I T W O N L A S T

A late Cubist drawing by Pablo Picasso, L’homme au Gibus (1914),...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:25:10 -0400

A late Cubist drawing by Pablo Picasso, L’homme au Gibus (1914), is being raffled by The International Association to Save Tyre to fund the historic preservation of the Lebanese city.

The 30.5 cm x 24 cm gouache-on-paper drawing anonymously donated is signed and certified as an authentic work by the Picasso Administration. It has an estimated value of €800,000 to €1,000,000. Less expensive Picasso drawings have showed up at charity raffles before but this is the first time the French government has authorized an international raffle online. Tickets priced at €100 aare nd available at the raffle’s aptly named 1 Picasso 100 Euros website. The number of available tickets is capped at 50,000, Sotheby’s will host the drawing on December 18, 2013 in Paris.

How James Turrell Knocked the Art World Off Its Feet

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:51:56 -0400

How James Turrell Knocked the Art World Off Its Feet:

Bridget’s Bardo, Ganzfeld Series, 2009

By WIL S. HYLTON l The New York Times Magazine June 13, 2013

It was a beautiful Thursday morning in May, and everything was going wrong. James Turrell had six days to prepare for the biggest museum exhibition of his life — 11 complex installation pieces at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — but he didn’t have a single work finished, and he was missing crucial parts.

He shuffled into the office of Lacma’s director, Michael Govan, and flopped into a chair with a sigh.

“I’m pretty concerned,” Turrell said. “You know, the computer that came back from Russia was completely wiped.”

Govan tapped a foot underneath the table. The computer was essential. Much of Turrell’s work consists of special rooms that are infused with unusual light, and the computer helps run the show. It had been in Russia for another exhibition, but something went awry in transit.

“There’s nothing in it,” Turrell said. “Nothing’s in it at all! Nothing.”

Govan shook his head calmly. “That happens in Moscow,” he said.

Turrell shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I guess,” he said. “I don’t have a piece that’s finished yet. You know, it’s getting late on everything.”

“Has the lens left Frankfurt?” Govan asked. This was another essential part.

“No, it hasn’t left Frankfurt,” Turrell said.

“I thought it did,” Govan said.

“No, no,” Turrell said. “It has not left Frankfurt. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Now it was Govan’s turn to sigh. “You should have been a painter,” he said. “Five years of planning, three months of construction, and there’s not one work of art.”

The plan had been simple on paper: Turrell would open three major shows inside a month. As soon as he finished the Lacma pieces, he would race to Texas for another huge installation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and then to Manhattan, where he is opening a show at the Guggenheim next week. Taken together, the three-museum retrospective is the biggest event in the art world this summer. As the curator of the Houston exhibition, Alison de Lima Greene, put it, “This is the first time that three museums have mounted exhibitions of this magnitude in conjunction, all devoted to a single artist.” In total, the retrospective takes up 92,000 square feet.

Assembling any Turrell show is a complicated affair. Unlike a show of paintings and sculpture, every piece must be built on site, and even more than with most installation art, his work requires elaborate modifications to the museum itself. Windows must be blocked off or painted black to obscure the outside light; zigzagging hallways are constructed to isolate rooms; and each of the rooms has to be built according to Turrell’s meticulous designs, with hidden pockets to conceal light bulbs and strange protruding corners that confuse the eye. Even the drywall must be hung and finished with exacting precision, so that each corner, curve and planar surface is precise to 1/64th of an inch. It can take hundreds of man-hours to finish a single room; he was erecting 11 at Lacma.

Turrell at 70 is a burly man with thick white hair and a snowy beard. He tends to dress in dark clothing, like Santa Claus in mourning. We had been spending a lot of time together as he prepared for the shows, and I had followed him to Los Angeles to see the final stages. After the conversation with Govan, I retreated outside and found a bench in the shade to do some reading. I expected to be there a while. Two hours later, I looked up and saw Turrell standing there with a smile. “Well,” he said, “we’ve got one ready. Come on, let’s take a look.”

I followed him inside the building, and we rode an elevator to the second floor. We stepped into a dim lobby filled with construction equipment. “This way,” he said, turning into a dark hallway. I walked behind, my hands groping for the walls. Turrell stayed a few steps ahead, muttering directions — “forward now, another step, this way, and turn” — until I rounded the final corner and saw the piece materialize before me. It was a looming plane of green light that shimmered like an apparition. The rush of blood to my head nearly brought me to my knees.

It is difficult to say much more about the piece without descending into gibberish. This is one of the first things you notice when you spend time around Turrell. Though he is uncommonly eloquent on a host of subjects, from Riemannian geometry to vortex dynamics, he has developed a dense and impenetrable vocabulary to describe his work. Nearly everyone who speaks and writes about Turrell uses the same infernal jargon. It can be grating to endure a cocktail party filled with people talking about the “thingness of light” and the “alpha state” of mind — at least until you’ve seen enough Turrell to realize that, without those terms, it would be nearly impossible to discuss his work. It is simply too far removed from the language of reality, or for that matter, from reality itself.

The piece that day at Lacma, for example, was one of his “Wedgeworks” series. The room was devoid of boundaries, just an eternity of inky blackness, with the outline of a huge lavender rectangle floating in the distance, and beyond it, the tall plane of green light stretching toward an invisible horizon, where it dissolved into a crimson stripe.

I suppose it would be fair to say that all of this was an illusion. The shapes and contours I saw were made entirely of light, while the actual walls of the room were laid out in a way I could never have guessed. When, after a few minutes, a museum worker accidentally flipped on a bright light, I was surprised to see a small chamber in the back, with a workman’s ladder propped against the wall. Turrell lurched toward the doorway in a panic, crying out, “What the hell are they doing?”

