Fit to be Tired

"The task for me is to not only comprehend the world, but to change the world. I would like to see a world where America lives up to its ideals, and resolves the contradiction between reality and principles."

Ronald Takaki

Modernist Landmark Raises Concerns as It Goes to Auction

The Kaufmann House, a 1946 glass, steel and stone landmark built on the edge of this desert town by the architect Richard Neutra, has twice been at the vanguard of new movements in architecture — helping to shape postwar Modernism and later, as a result of a painstaking restoration in the mid-1990s, spurring a revived interest in mid-20th-century homes.

Now the California homeowners who undertook that restoration hope Neutra’s masterpiece will play a role in a third movement: promoting architecture as a collectible art worthy of the same consideration as painting and sculpture.

Those owners, Brent Harris, an investment manager, and Beth Edwards Harris, an architectural historian, are finalizing their divorce, and plan to auction the Kaufmann House at Christie’s in New York in May. The building, with a presale estimate of $15 million to $25 million, will be part of Christie’s high-profile evening sale of postwar and contemporary art.

Commissioned by Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., the Pittsburgh department store magnate who had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright about a decade earlier to build Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, the house was designed as a desert retreat from harsh winters. Constructed as a series of horizontal planes that seem to float over glass walls, the house seems to absorb the mood of the surrounding desert.

Auctions of such midcentury landmarks have become more common in recent years. In 2003 Sotheby’s sold the 1951 Farnsworth House southwest of Chicago, designed by Mies van der Rohe, at auction for $7.5 million. In June Jean Prouvé’s 1951 Maison Tropicale, a prototype for prefabricated homes for French colonial officials stationed in Africa, sold at Christie’s for $4.97 million.

Such auctions are bringing a new level of scrutiny to a form that, little more than a decade ago, attracted so little notice that the Kaufmann House was being offered for sale as a teardown.

Still, such sales sometimes draw criticism from preservationists who would prefer that the houses be tended by a public institution or trust that guarantees continued access for architecture students and scholars rather than sold to the highest bidder. (The Farnsworth House, now open to the public, was bought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, while the Maison Tropicale went to a private bidder.)

But Dr. Harris, who worked toward her doctorate in architectural history while restoring the Kaufmann House, said she believed an auction would further the preservationist cause. “It’s an odd thing, but the more money this house goes for, the better it is for preservation in my point of view,” she said on Monday while giving a tour of the house to a reporter. “I think it will encourage other people who have the income to go out and get places like these to restore, rather than just looking for some pretty palace somewhere.”

The Kaufmann House is one of the best-known designs by Neutra, a Viennese-born architect who moved to the United States in the 1920s and designed homes for the next few decades for many wealthy West Coast clients. His buildings are seen virtually as the apotheosis of Modernism’s International Style, with their skeletal steel frames and open plans. Yet Neutra was also known for catering sensitively to the needs of his clients, so that their houses would be not only functional but would also nurture their owners psychologically.

When Brent and Beth Harris first saw the Kaufmann House, it was neither a pretty palace nor an obvious candidate for restoration. Strikingly photographed in 1947 by Julius Shulman, it stood vacant for several years after Kaufmann’s death in 1955. Then it went through a series of owners, including the singer Barry Manilow, and a series of renovations. Along the way, a light-disseminating patio was enclosed, one wall was broken through for the addition of a media room, the sleek roof lines were interrupted with air-conditioning units, and some bedrooms were wallpapered in delicate floral prints.

In 1992 Beth Harris, an architectural tourist of a sort, scaled a fence one afternoon to peek at the famous house while her husband discovered a for-sale sign in an overgrown hedge.
“It quite clearly was at some risk of being severely modified by whoever was to buy it, or potentially demolished,” Mr. Harris said, recalling his first glimpses of the house.

In Palm Springs, increasingly dominated by faux Spanish estates, Neutra’s Modernism “wasn’t the prevailing style,” Mr. Harris said, and the Kaufmann House “had been for sale for at least three and a half years.”

He added: “No one wanted it. And so it was a gorgeous house, an important house, and it was crying out for restoration.”

After purchasing the house and its more than an acre of land for about $1.5 million, the Harrises removed the extra appendages and enlisted two young Los Angeles-area architects, Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner, to restore the Neutra design. They sought out the original providers of paint and fixtures, bought a metal-crimping machine to reproduce the sheet-metal fascia that lined the roof and even reopened a long-closed section of a Utah quarry to mine matching stone to replace what had been removed or damaged.

Without the original plans for the house, the Harrises dug through the Neutra archives at the University of California, Los Angeles, looking at hundreds of Neutra’s sketches of details for the house. They persuaded Mr. Shulman to let them examine dozens of never-printed photographs of the home’s interior, and found other documents in the architectural collections at Columbia University.

The Harrises also bought several adjoining plots to more than double the land around the 3,200-square-foot house, restoring the desert buffer that Neutra envisioned. They rebuilt a pool house that serves as a viewing pavilion for the main house, and kept a tennis court that was built on a parcel added to the original Kaufmann property.

The Harrises “were visionaries in their own way,” said Joshua Holdeman, a senior vice president at Christie’s who oversees the 20th-century decorative art and design department. With the renovation “they created a whole new public awareness of midcentury-modern architecture.” Describing the results of the restoration in The Los Angeles Times in 1999, Nicolai Ouroussoff, now the architecture critic for The New York Times, said the house could “now be seen in its full glory for the first time in nearly 50 years.”

The pending sale is bittersweet for the current owners, who said they planned to give a portion of the proceeds to preservation groups. Asked how it felt to be close to selling the property, Dr. Harris looked back at the house, blinking away tears.

“Oh, it’s horrifying,” she said. “But we did our time here. There will be other things.”

New York Times 31 October 2007 by Edward Wyatt

Khun Sa Dead at 74

Burma's 'Opium King' Khun Sa died today in Rangoon aged 74.

A warlord, liberation fighter, heroin king pin, and rumoured associate of the CIA, Khun Sa became one the principal figures in opium smuggling in the Golden Triangle.

At one point commanding a private army of 15,000 men, he fought for the autonomy of the Shah ethnic minority in Burma's remote north-eastern Shan State. He also ensured a steady flow of heroin to the streets of Europe, the United States, and Asia.

Having given himself up to Burmese authorities in 1996, Khun Sa retired in Rangoon and successfully avoided US attempts to have him extradited.

