California Cool

Books March 2008 Atlantic Monthly

Editor’s Choice: When postwar modernism went west, it dropped the angst—and transformed a culture.

by Benjamin Schwarz

Benjamin Schwarz is The Atlantic’s literary editor and national editor.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, a small group of painters in Southern California made the region an internationally prominent modern-art center and defined an “L.A. Look” recognizable to this day; Los Angeles’s architects produced the most influential and winning collection of modernist houses ever built; its designers created America’s most seminal and enduring modern furniture designs; and its musicians mounted the only significant challenge to New York’s jazz supremacy in the past 60 years. A number of penetrating books—Peter Plagens’s Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945–1970; Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies; Pat Kirkhams’s Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century; Elizabeth Smith’s Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses; and Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945–1960—have probed discrete aspects of this remarkable cultural flowering. But the first to connect the various artistic forms that modernism took in the region is the unusually intelligent and lavishly illustrated Birth of the Cool, by Elizabeth Armstrong, with essays by six prominent art critics (the epony­mous art exhibition is currently touring the country). More important, the book provocatively suggests that a common sensibility animated all those forms. It thereby illuminates the substance of style—that is, how an aesthetic both shapes and is shaped by viewpoint and temperament, proclivities and prejudices.

Nearly every aspect of this sudden efflorescence can be traced to long- developing regional trends and affections, or was at the least firmly anchored in Southern California’s eccentric economic, social, climatological, and even technological environment. For instance, Southern California produced little noteworthy modern art before the austere, crisply defined “Hard-Edge” geometric paintings, with their uninflected colors, that Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammers­ley, Karl Benjamin, Helen Lundeberg, and June Harwood created beginning in the early 1950s. And when it did, those works were uniquely tied to Southern California conditions. The paintings were in part inspired by the pure, clean lines of Los Angeles’s Case Study houses and the city’s other modernist dwellings. (Appropriately enough, Birth of the Cool devotes one full essay and a significant part of another to these houses, and their images are reproduced throughout the book.) The region’s strong, clear light, which at once sharpens and idealizes forms and creates uncannily crisp shadows, was undoubtedly the essential factor in the development of the Hard-Edge style (though, surprisingly, Birth of the Cool fails to note it).

Similarly, the elegant yet sprightly, pavilion-like glass-and-steel Case Study houses, designed for Los Angeles’s swelling postwar professional middle class, could only be realized with new techniques and materials, many of which had emerged from the region’s war industries. As Elizabeth Smith notes in an essay in this book, “technologically oriented” Southern California proved unusually receptive to residential applications of those innovative industrial methods and materials, which were easily available in the region.

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Are you sitting uncomfortably?

The bourgeoisie get it in the neck on both sides of the Channel in Yasmina Reza's latest class act

Susannah Clapp
Sunday March 30, 2008
The Observer

God of Carnage Gielgud, London W1 & Théâtre Antoine, Paris

Even when things go wrong for Yasmina Reza, they produce a theatrical frisson (she's French). Two-thirds of the way through the first night of her new play, the lights dipped suddenly (the cast carried on so blinklessly that the twilight could have been taken for part of the story) and a Porlocky person emerged from the wings to announce an electrical failure. Was this postmodernism? We were, after all, watching the work of a continental author. Then Cameron Mackintosh (theatre owner) and David Pugh (producer) appeared to say that after a pause the Show Would Go On. So there were cheers and clapping and Blitz spirit, and the enjoyable sense that a story had been born and a premiere turned into an event. People love it when something collapses in the theatre - though perhaps they love it more when they aren't paying for their seats.

Reza is a phenomenon, a phénomène, a Phänomen, a fenómeno. Her plays have been translated into 35 languages; the most famous, Art, ran in London for six years, with more than 20 different casts, starting with Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney and Ken Stott, and going on to include Jack Dee and The League of Gentlemen. Last year (in pre-Carla Bruni days), Reza wrote a best-seller about Nicolas Sarkozy in which she managed to be both sugary and sharp.

Now her new play, God of Carnage, first seen in Zurich, is being staged on both sides of what used to be the Channel and is now the Tunnel. At the Théâtre Antoine in Paris, in a production directed by the playwright, Isabelle Huppert is as intricate on stage as on screen: she's that extraordinary thing, an alluring study of affectation; her constantly working hands and facial expressions seem to be engaged in a tango. In Shaftesbury Avenue, a line-up of Reza-sharp actors - Ralph Fiennes, Tamsin Greig, Janet McTeer and Ken Stott - guarantees and justifies full houses.