Other pieces by Turrell are even more disorienting. His “Dark Spaces” can require 30 minutes of immersion before you begin to see a swirling blur of color, while some of his rooms are so flooded with light that the effect is instantly overpowering. Stepping into one of his “Ganzfeld” rooms is like falling into a neon cloud. The air is thick with luminous color that seems to quiver all around you, and it can be difficult to discern which way is up, or out.

Not everyone enjoys the Turrell experience. It requires a degree of surrender. There is a certain comfort in knowing what is real and where things are; to have that comfort stripped away can be rapturous, or distressing. It can even be dangerous. During a Turrell show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1980, several visitors to a piece called “City of Arhirit” became unsteady in the bright blue haze and tried to brace themselves against a wall made of light. Some of them fell down. A few got hurt. One woman, who broke her arm, sued the Whitney and Turrell for more than $10,000, claiming that the show made her so “disoriented and confused” that she “violently precipitated to the floor.” Another visitor, who sprained her wrist, sued the Whitney for $250,000. The museum’s insurance company then filed a claim against Turrell, and although a member of the Whitney family put a stop to the suit, Turrell still gets sore thinking about it. He spent $30,000 to defend himself, but it’s not the money that bothers him the most. It’s the lingering feeling that the work didn’t … work.

“On some level,” he told me, “you’d have to say I failed.”

We were at his townhouse on Gramercy Park in Manhattan. Like Turrell’s other two homes, in northern Arizona and eastern Maryland, it was furnished mostly in the Shaker style. The walls were cream, with very little hanging art, and the furniture was all in cherry. Turrell sat at the center of a dining table and began to describe other incidents. One of his friends had taken a tumble at the same Whitney show. “He was just standing there,” Turrell said with a shrug, “and he leaned back and fell.” At a show in Vienna, another visitor took a running start and leapt into a Ganzfeld room, perhaps expecting to land on a bed of pillowy clouds. She smashed into a wall. And then there were the “Perceptual Cells.”

The Perceptual Cells are Turrell’s most extreme work. The visitor approaches a giant sphere that looks like an oversize Ping-Pong ball and lies down on something like a morgue drawer to be pushed inside. When the door is shut, the lights come on, so bright that it’s almost pointless to close your eyes. As the colors shift and morph, you begin to see things that aren’t there, like tiny rainbows floating in space and crisp geometric forms. It turns out that what you’re seeing is the biological structure of your own eye, which, in the blinding intensity, has turned on itself.

Even Turrell describes the Perceptual Cells as “invasive” and “oppressive.” Some of his most avid fans prefer not to see the series. Andrea Glimcher represents Turrell at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan, but when she visited Lacma for the opening in May, she declined to view the Perceptual Cell. “Just thinking about it makes me want to press a panic button,” she told me. When one of the curators of this year’s Guggenheim exhibition, Nat Trotman, viewed the Perceptual Cell at Lacma, he wrote me to say that it had “rewired” his thinking and was “very aggressive and very hallucinatory.” Before viewers climb into the Perceptual Cells, Turrell makes them sign waivers to certify that they are 18 years old, sober and sane.

The joke among Turrell’s friends is that, to see his work, you must first become hopelessly lost. Though he is routinely listed among the signature artists of his generation (in 1984, he and Robert Irwin became the first visual artists to receive MacArthur “genius” grants), he has never enjoyed the widespread recognition of artists like Donald Judd, Jasper Johns and Chuck Close. In fact, Turrell has not held a major museum show in New York since the Whitney exhibition of 1980, or in Los Angeles since 1985.

Much of his art is located in the far corners of the earth. There is an 18,000-square-foot museum devoted to Turrell in the mountains of Argentina, a monumental pyramid he constructed in eastern Australia and an even larger one on the Yucatán Peninsula, with chambers that capture natural light.

Turrell’s greatest work and lifelong fixation is an extinct volcano on his ranch in Arizona, where he has been developing a network of tunnels and underground rooms since 1974. The volcano has a bowl-shaped depression on its top and is known as Roden Crater. Turrell has never opened the crater to the public, and he is guarded about who sees it. An invitation to visit Roden is one of the most coveted tickets in American art.

“It has become, even unfinished, as important as any artwork ever made,” Michael Govan said. “I know I’m going out on a limb here a little bit, but I think it’s one of the most ambitious artworks ever attempted by a single human being.”

Turrell’s obsession with the crater is the stuff of legend, but he prefers not to analyze it. For a man driven by such a monomaniacal artistic impulse, he is startlingly uninterested in himself. Through dozens of conversations in multiple cities over perhaps a hundred hours, I found him willing to examine almost any idea, so long as it didn’t require any self-reflection. I would ask, for example, about his place in the art world, or his faith, or lack of it, or how he feels about the crater as he grows older and the forces of obsession and mortality collide — and each time he would nod and frown and say something like, “Well, you know, you just have to accept things as they are.” Then he would launch into a 30-minute dissertation on the geometry of sailboat hulls. The more questions you ask Turrell, the more elusive he seems. Growing up Quaker, he was always being told to nurture “the light within.” At 70, he seems more interested in the light without.

Some of Turrell’s contemporaries view the mystery around him with a measure of envy. One day this spring, I stopped by the studio of Chuck Close in Lower Manhattan. There was a large, incomplete portrait of a woman hanging from one wall, with its lower half descending through a narrow gap in the floor. Close, who has been in a wheelchair since an arterial collapse in 1988, raises or lowers the canvas in order to reach the spot where he’s working. A few years ago, Turrell invited him to visit Roden Crater.

