Sophianotloren

Hey look at this adorable new dinosaur!

Postcards as horrifying propaganda of colonial pasts.

What do we find when the reservoirs dry up? (spoiler alert: some neat stuff and also some gross stuff.)

John Berger at 88.

We don’t live on the moon yet because we don’t need to nuke Russia from that far away.

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tastefullyoffensive:

A Florida man snapped this photo of a raccoon riding an alligator at the Ocala National Forest (full story). Photo by Richard Jones via WFTV.

The long time Dominican Republic treatment of Haitian migrants has been an abomination. Now it is getting worse with the DR seeking to strip descendants of Haitians of their citizenship.

…Link is fixed. This is what happens when you set up material for the next day because you are going to be at a conference and then you screw it up. Thanks to Origami Isopod for the link. Also, thanks to the LGMers who came out for my DC booktalk last night. Working on scheduling a couple more events and will let you all know. I can say that those in New York should plan on being at Local 61 in Brooklyn on July 29 for drinks and me.

COLOGNE, Germany — Sigmar Polke was based in Cologne for over 30 years before he died there in 2010 at age 69, and his Alibis: Retrospective brings his body of work home to rest at the Museum Ludwig. The show cleanly displays roughly 250 items he left behind, generally segregating them by medium. Taken together, the works divulge, veil, dissemble, and entangle late-20th century overcooked Pop imagery and beautifully illustrate Polke’s commitment to meaningless charade.

An inescapable reference for me behind his work is the painter/poet Francis Picabia, as both shared an open-minded, post-conceptual practice that was Dada in its playful, Duchampian sensibility. From 1961 to 1967 Polke studied at the Arts Academy in Düsseldorf under K.O. Götz and Gerhard Hoehme, and where Joseph Beuys was quite influential. There, he attended the 1963 Fluxus festival and developed his Neo-Dada, Fluxus interest for the instability of process.

Polke integrated the photomechanical into his paintings as early as 1963 — work that paved the way for his penchant for image manipulation. In addition to these titanic paintings, there are wonderful, dainty watercolor drawings from his youthful notebooks. Ghostly, washy photographs, taken on the suffering, old Bowery, span an entire wall. Astonishing are the bizarre appropriations of found images in photo-based prints like “Untitled” (1975) and “Untitled (Quetta, Pakistant)” (1974–78) and the intensely complex stencil paintings, like “Pill” (1976) and “Alice in Wonderland” (1972).

The show stresses his paintings, but the films are the buried truffles. They are the key to the oeuvre, as film permeates all his ethereal creations. The semi-translucent qualities of film — its chemical make-up and its casting of a wide but immaterial projection — pervade his work. It’s also worth noting that Polke as a teenager apprenticed in a stained-glass studio: the art of translucency par excellence.

In works like “Pill” (1976), Polke raises awareness of a key contemporary dilemma: the interface between our physical reality and cyberspace, where form is set adrift and caught between two spaces. The work’s translucent and virtual quality, stemming from Polke’s central idea of art as a slippery process, gives “Pill” (and most of his work) an immaterial reality that is shared with media distribution on the net. We also see this in his early media-based paintings such as “Girlfriends” (1965/1966) where Polke incorporated the photographic reproductions of raster dots that were used in prints. It is a work that also calls to mind Roy Lichtenstein’s “Look Mickey” (1961) where he first employed the Ben-Day dots printing process.

At the entrance of Alibis is a photograph of Polke, along with his bio, holding up the Mothers of Invention’s 1970 album cover Weasels Ripped My Flesh. This record’s outstanding use of free jazz, sonic experimentation, lyrical nonsense, and noise music turns out to be another source of inspiration for Polke. The reference offers another context for his anti-authoritarian images. Although pop-oriented, like Zappa, Polke’s trippy work is charged with the mystery and chance of everyday life.

Wild image clusters, like in “Dr. Berlin” (1969–74), mash up hallucinatory Henri Michaux-like, mind-bending art with Thomas Bayrle’s tech art. Indeed, there is something of the sensual enjoyment of getting high throughout this show that so pervaded the ‘70s and ‘80s cultural scene — even though it was installed far too high up on the wall, the wobbly “Dr. Berlin” amusingly decomposed and melted the more time I spent with it. But there is also something tongue-in-cheek about its caustic punk humor and the way the pop imagery falls apart. Polke’s brilliant instinct for the deteriorating figurative image — such as when he barely paints “Why Can’t I Stop Smoking?” (1964) or loosely paints over tawdry pattern fabrics, as with “Heron Painting I” (1968) — indicates something deeper than pop. He shows himself to be somewhat of a symbolist painter, one alert to the stylistics of both pop (a badly formulated misunderstanding of the deeper stakes in life) and lyrical abstraction. In that respect his work is indeed a form of anti-pop (or post-pop) art, and is somewhat inspiring in our tedious times of celebrity culture.