As always with Reza, everything hangs on the casting. She's a writer for the stage not the page: a creator of vessels for actors to fill. Performers of her work will have to look hard for an unforgettable pungent phrase (has anyone ever said: only Yasmina Reza could have put it like that?), but not at all hard for singular theatrical shocks, shrewd circumstantial detail and soliloquies that give them a moment in the sun with a big central subject.

It's no surprise (and not just because the title tips you off) that God of Carnage - in which two middle-class couples meet to discuss and heal a spat between their sons - turns on the idea that adults are no more evolved than kids, that the bourgeoisie, groomed and courteous on the surface, are beastly underneath. It would take a really radical playwright to speak up for the middle classes, and Yasmina Reza is the opposite of that. The central image of her play is a tinkling irony: a pet hamster, hated by one of the dads, is dumped in the gutter where it proves as unable to cope with life outside as it was with life in a cage: the creature is neither wild nor tame.

Reza's disgruntled quartet are hamster-like. The most visceral of their deeds may look alarming in a sitting room, but they boil down to no more than angry rearrangements of décor. These are, nevertheless, acts of exposure. The clafoutis-baking mother who goes on about Darfur (Janet McTeer is majestic and ridiculous in an embroidered skirt and sincerely-deep voice) dismantles her peaceful, understanding profile when she hurls her guest's handbag across the room.

Tamsin Greig, a second wife in a too-smart suit, comes on with little-girl tilts of the head and wispy voice, and ends by shredding dozens of expensive Hockney-style tulips and plunging her husband's mobile into a vase. Thank God Debbie in The Archers has gone back to her suspicious-sounding lover in Hungary: the stage has gained a sly and slinky actor.

She's astute, is Reza. Her dialogue is often fraudulent (McTeer announces that she has no sense of humour - the one thing to which no one ever admits) but it's also sprinkled with legal-like wit (was one boy 'armed' or merely 'furnished' with a stick?). Her often languorous action is punctuated by sure-fire devices: you can't fail to impress with mobile-phone jokes in the theatre - nor with projectile vomit.

The very faintness of the characterisation is a spur to actors, to show what they can do. A lot, as it happens. Fiennes radiates contempt (his mouth and legs are always open) as a shark-faced lawyer who, wrapped up in defending a dodgy medicine, is like an MP in a sex scandal, compelled to spend time with his family. Stott is the most patronised character, and the most powerful: genial, raging and disappointed.

In Paris, the action takes place in front of a concrete wall split by a huge crack; there are animal howls as the lights go down at the end of the evening. Matthew Warchus's London production is less savage: Mark Thompson's scarlet set is

not riven, but wrinkled with tiny fissures; there is no baying. Reza gets something of a makeover in London, where Christopher Hampton's terrific idiomatic translation turns every insult into an elegant joke: the playwright, who worries that British audiences laugh at her plays (she thinks of them as tragedies), may not like that.

Thanks to Nahal

Richard Serra at MoMA: Towering sculptures in torqued steel

I have been wanting to post this for the past 8 months -- somehow it never happened. but better late than never

By Michael Kimmelman

The artist Richard Serra.(Mary Altaffer/AP)

NEW YORK: The Richard Serra retrospective, arrived this week at the Museum of Modern Art virtually a foregone matter, in the way that Picasso and Matisse shows arrived in the old days. It's a landmark, by a titan of sculpture, one of the last great modernists in an age of minor talents, mad money and so much meaningless art. At 67, Serra is still nudging the language of abstraction, constructing ever more awesome mazes of looming Cor-Ten steel.

The other day in the museum's garden, where two big Serras from the 1990s have been parked for some weeks, children dashed down the curved, leaning, fun-house corridors of "Intersection II," while a trio of young women sunbathed (before a blushing guard appeared) on the ground inside "Torqued Ellipse IV," its enclosing wall bent, curved and folding outward, conveniently forming a giant face tanner. All around, office workers sloughing off the afternoon and tourists resting tired feet roused themselves from scattered garden chairs to survey the two sculptures, sauntering through them like explorers happening upon a South Sea island, squinting up into the sky from time to time to fix their locations in space.