“I was shocked when I got out there,” Close said. First, that Turrell had made the crater wheelchair-accessible. “He proudly put me in this four-wheel-drive golf cart and drove me all the way up into the thing.” But when they reached the top, Close found another surprise. Turrell has spent years shaping the rim of the caldera in such a way that it seems to distort the contour of the sky. He calls this “celestial vaulting,” and he helped Close lie down to experience the phenomenon. Staring up, Close was struck in equal parts by the power of the illusion and its subtlety. “He’s an orchestrator of experience,” Close said, “not a creator of cheap effects. And every artists knows how cheap an effect is, and how revolutionary an experience.”

Close is among the most famous living painters, but when he looks at an artist like Turrell, it sometimes makes him skeptical of his own fame. “It makes me wonder if I’m making pabulum for the masses,” he said with a laugh. Close described how, in the 1960s, artists like Turrell and Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria “wanted to go in the desert and dig a hole or ride a motorcycle in a circle, or dig a ditch, or put a bunch of spikes for lightning to hit. It was about not making a commodity. Not making it something that would go in a gallery.” Many of those artists criticized Close for working in a more conventional medium. “I’ve been arguing with Mel Bochner for years,” he said, “because Mel gave me tremendous grief for making stuff that hung on the wall, like I might just as well have been a prostitute inviting people up to my room.”

Close pointed out with a wry smile that most of those friends have since found a way to show their work. “After a while, they thought, Oh, no one’s going to see this stuff!” he said. “So then they take photographs. Then they frame the photographs and put them in a gallery.” Still, he sometimes wonders if they were on to something back in the ’60s — and if Turrell, in his work at the crater, still is.

“I may be known by more people, but I’m often known for all the wrong reasons,” Close said.

For his part, Turrell has begun to think more about what he’ll leave behind. On a recent drive across the desert to see the crater, he turned to me and said, “I was absolutely going to get this project done by the year 2000, so I’m a little embarrassed by it. There have been periods of euphoria. There have been times that I’ve been discouraged, and times when I’ve just gone out and enjoyed the place — and realized that maybe this would be it. Maybe it wouldn’t get any further.”

We were approaching the crater through a field of impossibly picturesque cattle, their long, straight backs and thick conformation the envy of any rancher. Turrell bounced along at the wheel of the truck, smiling at the herd. “We’ve learned a lot about livestock,” he said, “but the biggest thing is learning about personnel. You know, you’re not going to want artists to take care of your livestock.”

When Turrell first spotted the crater from an airplane in 1974, he had no intention of buying the land around it. He just wanted to dig into the volcano. He persuaded the Dia Art Foundation in Texas to purchase the site on his behalf. When the foundation spiraled into financial trouble a few years later, Turrell scrambled to take over the title. He applied for a loan, but the bank told him the ranch wasn’t big enough to turn a profit.  “They said, ‘This will just be a gentleman’s ranch, and you’ll lose money,’ ” Turrell said. “Which I now understand is true. They said: ‘But there’s one ranch over that’s now for sale. If you buy that one, and you buy the one in between, we think we could negotiate — we won’t loan you a little, but we’ll loan you a lot!’ ”

Turrell by then was married with young children, and his wife opposed the purchase. “My wife said at the time, ‘You’re mortgaging our children’s future,’ ” he said, “and for that and other reasons, she left — and I took the loan.”

By the time Turrell had signed the note for all three ranches and leased the public land between them, he was the proud, solitary overseer of a 155-square-mile property that could be supported only with livestock. He was 36 years old and had never raised a cow in his life.

Turrell was brought up in Pasadena in a devout Quaker family. “It was like the conservative Mennonites,” he said. “I come from a family that does not believe in art to this day. They think art is vanity.” Even as a child, Turrell was skeptical of the family’s old-fashioned mores. Little things, like his mother’s refusal to use household appliances, bothered him. “My mother did not have a toaster oven and would toast bread in the oven, which I thought was stupid,” he said. “They didn’t do cars and electricity, that kind of stuff.”

One of Turrell’s aunts, Frances Hodges, lived in Manhattan and worked for a fashion magazine. When Turrell visited, Hodges would take him to concerts and museums, expounding upon the virtues of engagement with modern life. “Her whole thought,” Turrell said, “was doing something society would contend with. That was her purpose in fashion. She didn’t care if it was a vanity.” On a trip to the Museum of Modern Art with Hodges in the 1950s, Turrell discovered the work of Thomas Wilfred, who experimented with projected light in the early 1900s. Turrell remembers staring at one of Wilfred’s “light boxes,” in thrall to its shifting lines of shadow and color. Today, his home on Gramercy Park is next door to the one where Hodges lived.

In 1961, Turrell entered Pomona College to study math and perceptual psychology, but on the side, he continued to indulge his interest in art. He took courses in art history and signed up for studio classes. After graduation in 1965, he enrolled in a graduate art program at the University of California, Irvine. That wasn’t to last. In 1966, he was arrested for coaching young men to avoid the Vietnam draft. He spent about a year in jail, and after his release in 1967, moved into a shuttered hotel in the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica. Over the next seven years, he would make a series of artistic breakthroughs that define his work today.

Turrell had discovered a strange optical effect in one of his projects for grad school. By placing a slide projector in an empty room and pointing its beam toward the corner, he found that he could make a cube of light that seemed to occupy physical space. As he settled into the rooms of the Mendota Hotel, he began to explore variations on the idea. Soon he was using colored slides and moving the projector around the room. He discovered that he could make pyramids and rectangles of light, which seemed to lean against the wall or float halfway to the ceiling. After a few months, he switched the bulb from tungsten to xenon, fascinated by the subtle difference in its effect. Over the next five decades, he would become an expert on light-bulb varieties, studying the distinctive character of neon, argon, ultraviolet, fluorescent and LEDs. For his 70th birthday last month, a friend gave him a bulb he’d never used before; Turrell was ecstatic.

