Through October 30

Yancey Richardson

by Jonathan Franzen
October 11, 2010
The New Yorker

In the early nineties, when I reached the point of having no money at all, I began to borrow people’s houses. The first house I sat belonged to a professor at my alma mater. He and his wife were afraid that their son, a student at the college, would throw parties in their absence, and so they urged me to consider the house my private and exclusive home. This was already something of a struggle, because it’s in the nature of a borrowed house that its closets will be hung with someone else’s bathrobes, its refrigerator glutted with someone else’s condiments, its shower drain plugged with someone else’s hair. And when, inevitably, the son showed up at the house and began to run around barefoot, and then invited his friends over and partied late into the night, I felt sick with powerlessness and envy. I must have been a repellent spectre of silent grievance indeed, because one morning, in the kitchen, without my having said a word, the son looked up from his bowl of cold cereal and brutally set me straight: “This is my house, Jonathan.”

A few summers later, having less than no money at all, I borrowed the grand stucco house of two older friends, Ken and Joan, in Media, Pennsylvania. My orientation occurred one evening over Martinis that Ken gently chided Joan for having “bruised” with melting ice. I sat with them on their mossy rear terrace while they enumerated, with a kind of mellow resignation, their house’s problems. The foam mattress in their master bedroom was crumbling and cratered; their beautiful carpets were being reduced to dust by an apparently unstoppable moth infestation. Ken made himself a second Martini, and then, gazing up at a part of the roof that leaked during thunderstorms, he delivered a self-summation that offered me an unexpected glimpse of how I might live more happily, a vision of potential liberation from the oppressive sense of financial responsibility that my parents had bequeathed me. Holding his Martini glass at a casual angle, Ken reflected to no one in particular, “We have . . . always lived beyond our means.”

The only thing I had to do to earn my keep in Media was mow Ken and Joan’s extensive lawn. Mowing lawns has always seemed to me among the most despair-inducing of human activities, and, by way of following Ken’s example of living beyond one’s means, I delayed the first mowing until the grass was so long that I had to stop and empty the clippings bag every five minutes. I delayed the second mowing even longer. By the time I got around to it, the lawn had been colonized by a large clan of earth-burrowing hornets. They had bodies the size of double-A batteries and were even more aggressively proprietary than the son in the first house I’d borrowed. I called Ken and Joan at their summer house, in Vermont, and Ken told me that I needed to visit the hornet homes one by one after dark, when the inhabitants were sleeping, and pour gasoline into the burrows and set them on fire.

I knew enough to be afraid of gasoline. On the night I ventured out to the lawn with a flashlight and a gas can, I took care to recap the can after I’d poured gas into a burrow, and to take the can some distance away before returning to throw a lighted match at the hole. In a few of the holes, I heard a piteous feeble buzzing before I set off the inferno, but my empathy with the hornets was outweighed by my pyromaniac pleasure in the explosions and by the satisfaction of ridding my home of intruders. Eventually, I got careless with the gas can, not bothering to recap it between killings, and there came then, naturally, a match that refused to be lit. While I struck it on the box, again and again, and then fumbled for a better match, gasoline vapors were flowing invisibly back down the slope toward where I’d left the can. When I finally managed to ignite the burrow and run down the slope, I found myself pursued and overtaken by a river of flame. It expired just short of the can, but it was an hour before I could stop shaking. I’d nearly burned myself out of a home, and the home wasn’t even mine. However modest my means were, it was seeming preferable, after all, to live within them. I never house-sat again. ♦

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: October 9, 2010

Time for a pop quiz.

The New York Times reported recently on a Pew Research Center poll in which religious people turned out to be remarkably uninformed about religion. Almost half of Catholics didn’t understand Communion. Most Protestants didn’t know that Martin Luther started the Reformation. Almost half of Jews didn’t realize Maimonides was Jewish. And atheists were among the best informed about religion.

So let me give everybody another chance. And given the uproar about Islam, I’ll focus on extremism and fundamentalism — and, as you’ll see, there’s a larger point to this quiz. Note that some questions have more than one correct choice; answers are at the end.

