Peter Shire’s Annual EXP Pottery Sale

December 4, 6-10
December 5, 12-6
December 6, 12-5

Echo Park Pottery
1850 Echo Park Avenue,
Los Angeles, CA 90026,

EXP Pottery

Teal Legs, 2011
Acrylic on steel
34″ x 14″ x 48″

Through December 31, 2011

Shane Cambell

BEFORE THE PH.D. Steven Pinker in 1971 with fellow Wagar High School students on a Canadian television quiz show.

By CARL ZIMMER
NY Times Published: November 28, 2011

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve.

Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.”

At the dinner table, he argued with his parents about human nature. “They said, ‘What would happen if there were no police?’ ” he recalled. “I said: ‘What would we do? Would we rob banks? Of course not. Police make no difference.’ ”

This was in Montreal, “a city that prided itself on civility and low rates of crime,” he said. Then, on Oct. 17, 1969, police officers and firefighters went on strike, and he had a chance to test his first hypothesis about human nature.

“All hell broke loose,” Dr. Pinker recalled. “Within a few hours there was looting. There were riots. There was arson. There were two murders. And this was in the morning that they called the strike.”

The ’60s changed the lives of many people and, in Dr. Pinker’s case, left him deeply curious about how humans work. That curiosity turned into a career as a leading expert on language, and then as a leading advocate of evolutionary psychology. In a series of best-selling books, he has argued that our mental faculties — from emotions to decision-making to visual cognition — were forged by natural selection.

He has also become a withering critic of those who would deny the deep marks of evolution on our minds — social engineers who believe they can remake children as they wish, modernist architects who believe they can rebuild cities as utopias. Even in the 21st century, Dr. Pinker argues, we ignore our evolved brains at our own peril.

Given this track record, Dr. Pinker’s newest book, published in October, struck some critics as a jackknife turn. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (Viking), he investigates one of the most primal aspects of life: violence.

Over the course of 802 pages, he argues that violence has fallen drastically over thousands of years — whether one considers homicide rates, war casualties as a percentage of national populations, or other measures.

This may seem at odds with evolutionary psychology, which is often seen as an argument for hard-wired Stone Age behavior, but Dr. Pinker sees that view as a misunderstanding of the science. Our evolved brains, he argues, are capable of a wide range of responses to their environment. Under the right conditions, they can allow us to live in greater and greater peace.

“The Better Angels of Our Nature” is full of the flourishes that Dr. Pinker’s readers have come to expect. He offers gruesomely delightful details about cutting off noses and torturing heretics. Like his other popular books, starting with “The Language Instinct” (1994), it is a far cry from his first published works in the late 1970s — esoteric reports from his graduate work at Harvard, with titles like “The Representation and Manipulation of Three-Dimensional Space in Mental Images.”

From Irregular Verbs, a Career

He came to Harvard after graduating from McGill University in 1976. At the time, he was convinced that a life in psychology would allow him to ask the big questions about the mind and answer them with scientific rigor. “It was the sweet spot for me in trying to understand human nature,” he said.

But he quickly realized that such explorations would have to wait. “You can’t do a Ph.D. thesis on human nature,” he said. “So I studied much smaller problems — academic bread-and-butter problems.”

He began by studying how we picture things in our heads, looking for the strategies people use to make sense of the visual information continually flooding the brain. As he worked on his dissertation, however, he recognized that many other scientists were also tackling the same problems of visual cognition.

“There were a lot of people studying them who were doing a better job than I could,” he said. So he looked for another problem.

The field he settled on was language, and it proved to be consuming. For Dr. Pinker, it was “a window into human nature.” Linguists have long debated whether language is a skill we develop with all-purpose minds, or whether we have innate systems dedicated to it.

Dr. Pinker has focused much of his research on language on a seemingly innocuous fluke: irregular verbs. While we can generate most verb tenses according to a few rules, we also hold onto a few arbitrary ones. Instead of simply turning “speak” into “speaked,” for example, we say “spoke.”

As a young professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he pored over transcripts of children’s speech, looking for telling patterns in the mistakes they made as they mastered verbs. Out of this research, he proposed that our brains contain two separate systems that contribute to language. One combines elements of language to build up meaning; the other is like a mental dictionary we keep in our memory.

This research helped to convince Dr. Pinker that language has deep biological roots. Some linguists argued that language simply emerged as a byproduct of an increasingly sophisticated brain, but he rejected that idea. “Language is so woven into what makes humans human,” he said, “that it struck me as inconceivable that it was just an accident.”

Instead, he concluded that language was an adaptation produced by natural selection. Language evolved like the eye or the hand, thanks to the way it improved reproductive success. In 1990 he published a paper called “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” with his student Paul Bloom, now at Yale. The paper was hugely influential.

It also became the seed of his breakthrough book, “The Language Instinct,” which quickly became a best seller and later won a place on a list in the journal American Scientist of the top 100 science books of the 20th century.

Dr. Pinker used the success of the book to expand the scope of his work. “It gave me the freedom to return to these much larger questions, informed by what I could learn about real humans,” he said.

For the past 17 years, he has alternated between wide-ranging books on human nature, like “How the Mind Works” (1997) and “The Blank Slate” (2002), and books focused on his research, like “Words and Rules” (1999), about irregular verbs. He writes at the apartment he shares with his wife, the novelist Rebecca Goldstein, and at a house on Cape Cod.

Cause for Optimism

As a public intellectual, Dr. Pinker has engaged in a series of high-profile debates about evolutionary psychology. In 1997, the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould accused him and other evolutionary psychologists of seeing fine-tuned adaptations in every facet of human existence.

Evolutionary psychology, Dr. Gould wrote, “could be quite useful if proponents would trade their propensity for cultism and ultra-Darwinian fealty for a healthy dose of modesty.”

Dr. Pinker gave as good as he got. He declared that Dr. Gould was “scrambling things so that his opponents have horns and he has a halo.” (Dr. Gould died in 2002.)

Then there is the question of male and female minds. In 2005, Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, caused an uproar by speculating that one reason for the underrepresentation of women in tenured science and engineering positions was “issues of intrinsic aptitude.”

Dr. Pinker (who had moved from M.I.T. to Harvard in 2003) came to Dr. Summers’s defense, and ended up in a high-profile debate with a fellow Harvard psychologist, Elizabeth Spelke.

Dr. Pinker argued that there were small but important biological differences in how male and female brains worked. Dr. Spelke argued that these differences were minor, and that evolutionary psychology had no part to play in the debate.