By the late 1960s, he was also experimenting with outdoor light. He painted the windows of the hotel and scratched lines in the paint, allowing narrow slits of light to enter the room. He found that he could create patterns and illusions, much as he had with the projector. He called the series “Mendota Stoppages,” and he felt they had at least one advantage over the projection series: Because the light came from outside, there was no machinery in the room. He had created a gallery in which the art was made entirely of light.

Turrell wanted to keep the room empty but fill it with electric light. He realized that he could modify the walls to create hidden chambers for the bulbs. He called these pieces “Shallow Space Constructions” and tried a dozen permutations. In some, he tucked bulbs along a single edge of the room; in others, the whole frame of a wall glowed with brilliant color. One of the earliest Shallow Spaces, “Raemar Pink White,” is currently on display at Lacma. After 44 years, it still has the coruscating radiance of something from a future world.

By the early 1970s, Turrell was exploring another phenomenon with natural light. Instead of scratching paint on the windows, he cut large holes in the walls and ceiling of the old hotel to create a view of the open sky. With the right size of opening and the right vantage and some careful finish work, he found that it was possible to eliminate the sense of depth, so the sky appeared to be painted directly on the ceiling. Then he pointed electric lights at the hole, marveling at the dissonance between the light coming in and going out. He discovered that when he changed the color of the electric lights, he could change the apparent color of the sky. He called the series “Skyspaces.”

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A Rare Reunion for the ‘Antwerp Six’ By Suzy MenkesPublished:...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:03:54 -0400

A Rare Reunion for the ‘Antwerp Six’

By Suzy Menkes
Published: June 17, 2013

ANTWERP — They were known as the ‘’Antwerp Six” back in the 1980s, when the idea of Belgian fashion seemed like a contradiction in terms.

Now names like Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Bikkembergs and Dries Van Noten slip off fashion tongues. And last week, Walter Van Beirendonck, head of the fashion department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, led a group reunion — 30 years after their own student days — to celebrate their school’s 50th anniversary.

‘’Thirty years — it was a hell of a ride and I don’t regret a minute,’’ said Mr. Bikkembergs, while Dirk Van Saene took a more nostalgic view, saying: ‘’I was never so conscious about it. When you are young, it is different and I regret it now that I didn’t live it 100 percent.’’

The fashion gang, which also included Marina Yee, had loaded its clothes into a truck in 1986 and drove to London, a trip that ended up putting Belgian fashion on the international map of style.

Since then, Ms. Yee remembers only one other occasion when the six got together: To crack a bottle of Champagne at a millennium charity event.

“Lot of memories coming back — but not so much, as we see quite a lot of each other,’’ said Mr. Van Noten, who opened his first tiny store in Antwerp in 1986 and has built his international business from the city. He persuaded Ms. Demeulemeester, who tends to keep to herself in her Le Corbusier house on the edge of the city, to join the group’s celebration this time.

Both admitted to a wave of nostalgia as they walked through a Royal Academy room that had served as a show space during their student days.

‘’I think it was a very exciting moment all together at school,’’ said Ms. Demeulemeester. ‘’It was really nice to go back to the old academy, to feel not much had changed.”

The reunion had a purpose: The established designers were part of a jury viewing the work of students in the four-year master class.

The historic city, with its Gothic spires, grand guildhalls and old wharfs, offered students the chance to select personal environments for their runway shows that could vary from the academy’s underground sculpture room to the opera house, or even a flower shop — more opportunity for self expression than was given to students in the academy’s early days.

The result was a stream of dramatic installations, from the fairground circle created by the Japanese designer Minju Kim to an underground forest of tree-like clothing from Jack Davey.

In September, Kaat Debo, director of MoMu, the Antwerp fashion museum, plans to stage an exhibition to celebrate the fashion school’s 50th anniversary. With the title of ‘’Happy Birthday Dear Academie’’ and an opening date of Sept. 8, it will run in tandem with other exhibitions, events and conferences marking 350 years of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, to be held at MAS, Antwerp’s new city museum, and M HKA, the museum of contemporary art.

Ms. Debo is adamant that the ‘’Antwerp Six’’ were a turning point for the school.

‘’When the fashion academy started 50 years ago, all the students were Flemish — but the ‘Antwerp Six’ made it attractive internationally,’’ Ms. Debo said. ‘’Now there are 27 different nationalities in the 150 students, and it is important to show not only the history of the school but its relevance to the fashion world.’’

thebengalstripe: Miu Miu SS99

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:33:01 -0400

thebengalstripe: Miu Miu SS99

Hipgnosis’ final sketches for Pink Floyd’s The Dark...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:01:00 -0400

Hipgnosis’ final sketches for Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album, on the cover of this month’s Creative Review

Are Coders Worth It ?

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:27:44 -0400

Are Coders Worth It ?:

By JAMES SOMERS l Aeon Magazine June 6, 2013

There’s this great moment in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) when the world’s most celebrated sushi chef turns to his son, who is leaving to start his own restaurant, and says: ‘You have no home to come back to.’ Which, when you think about it, isn’t harsh or discouraging but is in fact the very best thing you could say to someone setting out on an adventure.

Last October I quit my job to become a freelance journalist. I had only ever made about $900 from writing, but my latest project, a profile of Douglas Hofstadter, had attracted interest from a couple of big American magazines. I stood to make anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000 from the piece.

My plan was to sell that profile and keep writing others like it. This would be a rambling life of the mind. I would find a subject that I was intensely curious about and I’d live with it until I’d learnt everything there was to know. Then I would sit in a room somewhere and tap out a synthesis of such depth and piquant grace that no writer of non-fiction would think to touch my subject again — because I had nailed it, because I had put it to rest forever.

My new life began on a Monday. I’m a late sleeper, but I read somewhere that writers do their best work in the mornings. So I woke up early, put on some coffee, and cracked open my laptop.