There is also a cosmic side to Polke as seen in the early, altogether deviant, film “The Whole Body Feels Light and Wants to Fly…” The 16mm film (transferred to digital video) with sound overlay is an audacious 1969 collaboration between the artist Christof Kohlhöfer and Polke depicting something of an eccentric séance. One scene, that recalled Bruce Nauman’s body-based video work “In Stamping in the Studio” (1968) where he filmed himself repeatedly stamping back and forth across his studio floor, shows Polke furiously and repeatedly scratching himself over his clothes as two Brenda Lee songs play over each other. There is no Debordian spectacular society portrayed. Rather, Kohlhöfer traces the tension between a dreamy Polke and emotionless trance. The camera takes very unusual perspectives. For example, we see Polke undergo something of a tortuous encounter with the magic of a pendulum. Reclining, his face is covered by a white hood, showing only his nose and mouth through a roughly cut hole. In his mouth he is holding and moving up and down a rubber turkey baster. Amusingly, he jousts with the metal tip of the swinging pendulum. In a voice-over we hear a cackling Polke read a weird but poetic text that includes bits from The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life and The Seventh Book of Mosis.

But the best bit of the film does not feature Polke: a lengthy overhead shot of an overstuffed lackluster chair that, after being drenched in water, takes on an almost fairylike quality under the rhythm of a swaying ceiling lamp, while a homemade noise soundtrack plays. Kohlhöfer achieves this machine-like sound by plunking a metal knife on a tabletop and processing the resulting tinny vibrating sound through six cassette tape players. The soundtrack is brilliant — a first-rate example of beautiful and agitated noise art, typical of a post-minimalist/post-conceptualist spirit that turned toward the absurd so as to transcend the banal world. I found it very astute.

With Polke, art can now be part of our tech culture and behave like a dream, free from some of the classical strictures of time and space, and free from some of art’s traditional earthly limits. For some, this merging of art and technology has demanded a new need for the “real” of the tactile. But for Polke, art existed as “real” when he could create it through process-based technological apparatuses. In his work, he dreamed up of new realities that transcended country, race, and gender. I understand this aspect of Polke as the anti-materialist in him. More than anything, his art displays and embodies the German aphorism that best sums up the work of Sigmar Polke: Wir sind high und frei (We are high and free).

Alibis: Sigmar Polke Retrospective continues at the Museum Ludwig (Heinrich-Böll-Platz, Cologne, Germany) through July 5.

By Mary Bernstein

As the U.S. awaits the imminent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges which might legalize same-sex marriage throughout the country, it is important to take time to consider what this means for the LGBT movement, LGBT identities, and LGBT communities.  Despite enormous grassroots support among LGBT people for same-sex marriage, there has been much criticism of the pursuit of same-sex marriage by queer activists that stems from concerns that many groups of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) are being left behind, while those who are most “homonormative” become accepted and, as a result depoliticized.  This concern is translated into fear that LGBT people are marching en masse to the suburbs where they will be enclosed behind white picket fences, sipping homonormative Kool-Aid and failing to realize that heteronormativity and homophobia are alive and well.

In my SWS presidential address (here), I consider the everyday lives of same-sex couples with children, a subject about which queer critics are strangely silent.  This silence of queer critics regarding same-sex couples with children is partly a function of a failure to look at the everyday lives of LGBT people, whether in cities, suburbs, or elsewhere.  While official marriage equality discourse may be relatively conservative, I am interested in thinking about the lived reality of same-sex couples with children and how same-sex marriage may propel them to be more “out” about their relationships and lives.  What happens in public spaces ranging from schools and playgrounds to hospitals and neighborhoods does not simply reproduce heteronormativity; the very presence of gay and lesbian couples, especially those with children challenges assumptions that everyone is heterosexual.  Recent court cases have begun to acknowledge what rigorous research has demonstrated; namely that the gender of the parents or even having two parents present is not necessary to producing healthy well-adjusted children.

What are the underlying concerns about how the state regulates intimate relationships?  Will same-sex marriage address structural inequalities or mainly benefit white, middle-class people?  I agree that access to marriage will not benefit all people in the same way.  But nonetheless the pursuit of same-sex marriage is supported by a broad array of LGBT people.  It is impossible to escape regulation.  The question is not whether the state should regulate intimate relationships, but how the state should regulate them.

When couples do not have access to the state, as in the case of cohabiting couples, they often turn to the state for help when their relationships end.  The weaker party, generally the woman in heterosexual relationships, tends to make out poorly in these cases.  So a lack of state regulation is not necessarily beneficial and may exacerbate existing inequalities.

So what will happen to the LGBT movement once same-sex marriage is achieved throughout the U.S.?  If one looks at projects sponsored by the Arcus Foundation, one of the largest funders of LGBT activism, the preponderance of grants are given to projects and organizations specifically composed of people of color or those seeking racial justice.  And a closer look at the largest national LGBT organizations suggests an emphasis on a broad range of issues.