“The kinds of careers people pursue now, the kinds of choices they make, are radically different from anything that anybody faced back in the Pleistocene,” Dr. Spelke said at the close of the debate. “It is anything but clear how motives that evolved then translate into a modern context.”

In a way, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” is a response to this kind of critique. He says the idea for the book took root in his mind around the time of his debate with Dr. Spelke, when he stumbled across graphs of historical rates of violence. In England, for example, homicide rates are about a hundredth of what they were in 1400.

In 2006 Dr. Pinker was invited to write an essay on the theme “What Are You Optimistic About?” His answer: “The decline of violence.”

The reaction to the essay was swift and surprising. “I started hearing from scholars from fields that I was barely aware of, saying, ‘There’s much more evidence on this trend than you were aware of,’ ” he said.

Researchers sent him evidence that violence had declined in many other places, and in many different forms, from the death rate in wars to rates of child abuse. “I thought, ‘This is getting to be a conspiracy.’ It was beyond my wildest dreams. I realized there was a book to be written.”

Dr. Pinker set out to synthesize all these patterns and find an explanation for them. And in the process, he wanted to rebut stereotypes of evolutionary psychology.

“There’s a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it’s fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife,” he said. “Why even try to work toward peace if we’re just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?”

Instead, Dr. Pinker argues that evolutionary psychology offers the best explanation for why things have gotten better, and how to make them even better.

Civilization’s Effect

“Better Angels” has impressed many experts on historical trends of violence.

“Steven Pinker’s great achievement is to weave these trends into a much larger pattern of reduced violence, greater empathy and, indeed, a comprehensive civilizing process,” said Nils Petter Gleditsch, a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway.

Human violence started dropping thousands of years ago with the formation of the first states, Dr. Pinker argues. For evidence, he points to archaeological studies and observations of stateless societies today. With the birth of the first states, rates of violence began to fall, and they have dropped in fits and starts ever since.

Dr. Pinker grants that these results may be hard to believe, but he thinks that is more a matter of psychology than of data. The emotional power in stories of violence — whether on the nightly news or on “Law and Order” — can distract us from the long-term decline.

He acknowledges, of course, that the past century produced two horrific world wars. But he says they do not refute his argument. Statistical studies of war reveal a lot of randomness built into their timing and size. The 20th century, he argues, suffered some particularly bad luck.

Dr. Pinker finds an explanation for the overall decline of violence in the interplay of history with our evolved minds. Our ancestors had a capacity for violence, but this was just one capacity among many. “Human nature is complex,” he said. “Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.”

Which inclinations come to the fore depends on our social surroundings. In early society, the lack of a state spurred violence. A thirst for justice could be satisfied only with revenge. Psychological studies show that people overestimate their own grievances and underestimate those of others; this cognitive quirk fueled spiraling cycles of bloodshed.

But as the rise of civilization gradually changed the ground rules of society, violence began to ebb. The earliest states were brutal and despotic, but they did manage to take away opportunities for runaway vendettas.

More recently, the invention of movable type radically changed our social environment. When people used their powers of language to generate new ideas, those ideas could spread. “If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate,” Dr. Pinker said. “That pulls you away from what human nature would consign you on its own.”

And these ideas helped drive down violence even further. Ideas about equality led to women gaining power across much of the world, and “women are statistically more dovish than men,” Dr. Pinker said.

Reviews for the new book have been largely enthusiastic, though not unmixed. In The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert called it “confounding,” “exasperating” and “fishy.”

“Hate and madness and cruelty haven’t disappeared,” she concluded, “and they aren’t going to.”

Dr. Pinker’s response was equally scornful. “No honest reviewer would imply that this is the message of the book,” he wrote on his Web site.

Though violence has indisputably declined, he says, it could rise again. But by understanding the causes of the decline, humanity can work to promote peace. He endorses the new book “Winning the War on War” (Dutton/Penguin), by the political scientist Joshua S. Goldstein, which argues that the slogan “If you want peace, fight for justice” is precisely the wrong advice.

If you want peace, Dr. Goldstein argues, work for peace. Dr. Pinker agrees.

“It’s psychologically astute, given the massive amount of self-serving biases,” he said. “In any dispute, each side thinks it’s in the right and the other side is demons.”

The moral of his own book might be, If you want peace, understand psychology.

The Vails’ former ranch, now part of Channel Islands National Park, is no longer a home for cattle, cowboys or adventurous children. And now the family’s last link to the place is being severed.

By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times
November 28, 2011

Reporting from Santa Rosa Island, Calif.—
For the family that once owned Santa Rosa Island, it was part Zane Grey, part “Robinson Crusoe.”

Generations of Vail cousins would arrive from the mainland and take refuge for months at a time. They would explore places with pirate-map names: Skull Gulch, Abalone Rocks, China Camp. They were city kids, but they rode with the island’s cowboys and knew the island lore — stories about ghosts, about shipwrecks, about a mythical temptress named Rita who supposedly awaited new cowboys.

For a senior project in high school, Nita Vail talked her teachers into letting her saddle up for a full season on Santa Rosa, spending weeks on end with the cowboys.

It was hard, but worthwhile.

“You’re in a sitting trot at dark-thirty in the morning and you’re riding 20, 30 miles,” Nita Vail recalled. The “gathers,” as they were called, weren’t over until all the cattle were herded onto custom-made ferries — the Vaqueros I and II — for the rough trip across the Santa Barbara Channel.

These days, when members of the venerable ranching family fly out to Santa Rosa Island, it isn’t to round up cattle. It’s to say goodbye.

The island became part of Channel Islands National Park in 1986, and the storied Vail & Vickers ranch — a spread that spanned the island’s 84 square miles of rolling grasslands and rugged coastline — shut down 12 years later. But the family continued to run a big-game operation, guiding hunters to the trophy deer and elk transplanted to the island nearly a century ago.

Under an agreement with the National Park Service and an environmental group, the sport hunting ended last month. Now, professional marksmen are tracking the remaining dozens of deer and elk from canyon to canyon, sometimes targeting them from helicopters.

The Vail & Vickers Co., a partnership formed by Arizona ranchers in 1889, will dissolve Dec. 31. Without land or cattle — or deer or elk — there’s nothing left to manage.

Once home to thriving Chumash villages, the island is all but unpopulated — a natural gem that only hints at its rich human history. In its day, the Vail & Vickers ranch was part of a California shaped by outsized personalities and powerful families, a state where palaces built by the likes of Hearst and Huntington have long since become public treasures.