For an excellent PBS Frontline documentary on the Burma's heroin trade and the rise and fall of Khun Sa see:

Also see slide show on the 'King of the Highlands'

Meditatio

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs

I am compelled to conclude

That man is the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man

I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.

Ezra Pound

Tribute Oscar Niemeyer

Shame is for Sissies

Once again it is time to reflect on the infamous exploits of Edward von Kloberg III -- the cape wearing Washington based aide-de-camp to the damned.

Edward von Kloberg III, Lobbyist for Many Dictators, Dies at 63

Edward von Kloberg III, a flamboyant lobbyist here who maintained a high-profile client roster that could easily be found in his Rolodex under "d," for dictator, died on Sunday in Rome. He was 63.

Mr. von Kloberg, whose death was classified a suicide, apparently leapt from the parapet of a castle, the State Department said on Tuesday. He left behind a note, the contents of which were not disclosed.

In a town where public relations is nearly a fourth branch of government, Mr. von Kloberg eagerly took on some of the toughest cases: tyrants, dictators and mass murderers whom others refused even to meet. Among them were Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceaucescu of Romania, Samuel K. Doe of Liberia and Mobuto Sese Seko of the former Zaire. He once called these and other clients "the damned."

Mr. von Kloberg liked to call himself the lobbyist for "the impossible," rather than the reprehensible, and he proudly noted that he turned away only one potential client as irredeemable.

"I did refuse to represent one dictator, Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, the Somalian warlord," Mr. von Kloberg told The Washington Times in 2003. Explaining the choices he made in his life, he liked to say: "Shame is for sissies."

Nevertheless, Mr. von Kloberg also represented less controversial governments and business interests. He was known to be well informed on the substance of foreign policy and was often up to date on the intrigue at foreign embassies and the State Department, in both Democratic and Republican administrations. A frequent host of salon-style dinners, he relished mixing political figures with Washington reporters.

Mr. von Kloberg lived in Washington. Among his survivors are his companion, Darius Monkevicius of Rome, and a sister, Carol van Kloberg of Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Edward Joseph Kloberg III was born in New York on Jan. 9, 1942. He attended Princeton University and graduated from Rider College in 1965. He had a master's degree in history from American University, which later hired him to be a fund-raiser and then an administrator until 1982, when he entered public relations.

His firm became the public relations outfit of choice for many leaders who were on their way to becoming outlaws. Mr. von Kloberg (he grafted the "von" onto his name because he thought it sounded distinguished) ran an organization called Washington World Group and earned large fees from the assorted potentates and pariahs he represented, allowing him to live extravagantly (he often wore a black cape to formal occasions), with frequent lavish parties and travel, for which he packed one or more steamer trucks.

One of his favorite lobbying strategies was letters to the editors of newspapers - especially his apparent favorite, The Washington Times - defending his clients when front-page news articles questioned their actions.

For example, after reports that Pakistan had purchased missiles from North Korea in 2003, Mr. Von Kloberg dispatched a letter to The Washington Times in which he said "our so-called ally, Pakistan" - an ally of the Bush administration in its fight against terrorism - "systematically deceived and lied to the United States by engaging in clandestine nuclear exchanges with North Korea."

Pakistan had actually been his client years earlier. In 1994, Ali Sawar Naqvi, a senior diplomat in the Pakistani embassy, wrote Mr. von Kloberg to thank him for his "warm affection and ready assistance," the newspaper India-West reported in 2004.

It came out later that he had acquired a new client: India, Pakistan's bitter rival. This was not the first time he had switched allegiances. After representing Mr. Mobuto of Zaire, he took as a client the man who replaced him, Laurent Kabila.

"Some may wonder why Mr. Kabila, who had waged war to topple Mr. Mobuto two years ago, would now turn to us for representation," Mr. von Kloberg wrote in 1999. He did not answer the question directly but did note that he would not try to "justify or hide" the human rights and other abuses of his clients.

"Instead," he added, "we attempt to balance and even change the situation by offering realistic advice to our clients and facts that are often ignored by the press."

Later, he appeared to be courting Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, when he wrote another letter in 2001 praising North Korea's efforts to "reunite with the South" and "recognizing North Korea's rightful seat among the community of nations."

There is no evidence that Mr. von Kloberg ever recruited Kim Jong Il. He once acknowledged that he had also failed in his efforts to recruit another outcast.

"I've had every great dictator in the world except for Stroessner," he lamented in 2003. Gen. Alfredo Stroessner was the corrupt and ruthless ruler of Paraguay from 1954 to 1989.

For all his flamboyance, Mr. von Kloberg did show flashes of modesty. In 2003, when HBO began the show "K Street" on the world of Washington lobbyists, Mr. von Kloberg remarked, "I can't imagine that the rank and file of American life will be that interested."

New York Times May 4, 2005 by Joel Brinkley

Tatra T-87

The Tatra T-87 emerged in 1937 as the first true streamlined production motor car. Its pioneering design was developed by Austrian-born Hans Ledwinka and engineers at the Czech Tatra company. Tatra had built carriages and rail coaches since the mid 19th century before entering into motor-car production in 1897 (the year that Ledwinka joined the firm). Around 1930, Tatra engineers conceived a radical redesign of what had become the standard box-shaped automobile, mounting an air-cooled engine at the rear of a backbone chassis.

Several prototypes appeared in 1931 and 1933, before the launch in 1934 of the T-77, a six-seater luxury car powered by a V-8 engine. Its distinctive features were a central seat for the driver and a dorsal rear fin similar to those used in contemporary racing cars. Despite its advanced design, the car’s road holding was criticised and relatively few were produced before the T-87 appeared two years later.

The new model handled better, was lighter and more compact, delivered an even higher top speed of 160 kph and used less fuel. Many of these improvements followed from its monocque shell structure, which had first been used in aircraft and racing cars. Although the driver was now conventionally placed, the T-87 retained its predecessor’s central third headlight and what had now become Tatra’s trademark fin. Introduced for aerodynamic reasons, the fin emphasised the T-87’s striking streamlined form. This drew on studies in minimising air resistance and drag by the Swiss-based designer Paul Jaray and on bodywork patents licensed from the American Budd company (responsible for the Zephyr train). Other suggested influences on the overall design include the sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the architect Erich Mendelssohn.