1. Which holy book stipulates that a girl who does not bleed on her wedding night should be stoned to death?
a. Koran
b. Old Testament
c. (Hindu) Upanishads

2. Which holy text declares: “Let there be no compulsion in religion”?
a. Koran
b. Gospel of Matthew
c. Letter of Paul to the Romans

3. The terrorists who pioneered the suicide vest in modern times, and the use of women in terror attacks, were affiliated with which major religion?
a. Islam
b. Christianity
c. Hinduism

4. “Every child is touched by the devil as soon as he is born and this contact makes him cry. Excepted are Mary and her Son.” This verse is from:
a. Letters of Paul to the Corinthians
b. The Book of Revelation
c. An Islamic hadith, or religious tale

5. Which holy text is sympathetic to slavery?
a. Old Testament
b. New Testament
c. Koran

6. In the New Testament, Jesus’ views of homosexuality are:
a. strongly condemnatory
b. forgiving
c. never mentioned

7. Which holy text urges responding to evil with kindness, saying: “repel the evil deed with one which is better.”
a. Gospel of Luke
b. Book of Isaiah
c. Koran

8. Which religious figure preaches tolerance by suggesting that God looks after all peoples and leads them all to their promised lands?
a. Muhammad
b. Amos
c. Jesus

9. Which of these religious leaders was a polygamist?
a. Jacob
b. King David
c. Muhammad

10. What characterizes Muhammad’s behavior toward the Jews of his time?
a. He killed them.
b. He married one.
c. He praised them as a chosen people.

11. Which holy scripture urges that the “little ones” of the enemy be dashed against the stones?
a. Book of Psalms
b. Koran
c. Leviticus

12. Which holy scripture suggests beating wives who misbehave?
a. Koran
b. Letters of Paul to the Corinthians
c. Book of Judges

13. Which religious leader is quoted as commanding women to be silent during services?
a. The first Dalai Lama
b. St. Paul
c. Muhammad

Answers:
1. b. Deuteronomy 22:21.
2. a. Koran, 2:256. But other sections of the Koran do describe coercion.
3. c. Most early suicide bombings were by Tamil Hindus (some secular) in Sri Lanka and India.
4. c. Hadith. Islam teaches that Jesus was a prophet to be revered.
5. All of the above.
6. c. Other parts of the New and Old Testaments object to homosexuality, but there’s no indication of Jesus’ views.
7. c. Koran, 41:34. Jesus says much the same thing in different words.
8. b. Amos 9:7
9. all of them
10. all of these. Muhammad’s Jewish wife was seized in battle, which undermines the spirit of the gesture. By some accounts he had a second Jewish wife as well.
11. a. Psalm 137
12. a. Koran 4:34
13. b. St. Paul, both in 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, but many scholars believe that neither section was actually written by Paul.

And yes, the point of this little quiz is that religion is more complicated than it sometimes seems, and that we should be wary of rushing to inflammatory conclusions about any faith, especially based on cherry-picking texts. The most crucial element is perhaps not what is in our scriptures, but what is in our hearts.

Scattered Papers with Belgium Women on Violet Background, 2010
Acrylic, pencil on canvas
28 x 22 inches / 71,1 x 55,9 cm

Black Globe, 2010
Acrylic, pencil on canvas
30 x 24 inches / 76,2 x 61 cm

Black and White Composition with Globes, 2010
Acrylic, collage on canvas
24 x 20 inches / 61 x 50,8 cm

Through October 30

Kimmerich

Unravel
2010
oil on linen
41 x 29 inches
AO050

Through October 17

Lisa Cooley

Reverse Grey Scale, 2008
Wood, Steel, Paint, Epoxy
69 x 98 x 29 inches
175.3 x 248.9 x 73.7 cm

Opens October 8, 6-8 pm
Through November 13

Harris Lieberman

Altman Siegel at Frieze

Mike Albans for The New York Times

By KIRK JOHNSON
NY Times Published: October 6, 2010

DENVER — It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees?

Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.

Liaisons between the military and academia are nothing new, of course. World War II, perhaps the most profound example, ended in an atomic strike on Japan in 1945 largely on the shoulders of scientist-soldiers in the Manhattan Project. And a group of scientists led by Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana in Missoula has researched bee-related applications for the military in the past — developing, for example, a way to use honeybees in detecting land mines.

