn’t detail what information friends’ applications have accessed about a user.
Facebook apps transform Facebook into a hub for all kinds of activity, from playing games to setting up a family tree. Apps are considered an important way for Facebook to extend the usefulness of its network. The company says 70% of users use apps each month.
Applications are also a growing source of revenue beyond advertising for Facebook itself, which sells its own virtual currency that can be used to pay for games.
Following an investigation by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, Facebook in June limited applications to accessing only the public parts of a user’s profile, unless the user grants additional permission. (Canadian officials later expressed satisfaction with Facebook’s steps.) Previously, applications could tap any data the user had access to, including detailed profiles and information about a user’s friends.
It’s not clear if developers of many of the apps transmitting Facebook ID numbers even knew that their apps were doing so. The apps were using a common Web standard, known as a “referer,” which passes on the address of the last page viewed when a user clicks on a link. On Facebook and other social-networking sites, referers can expose a user’s identity.
The company says it has disabled thousands of applications at times for violating its policies. It’s unclear how many, if any, of those cases involved passing user information to marketing companies.
Facebook also appeared to have shut down some applications the Journal found to be transmitting user IDs, including several created by LOLapps Media Inc., a San Francisco company backed with $4 million in venture capital. LOLapp’s applications include Gift Creator, with 3.5 million monthly active users, Quiz Creator, with 1.4 million monthly active users, Colorful Butterflies and Best Friends Gifts.
Since Friday, users attempting to access those applications received either an error message or were reverted to Facebook’s home screen.
“We have taken immediate action to disable all applications that violate our terms,” a Facebook spokesman said.
A spokeswoman for LOLapps Media declined to comment.
The applications transmitting Facebook IDs may have breached their own privacy policies, as well as industry standards, which say sites shouldn’t share and advertisers shouldn’t collect personally identifiable information without users’ permission. Zynga, for example, says in its privacy policy that it “does not provide any Personally Identifiable Information to third-party advertising companies.”
A Zynga spokeswoman said, “Zynga has a strict policy of not passing personally identifiable information to any third parties. We look forward to working with Facebook to refine how web technologies work to keep people in control of their information.”
The most expansive use of Facebook user information uncovered by the Journal involved RapLeaf. The San Francisco company compiles and sells profiles of individuals based in part on their online activities.
The Journal found that some LOLapps applications, as well as the Family Tree application, were transmitting users’ Facebook ID numbers to RapLeaf. RapLeaf then linked those ID numbers to dossiers it had previously assembled on those individuals, according to RapLeaf. RapLeaf then embedded that information in an Internet-tracking file known as a “cookie.”
RapLeaf says it strips out the user’s name when it embeds the information in the cookie and shares that information for ad targeting. However, The Wall Street Journal found that RapLeaf transmitted Facebook user IDs to a dozen other advertising and data firms, including Google Inc.’s Invite Media.
All 12 companies said that they didn’t collect, store or use the information.
Ilya Nikolayev, chief executive of Familybuilder, maker of the Family Tree application, said in an email, “It is Familybuilder’s corporate policy to keep any actual, potential, current or prior business partnerships, relationships, customer details, and any similar information confidential. As this story relates to a company other than Familybuilder, we have nothing further to contribute.”
October 17th, 2010
By DANIELLE AUBERT, LANA CAVAR AND NATASHA CHANDANI AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY CORINE VERMEULEN
October 14, 2010
NY Times
A few blocks east of Detroit’s downtown, just across Interstate 375, sits Lafayette Park, an enclave of single- and two-story modernist townhouses set amid a forest of locust trees. Like hundreds of developments nationwide, they were the result of postwar urban renewal; unlike almost all of them, it had a trio of world-class designers behind it: Ludwig Hilbersheimer as urban planner, Alfred Caldwell as landscape designer and Mies van der Rohe as architect.
The townhouses, plus three high-rise buildings, were built between 1958 and 1962 on land previously occupied by a working-class African-American neighborhood, Black Bottom. While much of Detroit began a steep decline soon after, Lafayette Park stayed afloat, its residents bucking the trend of suburban flight. Lafayette Park today is one of the most racially integrated neighborhoods in the city. It is economically stable, despite the fact that Detroit has suffered enormous population loss and strained city services.
We wanted to hear how residents — especially people with long-term, intimate knowledge of living with Mies — think about this unique modernist environment and how they confront and adapt it to meet their needs. During our research, we were struck by the casual attitude that many residents have toward the architecture. Then again, Detroit has an abundance of beautiful housing options: one can live in a huge Victorian mansion, a beautiful arts and crafts house or a cavernous loft-conversion space in a former factory. Living in a townhouse built by a renowned architect isn’t as noteworthy as one might think. At the same time, such nonchalance is a mark of success: the homes are great because they work, not because they come affixed with a famous name.
Indeed, their beauty isn’t always obvious. There is a kind of austere uniformity to the Lafayette Park townhouses when viewed from the outside. Some visitors find them unappealing; one contractor described them as “bunkers.” The interior layouts are nearly identical. The units are compact in size and some people find them too small, though the floor-to-ceiling windows on the front and back of each building open the living spaces to the outside.
To be sure, there are people who live in Lafayette Park who are architecture enthusiasts, keenly aware of Mies van der Rohe’s place in history, who were drawn here specifically because he designed these buildings. But they are a minority. Many more residents were attracted to the lush landscape, the sense of community, the gigantic windows and the convenience of living downtown.
While they may have strong aesthetic preferences, the residents we spoke with do not necessarily favor midcentury modernism in their interiors or architecture. But they make it work: several people remarked on the way the interiors in the Lafayette Park townhouses can function as blank canvasses for a variety of decorating styles. Indeed, the best design doesn’t force a personality on its residents. Instead, it helps them bring out their own.
October 16th, 2010