Actually they were explorers. These shapes and experiences are new. That's about the best, and the rarest, compliment you can give to any artist. Serra's "Torqued Ellipses" and "Torqued Toruses" and other recent works like "Band" and "Sequence" have their origins in work he did 40 years ago in rubber and lead, as this retrospective handsomely affirms, but these are nonetheless unprecedented variations on the theme of dumbfounding spirals and loops.

The public's perception of Serra's work has also obviously changed from the bad days of "Tilted Arc," a quarter-century or so ago. That same vocabulary of curved, giant metal walls, once vilified as art-world arrogance, is now better understood and broadly admired. This is how radical art operates.

In Serra's case you can also call it democratic art because it sticks to pure form that requires no previous expertise to grasp.

There's no coy narrative, no insider joke or historical allusion or meta-art theme. There's none of what Serra disdainfully calls, in the show's catalog, "post-Pop Surrealism," by which he lumps together all contemporary art that leans for a crutch on language and Duchamp.

Serra famously looked at Borromini churches in Rome before he started torquing steel, but his work is not "about" Baroque architecture any more than it's about Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman or Donald Judd, whom he also looked at and learned from early on.

The art is about the basic stuff of sculpture, isolated and recast: mass, weight, volume, material. What matters in the end are your own reactions while moving through the sculptures, at a given moment, the works being Rorschachs of indeterminate meaning.

A filmmaker I met in Bilbao, Spain, wandering through Serra's sculptures there, likened the experience to movies. He thought the paths Serra devised within the works, between curving walls of steel, which suddenly jog, then arrive, unexpectedly, at cavities or enclosures, were like plot twists with surprise endings. Except there are no beginnings or endings in the sculptures. A novelist who has written about the Holocaust said the high, curving steel walls leaned over him threateningly, leading him until he became disoriented and lost, into what he felt were penned-in spaces, bringing to mind a concentration camp. The art scared him, he said, but he also loved it.

Kant called this feeling "the terrifying sublime," which is "accompanied by a certain dread or melancholy." Awe and fear mingle with pleasure. The concept was applied to mountain climbing, and Serra's new works on the museum's second floor evoke canyons, dunes, crevasses and ravines. The industrial steel walls, in uncalculated rusty orange and velvety brown, evoke natural terrains; the spaces through which the sculptures move people are akin to spaces in nature.

And like nature you get to know them only by walking around them, although the works partly thwart the effort. Serra's "Torqued Ellipses" and their descendants can't be pictured mentally, except in broad strokes. They're too complicated; from outside you don't know what the inside is like, and vice versa.

This complexity, requiring your constant attention, is the pleasure of the art, and it adds the element of time to three dimensions, which is among the changes Serra and his generation brought to sculpture.

That second floor at the Modern, by the way, is the show's tour de force. A high, huge and like so much of this museum, totally unlovable space, it was conceived for housing Serra's sculptures.

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Five Things You Need to Know to Understand the Latest Violence in Iraq

By Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar, AlterNet
Posted on March 27, 2008, Printed on March 27, 2008

Heavy fighting has spread across Shia-dominated enclaves in Iraq over the past two days. The U.S.-backed regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered 50,000 Iraqi troops to "crack down" -- with coalition air support -- on Shiite militias in the oil-rich and strategically important city of Basra, U.S. forces have surrounded Baghdad's Sadr City and fighting has been reported in the southern cities of Kut, Diwaniya, Karbala and Hilla. Basra's main bridge and an oil pipeline connecting it to Amara were destroyed Wednesday. Six cities are under curfew, and acts of civil disobedience have shut down dozens of neighborhoods across the country. Civilian casualties have reportedly overwhelmed poorly equipped medical centers in Baghdad and Basra.

There are indications that the unilateral ceasefire declared last year by the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is collapsing. "The cease-fire is over; we have been told to fight the Americans," one militiaman loyal to al-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor's Sam Dagher by telephone from Sadr City. Dagher added that the "same man, when interviewed in January, had stated that he was abiding by the cease-fire and that he was keeping busy running his cellular phone store."

A political track is also in play: Sadr has called on his followers to take to the streets to demand Maliki's resignation, and nationalist lawmakers in the Iraqi Parliament, led by al-Sadr's block, are trying to push a no-confidence vote challenging the prime minister's regime.