But researchers on both sides say that colony collapse may be the first time that the defense machinery of the post-Sept. 11 Homeland Security Department and academia have teamed up to address a problem that both sides say they might never have solved on their own.

“Together we could look at things nobody else was looking at,” said Colin Henderson, an associate professor at the University of Montana’s College of Technology and a member of Dr. Bromenshenk’s “Bee Alert” team.

Human nature and bee nature were interconnected in how the puzzle pieces came together. Two brothers helped foster communication across disciplines. A chance meeting and a saved business card proved pivotal. Even learning how to mash dead bees for analysis — a skill not taught at West Point — became a factor.

One perverse twist of colony collapse that has compounded the difficulty of solving it is that the bees do not just die — they fly off in every direction from the hive, then die alone and dispersed. That makes large numbers of bee autopsies — and yes, entomologists actually do those — problematic.

Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal.

“It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”

Research at the University of California, San Francisco, had already identified the fungus as part of the problem. And several RNA-based viruses had been detected as well. But the Army/Montana team, using a new software system developed by the military for analyzing proteins, uncovered a new DNA-based virus, and established a linkage to the fungus, called N. ceranae.

“Our mission is to have detection capability to protect the people in the field from anything biological,” said Charles H. Wick, a microbiologist at Edgewood. Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see what the Army’s analytic software tool could do. “We brought it to bear on this bee question, which is how we field-tested it,” he said.

The Army software system — an advance itself in the growing field of protein research, or proteomics — is designed to test and identify biological agents in circumstances where commanders might have no idea what sort of threat they face. The system searches out the unique proteins in a sample, then identifies a virus or other microscopic life form based on the proteins it is known to contain. The power of that idea in military or bee defense is immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use what they already know to find something they did not even know they were looking for.

But it took a family connection — through David Wick, Charles’s brother — to really connect the dots. When colony collapse became news a few years ago, Mr. Wick, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Montana in the 1990s for the outdoor lifestyle, saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about bees.

Mr. Wick knew of his brother’s work in Maryland, and remembered meeting Dr. Bromenshenk at a business conference. A retained business card and a telephone call put the Army and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same blossom.

The first steps were awkward, partly because the Army lab was not used to testing bees, or more specifically, to extracting bee proteins. “I’m guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk,” Charles Wick said. “It was very complicated.”

The process eventually was refined. A mortar and pestle worked better than the desktop, and a coffee grinder worked best of all for making good bee paste.

Scientists in the project emphasize that their conclusions are not the final word. The pattern, they say, seems clear, but more research is needed to determine, for example, how further outbreaks might be prevented, and how much environmental factors like heat, cold or drought might play a role.

They said that combination attacks in nature, like the virus and fungus involved in bee deaths, are quite common, and that one answer in protecting bee colonies might be to focus on the fungus — controllable with antifungal agents — especially when the virus is detected.

Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death. One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility, he said, is a kind of insect insanity.

In any event, the university’s bee operation itself proved vulnerable just last year, when nearly every bee disappeared over the course of the winter.

Robert Wright for The New York Times

Peter Taft and Cassius at Lady Jay’s bar in Brooklyn.

By GUY TREBAY
NY Times Published: October 6, 2010

SO a dog walks into a bar. Honestly, no joke. The dog is a German shepherd and he’s not just any dog, he’s a hero. He’s a shelter dog saved from a pound as a puppy and destined for euthanasia until some alert human spotted a spark in him — some cleverness, some drive — and set in motion a series of events that led to him becoming a search-and-rescue animal. Now he is one of those dogs you sometimes see in the news, snout to the rubble in the wreckage of disasters in Haiti, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, at ground zero.

The dog is named Cassius. The bar is Lady Jay’s in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Cassius comes into the place like he owns it, like he’s known there, and he is. It is the last day of an unseasonal heat wave, and as Cassius enters he automatically lopes past the long wood bar itself, making for the backyard deck. Circling the space to give it a once-over, he concludes that all is well and flops down in a furry heap.

