Langton Hughes Library, Clinton, Tennessee

The Children's Defense Fund now owns the former Alex Haley Farm and uses it as a headquarters and conference center. Maya Lin was commissioned to remodel a barn on the property to accommodate a 5000-volume reference library on civil rights and children's advocacy and a small book store."The idea was to maintain the integrity and character of the old barn yet introduce a new inner layer. The integration of old and new allowed me to leave exposed and untouched the main body of the building yet build the library within the existing structure." (Lin, Maya Ying, Boundaries, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000, p.10:24)

Our Latin Thing. 1971

Dizzie Gillespie, Cal Tjader, Monterrey Jazz Fest. 1975

Finding The Stuff Of Art In the Gutter

WALKING on the Lower East Side of Manhattan six years ago, Tom Fruin noticed a yellow plastic drug baggie. Curious, he picked it up, thinking that as an artist he could do something with it.

He did. Over the next 18 months, Mr. Fruin, 27, who lives in Brooklyn, collected almost 3,000 drug bags from around the city. They were plastic or glassine, some clear, others solid-colored or patterned, and they ranged from pinkie-nail-size crack bags to credit-card-size marijuana packets. He sewed them together into a quilt that sold for $20,000.

These days, collectors are snapping up Mr. Fruin's works faster than he can make them. His first solo show, at the Stefan Stux Gallery in Chelsea last year, sold out. Almost all of the 19 quilts in his second solo exhibit, ''Cultural Narcotics: The Straight Dope,'' were already sold when the show opened at Stux on March 30. The buyers included the actor Willem Dafoe, who paid $30,000 for a piece.

Asked about the Dafoe purchase, Mr. Fruin looked abashed. ''I guess these things are sort of prestigious,'' he said. ''But that's not an indicator of success for me.''

Mr. Fruin had a graphic design career in mind when he moved to New York in 1996, after receiving a degree in studio art from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Instead, he spends his days bicycling around parks and housing projects, storing his findings in Ziploc bags and scribbling notes (''extreme corner light blue bags 5'') for later reference.

Over the years, random collecting revealed patterns: a cluster of colorful heroin bags had been opened the same way, presumably by the same user; bags from the same drug batches were decorated with dinosaurs, dollar signs or logos like ''Dirty Urine'' and ''R.I.P.''

Mr. Fruin hangs his quilts from metal rods extending out from the wall, creating a stained-glass effect. ''For me it's not so much about the imagery as what it actually is,'' he said. ''The light going through completes it for me -- it's sort of an ephemeral, nonexistent residue of itself.''

Equal parts anthropology and art, Mr. Fruin's pieces are usually composed according to geography or chronology. One quilt maps out a housing project, with lighter bags representing buildings and darker ones the surrounding grassy areas. Another, replicating the American flag, contains baggies and documents -- a scrap of a tax return, a name tag -- found under the floorboards of an apartment in Manhattan's meatpacking district.

Collecting bags is occasionally hazardous -- Mr. Fruin has had boiling water and diapers thrown at him and has had run-ins with the police -- and usually solitary. With little information about the bags' origins, he spins his own tales. Finding bags with cocaine straws inside, he imagines a user tossing evidence out a window. Most bags are empty, but they sometimes contain seeds and on a rare occasion are filled with drugs (which hasn't caused legal problems in galleries so far).

''I like to think that's sort of a rich addict,'' Mr. Fruin said, laughing. ''Maybe they're just doing it in the dark.''

By Deborah Bach New York Times April 14, 2002

Record Store Day April 19 - Ameoba Music

Jail Finds

A library volunteer from Dane County, Wisconsin has carefully catalogued prisoner's abandoned poems, drawings, and scribbles from the jail house.

For more pictures visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/jumble/collections/72157594588091111/

Brain Control Monkey

East Germany lives on

I've posted about the Strange Maps website before, but thanks to that site I've learnt something that's too surreal for words.

I honestly believed that East-Germany ended with the unification of October 3rd, 1990. However, that's not quite the case. Let's go back to the year 1972, when this story started...

In June of that year, Fidel Castro visited East-Germany. As a present, he gave the communist party of that country a small island in the caribic. That the "gift" was actually the price Cuba had to pay to obtain the right to a higher production of sugar is beside the point; the point is that East-Germany got an island. It was named Cayo Blanco del Sur (white island of the south), until it was later renamed Cayo Ernesto Thaelmann, after a leader of the German Communist Party in the thirties, called Ernst Thälmann.

Now we should skip a whole bunch of years, and flash-forward to 1990, the year of the German unification. In the German-German contract of unification (Deutsch-Deutschen Einigungsvertrag), it was agreed that five new federal lands (bundesländer) and Berlin were added to the federal republic of Germany. There was no mention of the island. If the island was actually part of the deal, you'd expect it to be part of the contract, right?

The situation right now: Havana has more or less taken control of the island, claiming that the gift of 1972 was merely a symbolical one. But officially, East-Germany lives on as a tiny island in the Caribbean...

courtsey of http://archipelagoes.blogspot.com/

More Pentagon Black Patches

Clockwise from top left: Ghost Squadron. For search and rescue; National Reconnaissance Office. Dragon is code for infrared imaging on advanced KH-11 satellites; Desert Prowler. May represent Groom Lake, Nev., a k a Area 51; Special Projects Office. Oversaw F-117A stealth fighter support; 4451st Test Squadron. Stealth fighters; 413th Flight Test Squadron. Possibly referring to simulated or real electronic threats against aircraft

Skulls. Black cats. A naked woman riding a killer whale. Grim reapers. Snakes. Swords. Occult symbols. A wizard with a staff that shoots lightning bolts. Moons. Stars. A dragon holding the Earth in its claws.