When, in 1958, Ernest Hemingway was asked: ‘What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?’, he responded:

Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

Writing is a mentally difficult thing — it’s hard to know when something’s worth saying; it’s hard to be clear; it’s hard to arrange things in a way that will hold a reader’s attention; it’s hard to sound good; it’s even hard to know whether, when you change something, you’re making it better. It’s all so hard that it’s actually painful, the way a long run is painful. It’s a pain you dread but somehow enjoy.

I worked on my Hofstadter piece until early Thursday afternoon. On Thursday night I got an unexpected email. It was a job offer, and these were the terms: $120,000 in salary, a $10,000 signing bonus, stock options, a free gym membership, excellent health and dental benefits, a new cellphone, and free lunch and dinner every weekday. My working day would start at about 11am. It would end whenever I liked, sometime in the early evening. The work would rarely strain me. I’d have a lot of autonomy and responsibility. My co-workers would be about my age, smart, and fun.

I put my adventure on hold.

In college I sort of aimlessly played. I read what I wanted and tinkered with my computer, I made little websites for my own amusement, I slept late and skipped class, and though sometimes I saw myself as an intellectual-at-large in the style of Will Hunting, I was basically just irresponsible. It’s only because of an exogenous miracle that, when I graduated in 2009 with a 2.9 GPA and entered a famously bad job market, I didn’t end up in privileged limbo — in Brooklyn, say, on my parents’ dime. In fact, I was among the most employable young men in the world.

The exogenous miracle is that playing around with websites suddenly became a lucrative profession.

I am a web developer, and there has never been a better time to do what I do. Here’s how crazy it is: I have a friend who decided, part way into his second year of law school, to start coding. Two months later he was enrolled in Hacker School in New York, and three months later he was working as an intern at a consultancy that helps build websites for start-ups. A month into that internship — we’re talking a total of six months here — he was promoted to a full-time position worth $85,000.

I didn’t think finding good work would be this easy. I always figured I would end up like my sister. My sister set academic records in high school and studied at the University of Chicago but the only position matching her qualifications, when she came out of school, was a job translating airline menus. She had an especially bright and sensitive mind, but no technical specialty; and the market did what it’s wont to do to people like that.

I remember one time at dinner she had asked my dad, who was something of a corporate bigshot: ‘You always talk about the value of hard work. But what about somebody in a coal mine — wouldn’t you say he works as hard as you? Why should you get paid so much more than that guy?’

I used to think that was an awfully naive question.

In 1999 a dotcom with no revenue could burn $100 million in one year, with $2 million of that going to a Super Bowl ad. Its namesake website could offer a terrible user experience, and still the company could go public. Investors would chase the rising stock price, which would drive up the price further, which in turn drew more investors, feeding a textbook ‘speculative bubble’ that burst the moment everyone realised there wasn’t any there there.

This kind of stuff isn’t happening any more. It’s not that the internet has become less important, or investors less ‘irrationally exuberant’ — it’s that start-ups have gotten cheaper. A web start-up today has almost no fixed capital costs. There’s no need to invest in broadband infrastructure, since it’s already there. There’s no need to buy TV ads to get market share, when you can grow organically via search (Google) and social networks (Facebook). ‘Cloud’ web servers, like nearly all other services a virtual company might need — such as credit-card processing, automated telephone support, mass email delivery — can be paid for on demand, at prices pegged to Moore’s Law.

Which means that these days the cost of finding out whether a start-up is actually going to succeed isn’t hundreds of millions of dollars — it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s the cost of a couple of laptops and the salary you pay the founders while they try stuff. A $100 million pool of venture capital, instead of seeding five or 10 start-ups, can now seed 1,000 small experiments, most of which will fail, one of which will become worth a billion dollars.

And so there is a frenzy on.

You can see why I’m in such good shape. In this particular gold rush the shovel is me. We web developers are the limiting reagent of every start-up experiment, we’re the sine qua non, because we’re the only ones who know how to reify app ideas as actual working software. In fact, we are so much the essence of these small companies that, in Silicon Valley, a start-up with no revenue is said to be worth exactly the number of developers it has on staff. The rule of thumb is that each one counts for $1 million.

It helps that there aren’t enough of us to go around. I’m told by a friend at Bloomberg that they missed their quarterly tech hiring target in New York by 200 people. I get at least two enquiries a week from headhunters trying to lure me from my current job. If I say that I’m actively looking, I become a kind of local celebrity, my calendar fills with coffees and conversations, reverse-interviews where start-ups try to woo me.

It’s as if the basic structure of this sector of the global economy has been designed for my benefit. Since developers are a start-up’s most important — if not their only — asset, start-ups compete by trying to be a better place for developers to work. Just a few weeks ago, an MTV2 camera crew came into my office to film an episode of a show called Jobs That Don’t Suck. Cash bonuses, raises, stock options and gifts are the norm. I once worked at a place that had a special email address where you’d send requests for free stuff — a $300 keyboard, a $900 chair, organic maple syrup. I have yet to take a job where there wasn’t beer readily at hand. Hours are flexible and time off is plentiful. Fuck-ups are quickly forgiven. Your concerns are given due regard. Your mind is prized. You are, in short, taken care of.

You can imagine what it does to the ego, to be courted and called ‘indispensable’ and in general treated like you’re the one pretty girl for miles. When a lot of your contemporaries don’t even have jobs. When work, for most people, has a Damoclean instability to it, a mortal urgency. To be this highly employable is to feel liquid, easy, as if you can do no wrong. I know that I have a great job guaranteed in any major city. And it’s hard not to give a thing like that moral heft. It validates you is what I mean; it inflates your sense of your own character. I tell myself a story, sometimes, that while other people partied or read for pleasure, I was sitting in a room with my head down, fighting — that I worked hard to learn these minute technical things, and now I’m getting paid for it.