“Cassius, when he’s working, is total concentration,” said Peter Taft, who follows the dog into the place. “He definitely has an ‘off’ switch, though.”

Cassius, when he’s working, finds people in wreckage. That is why the American Kennel Club just gave him its Humane Fund Award for Canine Excellence. He is one of five dogs to receive the award this year, but only he has sniffed out signs of life after the January earthquake in Haiti, in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city.

He keeps company with Mr. Taft, a rock ’n’ roll and fashion photographer who also happens to have advanced certification in many aspects of emergent and austere medicine. On this particular day Mr. Taft is wearing a beat-up straw hat, a bushy ginger beard and scruffy jeans. The black polish on his fingernails is chipping. His look — remnant CBGB rocker washed ashore among skinny-jean hipsters of Williamsburg — lends credence to Mr. Taft’s assertion that, growing up as an “art geek” in Manhattan, he never saw himself as a search-and-rescue kind of guy.

“I didn’t think that was me,” he said, referring to the rescue experts he, like so many others, first became aware of in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. “I remember seeing them hand the dogs up into the building” to sniff for bodies, he said. (The bombing claimed 168 lives, including those of 19 children.) “I thought that kind of work was for tougher guys than me.”

A child of lawyers, Mr. Taft was born in Manhattan, raised on the Upper East Side and educated at boarding school. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a bachelor’s degree in theater. His credentials are hardly indicators of a future spent hanging out with members of the 82nd Airborne Division in post-earthquake Haiti.

And that is where Cassius comes in. Like every hero, canine or otherwise, Cassius has his own narrative trajectory. Rescued at a Milwaukee animal shelter by someone who spotted a quality in the small “goofball puppy,” the German shepherd was sent at two months to the Northwest K9 Academy in Seattle to begin training as a work animal. There he was discovered and adopted by Mr. Taft, who had been inspired to involve himself in training dogs for rescue work by another German shepherd, this one belonging to a friend, the blind mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer.

Mr. Weihenmayer, who has climbed the highest peaks on seven continents, once characterized his relationship to his dog, Wizard, like this: Weihenmayer is the big-picture guy, Wizard the detail man. Like every dog hero, Wizard and Cassius surpass the ordinary expectations of dogs as chattel or faithful, trusted servants. They belong to a category of animal partners that, if not altogether equal to humans, share some of Homo sapiens’s better qualities. For Wizard, Mr. Weihenmayer said of his dog, guiding a blind man was the canine equivalent of becoming president. Cassius, Mr. Taft said, seems almost fated for the work he does searching for survivors in a disaster’s aftermath.

“Once he grew into his potential, there was no limit to his dedication,” he said of his dog. “His work ethic is just incredibly strong.”

Cassius’ particular specialty is as a live-find animal: dogs that sound an alert when they sense signs of life undetectable by other means. It was his work in Haiti that led an independent judging panel to single Cassius out from among hundreds of nominees for the ACE award, which will be conferred on Cassius Oct. 16 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, said Lisa Peterson, a kennel club spokeswoman.

“It’s basically a celebration of the work of the dog and the actions of the dog, as well as a way to celebrate the incredible canine-human bond,” Ms. Peterson said.

Live finds were few in Haiti, Mr. Taft said. Typical of his experience there was a morning alert that an aftershock had sent a group of houses tumbling into a ravine. “There was a possibility of a 2- or 3-year-old at the bottom of the pit and a baby sitter,” he said, and as he spoke, it took much imagination to transport this hipster with chipped nail varnish and his sleek pet slumped on the deck of a bar to a distant ravine in a disaster-ravaged country.

Mr. Taft and Cassius joined a convoy of pickups, with military Humvees at the front and rear, and drove to the crater. There, man and dog descended a 12-foot-ladder, Cassius slung across Mr. Taft’s shoulders. As it happened, the pit was less a rescue scene than a grave; there were no survivors. “But we were able to ID the 8- or 9-year-old baby-sitter’s cadaver, ” Mr. Taft said, as well as what he chillingly termed the “viable remains” of a 2-year-old.