No, this is not the fantasy world of a 12-year-old boy.

It is, according to a new book, part of the hidden reality behind the Pentagon’s classified, or “black,” budget that delivers billions of dollars to stealthy armies of high-tech warriors. The book offers a glimpse of this dark world through a revealing lens — patches — the kind worn on military uniforms.

“It’s a fresh approach to secret government,” Steven Aftergood, a security expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said in an interview. “It shows that these secret programs have their own culture, vocabulary and even sense of humor.”

One patch shows a space alien with huge eyes holding a stealth bomber near its mouth. “To Serve Man” reads the text above, a reference to a classic “Twilight Zone” episode in which man is the entree, not the customer. “Gustatus Similis Pullus” reads the caption below, dog Latin for “Tastes Like Chicken.”

Military officials and experts said the patches are real if often unofficial efforts at building team spirit.

The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion. That is more than the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Those billions have expanded a secret world of advanced science and technology in which military units and federal contractors push back the frontiers of warfare. In the past, such handiwork has produced some of the most advanced jets, weapons and spy satellites, as well as notorious boondoggles.

Budget documents tell little. This year, for instance, the Pentagon says Program Element 0603891c is receiving $196 million but will disclose nothing about what the project does. Private analysts say it apparently aims at developing space weapons.

Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his Ph.D. in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has managed to document some of this hidden world. The 75 patches he has assembled reveal a bizarre mix of high and low culture where Latin and Greek mottos frame images of spooky demons and sexy warriors, of dragons dropping bombs and skunks firing laser beams.

“Oderint Dum Metuant,” reads a patch for an Air Force program that mines spy satellite images for battlefield intelligence, according to Mr. Paglen, who identifies the saying as from Caligula, the first-century Roman emperor famed for his depravity. It translates “Let them hate so long as they fear.”

Wizards appear on several patches. The one hurling lightning bolts comes from a secret Air Force base at Groom Lake, northwest of Las Vegas in a secluded valley. Mr. Paglen identifies its five clustered stars and one separate star as a veiled reference to Area 51, where the government tests advanced aircraft and, U.F.O. buffs say, captured alien spaceships.

The book offers not only clues into the nature of the secret programs, but also a glimpse of zealous male bonding among the presumed elite of the military-industrial complex. The patches often feel like fraternity pranks gone ballistic.

The book’s title? “I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me,” published by Melville House. Mr. Paglen says the title is the Latin translation of a patch designed for the Navy Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 4, at Point Mugu, Calif. Its mission, he says, is to test strike aircraft, conventional weapons and electronic warfare equipment and to develop tactics to use the high-tech armaments in war.

“The military has patches for almost everything it does,” Mr. Paglen writes in the introduction. “Including, curiously, for programs, units and activities that are officially secret.”

He said contractors in some cases made the patches to build esprit de corps. Other times, he added, military units produced them informally, in contrast to official patches.

Mr. Paglen said he found them by touring bases, noting what personnel wore, joining alumni associations, interviewing active and former team members, talking to base historians and filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

A spokesman for the Pentagon, Cmdr. Bob Mehal, said it would be imprudent to comment on “which patches do or do not represent classified units.” In an e-mail message, Commander Mehal added, “It would be supposition to suggest ‘anyone’ is uncomfortable with this book.”

Each year, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a private group in Washington, publishes an update on the Pentagon’s classified budget. It says the money began to soar after the two events of Mr. Bush’s coming into office and terrorists’ 9/11 attacks.

What sparked his interest, Mr. Paglen recalled, were Vice President Dick Cheney’s remarks as the Pentagon and World Trade Center smoldered. On “Meet the Press,” he said the nation would engage its “dark side” to find the attackers and justice. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows,” Mr. Cheney said. “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

In an interview, Mr. Paglen said that remark revived memories of his childhood when his military family traveled the globe to bases often involved in secret missions. “I’d go out drinking with Special Forces guys,” he recalled. “I was 15, and they were 20, and they could never say where they where coming from or what they were doing. You were just around the stuff.”Intrigued by Mr. Cheney’s remarks as well as his own recollections, Mr. Paglen set off to map the secret world and document its expansion. He traveled widely across the Southwest, where the military keeps many secret bases. His labors, he said, resulted in his Ph.D. thesis as well as a book, “Blank Spots on a Map,” that Dutton plans to publish next year.

The research also led to another book, “Torture Taxi,” that Melville House published in 2006. It described how spies kidnapped and detained suspected terrorists around the globe.

“Black World,” a 2006 display of his photographs at Bellwether, a gallery in Chelsea, showed “anonymous-looking buildings in parched landscapes shot through a shimmering heat haze,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times, adding that the images “seem to emit a buzz of mystery as they turn military surveillance inside out: here the surveillant is surveilled.”

In this research, Mr. Paglen became fascinated by the patches and started collecting them and displaying them at talks and shows. He said a breakthrough occurred around 2004, when he visited Peter Merlin, an “aerospace archaeologist” who works in the Mojave Desert not far from a sprawling military base. Mr. Merlin argued that the lightning bolts, stars and other symbols could be substantive clues about unit numbers and operating locations, as well as the purpose of hidden programs.

“These symbols,” Mr. Paglen wrote, “were a language. If you could begin to learn its grammar, you could get a glimpse into the secret world itself.”