But that doesn’t make the story’s ending any easier for the Vails.

“This is a sad time for us,” said Nita Vail, a great-granddaughter of the rancher who bought the island 26 miles off Santa Barbara in 1901. “We tried everything we could to keep the herds, but it didn’t work.”

A cowboy’s tale

Like all great westerns, the Vail saga started with a larger-than-life cowboy.

Walter L. Vail turned a $100 grubstake into a million-acre ranching empire based in Arizona. When the Southern Pacific railroad tried to gouge him, he orchestrated the West’s last great cattle drive. He left for California in the 1890s, eventually establishing an 87,000-acre ranch in Riverside County. He survived a near-fatal Gila monster bite and other Old West calamities, but was killed by a Los Angeles streetcar in 1906.

The Santa Rosa spread was an overgrazed sheep ranch when he and J.V. Vickers bought it. The Vickers family participated in big decisions about the property, but the Vails ran it day to day, at some points living on the island for long stretches of time.

Ed Vail, one of Walter’s seven children, was “a slave-driver,” his nephew Russ Vail once told an interviewer. “He was a hell of a cattleman and a hell of a horseman and a hard drinker.”

He also was an old-fashioned gentleman, Russ Vail said: “He rode in a coat, a tie and a vest all his life. Even if he was drunk, he was courteous as hell.”

In the 1920s, the family began importing Roosevelt elk and Kaibab mule deer to the island. “There was an ethic of ranchers wanting to see wildlife on their property,” said Vail cousin Will Woolley.

Those animals were also the game hunted by the family and their guests.

From time to time, Ed Vail hosted his friend Will Rogers. The two were so close that Vail was a witness when the famous humorist signed his will on Aug.5, 1935. Twelve days later, Rogers died in a plane crash at Point Barrow, Alaska.

Earl Warren, the former California governor, was hunting on Santa Rosa on Sept. 25, 1953, when a Navy PT boat showed up to ferry him back to the mainland. A guest of the Vails, he was being summoned to become chief justice of the United States.

In 1978 — partly to manage herds that had grown to 1,100 animals and partly to help the ranch through lean years — the island was opened to commercial hunting. Hunters would pay as much as $10,000 for a four-day outing, ranging the hills with guides and bedding down in the family’s 1855 ranch house, the oldest wood-frame home in Santa Barbara County.

But history soon took a turn that would spell the end for the deer and elk. Fearing condemnation, Vail & Vickers sold Santa Rosa Island to the government for $30 million in 1986. At the time, the Vails knew they couldn’t go on for long raising 2 million pounds of beef a year in a spot widely likened to the Galapagos, but they understood that they could keep ranching for 25 years, until 2011.

It didn’t work out that way. Family members say government restrictions after the sale forced them to quit 13 years earlier than they’d planned.

A 1997 lawsuit by the National Park and Conservation Assn. hastened the end of both ranching and hunting. The group alleged that the game animals — as well as the cattle — were degrading the environment. Under a settlement, they were to be removed over a four-year period ending this Dec. 31.

Failed attempts

There were attempts to keep the deer and elk in place.

Duncan L. Hunter, a former San Diego congressman, wanted to make the island a hunting resort for wounded veterans.

In 2007, Tim Vail, a cousin of Nita’s, urged a congressional committee to “engage in an open conversation that acknowledges that these magnificent herds will be slaughtered if this National Park … has its way.”

The plea didn’t succeed.

White Buffalo, a Connecticut-based company run by a wildlife ecologist, is conducting the final hunt. In the hunt’s first few weeks, the family gave more than 4,000 pounds of elk and venison to Ventura County charities.

In a recent statement, the conservation association said removing the deer and elk will “finally end their cycle of death on the island while allowing the opportunity for the full natural diversity of plants and wildlife to flourish.”

Native plants have already started a resurgence that park spokeswoman Yvonne Menard called dramatic.

The island’s future is still being mapped out.

There might be expanded camping opportunities, as well as lodging on the site of the cowboys’ bunkhouse. Without a hunting season, there won’t be a need to restrict travel. As visitors learn about discoveries like the 13,000-year-old bones that are thought to be North America’s oldest human remains, park officials hope, they will be astonished by the sweep of island history.

“It’s a great interpretive opportunity,” Menard said.

Russell Galipeau, the park’s superintendent, said displays in the old ranch buildings will help preserve the Vails’ cowboy heritage, of which there is plenty.

One recent afternoon, Woolley and Nita Vail — wearing a necklace with the ranch’s old VR brand — led visitors past a tiny schoolhouse, through weathered, long-empty corrals and into a hayloft where one Henry Lopez wrote his name in large letters and inscribed the date: Oct. 31, 1896.

In a barn, dust-covered saddles sat on a beam. There were huge clumps of horsehair, a wooden rack used to stretch hides, shelves crammed with bolts and pipes transformed by time into museum pieces. In a corner, Woolley pointed out a spot once occupied by a still rigged up from an old milk jug and some tubing.

A ranch foreman made “godawful stuff he called brandy,” Woolley said, and traded it to passing fishermen.

In its heyday, the ranch bustled with 10 to 15 cowboys, 150 horses and as many as 7,000 head of cattle.

Family members still hold ranching close. Tim Vail is an equine veterinarian. Woolley raises grass-fed beef in San Luis Obispo County. Nita Vail runs the California Rangeland Trust, a group that helps property owners preserve working ranches.

All that, Galipeau said, makes this “a very hard transition for the family.”

At a recent gathering of ranchers, Woolley concurred.

“It’s hard to see four generations of work, sweat, tears and dreams be relegated to the pages of a book,” he said, “when we knew it as a breathing, living entity.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 27, 2011

The supercommittee was a superdud — and we should be glad. Nonetheless, at some point we’ll have to rein in budget deficits. And when we do, here’s a thought: How about making increased revenue an important part of the deal?

And I don’t just mean a return to Clinton-era tax rates. Why should 1990s taxes be considered the outer limit of revenue collection? Think about it: The long-run budget outlook has darkened, which means that some hard choices must be made. Why should those choices only involve spending cuts? Why not also push some taxes above their levels in the 1990s?

Let me suggest two areas in which it would make a lot of sense to raise taxes in earnest, not just return them to pre-Bush levels: taxes on very high incomes and taxes on financial transactions.