Something prima donna-ish can happen when you start believing stories like that. I look at a lot of inbound résumés at my current job, and I throw away everybody who’s not a programmer. I do this enough times each day that a simple association has formed in my mind: if you’re not technical, you’re not valuable.

We’re the ones with the magic powers. Every programmer knows that code looks cool, that eyes widen when we fill our screens with colourful incantations. ‘The programmer,’ the late Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote in 1988, ‘has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before.’ We like that idea. We like to think that because we can code, we have unprecedented leverage over the world. We decide what 15 million people will see when they follow a link. Our laptops literally get hot from the electric action we command.

Nobody tells us we’re wrong for thinking this way. In fact, they reinforce the impulse. They congratulate us on being ahead of the curve.

And when you consider my prospects without code and you consider my prospects with code, the lesson really does seem to be: join me! Try Codecademy in New York, go to Hacker School — pledge yourself, like Michael Bloomberg did in 2012, to learn to code.

But that shouldn’t be the lesson.

I was only 21 when I became the chief technical officer of an American corporation. When that happened, I thought of my dad because he, too, had once been among the country’s youngest corporate executives, a chief financial officer (CFO) by the time he was 28. The only difference is that the company he helped to run in his twenties was Hardee’s, a fast-food restaurant chain with more than 1,000 locations, while the company I helped to run was a web start-up. Just about all we did, in our three years of operation, was spend $350,000 of other people’s money. Dad’s company made hamburgers; mine ate them.

I have a friend who’s a mechanical engineer. He used to build airplane engines for General Electric, and now he’s trying to develop a smarter pill bottle to improve compliance for AIDS and cancer patients. He works out of a start-up ‘incubator’, in an office space shared with dozens of web companies. He doesn’t have a lot of patience for them. ‘I’m fucking sick of it,’ he told me, ‘all they talk about is colours.’

Web start-up companies are like play-companies. They stand in relation to real companies the way those cute little make-believe baking stations stand in relation to kitchens.

Take Doormates, a failed start-up founded in 2011 by two recent graduates from Columbia University whose mission was to allow users ‘to join or create private networks for buildings with access restricted to only building residents’. For that they, too, raised $350,000. You wonder whether anyone asked: ‘Do strangers living in the same building actually want to commune? Might this problem not be better solved by a plate of sandwiches?’ (The founders have since moved on to ‘Mommy Nearest’, an iPhone app that points out mom-friendly locations around New York.)

A lot of the stuff going on just isn’t very ambitious. ‘The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean,’ wrote Alexis Madrigal in an essay about start-ups in The Atlantic last year. ‘Get four college kids in a room, fuel them with pizza, and see what thing they can crank out that their friends might like. Yay! Great! But you know what? They keep tossing out products that look pretty much like what you’d get if you took a homogenous group of young guys in any other endeavour: Cheap, fun, and about as worldchanging as creating a new variation on beer pong.’

Groupon clones are popular, as are apps that help you find nearby bars and restaurants. There are dozens of dating apps with little twists — like Tinder, an iPhone app where you swipe to the right on a potential match’s picture if you like them, and to the left if you don’t; or Coffee Meets Bagel, which gives you one match per day for a low-stakes, let’s-just-grab-a-coffee date. SideTour, whose tech team is run by a former co-worker, lets you buy small ‘experiences’ around the city, like dinner with a monk. Just yesterday a developer friend of mine who’d recently gone out on his own shared his latest idea: an app that shows you nearby ATMs.

The most successful start-ups, at least if you go by the numbers — $13.5 million to Snapchat, $30 million to Vine, $1 billion to Instagram (each of these windfalls indirectly underwriting 100 low-rent copycats) — seem to be the ones that offer teenagers new ways to share photos with each other.

When I go to the supermarket I sometimes think of how much infrastructure and ingenuity has gone into converting the problem of finding my own food in the wild to the problem of walking around a room with a basket. So much intelligence and sweat has gone into getting this stuff into my hands. It’s my sustenance: other people’s work literally sustains me. And what do I do in return?

We call ourselves web developers, software engineers, builders, entrepreneurs, innovators. We’re celebrated, we capture a lot of wealth and attention and talent. We’ve become a vortex on a par with Wall Street for precocious college grads. But we’re not making the self-driving car. We’re not making a smarter pill bottle. Most of what we’re doing, in fact, is putting boxes on a page. Users put words and pictures into one box; we store that stuff in a database; and then out it comes into another box.

We fill our days with the humdrum upkeep of these boxes: we change the colours; we add a link to let you edit some text; we track how far you scroll down the page; we allow you to log in with your Twitter account; we improve search results; we fix a bug where uploading a picture would sometimes never finish.

I do most of that work with a tool called Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails does for web developers what a toilet-installing robot would do for plumbers. (Web development is more like plumbing than any of us, perched in front of two slick monitors, would care to admit.) It makes tasks that used to take months take hours. And the important thing to understand is that I am merely a user of this thing. I didn’t make it. I just read the instruction manual. In fact, I’m especially coveted in the job market because I read the instruction manual particularly carefully. Because I’m assiduous and patient with instruction manuals in general. But that’s all there is to it.

My friends and I who are building websites — we’re kids! We’re kids playing around with tools given to us by adults. In decreasing order of adultness, and leaving out an awful lot, I’m talking about things such as: the Von Neumann stored program computing architecture; the transistor; high-throughput fibre-optic cables; the Unix operating system; the sci-fi-ish cloud computing platform; the web browser; the iPhone; the open source movement; Ruby on Rails; the Stack Overflow Q&A site for programmers; on and on, all the way down to the code that my slightly-more-adult co-workers write for my benefit.