His book explores this idea and seeks to decode the symbols. Many patches show the Greek letter sigma, which Mr. Paglen identifies as a technical term for how well an object reflects radar waves, a crucial parameter in developing stealthy jets.

A patch from a Groom Lake unit shows the letter sigma with the “buster” slash running through it, as in the movie “Ghost Busters.” “Huge Deposit — No Return” reads its caption. Huge Deposit, Mr. Paglen writes, “indicates the bomb load deposited by the bomber on its target, while ‘No Return’ refers to the absence of a radar return, meaning the aircraft was undetectable to radar.”In an interview, Mr. Paglen said his favorite patch was the dragon holding the Earth in its claws, its wings made of American flags and its mouth wide open, baring its fangs. He said it came from the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees developing spy satellites. “There’s something both belligerent and weirdly self-critical about it,” he remarked. “It’s representing the U.S. as a dragon with the whole world in its clutches.”

The field is expanding. Dwayne A. Day and Roger Guillemette, military historians, wrote an article published this year in The Space Review (www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1) on patches from secret space programs. “It’s neat stuff,” Dr. Day said in an interview. “They’re not really giving away secrets. But the patches do go farther than the organizations want to go officially.”

Mr. Paglen plans to keep mining the patches and the field of clandestine military activity. “It’s kind of remarkable,” he said. “This stuff is a huge industry, I mean a huge industry. And it’s remarkable that you can develop these projects on an industrial scale, and we don’t know what they are. It’s an astounding feat of social engineering.”

by William Broad New York Times 1 April.

Bandung Art Deco Indonesia

Bandung is the capital city of West Java, Indonesia. Its roots dated from prehistoric time, when a group of prehistoric people lived on the northern part of an ancient lake. Some thousands' years ago the lake became dry and changed into the present Bandung valley. The city is located on high land surrounded by spectacular hills and mountains, and because of that has a much cooler climate than most of Indonesian cities. The name of Bandung has been known since the fifteenth century as a part of the Hindu Pajajaran kingdom. From 1821 until 1852 the city was closed to the European and Chinese people.

Art Deco

Art Deco is the contemporary Modern Design, Architecture, and a broad spectrum of Decorative Arts. It drew renewed inspiration from ancient arts and primitive arts, and was purified by ideas of the functionalists. In the United States it was known as "Modernism," and in France as "Art Moderne." Some said that it was a reaction to "Art Nouveau," and the other said that it was an extension of "Art Nouveau."

The term "Art Deco" was first used in 1968, in a book written by Bevis Hillier to describe the interrelated art and design movement of the era. Parallel to the movements in the United States were the three main movements in Europe. The first one was started in Austria and Germany, known as "Jogendstil." In contrast to "Art Nouveau," it emphasized the functional design that was based on logic and geometry. The second one was the decorative movement as an extension of "Art Nouveau," that can be identified from the highly colorful and ornamental style which ruled Paris in the immediate post World War years. Instead of maidens and flower sprays, arches, sunbursts, colorful geometric patterns, and floral abstraction themes were introduced. The third movement was the principle of Dutch Modern Decorative Art and Decorative Movement in Architecture, as the peak of the Amsterdam School from 1910 to 1930. It was the Dutch modern expressionist architectural style, a rational architecture which elements were derived from the structure.

The climax of Art Deco came in 1925 with the "Paris Exposition International des Arts Decorative et Industries." It had originally been proposed in 1912 for 1915, in order to inspire the French designers to develop works equal to that produced by their German contemporaries. The designers produced various abstract floral ornamentation's derived from "Art Nouveau."

In Architecture, the 1920's style was characterized by the design of pavilions with zigzagged setbacks, the use of unusual materials, the incorporation of decorative wall paintings, ornamental metalwork's, and decorative glasswork on geometric and floral themes. Many examples of the works from the peak of Amsterdam School era can be seen throughout the Netherlands. Many buildings are of an exceptional quality and have superb details.

Art Deco and the Amsterdam School in Bandung

Just like the influence of Hindu and Buddhist cultures in the 7th century, followed by the Islamic and Chinese cultural influence in 13th century, the Dutch cultural influence can be seen as just another part of other influences from abroad which shaped the Indonesian culture.

After the first World War, there were various movements in design and architecture, two of which were the Amsterdam School and De Stijl. The Amsterdam School stream has often defined as a reaction to the strict rationalism of Berlage in mid 20s. It is described as a non-theoretical and unsystematic in character, the very antithesis of Berlage's concept of communal architecture. It emphasized the individual artistry. It has same concept of decoration and design as Art Deco.

The Amsterdam School was a plastic and organic expressionist architectural movement with reference to Wright, and followed more constructional and functional principles. The Amsterdam School architects designed building masses of craftsmanship in wood, brick, iron, and painted glass. The architectural works were dominated by the undulating organic forms, used rough wrought stones, concrete, and iron. Their new communal housing projects were much more plastic in their accumulation and related fully to their immediate surroundings. The design concept showed the appearance of organic architectural plans. Building structures were not concealed and clearly visible. The decoration was derived from the structure.

There is an eastern cultural influence on the architectonic conception, including the Sundanese roof style. Of the important people in this movement are Van der Mey, De Klerk, Luthman and Kramer, who are among the most admired influence in Indonesia. These architects seem to have design influences on Indonesian architecture.

The city of Bandung architecture of that era was strongly influenced by Dutch design. It is the amalgam of Western and Eastern culture, which is sometimes called the "Indo-European" culture. In the first generation of Bandung Art Deco buildings, the similarity of the modern expressionist design concept of Van der May and Frank Lloyd Wright buildings were seen, for example in the Preanger Hotel designed by C.P. Wolff Schoemaker, with its geometric decorative elements on the exterior walls.

