Stephen Nash

Rondo dwarf galago of Tanzania, by Stephen Nash/Conservation International

Seurat

Alex Hillman Family Foundation
The rarely exhibited drawing “Square House,” conté crayon on paper.
“Georges Seurat: The Drawings” is at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400, through Jan. 7.

Among the Ruins

Photo: David W. Dunlap/The New York Times
The landmarked Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island.

1958 Ford Edsel

From the brochure collection of Steve Hayes

Ron van der Ende

Sputnik (Sputnik1): 2006: Bas relief: Recycled wood
230x200x18cm
http://www.artbbq.nl/ron/menu-eng.htm

Tom Hanke

German artist Tom Hanke of surrealien created a wallpaper that is specifically designed for your room, taking into account the exact placement of the door, light switches, and electrical outlets.

Marc Newson

Photo: Richard Harbus for International Herald Tribune

The spaceplane (interior designed by Marc Newson) was unveiled in Paris last week by its manufacturer, Astrium, part of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, as the latest challenger in the space tourism market.

Astrium plans to take people into space and straight back again. It expects to charge up to €200,000, or about $265,000, for a ticket when commercial flights start in 2012. Another competitor, Space Adventures, will offer multimillion-dollar eight-day holidays at a space station. When Astrium contacted Newson's design studio in early January, it had already completed the engineering of the spaceplane as a single craft with both jet and rocket engines. Most of the other leisure spacecraft will consist of a mother ship and a rocket. Astrium's jet engines will take the spaceplane, its pilot and four passengers to 15,000 meters, or about 49,000 feet, the rocket engine will power it to 60,000 meters, and the craft will then float up to zero gravity at 100,000 meters. It will return to Earth under its own power, landing like a conventional aircraft."They had engineered the basic configuration, and gave us an empty shell to design the interior and everything else relating to the passengers," explained Newson. "Obviously you have to respect the basic dimensions of the cabin and safety issues. Beyond that, it's a question of trying to understand the conditions that passengers will have to withstand, without losing sight of the ultimate goal of enhancing their experience of being in space."

Aaron Muszalski

Wood-burning

Until last month, Americans could admire Antonio Citterio’s Shaker wood-burning stove, which won Germany’s prestigious Red Dot design award in 2006, but they couldn’t have one — unless they were willing to pay extra to ship it from Europe and forgo fire insurance, because most insurance companies won’t write policies for homes with stoves that aren’t approved for use in the United States. To the rescue: Wittus Fire by Design of Pound Ridge, N.Y., the sole distributor of the Shaker stove in North America. Alyce Wittus, the company’s vice president, discovered the stove, made by Skantherm in Germany, on a buying trip to Europe and had it U.L.- and U.L.C.-rated for safety. The initial shipment of 30 has already sold out, but Ms. Wittus is expecting a new one any day. The Shaker model, left, weighs nearly 300 pounds and costs $4,280. (A model with a long bench is $4,780.) Information: (914) 764-5679 or wittus.com. Linda Lee: NYTimes

Lake Ontario

Photo: James Rajotte for The New York Times

A ship carrying road salt pulls into the Port of Oswego, N.Y., on Lake Ontario. The lake’s water level has dropped three inches during this month alone.

Turkey

Photo: Associated Press

Turkish soldiers patrolling the province of Hakkari, near the Turkish-Iraqi border.

Malibu

Photo: Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times

Lake Mead

Photo: Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures, for The New York Times

Draining

The 100-foot-high bathtub ring left by the dwindling waters of Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam.

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html?ref=magazine

Clint Eastwood

As Blondie in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
1966
Dir: Sergio Leone

San Francisco, California

Hyatt Regency Embarcadero

Lobby floor mosaic

18 October

Dodger Stadium 1965

Location shot: The Satan Bug

via Wikipedia:

The Satan Bug (1965) is a science fiction film in which a US government germ warfare lab has had an accident. The first theory is that one of the germs has gotten free and killed several scientists. The big fear is that a more virulent strain, named The Satan Bug, because all life can be killed off by it should it escape, may have been stolen. The film was loosely adapted from Alistair MacLean's 1962 novel The Satan Bug.