So here’s hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court decides Obergefell v. Hodges in a way that allows same-sex couples throughout the U.S. access to marriage.  Once same-sex marriage is achieved there will still be much to do and the good news is that activists are already doing it.  LGBT and queer people have a multiplicity of identities, and achieving same-sex marriage will perhaps open up even more space to expand the LGBT political agenda to find concrete policy solutions that support all families and to work in pursuit of broad intersectional goals of structural change, social justice, and the common good.

Mary Bernstein is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She serves as a deputy editor for Gender & Society and past president of Sociologists for Women in Society. Her SWS Presidential Address “Same-Sex Marriage and the Future of the LGBT Movement” is published in the June 2015 issue of Gender & Society.

Filed under: Family, Inequality, Law

Paul Bacon, who designed more than 6,500 book covers, passed away on June 8th from a stroke.

The list of books for which Bacon designed covers reads like a who’s who of literary and popular fiction: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, and many more. Most of Bacon’s covers feature bold lettering paired with a small image related to the text.

“‘He didn’t see himself as a sensitive artist; he was there to serve,’ said [Robert] Gottlieb, who worked with Mr. Bacon [at Simon and Schuster] for many years. ‘If you rejected the first one, he was happy to do a 10th one. We worked and worked until it was right.’”

Related Posts:

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outofmyelement-naclh2o:

I am so torn between my love of classic military aircraft and the jaw dropping awe of how amazing it would be to own a flying yacht…

Link 1 

Link 2

Link 3 (Sad demise)

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Just in time for your summer beach trip, J. Crew has released a limited-edition tote bag emblazoned with a Slurpee-shaded landscape and discreet sans serif lettering wishing “Love to Nepal.” The eye-catching infrared image, captured by New York–based photographer Sean Lynch, features Nepal’s Annapurna mountain range, according to the brand’s website. The fashion label states that it will donate 50% of the proceeds from the tote’s sales to the American Red Cross’s relief efforts in the recently earthquake-devastated country.

While this certainly isn’t the first time a brand has commodified a disaster, epidemic, or other charity cause to help boost sales and bolster buyers’ perceived virtue, what is particularly interesting about this case is Lynch’s image and the resemblance it bears to another contemporary photographer’s work: Richard Mosse. The Irish artist gained acclaim for his 2012 photo series Infra, which captures the war-torn Congolese landscape using a discontinued film, Kodak Aerochrome. Originally developed for wartime government surveillance since it made camouflage easy to spot, the film provides Mosse with a convenient war-related medium in addition to lending the photos their signature rubicund hue.

Infrared photography is not a new technology, and its use isn’t the purview of any one photographer. Judging from Lynch’s Tumblr, he has been creating infrared images for at least as long as Mosse, and his Nepalese series precedes the country’s recent earthquakes by nearly two years. Unlike Mosse, whose infrared use is limited to the Congo, Lynch has captured numerous other ultraviolet vistas, ranging from New York’s Central Park to Utah’s national parks.

Yet what Lynch’s and Mosse’s photographs share, besides their candy-hued hills, is a fetishized landscape that challenges reality. Because infrared film reveals color wavelengths that the naked eye can’t detect, this style of photography implies that we can see more through the image than we otherwise could in person.

With regard to Mosse especially, the luscious infrared tones abstract the land they depict. Amidst the fantastic vegetation, the harsh realities of war become grotesquely real — guns appear flatly gray, soldiers’ uniforms are often a muddy brown, skulls remain staunchly bone white. It is the tension between seduction and abjection that imparts critical weight to Mosse’s photos.

Lynch’s Nepalese landscapes are less overtly political and instead seem largely aesthetically driven. They showcase breathtaking mountain landscapes devoid of people and quaint huts seemingly empty of inhabitants. Without the grossly human element that grounds Mosse’s images, Lynch’s infrared style fetishizes an already mythologized, underprivileged, non-Western country. The film obscures the economic realities of a struggling nation and reduces it to a visual experience ripe for Western audiences.

By plastering Lynch’s Annapurna vista on a canvas tote to marginally benefit victims of Nepal’s back-to-back earthquakes this spring, J. Crew is trying to capitalize on the abject sublime, which in this case fails to present anything more than an illusory candy land. The bag further objectifies a now devastated nation, reducing it to a palatable consumer item that gestures toward philanthropic awareness but ultimately just confirms what we already knew about summer style — bright colors are in.

Art authenticators can finally breathe a sigh of relief: on Monday, the New York State Senate passed much-anticipated legislation that protects them from frivolous libel lawsuits. Act S1229A states that only “valid, verifiable claims” against authenticators will be allowed to proceed in court. It also stipulates that they be compensated financially for their legal expenses should they win. Though the bill has cleared one major hurdle with the State Senate’s approval, it still needs to be voted on by the State Assembly before it passes into law.