In the second generation of Bandung Art Deco buildings, the volume is the effect of static solidity, and is more accurately of plane and surfaces. The pure architectural symbol is the open box, as well as planes surrounding a volume, a geometrically bounded and weightless space. The villa of Ang Eng Kan designed by F.W. Brinkman in 1930 exhibits this aesthetical quality. In the second half of the period, the architects used more simple design patterns like lines, and the towering cylinder that has a basic design similarity with the Isola design by Wolff Schoemaker in 1931. The dynamic interior space concept is clearly seen in the interior lay-out of the building.

A.F. Albers and the Late Art Deco

Architecture expresses the life of the epoch. The architectural concept of the modernist architect was defined by the aesthetic demand for return to simplicity of form. The play of basic form of masses brought together in light and shade. Some of the buildings designed by Brinkman, like the Singer building in jalan Asia Afrika and the villa Ang Eng Kan in jalan Sangkuriang which were built in 1930, expressed the modern composition of boxes of De Stijl.

The other beautiful basic building form which produces plastic power and aesthetical emotion, instead of the box composition mentioned before, is the cylindrical composition of form as the IKIP building design by C.P. Wolff Schoemaker built in 1928, and located in the northern hills of Bandung.

Decorative Art in the late period of Art Deco was related to the style of the modern dynamic and plastic architecture. It is the "streamline" architecture, and is one of the stylistic references of world modern architectural technology. The lightness of the building structure and the dynamic streamline facade of Homann hotel, Bank Pembangunan Daerah, Three Colour Villa, and the Dago Thee Villa, designed by A.F. Aalbers between 1935 to 1938 are the four examples that we can find in the city.

People sometimes called it the "Ocean Liner" style, its reference to the ship design expressing the goal of a modern society. It is the translation of machines into architectural terms; the expression of motion, modern technology, optimism, and social order.

The Decorative Art and the architectural development shows how the acceptance of the later and best of Western architecture allowed the Dutch influence to be absorbed without destroying the city's long term identity. We should see the cultural mixture as an integral part of a cultural continuity and part of the whole history of Indonesia. The buildings of the period are the treasure of learning, the delight in the work of another era and have to be taken more care of.

References:

Akihary, Huib, "Architectuur en Stedebouw in Indonesie", Grafiplan, Geeuweebrug, 1988.

Duncan, Alistrair, "American Art Deco", Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1989.

Hartono, Dibyo (et.al.), "Studi Sejarah Arsitektur Pusat Kota Bandung", Bandung Society for Heritage Conservation, Bandung, 1989.

Miss Atom 2008

Meet Yulia Nagayeva. She's a Russian beauty queen. No, not the winner of the Russian prison pageant I wrote about last week; she's the winner of Miss Atom 2008. The contest was held earlier this month, and Yulia beat out many other stunning women of Russia's extensive nuclear industry. Of course, the U.S. in the past had its own version, Las Vegas' Miss Atom Bomb. What makes Russia's contest particularly unique, however, is that it is only open to workers in Russia's nuclear industry.

Miss Atom works for the TVEL Corporation, which is described on its website as "one of the world leading manufacturers of nuclear fuel." Tvel's fuel is reportedly in every sixth reactor in the world. And they have Yulia working there, too.

The concourse is determined by voters (Yulia got almost 4,000 votes). No word on whether she's going back to nuclear fuel, or has plans for bigger and better things.

Last year, Arms Control Wonk tried to rig the voting (and at least one commenter seemed to think the contest was rigged anyhow).

By the way, Yulia's hobbies include: photography, cooking, studying foreign languages and travel.

Sharon Weinburger, Wired Blog, 18 March.

Let's Be Frank

Though many people have recently woken up to the need to go green, for a few, living in harmony with nature has been a long-held ethos. One such person is Frank Harmon, a North Carolina architect who has been designing sustainably for almost three decades. His projects—mostly in his home state—include churches, arts and educational buildings, and houses that embody the ideals of new regionalism. Harmon hews to the notion that a structure should be specific to its place in terms of materials and its relationships to geography and climate. Raised in North Carolina but educated at London’s influential Architectural Association, Harmon worked for Richard Meier, the New York–based architect known for his impeccably detailed—if somewhat cold—white, glassy buildings. So what made Harmon turn toward his warmer brand of regionalism? He had a couple of very strong influences.

You’re an avid proponent of regionalism. How did you get there?

In my late 30s, I met Harwell Hamilton Harris, who became a very important mentor to me. He was the first modern architect to fuse modern principles with traditional materials like wood and stone and to illustrate a respect for climate and region. His thought was that every building is a portrait. It’s a portrait of the owner, or it’s the story of the site or the particular climate or materials of a region. In other words, he felt that all great architecture started with the particulars of climate or site or materials. The more I thought about that, the more I thought that was entirely true.

Also, as a child growing up, I used to love North Carolina barns and farmhouses; but, going off to school in England, then working in New York, I felt they were rather provincial. Then I moved back to North Carolina and realized the inherent intelligence in those buildings.

I was also influenced by my childhood home. I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, in a suburban development at the edge of the city where some very forward-thinking planner had created greenways and parks, preserving the streambeds. I grew up playing on the banks of those streams, and I can say now that most of what I know about architecture I credit to playing by those streams. To this day I thank the anonymous architect who planned those pathways.

That doesn’t sound like the stereotypical 1950s alienating suburb.