About those high incomes: In my last column I suggested that the very rich, who have had huge income gains over the last 30 years, should pay more in taxes. I got many responses from readers, with a common theme being that this was silly, that even confiscatory taxes on the wealthy couldn’t possibly raise enough money to matter.

Folks, you’re living in the past. Once upon a time America was a middle-class nation, in which the super-elite’s income was no big deal. But that was another country.

The I.R.S. reports that in 2007, that is, before the economic crisis, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers — roughly speaking, people with annual incomes over $2 million — had a combined income of more than a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money, and it wouldn’t be hard to devise taxes that would raise a significant amount of revenue from those super-high-income individuals.

For example, a recent report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out that before 1980 very-high-income individuals fell into tax brackets well above the 35 percent top rate that applies today. According to the center’s analysis, restoring those high-income brackets would have raised $78 billion in 2007, or more than half a percent of G.D.P. I’ve extrapolated that number using Congressional Budget Office projections, and what I get for the next decade is that high-income taxation could shave more than $1 trillion off the deficit.

It’s instructive to compare that estimate with the savings from the kinds of proposals that are actually circulating in Washington these days. Consider, for example, proposals to raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67, dealing a major blow to millions of Americans. How much money would that save?

Well, none from the point of view of the nation as a whole, since we would be pushing seniors out of Medicare and into private insurance, which has substantially higher costs. True, it would reduce federal spending — but not by much. The budget office estimates that outlays would fall by only $125 billion over the next decade, as the age increase phased in. And even when fully phased in, this partial dismantling of Medicare would reduce the deficit only about a third as much as could be achieved with higher taxes on the very rich.

So raising taxes on the very rich could make a serious contribution to deficit reduction. Don’t believe anyone who claims otherwise.

And then there’s the idea of taxing financial transactions, which have exploded in recent decades. The economic value of all this trading is dubious at best. In fact, there’s considerable evidence suggesting that too much trading is going on. Still, nobody is proposing a punitive tax. On the table, instead, are proposals like the one recently made by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Peter DeFazio for a tiny fee on financial transactions.

And here’s the thing: Because there are so many transactions, such a fee could yield several hundred billion dollars in revenue over the next decade. Again, this compares favorably with the savings from many of the harsh spending cuts being proposed in the name of fiscal responsibility.

But wouldn’t such a tax hurt economic growth? As I said, the evidence suggests not — if anything, it suggests that to the extent that taxing financial transactions reduces the volume of wheeling and dealing, that would be a good thing.

And it’s instructive, too, to note that some economies already have financial transactions taxes — and that among those who do are Hong Kong and Singapore. If some conservative starts claiming that such taxes are an unwarranted government intrusion, you might want to ask him why such taxes are imposed by the two countries that score highest on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.

Now, the tax ideas I’ve just mentioned wouldn’t be enough, by themselves, to fix our deficit. But the same is true of proposals for spending cuts. The point I’m making here isn’t that taxes are all we need; it is that they could and should be a significant part of the solution.

Heimo Zobernig
Untitled, 2010
Swarovski crystals, rubbish, acrylic bonding agent and acrylic on canvas
78.7 x 78.7 inches / 200 x 200 cm

Through January27, 2011

Kimmerich

Untitled (sml.bl.rd.crcls.crdbrd.cnvs.), 2011, acrylic, paper, cardboard,canvas, 14.5 x 13 7/8 inches (36.8 x 35.2 cm)

December 2, 2011 – February 5, 2012 (Opening: Thursday, December 1, 2011)

Secession

By BEN SISARIO
NY Times Published: November 25, 2011

Fugazi, the single-mindedly independent post-punk band from Washington, was famous for how it operated in concert. From its first shows in 1987 until it went on indefinite hiatus 15 years later, the group kept ticket prices low — $5 or so — and, to the relief of some fans and the annoyance of others, often paused when things got too wild in the mosh pit.

Less known was that the band fastidiously recorded almost every concert. After letting audio tapes for more than 800 shows languish in a closet for years, Fugazi has begun putting them all on its Web site, with the first batch of 130 shows going up next Thursday.

In keeping with its commercial principles of low prices and trust in fans, the shows’ suggested price is $5 each, with a sliding scale of $1 to $100, for the cheap or the philanthropic.

As a career-spanning archival project, the Fugazi Live Series has few equals, putting the band in the unlikely company of acts like the Grateful Dead and Phish. And for Dischord, Fugazi’s self-run label, it has taken more than two years and tens of thousands of dollars, said Ian MacKaye, one of Fugazi’s two singer-guitarists and a co-founder of Dischord.

But to hear the band members tell it, they never had much of a purpose for recording the shows in the first place, and hardly listened to them at the time.

“I’d say it was for posterity, but to what end, we had no idea,” Mr. MacKaye said in an interview this week. “As with a lot of collections, once we had a couple hundred tapes, we just continued to amass them. Why stop? We’d already gotten this far.”

Fugazi, whose music drew on the scraping force of punk and the rhythmic undercurrents of reggae, had been prodded to record the tapes by one of its sound men, Joey Picuri. The group never used a set list and sometimes went on improvisatory tangents, so the tapes were partly meant to preserve spontaneous moments that might otherwise be forgotten, said Guy Picciotto, Fugazi’s other leader.

“When we played, we wanted it to be like a free fall,” Mr. Picciotto said.

Mr. Picuri has a more prosaic memory of the project’s origins. “I was working with a band that was able to afford the price of a cassette for every show,” he said with a laugh.

The recordings capture everything that happened onstage until the tapes stopped rolling, including stage banter, sparkling or dull, and performances, glorious or flubbed. For preservation’s sake, the band did not edit out anything.

“We liked this idea of, ‘Let’s just let it be everything,’ “ Mr. Picciotto said. “There doesn’t have to be the idea that this is the great, golden document. It’s all there, and it’s not cleaned up. You get what you get.”

The sound quality also varies, and taken as a whole, the project also tells a story about musical technology from the 1980s into the 2000s. The earliest recordings were made on cassettes, then came digital DAT tapes, then CD-R’s and a few hard drives. Sorting through it involved not only the process of formatting and mastering the audio but also even more tedious chores like scouring hours of onstage banter to identify unlabeled tapes.

“I got sleuthy about it,” Mr. MacKaye said. “I’d listen to the accent of someone in the crowd and go, ‘O.K., that was in Italy.’ “

Megafans will be able to gorge on hundreds of recordings of Fugazi classics like “Two Beats Off” and “Waiting Room.” For more casual followers — or anyone daunted by the prospect of sorting through 800 set lists — the Web site will also include a crowd-sourced rating system that should allow the cream to rise to the top.