It was also one of the first espionage films to follow the lead of the wildly popular James Bond films that set the tone for action/adventure films of the '60s and early '70s. In contrast with the Bond spy thrillers, however, The Satan Bug was a serious attempt by director John Sturges to go in a different direction from his previous all-star blockbusters (The Magnificent Seven, 1960, and The Great Escape, 1963). Indeed, while it is hard to conceive of a film like Goldfinger (1964) without a major star in the lead role, The Satan Bug actually benefits from the lack of big name stars. George Maharis, a product of The Actors Studio, is an effectively laconic hero who uses his brain, not his fists. The Satan Bug is, in essence, a "thinking man's" spy thriller. However, The Satan Bug failed at the box office and remains largely unknown.

Los Angeles, California

Turkey

Osman Orsal/Reuters

Protesters at an anti-U.S. demonstration in Istanbul today.

Oil

Photo: a British soldier guarding oil pipelines near Basra, Iraq, 2005. By Toby Melville/Getty

via Andrew Sullivan

If Greenspan is right [that the war is about oil], haven't we already won the war in Iraq? My old friend Jim Holt explains why in the new LRB. Money quote:

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years.

And so when we keep asking the Bush administration for an exit strategy, we are, in fact, asking the wrong question. There is no exit strategy. The point is staying there for ever in order to ensure that energy supplies are secured by the West. Jim goes on:

How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq.

Five self-sufficient 'super-bases' are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred... But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure.

And so failure in Iraq is actually redefined as success. A long-term presence of 50,000 troops minimum is what seems to be in the cards anyway. Senator Clinton will keep the occupation going for fear of looking weak. And the price is cheap relatively speaking:

The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

Was this a plot from the beginning? I doubt it. But it is an obvious game-plan now.

Yamaha

Faro, Sweden

Photo: Dean C.K. Cox for The New York Times

Stora Gasemora is the closest thing to a hotel on the remote island.

Iraq

Photo: Joao Silva for The New York Times

Some of the 2,000 troops from Georgia, which seeks NATO membership, officially began a mission Monday in Kut, Iraq.

Jonathan Van Dyke

For Artware Editions, the artist Jonathan Van Dyke cast six different paper or plastic-foam coffee cups in Hydrocal plaster. Each is an edition of 10; shown here is Lee, $200. Go to www.artwareeditions.com.

October

Denis Rouvre

Denis Rouvre le photographe de Sortie de match
Photographs of rugby players
Exhibition:
October 24 - December 2: Espace Guillaume Expo: 32 rue de Picardie: Paris

Sorti le 2 novembre en librairie, "Sortie de Match", le livre de Denis Rouvre connait un vrai succès.

Pendant six mois, Denis Rouvre a assisté aux rencontres de tous les effectifs du Top 14 (Top 14 = ligue 1 du rugby). Match après match, il a eu accès aux vestiaires et en rapporte un témoignage de l'engament des rugbymen qui se sont laissés photographier à leur sortie de match.

Un beau livre sur le rugby qui, à travers 140 portraits, rend hommage à l'esprit sportif de ce sport.

Sortie de Match
Editions de la Martinière
Parution le 2 novembre
196 pages
28€

Wellcome Collection

Photo: Jonathan Player for The New York Times
Scientific and pharmaceutical glassware.

John Isaacs

I can't help the way I feel
2003
wax, resin, polystyrene, steel
86 1/2 x 59 x 70 inches
Wellcome Collection
http://www.ktfgallery.com/artists/john_isaacs/?project_id=30

Penguin Press

Michael Clayton

Warner Brothers Pictures
George Clooney.

Arclight this weekend.