No, it was built before World War II—sometime around 1920—and consisted of small houses, on small lots, and there were sidewalks. There was a huge change in suburban design in the 1950s. One reason for that was air-conditioning; the other was the bulldozer, which really came into its own after the war.I never use a bulldozer. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful tool, but unfortunately one of the cheapest things that can be done is to level a site, which destroys vegetation and wildlife and causes polluted runoff to flow right into our rivers and estuary systems. Prior to [its inception] you had to move earth by mule, and prior to air-conditioning you had to have porches for cooling. My grandmothers spent their time sitting on porches.I am sure the storytelling tradition in the South comes from sitting on porches.

How have you woven these kinds of regional traditions, like porches, into your work?

I have just completed a church in historic Charleston, South Carolina. It builds on an existing vernacular of Charleston architecture, a wonderful building type known as a “single house,” because they were only one room deep and always had [a] large porch across the south or southwest side of the house. So for this church, I said, “You need hallways, but why don’t we put them out on porches to reduce the heated area by a third?” So now it is one room deep and cross ventilated. It also has the first green roof in Charleston.

So the church is a kind of modern vernacular?

Yes, but I am not interested in vernacular to be sentimental. I am interested in what it can teach us. All vernacular architecture is sustainable. It is always inherently related to the region. But let me emphasize that regionalism should not be confused with parochialism any more than you would call Faulkner a local Southern writer.

You’ve been building sustainably for decades. Does the current green awareness represent a real shift?

Yes, I think it does. I’ve been doing green stuff for 25 years, and over that time I’ve had to educate my clients, and that has been very difficult. Today they all come to me and want something sustainable. The single biggest impact we have energy-wise is our buildings, not cars, and our clients get that. I think there is general unease about how we treat the world, and people want [to] build in a sustainable way. The pastor at the church in Charleston said that building sustainably is a moral issue. Architecture is arguably the most important issue of the day.

What about suburban development, which carpets so much of the country and seems to be the antithesis of regionalism? Is the message getting though there?

It is, I think. Almost all major builders are talking about how their buildings can be more sustainable. The greatest difference I can hope for is that houses and buildings can respond to places where they are. In our country we have the greatest geographical difference, so why is it that houses in Washington State look the same as buildings in Florida? The most sustainable—and liberating—thing we can do is to acknowledge the places we are in.

Frances Anderton, Dwell, April 2008

Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World

If you're part of a super-secret, clandestine, covert military unit, it seems like you wouldn't want to advertise it.

Turns out, some "black ops" personnel do. They come up with cryptic designs — images like dragons wrapped around the earth or naked women riding killer whales — to put on patches that commemorate their missions. What they mean and the details of the missions are almost impossible to figure out.

Trevor Paglen collects these military black ops patches in a new art and history book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me.

For more information visit http://www.paglen.com/tellyou/index.htm

The Bryant Park Project, NPR, January 14, 2008

Florence Broadhurst

To describe the life of Florence Broadhurst as eventful, or highly unusual would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that her life was a series of phases, each inhabited by a different persona: singer; dancer; actor; couturier; painter; charity worker and fund raiser; car and truck yard operator, fashionista and finally, wallpaper designer.

Florence Maud Broadhurst was born 28 July 1899 at Mungy Station, near Mount Perry Queensland, Australia. She was musical and had some success as a singer in local musical competitions.In 1922, she left Australia for China and South East Asia where she performed in musical comedy under the stage name ‘Bobby Broadhurst’. She became well known for her singing and Charleston dancing.

In 1926, Florence established the Broadhurst Academy in Shanghai. Here, she offered tuition in ‘violin, pianoforte, voice production, banjolele playing (taught by Florence), modern ballroom dancing, classical dancing, musical culture and journalism’.

Three years later in England, Florence married her first husband Percy Kann, and began a new career as designer-cum-dress consultant for Pellier Ltd, Robes & Modes, in New Bond Street, Mayfair.

With her second husband, Leonard Lloyd Lewis, a diesel engineer, Florence lived out the World War II years in England. In 1949, she returned to Australia with Leonard and their son Robert. It was here that she took up painting, and toured around northern and central Australia.

In 1954, the David Jones art gallery in Sydney, held solo exhibitions of her work. There followed further exhibitions, including group shows, in various galleries. During this time Florence became a founding member of the Art Gallery Society of NSW (1953), and a member of the Society of Interior Designers of Australia (c1954).

Around 1960, Florence established Australian (Hand Printed) Wallpapers Ltd in St Leonards, Sydney. Here Florence, with an initial staff of two, began designing and manufacturing the brilliant, flamboyant wallpapers that were to become her trademark.

The company moved to Paddington in 1969 and changed the name to Florence Broadhurst Wallpapers Pty Ltd. Both Florence and the company flourished. As designs and production techniques developed, the wallpapers found eager buyers in the international marketplace. Meanwhile, Florence became famous for her extravagant clothes and jewellery and vivid red hair.

On 15 October 1977, Florence Broadhurst was brutally murdered at her Paddington premises. The killer has never been identified.

Since her death, Florence Broadhurst’s reputation has been enhanced by a resurgence in popular appreciation of her extraordinary wallpaper designs, re-released by Signature Prints, who hold the licence to reproduce her work.