When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Nazi authorities monitored closely the Tatra company’s output. The T-87 was permitted in limited numbers as an ‘autobahn’ car, while its successor, the intended mass-market T-97, was suppressed to make way for Porsche’s Volkswagen, the design of which may have been influenced by the Czech car.

Kama Sutra and Feral Cats

To understand contemporary Russia, consider its airports WORKING as a journalist in Russia, with its eleven time zones, its endless steppe and perpetual taiga, means spending a lot of time in the air. It involves flying in planes so creaky that landing in one piece is a pleasant surprise —then disembarking in airports so inhospitable that some visitors may want to take off again immediately.

But, if he has the strength, beyond the whine of the Tupolev engines and the cracked runways, a frequent flyer can find in Russia's airports a useful encapsulation of the country's problems and oddities. In their family resemblances, Russia's airports show how far the Soviet system squeezed the variety from the vast Russian continent; in their idiosyncrasies, they suggest how far it failed to. They illustrate how much of that system, and the mindset it created, live on, 15 years after the old empire nominally collapsed. Russia's awful, grimy, gaudy airports reveal how much hasn't changed in the world's biggest country—but also, on closer inspection, how much is beginning to.

Sheremetyevo: Landing at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, first-time visitors may be unnerved to see their more experienced co-passengers limbering up, as if for a football match or gladiatorial combat. When the plane stops taxiing, or before, the Sheremetyevo regular begins to run.

Sheremetyevo is war. The international terminal was built for the 1980 Olympics, to showcase the Soviet Union's modernity; now it recalls the old regime's everyday callousness (the anarchic domestic terminal is even worse). On a bad day, the queue at passport control stretches almost to the runway.

The Sheremetyevo virgin soon meets the various species of Moscow queue-jumper: the brazen hoodlum; the incremental babushka; the queue-surfing clans who relocate in groups when one of their number reaches the front. The immigration officer—usually sporting peroxide blond hair, six-inch heels and an abbreviated skirt—offers an early insight into Russian notions of customer service. Reflecting the country's neo-imperialist confidence, the immigration form was for most of this year available only in Russian (“distributed free”, it says, in case anyone is tempted to pay).

As with most Russian problems, cash can mitigate the Sheremetyevo ordeal: beautiful girls meet VIPs at the gate and escort them straight to the counter. If he passes customs unmolested, the visitor emerges into a crush of criminal-looking taxi drivers. If, as it will be, the traffic is bad on Leningradskoe Shosse, the road into town, the driver may try to ingratiate himself by driving on the pavement; a 50-rouble backhander will settle things if the police pull him over. On his return to Sheremetyevo, to reach his departure gate the visitor must negotiate a bewildering series of queues, starting with one to get into the building: if he is unassertive, he will still be standing in one of them when his plane takes off. There is nowhere to sit. Forlorn African students camp out in the upstairs corridors. The attendants in the overpriced food kiosks are proof incarnate that the profit motive is not yet universal—though stewardesses on Russian carriers offer unofficial upgrades on reasonable terms. For a small consideration, they sometimes oblige smokers on long-haul flights by turning off the smoke alarms in the toilets.

Mineralnye Vody: To reach this airport, in the north Caucasus, passengers pass through a series of military roadblocks, where documents and the boots of cars are checked by slouching policemen, looking for weapons or terrorists. But a sensible terrorist would leave his weapons at home and buy new ones at the airport, where a wide selection of enormous knives and ornamental Caucasian swords is on sale. There are also embossed Caucasian drinking horns, and a large number of Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra.

Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. In Soviet times, before the region that the airport serves was desolated by separatist insurgencies, blood feuds and government brutality, the nearby mineral spas were popular holiday resorts. The building is incongruously large for a part of Russia that today, for all its macho hospitality and merriment, feels more African than European in its violence, poverty and corruption. It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of the Soviet Union.

Vladikavkaz: Roughly meaning “to rule the Caucasus”, this city, south of Mineralnye Vody, is an old tsarist garrison and the capital of North Ossetia, one of the semi-autonomous ethnic republics of the north Caucasus. Backed by the Caucasus mountains and bisected by the rugged Terek river, Vladikavkaz might be pleasant, were it not for the occasional terrorist eruption and internecine gangster bombing. The Ossetians are Christians, give or take some residual animism, and are Moscow's traditional allies against the restive Muslims of the other republics. Like several other local peoples, the neighbouring Ingush were deported by Stalin in 1944; the Ossetians took part of their territory, and the two fought a war in 1992.

Vladikavkaz airport is actually closer to another, smaller town, obscure and unremarkable until September 2004: Beslan. The road to the airport leads past the auxiliary cemetery that was used to bury the hostages slain in the terrorist atrocity at a Beslan school; toys and drinks (because the dead children were denied water by their captors) are scattered on the graves. The airport ought to be hyper-sensitive to security risks.

It seems not to be. When your correspondent passed through, he noticed a couple of shady characters and their hulking bodyguard talking to an airport official. The official took their documents to the security desk. “Who are they?” asked the security officer. “They are businessmen,” replied the official, as the documents were stamped. The party appeared to reach the runway via a side door, with a large hold-all seemingly unexamined.

Kaliningrad: This airport has a sort of holding pen in which passengers are kept before being released onto the tarmac. Surveying the assembled crew, with their standard-issue gangster coats and tattoos, it becomes obvious why Kaliningrad has a reputation as a smugglers' haven. It used to be Königsberg, city of Kant and celebrated Prussian architecture. By the time the Nazis, British bombers and the Red Army had finished with it, little of pre-war Königsberg was left. Then Stalin took a shine to it, deported the remaining Germans and incorporated the region into the Soviet Union. It is now an island of Russia in a sea of European Union—an anomaly that is profitable for a certain class of businessmen. As well as contraband, the exclave boasts most of the world's amber and Russia's ageing Baltic fleet.

The Kremlin worries that the Poles or the Germans might try to take Kaliningrad back; but, in truth, no one else really wants it. As the aromas of vodka and Dagestani cognac waft around the airport holding pen, the consolation for the nervous traveller is that if one group of dodgy passengers starts something nasty on the flight, another one will probably finish it.