Also included: fliers, tickets and photographs, meticulously collected and cataloged alongside the recordings. The band is encouraging fans to submit additional ephemera and to help fill in gaps of unrecorded shows.

For most bands this kind of exhaustive self-chronicling would be out of the ordinary. But as fans of Fugazi and Dischord know, the band and its label have long seen it as something of a mission to document their own work and the larger Washington underground scene carefully.

“Most labels put out records to get a band known,” Mr. MacKaye said. “The idea of Dischord was to document something that already had energy. In the beginning we were interested in documenting the music offerings of our scene, and it just kept going.

via

Through December 22, 2011

Fredrech Petzel

By James Camp
The Observer Published 11/15

More than any writer of his era, Kurt Vonnegut survives as an image: haggard, mustachioed, nicotine-stained, his hair a tangle—a cat’s cradle, one might say—of curls. As was often noted, he looked like Mark Twain, only cuter. Certainly, he was more boyish than Twain. He was a millionaire who rued, until he died, that his mother had not been a better hugger; a grown man who went swimming, sheepishly, in pants; a father who “painted pertinent quotes on various walls in the house.” He was 6’3″, but small at heart. “If the government assigned heights based on maturity,” he wrote in a letter to his first wife, Jane, “[I] would be much shorter.”

Vonnegut’s fiction was similarly deceptive; he addressed major themes in a minor key. “Mass destruction was a bit of a Vonnegut trope,” as Charles Shields observes in And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Henry Holt and Co., 528 pages, $30.00). That this was so is undeniable, and yet the message of Vonnegut’s darkest novels must sound saccharine to many schoolchildren. He believed in common decency and common sense, in mankind over machines. He was big on being nice. Being nasty was a bête noire. To the madness of his century, Vonnegut, who died in 2007, applied the moral vision of a Mouseketeer.

This made him a sympathetic public figure, who was quick to decry the religiosity of the Republican party and the war in Vietnam, but a novelist whose limitations were as conspicuous as his gifts. “There is an almost intolerable sentimentality in everything I write,” as Vonnegut himself admitted. In his greatest satires, Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), he envisioned catastrophic events from the perspective of their bystanders. This reflected a truth of his own experience. As an American prisoner of war in Dresden, in 1945, Vonnegut had hidden in an underground meat locker while Allied aircraft firebombed the city. When he emerged, “Lazarus-like,” days later, Dresden was a cinder. “It was as if he had slept through the sacking of Troy and woke just as the Greeks were boarding their ships for home,” as Mr. Shields puts it.

Vonnegut’s genius was to stake out this experience of anticlimax as his novelistic territory. His heroes are bemused bit players whose lives are measured by their distance from great affairs, rather than their proximity to them. It is a worldview inverted in favor of the little guy, and it is as hostile to change as it is to power. Mr. Shields is insightful when he points out that Vonnegut, though revered by hippies, was “less a radical than a reactionary.” On the day of the moon landing, in 1969, Vonnegut went on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, where he could rail against its profligacy in real-time. “For that kind of money,” Vonnegut had already written, paraphrasing a scientist, “the least [NASA] can do is discover God.” He had become the lord of the bumpkins. And indeed, with his frayed Afro and slight stoop, his invariable cigarette, Vonnegut looked the part.

It is surprising, then, to discover the degree to which this look and the persona that went with it were contrived. Mr. Shield’s biography of Vonnegut takes its title from Slaughterhouse-Five, where it occurs dozens of times; it is the perennial refrain of bad news. “He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot. So it goes.” The phrase encapsulates the attitude of wistful passivity that readers correctly associate with Vonnegut’s fiction. But it is an ironic title for the biography of the man himself, because Kurt Vonnegut the illustrious author was a strenuous work of artifice, whose fate was anything but thrust upon him. “We are what we pretend to be,” Vonnegut wrote in his third novel, Mother Night (1961), “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” He was a scrupulous pretender who heeded his own advice.

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922. He grew up in a milieu so mistrustful of art that, when it came time for him to go to college, he was compelled, against his wishes, to study chemistry. Yet he discovered his vocation early. Vonnegut wrote columns for his high school and college newspapers, and, after the war, in 1951, he quit a well-paid job in public relations at General Electric to pursue his fiction full-time. But he was already married and a father, and he continued, perforce, to supplement his income by less exalted means. He worked as a high school teacher, a creative writing instructor, a copywriter, a car salesman and a caption writer for Sports Illustrated, where his tenure was characteristically brief. “The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” Vonnegut wrote the day he walked out. He was rarely too proud to stoop to an opportunity, but often too proud to exploit one. “Maybe the problem was not that the agents didn’t know what to do for [Vonnegut],” the SI secretary, Carolyn Blakemore, later reflected, “but he didn’t know what to do in the role of a writer.”

Ms. Blakemore misjudged her colleague. One thing Vonnegut did do was rise at 5 every morning to write. And when his moment finally came, he seized it with an alacrity that is hard to distinguish, in Mr. Shields’s telling of the story, from opportunism.

As the publication date drew near for Slaughterhouse-Five, on which Vonnegut had worked, fitfully, for 20 years, he brooded over his author photo. He was clean-cut, clean-shaven, a bit paunchy—in 1969, an unlikely candidate for cultural eminence. He decided “to cultivate the style of an author who was in.” “To meet the expectations of his audience was key,” Mr. Shields writes. “He lost weight, allowed his close-cropped hair to become curly and tousled, and grew a moustache. … He looked like an avant-garde artist and social critic now, not rumpled Dad-in-a-cardigan.” His upper lip would never reappear. Slaughterhouse-Five became a number-one New York Times best-seller, and its tousled (not rumpled) author became an icon of the counterculture.

In retrospect, the acuity with which Vonnegut marketed himself seems to demonstrate an insight into his era that is close to cynicism about it. Mr. Shields’s thoroughgoing biography does little to dispel this impression. (Mr. Shields, in turn, can demonstrate a thoroughgoingness that is close to comedy. When he quotes from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, he footnotes it, play, act, and scene.) Vonnegut became an idol to a demographic to which he personally remained aloof. He did not get hippies, and they, up close, did not get him. When he met with Jefferson Airplane to brainstorm lyrics, they could only apologize to each other. “As a friend wrote to [Vonnegut] sometime later, ‘Your writing has the peculiar quality of only reflecting the reader’s beliefs back on him.’”