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, holds a collection also, with a Broadhurst display currently included in the exhibition, Inspired! Design across time. \

by Anne-Marie Van de Ven, curator, visual communication design and photography, Powerhouse Museum

Merchant of Death Arrested

U.S. officials said today they will seek extradition of an infamous Russian arms dealer known as the "merchant of death" who was lured out of hiding and arrested in Thailand in an intricate sting by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Viktor Bout, a former Soviet air force officer who has multiple aliases, has been hit with numerous international and U.S. financial sanctions for his longtime role as a suspected arms dealer to some of the world's most notorious terrorist and insurgency groups, including al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.U.S. and Thai officials said Bout was arrested in Bangkok on a warrant from the DEA, which alleges that the Russian was about to close a deal to supply as much as $15 million worth of missiles and military assault rifles to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Known by its Spanish initials, FARC, the group is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.

The deal was part of a sting arranged by the DEA using undercover informants who posed as FARC operatives and convinced Bout to leave the safety of Russia to finalize the transaction, according to a complaint unsealed this afternoon in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. One of Bout's close associates, Andrew Smulian, was also arrested, authorities said.

Bout's odds-defying career as an amoral arms merchant who often supplied both sides in military conflicts has been the subject of lengthy journalistic exposes, a recent book and, loosely, the Hollywood movie "Lord of War," starring Nicolas Cage. He is believed to have at least five passports and to be fluent in six languages, according to media and government reports. He is believed to have been born in Tajikistan in 1967, according to the DEA complaint.

Bout operates a broad network of delivery companies with as many as 50 cargo planes, primarily old Soviet aircraft, that specialized in running supplies to conflict zones. His alleged customers over the years have included al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, former Liberian despot Charles Taylor, Unita rebels in Uganda, the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, and rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s. Cargo companies connected to Bout also were linked to hundreds of supply flights into Iraq for private contractors and the U.S. military early in the Iraq war.

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Bout in 2004 for alleged war profiteering because of his ties to Taylor, and froze the assets of 30 companies and four individuals linked to Bout in 2006. Bout also is accused of violating United Nations arms embargoes.

In an interview with the Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy in 2002, Bout denied many of the allegations, saying he does "aviation lifts. This is my main business." He said he "never supplied anything to or had contacts with the Taliban or al-Qaeda," and did not have multiple passports."It sounds more like a Hollywood blockbuster," he said. "It seems so interesting to find a Russian track in it."

The news agency RIA-Novosti said Russian officials may seek Bout's extradition home if they get to review Thai investigative materials, but Bout could be in the United States before that happens. Interfax, citing an anonymous Russian law enforcement source, said there is no criminal case against Bout in Russia.

by Dan Eggen, Washington Post, 6 March.

Color Chart

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today

March 2–May 12, 2008

The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor, Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colors gave way to an excitement about color as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol's "I want to be a machine;" the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella's "Straight out of the can; it can’t get better than that." Color Chart is the first major exhibition devoted to this pivotal transformation, featuring work by some forty artists ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter to Sherrie Levine and Damien Hirst.

KLAX Berkeley - Best Various Artists 2007

Various Artists - NEW YORK LATIN HUSTLE (Soul Jazz)
Various Artists - DIRTY SPACE DISCO (Dirty)
Various Artists - GREATEST HITS OF GAMM (GAMM)
Azymuth - Azimuth (reissue) (Far Out)
Various Artists - RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE (Soul Jazz)
Matthew Dear - Asa Breed (Ghostly International)
Various Artists - OM HIP HOP VOL. 1 (Om Hip Hop)
The Blackhorse Project - Input (Molaman)
Barbara & Ernie - Prelude To.(reissue) (Fallout)
Sugar & Gold - Creme (Antenna Farm)
Budos Band - The Budos Band (Daptone)
Cake - B Sides and Rarities (Upbeat)
Various Artists - SISTER FUNK 2 (Jazzman)

Oakland Slam Poetry - Tourettes Without Regrets

Oakland.....My Dear Old Neighborhood

People Say - Jackie Orszaczky Band

Music lovers mourn band leader Jackie Orszaczky

JACKIE ORSZACZKY, a renowned bass guitarist and one of the nation's most influential band leaders of the past 25 years, has died after a long illness.

Orszaczky, 60, died in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital on Sunday from complications in his treatment for lymphoma. He had been admitted after collapsing at home.

His last gig was at the Macquarie Hotel in Surry Hills on January 24, a night the trombonist James Greening described as unbelievable. "Since his illness he continued to sing better and better every time I played with him," said Greening, who played with Orszaczky for 25 years. "It was inspiring and really empowering."

On Sunday night some of Orszaczky's close friends returned to the hotel to play and to remember a giant of the music scene.

Greening said Orszaczky's legacy was the way he demonstrated how to create a band that worked in total unity. "He had absolute clarity about what was important in music. Because of this he led with total clarity … and allowed everyone in the group to play at their best."

In his wry and humble way he passed on knowledge not only to those he worked with but to "the hundreds of players who came to see him play," Greening said.

Born in Hungary, Orszaczky moved here in 1974 and soon became an in-demand session bass player and band leader, fronting Marcia Hines's band in the late 1970s. As a muso, arranger and producer he contributed to albums from artists including the Whitlams, Tim Finn, Savage Garden, You Am I, Hoodoo Gurus, Grinspoon and Leonardo's Bride.

John Shand, Herald jazz critic, said this breadth of activity and depth of knowledge set Orszaczky apart. "I can't think of anyone in the entire country who touched so many different musicians in so many different ways."

Orszaczky remained popular in Hungary and attracted 30,000 people at his annual Budapest concerts. He is survived by his partner, the singer Tina Harrod, and two daughters. A private funeral will be held this week and on Sunday from 4pm there will be a wake at the Harold Park Hotel.