Saint Yrieix

A reliquary bust of Saint Yrieix.
Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through March 2; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec

Fascist

Direct from Andrew Sullivan:

War Criminal

After reading the full investigative piece in the NYT today on how this administration decided on breaking America's historic ban on torture and then pursued a long, corrupting policy of ensuring that the interpretation of the law was politicized to keep torture alive, it is hard to disagree with Marty Lederman:

Between this and Jane Mayer's explosive article in August about the CIA black sites, I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation's recent history -- not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals -- lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers -- without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.

The way in which conservative lawyers, and conservative intellectuals, and conservative journalists aided and abetted these war crimes; the way in which the president of the United States revealed so much contempt for the law that he put a candidate to run the Office of Legal Counsel on probation before he appointed him in order to keep the torture regime in place, the way in which Republicans and Democrats in the Congress pathetically refused to stand up to these violations of American honor and decency in any serious way (and, I'm sorry, Senator McCain, but in the end, you caved, as you always do lately): these will go down in history as some of the most shameful decisions these people ever made. Perhaps a sudden, panicked decision by the president to use torture after 9/11 is understandable if unforgivable. But the relentless, sustained attempt to make torture permanent part of the war-powers of the president, even to the point of abusing the law beyond recognition, removes any benefit of the doubt from these people. And they did it all in secret - and lied about it when Abu Ghraib emerged. They upended two centuries of American humane detention and interrogation practices without even letting us know. And the decision to allow one man - the decider - to pre-empt and knowingly distort the rule of law in order to detain and torture anyone he wants - is a function not of conservatism, but of fascism.

James Comey - one of the principled conservatives, like Jack Goldsmith, who actually supported the rule of law and American decency - put it succinctly enough:

"We are likely to hear the words: 'If we don’t do this, people will die,'" Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

"It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most," he said. "It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country."

A couple of things need to be stressed, because I've learned the hard way that intelligent people simply refuse to absorb what is staring them in the face, when what is staring them in the face is so staggering:

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics.

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?

September

Flood Building

Market Street, San Francisco, California

Courtesy of California Historical Society, North Baker Research Library, 678 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94105-4014

http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/collections/northbaker_research.html

Dominique A

Herbert Muschamp 1947-2007

Photo:

Robert Maxwell for The New York Times

Herbert Muschamp in October 2006 in New York.

via NYTimes:

Herbert Muschamp, a writer for The New York Times whose wildly ranging, often deeply personal reviews made him one of the most influential architecture critics of his generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 59 and lived in Manhattan.

As the architecture critic for The Times from 1992 to 2004, Mr. Muschamp seized on a moment when the repetitive battles between Modernists and Post-Modernists had given way to a surge of exuberance that put architecture back in the public spotlight. His openness to new talent was reflected in the architects he singled out, from Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel, now major figures on the world stage, to younger architects like Greg Lynn, Lindy Roy and Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto.

Mr. Muschamp often reflected on the central role that gay men played in New York’s cultural history, specifically the world that he entered as a young gay man escaping the homogeneity of suburban Philadelphia.

Reminiscing lovingly about Edward Durell Stone’s so-called lollipop building on Columbus Circle — now undergoing an extensive redesign — in a 2006 article in the paper’s Arts & Leisure section, he described his generation’s experience this way:

“We were the children of white flight, the first generation to grow up in postwar American suburbs. By the time the ’60s rolled around, many of us, the gay ones especially, were eager to make a U-turn and fly back the other way. Whether or not the city was obsolete, we couldn’t imagine our personal futures in any other form. The street and the skyline signified to us what the lawn and the highway signified to our parents: a place to breathe free.”

San Francisco

Antonio Roman-Alcala

Double Portrait: San Francisco: 2007
iPhone camera

Blackwater

Photo: Chris Curry/The Virginian-Pilot/ZUMA Press

Blackwater USA Academy recruit Gregory Collier screams to team members during a drill at the Blackwater compound in Moyock, N.C., on Aug. 2, 2006.

via Salon: The dark truth about Blackwater

Outsourcing the war to private military contractors such as Blackwater has shattered the United States' moral authority and its ability to win wars like that in Iraq.

