jameswagner – Page 45

Hadron Collider going after the primordial fire

Fermilab scientists in Illinois hold pajama party celebrating activation of collider near Geneva

I love this story. I had tears in my eyes before I had barely begun reading it, and they’re still there as I’m typing this. Very good journalism, and the photos are absolutely wonderful.

An ocean away from Geneva, the new [Hadron] collider’s activation was watched with rueful excitement here at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, which has had the reigning particle collider.
Several dozen physicists, students and onlookers, and three local mayors gathered overnight to watch the dawn of a new high-energy physics. They applauded each milestone as the scientists methodically steered the protons on their course at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Many of them, including the lab’s director, Pier Oddone, were wearing pajamas or bathrobes or even nightcaps bearing Fermilab “pajama party” patches on them.
Outside, a half moon was hanging low in a cloudy sky, a reminder that the universe was beautiful and mysterious and that another small step into that mystery was about to be taken.

I’ve only read the hard copy story so far, and since I’m listening to a dramatic, late (wartime) symphony by Nikolai Myaskovsky right now, I’ll wait to watch the video on the NYTimes site.

entrance to the underground Cern Laboratory near Geneva

The wooden 2002 Palais de l’Equilibre [architect Herv� Dessimoz, construction engineer Thomas B�chi], the icon of the 2002 Swiss National Exhibition, performs as the public face of the laboratory. It’s now been dubbed, “Globe de l’Innovation”, but I prefer the sound and the idea of the original name. Its shape and its current placement are surely a tribute to �tienne-Louis Boull�e‘s theoretical, monumental designs, in particular his “C�notaphe a Newton” (1784). For a discussion of the architecture of the underground lab itself, see this Charles Jencks essay, “Ultimate architecture: Cern’s partical detector”.

[first image by Peter Wynn Thompson from the NYTimes, the second by Anja Niedringhaus from Associated Press via NYTimes]

“Active Forms” at Eleven Rivington

Marcius Galan Isolante (quadrada)/Isulated (square) 2006 painted metal 55″ x 52″ x 36.75″ [installation view]

Edgard de Souza Tigelinha (grupo I) 2004 cow skin 23.75″ x 35.5″ x 4″ [installation view]

The first show of the fall season at Eleven Rivington is curated by Fernanda Arruda. “Active Forms” includes work by three young South American artists currently working in S�o Paolo. The sculptures and works on paper by Edgard de Souza, Marcius Galan and Camila Sposati are displayed here, literally, in the shadow of several small hanging drawings by the Swiss-born Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919-1988), a pioneer in conceptual abstraction most familiar for work which combined language and paper.

Robert Longo’s “Monsters”

Brock Enright Untitled 2008 [detail of installation, with small wooden objects “Computer 1” on the left, “Computer 2” on the right]

[large detail]

Robert Longo [his new ArtCat site is coming soon!] has a curatorial project he calls “Monsters” at Rental. It opened last night. There’s one 1999 study by Longo in the show, but each of the some dozen other artists has assisted Longo in his studio during the last ten years. An acrylic and silkscreen on canvas piece by Zander Vaubel has been placed above the gallery desk. Vaubel died in a tragic accident in Brooklyn in 2006 He was 22.
I was already familiar with Brock Enright‘s art, and that of Paolo Arao, but I think the others were new to me. A number of works stood out even in what was a very crowded reception. Of course I was intrigued by Enright’s installation, one of a number of works he expects to complete which will incorporate elements from his dramatic projects. I liked Arao’s drawings, as well as works by Michael Owen, Jason Bartell, Garrick Imatani and Eric Schnell. The names of Qing Liu, Julio Gonzalez, Colin Hunt, Owen McAuley, Nathan Spondike and William Latta complete the list.

before the storm

This is what the sky looked like above a mid-nineteenth-century warehouse on a breezy West 27th Street around 7 o’clock last night. The rains arrived hours later.

Sara Benincasa plays Sarah Palin

For years we’ve been horrified by what’s been coming out of the Republican camp, but now we can take a laugh break.
I found the first of these four videos through the New York magazine blog site while searching Google for results on Levi Johnston/”sex on skates” after reading Maureen Dowd’s “Too Much Life?” [print edition title], in the NYTimes this morning. I usually skip her rants, but today I found it somewhat compelling, not least because jumping out of the page was the phrase:

wild soap opera storylines erupting from the Palin family and the Alaskan wilderness [my italics]

The videos are by Sara Benincasa. The one I saw was incredibly cute (and I mean that in the best way), but most important it was a truly hysterical parody, and not the least bit mean. Yes, I know the real story isn’t this family, but rather McCain’s misjudgment and his cynicism.
Now excuse me while I go off to look at the other three videos.

[image from youtube]

NURTUREart benefit – save the date – October 27

I know it’s almost two months away, but if your calendar fills up like my calendar does, and if you already know how worthy this operation is, you’ll appreciate knowing now that the 2008 NURTUREart benefit is scheduled for October 27th. It’s also an terrific opportunity to bring home some terrific art, so put it in your calendars: As Barry says on Bloggy, “You know any group that honored James and me at the last one has excellent taste”.
Oh, and the bash will be in Manhattan, at James Cohan Gallery on West 26th Street. More details as we get closer to the date.

in America, anyone can become president

an early image of the “Me Worry?” kid, possibly from the 1920s according to Wikipedia

Going back at least as far as The Yellow Kid, we’ve always had our Alfred E. Neumans, but we never used to make them emperors.
The upshot of telling a citizenry over and over again for two hundred years that anyone can become president is today’s reality that anyone can become president – unless of course they’re smart or work hard to deserve the honor and responsibility.
Mournful thoughts about the current occupant of the White House and the two cyphers whom the corporations are about to nominate to succeed him are the occasion for my reflection on this baleful subject.
We now know that Bush clearly wasn’t an accident, and McCain and Palin scare me perhaps more – if that’s even possible.