This cascade of invention is a miracle. But as much as I want to thank the folks who did it all, I also want to warn them: When you make it this easy to write and distribute software, so easy that I can do it, you risk creating a fearsome babel of gimcrack entrepreneurship.

Is there another dotcom bubble on? It’s hard to call it a ‘bubble’ when the Nasdaq’s not running wild, when no one’s going to lose their pension — when all anyone’s going to lose is, in fact, time: time pretending at enterprise; time ‘sharing’ and ‘liking’ in forums of no consequence; time tapping out pedestrian code, extracting easy money.

The only rigorous way to think about value is in terms of dollars, in terms of prices arrived at by free exchange. Numbers like that are hard to dispute. If a price is ‘too low’ or ‘too high’, there’s said to be an opportunity for risk-free moneymaking. People tend to gobble up those opportunities. And so the prices of things tend to level out to just where they’re supposed to be, to just what the market will bear.

Am I paid too much to code? Am I paid too little to write? No: in each case, I’m paid exactly what I should be.

It’s like that question my sister asked dad at dinner. There’s an answer to that question — and this is the one I remember hearing that night — that says that my dad was probably paid more than the coal miner because the skills required to be CFO of a Fortune 500 company are scarcer, and more wanted, than the skills required to be a coal miner. It’s the combination of scarcity and wantedness that drives up a salary.

And that answer seems fair, and fine, it seems to settle the question, but we’re not talking about pork belly futures, we’re talking about real people and what they do all day, and my sister, naive as she sounded, had a point, and that point is that the truly naive thing, the glib and facile thing, might be equating value with a market-clearing price.

The price of a word is being bid to zero. That one magazine story I’ve been working on has been in production for a year and a half now, it’s been a huge part of my life, it’s soaked up so many after-hours, I’ve done complete rewrites for editors — I’ve done, and will continue to do, just about anything they say — and all for free. There’s no venture capital out there for this; there are no recruiters pursuing me; in writer-town I’m an absolute nothing, the average response time on the emails I send is, like, three and a half weeks. I could put the whole of my energy and talent into an article, everything I think and am, and still it could be worth zero dollars.

And so despite my esteem for the high challenge of writing, for the reach of the writerly life, it’s not something anyone actually wants me to do. The American mind has made that very clear, it has said: ‘Be a specialised something — fill your head with the zeitgeist, with the technical — and we’ll write your ticket.’

I don’t have the courage to say no to that. I have failed so far to escape the sweep of this cheap and parochial thing, and it’s because I’m afraid. I am an awfully mediocre programmer — but, still, I have a secure future. More than that, I have a place at the table. In the mornings I wake up knowing that I make something people want. I know this because of all the money they give me.

Jeff MermelsteinUnitled ($10 bill in mouth) New York City, 1992...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 00:40:24 -0400

Jeff Mermelstein
Unitled ($10 bill in mouth) New York City, 1992
1992

Ko. Machiyama

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 00:40:04 -0400

Ko. Machiyama

…as we witnessed, the mountain has become an icon for...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:39:00 -0400

…as we witnessed, the mountain has become an icon for everything that is wrong with climbing. Unlike in 1963, when only six people reached the top, in the spring of 2012 more than 500 mobbed the summit. When I arrived at the apex on May 25, it was so crowded I couldn’t find a place to stand. Meanwhile, down below at the Hillary Step the lines were so long that some people going up waited more than two hours, shivering, growing weak—this even though the weather was excellent. If these throngs of climbers had been caught in a storm, as others were in 1996, the death toll could have been staggering.

Everest has always been a trophy, but now that almost 4,000 people have reached its summit, some more than once, the feat means less than it did a half century ago. Today roughly 90 percent of the climbers on Everest are guided clients, many without basic climbing skills. Having paid $30,000 to $120,000 to be on the mountain, too many callowly expect to reach the summit. A significant number do, but under appalling conditions. The two standard routes, the Northeast Ridge and the Southeast Ridge, are not only dangerously crowded but also disgustingly polluted, with garbage leaking out of the glaciers and pyramids of human excrement befouling the high camps. And then there are the deaths. Besides the four climbers who perished on the Southeast Ridge, six others lost their lives in 2012, including three Sherpas.

— National Geographic; Everest Maxed Out: How to fix the mess at the top of the world

Sideburn Magazine: Nikki

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:38:00 -0400

Sideburn Magazine: Nikki

GOODHOOD The Art of Looking Sideways - Men’s Spring/Summer...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:35:00 -0400

GOODHOOD The Art of Looking Sideways - Men’s Spring/Summer 2013 lookbook

Wood sculpture by Katsura Funakoshi (from A Magazine curated by...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:20:00 -0400

Wood sculpture by Katsura Funakoshi

(from A Magazine curated by Haider Ackermann)

“We must replace the limited variety of timbres of orchestral...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:18:25 -0400

“We must replace the limited variety of timbres of orchestral instruments by the infinite variety of timbres of noises”.

The Art of Noises (L’Arte dei rumori) (English translation PDF) is a Futurist manifesto, written by Luigi Russolo in a 1913 letter to friend and Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. The Art of Noises is considered to be one of the most important and influential texts in 20th century musical aesthetics. In it, Russolo argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of the urban industrial soundscape; furthermore, this new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition. He proposes a number of conclusions about how electronics and other technology will allow futurist musicians to “substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.”

Russolo sees the futurist orchestra drawing its sounds from “six families of noise”:

Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms
Whistling, Hissing, Puffing
Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling
Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Buzzing, Crackling, Scraping
Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc.
Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs

Russolo asserts that these are the most basic and fundamental noises, and that all other noises are only associations and combinations of these.