“In Haiti, I saw with my own eyes Cassius and Peter save a man from under a rock, and that’s heroic,” Cmdr. James Robinson, a retired New York City firefighter who is known as Rocky, said of the pair. Mr. Robinson is executive director of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps, the nonprofit that Mr. Taft accompanied to Haiti on a plane lent to the group by a Scientologist movie star. Back at the top that day in Haiti, Mr. Taft rewarded Cassius the same way he always does. How is that, he was asked.

“With a Vienna sausage,” he said, and at the sound of that the dog on the deck of the bar pricked up his ears.

“Next to a Subway hero,” Mr. Taft said, “Vienna sausage is his favorite thing in the world.”

Wonder Association

By Charles Q. Choi
October 5, 2010 |
Wired Magazine

Browse through a few typical online comment threads, and the need for anger management quickly becomes clear, likely sending sane people scurrying off to more pleasant corners of the internet. Now scientists at Yahoo and their colleagues are devising ways to automatically flag inordinately irate commenters to keep them from ruining online conversations for others.

To help curb so-called trolls who spew disruptive comments as a kind of sport, researchers developed techniques for automatically identifying negative posts that are off-topic while staying away from relevant ones. But rather than banishing hostile jerks or deleting their comments, the system could someday help steer them into more productive discussions.

“We might want mechanisms where you can ask people to tone it down, or ‘take it outside’ to not disrupt others, or use humor to defuse situations,” said cognitive scientist Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo Research, who presented the work Sept. 30 at the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Atlanta.

Churchill and computer scientist Sara Owsley Sood of Pomona College analyzed 782,934 comments from 168,095 distinct threads from October 2009 articles on the news-story commenting site Yahoo! Buzz. To determine whether comments were on-topic or not, they first used the same techniques used by search engines to evaluate the relevance of a site to a query: The more words a comment contained that were also found in the story it was connected to, the more on-topic the comment was judged.

Next, the comments were judged as either angry, happy or sad. For example, “sucks” is linked with anger. The system learned to recognize emotions by reading LiveJournal posts, which bloggers can tag with moods such as “creative,” and analyzing which word combinations were linked most with certain moods.

The algorithms fared well at catching irrelevant comments and deciphering sentiments. The researchers agreed with the angry-sad-happy judgments on comments taken at random from their data 65 to 80 percent of the time. They hope to upgrade the system by having it learn from comments they manually classify by mood.

“The research here has the psychological sophistication in knowing what the right models of thinking about emotion are, combined with the computational techniques for figuring out how to actually analyze this on a mass scale,” said social and computer scientist Katherine Isbister at New York Polytechnic University, who did not take part in this research.

There is still a lot of room for improvement for the algorithms. They face challenges judging when people are being sarcastic, for instance, or when the meaning of words might change with context. Recognizing that “terribly good” actually implies a positive sentiment, for instance.

“The system could learn to recognize signals of sarcasm with things like emoticons that convey the actual sentiment,” Churchill said.

The technique could possibly be tweaked for different online communities, Isbister said. “You can expect certain forums to be more caustic, where it’s expected and even enjoyable to joust with others, while on other forums, such as where people are sharing about their health issues or something else sensitive to them, hurling out volatile emotions can shut down what you’re trying to do with the site. This could allow you to cultivate what feelings you want in your community in a semi-automated way.”

Churchill and Sood noticed that comment threads followed certain emotional trajectories: Fifty-four percent started out positive and ended up negative, while 43 percent made the negative-to-positive switch. Future research could reveal how negative and positive comments have an impact on the posts that follow, which could reveal ways to prevent arguments from escalating and steer conversations in friendlier directions.

Archinect

through november 13

Haunch of Venison Berlin

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 3, 2010

A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you’re starring in “The Birth of a Nation,” but you’re actually just extras in a remake of “Citizen Kane.”

True, there have been some changes in the plot. In the original, Kane tried to buy high political office for himself. In the new version, he just puts politicians on his payroll.

I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run. What’s the difference?

Well, for one thing, Fox News seems to have decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan.

Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.

Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O’Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there’s not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.

As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox” — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.

So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?

Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that when billionaires put their might behind “grass roots” right-wing action, it’s not just about ideology: it’s also about business. What the Koch brothers have bought with their huge political outlays is, above all, freedom to pollute. What Mr. Murdoch is acquiring with his expanded political role is the kind of influence that lets his media empire make its own rules.

Thus in Britain, a reporter at one of Mr. Murdoch’s papers, News of the World, was caught hacking into the voice mail of prominent citizens, including members of the royal family. But Scotland Yard showed little interest in getting to the bottom of the story. Now the editor who ran the paper when the hacking was taking place is chief of communications for the Conservative government — and that government is talking about slashing the budget of the BBC, which competes with the News Corporation.

So think of those paychecks to Sarah Palin and others as smart investments. After all, if you’re a media mogul, it’s always good to have friends in high places. And the most reliable friends are the ones who know they owe it all to you.

Maybe the spookiest experience I have ever had. A German engineer bought this house in La Jolla, and in 1903 he and two Chinese laborers dug this tunnel for two years. The best 4 dollars I ever spent in San Diego.
Thanks to Matt Connors for the local knowledge.

Kelly Breslin

Jiří Kovanda, XXX, Pressing myself as close as I can to the wall, I make my way around the whole room; there are people in the middle of the room, watching…, November 26, 1977, Hradec Kráklové, Two silver gelatin prints and text on paper, Two pieces: 11 ¾ x 8 ¼

Jay DeFeo

John Divola

Martha Friedman

Daniel Gordon

Ryan Kitson

Jiří Kovanda

Kiyoji Otsuji

Adam Putnam

Laura Riboli

Judith Scott

Martin Soto Climent

Erika Vogt

Christopher Williams

Mark Wyse

Through October 16, 2010

WALLSPACE

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: October 2, 2010

A friend in the U.S. military sent me an e-mail last week with a quote from the historian Lewis Mumford’s book, “The Condition of Man,” about the development of civilization. Mumford was describing Rome’s decline: “Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.”

It was one of those history passages that echo so loudly in the present that it sends a shiver down my spine — way, way too close for comfort.

I’ve just spent a week in Silicon Valley, talking with technologists from Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, Intel, Cisco and SRI and can definitively report that this region has not lost its “inner go.” But in talks here and elsewhere I continue to be astounded by the level of disgust with Washington, D.C., and our two-party system — so much so that I am ready to hazard a prediction: Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.

There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.

President Obama has not been a do-nothing failure. He has some real accomplishments. He passed a health care expansion, a financial regulation expansion, stabilized the economy, started a national education reform initiative and has conducted a smart and tough war on Al Qaeda.

But there is another angle on the last two years: a president who won a sweeping political mandate, propelled by an energized youth movement and with control of both the House and the Senate — about as much power as any president could ever hope to muster in peacetime — was only able to pass an expansion of health care that is a suboptimal amalgam of tortured compromises that no one is certain will work or that we can afford (and doesn’t deal with the cost or quality problems), a limited stimulus that has not relieved unemployment or fixed our infrastructure, and a financial regulation bill that still needs to be interpreted by regulators because no one could agree on crucial provisions. Plus, Obama had to abandon an energy-climate bill altogether, and if the G.O.P. takes back the House, we may not have an energy bill until 2013.

Obama probably did the best he could do, and that’s the point. The best our current two parties can produce today — in the wake of the worst existential crisis in our economy and environment in a century — is suboptimal, even when one party had a huge majority. Suboptimal is O.K. for ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times. We need to stop waiting for Superman and start building a superconsensus to do the superhard stuff we must do now. Pretty good is not even close to good enough today.

“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” said the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. Indeed, our two-party system is ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or high-aspiration in confronting our problems. We simply will not be able to do the things we need to do as a country to move forward “with all the vested interests that have accrued around these two parties,” added Diamond. “They cannot think about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations,” where each one’s gains are seen as the other’s losses.

We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.

“If competition is good for our economy,” asks Diamond, “why isn’t it good for our politics?”

We need a third party on the stage of the next presidential debate to look Americans in the eye and say: “These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.”

Erika Vogt, Geometric Persecution, 2010, color video, 15 minutes. Installation view.