Vladivostok (“to rule the east”): At the other end of the Russian empire, near China and on the Sea of Japan, Vladivostok is the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railway. It became famous during the Russian civil war as a wild eastern entrepot of refugees and interventionists; nowadays it is described (mostly by people who haven't been there) as Russia's Hong Kong or San Francisco. Here you face a classic Russian-airport dilemma.

You have clambered around the tsarist fort, and inside the decommissioned Soviet submarine. You have seen the children riding reindeer on the cigarette-ash beach, and peered at the disconsolate alligator in the aquarium. You have also met the mayor, known in the city, not altogether affectionately, as “Winnie the Pooh”, or “Vinnie Pookh”. He acquired his nickname during his fabled reign as a gangland boss. The mayor has ridden the post-Soviet escalator from crime to business and on into politics, securing his office after his main election rival was wounded in a grenade attack. In response to questions about his past, the mayor inquires whether you yourself have ever been in prison. You are not sure whether the mayor is asking or offering.

A dubious car arrives to take you to Vladivostok airport, about an hour's drive from the city, along a road lined with the forests that, like crab and salmon, are one of the great but fragile prizes of far-eastern Russian power struggles. Your driver is keener on talking than driving. “The Chinese are too cunning for us,” he says, decelerating with every fresh lament. “We are giving away our natural resources”. The factories are all closed; there is no place for anyone over 40 in the new Russia. It becomes clear that this driver is not entirely sober. You are running perilously late for your flight out of Vladivostok. Should you or shouldn't you ask him to go faster?

Murmansk: Well into the month of May, the runway at Murmansk is still fringed with snow; it dusts the pine trees over which incoming planes descend, along with still-frozen ponds and rivers. In the airport's VIP lounge there is a set of sofas of daunting tastelessness. The main terminal is mostly empty, save for a bar, a pool table and some fruit machines. Downstairs, outside the toilets, there is a strange drawing of a man wearing a trilby hat, silhouetted against the sun. But upstairs there is a lovely metallic relief on the wall, depicting everything that is produced in the Murmansk region, or that was once produced.

The biggest city anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, Murmansk was built for and shaped by war. It was founded during the first world war, and was a destination for the famous allied sea convoys during the second, when it was utterly destroyed. When the Kursk submarine was raised from the floor of the Barents Sea in 2000, the corpse-laden wreck was towed back to the nearby dry docks; nuclear icebreakers are their regular customers. A church was built in memory of the dead sailors, and stands amid the other monuments to deceased warriors. Otherwise, Murmansk is cluttered with the usual post-Soviet paraphernalia: a Lenin statue; shabby kiosks; gambling halls; pavements that seem to dissolve into the road.

For all that, the Arctic setting has its own appeal. Icy it may still be, but from late spring the Murmansk girls don their short skirts, and it is light around the clock. In the small hours, down at the port, seagulls wheel around the cranes resting motionless, like giant, paralysed insects, against the illuminated pink clouds. A Ferris wheel rotates on a hill above the town.

Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: In tsarist times, Sakhalin island was a giant prison camp. Visiting in 1890, Chekhov considered it the most depressing of the many depressing places in Russia. From 1905, when Russia lost its war with Japan, the southern part of Sakhalin was ruled by the Japanese; it was taken back in 1945, along with four smaller islands that the two countries still bicker over. Traces of Japanese architecture are still visible; so are the descendants of the Korean slave labourers whom the Japanese imported. The Soviet experiment bequeathed sparse squares and omnipresent Lenins. After the experiment failed, many of Sakhalin's inhabitants fled its wasting beauty. Salmon can still be scooped by hand from its rivers in the spawning season, but much of the fishing fleet is rusting in the bays.

Yet Siberia and Russia's far east have always been lands of opportunity, as well as exile. On Sakhalin, today's opportunities are mostly in oil and gas, which foreign consortia are extracting from beneath the frigid Sea of Okhotsk, off the island's northern shore. New pipelines cut through forests, and up and down mountains, to an export terminal in the south. A stone's throw away, there are elderly Russians living on what they can fish and find in the forest; the few remaining indigenous reindeer-herders survive on even less. But in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital, there are new hotels, bars and jobs.

The primitive domestic terminal at the airport has a tannoy system, but the announcements are inaudible, and their main effect is to spread fear. Destination names are put up, taken down and put up again above the check-in desks. The upper floor is appointed with weirdly ornate Soviet chandeliers. Last year a family of bears wandered onto the runway: the airport authorities hunted them in vain. But there is also a new international terminal to serve the flights from Japan and South Korea. The staff there speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence.

Irkutsk: Five hours ahead of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, Irkutsk is the nearest city to Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of fresh water—water so clear that it induces vertigo in many of its visitors. The drive to the lake leads through vast forests, past the roadside shamanistic altars of the indigenous Buryats, under an enormous Siberian sky. In the 19th century Irkutsk was home to many of the so-called Decembrists, and the wives who followed them into exile after their 1825 revolt against the tsar: men and events that might have changed Russia's history, and the world's. Alexander Kolchak, a diehard White commander, was shot in Irkutsk in 1920; his body was thrown into the icy Angara river.

Planes descend into the city's airport over identikit Soviet apartment blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the hut's wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.

The staff speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence The hut, however, is only temporary: a new, modern terminal is being built. It will be needed if the local authorities attract all the tourists they are hoping for. Lake Baikal, the awesomely beautiful main draw, was threatened by a new oil pipeline—until Vladimir Putin ordered its route moved away from the shores of what Buryats call the “Sacred Sea”.

Yekaterinburg: Long-term residents of this city in the Urals shudder when they recall the state of its airport in the 1990s: never any taxis, they say, and very often no luggage. The arrivals hall still has a faint abattoir feel. But, next to it, a colonnaded Soviet edifice has been turned into a business terminal. And there is a new, glass-walled international terminal of positively Scandinavian gleam and efficiency, erected recently using private money. It has a swanky bar that serves edible food. There is an internet café where the internet connections work. “An airport”, says one of its managers proudly, “is a city's visiting card.”

It is not too fanciful to see the contrasting parts of Yekaterinburg's airport as a metaphor for the city's development. It was in Yekaterinburg that the Bolsheviks murdered the last tsar in 1918. Outside town, close to the border between Europe and Asia, there is a memorial to the local victims of Stalin's purges—a rare and moving place in a generally amnesiac nation.
In a nearby cemetery stand what wry locals describe as memorials to the victims of early capitalism: life-size statues (complete with car keys) of the dead gangsters who earned the city its 1990s sobriquet, the Chicago of the Urals. Because of the military industries that moved there during the war, Yekaterinburg was closed to foreigners until 1990. But these days most of the surviving crooks have gone straight, or into politics. Hoteliers are parlaying the city's infamy into a tourist attraction, foreign consulates are being opened, and businessmen and tourists can fly directly to the new airport.