The bill amends the existing Arts and Cultural Affairs law to address an enormous problem. In recent years, art authenticators have increasingly become victims of some of the art world’s biggest bullies. Those who formulate opinions about artworks that collectors disagree with have found themselves served with bogus libel lawsuits, forced to bear the financial burden of crippling lawyers’ fees even when the suits get thrown out.

It’s also been detrimental to art historical scholarship. In 2012, for instance, the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat stopped providing certificates or opinions of authenticity in order to avoid any legal repercussions. That same year, researchers at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art cancelled a conference about a group of alleged Francis Bacon drawings for the same reason.

Thanks to the new law, that sad era in contemporary art may finally be relegated to the history books. The legislation covers any “person or entity recognized in the visual arts community as having expertise regarding the artist, work of fine art, or visual art multiple, or a person or entity recognized in the visual arts or scientific community as having expertise in uncovering facts that serve as a direct basis, in whole or in part, for an opinion as to the authenticity, attribution, or authorship of a work of fine art or visual art multiple.”

That includes authors of catalogue raisonnés or other texts wherein an opinion about an artwork is expressed or implied. It excludes anyone who doesn’t practice the trade in “good faith” — that is, anyone who stands to gain financially from evaluating an artwork (besides the standard authentication fees).

“Our art galleries and museums are an integral part of a successful
tourism industry throughout New York State,” Senator Betty Little, who sponsored the bill, said in a statement. “A key component of the industry are highly skilled experts who provide opinions about the authenticity of works of art.”

I guess it’s September now. I hate, hate, hate these markers of the passage of time — reminders of how little has changed, how stagnant life still is, how dreadfully hopeless my prospects still are for finding anything stable, anything functional.

7 and a half months I’ve been homeless (this time around)
10 months I’ve been single.
13 months I’ve been trying to find a place to live (again, this last time around.)
10 different addresses I’ve had since I moved out of my parents’ place.
5 and a half years since I “left the nest.”
Too many sleepless nights, too many days I don’t eat enough food, too much stressing out and worrying about everything, and so little control over any of it…

Letters I’ve needed to write for years. Items that I ended up with that need to go back to their rightful owners. Money I still get hounded by debt collectors over, going on 4 years later.

33 years old, over halfway to 34, and all I see is day after day of uncertainty and fear and chaos.

“What do you see yourself doing one year from now? What about 5 years?  What about 10 years?”

I can’t see myself one year from now. I don’t have the capacity. I don’t have the framework to begin to conceptualize what a year ahead might look like, or even what a month ahead might be.  I can’t make plans because I can’t grind against the gears of this enormous machine that is rolling the opposite direction and always threatening to crush me underneath. And so rarely has something I’ve planned actually worked the way it was supposed to — the  trip to meet DE-B, or the one for my miserable birthday with Lime, or the one that didn’t even end up happening due to circumstances (and people) beyond either of our control when I thought I was going to visit Shine (whose name I don’t think I’ve mentioned here before) earlier this summer to celebrate Independence Day.  Things haven’t gone the way I’ve planned with simple things or big ones, and I have such limited power to accomplish things on my own, so little power to wield…

Where is my home? Where do I go? I don’t know what to do, and I’m scared. I keep posting my “looking for housing” craigslist ad, I keep checking out every single notification from PadMapper that comes in from my saved search (and there’s really not much) but there’s just nothing that I can possibly afford that’s also safe, that has any chance of lasting or being even remotely stable.

I don’t know what to do.

Filed under: General

(The Rude Pundit is reviewing The Silencing, which is not the title of a serial killer movie but is columnist/commentator Kirsten Powers' new book, subtitled, "How the Left Is Killing Free Speech.")

As mentioned yesterday, the biggest problem of The Silencing is the incredible lack of anyone actually being silenced. Challenged, annoyed, harassed, insulted, debated, yeah, sure. But someone being denied the ability to speak or someone losing a job? Not so much.

In fact, here's a list of a bunch of examples in the book where the end result is not silence:

Page 29: Alec Baldwin tweets racist things about conservative pundit Michelle Malkin. Others tweet racism, too. Malkin did not lose her column.

(Side note: Powers relies a great deal on things people tweet. If you rely on Twitter for examples of ugliness, you may as well just say, "Yeah, most of Twitter" and be done with it. Just because Twitchy and Huffington Post think tweets are important doesn't mean they are.)

Page 31: Ed Schultz, Bill Maher, and Keith Olbermann said sexist things about S.E. Cupp and Sarah Palin. And we never heard from them again.

Page 34: Chris Matthews and others say that people who oppose Obama are racist. Then Matthews had them all killed, as is his way.

Page 36: Paul Krugman and others say that Rep. Paul Ryan was racist in what he said about "inner city" men and women.