By: Aram Moshayedi
Art Forum

“Geometric Persecution,” the title of Erika Vogt’s exhibition, is a neologism. Even so, there is something that rings familiar and true when one considers how or why geometry—that fundamental system of knowledge inherited from Euclid—might be a subject worthy of retribution. Vogt’s title offers another way to describe the more or less timeless pursuit of pictorial representation and those tendencies toward abstraction that have historically sought to undermine the supremacy of geometric order as the frame through which all experience is shaped. Thus, the video, drawings, and sculptural objects that make up this exhibition sit uncomfortably with their roles as mediators between the world they inhabit and the world they represent.

A video that shares the show’s title sits at the exhibition’s conceptual center. In it, a lone wayfarer travels through an abandoned set of landscapes and employs magic walking sticks and rusted devices and tools to assist her in her travels. An accumulation of the same painted sticks and instruments from the video makes its way into the exhibition space. The objects are affixed with stiffened handles for visitors to pick up and engage as they navigate their own viewing experience. These proplike aids come in handy, as the projection screen—painted in two high-gloss shades of gray—reflects the light of the projector back outward to further obscure the video’s content. The processes of mediation become visible here, and, as in much of Vogt’s previous work, there is a refreshing lack of fixity in the images she assembles and disassembles, composes and decomposes.

OVERDUIN AND KITE
6693 Sunset Boulevard
September 12–October 23

by: PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 2, 2010

Ezra Klein has written in, asking for a post laying out the difference between the more or less Keynesian model Brad DeLong and I work with and the models others have been using – and how their predictions differ. It’s a good request, although the truth is that the other side in this debate doesn’t necessarily agree on a single model, or even use models at all. Still, I think it is possible to describe the general views of the other guys — and to see how off their predictions have been.

So: first of all, the other side in this debate generally adheres, more or less, to something like what Keynes called the “classical theory” of employment, in which employment and output are basically determined by the supply side. Casey Mulligan has been most explicit here, coming up with increasingly, um, creative stories about how what we’re seeing is a choice by workers to work less; but the whole Kocherlakota structural unemployment thing is similar in its implications.

Oh, and the Cochrane-Fama thing about how a dollar of government spending necessarily displaces a dollar of private spending is basically a classical view, although there doesn’t seem to be a model behind it, just a misunderstanding of what accounting identities mean.

Once you have a more or less classical view of unemployment, you naturally have the classical theory of the interest rate, in which it’s all about supply and demand for funds, and something like a quantity theory of money, in which increases in the monetary base lead, in a fairly short time, to equal proportional rises in the price level. This led to the prediction that large fiscal deficits would lead to soaring interest rates, and that the large rise in the monetary base due to Fed expansion would lead to high inflation.

You can see the classical theory of interest and the soaring-rate prediction clearly in Niall Ferguson’s remarks:

After all, $1.75 trillion is an awful lot of freshly minted treasuries to land on the bond market at a time of recession, and I still don’t quite know who is going to buy them … I predict, in the weeks and months ahead, a very painful tug-of-war between our monetary policy and our fiscal policy as the markets realize just what a vast quantity of bonds are going to have to be absorbed by the financial system this year. That will tend to drive the price of the bonds down, and drive up interest rates

and, of course, in many WSJ op-eds, in analyses from Morgan Stanley, and so on.

Meanwhile, you can see the high-inflation prediction in pieces by Meltzer and Laffer — with the latter helpfully titled, “Get Ready for Inflation and Higher Interest Rates”.

While the other side was making these predictions, people like me were saying that classical economics was all wrong in a liquidity trap. Government borrowing did not confront a fixed supply of funds: we were in a paradox of thrift world, where desired savings (at full employment) exceeded desired investment, and hence savings would expand to meet the demand, and interest rates need not rise. As for inflation, increases in the monetary base would have no effect in a liquidity trap; deflation, not inflation, was the risk.

So, how has it turned out? The 10-year bond rate is about 2.5 percent, lower than it was when Ferguson made that prediction. Inflation keeps falling. The attacks on Keynesianism now come down to “but unemployment has stayed high!” which proves nothing — especially because if you took a Keynesian view seriously, it suggested even given what we knew in early 2009 that the stimulus was much too small to restore full employment.