Sheremetyevo: Ignore the snarling waitresses and look again at Sheremetyevo: something is happening. Its operators have come under pressure from Domodedovo, Moscow's other main airport, which was reconstructed a few years ago, and to which airlines have migrated in such numbers that its spacious facilities are often overrun. Sheremetyevo is getting a makeover (as are several of the other airports mentioned in this article).

There is a new café. There are now electric screens on the baggage carousels, displaying the numbers and origins of incoming flights (even if they do not, as yet, always correspond to the baggage circulating on them, much of which is still wrapped in clingfilm to keep out thieves). The nightmarish domestic terminal is being replaced, and a third terminal is going up. A new train service will one day replace the agony of Leningradskoe Shosse. Haltingly, frustratingly but undeniably, Sheremetyevo has started to change—much like Russia itself.

Dec 19th 2006 MOSCOW From The Economist print edition

Lunch with the FT: John Bolton

By Edward Luce

Published: October 19 2007 17:01

I am no believer in providence. But having booked lunch with John Bolton – perhaps the most hardline (now former) member of the Bush administration – I arrive to find Donald Rumsfeld seated at the next table, and have the fleeting thought that I might possess my own newspaper-reading guardian angel.

Since I have arrived first I now have the advantage of watching Bolton, whose shock-white handlebar moustache gives him an unmistakeable Asterix-like appearance, cross the floor towards me. I wait to see what happens when he chances upon the former Secretary of Defense.

A brief moment of camaraderie ensues in which the former US ambassador to the United Nations takes out the cover of his forthcoming book about his time there – Surrender Is Not an Option – and shows it to Mr Rumsfeld. The latter clearly approves and they both laugh heartily. Then Bolton moves on to my table.

We are meeting at the lobby restaurant of the Mayflower Hotel – one of Washington’s most upholstered establishments. It is just a block away from Bolton’s office at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think-tank he joined last January. He had been left with little choice but to resign from his job at the UN, Congress having refused to confirm his appointment. Bolton says that he eats here often.

“In fact I introduced Rumsfeld to this place,” he says. “We had lunch here shortly after we both left the government [Rumsfeld was ejected in November]. We were sitting right here at this very table. Maybe it’s my libertarian philosophy: but being in government is hard. So we were both feeling liberated.”

We order immediately – Bolton goes for the club sandwich with freedom – oops – French fries and a glass of iced tea. I order a salade Nicoise and a cranberry juice. Clearly this isn’t going to be one of those fancy meals. Bolton makes a point of telling me that he prefers plain food – although the Mayflower has plenty of continental dishes on its menu. “I like this place because if you want something simple, then you have that option,” he says.

Ordering over, it’s my turn to scrutinise Bolton’s book cover. I ask where the title came from. He tells me it was prompted by his memories of being a 15-year-old volunteer for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid. The hardline Republican was trounced by Lyndon Johnson.

Goldwater’s reputation has been rehabilitated in recent years, and he is now portrayed by conservatives as a kind of John the Baptist to Ronald Reagan’s Jesus. At the time he was criticised harshly by moderate Republicans. But to John Bolton, who came from a blue-collar background (his father was a fireman in Baltimore), Goldwater’s uncompromising conservatism made him an instant and lifelong hero: “It was just outrageous that a man like Goldwater could be trashed the way that he was,” he says. “One thing was clear – surrender was not an option, and the book editors said that would be a great title.”

Feeling mildly intimidated, not least by Bolton’s warlike moustache, I venture an ill-timed joke: “Well of course, everyone will instantly think of that phrase ‘Cheese-eating surrender monkeys’,” I say, referring to the memorable line coined for the French after they had voted against the Iraq war at the UN. Bolton looks at me suspiciously. An awkward moment of silence follows.

I break it with a question, asking him to explain what made him a “Goldwater conservative” – Bolton’s preferred tag – as opposed to a neoconservative, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s former deputy who nowadays sits along the corridor from Bolton at the AEI. Bolton warms instantly to the theme. One of the key differences, he says, is that most neoconservatives used to be left-wing. As a Goldwater teen, Bolton had clearly avoided that provenance (interestingly, Hillary Clinton started off as a “Goldwater girl” in 1964). Bolton is also keen to point out that he is a follower of Edmund Burke, the late 18th-century Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher, whose empirical conservatism would rule out most of the neocons’ utopian agenda.

“We used to joke that neoconservatives were liberals who’d been mugged by reality,” Bolton replied. “I have always been a conservative. The idea of big-government conservatism has more neocon adherents than from unmodified conservatives.”

Our food arrives and Bolton periodically drenches his fries in tomato ketchup as he eats. I try to counteract the lingering sense that I have shown myself up as too European for Bolton’s taste by tackling my salad with aggressive jabs. We carry on with the neocon versus Goldwater conservative discussion as we eat. I suggest that on Iraq, or indeed the nuclear ambitions of Iran, the views of both groups happily coincide.

Through a mouthful of fries, Bolton only half-agrees. He concedes that their views coincided on the need to remove Saddam Hussein – Bolton felt it was in America’s interest to eliminate a potential threat. But he parted ways with the neoconservatives on the objectives of the subsequent occupation. “I am all in favour of democracy in Iraq,” he says. “I don’t know what else I would say. But our national interest today is to stop any part of Iraq from becoming a base for terrorism and if that is accomplished with a less than Jeffersonian type of democracy, then that’s OK with me.”

Mistakes were made, he concedes – only not the ones most people would identify. “In terms of Iraq’s governance I would have put the Iraqis in charge as soon as possible,” he says. “I’ll exaggerate for effect but what we should have done is said to the Iraqis: ‘You’re on your own. Here’s a copy of the Federalist papers. Good luck.’”

And what of the Bush administration’s idea of spreading democracy, I ask. Is that now discredited? “You can’t discredit something that was wrong from the start,” he replies with evident feeling. “Their [the neocons’] ultimate conclusion is that if all the world were filled with democracies, there would be no war. But that is contrary to the entire human spirit.