Letty Schmiterlow

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:18:14 -0400

Letty Schmiterlow

We recently asked Brecht Vandenbroucke to talk a bit about his...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:14:07 -0400

We recently asked Brecht Vandenbroucke to talk a bit about his work, here’s what he had to say: “I am a ginger artist currently living in Ghent (Belgium). I am 24. I make comics, paintings, drawings, zines, movies etc… I love art. I am interested in popular culture, happiness, insanity, surrealism, loneliness, death and alienation. Drawing is very lonely. But I also like fun, fun is good. I’ve been making stuff all of my life and I guess I will continue doing it until the day I die. life is too short, there is not enough time to do everything I want to and I find that sometimes a bit depressing.”

When asked what inspires and informs his work, Brecht says “Ideas pop in to my head all the time, So I write them down. I write a lot. The moment I have an idea I see the entire image in my head. But then I look for more information on the subject to avoid cliches. the right colour/car/computer/furniture/plants,/guitar, etc… Everything has to be right. I like pulling stuff from reality into my work. I used to work with a sketchbook and make detailed compositions and sketches of everything but I found it much easier lately to paint the images immediately, and just see what comes out. It’s easy as I can erase mistakes whenever I want.

Talking about his influences, Brecht elaborates: “I like lots of artists and illustrators but I think I’ve been mostly influenced by the work of Mark Beyer, ATAK, Charlotte Solomon, Topor, Henry Darger, David Shrigley, Daisuke Ichiba and Glen Baxter. They rock. But I also love Disney and crappy comics. I love culture in all forms, I don’t see a difference between pop culture and underground culture.” (via)

Acronym L-V3TS teflon coated leather vest

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:12:47 -0400

Acronym L-V3TS teflon coated leather vest

Video

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 01:20:56 -0400

Yang Li

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 01:20:30 -0400

Yang Li

The Real Couple behind "Before Sunrise"

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:56:12 -0400

The Real Couple behind "Before Sunrise":

youmightfindyourself:

By Forrest Wickman | Slate, May 30, 2013

If you stick around through the closing credits of Before Midnight, the latest film in the trilogy that also includes Before Sunriseand Before Sunset,you’ll see that the movie is dedicated to someone whose name even the most die-hard fans have never heard before: Amy Lehrhaupt. Almost 25 years ago, Lehrhaupt met a young man named Richard Linklater and spent a night with him that he never forgot. Their encounter inspired Linklater to conceive and direct Before Sunrise, the first film in the series. She never saw it, though; unbeknownst to Linklater, by the time that movie came out, Lehrhaupt was dead.

Linklater never mentioned Lehrhaupt by name in the press before promoting Before Midnight—Ethan Hawke has said that the director was uncomfortable mentioning her until “extremely recently”—but he has long made brief references to their encounter. From a number of interviews he’s done over the years, we can now piece together the complete story of how Lehrhaupt helped inspire the series.

Linklater met Lehrhaupt in fall 1989, when he was visiting his sister in Philadelphia. He was 29 and had just finished shooting Slacker, and was staying there for one night while passing through on the way home from New York. Lehrhaupt was several years younger, about 20. They met in a toy shop, and ended up spending the whole night together, “from midnight until six in the morning,” “walking around, flirting, doing things you would never do now.” As inBefore Sunrise, most of what they did was talk, “about art, science, film, the gamut.” Did they kiss? Yes. Did they have sex? The Times went so far as to ask Linklater in a recent interview, but he said he wants to “leave a little mystery.”

Even in the midst of that romantic night, the filmmaker in Linklater couldn’t help but consider its cinematic possibilities. In a 2004 interview with the New York Times, he remembered “walking around [thinking], ‘If I could just capture this feeling I’m having right now,’ instead of actually having that feeling.” On a recent episode of the podcast The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, he recalled mentioning the movie idea to Lehrhaupt that night:

Even as that experience was going on … I was like, “I’m gonna make a film about this.” And she was like, “What ‘this’? What’re you talking about?” And I was like, “Just this. This feeling. This thing that’s going on between us.”

But as the night came to an end, the paths of Linklater and Lehrhaupt began to diverge from the fictional storyline of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy). In fact, on The Q&A, Linklater revealed that the ending of Before Sunrise was in part a response to what happened with him and Lehrhaupt. Unlike Jesse and Céline, who agree to reconvene in six months, the real-life young lovers exchanged numbers and tried to keep in touch while they were away. They called each other a few times, but it was “that long distance thing” that did them in. “It sort of did the fizzle,” he says, “So in the first movie that was a thing, the idea that they would intellectually kind of get beyond that and say ‘Well, we’re on different continents. What are the odds that it’s gonna work. Let’s just commit to this night.’ ”

Linklater soon became involved with another woman, who “swept into [his] life … and took over for about a year or so,” and he and Lehrhaupt never talked again. He did think that maybe “she would show up at a Before Sunrise screeningor something.” In Before Sunset, Céline shows up at a reading of Jesse’s book This Time, which is based on their night together. “It would be so weird,” he said, in 2004. But she never did.

Linklater didn’t know then that Lehrhaupt had died in a motorcycle accident on May 9, 1994, before she reached her 25th birthday. Before Sunrise started filming a few weeks later. Linklater only learned of her death three years ago, when a friend of Lehrhaupt’s, who knew about the encounter, put it together and sent him a letter. “It was very sad,” Linklater told the Times. Ethan Hawke was similarly devastated when he heard it, though he reminded Linklater that if he hadn’t met her, then he never would have made these movies or met some of the people who worked on them with him. “Who knows how we reverberate through each other’s lives,” Linklater reflected in another interview, “But she’s an inspiration on this.”

In this way, Linklater did find another way to make that feeling, that “thing in the air” they once had between them, last: He turned it into cinema.

Zumthor

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:50:00 -0400

Zumthor