By Clare Morgan, Sydney Morning Herald, February 5, 2008

The Dog's Master

Pieter Hugo 'Gadawan Kura' - The Hyena Men

These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption 'The Streets of Lagos'. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me.

Through a journalist friend I eventually tracked down a Nigerian reporter, Adetokunbo Abiola, who said that he knew the 'Gadawan Kura' as they are known in Hausa (a rough translation: 'hyena handlers/guides').

A few weeks later I was on a plane to Lagos. Abiola met me at the airport and together we took a bus to Benin City where the 'hyena men' had agreed to meet us. However, when we got there they had already departed for Abuja.

In Abuja we found them living on the periphery of the city in a shantytown - a group of men, a little girl, three hyenas, four monkeys and a few rock pythons. It turned out that they were a group of itinerant minstrels, performers who used the animals to entertain crowds and sell traditional medicines. The animal handlers were all related to each other and were practising a tradition passed down from generation to generation. I spent eight days travelling with them.
The spectacle caused by this group walking down busy market streets was overwhelming. I tried photographing this but failed, perhaps because I wasn't interested in their performances. I realised that what I found fascinating was the hybridisation of the urban and the wild, and the paradoxical relationship that the handlers have with their animals - sometimes doting and affectionate, sometimes brutal and cruel. I started looking for situations where these contrasting elements became apparent. I decided to concentrate on portraits. I would go for a walk with one of the performers, often just in the city streets, and, if opportunity presented itself, take a photograph. We travelled around from city to city, often chartering public mini-buses.

I agreed to travel with the animal wranglers to Kanu in the northern part of the country. One of them set out to negotiate a fare with a taxi driver; everyone else, including myself and the hyenas, monkeys and rock pythons, hid in the bushes. When their companion signalled that he had agreed on a fare, the motley troupe of humans and animals leapt out from behind the bushes and jumped into the vehicle. The taxi driver was completely horrified. I sat upfront with a monkey and the driver. He drove like an absolute maniac. At one stage the monkey was terrified by his driving. It grabbed hold of my leg and stared into my eyes. I could see its fear.

Two years later I decided to go back to Nigeria. The project felt unresolved and I was ready to engage with the group again. I look back at the notebooks I had kept while with them. The words 'dominance', 'codependence' and 'submission' kept appearing. These pictures depict much more than an exotic group of travelling performers in West Africa. The motifs that linger are the fraught relationships we have with ourselves, with animals and with nature.

The second trip was very different. By this stage there was a stronger personal relationship between myself and the group. We had remained in contact and they were keen to be photographed again. The images from this journey are less formal and more intimate. The first series of pictures had caused varying reactions from people - inquisitiveness, disbelief and repulsion. People were fascinated by them, just as I had been by that first cellphone photograph. A director of a large security company in the USA contacted me, asking how to get in touch with the 'hyena group'. He saw marketing potential: surely these men must use some type of herb to protect themselves against hyenas, baboons, dogs and snakes? He thought that security guards, soldiers and his own pocket could benefit from this medicine.

Many animal-rights groups also contacted me, wanting to intervene (however, the keepers have permits from the Nigerian government). When I asked Nigerians, "How do you feel about the way they treat animals?", the question confused people. Their responses always involved issues of economic survival. Seldom did anyone express strong concern for the well-being of the creatures. Europeans invariably only ask about the welfare of the animals but this question misses the point. Instead, perhaps, we could ask why these performers need to catch wild animals to make a living. Or why they are economically marginalised. Or why Nigeria, the world's sixth largest exporter of oil, is in such a state of disarray.

Little Superstar

Sugar Ray Leonard vs Thomas Hearns 16 September 1981

Sugar Ray Leonard Vs Thomas Hearns - Boxing's Greats Duke It Out - The funniest videos clips are here

That Mushroom Cloud? They’re Just Svejking Around

One Sunday, several months ago, early risers gazing at Czech Television’s CT2 channel saw picturesque panoramas of the Czech countryside, broadcast to the wordless accompaniment of elevator music. It was the usual narcoleptic morning weather show.

Then came the nuclear blast.

Across the Krkonose Mountains, or so it appeared, a white flash was followed by the spectacle of a rising mushroom cloud. A Web address at the bottom of the screen said Ztohoven.com.

Ztohoven, to no one’s great surprise, turned out to be a collective of young artists and friends who had previously tinkered with a giant neon sculpture of a heart high atop Prague Castle, and managed (during a single night, no less) to insert announcements for an art opening inside all 750 lighted advertising boxes in the city’s subway system.

Now half a dozen members of the group face up to three years in jail or a fine or both, charged with scaremongering and attempted scaremongering. The trial is set for March. Some Czechs expressed outrage over Ztohoven’s action, naturally, but in general it drew a mild, tolerant, even amused public response, in contrast to how terrorism-related pranks, or what might seem like them, have been widely greeted elsewhere. The incident instead has highlighted an old Czech tradition of tomfoolery that is a particular matter of national cultural pride.

Not long ago a film that became a local hit, “Czech Dream,” documented a boondoggle by two young Czech filmmakers, who enlisted advertisers and publicists to devise a marketing scheme for a nonexistent supermarket. The movie’s goal, like Ztohoven’s, was to wag the dog: lampoon media manipulation and public gullibility. In the trailer hundreds of shoppers swarm a weedy field, rushing toward what they believe to be the store, which turns out to be a painted backdrop. The mushroom cloud, in a sense, upped the ante on the supermarket.