Page 39: Some feminists think women who are against abortion rights are not feminists. Some feminists believe there is a GOP War on Women.

Page 46: Some blogs thought that National Journal editor Ron Fournier, late of AP, was unfair in his criticism of Barack Obama in 2008.

Page 59: Some religious organizations wanted to opt out of requirements that they not discriminate against LGBT people if the organization wants government contracts. Liberal blogs thought that was discrimination.

Page 107: The entire chapter is about how President Obama and his administration seek to discredit Fox "news," which, as we know, was totally taken off the air. (Really, was Powers under some kind of contractual obligation to defend Fox? Because there is a "doth protest too much" feel to this whole part.)

Page 123: Media Matters says mean things about Fox. (Indeed, Powers seems to believe that David Brock is the King of Liberal Media, which, as far as the Rude Pundit has heard in his secret underground cabal meetings with every other lefty blogger, is not the case.)

Page 142: Only Fox covered the story of killer abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, which would be totally true if it wasn't completely false.

Page 154: Some women writers accused Mitt Romney of "mansplaining" things. Obviously, that's why Romney lost the 2012 election.

You get the idea. Time and again, Powers' examples are ludicrous, like the worst whining of right-wing blogs and Newsbusters. She invokes Joseph McCarthy several times, but when she does, it's just shorthand for "people said shit that was unfair," not "someone lost everything because of their beliefs."

To be fair, the section on college campuses does contain real, genuine, disturbing censorship by the left. Like Powers, the Rude Pundit found the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis somewhat appalling. Even if he disagrees with her, an angry mob shouldn't determine who gets to speak. And he couldn't agree more that the UC-Santa Barbara incident where a professor tore up the signs of an anti-choice protester on campus is messed up. These are acts of silencing. Women being mean to Mitt Romney is not.

Powers believes that liberals should"know better" than to attack people with language more befitting, one assumes, conservatives. But this grasping at every time liberals - the phrase that Powers coins and uses endlessly is "illiberal left," which is about as meaningless as it sounds - say something bad means that Powers ignores actual silencing that is done repeatedly by the right, aided and abetted by Fox "news."

Remember the story of Shirley Sherrod? She was viciously attacked and hounded out of her job at the Department of Agriculture by right wing blogs and Fox for something she said, purely and simply and totally reported wrongly, as even Fox had to admit.

Or how about how ACORN, an organization devoted to helping poor people, was destroyed by the same bad actors (with scumsucking piglet James O'Keefe) who put out lie after lie, all based on falsely represented speech. How many people lost their jobs? How many voices of advocates were silenced?

There is this myth that conservatives like to tell, about intolerance on the left. To be sure, there are excesses. To be sure, speech codes and trigger warnings deserve examination and criticism. And there is a debate to be had over balancing religious freedom with non-discrimination, a debate that the Rude Pundit would be happy to have with Powers.

But, looking at the history of speech in this country, including McCarthyism, the victims of genuine silencing are usually the ones who Powers tries to make the villains.

Happy Captain Picard Day!!!

Wallpapers, Series 3

Latest installment of online project curated by nicolassassoon features a series of artists who use computers to make their work, which is then exhibited in real world exhibitions.

The latest series features works by Nicolas himself, Sara Ludy, and Sylvain Sailly.

You can view the collection and find out more here

Hovertext: He's actually an adjunct professor of literature.

New comic!
Today's News:

WASHINGTON, DC — Chanting “kick Koch off the board” and lifting signs with slogans like, “climate deniers out of science museums,” a crowd of protesters picketed in front of the Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) just after 12:30pm. Marching in a circle, there were around 60 or 70 activists in attendance, a bit shy of the “hundreds” promised by the protest’s press release. Mere minutes into the event, a middle aged man in a collared shirt and slacks walked by, thrust his arms out in frustration, and said, “Wrong, wrong, wrong … It’s a democracy.” A protestor countered by claiming Koch’s private funds were influencing a public institution, but the man simply sighed and continued walking. That was about as spontaneous as the day would get.

Back in March, the Natural History Museum, a confusingly named mobile museum focused on social justice and climate change, released an open letter to the Smithsonian Institution. It read:

David Koch is a major donor, exhibit sponsor and trustee on the Board of Directors at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and the American Museum of Natural History. David Koch’s oil and manufacturing conglomerate Koch Industries is one of the greatest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Mr. Koch also funds a large network of climate-change-denying organizations, spending over $67 million since 1997 to fund groups denying climate change science.

When some of the biggest contributors to climate change and funders of misinformation on climate science sponsor exhibitions in museums of science and natural history, they undermine public confidence in the validity of the institutions responsible for transmitting scientific knowledge. This corporate philanthropy comes at too high a cost.