[image from wikipedia]

nobody needs the RNC: do it yourself in Minnesota

The Minnesota September 1st “March on the RNC and Stop the War” began in St. Paul at 11am local time today (CDT is one hour earlier than New York). Marchers planned to start with a rally at the state capitol, go to the Xcel Center in a “permitted” march and return to the capital, but things are already getting interesting as I write this. For more information see marchonrnc.org.
For continuous updates, go to this page on the Twin Cities Indymedia site or check out the MnIndyLIVE twitter feed.

Should you need more context for this, see my earlier posts from August 28 and August 30, and this Salon.com piece by Glenn Greenwald published just 24 hours ago. It’s excerpted here:

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it’s not difficult to see why. As the recent “overhaul” of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated — preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror — we’ve essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.
Beyond that, there is a widespread sense that the targets of these raids deserve what they get, even if nothing they’ve done is remotely illegal. We love to proclaim how much we cherish our “freedoms” in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic — but we’ve decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it’s therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

It seems we’re now leaving it up to the kids to defend liberties we all used to pretend were ours. I hope that somehow both they and the genuine patriotism which inspires them survives. At the moment they aren’t being given much support, or even the recognition which a real media would owe them, the rest of us, and the entire world.

[image from marchonrnc]

the real meaning of Labor Day [a reminder]

National Guardsmen firing into demonstrators during the 1894 Chicago Pullman strike* [contemporary Harpers Weekly drawing]

[six years ago today I did an entry titled “the real meaning of Labor Day“. I posted it again last year, and I think it’s time to do it again. My brief text was augmented with quotes from the site of Jim Lehrer’s PBS show, NewsHour, on a page which had appeared the week before September 11, 2001. Last year I added the image which appears above]

It’s not the barbeque, and it’s certainly not the traffic. It was born as an attempt to appease the working people of America. [Remember the Pullman strike in history class?] Unfortunately it seems to have worked too well.

The observance of Labor Day began over 100 years ago. Conceived by America’s labor unions as a testament to their cause, the legislation sanctioning the holiday was shepherded through Congress amid labor unrest and signed by President Grover Cleveland as a reluctant election-year compromise.

Soon after, when the entire nation became thoroughly frightened by the bugbear of socialism and communism, the movement was de-radicalized. The real Left was gradually marginalized and almost totally eliminated from American culture and society. The workers’ movement itself became middle class, before it acquired the material benefits and political power which that adjustment should have delivered. And there it languishes.

In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it “the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed…that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.”
Almost a century since Gompers spoke those words, though, Labor Day is seen as the last long weekend of summer rather than a day for political organizing. In 1995, less than 15 percent of American workers belonged to unions, down from a high in the 1950’s of nearly 50 percent, though nearly all have benefited from the victories of the Labor movement.

Happy Labor Day, but don’t forget.

*
I haven’t been able to find a really good compact summary of the strike anywhere on line, although there is this setting of the broader context in a discussion from Howard Zinn. I would definitely welcome any other suggestions. I can however offer information on some of the numbers involved in the physical conflict itself, quoted here from the Kansas Heritage Group:

The total forces of the strikebreakers both government and private were [against 100,000 strikers]: 1,936 federal troops, 4,000 national guardsmen, about 5,000 extra deputy marshals, 250 extra deputy sheriffs, and the 3,000 policemen in Chicago for a total of 14,186 strikebreakers. In addition to these figures there were also twelve people shot and killed, and 71 people who were arrested and sentenced on the federal indictment.

No picnic.

[image from Wikimedia Commons]

convention city police: wild dogs onto fresh meat

A throng of media members and interested observers crowd together in a yard next to a house on Iglehart Ave. that was raided by police Saturday afternoon.[Minneapolis Star Tribune caption]

UPDATE: Before going off to a restless sleep, I will note that up to this moment (it’s Sunday, 2:30 am EDT) I can find absolutely nothing about these raids on any of the popular alternative political blogs. As usual, they’re all totally distracted by the agenda laid out for them by the criminal establishment they are supposed to at least critique and creatively resist. I mean, come on, Sarah Palin? Right now she’s just a zero operating as a smoke screen.

I thought New York in 2004 was pretty horrible, but I can’t keep up with and can’t begin to cover here all the developing stories about the police state tactics employed this year in both Denver and the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
It’s not just the nausea induced by these increasingly appalling reports. They already exceed even the expectations of my cynical imagination, and now I’m sure there will be much more, since there is nothing in place to stop the successful progress of our special brand of American authoritarianism. What’s happening at the sites of the two political sales conventions is part of a system designed to secure not us, but the reactionary corporate state which has succeeded in turning relatively-free citizens into medicated subjects meaningful to it only as consumers.
If you can still take it, I suggest searching online for news using the key words “police” “arrests” or “Convention”. You’re going to be shocked.
Ah hah! Barry is sitting just across from me as I’m writing this and he’s invited me to look at two posts he’s just completed. He’s put it all together better and more quickly than I could imagine any one writer could. Look at Bloggy’s “It’s all ultimately one big (political) party” and “Crackdowns on protestors and press in Denver and Twin Cities“.
The second post begins:

[at the homes of activists in the Twin Cities] They are knocking down doors and coming in with semi-automatic weapons to arrest people and confiscate belongings, including computers, journals, and political pamphlets. They have also arrested National Lawyer Guild lawyers trying to find out more information.

This is me again now: I thought a moment about finishing my last post two days ago with the hope that no one tries to burn down the Capitol building in Washington. Now I’m thinking it absolutely wouldn’t be necessary this time.

[image by David Joles from StarTribune, where there are more photos and a story]