“I’m not sure history has ended. Russia has passed through democracy and come out the other side. You could make the same case about the European institutions, which don’t seem to be accountable to anybody except their foreign ministries.”

The waiter asks what we would like next. Bolton asks for a coffee – “just a coffee” – while I request a double espresso with separate hot milk. Bolton gives me another of his flinty looks. Feeling the need to explain, I say: “Ordinarily I’d order a large macchiato, but sometimes they don’t know what that is.” I realise at once that I am only digging myself deeper. “I wouldn’t know,” says Bolton after a pause. “I just get coffee.”

The pause continues. To get things going again, I raise what is perhaps Bolton’s favourite topic – the State Department, his home through several Republican administrations but which he continues openly to disdain. Much like the British description of diplomats having “gone native”, American diplomats are often accused of succumbing to “clientilism”. Is that still his view? Bolton springs back to life.

“Yes,” he says, “but even the word ‘clientilism’ shows how little the State Department understands the problem: surely your client is the US? In fact what they mean by clientilism is that if you’re the French desk officer, then you become too pro-France.” Bolton is more than happy to continue in this vein. Meanwhile I try to slurp my double espresso as noisily as possible.

As I do so Bolton relates a story, “possibly apocryphal”, about George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, who would point to a large globe and ask newly appointed American ambassadors to find their country. Invariably they would point to where they were going. “No,” said Shultz, spinning it back to America, “that is your country.”

Bolton continues: “The foreign service ought to be advocates for American interests, not apologists. This problem is not unique to the US but neither is it necessarily the rule everywhere else.” So which foreign services do serve their national interests? I ask. “The Russians,” he says. Then he pauses for a while before adding, “And the French.” Formidable, I think. “And the Indians and especially the Pakistanis.”

I ask whether nakedly pursuing one’s national interest might be counter-productive, particularly in the post-9/11 world. Surely alienating people around the world might also undermine America’s interest? Bolton dislikes the premise of my question. “Every country has an aspect to it that rubs up people the wrong way,” he says. “I quote in my book a great rhyme from world war two: ‘In Washington Lord Halifax whispered to Lord Keynes, it’s true they have the moneybags but we have all the brains.’”

Look what happened to the British, I reply. Such hubris didn’t serve them very well. “Name a country that hasn’t had hubris at one point or another,” Bolton responds. “Sweden had an empire as did Lithuania…” But sometimes, I interrupt, foreigners detect a providential quality to American motives that it might be better to downplay – that God has a hand in the US’s destiny.

“Well,” he replies and pauses before continuing. “There are Americans who believe that. My favourite story is of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who were bitter enemies during their presidencies, but who become friends at the end. They both died on the 50th anniversary of the declaration of independence – 4th July, 1826. Now try to put that in its historical context.”

It was a revealing example – and also interesting and provocative, as is Bolton’s wont. By this stage I sense that his suspicion of me has mildly dissipated. As we wait for the bill, we finally get round to the subject of Iran. Bolton finishes with a flourish, confidently predicting that George W. Bush will launch a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office.

He can’t resist one last European dig. “Four years of European diplomacy have given the Iranians the one asset they could not have purchased – and that was time,” he says, wagging his finger. “And now, irony of ironies, after fiddling around with all this futile diplomacy, we finally have a French president who sounds just like we do on Iran.” C’est la guerre, I think. A sobering conclusion to a sober Anglo-Saxon meal.

Edward Luce is the FT’s Washington bureau chief

Mayflower Hotel, Washington DC
1 x club sandwich
1 x French fries
1 x salade Nicoise
1 x iced tea
1 x cranberry juice
1 x regular coffee
1 x double expresso
Total: $57.54

Films Worth Seeing

This Week's Movie Picks from TNR's Film Critic
by Stanley Kauffmann

Golda's Balcony. Whatever one's immediate prejudice against a one-actor film about Golda Meir, overcome it. Valerie Harper's performance of Meir is fully realized in acting and idea terms, and this account of events on and before the start of the Yom Kippur War is moving, even to those who are for any reason suspicious. (From the upcoming 11/5/07 issue.)

Lust, Caution. Ang Lee asks for our patience as he establishes his drama. (Ten minutes less would have helped.) But his account of the affair between a rebel young Chinese woman and a Chinese stooge of the Japanese occupiers in 1942 explodes at last--unforgettably. Lee finds a unique dramatic use for sex. (10/22/07)

Michael Clayton. Tony Gilroy, the writer-director, delves more deeply than we expect into American corporate corruption. George Clooney is engrossing as a trouble-shooter for an immense New York law firm, the writing is exceptionally vital, and the theme of considerable importance. (From the upcoming 11/5/07 issue.)

Sleuth. Filmed first in 1972, this two-character English comedy-thriller creaks a bit, but Michael Caine's assurance, Jude Law's bravura, Kenneth Branagh's generally slick directing, and an array of scenic and lighting displays keep it entertaining most of the time. (10/22/07)

--SK

Stanley Kauffmann is The New Republic's film critic.

The Gallic Godfather

France's very own godfather of soul.....Vignon

Move On Up - Flea Market Funk Pocast Vol. 16

Move On Up - Flea Market Funk Pocast Vol. 16

Little Razor & the Swingmasters - Razor Blade/ Tri Us

Dennis Coffey - Getting It On ‘75/ Sussex

Senor Soul - It’s Your Thing/ Whiz

The Dynatones - The Fife Piper/ HBR

Truman Thomas - Mr. Soul/ Veep

Cal Tjader - Solar Heat/ Skye

Bobo Mr. Soul - H.L.I.C/ Ovide

Brother Soul - Feelin’ Funky/ ElmCor

The Family - Family Affair/ North Bay

Elijah & The Ebonies - Hot Grits/ Capsoul

Gus “The Groove” Lewis - Let The Groove Move You/ Tous Sea

Brother Jack McDuff - Black Is!/ Cadet

Johnny Hammond - Rock Steady/ Kudu

Clifford Curry - Soul Ranger/ SSS International

The San Remo Golden Strings - I’m Satisfied/ Ric Tic

Let’s Groove Together - Our Ladies of Soul/ Kelton

Niche Modern

Let there be light!