Shortly after the letter was published, the Smithsonian released a statement that explained, “Donors and supporters have no influence on the content or presentation of Smithsonian exhibitions, regardless of their private interests,” and “the Smithsonian’s official statement on climate change, based upon many decades of scientific research, points to human activities as a cause of global warming.” The statement also made reference to an October 2, 2014, press release from the Smithsonian, which further elaborated their stance on climate change and the “pressing need” to research it.

But the conflict didn’t end there. The objections were covered by the New York Times, and The National History Museum gathered nearly 430,000 signatures for a petition to oust David Koch from the Smithsonian’s advisory board.

At today’s protest, the group handed boxes containing the signatures to four Smithsonian representatives who agreed to take them to the organization’s Board of Regents, whose meeting was in session during the protest.

When asked about the protestors, Linda St. Thomas, a spokesperson for the Smithsonian, said she understood that the activists wanted the Smithsonian to remove Koch, “which they’re simply not going to do.” She also acknowledged they had voiced concerns about the Human Origins exhibit and have claimed it implies humans can “just adapt to climate change,” but she said, “it does not.”

After picketing for 20 or so minutes, the group marched down to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and set up a PA system and microphone on top of the van that houses their mobile natural history exhibit. Beka Economopoulos, director of The Natural History Museum, climbed on top of the vehicle to expound on the group’s major talking points. In addition to Koch, she also called for the termination of Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a part-time researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Soon was the subject of a recent New York Times investigation that found he received over $1 million in funding from fossil-fuel interests that he subsequently failed to disclose.

Once Economopoulos finished, Joe Romm, climate scientist and founder of the publication Climate Progress, climbed up the ladder as well. He’s written complaints about the Smithsonian in the past, but today he harped on the importance of science to the founders of the United States, particularly Thomas Jefferson, and claimed that David Koch stands in stark contrast to American values, calling him “the biggest anti-science funder on the earth.”

Romm lambasted the museum’s Hall of Human Origins, claiming it was full of “misleading” statements and “grotesque distortions.” In his view, the exhibit suggests that “climate change isn’t a big deal, and we’ll evolve our way out of it.” He closed by saying the Smithsonian Foundation is “enabling and legitimizing” the “anti-science” of Koch by allowing him to remain on their Advisory Board.

An unaffiliated activist and former Smithsonian employee, who declined to be named for this story, watched the entirety of the protest with a vague look of dismay. “They’re too demanding … you have to have leverage to make demands,” he noted. The cause was not lost on him. Having been involved in environment-related protests in the past, he said he agreed with the fundamental premise of their argument, but he didn’t think their “preachy” approach would have any productive impact on Koch or the Smithsonian. “It’s a moral issue, yes, but they’re saying it’s ‘the’ moral issue, and it’s not.”

Reverend Lennox Yearwood, president of the Hip Hop Caucus, closed out the event by discussing the links between poverty, social justice, and climate change. Most pointedly, Yearwood recounted how Georgetown University was once funded by slave-run plantation owners. Rather than oppose slavery and defy the “David Kochs of their time,” the university actually determined Christians could be moral and own slaves. Yearwood noted how the university still bears this moral stain on its history, and if the Smithsonian doesn’t oust Koch, they’ll have to live with the burden of moral blemish on their own history.

California’s getting more and more serious about water conservation: For the first time in nearly 40 years, the state mandated cuts for many of its oldest water-rights holders, many of whom are farmers. This comes just a few months after Governor Jerry Brown’s call for a 25 percent reduction among the state’s cities and towns—and as the state enters the summer of its fourth consecutive year of drought. Though agriculture water use will be hard to monitor, thirsty urban users who don’t comply face a range of fines.

So how do you explain a place like Rancho Santa Fe, an enclave of San Diego County, where water use has gone up by 9 percent since April?

Money. Steve Yuhas, a conservative talk-show host and part-time resident of Rancho Santa Fe, explained in a Washington Post hate-read this weekend: “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he said. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Yuhas’ quote is one of many nauseatingly backwards statements in the piece on why ultra-wealthy owners of multi-acre properties—which might boast orchards, stables, elaborate waterworks, and of course, bright sweeps of lawn—deserve more sympathy and fewer penalties.

“I’m a conservative, so this is strange, but I defend Barbra Streisand’s right to have a green lawn,” Yuhas says elsewhere in the story. Gay Butler, an interior designer, believes that having such few residents (two) on a property the size of hers (four acres) is actually conservation-positive. “You could put 20 houses on my property, and they’d have families of at least four. In my house, there is only two of us,” Butler says. “[T]hey’d be using a hell of a lot more water than we’re using.”

Rancho Santa Fe counts among the few areas in California required to squeeze water use by 36 percent, the maximum reduction. But it’s also one of a few places in the state that’s actually cranking the faucet open harder since the drought began, for reasons that aren’t totally clear. Are residents jacking up water use “in a misguided attempt to increase their baseline before rationing kicks in,” as one local water official suggested to the Post? Is a sort of deprivation mentality encouraging folks to flood their yards? Or is it something more brazen and selfish: A fat middle finger pointing north to Sacramento?