The conflict is one that the U.S. media appears incapable of describing in a coherent way. The prevailing narrative is that Basra has been ruled by mafialike militias -- which is true -- and that Iraqi government forces are now cracking down on the lawlessness in preparation for regional elections, which is not. As independent analyst Reider Visser noted:

On closer inspection, there are problems in these accounts. Perhaps most importantly, there is a discrepancy between the description of Basra as a city ruled by militias (in the plural) ... [and the] facts of the ongoing operations, which seem to target only one of these militia groups, the Mahdi Army loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. Surely, if the aim was to make Basra a safer place, it would have been logical to do something to also stem the influence of the other militias loyal to the local competitors of the Sadrists, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq [SIIC], as well as the armed groups allied to the Fadila party (sic) (which have dominated the oil protection services for a long time). But so far, only Sadrists have complained about attacks by government forces.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer. Raed Jarrar is Iraq Consultant to the American Friends Service Committee. He blogs at Raed in the Middle.©

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Summer is for Sissies from watch berlin

State Inc.

The most important new forces in global business are aggressive, wealthy, and entrepreneurial. But they aren't corporations: they're authoritarian governments.

Officials from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. (Bloomberg)

By Joshua Kurlantzick March 16, 2008

IT WAS THE biggest corporate deal in the history of sub-Saharan Africa: Last October, a foreign firm spent nearly $6 billion for a chunk of Standard Bank, the South African company that has long dominated finance on the continent.

Yet the foreign suitor was not Citigroup, or UBS, or some other titan of private commerce. It was the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a company owned wholly by the Chinese government.

On a business level, the deal gave ICBC's Chinese customers access to banking across Africa, and set the stage for closer relations between Chinese companies and African nations. In a bigger sense, it embodies a change that is reshaping the dynamics of global business.

In the past five years, governments around the world have been transforming themselves into deal makers and business players on a scale never seen in the modern era. In China, state-owned oil giant PetroChina has become the largest company in the world, worth more than $1 trillion. In Russia, state-owned Gazprom has grown into the world's largest gas company. States are also wielding influence by directly buying into major private firms: The investment fund run by the Arab emirate of Abu Dhabi is now the world's largest, and recently spent $7.5 billion to become the top shareholder of the American financial giant Citigroup. Singapore's state-controlled wealth fund, Temasek Holdings, sank $5 billion into Merrill Lynch, the largest US brokerage. By 2015, according to an estimate by Morgan Stanley, such state-owned funds will control a staggering $12 trillion, far outpacing any private investors.

The rise of states as global economic players marks a sharp reversal from decades in which private enterprise seemed an unstoppable force in global finance, commerce, and culture. It represents a new and unexpected fusion of state control with the business principles of capitalism. And it is already causing a significant shift in global power.

The new state capitalists - China, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and others - are primarily authoritarian nations. And as they become bigger commercial players, they are gaining new influence in a realm once dominated by the democratic West. Some political scientists, such as Azar Gat of Tel Aviv University, who coined the phrase "authoritarian capitalism" to describe the trend, see these countries as the first major threat to the idea of free-market democracy since fascism and communism.

One striking recent study by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, shows that the economies of politically unfree nations have grown faster than those of politically free nations over the past decade, often through forceful use of business and financial power. A recent report by the global monitoring organization Freedom House found that "a group of market-oriented autocracies" were an important force in an overall decline in world freedom.

Arch Puddington, Freedom House's director of research, sees these countries' new financial clout as having significant consequences for the world. "These autocracies are unapologetic and increasingly assertive, at home and abroad," he writes.

In modern times, business and government have occupied increasingly separate spheres in Western economies - separation that has laid the groundwork for their economic ascendancy. By the end of the 20th century, many economists and political scientists assumed there was no other path to growth.

The modern record of state-controlled business, by contrast, was chiefly one of failure. When the fascist and communist governments of the 20th century seized the reins of domestic industries, they ended up undermining development and bringing misery to millions of their own citizens. As private enterprise flourished in the West, the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union were widely seen as a repudiation of the idea that governments could successfully control the business sector.

But the wake of the Cold War also sowed the seeds of a new discontent with free-market private enterprise. Many emerging nations were stung by ill-planned privatization strategies in the 1990s. In Latin America, a decade of privatization proved so unpopular that, in a regionwide poll taken in 2001, a majority of people across 17 countries viewed privatization unfavorably. Across Africa, this era, known as the "lost decade," resulted in rising poverty, and even longing for some nations' authoritarian past.