Mr. Shields is a rather bland reader of his subject’s fiction. “The more autobiographical his work became,” he observes, “the less space he devoted to fiction.” Still, he has a nose for its author’s contradictions. The sentimental old man of American letters could be a cold fish in the flesh. A holder of rousing political opinions, Vonnegut “had only been mildly interested in politics most of his adult life”—until he realized that “his audience expected him … to moralize.” A salty Midwesterner, he fed “at the trough of celebrity up to his ears.” A stormy foe of the Vietnam war, he was also a stockholder in “Dow Chemical, the sole maker of napalm.”

And Vonnegut, who championed family to his readers, was reckless with those closest to him. “The persona, the ‘ghost’ of him, as he called it, became like an itching, second skin he couldn’t slough off,” as Mr. Shields writes. In 1972, while living in Manhattan with the photographer Jill Krementz, whom he married in 1979—“I taught Kurt to play tennis and to make love”—he asked his estranged first wife to file his taxes. “That would give him more time to write.” He spurned the agent, Knox Burger, to whom he owed his career, and the publisher, Sam Lawrence, to whom he owed its resurrection. When critics, after Slaughterhouse-Five, began to pan his novels, “he charged [them] with one of his favorite accusations: they were just snobs.” Still, he “badly … wanted to teach at Harvard.”

“Perhaps it was possible to live too long,” writes his biographer. Vonnegut aged ungracefully. His writing declined, his relationship with Ms. Krementz staled—to his children, he referred to their marriage as “his disease”—and, in 1984, he attempted suicide. “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all,” Vonnegut wrote. Yet Vonnegut himself seems to have been the victim less of a series of accidents than of the voracity of his own designs on fame. “Thinking about his behavior usually led to periods of depression,” Mr. Shields writes, “which in turn interfered with his work.”

This was a truth that Vonnegut, characteristically, could deal with only in doodles. In the 1970s, “he began adding six quick strokes of a felt-tip pen under his signature—an asshole. … He was an asshole, he explained …; however, ‘being human was an asshole condition.’” So it goes.

“Herm”, 2011
Glazed ceramic and acrylic on wood
170 x 34,5 x 29 cm

Daniel Bucholz

Cornet of Horse
Sat 19. Nov 2011 – Sat 17. Dec 2011

Johann Konig

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 20, 2011

There’s a word I keep hearing lately: “technocrat.” Sometimes it’s used as a term of scorn — the creators of the euro, we’re told, were technocrats who failed to take human and cultural factors into account. Sometimes it’s a term of praise: the newly installed prime ministers of Greece and Italy are described as technocrats who will rise above politics and do what needs to be done.

I call foul. I know from technocrats; sometimes I even play one myself. And these people — the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency, the people who are bullying both Europe and the United States into austerity — aren’t technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics.

They are, to be sure, a peculiarly boring breed of romantic, speaking in turgid prose rather than poetry. And the things they demand on behalf of their romantic visions are often cruel, involving huge sacrifices from ordinary workers and families. But the fact remains that those visions are driven by dreams about the way things should be rather than by a cool assessment of the way things really are.

And to save the world economy we must topple these dangerous romantics from their pedestals.

Let’s start with the creation of the euro. If you think that this was a project driven by careful calculation of costs and benefits, you have been misinformed.

The truth is that Europe’s march toward a common currency was, from the beginning, a dubious project on any objective economic analysis. The continent’s economies were too disparate to function smoothly with one-size-fits-all monetary policy, too likely to experience “asymmetric shocks” in which some countries slumped while others boomed. And unlike U.S. states, European countries weren’t part of a single nation with a unified budget and a labor market tied together by a common language.

So why did those “technocrats” push so hard for the euro, disregarding many warnings from economists? Partly it was the dream of European unification, which the Continent’s elite found so alluring that its members waved away practical objections. And partly it was a leap of economic faith, the hope — driven by the will to believe, despite vast evidence to the contrary — that everything would work out as long as nations practiced the Victorian virtues of price stability and fiscal prudence.

Sad to say, things did not work out as promised. But rather than adjusting to reality, those supposed technocrats just doubled down — insisting, for example, that Greece could avoid default through savage austerity, when anyone who actually did the math knew better.

Let me single out in particular the European Central Bank (E.C.B.), which is supposed to be the ultimate technocratic institution, and which has been especially notable for taking refuge in fantasy as things go wrong. Last year, for example, the bank affirmed its belief in the confidence fairy — that is, the claim that budget cuts in a depressed economy will actually promote expansion, by raising business and consumer confidence. Strange to say, that hasn’t happened anywhere.

And now, with Europe in crisis — a crisis that can’t be contained unless the E.C.B. steps in to stop the vicious circle of financial collapse — its leaders still cling to the notion that price stability cures all ills. Last week Mario Draghi, the E.C.B.’s new president, declared that “anchoring inflation expectations” is “the major contribution we can make in support of sustainable growth, employment creation and financial stability.”

This is an utterly fantastic claim to make at a time when expected European inflation is, if anything, too low, and what’s roiling the markets is fear of more or less immediate financial collapse. And it’s more like a religious proclamation than a technocratic assessment.

Just to be clear, this is not an anti-European rant, since we have our own pseudo-technocrats warping the policy debate. In particular, allegedly nonpartisan groups of “experts” — the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Concord Coalition, and so on — have been all too successful at hijacking the economic policy debate, shifting its focus from jobs to deficits.

Real technocrats would have asked why this makes sense at a time when the unemployment rate is 9 percent and the interest rate on U.S. debt is only 2 percent. But like the E.C.B., our fiscal scolds have their story about what’s important, and they’re sticking to it no matter what the data say.

So am I against technocrats? Not at all. I like technocrats — technocrats are friends of mine. And we need technical expertise to deal with our economic woes.

But our discourse is being badly distorted by ideologues and wishful thinkers — boring, cruel romantics — pretending to be technocrats. And it’s time to puncture their pretensions.

Wallace Berman, Verifax collage 6 x 5 in

Through 1/22/2011

The Armory Pasadena

Opens Tonight November 19. 6-8 PM

November 19 – December 22, 2011

Marc Foxx

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 17, 2011

By next Wednesday, the so-called supercommittee, a bipartisan group of legislators, is supposed to reach an agreement on how to reduce future deficits. Barring an evil miracle — I’ll explain the evil part later — the committee will fail to meet that deadline.