To hack into the CT2 broadcast, Ztohoven simply switched cables on an unmanned, remote camera at a limestone quarry in the mountains, which the artists had scouted three years earlier. Then they piped in their video. The name Ztohoven makes a pun in Czech that means both “out of it” and an obscenity. Rightly, the group presumed this would tip off viewers that the explosion was fake, in case they hadn’t already guessed it from the cheesy special effects.

Contrary to what the British press reported, no “War of the Worlds” panic ensued. So far as anyone can tell, not a single sleepy-eyed Czech viewer was frightened by the stunt, their lack of fear, the state attorney said, not being the explanation for the curious charge of “attempted” scaremongering. (The charge is a Czech legal fine point.)

As for exactly who the group’s members are, that remains something of a mystery, which Ztohoven theatrically guards. Even the state prosecutor said over the phone the other day it was private information until the trial. Nevertheless three members of the group — two amiable ringleaders and a quiet, sweet-faced 26-year-old who looked as if he were 12 — agreed to meet at an empty cafe over coffee and Coke. They declined to give their names. But they brought a film crew.

Turns out, Ztohoven includes no women. “That’s the problem of radicalism,” sighed the threesome’s 33-year-old elder statesman, who called himself Roman Tyc. (The pun works in English.) “To get together for pranks is also more difficult now that we’re getting into our 30s.”

His associate, in a pastel crewneck sweater, who gave his name as Zdenek Dostal, and whom the highly voluble Roman had a tendency to talk over, said the action on Czech Television, which Ztohoven titled “Media Reality,” was “not meant to be threatening but to land softly on the public consciousness so that people won’t let themselves be brainwashed.”

The artists just wanted to startle viewers “from their lethargy,” piped in the quietest member of the trio, Mira Slava (punningly, “peace and fame”). All three Ztohovenites recoiled at a description of an art project some years back entailing fake bombs left in a New York subway station, which briefly shut part of the city down.

Nothing really happened at all here, initially, anyway. Ladislav Sticha, the tall spokesman for Czech Television, told me that the show’s audience was “miniature” — presumably he meant small in number. Only a few people, among them perplexed hikers checking the weather before setting out for a Sunday stroll, called or sent e-mail messages to inquire.

But then Czech Television broadcast Ztohoven’s handiwork hour after hour on its numerous news programs, and the video soon landed on YouTube. By the next day all Europe knew about it.

“It’s not that we would not have supported this kind of art, if they had come to us,” Mr. Sticha added, somewhat abashed that, because Czech Television filed a complaint for breach of property, the affair ended up in court.

Hardly anyone here seems to want Ztohoven to receive more than a legal slap on the wrist, if that. Neither have fellow artists protested the trial in the streets, nor made a freedom of speech issue out of it. A literary weekly even mildly took Ztohoven to task for being a little too hungry for media attention.

On the other hand, the National Gallery in Prague last month awarded the group a prize. Milan Knizak, the National Gallery’s white-haired, pony-tailed director, himself an artist and one-time Czech Actionist, explained that the award was not a statement about the court case but given for the “directness” of “Media Reality.”

Back in the 1960s, Mr. Knizak added, he contrived to send hundreds of packages to a randomly chosen apartment building in Prague: “clothes, furniture, live fish, tickets to the movie theater.”

“No art was present” in that action, he went on. “It meant a change in the everyday life of everyday people. It didn’t take place in a gallery or museum, it just happened. Like love. You don’t reason why. It just is.”

Ztohoven’s work has a larger context, in other words. It belongs to a history of Czech literary and artistic mystification and sly, deadpan humor that is the expression of a small, underdog nation dominated for generations by outsiders, one after another. “The Good Soldier Svejk,” by Jaroslav Hasek, the famous Czech novel that is the masterpiece of this genre, tells of an idiot Candide, a hopeless orderly whose humanity throws into contrast a decaying empire.

“The Czech hero was no longer the nobleman but the poor, simple creature,” Mr. Knizak said about “Svejk,” “not Don Quixote but Sancho Panza.”

The book, it seems, even gave rise to a droll verb: “Because of the past, Austria, communism, fascism, someone always stepping on our necks, we have had no choice except to Svejk around,” Roman Tyc said about the general Czech psyche.

From Svejk’s example derived the fictional Jara da Cimrman, a kind of kitsch anti-Svejk, concocted by a group of writers and actors partly as a protest against authority during the communist era. In a country that claims no towering inventors or explorers, Cimrman became the quintessential Czech hero, a Zelig who trekked to the North Pole but missed it by several yards, who advised Chekhov, but failed to get credit. (“Two sisters?” he asked the Russian. “Isn’t that too few?”)

“It’s the difference between us and the Soviets,” Ladislav Smoljak, one of Cimrman’s creators, said one recent morning in his apartment, where an imitation Vermeer hung on the wall. “The oppression under which we lived was mostly mild so our reaction has been mild too. Mystification is a part of it.”

“Mystification is too strong a word,” Mr. Knizak, the gallery director, responded. “It’s more nebulous: important and unimportant at once, not aggressive, light, distant, not black humored. Czechs don’t start revolutions in the streets. We settle things over beer in pubs.”

Which, as it happened, was where Jiri Rak held forth the other night. A specialist in Czech smallness and a historian of culture, he summed up Ztohoven’s larger meaning in a neighborhood bar. “When people make fun of something, they are making themselves free of it,” he said. “That’s the condition of the small nation. It’s a defense for everyone today in the globalized world.

“I think the goal of Czech mystification is to show us that we live in a world continually mystifying us — the politicians, the advertisers.” He paused over his Pilsner, then raised the glass. “Thank God for Ztohoven.”

By Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times on 24 January, 2008