The failure of those privatization strategies helped create a ready audience for a different model. Perhaps the most dramatic example is China. Over the past 25 years, while keeping firm control over its economy, China has adopted many of the tools of capitalism - ceding some operational power to a Western-trained executive class, inviting foreign investment and partnerships, and buying and selling on the global open market.

Beijing has also selected a range of strategic industries to develop, from oil to telecommunications to automobiles. By creating the state-owned China National Chemical Corporation in 2004, Beijing birthed a plastics manufacturing giant, one that quickly swallowed foreign companies like Qenos, one of the biggest plastics firms in Australia. State-owned Chinese automaker Nanjing Automobile bought up famed British car brand MG Rover, while Huawei, boosted by massive loans from state-linked Chinese banks, has expanded around the globe, even trying to take over US tech giant 3Com, a deal essentially scuttled by Congress.

The result has been the most staggering economic development in modern history - all with a firm government hand on the tiller, and without the liberal political reforms considered by many in the West essential to economic growth. China has become the third-largest economy in the world; the city of Shanghai has transformed into a soaring business district packed with skyscrapers and luxury hotels. Even smaller provincial cities have grown into high-rise centers whose shopping malls are packed with moneyed Chinese buying up cars, lattes, and all the other fruits of capitalist prosperity.

The Chinese example is proving immensely influential. Though China does not explicitly promote itself as a model of development, its government runs training programs for thousands of technocrats from across the globe, who hail from nations as wide ranging as Cuba and Vietnam. At last year's African.......

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Making sense of modern art

REQUIRED PLUG-INS Flash version 8 or above QuickTime version 4 or above Click on the icons below to download plug-ins.

Welcome to the next generation of Making Sense of Modern Art (MSoMA). This program, recently brought to the Web in high bandwidth format, offers an extensive and engaging guide to modern and contemporary works in the Museum's permanent collection. Its rich-media format enables you to "zoom in" on full-screen details of individual artworks, explore excerpts from archival videos and films, and listen to commentary by artists, art historians, critics, and collectors. This feature works best with high-bandwidth Web access. You can also view it at the Museum on our interactive kiosks, located in the galleries and the Koret Visitor Education Center. If you can't access the QuickTime movies, please check our troubleshooting tips. We welcome your feedback regarding this program. Please send comments and inquiries to edu@sfmoma.org. An index of the artworks featured in Making Sense of Modern Art.

The Permanent Energy Crisis

posted March 11, 2008 09:53 am

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Permanent Energy Crisis Hits Home

Back in January, on his trip to the Middle East, the President all but begged the Saudi royals -- the New York Times referred to his requests as "entreaties" -- to put more oil on the global market and so lower prices at the pump in the U.S., essentially saving his "legacy." In April 2005, in his previous meeting with then-Crown Prince, now Saudi King Abdullah, Bush was also fretting about oil prices. A barrel of crude was then pegged at $54. This time, the President who, in his seven years in office, has told the leaders of more nations more times what they "must" do, approached the Saudi king with the sort of diffidence (by his own description) that a needy vassal might employ with his liege lord.

No surprise there. By this Tuesday, the price of oil had crested above $109 a barrel, more than doubling since 2005, and a gallon of regular was already averaging $3.22 at U.S. gas pumps with the latest price leaps yet to register. Estimates for oil at $130 a barrel this year and $150 in 2009 are now common. Something else had changed as well -- the mood of the Saudis and the leaders of many other petro-powers. Last week, OPEC officially rejected the President's entreaty to immediately increase the oil supply without even a polite nod, instead suggesting that the Bush administration was mishandling the American economy. Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, couldn't have been blunter. There was no need, he insisted, to increase global supplies by "even one barrel of oil."

In fact, the global resource landscape is changing fast and the "sole superpower" on the planet is looking ever more forlorn. Over the years, no one has caught this changing landscape better than Michael Klare. Once again just ahead of the curve, he has produced a new book (to be published in mid-April), Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, that lays out the resource and power map of the planet, which is morphing in startling ways. Over the coming months, Klare will be producing a series of articles for Tomdispatch.com based on the findings in his book. This is the first of them. His are words worth heeding. Tom

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