If this news surprises you, you haven’t been paying attention. If it depresses you, cheer up: In this case, failure is good.

Why was the supercommittee doomed to fail? Mainly because the gulf between our two major political parties is so wide. Republicans and Democrats don’t just have different priorities; they live in different intellectual and moral universes.

In Democrat-world, up is up and down is down. Raising taxes increases revenue, and cutting spending while the economy is still depressed reduces employment. But in Republican-world, down is up. The way to increase revenue is to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and slashing government spending is a job-creation strategy. Try getting a leading Republican to admit that the Bush tax cuts increased the deficit or that sharp cuts in government spending (except on the military) would hurt the economic recovery.

Moreover, the parties have sharply different views of what constitutes economic justice.

Democrats see social insurance programs, from Social Security to food stamps, as serving the moral imperative of providing basic security to our fellow citizens and helping those in need.

Republicans have a totally different view. They may soft-pedal that view in public — in last year’s elections, they even managed to pose as defenders of Medicare — but, in private, they view the welfare state as immoral, a matter of forcing citizens at gunpoint to hand their money over to other people. By creating Social Security, declared Rick Perry in his book “Fed Up!”, F.D.R. was “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.” Does anyone doubt that he was speaking for many in his party?

So the supercommittee brought together legislators who disagree completely both about how the world works and about the proper role of government. Why did anyone think this would work?

Well, maybe the idea was that the parties would compromise out of fear that there would be a political price for seeming intransigent. But this could only happen if the news media were willing to point out who is really refusing to compromise. And they aren’t. If and when the supercommittee fails, virtually all news reports will be he-said, she-said, quoting Democrats who blame Republicans and vice versa without ever explaining the truth.

Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to “centrist” pundits who won’t admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?” Mr. Obama: “I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.” Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?”

You see, admitting that one side is willing to make concessions, while the other isn’t, would tarnish one’s centrist credentials. And the result is that the G.O.P. pays no price for refusing to give an inch.

So the supercommittee will fail — and that’s good.

For one thing, history tells us that the Republican Party would renege on its side of any deal as soon as it got the chance. Remember, the U.S. fiscal outlook was pretty good in 2000, but, as soon as Republicans gained control of the White House, they squandered the surplus on tax cuts and unfunded wars. So any deal reached now would, in practice, be nothing more than a deal to slash Social Security and Medicare, with no lasting improvement in the deficit.

Also, any deal reached now would almost surely end up worsening the economic slump. Slashing spending while the economy is depressed destroys jobs, and it’s probably even counterproductive in terms of deficit reduction, since it leads to lower revenue both now and in the future. And current projections, like those of the Federal Reserve, suggest that the economy will remain depressed at least through 2014. Better to have no deal than a deal that imposes spending cuts in the next few years.

But don’t we eventually have to match spending and revenue? Yes, we do. But the decision about how to do that isn’t about accounting. It’s about fundamental values — and it’s a decision that should be made by voters, not by some committee that allegedly transcends the partisan divide.

Eventually, one side or the other of that divide will get the kind of popular mandate it needs to resolve our long-run budget issues. Until then, attempts to strike a Grand Bargain are fundamentally destructive. If the supercommittee fails, as expected, it will be time to celebrate.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Most cats enter feline agility competitions cold, but other cats are trained

By JENNIFER A. KINGSON
NY Times Published: November 18, 2011

It is a sport in which the contestants sometimes lie down in the middle of the field, unmotivated and bemused.

Feline agility competitions, in which cats run through a miniature obstacle course full of hurdles and tunnels, have become fixtures on the cat show scene. Modeled after canine agility competitions, the tournaments feature a ring in which cat owners — some of whom have trained their pets from kittenhood — brandish a feather or sparkly wand to try to coax a cat to climb stairs, weave around poles and leap through hoops in as little time as possible.

Some cats tear through the course in seconds. Others make it clear to the eager onlookers that they could not care less.

“You have to get the cat to focus on the toy,” said Anthony Hutcherson, who raises Bengal cats in Port Tobacco, Md., and whose oldest cat, Justin, has run the course in nine seconds. “Cats will pretty much chase a feather on a string anywhere.”

This weekend the two major organizations for cat lovers — the International Cat Association and the Cat Fanciers’ Association — are holding their annual cat shows, one in New York City and the other in Indianapolis. At both events, any cat registered at the show can partake in the agility event while the pedigreed cats are being judged.

Most people send their cats into the ring cold, where they often get spooked by the crowds and unfamiliar setting. But others train their cats — usually with a regimen of kibbles, praise and neck rubs — and find that they will do tricks, albeit on their own terms.

“They have to do all 10 obstacles, in order, counterclockwise, with no mistakes,” said Jill Archibald, agility coordinator for the Cat Fanciers’ Association, who will be the ringmaster in Indianapolis.

Archibald, a retired physical education teacher from Freehold Township, N.J., has posted a series of online videos about how to train your cat. She also has built her own 20-foot-by-30-foot agility ring, which she drives from one cat show to the next. She made the obstacles herself, including jumps and hoops, because the only ones sold commercially are meant for dogs, and thus too large.

About 30 percent of the cats finish the course in the allotted four and a half minutes, said Russell E. Reimer, a ringmaster in Mesa, Ariz. “Most of them have a hard time with the weave poles,” he said. “The tunnels, the steps, the hurdles are no problem.”

Under the Cat Fanciers’ Association’s rules, which differ from those of the International Cat Association, a cat is awarded 15 points for each obstacle it navigates successfully, Reimer said.

But is it the cat’s own work ethic or its training regimen — nature or nurture — that makes an agility champion?

“I think it’s more the personality of the cat,” said Reimer, who breeds Burmese. “There are some Maine coons that won’t do anything in there, and there are others that’ll tear the course to shreds. The same with the Abyssinians.”

He once had an Abyssinian kitten named Twink that was a real natural. “All you had to do was wave a wand at her to get her started, and she would stop at the weave poles to wait for me to catch up,” Reimer recalled. “The fastest time for Twink was seven seconds — she was that fast.”

Feline agility got started about a decade ago when two couples who met on the cat show circuit went out to dinner and started talking about the tricks their cats did. They modified some dog agility obstacles and showed them to their cats; from there, a group called International Cat Agility Tournaments — or ICAT — was born.

“When we first started it, everybody said, ‘Train a cat? Impossible!’ ” said Shirley Piper, one of the four founding members.