Savage Luxury

Arthur Thomas Challen Portrait of Moira Madden 1937oil on canvas76.1 x 63.3 cmLa Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Gift of Mrs SM Challen 1966© Estate of the artist

Savage Luxury

Modernist Design in Melbourne 1930–1939
14 July - 4 November 2007
Venue: Heide III: Central Galleries
Curator: Nanette Carter

Savage Luxury: Modernist Design in Melbourne 1930–1939, presented by Connex, is a lavish insight into early modernist interior design originating in Melbourne during the 1930s. The exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of modern interiors and furnishings designed and commissioned in Australia prior to World War II, positioning Melbourne at the forefront of interior design at this time.

Modernist design emerged in Australia during the 'thrifty thirties’ — a decade of economic hardship and social unrest — yet in terms of technology, style and culture, the period inspired rigorous change and innovation. Savage Luxury introduces Melbourne’s key design proponents: the furniture and textile designers, architects and patrons, and artists and their work, as well as the range of designer shops, department stores and small manufacturers that promoted and supported the modern style.

Focusing on revolutionary approaches to design that reflected and facilitated social change, the exhibition reveals how furniture and interiors came to express a modern way of life and a new sense of Australian cultural identity, one favouring European and American ideals in place of the predominant British trends. Furnishings, textiles and fine and decorative arts by leading artists and designers such as Fred Ward, Michael O’Connell, Frances Burke and Sam Atyeo — in recreated room settings that include a woman’s apartment and a modern milk bar — evoke the design and décor of 1930s interiors.

Savage Luxury is exclusive to Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Paris DJs Soundsystem - African Mashed Potato Popcorn Vol.5 - Afrogroove

Paris Dj's playing some afro tunes. Enjoy!

Kirk Paradise and Tandi Prince

...one of the more extraordinary news items I have seen for a while. I particulary enjoyed the insights provided by Kirk Paradise and Tandi Prince. Props to Dr. Newman for sending in the article. Keep them coming.

Alabama City Reopening Fallout Shelters

By JAY REEVES

Sep 27, 2007 HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP)

In an age of al-Qaida, sleeper cells and the threat of nuclear terrorism, Huntsville is dusting off its Cold War manual to create the nation's most ambitious fallout-shelter plan, featuring an abandoned mine big enough for 20,000 people to take cover underground.

Others would hunker down in college dorms, churches, libraries and research halls that planners hope will bring the community's shelter capacity to 300,000, or space for every man, woman and child in Huntsville and the surrounding county.

Emergency planners in Huntsville an out-of-the-way city best known as the home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center say the idea makes sense because radioactive fallout could be scattered for hundreds of miles if terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb.

"If Huntsville is in the blast zone, there's not much we can do. But if it's just fallout ... shelters would absorb 90 percent of the radiation," said longtime emergency management planner Kirk Paradise, whose Cold War expertise with fallout shelters led local leaders to renew Huntsville's program.

Huntsville's project, developed using $70,000 from a Homeland Security grant, goes against the grain because the United States essentially scrapped its national plan for fallout shelters after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Congress cut off funding and the government published its last list of approved shelters at the end of 1992.

After Sept. 11, Homeland Security created a metropolitan protection program that includes nuclear-attack preparation and mass shelters. But no other city has taken the idea as far as Huntsville has, officials said.

Many cities advise residents to stay at home and seal up a room with plastic and duct tape during a biological, chemical or nuclear attack. Huntsville does too, in certain cases.

Local officials agree the "shelter-in-place" method would be best for a "dirty bomb" that scattered nuclear contamination through conventional explosives. But they say full-fledged shelters would be needed to protect from the fallout of a nuclear bomb.

Program leaders recently briefed members of Congress, including Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., who called the shelter plan an example of the "all-hazards" approach needed for emergency preparedness.

"Al-Qaida, we know, is interested in a nuclear capability. It's our nation's fear that a nuclear weapon could get into terrorists' hands," Dent said.

As fallout shelters go, the Three Caves Quarry just outside downtown offers the kind of protection that would make Dr. Strangelove proud, with space for an arena-size crowd of some 20,000 people.

Last mined in the early '50s, the limestone quarry is dug 300 yards into the side of the mountain, with ceilings as high as 60 feet and 10 acres of floor space covered with jagged rocks. Jet-black in places with a year-round temperature of about 60 degrees, it has a colony of bats living in its highest reaches and baby stalactites hanging from the ceiling.

"It would be a little trying, but it's better than the alternative," said Andy Prewett, a manager with The Land Trust of Huntsville and North Alabama, a nonprofit preservation group that owns the mine and is making it available for free.

In all, the Huntsville-Madison County Emergency Management Agency has identified 105 places that can be used as fallout shelters for about 210,000 people. They are still looking for about 50 more shelters that would hold an additional 100,000 people.

While officials have yet to launch a campaign to inform people of the shelters, a local access TV channel showed a video about the program, which also is explained on a county Web site.

If a bomb went off tomorrow, Paradise said, officials would tell people where to find shelter through emergency alerts on TV and radio stations. "We're pretty much ready to go because we have a list of shelters," he said.

Most of the shelters would offer more comfort than the abandoned mine, such as buildings at the University of Alabama in Huntsville that would house 37,643. A single research hall could hold more than 8,100.

Homeland Security spokeswoman Alexandra Kirin said of Huntsville's wide-ranging plan: "We're not aware of any other cities that are doing that."

Plans call for staying inside for as long as two weeks after a bomb blast, though shelters might be needed for only a few hours in a less dire emergency.

Unlike the fallout shelters set up during the Cold War, the new ones will not be stocked with water, food or other supplies. For survivors of a nuclear attack, it would be strictly "BYOE" bring your own everything. Just throw down a sleeping bag on the courthouse floor or move some of the rocks on the mine floor and make yourself at home.

"We do not guarantee them comfort, just protection," said Paradise, who is coordinating the shelter plans for the local emergency management agency.

Convenience store owner Tandi Prince said she cannot imagine living in the cavern after a bombing.

"That would probably not be very fun," she said.

It Is Not Easy Being Green

Green Piece by Jed Perl

Green should be a primary color. Maybe the primary color. Nature, after all, cannot do without it. And yet, what we all learned as kids, taking art in kindergarten or first grade, was that green was not essential. Green, so we were told, was a "secondary color." We had to have the primaries; red, yellow, and blue could not be mixed. Green, however, could. And after we swirled together yellow and blue poster paint and saw green paint emerge, most of us were probably left with the suspicion that green was a secondary citizen, an idea that flies in the face of the experience that we all have on an ordinary summer day--which is that green rules.