By P.W. Singer

On Sept. 16, 2007, a convoy of Blackwater contractors guarding State Department employees entered a crowded square near the Mansour district in Baghdad, Iraq. But versions of what caused the ensuing bloodshed diverge. Employees from the firm claim they were attacked by gunmen and responded within the rules of engagement, fighting their way out of the square after one of their vehicles was disabled. Iraqi police and witnesses instead report that the contractors opened fire first, shooting at a small car driven by a couple with their child that did not get out of the convoy's way as traffic slowed. At some point in the 20-minute gunfight, Iraqi police and army forces stationed in watchtowers above the square also began firing. Other Iraqi security forces and Blackwater quick-reaction forces soon reportedly joined the battle. There are also reports that one Blackwater employee may even have pointed his weapon at his fellow contractors, in an effort to get them to cease firing.

Since then, the Iraqi and U.S. governments have launched separate investigations, likely ensuring that the differing versions of the story will never meet. The only thing agreed upon is the consequences: After a reported 20 Iraqi civilians were killed, including the couple and their child, who was subsequently burned to the mother's body after the car caught fire, the Iraqi government and populace exploded with anger.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called the killings a crime, announcing that his government was pulling Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq and would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have been involved in the killings. But there were two problems: Despite its mission of guarding U.S. officials in Iraq, Blackwater had no license with the Iraqi government. Secondly, the murky legal status of the contractors meant they might be considered exempt from Iraqi law because of a mandate left over from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. governing authority in Iraq that was dissolved more than two years prior.

The Blackwater mess has roiled Capitol Hill and shined light on the many questions surrounding the legal status, management, oversight and accountability of the private military force in Iraq, which numbers more than 160,000 -- at least as many as the total number of uniformed American forces there. The debate will heat up again Tuesday with hearings by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee led by Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California. The problem is, some of the most critical questions may yet go unasked.

I've done a decade's worth of research and writing on the military's use of private contractors... and when I evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops. Even worse, the government can no longer carry out one of its most basic core missions: to fight and win the nation's wars. Instead, the massive outsourcing of military operations has created a dependency on private firms like Blackwater that has given rise to dangerous vulnerabilities.

On Tuesday, among those testifying on Capitol Hill will be Erik Prince, the chairman and owner of Blackwater, as well as a series of State Department officials who were supposed to have overseen the firm's activities. We can expect that Prince will wrap himself in the flag, discussing all the vital missions that Blackwater conducts in Iraq, while downplaying the recent killings. State Department officials are likely to say that they had no other option but to use the firm, given their lack of Diplomatic Security forces -- conveniently ignoring that the department has chosen to hollow out its Diplomatic Security corps and instead hand over the task to a consortium of private firms led by Blackwater under a multibillion-dollar contract.

Waxman's committee, which has already been focused on politically connected companies and contracting corruption in Iraq, has disclosed a series of documents in recent days that reveal some dark patterns with Blackwater. The documents appear to show that the firm cut corners that may have contributed to employee deaths, it may have tried to have documents classified in order to cover up corporate failures, and the State Department's own inspector general may have tried to impede investigations into Blackwater, including threatening to fire any of his inspectors who cooperated with Congress.

Prince will take his shots, and State officials will point to new investigations they are now launching to try to mollify congressional anger. But regardless of whether the Blackwater contractors were justified in the shooting, whether there was proper jurisdiction to ensure accountability, or even whether using firms like Blackwater saves money (the data shows it does not), there is an underlying problem that everyone is ignoring.

Our dependency on military contractors shows all the signs of the last downward spirals of an addiction. If we judge by what has happened in Iraq, when it comes to counterinsurgency and the use of private military contractors, the U.S. has locked its national security into a vicious cycle. It can't win with them, but can't go to war without them.

More: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater/print.html

Confisserie et Patisserie

http://www.miettecakes.com/

San Francisco Bay

Saturday 29 September 2007