The point is that recent events have actually amounted to a fairly clear test of Keynesian versus classical economics — and Keynesian economics won, hands down.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 30, 2010

Serious people were appalled by Wednesday’s vote in the House of Representatives, where a huge bipartisan majority approved legislation, sponsored by Representative Sander Levin, that would potentially pave the way for sanctions against China over its currency policy. As a substantive matter, the bill was very mild; nonetheless, there were dire warnings of trade war and global economic disruption. Better, said respectable opinion, to pursue quiet diplomacy.

But serious people, who have been wrong about so many things since this crisis began — remember how budget deficits were going to lead to skyrocketing interest rates and soaring inflation? — are wrong on this issue, too. Diplomacy on China’s currency has gone nowhere, and will continue going nowhere unless backed by the threat of retaliation. The hype about trade war is unjustified — and, anyway, there are worse things than trade conflict. In a time of mass unemployment, made worse by China’s predatory currency policy, the possibility of a few new tariffs should be way down on our list of worries.

Let’s step back and look at the current state of the world.

Major advanced economies are still reeling from the effects of a burst housing bubble and the financial crisis that followed. Consumer spending is depressed, and firms see no point in expanding when they aren’t selling enough to use the capacity they have. The recession may be officially over, but unemployment is extremely high and shows no sign of returning to normal levels.

The situation is quite different, however, in emerging economies. These economies have weathered the economic storm, they are fighting inflation rather than deflation, and they offer abundant investment opportunities. Naturally, capital from wealthier but depressed nations is flowing in their direction. And emerging nations could and should play an important role in helping the world economy as a whole pull out of its slump.

But China, the largest of these emerging economies, isn’t allowing this natural process to unfold. Restrictions on foreign investment limit the flow of private funds into China; meanwhile, the Chinese government is keeping the value of its currency, the renminbi, artificially low by buying huge amounts of foreign currency, in effect subsidizing its exports. And these subsidized exports are hurting employment in the rest of the world.

Chinese officials defend this policy with arguments that are both implausible and wildly inconsistent.

They deny that they are deliberately manipulating their exchange rate; I guess the tooth fairy purchased $2.4 trillion in foreign currency and put it on their pillows while they were sleeping. Anyway, say prominent Chinese figures, it doesn’t matter; the renminbi has nothing to do with China’s trade surplus. Yet this week China’s premier cried woe over the prospect of a stronger currency, declaring, “We cannot imagine how many Chinese factories will go bankrupt, how many Chinese workers will lose their jobs.” Well, either the renminbi’s value matters, or it doesn’t — they can’t have it both ways.

Meanwhile, about diplomacy: China’s government has shown no hint of helpfulness and seems to go out of its way to flaunt its contempt for U.S. negotiators. In June, the Chinese supposedly agreed to allow their currency to move toward a market-determined rate — which, if the example of economies like Brazil is any indication, would have meant a sharp rise in the renminbi’s value. But, as of Thursday, China’s currency had risen about only 2 percent against the dollar — with most of that rise taking place in just the past few weeks, clearly in anticipation of the vote on the Levin bill.

So what will the bill accomplish? It empowers U.S. officials to impose tariffs against Chinese exports subsidized by the artificially low renminbi, but it doesn’t require these officials to take action. And judging from past experience, U.S. officials will not, in fact, take action — they’ll continue to make excuses, to tout imaginary diplomatic progress, and, in general, to confirm China’s belief that they are paper tigers.

The Levin bill is, then, a signal at best — and it’s at least as much a shot across the bow of U.S. officials as it is a signal to the Chinese. But it’s a step in the right direction.

For the truth is that U.S. policy makers have been incredibly, infuriatingly passive in the face of China’s bad behavior — especially because taking on China is one of the few policy options for tackling unemployment available to the Obama administration, given Republican obstructionism on everything else. The Levin bill probably won’t change that passivity. But it will, at least, start to build a fire under policy makers, bringing us closer to the day when, at long last, they are ready to act.

Untitled (39), 2010
oil on linen
16 x 12 inches
(40.6 x 30.5 cm)

October 14 – 17, 2010

David Kordansky Gallery at Frieze Art Fair