Of course color systems are human inventions, and the primary and secondary colors as we encountered them in school do not represent an unchangeable idea about the nature of seeing, but rather a concept that, to some extent, grew out of the working methods of artists. The ancients sometimes argued that black and white were the primary colors, which makes sense when you consider that seeing depends on contrasts of light and dark. And Pliny described four basic colors--black, red, white, and something else, apparently untranslatable, which may or may not have been a sort of green. Color theory is a crazy subject, a favorite of crackpots and dreamers. (The German Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge believed that the primaries equaled the trinity: Blue was the Father, red the Son, and yellow the Holy Ghost.) So I don't feel many scruples about going right ahead and fielding my own little theory, which is that a lot of people, at least in modern times, have had some sort of problem with green. My guess is that idealists and absolutists are bothered by the natural dominance of green. They want to put it in its place. Let us not forget that, a century ago, red was the color of protest. And what are we to make of the fact that, where once radicals called themselves Reds, now many on the left are proud to be Greens? There must be a color theorist who can supply us with an explanation, with some sociological gloss on the radically complementary nature of red and green.

Artists who knew Mondrian during his years in Paris and New York told stories about his refusing to be seated at a location in a restaurant where he found himself looking out a window at the green of a tree. He had painted trees, magnificent trees, earlier in his career, using greens that had been darkened until they suggested ash and lead, but the ecstatically pure emotion of his later work necessitated banishing any trace of this most naturalistic hue. Kandinsky, that other founding father of abstract art, although he did use green throughout his career, had doubts about it, too. "This pure green," Kandinsky wrote, "is to the realm of color what the so-called bourgeoisie is to human society: it is an immobile, complacent element, limited in every respect. This green is like a fat, extremely healthy cow, lying motionless, fit only for chewing the cud, regarding the world with stupid, lackluster eyes." For some twentieth-century artists green was banality incarnate--the color of boredom. (I once knew a painter, a younger contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists, who made a joke of the anti-green sentiment, naming one of his abstractions something like Green, Green, I Love You Green.)

The nineteenth century was very much a green century, at least in the arts, which helps to explain why the twentieth-century avant-garde got fed up. But how could those nineteenth-century artists, all those realists and empiricists, not have adored green? The Impressionists, who carried their easels out into the sunshine, embraced an all-green-all-the-time approach, at least when they weren't painting the shadows purple. They understood that there is something magnificently out of control about green. It's the most unself-conscious of colors, but also the most promiscuous. The Art Nouveau masters, all the fin-de-siècle designers of posters and wallpaper and pottery and jewelry, tapped green's kinkier side, colors ranging from mossy grays to acidic limes, which suggested melancholy and extravagance, decadence and decay--the green of envy, the green of putrefaction, even death. And those are still the aspects of green that the pop culture people are thinking about when they want to gross us out. Remember the Hollywood cult classic tagline: "They'll do anything to get what they need. And they need Soylent Green."

If going green means accepting the power of the natural world, then painters have often been in the vanguard, from Giorgione in early sixteenth-century Venice, plunging his lovers into an emerald dream, to de Kooning in the 1950s, after he'd more or less abandoned the mean streets of Manhattan for Long Island, playing with all sorts of luscious-yet- febrile tints. It's probably the architects, however, who can teach us the most about living with green. I have wanted to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, the house cantilevered over a creek in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, since I was a kid, but only finally got there a few weeks ago, and it was an astonishing experience--it trumped even my wildest hopes. Over the years, I've thought so much about Wright's megalomania that I had begun to wonder if he could ever completely respond to the natural world, which was of course what he always said he wanted to do. The revelation of Fallingwater is that Wright's almost superhuman powers of invention are a perfect match for the green-on-green opulence of western Pennsylvania in its August glory. Fallingwater is a fearlessly extravagant building, all rhyming balconies and echoing angles and multiplying vantage points. This great house, with its surfaces of industrial concrete and native stone, suggests the bravado of a soloist's thunderous performance in a Romantic concerto, only the orchestra that Wright challenges is nature itself. And Wright, perhaps remembering the kindergarten lesson about red and green being complementaries, has inserted, at the very heart of Fallingwater, a vertical strip of windows, all painted red. That deep, strong red is a signature touch, an idealistic gesture emblazoned across a realist's dappled green world. There is some ecological lesson to be drawn from Fallingwater, something about perfervid idealism discovering its truest self only after grappling with nature's power. And this, come to think of it, is not a bad definition of the American sublime.

The New Republic New York Diarist Issue date 09.24.07

New York Times Review of Lost Vanguard exhibition at MOMA

The exhibition includes the facade of a largely forgotten garage in Moscow by the celebrated Konstantin Melnikov. (Richard Pare)

Le Corbusier, inspired by the ferment of Russian architecture, came from abroad to design the landmark Moscow headquarters for Centrosoyuz. (Richard Pare)

Ivan Zholtovski’s 1926 power station in Moscow neatly encapsulates the aesthetic battles among Soviet architects as they struggled to shape an architectural language for a revolutionary society, says Nicolai Ouroussoff. (Richard Pare)

Lenin's Mausoleum, designed by Aleksei Shchusev, is part of "Lost Vanguard," an exhibition of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art which celebrates the ferment of Russian architecture from 1922-32. (Richard Pare)

See New York Times review of the Lost Vanguard exhibition at MOMA:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/arts/design/20vang.html

From Little Things Big Things Grow

Last Saturday night singer-songwriter Kev Carmody performed at the 25th anniversary of the National Gallery of Australia. A highlight was the anthem 'From Little Things Big Things Grow'', which Kev co-wrote with Paul Kelly.

See performance at Live Earth in Sydney in July 2007 with Paul Kelly, Missy Higgins, and John Butler:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3f2x12ShPg

Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–32

NYC's MOMA is currently hosting an exhibition on Soviet avant-garde architecture in the postrevolutionary period. The exhibition closes on 27 October.

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=5138&ref=calendar

African funk

German vinyl archeologist DJ Frank has delivered another batch of sizzling afro funk tunes from the motherland. Enjoy!

http://www.soulstrut.com/mixes/listen.php?ID=107