A limitless sense of entitlement plus a a limitless supply of funds is a powerful combination.

Whatever it is, the Post reports that the 3,100 residents of Rancho Santa Fe have not “felt the wrath of the water police”:

Authorities have issued only three citations for violations of a first round of rather mild water restrictions announced last fall. In a place where the median income is $189,000, where PGA legend Phil Mickelson once requested a separate water meter for his chipping greens, where financier Ralph Whitworth last month paid the Rolling Stones $2 million to play at a local bar, the fine, at $100, was less than intimidating.

Supposedly, that’s about to change, as the water district imposes an allotment for basic daily needs. People who exceed their allotment might see their flow restricted by the district, or else have their tap totally shut off.

It’s important to point out the views of Rancho Santa Fe’s biggest guzzlers are not shared by the vast majority of Californians, as a statewide survey by the Public Policy Institute of California published earlier this month shows. For the first time, 39 percent of Californians named water and drought as the most important issue facing the state right now—over jobs and the economy. Asked about their governor’s required water restrictions in urban areas, nearly half of all residents said the cuts “do the right amount to respond to the drought.” Thirty-six percent said the restrictions do not do enough, while 12 percent said they do too much.

Still, for the “1 percent” among that 12 percent, a limitless sense of entitlement plus a limitless supply of funds is a powerful combination. With California’s groundwater regulations years away from taking effect, what’s to stop deep-pocketed homeowners from digging their own wells? Or trucking in water? Or striking deals with local politicians? One ultra-wealthy resident compares his sprawling lawns to his Chevy Suburban: He can afford to pay for copious amounts water and gas, so who’s to say it’s not his right to do so?

It’s a chilling analogy, because many predict that water shortages, exacerbated by climate change, are going to cause global warfare similar to the way oil has. Water and oil are both highly limited resources. Yet water, unlike oil, is a human right—for Californians and for the 750 million who live without access to clean water worldwide. The attitude that money can, and should, buy any quantity of water isn’t common yet in California, but as droughts become longer and more dire all over the planet, it will likely spread. And the gap between who can drink freely and who cannot will grow.

The hard times of the uber wealthy:

Billionaire hedge fund manager Dan Loeb and Lightyear Capital Chairman Don Marron are among the collectors who will head to the Swiss city of Basel to check out the world’s largest modern and contemporary art fair.

Art Basel opens to invited guests on June 16 in the quiet Swiss city on the Rhine River. The fair’s 46th edition includes 284 galleries from 33 countries showing works by 4,000 artists. Insurer AXA Art estimates there’s 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) of art on view, about the same as last year.

Last month’s New York auctions set new records as $2.7 billion of art changed hands — up 23 percent from a year earlier — and a Picasso painting fetched $179.4 million.

“Interest rates are so low that people have so much money they don’t know what to do with it,” said Robert Landau, owner of Landau Fine Art, which is offering a $30 million Pablo Picasso painting. He said one of his clients is a 37-year-old man who retired after earning a fortune and is “sailing around the world and buying paintings to put on the boat.”

Warren Buffett’s NetJets Inc., a sponsor of the fair for the 12th year, said it has booked about 110 private flights in and out of Basel, a 10 percent increase from a year ago.

Password-management service LastPass announced today that it "discovered and blocked suspicious activity" on its network on Friday. While the company says that there is no evidence that user vault data (a user's stored passwords) was taken or that ac...

[Content Note: Food insecurity; poverty; classism.]

Some of us hide to shield our loved ones and some because we've watched people shift in their seats when we share something a little too real in a complaint competition over not having enough money. The more we navigate social situations that allow for hints at our near destitution, the more we seek to avoid the sideways glances and uncomfortable check arrival moments while out with friends. We can each do grocery store math at lightning speed to remain inconspicuous to other customers. We become skilled at hiding because we know how uncomfortable poor people make those around them.

No one wants to hear how you triple checked your EBT card before leaving the house or how excited you were about the $2.45 you found in a coat pocket because it meant hitting up the dollar menu during your commute between jobs. You begin to feel more and more Othered until you participate in your own isolation.

...[Polling] responses indicate that many think fewer beneficiaries equals fewer poor people — backing up the anecdotal Twitter experience on the #PovertyIs thread: 50% of Americans are sure that none of their close friends are poor; 63% of Americans think there are no poor people in their immediate or near extended family (aunts, uncles, first cousins, grandparents); a whopping 76% of Americans can't conceive that they might know someone at risk of going hungry tomorrow; and 65% of Americans don't even think they know someone who's been late on a bill.

The reason so many don't think they know anyone living at or near the poverty line also might be because their loved ones are afraid to speak up about the reality of their situation.