She and her partner, Kathy Krysta, live in Riverside, Calif., with their 20 cats, which they train regularly, using toys and a system of taps. Some of their cats are so well trained that they will run an agility course on their own, with no feathers or other incentives.

“The spectators don’t care about records and organized running,” said Piper, who will serve as ringmaster at the Meet the Breeds show at the Javits Center in New York this weekend. “They just want to see a cat perform by itself.”

As best anyone can remember, agility competitions started popping up at cat shows around 2004, and scores have been kept sporadically. Occasionally there is some prize money, but more often a ribbon or small trophy is given.

Twyla Mooner, a Bengal from Reston, Va., is considered one of the greatest agility champions and will compete in Indianapolis this weekend. “She is all about speed,” said her owner, Lisa Maria Padilla. “There is not a whole lot of finesse and style, but she burns through the course, and she is good for about two runs a day.”

Most owners are not so lucky. Cat agility videos on YouTube show more bloopers than triumphs.

“There are people there shaking a feather for what seems like an eternity, and the cat just looks at the person and says, ‘I don’t think so,’ ” said Hutcherson, the breeder in Maryland.

Cat agility has not caught on quite as rapidly as its founders had hoped — and not, they insist, because it so often results in cat futility. The main problem is financial: most cat shows barely break even, and it is more lucrative to lease space in the show hall to vendors than to install an agility ring.

Vickie Shields, one of the four founders of ICAT, is hoping to invigorate the sport. She and her partner, Adriana Kajon, experiment with new obstacles in their living room in Albuquerque, where their cats get up every morning and sit expectantly by the drawer where the hoops are kept.

“We think of new things — ball pits, a tiny inflatable swimming pool,” Shields said.

The latter was a flop. “We tried to get the cats to jump over it, but they would run up to it and stop or take a drink,” she said.

Veterinarians are in favor of this kind of play. “I think we let cats’ brains rot, and I think it’s really sad,” said Cynthia M. Otto, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine.

She herself has trained her cat to ride a skateboard, and her dog to push it. “If you start doing this, it really changes your relationship with your animal and enhances your bond,” Otto said.

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Kings and pawns from the Lewis chessmen set.

By KEN JOHNSON
NY Times Published: November 17, 2011

If, by some typically improbable turn of events, Homer Simpson were to unearth from his backyard an old chest containing a chess set from medieval times, what would the pieces look like? Chances are they would resemble the lovable little contestants beautifully carved from walrus tusks by anonymous artisans in the famous cache known as the Lewis Chessmen.

Except for the pawns, which are shaped like tombstones and dome-topped, octagonal towers, each king, queen, bishop, knight and warder, as rooks used to be called, has the bug-eyed, stupefied expression of a Simpson. They could be Homer’s ancestors. You can judge for yourself: 34, all from the British Museum, are in “The Game of Kings: Medieval Ivory Chessmen From the Isle of Lewis,” presented in the perfect setting of the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s citadel for medieval art. The exhibition includes other chess pieces — Islamic and medieval — and carved bone objects from the Met’s collection, all of which serve mainly to show by contrast just how adorable the Lewis chessmen are.

In a booklet from the British Museum about the collection, James Robinson, the museum’s curator of medieval collections, asks, “Were the chessmen, in fact, meant to be comic?” Mr. Robinson points out some funny things about them. One of the warders, who wears a conical helmet and long robe and holds a sword and a shield, seems to glance nervously to his left, as if he’d heard a suspicious sound while standing guard at night. Some warders have their teeth overlapping the tops of their shields, a curious biting gesture thought to identify them as “berserkers”: Nordic warriors who went into battle in frenzied states that might have been induced by alcohol or Amanita muscaria, hallucinogenic mushrooms.

The kings, sitting on ornate thrones with swords across their laps, seem lost in thought, their shoulders weighed down by their preoccupations. The queens, also enthroned, have their hands clapped to their cheeks as if in dismay and thinking, “D’oh!” But Mr. Robinson observes about the pieces in general, “Identifying the exact nature of their attraction for people of the time is a challenge,” and so the humor question remains unanswered.

What is known about the chessmen is that they were found by a farmer on the Isle of Lewis, the largest island of the Outer Hebrides, in 1831. How they got there is a mystery. Some think they arrived from Iceland, but conventional wisdom has it that they somehow came off a merchant ship traveling a regular trade route between Norway and Ireland and that they were produced in Trondheim, a Norwegian town, between 1150 and 1200.

The hoard included 78 chessmen from at least four different, incomplete sets; some pieces resembling checkers; and a belt buckle carved from ivory. The British Museum quickly acquired most of them, and in 1888 the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, secured 11 that had remained in private hands.

Humorously intended or not, each piece is a wonderful, diminutive sculpture, ranging from 1 5/8 inches to just over 4 inches tall. Unlike Renaissance chess sets that abounded in feats of technique, the Lewis Chessmen have a folk art quality. Something archaic about them makes them seem strange and otherworldly. Though not realistic in the modern sense of the word, they appear magically animated, as if the right spell would awaken them from their dormant state.

Certainly they were a good choice for a scene in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” in which Harry and Ron Weasley play Wizard’s Chess using reproductions of the Lewis Chessmen. In the movie white pieces oppose red ones, which is how the figures were originally divided. But the red stains have worn away, and now they are all the color of ivory.

Close looking shows many details rendered with a tender touch. The faces are generically stylized, but each is different enough that some scholars have speculated that they might portray real people. Beards on the male combatants come in a variety of shapes and sizes; some of the kings are clean-shaven. Robes fall in buttery folds, with occasional passages of slight rumpling. Throne backs are carved into intertwining vines, mythic beasts and architectural elements. Each bishop wears an individualized miter. The knights ride pony-size steeds resembling carousel horses.

It is frustrating that plexiglass containers prevent you from picking them up for intimate examination. You would like to heft them, feel the smooth, warm bone and zoom in to see patterns on fabric and other details realized with eye-straining delicacy.

Mr. Robinson notes that some stragglers might yet turn up and make four complete sets. You might want to keep an eye out for a knight, 4 warders and 45 pawns. Meanwhile, a word to “The Simpsons” producers: How about an episode starring Bart as Harry in “Harry Potter and the Lewis Chessmen”?

split syd, 2008
Oil on linen 14 x 11 inches 35.6 x 27.9 cm

November 18, 2011 – March 25, 2012

SFMOMA

November 20-December 24, 2011

Opening Reception Sunday, November 20, from 6 to 8 pm

Overduin and Kite