Cultural stigma is very real, and poverty is pathologized through intense, systemic victim-blaming.

...#PovertyIs did something I couldn't have predicted or orchestrated: It gave me my voice back.

—My friend Katie Klabusich, on the #PovertyIs hashtag she started on Twitter, and breaking the silence and stigma around poverty in a country where 49 million people live with food insecurity. Read the entirety of her terrific piece here.

[Related Reading: This Is Class Warfare; A Letter About Food and Judgment.]

I just need to jump the cliff

new at explodingdog.com

laurelhach:

compensation 

Nine artists are suing Jerry Wolkoff, the owner of the 5Pointz site in Long Island City, Queens, for destroying their murals when his company G&M Realty had the building whitewashed in November 2013.

In a complaint filed earlier this month in federal court in Brooklyn and obtained by Hyperallergic, the artists — Maria Castillo (TOOFLY), James Cochran (Jimmy C), Luis Gomez (Ishmael), Bienbenido Guerra (FCEE), Richard Miller (Patch Whiskey), Kai Niederhausen (Semor), Carlo Nieva, Rodney Rodriguez (PANIC), and Kenji Takabayashi — claim that “without giving [the artists] a fair opportunity to remove and preserve their work, or even the minimum notice required by law, [Wolkoff and his company G&M Realty] suddenly decided to destroy it under cover of night, even though at the time of the destruction they were far from ready to demolish the buildings in question. The destruction was gratuitous, willful, and wanton, and undertaken without regard to the feelings, reputations, or financial interests of the plaintiffs, who now seek compensation for their devastating losses.” The artists claim their works were protected under the Visual Artists Rights Act and are seeking unspecified damages and payment of their legal fees. They are being represented by Eric Baum of Eisenberg & Baum.

“The artists were very upset and disturbed by the whitewashing of their work,” Baum told Hyperallergic. “They would have preferred for the building to have been preserved, for their artwork to have been preserved, for them to have received notice before the artwork was destroyed …. This is a case about damages, but it’s also something that the artists feel strongly about, they want to send a message that this type of art needs to be protected.”

As the lawsuit explains, the whitewashing of the 5Pointz building was entirely unnecessary, as the structure’s demolition had already been approved — it took place in August 2014. Furthermore, it was done 11 days before Jonathan “Meres One” Cohen — the volunteer curator of the building’s graffiti — was due to hand over the keys to the building, which Wolkoff had given him a decade earlier.

“By whitewashing the artwork, [Wolkoff and G&M Realty] denied [the artists] the opportunity to record, preserve, and/or remove their work, which could have been readily accomplished prior to or during the demolition of the building or with legal notice,” the complaint states. “[Wolkoff and G&M Realty] could have permitted [the artists] an opportunity to mitigate their damages, but they chose not to do so. Instead, they chose to act in a manner that can only be seen as having been intended to cause intense shock and emotional trauma by inflicting an egregious public insult and destruction of protected artwork.”

Construction of the luxury apartment towers that will replace 5Pointz is underway, though Wolkoff’s attempt last year to trademark the former graffiti center’s name in order to market the new buildings failed. To recap the highlights and eventual destruction of 5Pointz, check out Hyperallergic’s previous posts on the fight to save the once colorful cultural hub.

Minecraft Hololens Demo

Microsoft demonstrated how their Hololens augmented reality headset system could work with Minecraft real-time gameplay - video embedded below from kotakucom:

Minecraft is a game we’ve seen countless times before. And yet! The virtual reality demo showcased by Microsoft today makes the game almost seem brand new.

You can start a new world on any surface you’d like—as you can see in the GIF above. Magical.

… The amazing stuff starts at the 2:25 mark

More from Kotaku here

art-photographers.co.uk

To truly appreciate the delicacy of Susanna Bauer‘s leaf sculptures, think of crunching a dead leaf in your hand, how it disentigrates into dust with the slightest effort. To work with dry and fragile leaves as a medium for crochet seems nearly impossible, but Baur somehow manages it with ease, turning leaves into cubes, tunnels, and geometric patterns with techniques that might be more appropriate for durability of leatherwork. She shares about her process:

There is a fine balance in my work between fragility and strength; literally, when it comes to pulling a fine thread through a brittle leaf or thin dry piece of wood, but also in a wider context – the tenderness and tension in human connections, the transient yet enduring beauty of nature that can be found in the smallest detail, vulnerability and resilience that could be transferred to nature as a whole or the stories of individual beings.

Bauer has a new exhibition of work at Lemon Street Gallery in Cornwall, England through June 27th, and you explore a bit more on Facebook

art-photographers.co.uk

Simon Cook

art-photographers.co.uk

art-photographers.co.uk

Susanna Bauer

art-photographers.co.uk

Susanna Bauer

Simon Cook

art-photographers.co.uk

art-photographers.co.uk

art-photographers.co.uk

Susanna Bauer

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!